Also:

Guy Maddin’s Top Ten Films

Purchase Tickets

Launch event for Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger.

The New School, Theresa Lang Student Center, 55 West 13th on the second floor.
Time: 7:00pm.
Friday, March 12.

We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Mirimar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.

But then, “John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”

“I know it,” he said.

John was sort of short and angry about it.

“You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.

“Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.

“You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.

“Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.

“But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”

The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?

“You have a good time in Peru?” said I.

“Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that used it up some.”

“Even high in Mérida?” said I.

“Even,” said John.

“Even Greenland?” said I.

John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”

“Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”

“Shut up,” said John.

“Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane’s on fire?”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Said John. Yelled John.

“What’s wrong?” said I.

He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.

“What is it, John?” said I.

John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine—that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”

The paper from his kneepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.

“It was mine, mine, you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”

The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.

“Eject! Save your ass!” said John.

But I said, “What about you, John?”

John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”

“But you can’t,” said I.

But he did.

Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Mirimar base.
I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.

Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.

I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am aso absorbed myself and paralyzed.

I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.

Reading & Tribute for Gilbert Sorrentino

Celebrating the publication of his final novel:
The Abyss of Human Illusion

With Walter Abish, Ammiel Alcalay, Susan Daitch, and David Markson.

Saturday February 20th at 6pm

Pierogi Gallery
177 North 9th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 599-2144
www.pierogi2000.com

A new story from Matthew Derby, the author of Super Flat Times: Stories (2003 Back Bay Books). Derby’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, and The Believer, where he has served as an editor.

http://www.matthewderby.org

“It’s hot,” Dombal said, and it was the truth, but Murphy just kept looking at the yellow dumpsters and ate his sandwich, which was lettuce and pickles folded into a single slice of bread because that was all Murphy had left in his apartment.  Murphy was a person who didn’t answer your questions; he didn’t respond to your requests.  He did what he did and sometimes it coincided with the thing you wanted him to do and those were the lucky days.  Like, Murphy’s job was to remove the grilles from the heating units that ran along the back wall in each dorm room, and Dombal would follow behind with the vacuum, clear out the decades of balled hair, dander, condom rot, and animal bones from between the blades, and replace the grille.  Some days Dombal would enter a dorm room to find the grilles removed with precision, carefully laid out on the floor next to the heating unit, screws collected in a paper cup on the windowsill.  Other days, the grilles would be buckled, wrecked, twisted in an upward arc from the heating unit as if yanked by a powerful monster.  There were days when Murphy slept all day in the top bunk of one of the dorm rooms and leave the grilles untouched, and Dombal would have to remove them himself, which was bull because he was the cleanup guy and Murphy was the takedown guy, but Dombal didn’t want to have to explain to Bill, the Physical Plant shift manager, why there were so many dorm rooms with untouched heating units.  It was a summer thing and Bill never checked on their progress so none of it mattered but the job weighed on Dombal anyway. So, by mid-July, he was doing all the takedown and the cleanup while Murphy slept.

But even on the level of a simple conversation, Murphy would not just do the conversation.  Dombal would say something, ask a question or make an observation or just anything, and Murphy might respond, but what he said so rarely corresponded with the initial remark that Dombal often settled for silence.  “What is that song?” Dombal had asked that morning when Murphy put a tape in the tape deck of the Physical Plant van they used to haul the shop vac from dorm to dorm.  “You don’t get to know,” Murphy said and that was it, just a hot, whistling silence for the rest of the trip across campus.  But it was hot by the dumpsters and Dombal couldn’t resist saying, ‘It’s hot,’ and Murphy just looked on at the trash eating his sandwich, the same way he would if there was no Dombal there at all.

“Look at that yeti,” Murphy said instead, gesturing with his sandwich at The Yeti, who was assembling a window-washing nozzle on the soccer field at the bottom of the hill.  The Yeti’s real name was Laura, but on the first day, when all the summer workers got put into teams, Murphy had called her The Yeti and that was the end of the name Laura for her.  She was The Yeti because she was an enormous person, just truly a walking marvel.  Not in a fat way, though she was thick.  It was more of a freakish dialing up of the proportions – hands larger than hands should be, a face broader and squarer than a face should rightfully be.  Only her feet were sized for a normal person, and she wore white canvas slippers that brought her body to a sharp, precarious point.

“Yeah, heh,” Dombal said, looking at The Yeti.

“I’m going to do something to that yeti,” Murphy said.

“Yeah?”  The Yeti made Dombal sick in his gut.  He watched her massive red hands assembling the window washing apparatus and something low and spastic foamed in his heart, like his blood was ice-cold cola.  There were people Dombal didn’t like because of what they’d done to him and then there were people he didn’t like just because of the postures they struck in the world, and The Yeti was in the latter group.  Her very presence in a room stirred up a crazy rage.

“That yeti has something coming to it,” Murphy said.

“Yeah.  Like what are you thinking?”

Murphy forced the last of the sandwich into his mouth, making a sick hump of his cheek, and chewed.

Oki, the janitor at Massassoit House, let Dombal into the building at the start of his shift.  She was an ancient, stooped woman with a silver bowl cut who seemed always to be knitting in front of a small black and white television while water slowly boiled on a hot plate in the Janitors’ Lounge.  Dombal liked Oki because she smiled at him and didn’t ask him questions and didn’t in her countenance make him feel guilty that his life still lay before him like bare parchment before the map is drawn while hers was, in almost every way, already done.

“You on third floor today?” she said.

“I think so.”

Dombal shouldered his vacuum and his tool bag and took the elevator to the third floor.  He found Murphy in the first dorm room, already asleep.  Dombal took the elevator to the fourth floor because removing the grilles from the heating units was a loud and messy process and he didn’t want to wake Murphy.  He entered the room that faced the elevator.  The walls were yellowed and smudged, lit by the twin slim windows that let out onto the quad empty quad.  Squares of tape and corkboard riddled the surface of the walls, furred with loose drafts of carpet pile, human hair, stray ash. Dombal put his tool kit on the bare mattress and removed a screwdriver and a rubber mallet.  The grille had been painted over several times – He could barely make out where the screws were.  He centered the tool over the area where he guessed the center of the first screw head was and pounded with the mallet until he broke through and gained purchase.  Sometimes this process damaged the grille, sometimes irreparably.  But he was already doing another person’s job and he wasn’t happy about it, so if the grille broke it was not his fault.

Dombal drove out the screws one by one, leaning into the handle of the screwdriver with all his strength as he twisted.  When he finished, his hands tingled as if being pelted with sparks.  The blades of the heating unit were draped with a mat of gray dust.  He sucked this away with the vacuum, exposing the delicate copper apparatus which was like the spine of a prehistoric snake.  Something went into the vacuum that was not dust and the vacuum clogged.  He looked into the nozzle of the vacuum and saw a lump of red fabric.  He used the screwdriver to tease it back out through the mouth of the nozzle.  It was a woman’s silk panty, red with orange stripes.  He unfolded the underwear on the floor.  It was still relatively clean.  It must have fallen behind the heating unit only recently.  Dombal picked the underwear up and held it in his palms.  It seemed impossibly small.  He thought about the person who wore the underwear, and how she might have inhabited them, how much space she took up in the world.  There was a dimensionality to bodies that didn’t translate well from the photographs and illustrations he used for masturbation.  He saw something move out of the corner of his eye and turned.  It was his reflection in the floor-length mirror that was bolted to the dorm room’s door.  He saw himself kneeling on the floor, holding the underwear.  He stuffed the garment beneath the mattress and continued to the next room.

At lunch Dombal went to the vending machine to get Million Dollar Bash, which was a plastic bag filled with nuts and dried fruit and chocolate drops.  It was the only thing left in the vending machine, but this was no big deal because Dombal happened to like Million Dollar Bash.  He usually found enough loose change in the heating units to buy one bag a day, which he ate silently on the bottom bunk in one of the empty dorm rooms, handful by handful.  He put the change in the machine and pressed the buttons and the corkscrew that held the bags of Million Dollar Bash turned, moving them forward in graceful orchestration.  As the corkscrew turned, Dombal saw Murphy reflected in the vending machine’s glass surface.  He was sitting on a table in the lobby, talking to The Yeti.  The frontmost bag of Million Dollar Bash dropped into the receptacle and Dombal reached through the spring-loaded door to retrieve it.

“This is just what Bill told me.  All the mattresses, down to the lobby,” The Yeti said as Dombal approached the table.  She gave off a dense, yeasty smell.

“Down here, in the lobby.” Dombal said.

“All of them.”

Dombal looked at Murphy, who just stared out the window at the abstract steel sculpture in the quad, baseball cap pulled down over his brow.

“Why?”

“They’re getting replaced.” The Yeti whipped a sash of her straight colorless hair over her shoulder and then stroked it as if to apologize.  “We bring them down to the lobby and next week they bring dumpsters.  Then later, the new ones come.”

“What about the vents?”

“They said the vents can wait,” The Yeti said.  “The mattresses need to be down.”

“Who said this?  About the mattresses.”

“I told you.  This was Bill.  Speaking directly to me.”

“Bill?  He came here?”  Dombal had not seen Bill since the start of summer session, when he gave a brusque demo of the shop vac in a full University-themed track suit.  Dombal had stopped thinking about the Physical Plant staff altogether except as a sort of ghostly cabal, hovering invisibly and shapelessly above the dormitories.

“Let’s get this over with,” The Yeti said, clapping her hands together and rubbing them.  Dombal and The Yeti started across the lobby but Murphy continued to sit on the table.

“Come on,” The Yeti said.  Murphy did not respond.  “Are you seriously not going to help?” she said with a sense of naïve wonderment that seemed momentarily to shake Murphy.  He pulled at the brim of his cap and slid down off the table, deliberately looking away from Dombal and The Yeti as he approached.

The mattresses were gray and slick, threadbare ellipses worried into their midsections, the mark of semester after semester of muted couplings and studied, repetitive groinwork.  Faint impressions of menstrual spotting, Rorschach pissmarks.  Dombal and The Yeti worked as a team, each taking hold of one end and scuttling down the halls like crabs.  When they reached the stairwell they would hoist the mattresses over the guardrail and let them fall. Murphy worked alone on the first floor, thrashing and pounding the mattresses down the hall.

After two hours they’d only managed to move nine out of two hundred and forty mattresses into the lobby.  Murphy spread out on one and shut his eyes.

“Lazy,” The Yeti said.  Murphy opened one eye and then shut it again.

“Let’s get the rest,” Dombal said, heading toward the stairwell.

“Are you always this lazy?” The Yeti called out to Murphy.  He smacked his lips and rolled over onto his stomach.  His basketball shorts came down a little when he moved so that his crack was showing, but it somehow looked okay.

The Yeti stood at the threshold of the foyer, waiting for Murphy to respond.  Dombal started to climb the stairs.

When Dombal got to Massassoit House the next morning the mattresses were rearranged.  They had been stacked into a kind of fort.  Six mattresses on their side and three draped on top.  Dombal walked around the perimeter of the structure.  It looked sturdy.  It looked like someone had put some amount of time and effort into its construction.  The mattresses were slightly parted on one side and Dombal approached to have a look but as he crouched at the opening he heard a sound.  A rough, scattered breath, issued from high in the throat, choked off in mid-exhalation.  Dombal rocked forward slowly, pressing his knuckles into the stiff carpet pile for balance.  The breathing stopped.  Dombal went rigid.  He could actually feel the blood rushing through his ears, sloshing like a riptide.  The breath was gone for a long time, and then it erupted again in earnest, rhythmic and fierce.  He crawled silently toward the aperture, which glowed faintly from the inside.  The breathing took on a raw whistling overtone.  Dombal put his cheek against the wall of the cavity and peered in.  He saw the thickset curve of The Yeti’s right buttock, clutched in a percussive spasm against Murphy’s prone leg.  Dombal knew it was Murphy because of his green striped athletic socks and blown-out Keds. Stretched impossibly across The Yeti’s pinched behind, strapped there like a tourniquet, was the pair of red and orange underpants that Dombal had found behind the heating unit.  The pair that he’d held in his hands.

Dombal pivoted slowly and sat on his haunches to wait it out.  There was nobody in the hall and nobody in the quad.

“Hey.” It was Murphy, calling from inside the hut when they were finally done with the thing.  Dombal turned and saw Murphy’s naked arm extended through the opening.  He held a five-dollar bill between his index and middle fingers.  “Go get two Cokes and a Million Dollar Bash.”

Dombal took the bill and walked down the hallway to the recessed vending area.  He made change for the five.  Coins spilled into the pebbled metal dish.  Dombal scooped up the coins and approached the machine that had Million Dollar Bash.  He saw his reflection in the glass.  There was more flesh on his head than he remembered or wished to remember.  He put the coins in the machine and pressed the keys and the corkscrew turned, moving the cellophane bags along the track.

“You made a nice house,” Oki said, looking away from Dombal so that he knew she did not think it was a nice house at all.  She was frying something on the hot plate, a sort of egg with red sauce.

Dombal took his tool bag from the utility closet. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Bill came here.  He didn’t like it.”

“Bill?”

“Bill.  The manager.”

“What did he say?”

“He say he didn’t like it.  You need to take it down.”

Oki looked up at Dombal.  Her face was old and theatrical.  She went back to her task, batting the pale mashed egg around in the saucepan.  Dombal looked in his tool bag to make sure everything was there.  He closed the bag and took the elevator up to the first floor lobby.

There were more mattresses, maybe seventy-five of them, piled high in the space in an intricate pattern.  The structure had the feel of a Sumerian ziggurat, its peak grazing the acoustic tile of the drop ceiling.  It seemed to have at least two levels, the higher of which could be accessed by a graded staircase made from mattresses that were stacked and staggered with an architect’s precision. The structure had a look of real permanence, as though it had been built thousands of years in the past.

Dombal just stood and looked at the structure for a long time.  His heart was beating so fast that he almost fainted.  He wanted to jump up and give a flying roundhouse kick to one of the towers.  He waited to hear a sound but there was nothing.  He moved closer to the staircase.  There wasn’t any person or any sound.  He put his foot on the first step.

“Hey.”  It was Murphy’s voice.  Dombal looked down the hall. Murphy was struggling with a mattress that had doubled over on the landing of the central stairs.  “A little help?”

Dombal put down the tool bag and walked over to Murphy.

“Fuckwad.”

“What?”

“Fuckwad.  What I said.”

Dombal grasped the white twine handles sewn to the sides of the mattress and the two of them lifted it just high enough so that it grazed the surface of the rug.

“Where’s that Yeti,” Dombal said as they scuttled down the hallway toward the temple.

Murphy looked up and nodded toward the entrance.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Dombal said.

“I’ll show you.”  They got to the temple and Murphy dropped his end.  He climbed the stairs and, halfway up, made a little sweeping gesture with his hand that meant Dombal was to follow him.  They went in and padded down a dark corridor.  At the end of the corridor there was a small open space.  The Yeti lay inside, on her side, unconscious, wearing only an enormous pair of emerald, silken underpants and a white cotton bra.  Her feet were bound at the ankle.  In the opposite corner of the room there was a heap of empty candy wrappers, crushed Million Dollar Bash bags, Coke bottles, a half-eaten bag of carrots, a jar of mayonnaise, and a shallow bowl of water.

“What is this?” Dombal wanted to back out of the room but the moment to do so came and went and he was still standing there, looking down at the Yeti sleeping on the stained mattress, all tied up.

“You asked where she was.”  Murphy knelt behind the Yeti and put his hand on her thigh.

“Is she okay?”

“She sleeps in.”

“You – you sleep here?”

“I’ve been.  Yeah.”

The Yeti breathed evenly in her sleep.  Her face was as still as a night garden.  There was no other sound in the small room.

“I don’t – What’s happening.”

Murphy stood up.  “Just help me carry some more mattresses.”

“She’s okay, though.”

“Yes, fuckwad.  This is what she wanted.  She asked for this.”  He slid past Dombal and disappeared down the corridor.  “Come the fuck on, twat,” he called out over his shoulder.

Dombal looked at the Yeti.  Her breasts pooled unevenly in the massive brassiere.  Her mouth was slightly open.  He wanted to kick her in the gut.

They went up the stairs to the top floor.  Murphy had yanked all of the remaining mattresses out into the hallway, where they lay slumped like victims of a gas attack.  Without speaking they lifted the mattresses by their handles and hauled them to the stairwell.

“Why are you doing this?” Dombal asked.

“I’m bored.”

“You spend all day with that Yeti.”

“I guess I’m really giving it to her,” he said and it was the first time he had ever agreed with something Dombal had said.  He grinned in the dry aftermath of the sentence like a fox with a quail in its mouth.

“It doesn’t seem like you are,” Dombal said in a wispy voice.

“Huh.”

“You’re just spending all your time with the Yeti.  Like, sleeping with the Yeti, the whole day.”

“What’s your point, twatstick?” Murphy dropped his end of the mattress.  It sagged on the landing.

Dombal’s every muscle was taut.  He wasn’t able to say anything.  Time slipped by like the particles of dust briefly illuminated by the tall windows flanking the stairwell.

“What is your point?”

Dombal dropped his end of the mattress and walked down the corridor.  Halfway down, he realized that the only other way off the top floor was the fire exit, so he turned into one of the empty dorm rooms and sat on the steel frame of one of the beds.  The springs grated and snapped under his weight.  Someone had scratched an impossibly long penis into the brown paint along the length of the frame.  Dombal stared at the illustration and waited for Murphy to come in and start whaling on him, but he couldn’t hear anything but the sprinklers jetting rhythmically over the lacrosse field.  He waited for what seemed like a really long time for Murphy’s fist to find his head or his chest or wherever Murphy saw fit to whack him but Murphy did not appear.  Dombal’s face tingled with the anticipation of the blow.  He lay back on the frame and the springs dug into the base of his skull, trapping tufts of his hair in their tight coils, and he stiffened out and waited in the room for as long as he could stand to.

The next morning Dombal went to the Physical Plant building.  Bill’s office assistant let him in and told him to sit in the narrow, walled-in waiting area.  She took a phone call while he paged through a weekly magazine, reading nothing of its contents, his tacky fingers warping the paper.

The assistant placed the receiver in its cradle and called Dombal into Bill’s office, which was an arid, cream-colored room without windows.  Vendor calendars hung on the far wall, grimly designed documents top-heavy with photographs of women in puffed hair breaking up concrete with slick jackhammers.  Bill sat behind a steel desk and listened without blinking as Dombal told him about the mattresses and what went on inside.  Bill’s face lacked dimensionality.  It was as if all of his features were spread out on a single plane like a Mercator map.  He sat in his chair and took in Dombal’s report with the focused earnestness of a deacon.

“Is that all you can think of?” Bill asked when Dombal stopped talking.  “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“I want a cordless screwdriver,” Dombal said in a thin, crackling voice.

“Pardon?”

“My hands hurt from taking apart all those heating units.  I am awake half the night in pain.  I want a cordless screwdriver.”

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

Dombal got up and walked out of the Physical Plant building.  He flinched in the sunlight, expecting to see Murphy in the quad, running swiftly toward him with a bat.  But there was just the piping heat radiating from the blacktop.  He took the long way around campus but even so he saw the ambulance careen through the narrow paths that led to the dormitory block, escorted by two squad cars.  His gut steamed, so he took the dirt path up the hill to the convenience store and bought a large ice beverage and sat at the lone table by the window to drink it.  The spoon for the beverage doubled as a straw.  He pressed his left fist into his right palm to stanch the dull roaring ache.  He had the striped underpants balled up in his pants pocket but he didn’t know yet what he would do with them.  A customer entered the convenience store and bought a snack stick.  Dombal spooned up a heap of the ice beverage and held it against the roof of his mouth until the customer left.  The day would be stupid and hard, and would take the endurance of a mountain climber just to endure.

A reading from The Flame Alphabet

13 March, 2010
6pm

Marfa Book Company
105 South Highland
Marfa, Texas 79843
432-729-3906

An excerpt from Robert Coover’s new novel, Noir, which will be published by Overlook on March 4, 2010.

The alley. You can’t say it’s your home away from home, having no real home to be away from, but you know it well. You’ve spent serious time in it. Have been mugged, chased, blown, asked for a light, beaten up, paid off, conned, dumped, supplied, scared shitless, given hot tips, shortchanged, shot at in here. You say, here. The alley is not on any streetmap. It is under it somewhere. Or behind it. It is negotiated intuitively; maps are useless, maybe even deceptive. Even in the rain, its scabrous brick walls are layered with shadows, worn like old rags. It is not uninhabited. It has its pimps and dealers, street tramps, smalltime grifters, misnamed homeless (they know where their home is better than you do), muggers, psychopaths, deviants. Not unlike City Hall, in short, or any church or company boardroom. You have to keep your eye out for one of them in particular. Known as Mad Meg, she likes to leap out of the shadows and stab people with her rusty kitchen knife. Once an honest stripper, but misused by a sadistic sugar daddy who pumped her full of brain-burning opiates, thrown out on the streets when her mind went and her body bagged, now the hidden princess of the alley. Like the alley, she’s treacherously complex yet rough on the surface and without façade, oddly innocent or at least neutrally unmotivated even as she lunges at her victims, somewhat pestilential, smelling of urine and half-blind, the indecorous backside of the human condition, the poxy dead end we all try to avoid. She’s a friend of yours though she doesn’t always remember that. You bring her things that she collects like coat buttons, swizzle sticks, shoelaces, candy wrappers, and old tennis balls, and once she got you out of a scrape by attacking the killer who was attacking you, though that may have just been the luck of who was on top.

One wet day’s end you were tailing a guy through here who you thought might be Mister Big. You’d been having a few in Loui’s, talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, Joe’s view in sum being that life was full of sickness, loneliness, corruption, cruelty, paranoia, betrayal, murder, cynicism, impotence, and fear, and then there was the dark side. You realized that what was wrong with Joe was that he was a teetotaler.

Across the room at a dining table sat a fat guy in a white linen suit with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, delicately putting away the back half of a cow. Rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. He looked familiar. Joe didn’t know who he was but said he was a loner who came in from time to time to eat a few dinners. Probably you’d seen him in here before. Joe thought he might be a thin guy disguised as a fat guy.

Maybe. But he sure eats like a fat guy. Everything but the tail and horns.

He sometimes has those with cheese and coffee, Joe said.

On a hunch (a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble), when he lit up a cigar, paid, donned his panama, and left, you decided to step out into the drizzle and follow him. You knew zip plus toy soldiers about Mister Big, but you figured it was likely his nickname was for more than power alone. Even if the guy was only a mock-Mister B, it might be interesting to see where he goes, and you’d have something to report to the widow next time she turned up. At first you were on the street, watching in the classic surveillance manner his slow waddling movements in the reflections of shop windows, but then at some point you were in the alley. How that happens is almost always a mystery. You have privileged access to it down your back stairs, maybe everyone does, but if you step out the front door the alley is hard to find. You can’t see it and then, what do you know, you’re in it. The fat man in the panama and linen suit zigzagged along, never looking back, but you had the feeling he knew you were back there, paddling through the garbage, trying to pretend you were just out for your daily constitutional. It was probably time to forget it and turn around, but you weren’t sure where you were and were as likely to find your way out going forwards as backwards. And, besides, the more you followed him, the more convinced you were that this was the guy you were looking for. He was moving faster and faster, he maybe ate like a fat man but he moved like a thin man, maybe Joe was right, it was hard to keep up. Finally, he was running flat out, pivoting sharply around corners like a mechanical carnival target on ball bearings, hopping nimbly over obstacles, darting down narrow passageways, somehow skirting puddles that you splashed through, a pale luminosity flitting through the moist shadowy alley like a will-o’-the-wisp, and soon you were only catching fleeting glimpses of him in the distance and then you lost him altogether.

You leaned against a boarded-up door to get your breath, torch a fag. Where were you? No idea. But you could hear rustlings, knew you’d been had, knew your situation was dangerous. You’d pocketed what remained of the widow’s roll for operating expenses (Blanche on the phone rolled her eyes and shook her yellow curls) and though you’d blown some of it in Loui’s there was plenty left and you worried now about getting mugged, or worse. These guys could smell money like sniffer dogs, even in the rain, and they usually preferred to ice their victims rather than merely threaten them, as it gave them more undisturbed pocket-poking time. The alley branched out in five or six directions from here, mostly you supposed into rat-infested dead ends where killers lurked. Your .22 was back in the office; you had nothing to defend yourself with except your fists. Glancing around for a weapon of some sort, your eye fell on a big ivory coat button and, keeping your back to the wet wall, you snatched it up in case you ran into Mad Meg. Beyond it was an old yellow tennis ball soaking in a puddle, and beyond that a red plastic swizzle stick. The swizzle stick was in front of what looked at first glance like a back door, but turned out to be a low underpass into another dark tangle of alleyways. A brass button off a military coat, a knotted shoelace, another bald tennis ball, a green-and-gold candy wrapper. These objects might have fallen out of Meg’s bagged household effects as she passed through here, or she might have dropped them on purpose. Either way, following their trail was your only shot. At the very least, if you came upon her, you could maybe wrestle the kitchen knife away from her, use it to fight your way out of here. It was a kind of scavenger hunt, chased by muffled footsteps, tumbling ashcan lids, the squawk of a startled cat being kicked.

Suddenly, picking up a pair of crimson-and-blue ice-skate shoelaces, you found yourself in a blind alley. A trap? An aluminum candy wrapper lay like a lottery ticket in front of a puckery patch of wet asphalt. There was a day-glo orange tennis ball, bright as fresh fruit, beyond the patch in front of the windowless brick wall that closed off the alley, but on your left, closer by, between two battered ashcans standing like woebegone sentries, lay a swizzle stick with a little flag on it that you remembered giving her. Mad Meg had saluted it, then picked her nose with it. You chose that over the orange ball, and as you stooped to pick it up, a red-eyed assailant in old army fatigues came charging out of a shadowy hole in the opposite wall with a switchblade. Oh shit. You braced yourself, yanking one of the ashcans in front of yourself, but when the guy stepped onto the puckery patch, that was as far as he got: his feet stuck, sank, the asphalt sucking him down, his screams smothered by the falling rain. There was a final wet sucking sound and your attacker was gone, nothing left but the switchblade and the echo of his final curse. You skirted the patch to gather up the orange tennis ball, saw the pink cloth-coat button in the mouth of the hole in the wall whence your attacker came, crouched down, picked it up, and crept through.

You were in the alleyway behind your office building. You left your collection of memorabilia in the hole along with a button ripped from your own trenchcoat and the switchblade. All right, it made Meg all the more dangerous next time she rushed you, but you owed her as much.

§

Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

equipment, personnel, ad revenues, sky scrapers, almost ate me up. Key thing. Twenty-four news network, bury yourself, don’t get

no harness could hold him, prevent his little neck from snapping, she found herself an unscrupulous harness dealer, even he refused, she doubled and redoubled, soon six figures for a damn parachute harness, by no means a low six. He gave way as they all do, the wife indemnified him and took to the sky with our baby, crashed square in a pumpkin patch, neck snapping on impact, or before, in midair. Boy dead on impact, or before, perhaps, little heart bursting, perhaps. More than one way to take the wife’s later description of the sound. So peaceful, she said, snap the most peaceful snap possible. Our son perhaps gone already. Changes everything, crucial fact changed, snap not the same snap, no way of knowing. What delicious soup. After the tragedy, the burial, surrendered herself full-time to the exploitation of the corpse, most obscene goddamn

paid her deeper into the art game, AIDS-charity game, worked for a time, stifled her tastelessness. New toys, me with my own. Hocked the theaters, Obie awards, built ground-up a 24-hour cable news network, dandy new toys, none of it enough. Art game, AIDS game, news cycle. The wife back at the corpse, wailing at her misfortune, hers, mark it, nasty ululations, pseudo-spontaneous histrionics, express purpose bringing low all within earshot. Be warned, you, sir, and your Tanya, now within the perimeter of ululation, our wives descending, fourth cellar, and you and I at this table, and the high windows, and the chandelier, and Granger and Kidd, a locked

small, dried-out, bent and gravely crippled southern Italian men, with the family for generations, subjected me to heinous childhood rituals. Thought all that hidden from my parents, but growing up, gathering evidence, shoveling bullshit, the will at last to see what it had truly been. All these rituals expressly commissioned by

day in, day out, ululations. Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge. Disappeared for weeks at a time, news game, those vipers and cocksuckers, home shorter intervals, more and more among vipers and cocksuckers, finally left the Copper Beeches for good, hearth and home, childhood goddamn home, The Pentecost and Untitled #43, projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, all that behind me. Buried myself in advertisers, personalities, affiliates, going concerns, cocksuckers, vipers, every step dragging. Copper Beeches, childhood home, abandoned it to the wife’s ululations, those wails that shook bedrooms, libraries, first and second cellar, goddamn unending screams refracted in the accelerator of her toxic self-regard, up to such a pitch of horror, so many thousand decibels, that the last of our servants, the sorriest old pricks, the ones hadn’t fled, such disgust, at the boy’s death, smashed locked doors, scrambled through screens they’d slashed, literally ran for the hills, and me not there to wrestle them back. Pieced it together after, came home at last, rehired them, same pricks, double, triple salary, wrestled them back, still others back on their own, frail, flailing at the door

dropped like flies, ancient servants, to leave, to return, too much, did them in, all but the valet, also his daughter, such a precious baby girl, what delicious soup, eat goddammit. Ignore the wrenching of planks and mortars, the crash

silence in the Italian and African marble, cobalt and amber mosaics, the projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, silence there, ribbed vaults, mahogany tables, panels of goddamn ivory damask, all buffeted by oceanic silence. The beeches in the high blue windows, and a cold piss reek

your wife, her contractions closer, delicious soup, please try

creaking in the south wing. Pay no attention. As though foundations were precipitously

rubbing alcohol with food coloring, mashed together acids, bases, foodstuffs burnt and ground with unsanitary pestles, injected these deadly stews into the arms of North Africans, our scientists came to us addicted to painkillers and left in

Theatre, those triumphs, even all that, the faggotry, the Obies, so much, just so much bullshit, would’ve been devoured, news game, lacked the will for it, if not for the son, his death, and the wife’s ensuing ululations. The hell out of

back again at last, Copper Beeches, first night back, a year ago today, first night, such silence, stench, such piss and suicide, the wife dead at last, I thought, had to be suicide, she’d never up and abandon her childhood home, nor find the will to shut down her ululations, should have said my childhood home, but that’s not it either. Copper Beeches our shared childhood home

echo of an echo, each night

Mother, father, me, here in the mansion, she and her father over the garage, the Mechanic’s House, we called it, her father a mechanic, then a suicide, still after his death we called it the Mechanic’s House, not the Suicide’s House. Spied through bedroom window, tits in profile, bigger by the year, opera glasses, the two of us children, just think, two children, running among the sycamores, then our crawl space where the Second Nocturne hissed. Our hand-crank record player, she wouldn’t have abandoned all that. And the stench in the foyer, lounge and conservatory, rotting meat. Perhaps a human stench, a human rot

and you and your Tonya, stranded on the mountain these months, your Pullman car. No more shivering, you’re home at last. Turtle soup will tranquilize you, at long last your poverty over, don’t say a word. Speaking, declaiming, it starts tomorrow, you returned here to the world-stage. You, your wife, Tonya, here again for new Obies at last, though only you will be acting, your wife, the life gestating inside her, the contractions, she will

demanded it, brought you back, that my wife might once again take on Melinda

16^th-century opera glasses, straddled a branch near the garage, the Mechanic’s house, the tape is running. Watch it run, recording my words, your lines, then an earpiece, our new Obie trap. You me, valet you, my speech, your silence, soon your speech, his silence, every night recorded, two tapes alternating, degrading at the

first night back, wife alive, found her at last, silent, perched on the bed, pearlescent white slip gathered at thighs, no blouse, socks or hairnet. A view of my wife. Tits in profile again, these weeks or months alone had beautified her, indecent. Such goddamn indecency. This the most discernable in the onrush of feelings. Hairline, face, rack, knees, ankles, toes, profile-view, like children again, indecent, grisly. And, second chain of associations, less visceral but in retrospect perhaps

and fear. Turtle soup quiets her. She escorted your Tanya through the trapdoor, my wife, shell in hand, escorted your pregnant wife down, second cellar, third cellar, down. Such silence. See how well I’ve arranged things. Arrangements always my forte, you must remember. Your star turns in Mother Earth and Hot-L Baltimore, as theater producer I was the past master, not of the art, but the arrangement, halt the rehearsals, you remember now, undercutting the director, not a lick of goddamn shame, usurping prerogatives, a leap onto stage, rearrange your bodies, hauling this way and that, working arms, legs, into improbable combinations, then at last a tableau of breathtaking rightness. Always the lowest possible opinion of the actor’s art. Took on the producer mantle, actors my mannequins, I called them that, my stop-motion mannequins, all actors can hope to be, stop-motion mannequins, what’s required, soon you and your wife came to understand, full surrender to the master-arranger, nothing

world-wide declared you best husband-wife duo, O’Neill, yes, and Strindberg, Chekhov,  triumphs all, such art, such triumph, such bullshit, I hired you, put you in your place. The master’s arrangements counterintuitive, physically excruciating, tendons pushed to breaking, then past, crack of sinew, vast dark stage resounding in your submission, never relent, you soon came to understand. Broke you of your stage-art, stage-faggotry, broke you down, took you apart, my tools first bags of money, then arrangements, I changed you from grotesque actor-artists to stop-motion mannequins, shook you like peach trees, what showered down wasn’t juicy peaches but Obie

wife insisted, clean break. Sent you packing, you and your Tonya, not your child. Took your baby, your first baby, made him ours, our first baby. World-historical thespians, now broken-down, worthless. Closed the theater, pawned the Obies, my wife planned love-activities, bonding activities, snorkeling, rock-climbing, base-jumping with our first baby, the one we’d stolen, it’s not we, not this time, who will raise him, this time me, second boy just me alone, 3^rd cellar, his quarters, 4^th cellar, our wives, if they live, even now a new boy, about to be born, or being

barren wife, should’ve known

day by day, year by year, until it snaps, then cellophane tape, spliced and

my first boy, now dead, but then, his living days, to scrape your Tonya from his skull, feel that love, that open-heartedness, as idealized by Melinda Gates, she planned love-activities. The wife, how she needed to feel such love, enwomb him, base-jumping, para-sailing, stegophily, that she might see Melinda Gates through the child, and the child through Melinda Gates, to feel that openness, that love

night she dreams Melinda Gates, the wife finds Melinda Gates’ thumbprints everywhere. Spotted Melinda Gates at the reservoir, wife behind a stroller, my first boy, not dead yet, me at the wife’s side, or just ahead, beside the stroller, the wife behind it. Melinda Gates jogged towards us, white sweatbands gleaming, wrists, forehead, all white. Melinda Gates paused, jogged in place, complimented the wife on our baby, I should say our dead baby, that first baby, not yet dead, no, not yet. A time when my boy, when he wasn’t, you see, when he wasn’t dead, and at the compliment of Melinda Gates, the wife’s jaw, no other way to say it, hung ajar. This jaw-event, it extended beyond your normal case of shock, case or nerves, wife a corpse, Marley’s ghost, binding-scarf undone, skull and mandible blown apart, I had to laugh. Stared, perverse fascination, at last as she really was, a goddamn corpse, dangling jaw, Melinda Gates to thank, our first Melinda Gates encounter, the absolute life in Melinda Gates exposed the absolute death in my wife, I chuckled, touched the hand of the baby, of the dead baby, rushed Melinda Gates, shook her hand, furiously pumped the arm, caressed the sweatband, thanked her for at last exposing my wife, shuffling corpse-meat contraption, no hope for her at last, grisly

huge mastiff, he tunneled so good, blocked escape, that mountain, that Pullman car, your avalanche, your true home, these months, coming to term, as if escape were even

reason for the summons, the telegram, 32 weeks ago today, no inkling of that. Such knowledge by grim necessity ruthlessly and unconsciously suppressed, you and your wife smiling like jerks, seats of plush velvet, first-class passage already booked, years of brutal, near-fatal emmiseration behind you. Actor’s art long abandoned, more soup

Obies soon to glint, second cellar, appurtenances and drainage holes, while, fourth cellar, the wives free to ululate, I will take the boy, the new boy, leave the wives, the valet will bring them turtle soup, this will silence them. Turtles now an endangered species, thanks to the wife, her turtle-hunger, turtle-mania, my wife deep down with your wife, fourth cellar, two wives, their new living quarters, you soon in second cellar, the theater I’ve constructed, my star, my wretch, emmiserated to the point of death, I broke you down, sent you packing, waited years, then, via telegram, called you back. Buried you halfway here on the mountain, left you stranded, you and your wife, Pullman car, a life gestating inside her, freed you just in time, your wife now fourth cellar, her labor, her ululations, my wife’s beside her, my wife’s ululations beside her, now again your child will be my

The Pentecost. And our two wives, dead or alive in the fourth cellar, my new child playing in the corner of the third cellar, plastic horses, safe from

Sent private dicks to monitor your love rituals, record her sleeping temperature, monitor her cycles, at last the moment came, a telegram

first night, weeping, the wife stroked my face, this is not it can’t you see that it’s just not it anymore. I said, we’ll get the servants back. Said I’d change, listen, love her again, the two of us children again together, I’d find again for our nocturne, our hand-crank record player, amongst all the rubbish, and I searched and searched

opted for a week facing Kidd, travel a mile in my wife’s shoes, not only excruciating but psychically destabilizing, the wife swapped out Kidd paintings nightly, Untitled #18 for  Untitled #5, Untitled #77 for Untitled #18, eyes that

that halt, Pullman car high on the mountain, an avalanche of my own arrangement, your wife came to term, every courtesy shown, no service denied, you could not leave or kill yourselves, that was all, eight months, your mountain, your Pullman car, then onto  the Copper Beeches, this dining room, turtle soup,  trap door below, other doors locked, Baccarat chandelier suspended above, paintings of Granger and Kidd, a locked room

shrugged off the throng of porters, threw out elbows, one telegram and you came running, you and your Tonya ideal assholes, suitcases empty, you saved room for cash money, bags of money you imagined awaited you here, and which do in fact await you, in the telegram no mention of cash money, studiously avoided it, but between the lines, that studiousness pressed to breaking, something gleamed, like money, wouldn’t you

each day erase your memory, sharp crack to the skull, revolver’s butt

first night, pearlescent, profile-view, an understanding, Hello Roger, she said

judge from the crash, your eye tracking down, the sconce below Kitt Kidd’s Untitled #43 broke free. Won’t glance back, even now, never look back at Kidd’s work. Kidd behind, Granger in front, the Baccarat chandelier dozens of meters overhead, it will not fall. You and I together again, Limoge porcelain and green-fired Meissen porcelain, silk jacquard table cloth, high windows spilling blue light, or sepia, sun falling through different panes, hours pass, a multiplicity of panes configured just so, always a single color, blue or sepia or dull white light, depends on the hour. Blue now, soon dull white, then sepia at last. And mirrors to reflect our light downward, ingenious cellar mirrors, thus did my parents arrange things here at Copper Beeches, no reason to part with it, keep the finest traditions, eliminate the rest, blue light dropping through the traps door to the first cellar, valet perched between second and third, the darkness there, turtle shell pressed conchlike to lips, at ululations or screams he’ll signal with a

The Pentecost. And our two wives, dead or alive in the fourth cellar, a new child to play in the corner of the third cellar, plastic horses, safe from

miss him so goddamn much, I miss my boy, so much.

something of the actor’s art. It burned in the infant’s eye, faint but true, would have had to break him down if not for the wife, pumpkin patch, an end to all that. My boy no actor, you see, a news cycle boy, that empire. My scion, not yours. But the actor’s art, genetic faggotry, you tainted him, I think, this new one free of the taint, he’d better be

first night, her bedroom, at last I saw it, a turtle shell. She lifted it, sipped. I understood how she’d survived, floor parqueted in turtle shells, living turtles, dead turtles, must have blockaded herself in, then survived on turtles, she returned the shell to a Bunsen burner, I said, what’s with all the turtles, she lowered the flame,  O these really don’t know where they came from one day, and snapped her fingers, such contrast to her otherwise languid demeanor I flinched, there were just turtles

first cellar, reception and box office, second cellar, theater, your quarters, third cellar, my quarters, also my control room, also the boy’s quarters, plastic horses, fourth cellar, wives alive or dead, dull white

last a child, a new child, trapped you in the Pullman

trap door, listen for the ululations, or rather, blowing of the shell. Nothing, nothing, wait, yes, faintly now, nothing, now again faintly, no, now nothing. Can’t hear the wife’s ululations if she’s uluating, your Tonya’s screams if she’s screaming, too distant, too muffled, thus the valet, positioned between second and third floor, blows the turtle shell. At screams or ululations he blows. Nothing, yet faintly now again

tits in profile, feet and hands, onrush of emotion, I’ll translate or transcribe the speech of the wife’s hands and feet. First night back, two hands grip one another, creatures doing battle, then cold mechanical interchange, first attacks, then interchanges, her hands, her feet, half-legible movements of her extremities, they told the tale. Pooled blue Bunsen light, right foot tapping among turtles, left foot stationary, big toe and long calloused second toe twisting, such tapping and twisting, translate, transcribe, we came to the house out of great horror both of us childhoods of unspeakable pain came into this marriage of convenience yes with postures of absolute vanity we had both of us broken through every convention destroyed every prejudice that might have kept us as we were as they imagined we were little children damaged children stared with ravening eyes held our ground as we’d learned we must took possession of the household with unspeakable arrogance  no other weapons damage and arrogance our only weapons one or the other we’d made our choice seized the latter joined forces in this big house this haunted space this Castle Rackrent cue the bats cue the shadows and ghosts cue the howls and rattling chains, all this true, I admitted, and also, what I didn’t say, beside the goddamn

and my wife, don’t you understand the moment passes and it never comes back? The wife demanded new country, new language, new animals, no, I said, without saying

our nocturne, our hand-crank, still lost, I couldn’t

19  bathrooms, 12 fireplaces, 29 crystal chandeliers, four-story skylit art gallery, 280-foot reception hall

instructed the servant, blow the hollow turtle shell at critical moments, your wife screaming in her throes, my wife ululating, the same sound for both, in the stage production the same sound-effect to be employed, blast of the turtle shell for either and for both, never know which of them is screaming, ululating, or if they both are, only know if  they’re both silent at

the wrenching of planks and mortar high above, the crash, I said the crash, of the port couchere falling, you hear and understand nothing, I hear, understand everything. Out the high crescent windows copper beeches

one tape playing, one recording, next night switched, your earpiece, my words

slipping and screeching in muddy leaves, the wife stumbled over herself on three hooves, she tore and tripped on her weirdly bloated and stained skirt, in her stumbles looked like she was burdened with a surfeit of legs. Hours of struggle through the beeches, the sycamore perimeter, at long last tumbled face-down in the mud, path of Melinda Gates. Did Melinda Gates slow down? She took no notice, jogged or danced on, soon vanished, never yet to return, radiating to the last absolute life. Very next day the wife closed her AIDS hospices, went to work on a cure, sent away the AIDS patients, rang security, had them literally kicked to the curb, done forever with AIDS treatment, dedicated now to the cure, goddamn mistake, macro level we work for a cure, micro level, treatment. Even tens, hundreds of millions, wife and I remained always on the micro level, with AIDS. To look for a cure not only futile, destructive. The wife’s dollars, my dollars, they sponsored obscene testing regimens in North Africa

trap door, my parents Indian-style at the edge, looking down, first cellar, second cellar, they observed  the heinous rituals. Third and fourth cellar, dug them this year, you on the mountain, Pullman car, coming to term, a mastiff tunneling, fierce black son of a bitch, windows all white, a Pullman packed in snow, the muzzle hits, I kept digging

rings on the floor, snifter rings where mother, father, slopped cognac, rituals night after night in the second cellar, my parents giddy and without the least shame, peering down

the fire that slices the tongue, faces uplifted, these holy people. I am

wife never failed to write them new checks, Grants 4 The Cure, yellow eyes burning with liver failure, with addiction, a matter of days or weeks word came they too had died, first doing in several score North Africans with their rank quackery

fletcherize the small painted turtle, Chrysemys picta, drink from the larger shell, Chelydra serpentina, you act my part, valet takes yours, me in the third cellar control room, or the wings, pistol cocked. High windows, blue light, or sepia now

Past the beeches, not among them, or rather through them, or just at the perimeter, between the sycamores and beeches, I think, passing from tree to tree, slender trunks like bone, Melinda Gates surpassingly or ideally graceful, gliding, almost dancing as she moved, simplest dance, expressing or opening onto the most profound inner silence, Melinda Gates falling, rising between sycamores, or erased from one tree, present at the next, ponytail, wrists-bands, whole person glinting complexly in the golden

you must see, Kidd paints

eyes, an endless run of eyes

to speak the truth here, this table, tonight, impossible. So the tape, the second cellar, Obies, wine-swilling crowds, the valet’s daughter, so precious, she’ll grow up to serve them, just as my boy, my new boy, will grow up for the news game, echo of an echo, each night new, further degrading at the truth

foul play, my new

up to the second cellar, crack the skull, down to fourth, check the wives, living or dead, third cellar, my boy, my son, each day growing up, plastic horses

always in the wings, always watching. Slightest hitch I reach in vest

and genetic faggotry, my new son perhaps an evolutionary mannequin, evolutionary faggot, no chance of that, but just say, perhaps

nocturne. Hand-crank player, here somewhere, dug for it, excavated crawl spaces, built third cellar, fourth cellar

inoculate him, one night on stage, new son, valet’s role, perfect boy, inoculate, eradicate, then onto news cycle, my boy, my heir.  Years hence, my living son, he joins you on stage. Fifteen, sixteen years old, plays you, one night only, plays you as you now sit, dumb, while you play me, earpiece, cassette tape, jabbering these words, as you will have by then jabbered them for years. The boy will only know you onstage, second cellar, one night only, never in third cellar,  in fourth cellar, where you shall never venture, never in any semblance of real life, never an understanding your biological roll, biological taint, he’ll take on the valet’s part, play you, one night only, just one taste, then vile rituals to inoculate

dawning slowly, over years, first realization, rituals not as the servants had insisted with what seemed, even then, an oddly jocular, ironic tone, shameful secrets that must at all costs be kept from my parents, second realization, parents played their own part, offered a basic sketch, types of activities servants might partake in with the subject, the subject how I imagined myself named during such negotiations, third realization, my parents laid out maneuvers, timing, precise degree of pain, number of candles, tensile strength of silk, angles of hip and bone the subject to be worked through, fourth realization, years later, servants, too, victims of my parents’ perversity, lesser victims, goes without saying

moans, shudders, dull steady creaks, syncopated, falling into easy meter, again syncopated, overtones and disharmonies of all possible description, dull white

both lamps fallen, paintings in shadow, sepia tone long gone, only the chandelier 120 feet above our skulls, the chandelier will not fall, this I can

goddamn chandelier, fragment of Baccarat crystal, a blood spray on Limoge, not fatal, I assure you. So then every night the goddamn chandelier falls. Vast crowds, ovations, perfect Obie trap, each night stellar faggotry, a falling goddamn

splice and continue, crack the skull, search for hand-crank

special staircase, first cellar to third, bypass second cellar altogether, so even on his way up he will never, before that night, have set foot there, second cellar, you forever confined

stamped your tickets, you steamed away, the mountains, the blizzard, fifty feet under, your Tonya strapped stove to her torso, dragged it through the Pullman to do away with the life inside her, she failed, only damaged herself, won’t make it, I fear

black gums, black muzzle, slapping against the Pullman window, through the packed snow parting, hot tar on glass, lips drawn, yellow fangs, black son of a bitch, incisors scratching glass, muzzle sliding, then, new quadrant, small tar blot, the foot pushing off. Muzzle gone, all white, snail-trail of drool

one night on stage, inoculate my new boy, falling chandelier, chandelier effect gone wrong, new boy, new tragedy, fifteen, sixteen years hence, no chance of that

lonely houses, vast fields, poor ignorant folks, no legal know-how, countless deeds, hellish cruelty, hidden wickedness, year in, year out, steaming piss, crack the skull

my boy struck, deep-vein, could never

foul play

and no chance for connection. He doesn’t know you, won’t know you, has never, will never have, seen you before

Second cellar, third cellar, down

The chandelier’s fallen. And there’s too little time

boy’s one day on stage, an accident, or perhaps human agency, perhaps

you, the wife, if alive, the valet, your Tonya, if alive, all suspects, wine-swilling crowds, vipers, cocksuckers, quacks, valet’s daughter, all suspects, the blame

this revolver in my pocket, the misfire

acute and deep-vein thrombosis, my boy

new boy struck, deep-vein, could never

Every day the chandelier effect, every day courting injury, death, that it should fall that day, perhaps human

jealousy, hatred, suicide, in this life so much that is possible, the wonder’s we don’t kill more often than

revenge, grief, dyadic death and neonaticide, valet’s granddaughter born dead, for instance, or killed soon thereafter, and the nocturne, the hand crank, you, your Tonya, all suspects, all vipers and

And say he loves her. My son, the valet’s daughter, a love-match. And if they fled, a chance. But a life of cellars, to free oneself, how can you

Valet’s daughter pregnant, and it’s

A Marley’s chain of motives, sparkling blue and sepia and white light

AIDS charities, art galleries, elementary chattering toys, wind them up, release them, return a year later to

dying son, please not

too late

perhaps a fifth cellar, sixth cellar

oh not again

indebted to Melinda Gates, I

change me

a boy

locked and

§

Mark Edmund Doten’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, Lamination Colony and the Believer. He’s the managing editor of Soho Press.