What proof? What incident? What detail?
Places. Outdoors at the seashore, nearby here, on a rare afternoon with a powerful cold wind but a brilliant hot sun, with the moon so visible it was as if the sun were shining in the middle of the night, I once encountered a man and woman together, on the ground. I have a habit of walking alone, compounded by a terrible habit of not watching where I’m going. The woman was naked only from the waist down. Blonde and healthy, she wore a sweatshirt with a brand name printed across it in French. He wore a gray gym T-shirt marked between his large back muscles with dark smudges of sweat raised, even in this weather, by the exertion of the act. They’d had a blanket but they’d kicked it off. The air thickened with their odor. They lay in the hollow behind a dune crowned with short blasted yellow stalks. Yet this was a historic site; nearby the couple stretched the shadow of the new wooden tower commemorating Marconi’s original iron one, out of which he’d sent the first transatlantic wireless message, a flowery address filled with philosophy. A message from a President, for a King. Only the roots of the old tower remain, the stubs of iron and concrete nearly out of sight in the sand at the edge of the sea. Therefore it must have been a sightseeing impulse that had brought the man and woman out here originally, but then one or the other had felt the lowdown and habitual tug. Now they’d finished, and their hands lay curled for warmth under each other’s armpits, so that for a moment they seemed nothing but two empty shirts: still soggy from the wash, still connected by the bit of colorless line that had been torn free, with them, by the wind. I got out of there before she recognized me.
So…I say “so,” but rhetorical connections drop off to sleep as well…rhetoric and logic and argument as well. Without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick.
So…and…have I stiffened in my habits till I’m some kind of human playing card, finished while half-formed? Would a kiss flesh me out beneath the belt? Just a kiss, just a sigh…no. You must remember: this is no Disney. Nowadays I don’t even care for Disney. My ears howl with the sea wind. So…and…have I broken up now, here even before my next part, my Part Thirteen (won’t it at least contain bad luck, my Thirteen? at least never repeat, like AN EMOTION, so many stiff pages back?) — have I broken up now and here into my last locale? A conte a clef in which the clef is a cunt. Squirrel away the memory, fish it out for a cold night beside the radio. Any hand which once held that spot soon enough holds nothing except its own.
Places, places.
In Locale II, according to Robert Monroe, there stands the Sign In Space. “Stands” is the wrong word, granted, “sign” and “space” also wrong, all three imply physical existence. And how fill a ghost? But:
It seems that an almost measureless time ago…
Those are the correct words, I mean those are the words that Monroe uses. “Almost measureless”—such a tin ear, I’ve fallen in love with the man. His prose feels like he ran chewing gum through the typewriter, but I did read his book. That, I did.
It seems that an almost measureless
time ago a very wealthy…woman
wanted to ensure that her son would
get into heaven. A church offered
to guarantee this to her, provided
she paid the church an enormous sum….
The woman paid but her son did not get
into heaven. In…revenge she used up
her remaining wealth to have a sign put
up in the skies of heaven so that throughout
all eternity those who saw…
Yet this sign is unreadable. I can’t imagine a more hogwild hope, cartwheeling and cranky like a child’s, and at the same time I can’t imagine one more meanly and permanently gutted, betrayed behind the back. But I can imagine, nonetheless, the way the dead and their visitors come to see it.
Yes imagine, because I never saw that sign. I never traveled so far. But the ghosts…see them come to see it. All assemble out of far places, blots and shafts of deeper darkness approaching across a dark muculent expanse. The dead world’s atmosphere hangs in thick dollops of goo, so that when the faces at last appear they’ve pressed through these treacle curtains unexpectedly, and very close. Faces — faces I know at once I’ve encountered only through the reflecting plastic of my radio dial, through their distant living voices that changed shape at a touch of my fingers. These people come, press past the curtains, come. Awkwardly they plump down beside me or rise like erratic bubbles, unfinished souls of every description gathering closer, feebs and jerks — grotesques maybe, stained with the slime of their locale, satanic or drab or…my hands are trapped, my chest pinned and caving in…their hard surfaces are decaying till, like honey, like gum, we bend in the brainless wobble of a wave, pressing nearer still, and my heart itself caves in, at which moment we’re made over finally together into a single uncomprehending whirl. We move in a circle around ourselves.
Before us dangle the undying figures of the sign. Hieroglyphs in limitless frieze, a bedlam of wrinkles and typefaces steaming from the imprint, bodies themselves. Feel the pieces shiver, the tremors sap the ground surface. Hear…the roar, the static and roar…
WHAT I DID
YOUR LAST EXAMPLE (written in lipstick)
“From the first big moment to the last big moment — from the first little moment to the last little moment—
Honey babe — we had our chances but I just couldn’t care. I’m not even sure what happened.’’
PHYSICAL DETAIL
At times these days I’ve felt as if I had a third hand. I’ve felt it between my other two. This third hand is visible only in unpredictable glances, glances off-angle, and it floats unattached at the wrist. Yet I will itch with its presence for hours. Time and again my senses are betrayed; time and again when I try to catch the ghost it breaks apart. Yet I continue to glimpse it, the freak, the further apprehension. If my eyes have started to water for some reason, I can just make out the hollowed palm, the winking lines of heart and fate. Fifteen separate fingertips wave across a murk of sleep-sand and tears. So a girl shrinks out of reach beyond a mirror that once tricked you with her reflection; dark men shape love songs round their cracked voices and without a move, without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick. What is all our caring but these vacant and half-connected hands?
At the Dig
Now, unexpectedly, Pinnerz found himself swamped. His son was no longer in town to help. Now, no question, he had to go wangle with the construction crew. He waited till he saw the men break for morning coffee. Then he hurried up the plankway from his dig to the crew’s worksite, squeezing sideways through the gap between the granite walls of the condemned warehouse and the 4-x-4 that anchored the plywood partition against the downtown traffic. He announced that he’d need another day at least.
“Another day.” The crew foreman measured Pinnerz with a look that could be taken two ways. “Another day.”
“That would pretty much kill the week, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it Bud? We couldn’t get that cable in this week if we took off another day.”
But that second speaker was the nervous one in the crew. Italian or Greek, he could be seen jawing every time a person looked over from the dig. Pinnerz knew he could be ignored. But the crew foreman, though he didn’t look at the talker, didn’t change the way he was sizing up Pinnerz either.