know. It is amazing that I do not kill.
*
I am afraid of dying, especially of pneumonia. I am sick all the
time, fever, sore throat, chill to the bones, joints stiff, abdominal pains from the fumes, headaches from the fumes, dizziness from the fumes. I am afraid of sleeping, afraid of dying: each day is a nightmare of miles to walk not to die: is there
1 2. 6
money for a cup of coffee today? I am a refugee: profoundly
despondent and tired enough to die: I want somewhere to live:
really live: I imagine it: warm and pretty: clean: no human shit
in piles: little bourgeois dreamer: dumb cunt: eyes hurt like
Spinoza’s: I am in the apartment, there is a driving rain, violent
wind, I stand in the rain inside, drenched.
*
The fumes start in winter. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter
again, summer again: the edge of fall. The chill is in the marrow
of the bones. The fatigue makes the eyes gray and yellow,
great rings circle them: the skin is dirty ivory like soap left in a
bathtub for years: the fatigue is like the awful air that rises
from a garbage can left to melt in the sun: the fatigue especially
sits on the tongue, slowing it down, words are said in broken
syllables, sentences rarely finished: speech becomes desperate
and too hard: the fatigue drowns the brain in sludge, there is
no electricity, only the brain sinking under the weight of the
pollution: the fatigue is smeared all over, inside the head it is
in small lakes, and behind the eyes it drips, drips. It is fall. The
windows are open. The book has been finished now. Many
publishers have refused to publish it. There is virtually no one
left to despise it, insult it, malign it, refuse it: and yet I have
been refining it, each and every night, writing until dawn. Now
I am tired and the book is perfect and I am done, a giant slug,
a glob of goo. A woman lets me go to her apartment, on the
ocean. Perhaps she saves my life.
*
In the living room there are large windows, and right outside
them there is the beach, the ocean, the sky, the moon: the sound of
the waves, the sound of the ocean moving over the earth becomes
the sound of one’s own breathing. It is foggy, hot, moist, damp,
and when fog rises on the water, huge roaches climb the walls
and rest on the tops of the windows. They are slow, covered in
the sea mist, prehistoric, like the ocean itself. They seem part
of my delirium, a fever of fatigue: I am alternately shivering,
shaking delirious and comatose, almost dead: a corpse, staring,
no pennies for her eyes. I have no speech left. I sit and stare, or
shake and cry: but still, the ocean is there. I hear the ocean, I
see the ocean: I watch the huge bugs: at dawn, I swim: I see
the red sun rise and I swim: I hear the ocean, I watch the
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ocean, I see how it endures, going on and on, I listen to the
sound of its endurance, I sit and stare or I shake, fevered. The
bright sunlight breaks up the fog, dries up the mist, the huge
brown bugs disappear: outside normal people chatter: the
afternoons are long, dull, too much sun, too many chattering
vulgar souls not destroyed, normal people with normal concerns: cheery seaside banter: old women on benches on the boardwalk right under my window: and at night teenagers
drinking beer, listening to the blaring radios, courting,
smoking. I avoid the bright sun of the afternoon and the normal
people. I sit in the living room, the sound of the ocean cradles
and rocks me, and I read Thomas Mann, listen to Mozart.
When the vulgar afternoon is over, I watch the ocean and I
listen to it endure. At night, I go out and in, out and in, walk
the beach, walk the boardwalk, sit in the sand, the wet sand,
watch the ocean, I watch it sitting, standing, walking, I walk
along its edge with concentration like not stepping on the
cracks in sidewalks, or I just tramp through the silky water as
it laps up against the sand. I sit on the empty benches on the
boardwalk and I watch the ocean. I go to the edge and touch
the vastness, the touch of my fingers is then carried back under
the water across the earth, and I am immortaclass="underline" the ocean will
carry that touch with it forever. I breathe to the sound of it
enduring. I breathe like it does, my blood takes on its rhythms,
my heart listens to the sound of the ocean enduring and mimics
it.
After five days, my lost boy comes to visit. We swim. In the
shower we make love. We sleep on the beach, in the fog, in the
mist. Inside the huge slick bugs line the tops of the windows,
poised there to drop off or fly, but never moving, primal, they
could be gargoyles, guardians in stone but as old as the sea. I
watch them. I stare. I am terrified by them but too tired to
scream or run or move: I am restless: they sit: I am afraid: they
sit: they are long, slick brown things, repulsive, slow: I must
be here, near the ocean, or perhaps I will die: maybe they wait
for that: grotesque guardians of my lonely, tired death. I am
restless. I go inside, I go outside. I listen to music: Bach,
Chopin, Mahler, Mozart. They and the ocean are renewal, the
will to live. So is the boy, my love, sleeping on the beach. I
have left him, fragile, exposed, as I always do, to sleep alone.
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He sleeps, I am restless, I go in and out. He leaves the next
day. I have two more days here. The ocean has turned me
nearly human: closer to life than death. Someday I want the
ocean forever, a whole life, day in and day out, a proper marriage: I want to be its human witness: near its magnificence, near the beat of its splendid, terrifying heart. Oh, yes, I am
tired: but I have seen the ocean come from the end of the
world to touch the sand at my feet.
*
He calls me, the publisher with the dripping upper lip, the hair
on it encrusted slightly yellow, slightly green. His voice is
melodious, undulating like the ocean, a soft washing up of
words on this desolate human shore: a whisper, a wind rushing
through the trees bringing a sharp, wet chill. He wants me,
wants my book: he is soft, melodious, undulating, tones like
music washing up in waves on the shore.
He calls, whispering. You are so wonderful to want me, I say.
*
He calls, whispering, a musical voice, soft, soft, like the ocean
undulating or the wind rushing through the trees at dusk, the
chill of night in the wind.
I am a writer, I have an agent, she stands between me and