There’s a pause.
Then a detonation — a muffled, rumbling blast that, after another pause, spits a morass of dead fish to the surface.
Perch, mostly.
Some white bass and sheepshead.
Sometimes I stop to drink wine.
I’m almost out of wine.
I wish it would rain. The sound of rain on water is the stuff of warm dreams.
When the wine is gone, I’ll just keep feeding grenades into the lake, one by one, until something happens.
Only two things can happen.
One: I kill all of the fish.
Two: I run out of grenades.
I’m out of grenades.
All of the fish are dead.
In the distance, the University lays on the shore like an evacuated whale. .
83
Berserk paillasse of violence.
84
Do you ever get the feeling that your molecules are dirty? My molecules feel like Biblical whores.
Liebestod.
Hello! I exist.
Burn in hell.
I am not afraid of poi.
I invented plaster, however.
Reboot. Revert.
Hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium.
Ich bin nicht ein glücklicher Mann.
I call to the long quasars in the rafters, in the hay.
I do not believe in superpowers. And yet I feel alive.
And when I forget to put on underwear, it feels gud.
Sadly, I am correct.
Datum.
The sum of human desire, consequence, suffering and madness can be attributed to two seminal factors: audacity and fear.
And now I will take a bath. In a tub.
There is no tub.
I am not the ghost of my former self.
I have never eaten a jelly donut. I never will.
Please check out my website. It’s full of porn and insight and darkness.
Everybody loves it.
I hate your guts.
How old am I?
I don’t want to die.
Maybe I’ll be the first one to live forever.
Shawty doesn’t even know how much I think about her.
Who doesn’t clean their garbage cans and their sponges and their broomheads on occasion?
Methods of Keeping Things Clean must be kept clean too. Otherwise: chaos.
Who is casting that shadow on her lunar anus?
Adjust the lighting please.
Everybody take a step back please.
Thank you.
My stepfather and my real father are as much the same person as they are themselves and entirely different entities.
There is no (step)father.
This is a good life.
I like reading about the moon.
Everything is black and white and nothing really happens and the landscape is just beautiful and I can jump, like, a hundred feet into the air.
I’m alone too.
I used to despise loneliness but I’ve become exceedingly addicted to it.
I think when you die you get to go to the moon.
Everybody gets to go to the moon.
Their own moon.
As I prepare to leap over a yawning impact crater, I lose my footing.
Discombobulation.
I crawl across the tundra until I hit a wall. Ragged solar winds peel the skin from my face.
I’m ok.
I consider the low albedo, the bi-hemispherical reflectance, the epoxies that combust on the stage of mourning.
I climb a ladder and jackknife off of the high-dive into the cool waters of the Void, producing tall eruptions of aftershock and dark matter and angel paste that burn holes in the ceiling of reality.
Soup. Surf. Eukaryote.
Monkey.
Shawty.
The sun swallows the sky.
The moon swallows the sun.
God swallows the moon.
The Universe looks awry.
85
Like tubs, like sushi — there is no University.
This is as it should be.
Tabula rasa.
I’ve said it before.
Remember?
Streets paved with glands, architectures paved with ether, intellects and ideologies evaporating into the veiled interstices of time and space. All that remains are the echoes of penetration, of flesh on flesh, a moist pop, performative gazes and eerie cottonmouths opening onto the wasteland.
I can’t tell if the libraries have been blown up or eviscerated like obese criminals.
The books are harder to look at than the bodies.
Memories produce turbulence in my lines of flight.
I must grip the armrests for support.
Vespers.
Ambience.
Over there is an elevator.
Where did it come from?
What’s an elevator doing at the University? There are only stairs at the University.
I have never seen an elevator outside the confines of its shaft. It looks naked.
The elevator is broken.
The elevator is on its back.
In the dead cornfield.
In the dry scales.
I circle the wreckage and gauge its semantic impact, its karmic potential. Then I pry open the doors with a crowbar and climb inside.
I take off my t-shirt.
I take off my sweatpants and my underwear.
I press a cheek against the walls of the mirrored chamber.
The mirrors are broken and the shards are sharp. They cut into my skin like unspeakable clichés.
I can feel the blood rolling down my face.
It feels gud.
Outside there are birds that don’t tweet and there are stars that don’t glint and the air doesn’t smell like anything.
And once again: this is as it should be.
This history, this reality, this future. . and dreams of wasabi slouching across the enormity of my tongue.
About the Author
D. HARLAN WILSON is an American novelist, short story writer, literary critic, editor, historian, playwright and English prof. Visit him online at DHarlanWilson.com and TheKyotoMan.com.