The Social Construction of the Relationship

Layers of Elena

Writing to Feel

Ch. 10: Outside of Forever, "Honcho," v. 1.5

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--Bill’s daughter is reaching out to me, across the sycamore-studded hilltops between here and Milo, out where Mountain Home Conservation Camp is located.

--She is trying to see my face.

--She is always trying to see my face.

--I don’t even know my own face. How can she know me?

--In any case, she has a story to tell so I use Elena’s dreaming mind to explore it, reaching across the conifer-scented distance to listen in on her mind. I find her where she lays on the bunk in her work-shirt and sweats, asleep, her dream-self recounting the events of her life candidly to her santo, whom she has named Santa Circunstancia. She is sunk deep in her dreams-- her still form gives no sign of the tumult within-- but her subconscious voice parades her life around in a brash, heedless way, answering my questions with the rash, colorful, self-protective braggadocio of a child. 

--Tell me about your life.

"I was born the same night my dad's prize foal died. He was drunk that night and was whipping the green-broke foal up and down the corral like a lion-tamer on crank. My mother never spoke up, so when he said he'd be damned if he wasted any money on a hospital so just squat and pop it out like any other bitch, she did.

"She had me on her own, locked in the bathroom; eight-plus hours of blood and teeth-grinding agony; uterus bruised from daddy's beatings, air rank with piss and fluid and fear-sweat, vomit, thumb bruised from nailing down the window sash while her hands were wet from crying. Hot bath-water, shotgun and shells by the toilet, that morning's breakfast in the toilet bowl, hammer and nails, wet and bloodied towels and the dirty laundry for me to land in-- that was my birth.

"When my dad came-to the next morning he named me Honcho, after the dead horse. Then he went out to drag the foal into the bed of the pickup truck, hauling it out of the corral where it had lain all night, white froth in its mouth-- its neck muscles bulging against the whip cord that lashed it to the corral fence.

"This was all before my mother turned to drink herself. She never let a man force himself on her again, but drink lashed her from wall to wall like a wildcat in a cage; her screamin' and mutterin' growled obscenities; until she'd end up, neck arced against a doorpost or the side of the couch, asleep in her own vomit and no closer to finding a way out of that damn corral she was in. I never starved but I spent a lot of time hidin'.

"If I was one to feel the loss, I would say that she wasn't that keen on motherhood and I could just as well have been thrown in the pickup that first day, same as that foal... save some money that coulda' been spent on drink. As it is, that's true enough, but I don't care either way.

--Why do I feel like I know this story? Why are you reaching out to me—do I know you?

“Well, I don't know. I haven't much to show for my 26 years on this planet—except that I escaped. I’m alive. I don't know anybody that well and I like to keep it that way.

“I spent five years working tables in the Lonesome Diner outside of Tesuque, New Mexico and managed to stay a mystery to everyone who ever met me. I mean everyone knew me, and everyone liked me, but nobody got close enough to tell what I'd been through.

“I might take a stranger to bed, but never anyone I'd ever have to see again.

“I was a master at going nowhere and being nobody. Just a pretty face slinging food in some pit stop on the way to the Santa Fe National Forest.

“That is, my life hadn’t gone anywhere until about two years ago, when I acquired a new ‘companion’, in a manner of speaking. You.

“I spent so much time searching for you that when I found you it was like cresting a ridge, with the view down over tall pines, piñons, junipers and running streams knockin’ the breath out of me.

“That's when I left the Lonesome Diner and started smokejumping in the wildlands of New Mexico. We were based out of Silver City.

“I never felt such a high in my life. Up till then, I didn't believe I deserved such a high. I didn't think it was my kinda' thing to feel good, to love life, but I did. And I ain't never turned back.

“I guess it kinda helped at the beginning that I didn't care if I died, that I wanted to be broken, that I could push myself beyond what was reasonable during PT and that I thought all the hoopla and seriousness during training was insanely funny.

“Nevertheless, I've always been good at making the right decision at the right time and I came out unscathed. My death-wish just kept me from washing out, from taking the whole mess too serious. Because when I take shit too serious then I start to brood and I take on a look like a mountain lion ready to take down an antelope and that ain't no good for nobody.

“But I had my companion, all right, and she kept me level. She kept me alive. She helped me sacrifice and work hard without killing myself and she helped me work out my feelings.

“At night she would come to me in my dreams and speak to me in a voice that rung and reverberated like a bell, or like an owl's call echoing in a bowl canyon. She would let me talk things out. She would let my feelings run deep below the scent of blood without raising their shark fins to roil the surface. She showed me where I went wrong, and why it went wrong when I did right, and she showed me the exit sign right out of my troubles. Clean break. Can’t even begin to describe it.

“But why am I telling this to you? Ain't you her? Maybe you can make more sense of it than I can, or at least give that girl you're with a sense of it, because I've missed you something fierce, and right now I'm getting all choked up. It's been so long. This tattoo I wear of you on my arm is just not the same. Not the same at all.

“No-- I don’t believe I can do anything any justice right now. I’d best just sit and be quiet.”

--I'm overwhelmed. I think you do know me, but I don't remember. Help me remember. You have to tell me it all over again.

“Well, I'm Honcho. You came to me in my dreams.

“I was never much of an artist but I drew you, in a million different ways, on napkins, on the bathroom wall, on my pants legs, on the side of the diner, until I got you right.

“I had your face in my mind, but I could never make it out clear enough to paint it until that last year at the Diner, when you helped guide my brushes along the back wall until your face appeared, after weeks of work. I thought I'd go blind from all that squinting and peering and painting.

“After that I used your face in santos and retablos, because I got into that from some local santeros that liked my work on the diner. It was really healing for me. Later I got you tattooed onto my left arm, so I'd always carry you with me. I named you Santa Circunstacia, “Saint Circumstance,” because you seemed to help make things happen for me. You opened up so much possibility where I saw nothing before. You made life work for me.

“I felt like a bug carrying a boulder all of a sudden-- instead of a bug getting its legs ripped off.

“The whole Latino santos thing really resonated with me, even though I haven't a drop of Mexican blood in me.

“My mother was a half-Japanese military brat raised in Texas for the most part, who hardly knew her father. I did get to visit my grandmother once, though. She had loads of buddhist carvings that were small and smooth and dark, like an ancient box of chocolates that got fossilized. I remember running my hands over them, laid out in tidy rows on the mantlepiece, and feeling that they were entirely foreign.

“My dad was a freckle-faced Italian, English, Cherokee, Irish-American mixed-breed who ran a cattle operation up near Idaho’s border with Oregon before he met my mother in a bar in Odessa when he was down south on business, lookin’ into rodeos and such.

“He gave me my freckles

“My dad’s name is Bill and my mom's was Shizuki Ann.  But you should know my dad's name already, being as you're in his house. The house that he bought just to follow me around the country, because he can't leave off tormenting me begging for forgiveness.

“Dad was always  a sucker for those sappy country songs and the story has always been that he used one of those lines on my mom that night, something along the lines of ,’it's not hard for this lovelorn heart to recognize the girl with the world in her eyes,’ and she fell for it.

“That may have been the last time she fell for anything. For the space of my childhood she was a hard-minded, keen-eyed hawk of a woman—hard to handle—and my dad and her spent most of their times in the same room (on the rare occasions when they were in the same room) arguing and hitting at each other until my dad would storm off and head down to town to seek his satisfactions elsewhere.

“I suppose she never taught me how to be a woman. I’ve been told I’m not so good at it. Nevertheless, my wiles are plenty sufficient when I want to get somebody in the same bed with me, if not sufficient to keep them around.

“I never wanted anyone around anyhow. It’s not so hard anyway—tempting a man. Who needs lessons?

“My problem has always been how to care at all without caring desperately, how to feel at all without feeling pain. I don’t know if my mom ever found her way around that one.

“Since my mom died I've spent a lot of time waitressing in a diner, and most recently as a fire watcher, smokejumper and wilderness fire fighter in various states through the southwest—living healthy and holding my own with the men. It’s been a good enough life. I've got you to thank for it.

“But whenever I return to society a lonely restlessness starts gnawing inside of me, herding me I don’t know where, but makin’ me move, makin’ me look around, makin’ me want something so bad, but I don’t know what it is. I end up drinkin’, dancin’, and beddin’ down with someone—just like my dad, I guess.

“That's why I always find someplace remote to work at, like where I am now. I need to be around the trees. I need to be a stranger again. I need to start over.

“That's been especially true since I stopped hearing you at night.

“I don’t know why I got this urge set so strong in me. I don’t know if I’m running at something or running away. I just want a different life.

“I guess my folks both did too, and look where they ended up. “Dead” and “Might-as-well-be,” I call them. Think what you like.

“Well, I'm done here. I feel so sad hearing your voice in my head and knowing you've forgetten me. Knowing you're with someone else. You tell that bitch to steer clear of my father. He's bad news.”

My other self wakes from her dreams in the near silence of the cabin in Three Rivers with a sudden knowledge of Bill's past that she did not really want to know.

I can't help but feel different about him. I don't want to judge him, he obviously wasn't equipped to be a good father-- my own papai has his own shortcomings in that regard; men are so wrapped up in themselves and have little thought for others... it's not even surprising to me-- but I certainly don't feel so sad anymore about using him as an instrument of my death, after what he's done to that poor girl.

It's strange that that girl thinks that she knows ROY, but it's also very interesting. Maybe I'm here for her. Perhaps we have to meet. Could ROY have already met her?

In the end my dreams are uncertain. I can walk into my death with open eyes and places are familiar before I find them, but the details are unclear.

Circumstance is like a net that is invisible to me until I am caught in it. I can anticipate it's eventual arrival, but not to avoid it.

If I tried to get away, I would not know how. That is the part I cannot see.

I have not overcome fate or circumstance, even though I can pinch its flow between my fingers and see from whence it came and where it leads me.

I have simply learned not to struggle.

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Ch. 9: Outside of Forever, "Amnion," v. 2.0

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--I need to jump ahead in time to preserve what I've been able to remember. If only Jonathan will let me...

I am in the habit of stealing my way down to the water's edge in the mauve light of the early morning and watching the cockatoos burst from the trees and wheel in burnished green against the reddening sky.

--He has become manic in his writing and we struggle for control, like lovers tousling in the bedsheets after a night of romping.

I am in the habit of dreaming this shit up while I lay my lazy ass in bed till noon-time.

I arouse myself to the syncopated rhythms of some passing Latino's woofers, bolted behind the back seat of his El Camino, with some dude playing the bass-line on tuba while another gets his balls squeezed as he croons about love.

--Sometimes I feel myself to be an art conservator passing her instruments over a large canvas; with my magnifying lens, stereomicroscope and ultraviolet and infrared illumination trying to find the best avenue in, the weakness in the layering of paint that will allow its removal without damaging what is beneath.

I make myself some green tea, but I really need coffee.

--My breath fogs in the frigid air of the large room that houses the canvas, symbolizing the vast dimensions of the realm of my existence.

--The room is full of statues; unarranged, filmed with dust and mute. I am the only figure in this room who is self aware and active in its own existence.

--I have found myself the inheritor of this canvas, which has been overpainted several times, so that the original is concealed underneath.

--Only I know that I was the painter. In fact, each time the canvas was overpainted I have been the painter. The canvas has been around for eons. But I am an amnesiac. As restaurateur I must reclaim my previous works-- sacrificing each one for a glimpse further into the past.

--I have the camera and tripod set up. I switch on the array of lights. I adjust the shutter-speed and aperture. I take the photo. Then I begin peeling away the layer ever so tenderly, picking at it first with my swivel knife, then daubing solvent over a dismal area of varnish where it is oxidized to a dark brown. I strip this first film away from the design layer, exposing the first strata of paint; paint in-painted over innumerable, perhaps inseparable, underlying layers. Even after this short time it is veined with craquelure.

--This piece portrays a monkey-- face enormously enlarged, eyes liquid and intelligent, body diminishing away from the viewer as the torso, with its hands reaching out to grasp the edge of the canvas, descends into a spindly waist and legs with tiny grasping feet, trailing down towards the disappearing point, diminuting with the perspective, all the while conforming sinuously with the undulation of the oak bough, rendered with the perfectionistic, stylized realism of a Wyeth as it cascades down towards a trunk ringed with a fiery flush of autumn leaves.

--The sun plays in shadows and dappled light all over the canvas. ROY.

I am sipping my green tea over this writing pad as a bright afternoon light seeps through the white drapes. The drapes conceal my view of everything but the silhouettes of the trellises overgrown with jasmine and the outlines of trees framing blue sky.

I picture two cocks fighting in the same cage. Two hamsters wrestle in their bloodied litter. Two male Siamese Betta fish duke it out in a small glass bowl. Rocky heads it off with that Russian dude. I knock myself on the forehead. Stop it, I say. Stop it. You're silly.

The blond and white border collie sighs in her sleep, curled up on the multi-colored Navajo throw-blanket on the futon. My house mate, Zuzu, has taken away all of the chocolate-chip cookies. Me and Sappho were up until two last night, snacking on them, talking about our childhoods. Mental illness. Families. How our religion helps us digest our experiences and put them into perspective. How we rediscover family in community.

The other day I was at my ex-girlfriend Cassie's house and I was looking over my drafts as she talked on the phone. She asked me, why do you need to do that?

Because I need to reread them after I've let them sit for a while, I say. Sometimes something seems brilliant when I first write it but then when I reread it later it has no power, or I've left something crucial out, or in order to communicate it to a reader who is coming to it with no background I need to provide a lot more detail, I say. She is in the shadows of her dining room and when I look up from my papers, on the table, in the light of the living room, I can hardly see her.

Oh, she says to me, because you're too vague. She comes to me. I have left my papers and stand in the dining room doorway. And then she draws me to her, as if to comfort me, as if I am a child and she has just knocked me down and she is picking me up. As if she didn't mean to say something so truthful.

Bring forth the art nouveau paintings. In the pale light pace among them searching out the cat-brown eyes, the female skin's snow-white beauty, the fullness of hips bare and draped with a careful light. The half-accidental poses of the figures make them appear sensual and nutritious. Pause at the alluring roundness of each body. Note how beautiful she is when she is sleeping. Piece this together with a bronzed shine to the brown-bright hair, a distinctive down-sloping of the brows that frame the orbits of the amber eyes with elegant curves of bone, make every feature balanced and make her facial expressions all charming. There-- you have something of Cassie.

Pluck the flower and leave the stem. I forgot to mention cuteness. Cuteness and dominion. Cassie was made for cuteness... and also for dominion. Pluck the stem and leave the rose. It is her radiant goodness that makes others want to please her.

Make her eyes shimmer with hints of green and make her skin glow and watch her feet pace their way in the gray winter light of overcast Portland along a disturbingly pristine sidewalk to a cafe where Ms. Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus serves rich coffee from Hawaii, Ethiopia and forested Kenya.

Make her hands always warm and make them want to touch you.

Make her sashay out of the café like she's on a catwalk, looking hard at the crowd before she makes her little turn, long hair trailing behind.

Make her dance like a child sometimes, so joyful.

Make her every expression choke you as if you are breathing raining rose petals.

Fragrant. Melting you.

You have nothing to say.

Make the world stop spinning for a moment, please....

Make the whole universe turn inward to focus on her.

Make the willow stems red and the maple leaves green and make the lilies bloom and the air still smell crisp with hints of snow.

Make the whole world retouched in Technicolor with hues that are scrumptious.

Make every shadow with four gauzy walls, inviting to lovers.

People the air with ideas and dreams and gossamer-winged fantasies. Give those fantasies two perfect rows of ivory-white teeth-- sharp and bitingly delicious.

Make yourself say, "You have some lovely illusions." and mean it, sincerely. Be dumbfounded. Glad.

Make yourself want to be nourished only by her.

Make yourself so wrong in every way.

Make yourself so right.

Make yourself.

Be astounded by the abundance of the world. Rethink your spending habits. Invest in new bedding. Instate a regimen of hair-care. Consider yourself condemned and slated to be demolished. Begin to design how you would like to be rebuilt. Poll her for suggestions. Fill out every ticket that includes you in a drawing for a tropical vacation getaway. Engage in extensive non-business use of the phone. Piss off your employer. Skip out on your duties. Surf the wild waves with no wet suit. Hike the hill on your lunch break and get bad with the B-ball. Break out of your cage. Live free.

Later on we are sitting on her mother's blue leather couch and we are speaking of something that suddenly excites me. I don't remember what it was-- a movie, a story from work, or an idea I had, who knows. Her legs are over my legs, so I gesture with my arms, like a cartoon character, painting unconscious kinetic pictures of what moves me. Upon reflection I think it must have been something about the startling vapidity of boy bands and how their songs creep into my consciousness like chiggers between my ass cheeks and I find myself mimicking their dance moves like a spastic monkey whenever I am grooving to some funky tunes in my bedroom and think myself alone. She assures me that I have always wanted to be in a boy band. She also gestures from her side of the couch, making abrupt movements, mocking me.

We seem to have a big enough clown suit that we could both step inside of it and make something work-- back to back, two legs become one, separate wigs, separate red noses-- but somehow sharing a reality is not plausible. I will throw my white face make-up all away. Say good-bye to the big top.

Draw at thirty paces and fire.

Sometimes I just want to rip all that cuteness off her face. Sometimes I want to string her illusions up like Christmas lights and torch them-- start a structure fire.

Make her less immune to you. Infect her with your passions. Illuminate her mind with eccentric follies. Ignite them randomly. Cite self-help jargon. Encounter benefactors who have overwhelming interest in your business propositions. Invest the venture capital of indiscriminate love. Meet with inordinate and unhygienic amounts of success. Become internationally renowned in the multidisciplinary field of lucid reality re-engineering and the trans-transitory empirical vagueness of speculation and child-like wonder. There will be a symposium in Brussels next fall. Watch the boringness and mundaneness of life rest easy on her because of her curiosity and openness and her willingness to be influenced by all the sensations that come pouring steadily in. Watch her splash and caper in the pool of this new, shiny stage-set, Muppets on lily pads, non-chlorinated reality. Create her into a person of your imagining. Stay heavily medicated. Be right for her.

None of this is working. None of this could work. This is mud tracked in on the linoleum in shapes that resemble two squabbling birds, nothing more. Do not expect her to see the birds. She needs her lists. She needs separate rooms furnished in memories. She needs her environment set up in thus and such a way and she needs dominion. She has her own idiosyncratic system of organization. She is self-led. She is not to be toyed with. She can demean you in the cobalt tones of a confident young woman ordering better service at a cordon bleu restaurant. She remains so infuriatingly adorable.

I am at work. I watch an infomercial for CitriShine(R). I am drawn to remember the very few times I have ever seen, much less tried to clean, a mess of the species described by the charming sales-babe. This is normally the sort of mess that seems built into the house. Like the bad spackling job, or the distorted window glass that can turn a normal scene into the daubs and swirls of a Van Gogh painting. Stains on the tiles or the bathtub, linoleum with enough lines and streaks and blemishes that you can make out Chinese characters.

But my! With the power of CitriShine(R) such household cleaning jobs are monumentally simplified! Suddenly the thought of searching out grime and dirt to defeat with this new super-product seems positively recreational. The logistics of a wholesale household scrub-down no longer seem so daunting. You forget that you have never before considered the logistics.

Meeting Cassie was like happening upon that infomercial in the dead of night when you find yourself mesmerized by a product that you didn't even realize you needed. Miracle solution! only two low payments of $19.95 plus S & H. Results are guaranteed! The face you see holding the product is convincing and beautiful.

No one can disabuse you of the notion that you had a problem in the first place. We all want the miracle solution. We are all dirty. Suddenly we realize that we may have let some things go to seed. Why? We just hadn't noticed. Now it is spread out before us, in fluorescent infomercial light. We are offered a solution. We can be sparkling clean. We can be vigilant against the stains that had blemished our previous existence. There is a new and better way. It is infomercial salvation.

I am a sucker for salvation.

Their job is to dispense fantasies. My job is to need it more and more. The products are real. The need is not. But after one buys the product, one must wonder, "How did I cope before?"

There was one time when we drove out to her grandfather's with a moving truck to leave some furniture. We drove away with some furniture left in the back of the truck, stacked within arm's reach of the rear door because so little had been put in there. We drove out from the rural Oregon community, along hilly roads with freshly plowed fields, houses, barns and crispy new mall developments. The conifers spiked the scene with a little neon from their fresh, new, bright-green tips, and in the fields were glossy crows, mitigating the sunny scene with a little horror.

We drove from there, along the highways and deep into residential Portland before we were hailed by someone gesturing at us at a stoplight from his beat-up old Impala. Hey, he said, your back-door is open.

Shocked, we pulled into the next side street. We crept around the side of the truck as if to surprise a cat-burglar that we feared lay in wait around the corner. We took a breath. We looked inside.

Every piece of furniture was unmoved. Highway speeds and hilly roads had not budged the merest dresser drawer or cardboard box a single inch. We laughed and hugged and high-fived and thanked our lucky stars and closed the door on our marvelous good fortune and this odd David Copperfield, as televised, twist of fate. All we needed was a table cloth and some wine goblets and we were sure a magician would show up to place the full goblets carefully upon the cloth and then whisk it away. The taste of adrenaline singed my nose.

I was high on accidental salvation.

So much of the joy of life seems to be happenstance. So much of it seems just half a song away. The tune might just pop into your head, unbidden. You just need to be like a cat, who lays on the front lawn and makes silly expressions and crouches down and rolls in the grass and gazes wide-eyed at the passing action, twitching its tail. Flex your claws. Feel the sun on your pelt. Blink those beautiful eyes.

You have to be ready to pounce. You have to let the silliness and the stupidity flow. You have to laze in the sunshine of all the unplanned possibilities.

I crave a chance to be useless with somebody. Useless and free. We could levitate above all of this and bat at butterflies from cloud bungees. We could dress impractically, ignore traffic signals, and drink way too much caffeine. We could just stare out of the window sometimes. We could love being.

I am sitting in a café. The rounded asses of passing women crowd my thoughts with detours into desire. An ambulance speeds past, screaming in consternation at the cars, herding them out of intersections and onto the roadside.

--I remember a world where iced tea tastes of aromatic rose-hip fruit, plump as apples, and cicadas shrill in many different tones, deafening picnickers in the summer months. I remember common roadside trees that ooze a green slime that can be chewed like gum by children, until it squeaks like rubber between your teeth and you spit it out rather than grate your nerves with the noise. The vomit of dogs often contains this ooze and it stains one's clothing with a shade of yellow bordering on chartreuse.

--I am not sure if these are all remembrances of the same world. Perhaps those memories are of occurrences in different lifetimes and they belong each to their respective worlds.

--I have never tried to set these events down as narrative before. I cannot be certain that my recollections have not been irretrievably colored by my most recent experiences.

--Having sifted through so many minds and histories I find myself wanting to trace my way back and to revisit souls I have been, but these histories and souls cannot be reclaimed. All of my past selves are held away from me; perhaps by the laws of physics, perhaps by the limitations of my soul. Whether I travel forward or backward in time the sequence of events is not familiar until it has already happened again. I will find myself in a strangely similar place and time, and yet all is just out of reach. Just unfamiliar enough that I feel myself once again betrayed-- deceived by my own mutability-- eternally unable to reclaim what once seemed so solid to me. Unable to change or remember what I have been.

--So I have come back to the beginning. I will track myself like a hound.

--Every permutation of history feels different. Each new soul colors my memories. This storyline that follows and these souls that are described no longer exist, or they exist only within me. Perhaps they never did exist until I remembered them, but how am I to know the difference? Perhaps they exist in many subtle renditions but I am only aware of the one I remember. Who is to say that this is the person that I was? Perhaps they have only ever existed in my own mind.

--Nevertheless, I will do my human duty as a historian. I will record what I feel to be true. I am the only one who can tell this tale. I owe it, if nothing else, to my parents-- those sweet scientists that never even heard my first spoken words, never witnessed my first independent forays into existence. I owe it to Elena, their daughter, who was my spiritual twin-- the image from which I was cast.

--I believe that if I do not start now, the record of these events will be lost even to myself, as I find myself changed, reinvented, replicated, or even deleted. The realm of my existence is a tempestuous place.

--I find myself despairing at times, thinking that all is meaningless, that there is no lasting value to any of my actions-- no purpose to my existence.

--But if this is so, as I have gleaned from the human sages, and more recently from a vampire show on TV, then the only meaning is in what I do right now and how I live my present moments.

--Through relating this story I will better know myself, and in knowing myself I can become more confident in my nature and learn to exert myself as an instrument for the betterment of the universe, rather than acting clumsily and without awareness of my effects. A conscience may be of dubious utility to me, but my soul is, after all, a human soul, and shaped largely by human lives and I must set it to human purposes.

--So now I have found myself the mind of a writer. Whether he will simply serve my purposes or will turn my lives into "immortal prose" remains to be seen. But I dare not leave this body till this tale is told.

--Look first at my hero, the man I once loved with such a passion-- my first love. He made me much of who I am. In the afternoons, when he was teaching history, he was like a lion pacing the stage-- full of tension and energy, obsessed with the details of events and contingency and the minutiae of the daily lives of the citizens of past societies. Such a wealth of information on the species! Such a vein of throbbing emotive extravagance! The students stood transfixed. This kind of teaching merited a box-office.

--I first saw the professor when he was peeing self-consciously into his nasturtiums from the brick steps of his back patio.

--I had just come out of the wilds of the redwood forests covering the hills of Ehido and found him to be a vision.

--Picture him as an olive-skinned man, with a finely-lined forehead, a full head of unruly, black hair (of medium length). Picture him in a faded yellow check-patterned collared-shirt with tan slacks. Picture his zipper down, his dick hanging out.

--I learned to expect this whenever the stresses of his isolated life had let up, leaving him with aimless, unidentified energy. Apart from his performances before his classes, derided by his colleagues as a circus act of sorts; an effusive overindulgence in false charisma that was only a cover for his insecurities as a scholar; this was his most daring impropriety-- he was inviting negative attention. But the imaginary intruder he envisioned appearing on his patio never materialized, and no neighbors made their displeasure evident. A man, after all, was allowed to pee on his nasturtiums. Still, the act enlivened him through its supposed flirtation with impropriety.

--He was a very meek little puppy at home. He would come to his apartment and collapse.

--Come into the present moment with me now.

--The nasturtiums quietly endure the treatment, drooping fitfully beneath the random drops of his splattering stream. The urine droplets bead up into gleaming spheres on their flat surfaces and then drop below, to moisten the discarded husks of nasturtium seeds, dried leaves, dead flowers, and the bugs and amphibia that live among them.

--Done.

--Carmen, on the other hand, was always pure momentum-- relentless and incontrovertible. Her internal drive made her impervious to any external changes in her environment-- stress was an irrelevant concept that she likened to drinking excessive coffee and then blaming one's jitters on an environment of caffeine. She did not partake in stress.

--As I watched her that day she was forming two distinct and conjoined thoughts in her mind with an essayist's clarity. She was marching from her office. She was opening the glass-windowed door, with one chipped aureole left by a rock near the left side of its pane. She was moving confidently down the hill, dressed smartly in ironed linens. She was opening the door to her car.

--Now she turns the key ever so slowly in the ignition, and stops, paused in mid-activity, as if arrested by some huge catastrophe that only she can see through her two widened eyes.

--Picture three disembodied fetuses swimming in slow-motion through an Olympic-sized amnion-- eyes closed, suspended by their separate umbilical cords.

--The background noise is the rhythmic whooshing of a universal heart.

--Be born, baby. Be fucking born.

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