When Kid saw the ziggurats, his first thought wasn’t of how long they’d been there or who built them but a clot of words, which he prayed: palace, corona, aura, aureola. “I Did Not Understand,” he said, even though he’d been hearing the rayguns for days now. We all had and nothing made sense. Nobody mentioned the flashes of afternoon or the coyote bark, chasing us just around the corners. Slamming doors so they couldn’t get inside. Kid was a stuttering DSM-V by this point & even he refused to talk about the murmur of alien tongues we heard sometimes when alone, which attacked the lymphatic system rather than the ears. Like his brain came and then rolled over on him asleep, is how he explained the absence inside after the Four Words materialized. They were his skeleton key, his sun & stars, his ugliness, combat, treasure. His epitaph even. Convinced, we headed to where he saw the ziggurats. On the way thru Dinkytown Kid suggested we get some snacks to boost morale in the ranks. His brain had digressed somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt from all the stuff he did. I looked at girls who walked by, when Kid was in the convenience store: wing rib dyejob pumpkin hieroglyphs cryptology lying hard sciences toothbrush spearmint Camels lighter gloves Durex soda cowboy Doritos. Kid bought Cooler Ranch but I wasn’t hungry. One walked by that hurt my gums. Continuing on, suspicions rose that Kid had availed himself of more Navel Store, shit you not kiddo, heavy stuff huh, down on our way to the river. He tapped my Not Totally Coca-Cola. We talked:

KID: When I meet Old Scratch, leaning toward sooner, I’m going to do a good thing for you. A real fine eyefucking extraordinary new-sheriff-in-jail thing.

ME: ?

KID: I’m gonna get a card for that library they have, the one the cocksucker started to keep all the books to himself, the books Little Horn gets when he successfully steals them from brains with instruments of his own persuasion and invention. Your Not One Hundred Percent Coca-Cola, for example. OR the Navel Stone.

ME: Is there also an art gallery in that vein? Or an entire city?

KID: How should I know? But in this brief instant of lunar clarity, cause the N.S. is starting to make my skull glow, let me tell you, I’m gonna steal your books and flip the ol’ Jackson to the Spooky Man. O SHIT THE RAYGUNS----

KID: I’ll mail them to you. Do you think Hell’s spread past Earth? Your books, I can bribe a minor demon, Ronwe or Astarix or Steven, to load them onto a rocket on its way back to Earth. I doubt they’re written in blood or anything that space travel could fuck up. If the planet’s too far away, and you die by the time the hellship arrives, I’ll just parachute them down right over here.

ME: Do the rayguns shoot faster than light?

Kid continued etc until we reached the ziggurats. I could barely see them in the dark. Maybe Kid saw them in the deadlights of his own, private moon. I Just Don’t Know. I finished my Actually Not In Any Way A Coca-Cola while he tried every possible permutation of the Four Words. Kid yelled poems, speeches, stories, invectives, jokes clean and dirty, finally the Words were profanaties as he convulsed in the dirt. I left him there, soundtracked by the moaning of the rayguns. A lot of time went by, at various speeds, sez the Voice. Listen: Time passes. Much later in life I found a box, far after Kid had finished his talks with the Navel Lady and died. I forgot what his Four Words are, exactly. The ones I said were invocations. I heard my own Four that night. I looked through the pages in the box, from before I’d even met Kid. Stuffed them back in. Closed the box up real tight. On the box there was the distinct purple thumbprint of a serious Letheylphenemine addict. The return address was:

The worst thing about being
here is that you have to
remember everything

The Apples & The Bees

I just ate an outstanding apple, standing in the sun in the funny little garden on the south side of Crowe Hall. It was a Honeycrisp--developed by the University of Minnesota and released in 1991, this cultivar (whose sweet, tart and flavorfully crisp flesh makes it ideal for eating raw) is now proud bearer of the heavy mantle of 'Minnesota State Fruit'--that I purchased from a sassy old lady farmer whom I banter with at the farmer's market every Saturday. I wonder if she'll let me haggle if I hit on her hard enough. New Student Week has begun and everywhere you turn your head, nametagged freshmen scuttle around corners. They move in large groups, or in trilateral family units, or sometimes even all on their own, with a purposeful stride and terrified twitchy features. The apple was so crisp and juicy that each bite sounded off like a gunshot and produced a mist of apple-scented vapor for the streaming sun to filter through.

(I wanted to describe the off-juicing as an 'arterial spray' but could not in good conscious do so.)

There were shady benches in this garden but bands of marauding yellowjackets, numerous and cocksure off of late-summer excess (and I suppose a healthy dose of pre-winter desperation), scared me off. I hate the hell out of bees. Standing on the sidewalk in the shade was not so bad, and it let me feel more like a strange and menacing prominence, which I enjoy because I am an egoist. 'Who is that forlorn and malevolent stranger with the harrowing beard and the nervous tapping foot? What magnificent pain, what tragic genius could drive him to flaunt social norms and so boldly eat that apple, with its crude crunchings and dribbling of juices (some into his very beard itself!), here in the sun before our very eyes? He pauses only to cooly appraise our daughter and girlishly twirl in place to shoo a bee, then turns his rage back to the helpless apple clenched in his hairy grip, back to the beastly heaving, ripping and tearing of the supple flesh, licking and smacking his lips, swallowing it down with demonic and overwhelming gusto. We are terrified, and strangely drawn.' This (really) is the narrative that ran through my head while I stood there and ate this apple.

I put all of my energies towards not eating a bee. People are coming back and I need to shave my hermit beard, which I suppose I grew to keep my company. In Peter the Great's Russia, men who wished to keep their beards had to pay a special tax and carry around a little medallion with a picture of a beard on it, and there was still a good chance that the Tsar himself would see you on the street, grab you by the beard and cut it off with the razor that he always kept on him for this purpose.* This apple, once the size of both fists held together (or brain-sized, if the old grade-school heuristic holds any water), has dwindled down to about one fist in volume. It is 75 degrees American and this tiny Asian girl is wearing jeans and three layers of sweatshirts; I suppose that come winter she will require a parka the size of a minivan. For her parents' benefit she has pointed out a dead bush of special significance but her mother would rather glare at me over sunglasses. (I suppose the 'Pax as Romantic Byronic hero whose all-consuming apple-passion destroys both himself and those around him' storyline above is pretty much from this woman's POV. Women fascinate me more and more these days.) I look back at her through my own sunglasses and take an especially big, sloppy bite of the Honeycrisp. I instantly regret not first sliding down my sunglasses and making true eye contact. I seem to have switched to the present tense.

*And here's the really great part: if you said a damn word about it, ol' Pete would probably take all your land and belongings and give 'em to his pals, exile your family to Siberia, and then cut your fucking head off, and everyone would say, "Well that was right and proper." Autocracy, everybody.

Curious about the mechanism by which creeping ivy clings to walls, I walked between those symmetrical dorm-things to examine their ivy-carpeted exteriors. One esp. verdant sun-drenched** corner was in unspectacular brown-gree blossom, said tiny boring flowers being however a subject of great interest for a veritable cloud of fucking bees. I stood mesmerized and transfixed and wished I had the power to strike bees dead, perhaps by breathing on them. By this point the apple was what most people would call a 'core,' but I continued to gnaw on it, as I enjoy eating like a refugee. Passersby reached for comment on the uneasy spook staring at a wall in his black cords and blue T used words like 'baleful' and 'maleficent.' My apple is gone, work starts in 5, and there are no bees indoors (if they know what's good for them). Excuse me.

**I find it interesting how often light, especially sunlight, is described in terms of water. Sunlight can drench, bathe, stream, flow, trickle or flood, and sometimes it will deluge or drown. I suppose sunlight and water both have a sort of primal patience and inevitibility about them; no matter how tight you seal it up, light and water will find a way in.

two failures

Corduroy and Sam arrived. Arriving not being very important, they’d been arriving for years now, not knowing anybody or at least hoping so. The house was charming, if I can say that, with a terrace in the back like a secret garden and so well-lit and inviting Corduroy thought he’d rather come over for a sandwich in the afternoon than to a house party after eight or ten hours of drinking. But they weren’t really drunk, really. Maybe body-drunk but sharp brained enough. Starting the ritual. Hide coats, find the bathrooms, look for friends and old enemies, babes, escape routes, fire hazards. The envy thick enough to breathe. He was tired of doing things like this. Lizard was there, an ancestor from the shadowland, still brown and loud but with her voice a lot lower than he remembered. Corduroy dated her friend and roommate for a year, after her. He hadn’t really considered the consequences of this until now beyond a basic ethical inventory considering revenge and pettiness and that stuff, until she was there as much as she could be in the yard. Corduroy and Sam slinking like two black cats looking for somewhere to hide from everybody, Lizard with her friends and the poor bastard she’d chosen to dance attendance on her for the night in a circle, with a look of dumb ecstasy on his face. Corduroy was reminded of himself having a similar look, and even after drinking a fair amount of the Comrade he still had a uniquely bad case of The Screamer. The Screamer being seasickness followed by a pure sharp wave of terror that one feels upon encountering an old girlfriend. Months and years and girls had passed but Corduroy still got The Screamer even through the amniotic protection of the Comrade. He relied on the Comrade a lot, these days.

Sam was trying to figure out how to talk to a girl he liked, who had open round melting eyes, a princess of the blood maybe, swilling Four Loko and chatting up the gays. Another part of the ritual, Corduroy thought, was remembering that nobody actually talked to who they wanted to talk to at things like this, you had to sneak looks and figure out who was eyeballing who. Going out and getting drunk had ceased to be fun a long time ago. It was field research or a puzzle or a simple distraction. They were in the courtyard, if I can use that word, when Lizard walked by. Corduroy got The Screamer real bad, and then he loved her, a lot more than he actually had when they were dating, and he loved her more because he knew it would only last for an hour or two and then he’d stop. Mouth shut, mouth dry, staring and dropping his cigarettes. Unable to talk to her beyond hello. Going into the bathroom, which was another thing he often did, to be by himself and try to aggregate the psychic data. There’s always a lot of it in Southeast, which was principally why he loved it and needed to leave so much. Above the toilet somebody had written “SWAMP FOOT STRIKES AGAIN”. Corduroy looked at himself in the mirror for three or four minutes without blinking. There was an empty tub of Long Islands. He went to the smallest room of the house, because that’s where the oldest person at the party always is, feeling uncomfortable, he went to the smallest room because he always liked to talk to the oldest person at the party for a long time because he knew that Lizard knew this habit about him and eventually she’d wander into it and talk to someone else, ignoring him completely. All girls do this. It happened immediately. Her presence in the room was warm, narcotic almost, another part of the inebriate love-feeling he was having for somebody who egged his house and left him twice. Not that he was anywhere near innocent about the whole thing. “The whole thing” just kept on getting more fucked up. Corduroy, having a facile conversation with the oldest person, who was way too fucking old to be there, thought he should probably be depressed by knowing and acting in this dumb sketch but was fairly porlocked by the Comrade, and also had a new shirt on, and also liked going out regardless of the heavy emotional cost. He was also very afraid.

One habit of Lizard’s was when she dressed to go out she’d never let him be in the room, or within two rooms of her. She flew into rages while she was dressing, so by the time she was finally ready all of her clothes scattered her room and her bathroom, dressed now and calmly sipping a vodka and Sprite. Corduroy, a quarter in the bag, asked her if her tantrum was over. She stuck out her tongue and they’d leave. Not talk all night. Lizard was a big one for cruelty. Corduroy admired the honest and open quality of it. Having not learned it until he dated her, the honest and open kind of cruelty. Vindictively, with her purse-holder there and the older man with the goatee talking about chemistry, two meaningless conversations happening. The various subtexts were so weighty and adolescent that Corduroy decided to check on Sam, but Sam had made no progress, so Corduroy went into the front yard with the Comrade and wondered if it was worth the effort to chat up one of the birds of paradise on the veranda, if I can use that word. I imagined girls and boys in radiation suits, doing their goddamnest not to bump into each other, faces covered while Ratatat and Notorious BIG played, getting decontaminated before they left so as not to spread the disease beyond the neighborhood.

Lizard left before Corduroy could talk to her. Sam didn’t talk to the sloe-eyed brunette. Two corpses walked home and listened to Kicking Television much quieter than they preferred to, respecting as much as they could the other people around them.

I ran into this kid from my neighborhood on the way back from class last week. I didn’t want to walk with him but we were headed in basically the same direction, so that’s what happened. My brain only works in transit to and from class, mysteriously, so I was annoyed that I had to waste that special fifteen blocks chatting with him about his chemistry test or whatever. And this was almost all fifteen of them, or maybe fourteen. He said a word I didn’t know the meaning of and while I was thinking about that he asked me if I wanted to come to his house and have a couple of beers. I remembered that he had a roommate I was fond of, and they always offered snacks. Then he mentioned offhandedly he was working on some songs and would I take a burned CD with me and check them out, they were just at his house. I just can’t tell anymore if people are holding the carrot or the stick.

He kept glancing around everywhere, and behind his back, and up and even sometimes down. After I’d accepted his offer I felt immediately guilty, like we were going to have sex but then I was going to go on a date with someone I actually like afterward, drinking his beers no less, promising I’d call, so I decided to ask him what the deal was with the looking around, and while I debated if this would be like a socially acceptable thing to do with a drinking buddy and wondering if instead I should just ask him what the goddamned word meant because it was really bothering me, on a fine Thursday afternoon when I had no reason to be bothered. But two blocks had passed, and I let it go until he turned down this side street that was five or six blocks out of the way and made no sense to walk down. This with all the looking around and the chemistry and the talk of the “underwater tone” he was getting from his new guitar pedals was too much, Rollins goes way around the train tracks and it was about the loneliest possible place to be walking with all the sun and the coffee and the general disinterest in everything. So I asked him what’s with the production because this nice Thursday was getting into some film noir shit and if the guy wasn’t such a geek I’d swear he was taking me to a drug deal or a bicycle theft or a general non-fine afternoon thing.

While he was answering it occurred to me how lonely this person must be.

He said that whenever he was going somewhere alone, which, more and more frequently, was the case (Here I’ll skip a digression re: his girlfriend’s fondness for white wine and pot, and driving to Taco Bell and then having a massive anxiety attack in the parking lot and hiding from him in the Target nearby for hours at a time, like twice a week or something. Or maybe not. Como Avenue stories aren’t exactly famous for their veracity, more like archetypes or fables that illustrate how fucked up everyone is) he pretended that somebody was following him. Not always someone he knew, although sometimes he pretended that it was a friend or relative, and not always somebody menacing and strange. Sometimes (probably a lot of the time) it was some blonde who saw him at the bus stop and followed him hoping he’d go into the deli and she could get his number while he was getting a gyro, and sometimes he’d drop his wallet. At this point, and we’d wandered way past our destination by now, him looking around like he’s a cheating husband on the soaps on the way to his Puerto Rican mistress, who incidentally has a husband that’s like a linebacker or a mafia guy, anyway at this point he stressed that even while he was pretending he’d dropped his wallet he could feel it in his back pocket. The trains nakkering by off Rollins, which had turned into an industrial district. Me smoking as fast as I can, fascinated in the way that it’s fascinating to watch Sam hit on girls.

When the stories about his girlfriend are told people always emphasize that it’s white wine, not red, white. Once some asshole tried to derail a friend’s girlfriend telling this story on a porch somewhere by delving into the minutiae of white wines and I could have just slapped them for interrupting the storyteller, who is generally shy and was telling the story well. Really, these Como fables/half- or full- truth trainwrecks are best heard around the fifth time or so because then you begin to see where the speculation and prejudice of the different tellers set in.

Now we were further from his house than when we started, as I quizzed him on all of the different strategies he pulled to shake off these imaginary followers of his, aside from aforementioned the take-the-empty-frontage-road-on-a-beautiful-day-when-there-are-tons-of-babes-out-walk. He liked to go into stores and pretend to browse, then suddenly run out the back door as fast as he could go. Or he’d order coffee and pretend someone in the shop was not only looking at them but also intently screwing up their courage to talk to him. I admired him for doing this secret thing to make his life more interesting. I thought that about wrapped it up, so I started steering him generally homeward, trying to prod more weirdness out of him all the while. I got into it and we ducked behind a dumpster for a minute, and then walked around a convenience store eyeballing people, which was my idea, because I was out of cigarettes anyway. Then the real true remarkable part of the story occurred, the climax, dénouement, whatever, the end.

He claimed that every time he tried to shake off these ghosts of his, every single time, something lucky happened to him. Different, little stuff: he finds ten bucks, he runs into an old friend just came to town and they pass fifteen happy minutes shooting the shit, his old lovely bicycle, stolen from him two years ago, is found leaning against an underpass when he tries to avoid the (imaginary) UMPD, who are coming to get him for some unbelievably flip and cool prank he has played. Never fails. One time he even actually does get a girl’s number, when he leaves a party early because his girlfriend’s wacked out on a jug of Carlo and a few bong rips. Himself also not being the soberest person around. He asks a girl out that’s following him, right there on the street in front of traffic and God. Of course he can’t call her because of the girlfriend. But he has her number and this has justified his behaviors, which become more and more elaborate as each day passes and he has to get up two hours early just to get to his morning class. He looks up sewer blueprints and takes taxis across town just to go shoot hoops with his roommates, &c. We are almost to his house and I remark that in fact, nothing good has happened to him yet unless he considers the probable psychological consequences of unburdening his strange Situationist drift thing to me, and he says something good will happen and invites me to choose a path at random to take us to the well-earned, by now, beer and demo tape of dubious quality which I am beginning to think might even be cool considering this guy is so goddamned deviant from general patterns of thought.

We look to the left, and there is his girlfriend, leaning against a Mazda, kissing another guy without any of the wine and dope haze she is famous for. I left to look up what exactly cryptomnesia was.