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many many entries. Under “garden gnome” there were only three. And the fisher gnome had pored over each of these before coming on this visit. The subject, living under the sway of mountains, shall eat of the sea. Another cloud will succumb to the blandishments of a solitary pass, the caresses of old verses oceans have long traded over the beaten body of earth. A garden gnome, bearing witness, will delight in flame. Nothing, however, may emerge from the cold pot but fences. The care required to maintain a field must be put aside. That was all well and good,

Thousand: Three Hundred Seven

something with jelly pooled in the center, what looked like a brittle humped up with nuts from nine continents, and a sugar-dusted mushroom. The fisher gnome nicked a sliver from the mushroom and popped it in his mouth. He hoped it was angelic. It tasted vaguely angelic, the kind he’d seen buried after one of those fests from which angels fall, stoned on ambrosia and charged particles. Like snow. Or like neon plumes. What future would fit it? He flipped to the index. Under “angel” there were 84 entries. Under “mushroom” there were 34. Under “eat” there were. There were

Thousand: Three Hundred Six

dipping it. And its head. Its head fall off! Where’s the head now? I push around with the spoon but the head doesn’t come up. Mush!” The garden gnome’s chin quivered and tears swam in his eyes. Not at all wanting to observe it, the fisher gnome saw the octopus tentacles made of shortbread on the garden gnome’s plate and the damp line where the octopus’ head must have attached. He looked at his own plate with its partly nibbled madeleine. Other cookies waited on the tray, including a shortbread giraffe, a shortbread sunfish, a shortbread palm tree, more madeleines,

Thousand: Three Hundred Five

asps? The dogs? Which? Could it have been the Achilles tendon? That part was in the book, after all. “But that’s why I’m here!” the fisher gnome protested. “I have come to help head it off, if at all possible, or, if no can do on that, to help reconcile you. Fate is fate.” The garden gnome was trolling the bottom of his teacup with a spoon. Looking for something? It was the fisher gnome’s turn to lean forward and peer into the other’s cup. “’Snot there!” wailed the garden gnome. The fisher gnome felt queasy. “I was just dipping,

Thousand: Three Hundred Four

fisher gnome added, “And it’s terrible! The heavens will open and dirt will rain down instead of water. Asps will snap out of petunias. Dogs will bark backwards. But the worst of it will come to roost on your clever little cottage. A swamp monster tall as a mizzen mast, breathing green gas, will squat over your chimney and.” And what? Why was he making things up? He had the book right there. Hurriedly the fisher gnome pawed through the whisper-thin pages. “And the Achilles tendon will ache,” he finished lamely. His host moaned. That did the trick then. The

Thousand: Three Hundred Three

teacup, he craned his neck to see. Hot tea had slopped over into the saucer, but that was all. The garden gnome yawned. Hah ho hum. A zephyr rattled the roses. “I was saying,” the fisher gnome continued, trying to find where he’d left off, “your future you have to look forward to, it’s coming up, and, lucky you, I have right here,” he tapped the tome of futures with a round knuckle, “thumbnail sketches of the ones possible, including your very own own.” Seeing he was about to lose the garden gnome’s attention to an octopus-shaped shortbread cookie, the

Thousand: Three Hundred Two

de dum,” burbled the garden gnome, driving a shortbread in the shape of an octopus around his plate. The fisher gnome blinked. He remembered where he was with distaste. God and his dangers! The fisher gnome dropped three lumps of sugar into his tea, to follow the four he’d already stirred in. He clattered the spoon around so furiously the garden gnome looked up from his octopus, he’d nibbled off two of its arms and was planning to see how it got along with just six before he nibbled two more, but something was going on in the fisher gnome’s

Thousand: Three Hundred One

do you think will become of you?” He gazed out upon a bumblebee grazing in a daisy that swayed and bobbed, as the bumblebee shifted its great body from foot to foot. The world once was young; a beautiful thing it was. But God was ever so easily disappointed. His anger flashed and in a fit, he battered the world with his fists. He splashed water on it from a boiling sea, melting its face. He kicked it, stomped all over it with boots of a leather of shame stitched with the stout thread of fear. “Dum de dum. Dum

Thousand: Three Hundred

though the way the garden gnome was carrying on, you’d think a dormouse had been stuffed in it. “A lump of sugar?” the fisher gnome inquired, holding one out with a pair of tongs. “Yes, please,” said the garden gnome, and stirred it into his tea with the clink clink clink of a pewter spoon with a hanged leprechaun handle. The leprechaun cast on the fisher gnome’s spoon had been crucified, he noted with a peculiar twinge. There was something familiar about it. “My dear boy,” said the fisher gnome, tapping the green bound volume under his right hand, “what

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Nine

returned to the gazebo and his guest who had already poured the tea and was dunking a madeleine. “This reminds me of something,” said the fisher gnome, gazing into the distance where the Andes sawed away at the sky. The garden gnome squinted at his teacup. “There’s,” he began then gave a yelp which made the fisher gnome tremble. “There’s the milk!” the garden gnome shouted, pointing a finger around which a loose thread of dusty web swirled. The fisher gnome patted his forehead with a blue linen napkin, not bothering to look where he had placed the milk, even

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Eight

down he gazed at it, puzzled, put his hands on his hips, tapped his foot, then raised the tray and looked under it. Not seeing what he was looking for there, he put the tray back and ducked his head under the table. Remaining stooped he nosed around the floor of the gazebo until he got to the stairs. Under each step with pudgy fingers he groped. He sniffed the cobwebs he dragged out, but they gave no clues. Glancing from side to side he worked his way up the path toward the main house, then shrugged, sighed, and, muttering,

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author of a well-thumbed, gilt-edged, green leather bound volume of futures the fisher gnome had laid out on the little round gazebo table, a yellow silk ribbon marking the page he most wanted to show his host. The fisher gnome snatched from the tea tray as it wobbled a pitcher of milk that threatened to spill, thus catching a few freed drops with his fluffy beard, and preventing a lamentable situation that might have involved tears, the garden gnome being, the fisher gnome seemed to recall, one of the sensitive multiply removed cousins. When the garden gnome set the tray

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Six

of suspense. I think we’re not in the same war zone.” “So you’d prefer I dragged my cart right over you than get out of the way?” “That’s what I’m saying, yeah.” The test was conducted, the evidence gathered, and a conclusion reached. In a garden in the southern hemisphere a gnome carried a tea tray down the path to the gazebo. He got some help carrying it up the steps of the gazebo for the fisher gnome, a cousin of the gnome’s sister, had stopped by on his way to the next exceptional event, an event limned by the

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Five

just walk through me with your pushcart anyway?” The girl shook her head. “Your body is too lumpy and the cart too heavy for me to get it over you. But, if you like, I can deflate you, roll you up, and stow you against the wall over there.” She nodded toward a boarded up storefront. “Have the sirens stopped?” “Only the ones that have been taken out. What impresses me are the shudders in the earth from the explosions of the bombs.” “That’s evidence then, isn’t it? As far as my ear is concerned there’s nothing but the silence

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Four

continuum, could you take advantage of one of the many others?” “I’m on a mission,” Samuel says firmly. “So is a sperm,” says the girl. “Uh. Ed is around here somewhere. Ed Rumiere. The Mayor.” “Of what?” “I forget. But he’s the mayor of this. Place. Town. City. And he’s the one who sent me on the mission.” “Which is to lie in the way on the sidewalk?” “No.” Samuel glares at her shadowed face. “It involved drinking a lot of coffee.” “Does this mean you have to pee?” “Do you have to pee in the spirit world? Can’t you

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Three

you still using that?” Her face is hard to make out, the street lamp creating a glow behind her head that Samuel doesn’t find mystical. “Sorry,” Samuel says, “just wondering if I’m supposed to know what ‘that’ is.” The girl nods. “It can be difficult to separate,” she agrees. “I did, in fact, mean the totality, the gestalt, as it were. But we can bring it down to the more immediate problem. I have a hand cart, which is too wide to get around you stretched out like that. If you aren’t needing to use these coordinates of the space-time

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-Two

put her house in order, Rhea finished for him. My house is not in order. Won’t you help me? Did I help her? The spiritual rain doesn’t bother the pigeon blinking sleepily, nestled on Samuel’s chest where he lies under the crossing shadows of a parking meter, each shadow from a different street lamp. The spiritual rain doesn’t bother Samuel either. The nausea has passed, though he still feels a bit wired. All this duplication of realities is more trouble than existence ought to go to, it seems to me. “Excuse me, sir?” A little girl leans over him. “Are

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety-One

a plane all by herself when she was nine! Her daddy was copilot, she said, but he took his hands off the controls and she brought the twin engine on down to a landing “smooth as any ten-year-old would make.” Why is it, Rhea, that you came to me? Samuel pushed his teacup and saucer away and leaned his elbows on the desk. I know I’m your father’s friend. And, as you say, I consider myself your friend, even though, till now, I can’t say as I knew you. But all this sounds beyond my ken. I help a client

Thousand: Two Hundred Ninety

her that Jesus would return with extra-terrestrials because they are the 21st century version of angels, and a former methamphetamine user transitioning from her biological givens toward spiritual and physical realness would be an obvious choice for prophet. Brenda knows how to sum things up, Samuel observed. OMG! Rhea agreed. Girl can see! She’s top pilot in her father’s space venture. She’s already flown to the edge of space four times. She says you don’t believe in gravity up there. You look down on Earth and it’s a pretty bubble that could pop at any time. J.E. let her land

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charge them more. It was called “the organization” because we didn’t want anybody to know what we were really talking about, you know. Inside we called it Jesus’ Extra-Terrestrials or J.E.T. I didn’t like that name very much. But Jesus’ Ear or J.E. (that was his code name) was the CEO of a leading Fortune 500 company and paid for the secret hideaways, some of which were pretty nice. How did he join? Um. I think it was his daughter who was one of my classmates at Smith. Yes. That was it. Brenda said it all made perfect sense to

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kinda hot that way. I could have gone for him, I guess. But his dad found out he was sneaking out to see me. I was in hiding, didn’t I say, and we were taking lots of precautions, but he found out. Now Joey’s in Eastern Europe or somewhere farther. Meanwhile Banana Li, our attorney, was honing her sixth sense, she joined the organization because when she met me she developed a sixth sense, which she’d never had before, it made her see auras around people’s eyeballs and she could tell whether somebody was lying to her, if so she’d

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financier, I can’t mention his name, was kidnapped from one of our compounds and ransomed for twenty-three million dollars. His father wasn’t going to pay a thing. You don’t negotiate with terrorists! he said. But then he started getting. Started getting. Rhea’s lip trembles. Body. Body. He started getting body parts. In the mail. They were cutting pieces off him and mailing the pieces to his father. And he paid up. He paid the whole thing. He was able to replace his son’s body parts with superior technology, which was pretty neat. Joey showed me his um things. He looked

Searching for Thousand

I title each “Thousand” post its number in the sequence. Today’s was “Thousand: Two Hundred Eighty-Six,” right? “Thousand” is the title; today’s is the 286th 100-word piece of “Thousand.”

Titles of posts, it seems, rate pretty high in search engine results, more than the main text of the post, at any rate. In the last year most of the titles of LuvSet posts have been numbers. The numbers tell you virtually nothing about what you are going to be reading in the posts themselves. Many of the Google searches that lead people to the blog lately have been searches for numbers, “two hundred fifteen thousand thirty,” being one of the searches that resulted in a visitor two days ago. The visitor stuck around one minute and thirteen seconds, according to my stats service. What could they have been searching for?

It does seem odd that LuvSet turns up in the first page of Google results when one plugs in that (written out) number. Do any of you numbers-searching visitors find what you’re looking for?

Thousand: Two Hundred Eighty-Six

And that’s where I am today. Didn’t you come about a cult? Samuel asked, refilling Rhea’s teacup with Constant Comment. Oh. That’s a sad story. It’s also scary. A rival cult is hunting me. They’ve already taken out James and four others. I know the news programs say that that was a mass suicide, that James recorded a video for distribution over the internet saying he was going to meet the aliens under Jesus’ command but I know for a fact that it was the Tralfamadurians. The Tralfamadurians have been tracking us for months. The son of a very powerful

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I owned. It was a lost thing; whosever it was, she needed it back. Someone with sense could save it, could make it work for them. I wasn’t shocked, looking at that meth-ravaged thing. My artist’s eye saw it; it was like Daddy’d handed over a photo of an ugly room, and I could see immediately how the elements already there could be rearranged to make a good place. A little care, a little attention, a little presence of mind. That’s what was missing. I handed the mirror back. The next day I found a 12-step group for meth fiends.

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not tragic. I mean, my father sat me down one day and say, “Rhea, I need you to look at something for me. A consultation, as it were.” And he gave me a hand mirror. You know my father. That is why I came to you about this matter, Sammy. She laughed. We are old friends, Sammy! Where was I? I looked in the mirror. I felt silly doing it. What was I going to see? My own face! What a trick Daddy was playing on me. But it wasn’t my face. No. He was right. It wasn’t the face

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he said. It was Jesus! He has risen and returned. He came to you in that flying saucer, didn’t he? James was so pressing, so certain. Everyone had tuned into his energy, as though what I’d brought with me was no mystery, it was clear. James knew what it was. It was Jesus! It couldn’t be anything else! He began to weep. Right there! Of course, it wasn’t unusual to cry in the group. People had such sad stories. They’d lost so many things to the drugs. Divorce, children, their parents disowned them. I almost felt bad, my story was

Thousand: Two Hundred Eighty-Two

When I told my story at group, I held the lily to my breast, and when when I when I got to that point in the story where that amazing man touched me, I extended the lily and I could see everybody’s eyes were fixed on the lily. It was like my heart was coming out of me again, like they were seeing the real me. One of the men, his name was James, he asked, Was it Jesus? And I said, I don’t know. But I could see he was so eager, he didn’t hear me. It was Jesus,

Thousand: Two Hundred Eighty-One

him for that. For giving me that. You know. It almost shattered the wall. But, you know, it didn’t. It was just a chink. A little more light came through. You see the light, you know. But it doesn’t always light up the whole. You start to see something but it’s not. It seems totally obvious now. But it wasn’t then. I was able to pretend I couldn’t see what was looking me in the face. For a long time. When I told about what happened, you know. The aliens. I stopped at the florist first and got a lily.

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a wall I tried to make man-shaped. But I knew people saw through it. They called me names. You know, when a boy in gym class in high school, thinking to insult me, maybe it was the worst thing he could think of to say, called me Woman. Called me woman. I remember. I was puzzled that he thought that was a bad thing. But what I remember most was the feeling, how right it was. Woman. That was what I was. Would be someday. If I was luckier than I’d ever been up to that point. I almost loved

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the lovely Rhea gazed pensively at the Des Moines skyline. Yes, she said, slowly. She blinked, then rummaged through her bag for a tissue, which used to catch a tear Samuel didn’t see. She drew a deep breath. I told my story. As I told it to you just now. That’s all. That’s all I meant to do. I was in rehab. Yes, I. I got into meth. I thought it agreed with me. I thought it made me real, the woman I’d never been allowed to be. The feminine finally broke through. I’d built up a wall against it,

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beckoned. I felt it rise from my chest and burst open in his hand, a white white lily. The visitors must then have returned me to my bed, for I remember watching the digits on the clock radio slowly count toward dawn, my body aching as though fevered, but weighted down. I could hardly move. When at last I stumbled from my bed, I found on the floor of the bathroom a broken vase and in a pool of water a lily, whole and undamaged. So this led to your starting a cult? Samuel asked, after a pause in which

Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy-Seven

two of the beings moved aside and, bathed in glory, a man stepped between my feet, my legs being too long for the table, and he looked down at me with the most piercing eyes such that I felt shot through with a bolt of blue, which was secured at one end to the foundations of heaven, at the other to the holy mother herself who was using it to climb out of the catacombs. He reached an incredibly long arm out and touched my chest, which made my heart, I had forgotten about my heart, my heart his touch

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only without the wires making little tents on my nightgown, and I was borne by unseen hands into the light which totally blinded me. I was on a table, cold and hard, like stainless steel, and these strange beings with swimming pool eyes, mouths that looked like they’d been dug out of a potato with a butter knife, completely hairless, no color at all, with pulsing bulbs and throbbing rods probed every one of my orifices. They were trying to make sure of something they knew already. I screamed but not even my ears could hear my screams. Just then

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on the door WHOMP on the door, my whole body quivering with the impact. Why don’t you come in already, I remember thinking, it’s not like I ever lock anything. My life is an open book, you know. It’s like a diary with one of those little locks on it but there’s no key to it because it’s never locked. I have no secrets. If anybody wants to know anything, they can just ask me. But the aliens, maybe they didn’t understand that, or maybe they just don’t understand human language, because I levitated, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist,

Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy-Four

my eyes, even the mirror agreed they were finer, more desirable. It was a flying saucer. That’s what started it. A UFO. It abducted me. I didn’t actually see it. I was asleep at the time. But in the middle of the night I awoke and there was this bright light shining right in my face. I was rigid, frozen, not from fright, no, I wasn’t quite frightened, I could feel my heart thumping in my chest, not fast, each thump like a fist pounding on a door, like there was a big man on the far side of me, raising his big fist and going WHOMP with it

Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy-Three

with a sparse moustache and a pedigree, I did not know her. I introduced myself and when she smiled I saw a flash of the duchess. I was startled. Yes, I was. Sammy, she said softly. I am in trouble. I am in ever so much trouble. I. You see. I started a cult. I did not mean it to be a cult! No! I. I only wanted to be worshipped. Is that so bad? But it was! At first the adoration was like a spa. I soaked in it and felt more beautiful every moment. My hair, my lips,

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knocked off its rings. I get a lot of calls after celestial incidents. My calendar filled up after the comet Xuxek. But the more interesting coincidence was Rhea’s call. The girl in the magazine, the daughter of my benefactor. I’d met her before, when she was, I must admit I recognized, quite a girly sort of boy, Ray, her boy name. The voice on the phone purred the way Ray’s had, husky for a woman, warm for a boy. When she showed up at my office, though I had seen her naked, though I’d seen her as a long-haired youth

Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy-One

the house is immaterial, you taught me that. If you’ve got to have it renovated so you can really live in it, so you can call it home, that’s what you’ve got to do. We are all made in God’s image, you know, but do we all look the same? I wanted to ask if she approved, not of the body adjustment, but of the baring of it all. She probably saw it in my face, for she smiled and kissed me softly and fluttered her eyelashes and swept away. That was the day before the comet slammed Saturn, and

Thousand: Two Hundred Seventy

baroness begged me to right it for her (him), got down on her knees and after that begged me. She gave me the start-up capital and her connections. She bragged to all her friends about me. And slagged me to those she knew did not respect her opinion. The years go by I’m flipping through a girly magazine and there is the duchess’ daughter with a staple in her navel. Used to be her son, or so she thought. When I asked the duchess how’d she felt, had it been a surprise, she arched a painted brow, and said, Darling,

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty-Nine

desperado with a six-shooter and the sun in my eyes. How could I forget our first instant communication across planets when you were lonesome on Enceladus and I was lonesome on the floor of the disco, poppers up my nose, the high energy rhythm of the ages pulsing in my sinews. If not for you, my dove, I wouldn’t have written the mash note to the baroness at the opera. It was you who gave me that courage. And when she (he, rather) heard from my midnight lips that I could see his spiritual house was not in order, the

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a condescending manner. You were the only one who believed in me when most were convinced I was merely a myth. It was you for whom I built the pyramids, the smaller pyramids, yes, but they were ready a lot faster. Why? Because I knew you knew that I knew nothing really about you but you pretended it was the perfect gift, thus salving the hurt I felt once I clued in to your aversion to slanted surfaces. I remember that night, dressing for the prom, you taught me to knot my very first bowtie, and how to outdraw the

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty-Seven

chair! If this is the Titanic, and icy water will soon be slopping over my knees, I want to go down in a deck chair! The sidewalk is rather hard. Coo, says the pigeon into Samuel’s ear, having hopped down from the Maserati roof. We should go somewhere, you and me, Samuel says. You are the only one who understands me. When I was a child, for example, you knew exactly what kind of cheese I preferred on my macaroni. When I was first learning computer programming, you were the only one who pecked through my code without clucking in

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty-Six

spiritual rain. The rain soothes everything, even the noises of the night, even the bumps in the night, even the murders and the rapes and the slow succumbing to decades of wrongs. The spiritual rain comes softly down to the world, filling open sores, smoothing out scars, pooling in the open mouths of the dead. Samuel closes his mouth. His mouth tastes awful. Where is all this music coming from? It’s like he’s lying under an orchestra that’s being strafed by jumbo jets and bombed by daft leprechauns in spangled blimps. And the band plays on. Where is my deck

Thousand: Two Hunded Sixty-Five

It actually sounds pretty good but one of them stops and says, “Guys! Guys! Hold on. I think we’re singing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to the tune of ‘Wait ‘Til the Sun Shines Nellie.’” But the others roll their eyes and an argument starts up about the real lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” as opposed to the secret initiate lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” which are probably sung backwards. That they can hear themselves over the klaxon of the submarine’s dive warning just proves the amazing strengths of the youthful ear. None of this disturbs the pigeon sleepily blinking in the

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starts up its cycle: woop woop reedle reedle reedle woop woop reedle reedle reedle woop de woop de woop a doop-doop reedle reedle reedle a ruddle de ruddle de roo. The tower bell bongs some aged hour. The air raid siren commences its rising tone, which will continue to rise until it tickles the underbellies of the bombers with its dreamy vibration. A woman screams. A child, at a higher pitch, whines, tugging on her purse. A lion roars. A mouse shrieks. Four boys gather in a doorway, snap their fingers, and launch into “Wait ‘Til The Sun Shines Nellie.”

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whispers. The pigeon blinks, turns its head one way then other, then settles down on the roof of the Maserati, while Samuel rages up and down the block punching parking meters. A soft spiritual rain begins to fall. Samuel drops to his knees again, gasping. Then he jumps up and rushes over to the coffee bar and demands a triple cap latte. The barista holds up his hands, shakes his head. No, senhor, no. An alarm goes off. It’s one of those old fashioned bank alarms, isn’t it? The insistent tapping of metal hammer against metal bowl. A car alarm

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty-Two

he can muster Samuel hurls the doughnut into the air. It steaks upward with a fierce zizz. Ed shakes his head. A krizzlekroo, he says softly, having come up behind Samuel, and lowered his lips to Samuel’s ear. Yearragagrugg!!! Lasers blast from Samuel’s eyes as the doughnut punches out of the stratosphere, burning into the mesosphere. The lasers intercept the doughnut and blow it smithereens. Samuel sinks to his knees, spent, his jaw quivering, his skin pale and blotchy. He bites at a breath, as though the air were too large to get his mouth around. Remember to breathe, Ed

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty-One

glop, mission, and expectation. What kind of fucking doughnut is that? A krizzlekroo. Samuel snatches the cream-stuffed confection from Ed’s hand. Hah! he says and squeezes it. It is, he discovers, rock hard. He tries not to flinch as his hand cramps around it. Arg! He bites it but his teeth can’t pierce the doughnut’s skin, and only leave trails in the powdered sugar as they drag across the surface. He pounds the doughnut with a fist, smacks it against his forehead, which action staggers him, then bangs it against the flagstone sidewalk. Whang! Whang! Finally, with all the strength

Talking about Thousand

25% of the way through this thing. 26%, actually. It takes ten days to achieve a single percentage point.

The transcendental butler first showed up in segment 185, which means he’s been around for about 30% of the … story … or whatever it is. He got a name in segment 195.

Without doing any other analysis than trying to remember I calculate that his is the longest stretch of anything approaching a narrative. Good for you, Samuel!

I’ve gotten some encouraging comments along the way – thanks, Elisabeth, Dave King, and the others of you who have left a few words. Although, as I’ve said in previous “Thousand process” posts, this project is a practice as much as a result, it’s still heartening when I’m told I’m not totally wasting your time, dear readers. I would like “Thousand” to be some kind of fun.

There are things we have to do every day. Eat. Piss. Wake up and get out of bed. Basic stuff. There are things we do every day because we have decided it’s important to do them. Brush teeth. Wash hands frequently. There are things we don’t do every day but keep on a semi-regular schedule. Vacuuming. Scrubbing the toilet.

“Thousand” is an every day activity. Despite various resolutions over the years I’m thinking “Thousand” has now surpassed any other creative assignment in terms of keeping to a schedule. I’ve missed two, maybe three days, since I started, just over 260 days ago. Almost 9 months of 100-word-a-day additions. Is that discipline? Am I driving myself nuts?

Kent is undergoing his final chemo treatment this week. He’s still hooked up to the chemical so won’t feel the full effects until it’s completely dumped into his system. Then he’ll feel lousy. The tenth of ten treatments in his prescribed regimen. After this treatment he gets to heal from the treatment. All heal! Kent’s ordeal was a major reason for my choosing to do “Thousand.” I can foresee a time I will skip doing “Thousand” for a few days because we are on vacation …

Thousand: Two Hundred Sixty

and teeth grind. An eyelid twitches. He gulps the coffee now, heedless of the damage it will do to the sensitive skin of his mouth and throat. Mission, Samuel hisses. Ed reaches out and squeezes Samuel’s shoulder but Samuel shrugs off the touch. What mission! What mission! In this doughnut, Ed says, picking one up so full of cream it oozes white goo from its injection hole at the pressure of Ed’s fingers, in this doughnut is a secret hidden esoteric message that will explain it all. Samuel casts a withering gaze upon the doughy shell and its cargo of

Thousand: Two Hundred Fifty-Nine

he eats them, as though ravenous, spilling flakes of glaze and doughnut crumbs, powdered sugar and jam filling flecking his lips. The pigeon hops down to peck away at the pretzels Ed has crumbled and spread on the soft top of the Mazerati convertible they are using as a table. I have a mission for you, Ed says. Samuel crams three doughnut holes in his mouth. I need you to find something. Something that will affect the harmony of the universe. Samuel slurps latte, burns his tongue, which makes his eyes water and his jaws tense up. His eyes blaze

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since. Since. Since he got up this morning? Samuel doesn’t look up again. If that is him, a statue for birds to rest and shit on, then it’s a version of him he feels no loyalty to. Ed’s hand steadies him. Samuel runs his free hand through his hair. It’s clean. The pigeon opens its wings again to balance itself, not apparently disturbed to find its inanimate roost walking about. When they get to street level Ed stops at a sidewalk coffee bar and picks up doughnuts, two tall lattes, and a packet of pretzels. Samuel doesn’t like doughnuts. But

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It’s okay whatever happens. Samuel doesn’t know why he feels so secure, so looked after. Hasn’t he just learned that for years he was alone, frozen in some purgatory of pigeons, unseen, it seemed, by anyone who might have decided it was dangerous to have a statue hovering above the city? Maybe he had been spotted, after all, had become a tourist attraction even, everyone fascinated by the trick but assuming a billionaire had the resources to place a man firmly in ether. Maybe there were souvenir postcards taken in various lights. This was the first thing that amused him

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to trust this man, spirit, whatever he is, Samuel lets himself be led. Down what seems to be a long, gradual staircase they step. Samuel can’t see the stairs, perhaps they are entirely invisible and only the darkness of the night prevents vertigo. He’s stood on the very edge of cliffs and high building ledges and the drop has seemed to draw him, making him breathless, dizzy. He does glance back, the penthouse already so far above, and he sees something dimly illuminated by the lights pouring out the picture windows. A figure? Standing. Out in the air? It’s okay.

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think my taking a swing at you took. You’re telling me I was frozen in time here? Which is where. Out in the air. I’m not even inside the building anymore? Time didn’t stop. The time you were in went on just as it had. To the pigeons, and to me, frankly, you were a statue. Your new friend, the one who’s rubbing against your ear and cooing, poor guy has left all his friends behind in the other time. Or. Ed shrugs. Anyway. Ed takes Samuel’s hand, and, even though he is wary, doesn’t think he really has basis

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things go, you know. The going of things. The things that go. For example. The sun. And the moon. They both go without going. What does this have to do with bird shit in my hair? Time. It takes time for that much pigeon crap to build up. As far as the pigeons were concerned, you were a good place to hang out, to rest. The pigeon on Samuel’s shoulder coos suddenly, puffing up its chest and thrusting its bill rhythmically. To court and mate. Not so good for nesting or eating, but you can’t have everything. But I don’t

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Samuel completes the swing, disturbing the pigeon which flutters to recover its balance. Samuel staggers, also a little off balance. He glares at the naked youth holding a bucket in one hand, a dripping steel brush in the other. Samuel now notices that his sleeve is soaked through. And his nose is dripping. He wipes water from his eyes and sees a strange white painted on his knuckles. Sorry, Ed says. Didn’t get to those. Your other shoulder either. And your hair. I meant to get back sooner, but you know how these things go. Go? Yes, as far as

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any bathroom floor. No, no. We are way beyond that. A sudden rage. Samuel balls his fists, his lips press into a line, his eyes flash, he swings. Ed goes off to the cleaning closet and comes back with a bucket and scrub brush. He scrubs away at the pigeon shit accumulated on Samuel’s extended arm and hand, then scrubs away at the shoulder. A pigeon, its head bobbing, steps around to the opposite shoulder and watches Ed work the layers of white and flecks of black off Samuel’s nose and cheeks. Ed stands back and clucks. Better, he says.

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hand over his chest. The material feels soft, then prickly, then smooth. He feels buttons, a heavy knit, a tie, ruffles, some at the same time, some seem quickly to vanish. On the version of himself he sees in the window his clothes are a blur. This is all getting a bit much. Look, he says. In my reality, the one in which I’m sitting on your bathroom floor and you are dead, Ed, is there a big passenger airliner about to slam into the building? Oh, you aren’t sitting on the bathroom floor. What? You are not sitting on

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wasn’t tortured to death in that reality. Yes, torture isn’t good for you. Neither is starving to death. There are many very painful diseases. The spirit body also is not without its ailments. Samuel looks out at the city, though he can see the room as well. Every object in it has its counterpart in the glass. Which alternate universe is that? He sees himself, a Samuel who looks well enough like Samuel, a Samuel who sees him looking and acknowledges the attention with a slight inclination of his head, a Samuel wearing. What is he wearing? Samuel runs his

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of millions of dollars secure in untraceable accounts in a country that, first, offers you political asylum, then solicits your advice on the invasion that will topple the tyrant, adding that a very important in the post-conquest government is yours for the asking. Naturally, you beg off such an ethically dubious proposition, but the wife demands you reconsider. She ought to take the position, then, you tell her; you will take charge of the children, or, at least, keep account of the nanny who comes with a Ph.D. and years of experience in training geniuses. It’s a good thing I

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him to the left until they are standing in the night half. The city lights. Don’t they dazzle! The burning building down town. The flames fill the smoke with an orange glow at its base, though as it rises Samuel loses track of it. Did the plane crash there? he asks. Ed shakes his head. You’re not following me. This is all show. Alternate realities intersect repeatedly every day. If something terrible happens to you, say you are tortured to death by the fanatical followers of the dictator, in another version of your life you escape to exile with hundreds

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diving out of the sun, its nose pointed right at the building he’s standing in. There’s a terrorist piloting that, he thinks. The plane is going to obliterate us, everyone aboard will die. Oddly, this thought does not terrify. Oughtn’t it? It does puzzle him a little. The thought itself, not the plane. That we are thinking and that our thinking takes time. One could probably divide a thought into components. Somebody probably’s already had a go at that. The sort of thing people get up to. Philosophers. Here, now, Ed says, placing his hands on Samuel’s shoulders and nudging

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were standing in your playpen, banging away at big buttons, turning ratchety knobs, and twirling those ring-a-ding dials! Samuel steps through the naked young spirit body of the billionaire mayor, as easily as the cars in Ed’s metaphor passed into and through each other. He walks right through a couch and through a hardwood table and a porcelain vase throwing out gigantic blossoms. He stops at the window. There are thirteen airliners now, all the same size and model. One is making the turn Ed pointed out. Another seems poised to follow it. But the one that concerns Samuel is

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means its fuel tanks have been topped off, its galley is loaded with fresh gouda and real champagne from Champagne, the slight flight attendant has already given his number to the executive in 3B (this is the second time they’ve remembered that they went to the same high school, twelve years apart), and the captain is flicking one more switch of the many switches she has been flicking since the plane began its taxi. There aren’t that many switches. A few switches. The copilot flicks a few switches. They look at dials and readouts. Remember when you did that? You

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getting ahead of the story, but, yes, one could say “harmlessly.” Let me take a detour. You seem to be getting impatient, as though my little car story were keeping you from something. Is that so? I. Well. Shouldn’t we worry about the disposition of the body? Um. Your body? I see. You are preoccupied with what is going on in the physical plane. Speaking of planes, look out there. Do you see that passenger airliner? Banking around the blobby cloud over the harbor. It’s full to capacity, and it’s embarking on a flight over the pole to Paris. Which

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sent emissaries. He’s drinking while he drives. He’s smoking! Did you see that! Smoking while he drives. Doesn’t he know that’s illegal? Where is smoking while driving illegal? The spirit plane? It is? What do you smoke on the spirit plane? Oh, the usual. A lot of smoke reaches the spirit plane. Many an offering is made in the form of smoke. So your spirit self is weaving like crazy and, what do you know, he swoops back into your lane, brushing your front bumper. Let me guess. The spirit car and my car pass harmlessly through one another? You’re

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a new white cowboy hat with a rattlesnake band, and he’s got a feather dangling on a silver chain from his left earlobe. His eyes are full of stars, his pants are full of the galactic swirl, his lips move to the words of the song about your high school girlfriend who went on to greater anonymity as a body, beautiful, naked, and framed for murder. Your spirit weaves a bit in that classic Cadillac (he left the Cressilantro in a garage in Vegas) and the sun glints off so much chrome at once that its like the stars have

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spirit car and driver goes right through you, right! Maybe you notice. Maybe no. But then spirit goes off on his own track, one completely perpendicular to yours, maybe all the way to the next town or he crosses three borders, showing his passport at each one and getting his passport stamped with artful rubber stamps. He jokes with the border agents about how the passport photo doesn’t look like him at all. He buys some groceries or souvenirs or invests in spiritual real estate. Eventually he comes back and this time he’s pacing you on the left. He’s wearing

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trying to get across, utilizing a metaphor with which you were familiar (but I seem to have been thinking of a metaphor with which someone else I once knew was familiar, he was big into cars, big cars, and fast cars), was a different way of looking at the interaction between the worlds. Let me go back to the highway you’re driving down, right, I don’t get the house thing, sue me, and your spirit self careens out of the right lane, the fast lane, and plows right into you, only instead of you guys getting in a big wreck,

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are no crashes. Keep your eyes on the road! There are no airbags in spirit world! Uh. I call myself a butler, not a driving instructor. Butler? That’s weird. Why would you do that? I consider the person a house which is inhabited and visited by spirits. Keeping those spirits in harmony, working together for the good of all, that is what I advertise. I used to advertise, but now I get all my work via referral. I assumed you knew what I did. Why hire me otherwise? I see. Yes. We’re inhabiting different worlds. You see, what I was

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In the physical world you are driving along in your Toyota sedan convertible XL3 turbo hybrid with racing stripes. The spirit realm is the next lane over and your spirit self is piloting the spirit equivalent of a Toyota Cressilantro. If you take your eyes off the road you can glance over at your spirit self and maybe your spirit self glances back, there’s an immediate connection, and sparks fly. In your case you try to get the two drivers to coordinate who perhaps weren’t, who were racing each other, say, or drifting apart. You want to make sure there

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up to the flow, and becomes one with it. One is such a lonely number. So you imagine the spirit world to be essentially the same world as the one you’re familiar with, that’s right, Samuel? Only to the left, just off stage, running parallel. Concurrent with, hewing to somewhat different laws. Laws a mercy. That’s not totally wrong. Who could ever be totally wrong! It’s not like the universe doesn’t have enough space for every wrong to be right. Or the multitude of universes stacked upon, within, below and through. I’m going to get didactic here for a sec.

Two Hundred Thirty-Six

sparkly at that), or the number of cilia in my intestines, are these me? It’s an old question. I could count back to the first year it was asked. I’m spirit, we can do things like that. Though it involves more travel than I’m interested in at the moment. He takes a deep breath. A necessary breath or one for show? Are you doubting my sincerity? I didn’t say anything. Samuel isn’t even sure he thought something. Samuel has trained his mind to ride the currents at the border between the spirit and the concrete. He doesn’t doubt, he opens

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led him through the red land, who disappeared into the pool. The blond curls, the shoulders, and he has a good-sized cock, too. Well. You look good dead, Mayor. Call me Ed. Ed. You look good. Yes. Thanks. I never really looked like this. This is my Peter Frampton spirit self. Peter Frampton lost his hair, too. Are you ashamed of what you really looked like? The now-familiar smile. Not at all. But are you your face? Are these limbs, this (he glances down at his sex) endowment, the blue paint on my toenails (yes, Samuel notes, blue polish and

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into the flesh, digging with his teeth. Samuel feels a gentle pressure, like a massage, and a wetness. He looks out over the city. Half of it is in darkness and atwinkle with lights. On the other half the sun blazes, washing the shadows until they are sheer and hide nothing. Samuel looks down again and sees Mayor Rumiere, Ed, has located the pull cord; the yellow ring grip protrudes from the palm while the injured flesh drips a watery blood. There, Ed, says, wiping his mouth. He stands up, facing Samuel, naked. No surprise that it’s the youth who

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they glide apart with the grace of elephants and the sun stretch its long warm legs upon the tiles like a proud spider? What do you think? Tell us. I think he took too many theoceuticals. Entheogens? God is a chemical. Who? The mayor takes Samuel’s hand and leads him out of the bathroom, both stepping carefully over the draped corpse. I’m sorry, he says. The noise in there could wake Brahma. At the window, a very nice window, you can easily forget it and drift over the city, the mayor, call me Ed, kisses Samuel’s palm, no, he’s biting

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end of the lining, isn’t it. Shut up. The tranquility, then, was amazing, wouldn’t you say? The solar disk ceased to ripple. The wind quit moaning and lay down in its own dust. The water going into the drain whispered as closely against the drainpipe’s wall as it could navigate to do. Very little splashing. The dying became circumspect. The angels, yes, even the angels, lowered their incessant and essential gossiping to a low background murmur. And what of you, Samuel, service worker, organizer, butler? How is the shine on the art pottery? And the drapes, upon the drawing, don’t

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there dead about? I wouldn’t know dead. Dead is done, isn’t it? What is dead going to do with tears! The day is measured out in soup spoons, coffee cups, ampoules, and seed pods. We carry our houses on our heads, the rain sloughing off the shingles, sluicing down the gutters onto the nice shirts our mothers pressed for us. Frankly, I think you are too tall. 3900 feet and rising? My name is Samuel P. Good4U. Isn’t. A new tolerance shall be construed over the objections of sundry restrictionists. The nice thing about asceticism is the et. It’s the

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leanings. Watch the red line. No, take the red line. Line up in yellow. The linings of clouds are of a spongy material that naturally holds heat and repels cold. The ignorance of the other side has often been likened to a pizza, particularly with basil and olives, more rarely with three kinds of cheese. And this, said the angel, is what your tears taste like. Ethereal eternal tears, the tears that have been stowed in the box of destiny just for you. When did you say that? I always say that. You say that to all the dead? Is

Two Hundred Twenty-Nine

What do they come to? You mean, when do they come to? There’s nothing letting the light in. The dark room has your name on it. Things develop in the dark. Pictures come out of it to the slightly less dark. Eyes lose their red eye. Ah, yes. Look into the red, my love. Let the red rise, full of head, and spill over. Blink. Remember to breathe. Put that out there. The first breath of winter. The cloud doesn’t know its linings. Are they green? Growing and leaved, fruited and fresh. Are they black? Samuel. Listen to the green

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name is the name you give yourself. Or the name pressed on you when you’re born? You grow into your name. It’s a hope. It’s a dream. It’s a change. It’s tradition. Gathered into the tribe. Your story is the name’s story. All story gets name. Names weren’t the first words. Nowhere near. If they were, they’d be easy to remember. And you know they are hard! You should earn a name. You should pay for a name. A name should eat your breakfast. Or be breakfast. I been crossin’ names off de liss ah day. And adding them up.

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know. Muhammads? Haven’t seen one. Not lately. There was a spate. There are places in the world. A capital attitude. That’s what she told me. You are angry at me over nothing, she said. A death in the family and then what? You expect sympathy for every sob. It’s not going to happen. The world is a hard place. The stones crumble along the rim. Those are the obvious ones. But down here, hidden under the grass, the stones below, cracks here too, and all the way through. Samuel. That’s his name. The name he’s chosen for himself. The truer

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can catch a peep. This one can hear you, you know. What attitude! You wonder what a meat is thinking, don’t you. You can lay thought eggs in their heads. I’ve done it. Makes ‘em writhe in bed, it does. The other day a Jesus was sitting with us, we’re poking it in the belly, poking it in the belly, we are, and it keeps hissing at us, hissing! Like it’s going to scare somebody. Not a demon, one of the Jesuses, blood dripping from its hands and all, gash in the side, crown of thorns, the whole bit. You

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those painful-looking yogic positions that takes so much work to achieve. Being able to still the body does help one escape distraction when keying into the subtle vibrations. Something about this client has destabilized the expected connections. The worlds are no longer aligned. Hopefully it’s a localized phenomenon. In any case it wouldn’t be the first time. Samuel has had hints of this on previous jobs, a little doubling of the person, phantom scents and voices. Could throw you if you hadn’t any training. Samuel is listening past several conversations, most of them not taking place where the surveillance system

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The august retrovert, supplied by the near term servant class, ordered by cinder by, a newsy crew flattering tidy teak ash avocets. Wonder of partners, the green whiff of the merry eventuality. I see you’ve returned with that headache. Let me put it to you this way. Another bath. Yes, you have not a corpse but a tinsel. Samuel takes off his shoes and settles down on the flooded tile floor of the bath. The bloated body of the billionaire mayor, neatly covered with a sheet, stretches full length on a pink rug. Samuel tucks his legs into one of

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beautiful he combines two realities, puts the stem of a striped lily to his lips and draws deep into his third spirit self its silvery smoke. “Allegro,” he says. “Another one unctuous.” But Samuel moves on across valleys of burnishment and glacial esprit. A nervous elegance destroys a stolid blanch at the union of the avalanche and the nostrum. Ms L’s face stands for the revolutionary in hard candies, but for the red stripes of the white peppermint wheel. After the rebuff of two and the commission of a lightly greased ceiling, a candled chandelier hungers into the master bath.

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the errand, like an abraxas, know what I mean, a grand refibrillator in the sense a symbolist might enhance with a parabolic wave and a parson’s whip. Friends occasionally recompense the fandango, okay, but what I’m really after is a pulchritude bombarded with the vagaries of wine and Roosevelt heat. I don’t see why elderberries knock spiral-bound salt savages for a loop in a novena. It just isn’t video. The far version. What has to happen, even in these benighted orgiastic avenues, is welt gravy parboiled, vanishing specks of garden art.” One of the other EMTs, a black boy so

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up short of heaven, and the toe of an angel jabs him in the eye. Ms L’s third form steps out, followed by her second form. The angel, leaning from a mattress of unknowing cloud, nibbles on Samuel’s ear, the one that seems most relevant at the moment. Three emergency medical technicians are smoking in the penthouse foyer and chatting about seraphim classes. The prettiest looks Samuel over as, distracted by the nudging of the angel, he bumps a potted fern. “I don’t know,” the EMT says, “if another certification is absolutely necessary. The daylight model is a frame around

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if heard with an ear he doesn’t yet have access to. Although he has been working this terrain for years now, he isn’t ready. His own spirits (or, better, one might say, those spirits that have chosen to cooperate with his business) have negotiated positive outcomes for over one hundred clients, and his reputation has been well regarded across two planes. This reality and the spirit world have been enough to deal with. But as the elevator barrels upward, at least four realities and eight spirit worlds are sliding apart and in conjunction. His stomach lurches as the elevator pulls

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rapid that Samuel’s spiritual and physical bodies move out of sync. Ms L also doubles, then triples, although her emotional affect does not alter. Not so far as Samuel can tell, anyway. And he has the advantage of being able to compare her spirit versions to her physical version or versions. In that rapidly rising elevator there seem to be multiple realities, each the sort to which we apply the term readily, a world one apprehends with the senses, a shared world, a world that behaves. Samuel hears resonances, some as song, some as noise, which might also be song

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in the bath. If he were to try to bite it, it would bounce away before his jaws, too small to encompass it, its skin too resistant to his blunt human teeth to be caught and held. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t tempting to try. He closes his eyes and the water closes over his head. Is it leaking through the zipper? When he opens his eyes Ms L the mayor’s appointment secretary is squeezing his hand. “Mayor Rumiere is asking for you.” Samuel Obie nods. He follows her to the private penthouse elevator. The elevator’s rise is so

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inner body. You think the soul resides somewhere inside. It doesn’t. The spirit body resonates on the spirit plane, coterminous with the physical body on the plane we consider reality. Samuel runs his tongue over the zipper where it cinches his upper lip. Yet another thing that’s always been there that he’s never noticed. The red dot is blinking. Other dots are converging upon it. Dots of different and uncomfortable color. The water is up to his knees, the water is up to his ass, the water tips into his navel, a closed port. An apple bobs like an iceberg

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head, feeling for the thread that will start the raveling. There is no such thread. However, he does find a zipper. He fingers its rough teeth, edges along them until they run out at the base of his skull. Then he fumbles forward, trembling, he has to take off the heavy work gloves in order to feel every tooth of the zipper. The grip will be where? He traces the zipper over the top of his head, down his forehead, down the nose, over the lip. Like train tracks into a tunnel it plunges into the hidden world of his

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bug bites, which are starting to itch. He pulls a handkerchief out of the pocket of his pea coat and, mopping his brow, knocks off his fedora. The wool scarf, fine as it is, is also itchy, so Samuel whips it off and drops it in the mud. He takes off his glasses, having never needed glasses. He peels off the swim cap that was hiding under the fedora and the yarmulke that was bobby-pinned to his scalp under the cap. He dangles from two fingers the toupee to which the yarmulke is pinned. The other hand probes his damp

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quickly. He bends his knees, and dives. Samuel reaches to unbutton his collar. His tie is in the way. It’s a red tie with tiny yellow paiselys. His mother-in-law gave it to him before she died. She was standing on the roof, which was where his birthday party was being thrown, and she was laughing as she tossed the wrapped box in the air, catching it, tossing it, laughing. Something tickles his fingers. A spider. Tiny and red, bigger than a mite, easily. Must have been living in the red grass. The back of his hand is dotted with red

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Samuel wants to say. Let’s strip naked and wallow in the mud. But the youth. Youth? Has drawn them to a pool, a swimming hole under a spreading oak. A slow moving stream spreads into a wide half circle. He steps out of his trousers and underwear. The chest is sunken, the hair on it gray. His lips are thin, his cheekbones jutting. This is an old man. But when he looks over at Samuel his smile is as warm as before, the same smile, unhurt by the bodily transformation. He sloshes into the shallows. The water ascends his calves

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spotted, and the skin isn’t flattering the muscles of the back but sagging, not hanging off, this is no sudden horror, but the skin betrays a looseness Samuel notices, he decides, only because he has been admiring the back’s shape and movement. When did the hair go? It’s gone. The youth might have been bald for years. Samuel looks down at the hand pulling him along. He follows willingly enough. The hand is cool now and dry. His own is sweaty and must feel hot because his clothes stick to him and they itch. Let’s take off all our clothes,

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going to marsh, and they are surprised by puddles they don’t see until they’ve stepped in up to the knee in grass that looked as firm as lawn. They are slogging now, not bothering to pull their bodies onto the relatively dry, solid humps because they’d just have to step right off again. In this increasingly difficult trek Samuel wonders where they are going. He slows, though the muck has already slowed them, and his tiring would be expected, and he watches the back ahead. The pink skin, once rosy from too much sun, perhaps, has gone pale and faintly