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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

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They lurch and stumble from lump to bump. Samuel sits suddenly, a foot having slipped on the grass, and he loses his grip. Oh, he says. That was. That was. He looks up. The young man is smiling mildly down at him, his skin creased at the edges of his lips, crinkling by his eyes, his chin roughened with reddish beard. And how his hairline has receded! The body is thicker. More than full, it seems to be carrying a weight it hasn’t grown used to. Samuel takes the offered hand and rises again. The ground beneath the hummocks is

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back, shadows touching its curves, flickering over the valley down its center, becomes a new landscape that Samuel sees himself wandering across, a landscape of yielding stone, warm and comforting, where he can explore his solitude. The young man glances over his shoulder, bemused, and Samuel grins sheepishly, as though his every thought were being read already by the young man’s skin. The golden light penetrates the hair at his crown, illumining a circle. Where the hair is thinning? So young and beautiful and balding? The ground becomes hummocky now, which makes it more difficult to hold the other’s hand.

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walk, the youth knowing where they are going. Fields of grass, a red grass, not red all the way through, not like they’ve been splashed with paint left over from the candy store or even a barn, but a rough grass that scratches against Samuel’s pant legs, a species of grass that’s got a hint of red in its green, like a presentiment of something unexpected that becomes banal before one has taken ten steps. And the air, too, has taken on a gold, which begins to accept its own red, a sunset combination, isn’t it? The young man’s naked

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newly spread and muscled, his hand squeezing the butler’s. A reassurance. And the eyes, like in a photograph, red. A red glowing at the center of each. Samuel lifts his free hand to touch a cheek, but the youth steps back. He pulls Samuel by the hand, and Samuel follows, readily. The youth’s first steps are backwards so he can continue to look Samuel over. Samuel feels caressed by the look, not exposed, received rather, accepted? Which feels wonderful. You think you don’t need anyone’s approval, but when you feel it, feel it so thoroughly, you tremble, you laugh. They

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the way one should feel, the way one should always feel. O! That is how a name used to begin, the one that drew him. What does it mean to him now? O circle, start on you anywhere and go on from there, go on, go on. No stopping until the traveler decides to, until he puts his foot down and points it in a new direction. The hand he is holding is not his own. A youth, his soft cheeks unbearded, dark curls around big ears, his eyes bright as in a photograph, his long neck descending to shoulders

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gleaming, pulsing. It has muscle, this red. It has strength, this red. Heat. Are those flames? Skinny, velvet flames, like the ribbons on a present. It’s funny. A gift of love. From me to you. Nobody’s laughing at you. We are all laughing together. It’s funny. It’s a funny life, isn’t it? Sammy, Sammy. It’s a funny life, is it not? Way down in the pit, way down at the bottom, a white glimmer, he sees the spread of his teeth. His practiced, professional smile relaxing into joy. Yes, the transcendental butler is off duty. Or maybe this is just

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throbs. The red dot. Is it whispering? Is it growing? Fatter. Thicker. Deeper. Samuel hears laughter. He closes his eyes. The darkness is red. Red and spreading. He puts out his hand. There is no resistance. Maybe this isn’t the spirit world. He opens his eyes. That, however, is not easy. He opens his eyes. He tries again, expelling his breath in the effort. The laughter, distant, then close, soft, is it even there?, then parked in his ear like a motor revving in a garage. The darkness is red, but it is not a dark red now. It is

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walkie talkie and runs from the room. Mr Opie, the transcendental butler, rubs an eyebrow and watches the unmoving red dot. It may not be moving but it is not dead. The dot. The man, yes, the mayor is dead. Of what did he die? He drowned. But that only means his lungs filled up with water. Did he overdose on medications? On contraband? Did someone push the old man under, hold him down so the water could find its way where the air used to, could enter him and take up the space his life occupied? The red dot

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ringtone. “Odd,” says the appointment secretary. “He has voice control answering.” She whispers the next, “He will pick up no matter what he’s doing. Sometimes I hear him farting. Panting.” Resuming a normal volume, “So far as I can tell he doesn’t care who hears. He likes us to know where he is, so has the penthouse rigged to capture his movements. A red dot on this schematic is him. Yes, always. Guests are randomly assigned other colors. It is that sophisticated. I’m trying a louder alarm now. Mr Rumiere, Mr Rumiere. OK. Pardon me.” Ms L snatches up a

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fingers a hint of that ancient obstacle. This world or the other one, you can’t have both. You can’t have both. He is humming this as though it were the lyric to a pop song. You can’t have both you can’t you can’t you can’t have both, baby. If you were to get there before me, I’d find you there, I’d find you there. I’ll take you there. The billionaire mayor whose spirit house the transcendental butler is to put back in order has not yet been found drowned in his bathtub. The telephone in the bathroom coos its dove-like

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would curse as they scraped it away. No worries. It’s only a dream. Nothing bad can happen in a dream. Samuel is walking to his meeting. He remembers reaching through the resistance, stroking the cheek of the man he had been, the man who was afraid. That makes his lips curl. Afraid! Fear real things. Not spirits. His career is predicated on the unreal these days. It was that dream that dispelled the wall, what had seemed solid becoming a passage. Whenever he has to cross from the here and now to the other realm he feels again in his

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that had whipped his hair against his cheeks, that had rippled and puffed his shirt, that had tugged at his pants (wasn’t he glad he’d worn a snug belt!), that had rushed through the seams of his shoes and cooled the sweat in the toes of his socks. The wind had not quit, hadn’t stood aside in favor of some other power. That body was still on target to slam into the side of the building, was heading there directly. If something wasn’t done in less than a second, he’d be fly on the windshield, a smoosh the window washers

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been dying he feared. Rather, he said to himself, getting up from the black leather office chair, he was afraid to leave the world of sensation. He pressed his hand against the glass, its blue no more blue from this side than any sky when you are in it. The hand held to the window encountered not a surface but resistance, an unwillingness to go on. The body he had been flying was still in the phenomenal world, stretched out, suspended. No, that was wrong. It wasn’t suspended, it was flying. The wind it rode blew with the same strength

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bang into it, he struggled. He struggled against the inevitable. This was not how it would end. What was about to happen, no. The great blue face of glass stared his death at him. Only, it wasn’t death. That’s not what he thought was coming. Perhaps he would not have recognized death if he had been awake and launched on a collision course with 182 stories of financial district. It’s not that he knew what it was, but when he was sitting in a board room in the building, looking out at the distant fields, he realized it had not

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anymore. It’s like he never had it. It was a mirage. After he’d walked through it he looked back and nothing was there. How could it be real? It left a residue, a new last name. “Obie. Is that Irish?” “Obie. Are you related to the Obie of the Obie Awards?” Once he dreamt he was flying. He soared over the a checkerboard of green and greener fields. A city appeared on the horizon. As it came closer he lost altitude. The air grew bumpy. A skyscraper of blue glass loomed. As soon as he realized he was going to

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new policies that improve the interplay of spirit forces, that create the optimal environment for spirit entities, so far as can be determined considering the current state of things. He’s done pretty well for himself. Travels the world. Fucks beautiful women, occasionally hires a boy for himself. Just to carry his luggage. And for the nude massages. Plus he likes to be paternal. He doesn’t like children. But he likes to help people. Samuel Obie. Mr Obie. It’s not actually his name. O and B are his initials. Or they used to be. He doesn’t go by that other name

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there also are those who are guests. There are invaders, too, but a butler is not an exorcist. You can’t do everything. The spirits of the throat want to work with the spirits of the lungs, but misunderstandings can occur. A butler’s job is to make sure the household runs smoothly, that the spirits who need to work together know their jobs and the spirits who oughtn’t be in each other’s business are occupied with their own. He’s more a consultant than a servant; he reviews the comity and efficiency of your spirit community, makes recommendations, oversees the implementation of

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sum up creation, creation’s purposes, and the context of creation within the greater realms. Spirit is not more important than flesh, but it is more durable. The transcendental butler is a practical man. He doesn’t like long explications of systems, how future meshes with parafuture, past with pastime, present with omnipresent or subpresent. He’s found some things that work and he sticks with them, whatever the ultimate culmination explanation is. He calls himself a “butler” because he sees you as a house, a big house, in which various entities come and go. There are those who are permanent residents, but

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at a conference on business ethics under the dome, peaceful as a pizza, with the end result known only to the calculator. The spirit remembers, vaguely, what it will be like to remember experiencing the emotions of flesh, although much of history won’t yet have been written, writing being invented by parrots in a negotiation with crows. Writing has been invented several times by writers who never heard of each other, never read anything, and are too busy masturbating to understand the language of signs. Nevertheless, in paradise, the wise advisor explained, everyone is a word, and their meanings all

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the spirit please check November 11th for an afternoon interview as he was to meet a potential client that day, he is sure, yet can find but no mention of it in his day book. It’s okay, the spirit advisor wanted to say, that client was an ephemeral manifestation of the coming change that will reorder the world, not an ending but a realignment that will benefit some and be worse for others. The client exists, yes, and last week you rescheduled her for December 10th per a request from her son who called to say she was needed

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it said, or would say to a future self, which, the spirit advisor did not tell the transcendental butler, would be the transcendental butler at some point, although describing the events that would bring that about, while laid out with the lucid perfection of paradise, remained somewhat mysterious to the spirit advisor. When it tried in a roundabout way to share with the transcendental butler the insights afforded by a conversation with one’s paradisal self the butler got grumpy, snappish, claimed he was fine, thank you, not bothered by any of this, but he had a schedule to maintain and

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Paradise Falls or twenty-three to Paradise Lake. Paradise Park, Paradise Valley, Paradise Hill, it adds up. Then there are the transdimensional charges, discounted for spirit callers, true, but not negligible. Transdimensional calling is surprisingly affordable, although technically impossible. The transcendental butler’s spiritual advisor had been talking to its own future self ensconced in paradise. Yes, the real paradise, where everything’s perfect and the lion lies down with the lamb in an only incidentally sexual manner, the heavens rain lemonade, and everyone lives forever as far as it possible to determine. The advisor in paradise offered a few perspectives worth considering

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and toast and sipping at a tiny foam-topped espresso. Though dawn had managed and the curtains drawn from the windows, lamps had to be lit. The butler squinted at his day book, then, with a disapproving grunt, opened his electronic personal assistant, so-called, to make sure the two agreed. For several years he had relied upon a spiritual back up, but it took sides in a conflict between clients getting a divorce and began feeding the butler bogus appointments. It’s only so humorous to discover $50 charges on the phone bill for ten minutes talking to Paradise or twenty to

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yellow and vaguely barbell-shaped. As the transcendental butler is called upon to bring all the client’s service spirits into a harmonic working relationship and the sleep spirit was introducing a note of discord (“In the morning I can only piss in the shower,” the client explained) the sleep spirit department was called to a meeting. Which was promptly commandeered by dream spirits complaining about their work being disregarded. “He tells people he doesn’t dream! After we’ve put in such a long night!” one howled, to much nodding and applause. The butler was still thinking about work while munching poached egg

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dropped his legs over the side of the bed and, after gingerly coaxing, added the rest of his body to his feet’s obligations. Over the boxers rumpled on the rug, he tottered, side-stepped the belt buckle, and got to the toilet before his sleep extension had wilted enough to allow him to hit the bowl. Pressing his forehead against the wall tile’s cool yellow, the transcendental butler waited for consciousness to drive away whatever sleep spirit conjured his genitals into a firm chaise longue for its comfort. There was more than one, he knew. He’d met someone else’s. It was

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future atmosphere of healthful oxygen, provides nor comedy nor drama nor bewildered fascination to the modern audience. So. Consciousness. Start there? I don’t know. There was light. And it was on an automatic timer because in the middle of winter the transcendental butler had to get up before dawn and he had that depression caused by lack of light in winter so had a rough time shaking the weight of sleep without the help of electric light. So it was good? He saw the light. And it was too bright. Groaning and hacking to get out the phlegm, the butler

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which we can identify. It’s all very well to say that virtually as soon as one puddle on a still-steaming earth slackened its rolling boil life found its chance and billions of years of successful being fruitful and multiplying began in that moment. Life! Who doesn’t love life! But how much family feeling do you get for a stromatolite? Maybe a gnome, a creature partial to toadstools and creeping slimes, would get misty over the “columnar calcium-containing mass of many layers.” But blue-green algae growing on a mound built up from the bodies of older algae, whatever it does for a

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an old anger, the shame that hurts every time it’s touched. I don’t know that the new has ever been created out of nothing. Except in the beginning? In the beginning there was. There was no there there. There was no here here, for that matter. There was no matter to matter. There was no one to know the difference. In the beginning a dream disturbed the contentment. All was without form and void where not prohibited. A twitch. Was that what initiated? Starting too far back, you know, it deprives the story of anything we could recognize, anything with

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growls in its sleep, which makes the cat turn and look. But the growl quickly fades, the dog raises its head, blinks, then returns the head to cushioning paws and sighs with satisfaction. This is how the world ends? Not with a bang-a-lang or boom-shakka-la, not with a sob or shudder, but with a contented sleep. OK. Done with that world. We could come back to it? We’ll see. First, we need to dream something up. Dreams are unreliable guides to the new. They tend to be knotted with aches of the past, echoes of terrors, the smarting scar of

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man and the boy are carrying you. What are they going to do, waft you down to the end of the world and toss you over the edge? You remember those paintings of ships toppling down the great waterfall the oceans come to at the edge of a flat earth. Lying on air, even paralyzed, isn’t a bad deal, really. Makes one sleepy. A cat curls up on your belly next to a curly-haired little dog. The cat, eyes squeezed shut, purring, kneads away with its forepaws and through your sweater the pricks of claws tickle your skin. The dog

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animal standing in the forest, the yellow orange of a gimbe, calamansi orange, gentle pitaya reds, the deeper gumichama reds, purples of jambul, so bright, so distracting, that the animal standing in the forest cannot be seen but for its immensity, its breathing, its confident strength. Lightly, like the tickle of a moth, you notice at the base of your skull a touching. The old man. Your feet stick straight out, and you remember the assistant in the magic act who is rendered stiff as a board and stretched out flat on a bed of absolutely nothing. How funny. The

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and suddenly the boy is in your face. Gently, he takes your left arm and folds it across your breast. He takes your right arm, folds it across the left. He moistens his thumb with a kiss and to a spot directly between your brows presses it. With the thumb resting in that place, you begin to tip back. The view is tilting, filling up with sky. You look to the boy’s eyes and you see safety there. But eyes are replaced by clouds, clouds taking on the fruit colors of a yummy sunset, the day’s blue transmogrifying also, an

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uniform. She was an angel, surely. She gave you a drink ticket. She didn’t have to do that. She could have stabbed you in the heart with a pitchfork. The kid drops his rag back on the counter and gives you a curious look. It’s as though he were looking at something left behind that it really seems unlikely anyone would abandon. Like a television sitting on the curb playing the world series. Or an obelisk woven from disposable chopsticks. He gives a nod to the old man who stands abruptly, rocking the table and upsetting the glass of ice,

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has snapshots of his handsome children in his wallet that he’ll offer up, a story with each, or who knows, he’s the devil. Or an angel. Could be. It is the end of the world, after all. Who knows who hangs out at the end of the world! But I suspect you are shy, that talking to strangers has always made you uncomfortable. And there’s something about the man’s silence and concentration that adds a wall you don’t feel you should break through to disturb him. You look over a shoulder. Where did that girl go? The one in the

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ain’t nobody gonna be it for you. When else you gonna be genuine, huh? The end of the world oughta sober up anybody, make ‘em think about what they been doing. What they been wastin’ time at? Did they make some love along the way? You’re alone at the end of the world. Unless you count the magpie. And the kid cleaning tables. And the old guy. You glance at him. He’s staring at his glass of ice. If you are the gregarious type you might go up to him, ask him what brought him to this, or maybe he

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what works for you. Be true to your own special, unique self. Don’t let anybody force you into some generic cookie-cutter version of a person. Don’t let anybody open your mouth, cram down your throat the soliloquy from Biloxi Blues, and permit yourself unthinkingly to throw it out as though your own heart (or a region nearby) contained naught but those words, those very only very you words which all these years had been waiting for the right moment to arrive, to set up shop, to hang out a shingle, to jump out in spangles and bows. Be yourself cuz

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you? Everybody wants to be in pictures. You’re more real that way. It’s not that you aren’t real, right now, standing at the end of the world, or rather, near the end of the world. The end of the world promises to be just down the boardwalk. Yet in a room dark but for the light of your face, who could deny you enhanced reality? OK, say you refuse that whole Lord returning business. Say you keep it simple, “Oops. My bad.” Or. “Pardon me.” Or. “Hey. What the fuck! You tryin’ to trip me or something?” Fine. Go with

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love interest has to dab at lightly with a cotton ball before turning to the apologetic hero and whatever else you are contracted to say falls away before the editor’s snips. But these lines entitle you to a union card, which means you get an agent and residuals, you get a royalty check every time the movie shows on late night TV, and surely you get a cut when the DVD comes out or the streaming video, don’t you think? I don’t know. Digital rights might still be up in the air. You’d say that stuff for a movie, wouldn’t

Thousand explained some more

So far I have three tags for this blog, two of them are related to the ongoing “Thousand” project: thousand and thousand process

Thousand Process is the tag for posts like the very one you’re reading.

I just reread the process posts for myself. Not much has changed, even though I wrote the last more than two months ago. Writing 100 words a day is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. It’s been at its most difficult when my husband Kent has been in the hospital or just home. That’s when I was so tired I could barely concentrate.

I began “Thousand” after Kent was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. “Thousand” was to give me a practice demanding attention that had nothing to do with household tasks or medical procedures. I needed a distraction, a distraction that was also art, a distraction that would be an ambition – a 100,00 word prose work. Call it a novel? An improvisation?

My stepmother Jan was diagnosed with cancer this spring also. We went from accepting her sympathy over Kent’s diagnosis to expressing concern over hers. Jan’s disease was frighteningly far advanced, we learned. An obituary for Jan was published in the Anchorage Daily News this week. Two others I know faced cancer diagnoses this year. 2010 has been a year.

“Thousand” has been a helpful chore. I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s going somewhere with me. Having the sense that one is moving forward is a good sense. Even if the progress is on something as weird as a plotless hunk of prose and the progress consists of slapping a bit more prose on it.

When my brother David was here for a visit and I sat down to write my “Thousand” piece for the day he was surprised to see me stop writing and erase every word I’d written past one hundred. The work that appears on the blog is not written ahead of time. I write it. I post it immediately after writing it. This is not to say the posts go up completely first draft. I write, read the work over, revise (occasionally extensively), reread until it works for me, then post. But I do not write ahead.

David said he knew other people who were doing long projects but they produce a lot during short periods then parcel the work out over time on their blogs. I can’t work that way. Not to say Never. But the point of “Thousand” is the process. A product is created, yes, and that’s not incidental, but the work is not the result but the living it.

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to atone for such transgressions as these I have committed against you.” What? You doubt you’d say that? Even if it was in the script and you were on the stage in a community theater? Everybody likes community theater. Maybe you’ve been cast in a major motion picture as an actor in a community theater through the outer wall of which the hero bursts his white Range Rover and you get only three words of this spiel out of your mouth before the styrofoam bricks rain down, supposedly leaving you with a cut on the head the paramedic and

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over a wing at you, flashes a white underlid over its black eye, says, “Raak! Raak! Raak!” and wanders off among the condiments. You take a step backward and bump into the youth who slipped out of the drinks stand to wipe down the tables. “Oh! I’m sorry,” you say. “You will have to forgive me. It was what I wanted least to do in this world. The day will come when the Lord returns in glory, flames of gold cushioning his naked soles, sparrows carrying a pot of tea, his eyeglasses of purest rose, and I will be forced

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skull was cleaned of its evil evil brain by tidy good samaritan magpies. The end! And its eyes, too. Plucked right out of their little bowls, like ordurves. The end!” The magpie bursts into a series of screeches, which, only after it stops and eyes you from its perch on the cash register, do you recognize as magpie laughter. The magpie turns its back on you with one hop, preens its breast, lifting a wing to probe under it, and dropping a turd on the boardwalk, which lands on older black turds centered in splashes of white. The magpie looks

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and a tongue covered with spines. That’s an end for you! So you gonna get something to drink or what? Ain’t ya thirsty? I’d be thirsty come all that way over the moors, wind blowing in my monkey face, hot sun poking in my eyes like a stick. We got sodas and juices and waters in variety. We got teas and tinctures, tisanes and elixirs. No? I can tell you a story. That’ll parch ya. Once upon a time. Once upon a time there was a cat! And the cat got run down by a car and then its split-open

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the blue ticket, and you smile nervously. “Cat! Always there’s a cat that’s at the bottom of things! You go on. You go on to the end of the world. It’s just down the way. Yes, yes. You go on to the end of the world and you’ll find a cat, I’ll bet you a dollar and a quarter. You go on to the end of the world and you’ll find a big fat ugly vicious cat sinking its nasty claws into the world’s tender, innocent flesh, and drawing the world to its cavernous mouth filled with needles and knives

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a leprechaun’s jacket. “How ever did you get that clean in the first place?” asks a magpie, which you notice for the first time. The youth dips the green rag in a bowl of suds, wrings it out, then hangs it from a blunt red hook. “Did you want something? Hell! Oh! Hello, you, did you want something? Something to drink? We also have biscotti and bags of potato chips and cheese twirls and rubbery candies. Pheh! What does anybody see in that gunk? Cat got yer tongue?” You realize the magpie is talking to you. Your hands close around

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taking your hand, helping you up, “You have arrived! Would you like a complimentary beverage?” You glance down at the blue drink ticket she’s slipped you. Her smile does not waver as you contemplate her existence, which seems persistent and likely. You are thirsty, so you go on down the boardwalk to the drink stand before which are three unoccupied tables with umbrellas. At a fourth an older man holds an unlit cigarette, and a clear plastic cup with nothing in it but ice sweats on the table. The youth at the drink stand is wiping down the counter with

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place. Tears begin to hurt in your eyes. One escapes, rushing down your nose and flinging itself toward the earth. It strikes the toe of your left shoe with an audible tump. You cross your arms over your chest and walk bent over. Your stomach twists. Are you hungry or are you ill? A ringing in your ears, you feel dizzy. “Hello, my name is Liz! Welcome to the End of the World!” A young woman with a polite smile, bright eyes, and a uniform jacket, knee-length skirt, black leather shoes with buckles, beckons from a boardwalk. “Yes,” she says,

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little hungry, aren’t you? Yes. Tired, too. How funny that your feet have gotten heavy; pushing them forward is like kicking a medicine ball. Earlier it was as though no foot even existed! The world flitted by while you turned your head to admire it. There’s an ache in your side. This breathing business is getting to be trouble. It was better when you forgot it, right? You pass a hand over your face and find it’s bunched up, so you massage your cheeks, your forehead. That smile seems to have stretched things beyond their ability to settle back into

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the rock and lose the view, you are surrounded by the blond stone for a moment, and in the shadow it feels cool, almost chill. There’s rubble in the path and you stumble, put your hand against the big rock to keep from falling. This isn’t the way you came. Must have been all that spinning around. Well, what’s the difference? When you were at your highest, you weren’t very high. If you follow the rock around to the right, there! The path is relatively smooth and it’s downhill all the way. You’re walking again, which feels good. You’re a

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You spin, slowly, once more. You close your eyes to do it. You breathe consciously to keep yourself steady. You keep your head up, your arms out for balance, your feet feeling the way on the uneven surface of the rock. When you open your eyes you can see it in your peripheral vision. It’s still there. And it’s not roaring toward you. It’s not some great machine, belching smoke and spinning belts, lubricated and powered up. It’s just there. Waiting, maybe. Indifferent, maybe. It expects you, you think. It won’t take long to get there. You step down from

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were approaching it but it that came for us. There, the speed! There, the power! Every way forward had been filled by the body of this terrific mechanism. There was nothing for us to do. Run? Crawl? Stand! The future this prophet’s rage-honed finger pointed out was too great, too complete, too damnably thrilling to avoid. There was nowhere to go. We could not even fall back. What was behind us was past, we couldn’t go there. The future in full reverse, its engines screaming at the insult, pressed every iota of its power into the mission. Crush the present.

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to end? Hard to say. But now that you see it, what else could it be? And it’s so close. So close. Really! From this little rock you can see the end of the world! Oh yes. It makes perfect sense. How close you are to the end! Move your feet. That’s all it will take to get you there. You remember to breathe. So much to remember this close to the end. Prophets have declared the imminence of the world’s end, declared it and described it, raised a righteous finger and pointed as though it were not we who

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and old oaks standing in loose groups, and the wind making the grasses and wildflowers shake and bow. The path you took to get here is a scar but a faded scar. If you’re not looking for it you don’t see it. You turn around and around, not at all afraid of getting dizzy. The world could go on like this forever. But then you see it. The end. The end of the world. What set your feet in this direction. Would you have said it was the end of the world if you hadn’t been looking for the world

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let it get as big and freaky as it wants. The wind is playing with your ears; are those the songs you last heard in bed, a tear in your eye? You feel like dancing! When was the last time? You touch your lip with a finger and feel the quiver there of a word you said once that gave such joy the vibrations have been rocking back through you ever since. You step off the path onto rock. It’s a big rock so you have to crouch and use your hands to get to the top. Meadows and marshes