LABORS: THE LAST TESTAMENT OF CHRIST By DAVID WESLEY FRANK And the woman took and spread a covering

over the wells mouth, and spread ground corn thereon; and the thing was not known. -2 Samuel 17:19 PART I 1. My knowledge began when I looked into the road the season after a small death. I sat for dinner. I was at a restaurant along the road. I lived alone and I was very tired. From the restaurant I saw a man stooped in the middle of four lanes. He tried to put belongings in one trash bag. He tried to put aluminum cans in another. The wind from the traffic blew these things away from him. A driver leaned against a truck stopped in front of the man, who was a homeless man. The driver spoke on his phone and adjusted his sunglasses. He looked into the front of shops along the road. I thought for a moment the homeless man had a sore jaw. I thought at first he had a redcolored scarf wrapped under his chin. A couple on the other side of the road also watched the homeless man. They looked newly old and they looked kind. They looked like they owned a modest shop in the city or a large shop in the country. Their blue jeans were the same color of blue. And suddenly I was outside and I calling on them. We drew near and they told me what they had seen: The homeless man had been hit by the driver. The driver had not slowed the truck for the homeless man. Maybe he had not seen him. I followed the couple to the homeless man who was still in the middle of the road. They offered him a towel and he refused it. He said only he should be blamed for the accident. He apologized. The husband from the couple turned toward me and his wife. He said the homeless man must be in shock. I looked at the homeless mans face. A bolt-shaped hole punctured his temple. The blood dripped down his jaw. It was dark and smeared through his hair. I spoke and asked the homeless man if he needed help. Traffic wrung around us and did not slow. The homeless man refused. I asked if he needed help picking up his things. He said I could help him with that. The sun was long on the back of my neck. I was stooped over with the homeless man. Blood from the puncture slipped from his body. Some of the blood fell onto my hands. The driver lowered his phone. He covered the mouthpiece and said he could not help. He motioned at the homeless man. He said something about blood. The police came and at that time I left the road and the homeless man. 1

I say this to tell you I am Jesus Christ and no longer can be. My name is Labors, my name is Balthuz, my name is Holy Christ Lord Jesus. I have lived inside a city. My reign is over the Kingdom. Inside a city were my families, inside a city were my loves. Loves are the same loves for all cities of Christs children. These children, both realized and unrealized, stake land inside combs inside their cities. They move along perimeters from one point to another. They move back. They move home. They reinforce their claims to land. They do not release the perimeter. They do not cross the center of their citys combs. They worry they might lose their place always. I saw a death during my last days inside my city. It was a small death. I call it small in order to diminish it. I call it small so it will not consume me again. I call it small because I wish it to be small. As all children, I diminish the powers to which I have pled. I tell you it was consuming so you will know that in this winnowing I became realized. It is through this consumption any child may be realized. This consumption ends with the repudiation of what cities warn of as bodily death. But that is not that for realized children. Theirs is an appropriation into the fires and wind near to me. I am different than other children. I was consumed as a child of Christ to become Christ Jesus. I cannot speak about the small death now. I can only say I became a realized child of Christ and can never die. My body is unbroken.

2. Children, I am the Lord God Jesus Christ and can no longer be. This is my will. My body is unbroken. It is conceiving. I cannot think of it otherwise. If I cannot not think of it, it cannot be. These are the experiences from a time before this: I was a child of Christ as you are a child of Christ. I was Christ but for name as you are Christ but for name. This was my experience and this is my will. I knew death in the world as a child of Christ. I wished to make that death my own. I wished for the disappearance that a child of Christ can never have. A child of Christ in disappearance is a child of Christ who was never seen and never was. Everything is true. The truth is fixed inside your body. Your body is forgotten apart from it. Your body is the truth inside creation. Your body is the heights of Christs children. Your body is not a constellation, it is all of his works. To blaspheme Christ is to ignore your body as preserved in Christs body. Death of the body is blasphemy. Death of the body is unpardonable. We are all children of Christ. As is Christ, so are our bodies also.

My children, whoever blasphemes Christ is unforgiven. They are without body. Death which breaks the body breaks the world into two worlds. All without body are unrealized. The child without body cannot know my children. I have said this before. I also said sins and blasphemies do not exist but for the blasphemy of unforgiven bodies. Whoever blasphemes my children, each of whom may be Christ, believes in the idea of two bodies for two worlds. My children recognize there was never two bodies. They know they have one body in one world in all places so long as they hold its truth. My children will not remember a division in the world. What is present to them is the body and belief of the children of Christ. They believe in the world and their everlasting bodies. An unrealized child is either without body or becomes without body. They are like a distant star that never was or only was once long ago. Do you study the body like a star? Do you admire it? Do you link it to other stars and force the sky give up a portrait? You dont. In the present you say into the past that the star never was. You say it to ancient days. My realized children, when you listen to others, you blind yourself in divided worlds. You cannot see fires and wind. This is not a testament. I write only to occupy myself. I write only to examine my body. It is the first time in a long time. It is terrible. I can carry nothing, but my back is bent. I chew nothing, but grind my teeth. I reach and flail and rarely stand. My limbs have grown now twice their original lengths. There is more but I cannot remember. I am sure my throne is in disrepair. It must be. But I will not return to the palisades. I will not call fires and wind. What if I could leave my children and my body? What if I believed I must? I confess this is why I write. I sense I will soon begin to forget and so disappear. I will never have been. But I wish to forget and disappear. Think about what I already told you. If I no longer recognize my own body as realized I will cease to be a realized child. If I cease to be a realized child I can never have been with Christs body and so have become Christ. I will be righteousness and a distant star that was never seen. Find this confession. Find my body. Tell me truths and release me. Allow me to disappear. Allow me to disappear as I would allow you to disappear. I will write this so I will know through you.

3. After leaving the homeless man I washed my hands in the bathroom of the restaurant I had entered. Soap wiped over my forearms and I rinsed them. I listened at the door before I exited back into the main room. Suddenly I worried I might smell like the homeless man to others in the restaurant. I looked for stains on my shirt. I skipped my hands along the sides of my pants. I followed the wallpaper. I saw the wound on the face of the homeless man. My eyes stung when I remembered how the blood was thick across his jaw. 3

I sat at a table beneath the front windows of the restaurant. I watched an ambulance arrive at the accident I had left. A police car came too and an officer spoke to the homeless man. Two paramedics closed around him. The homeless man continued to pick up cans as the officer spoke. He shook his head side to side. Paramedics watched. One touched him on the back of his arm. The officer turned to the driver of the truck. And the homeless man was gone. The sun was still high in the day. I wiped my face on my shoulder. My heart beat so quickly I noticed the vacuum of the rhythm. I thought of the diseases the homeless man might have passed me in his blood. I thought of them as long quills introduced to my body through the folds in my eyes. I thought of them as moccasins in the water. I thought of their saliva that deafens children, that stops their ears and estranges them from their mothers and causes them to fall. Selah. I looked at the menu of the restaurant and tried to think of ways the homeless man seemed like he didnt have an illness. He spoke clearly. His teeth were healthy. I wanted the others at the accident to be at the restaurant to be with me and agree with me. The woman from the older couple thought he was just in shock. I believed it then. But the homeless mans eyes werent lost or wild. They were apologetic. The driver didnt fear or worry about the homeless man. He didnt fear anything from him. When he complained about his blood he was not complaining. He meant only that it was only blood. It is merely a mans blood. They were not afraid. I moved to the counter of the restaurant. The girl on the other side was stocking dishes. I waited for her to see me and looked at a painting on the wall behind her. It was in two panels. It was in a style of a people before empire. The first panel was of two owls, the second panel of two wolves. The owls were identical except one had much larger pupils. The wolves were identical except one bared its teeth. The owl with larger pupils and the wolf that bared its teeth seemed to have been alive much longer than the others. The girl came to the counter. She spoke as if she was raising her voice above a machine. Did you see what happened? she said to me. No, I said. Something happened outside in the road. I think ambulances were there. Did you see them? No, I said. They were just there outside, she said. A man who just came in a minute ago said he thought he heard what happened. Who? I said. I dont know, she said. But I heard there was an old guy trying to cross the street and this truck just hit him. I heard the old man was walking slow but the truck didnt even try to stop. The girls eyes were wide. I didnt know what she wanted me to say. She smiled. I could see all her teeth. 4

I heard the old guys head was cracked open on the road but no one could tell just by looking, she said. I think hell die. Did your customer tell you that? I said. No, she said. But he was old and hit by a truck. Itll probably happen eventually. Well, hes in the hospital now, I said. It doesnt matter, she said. My grandma fell trying to sit down last winter and broke her wrist. This guy was hit by a truck. Theyd both die even if they had a hundred doctors. She smiled with her lips pressed closed.

4. I sat down and drank what the girl behind the counter had made for me. The sun filled the windowpane. I looked at the painting again. I saw the fangs and eyes and knew I didnt believe the homeless man was dead. I knew he hadnt seen his blood as a substance with the power of blood. It was not that same current throughout his body. I covered my eyes from the sun and thought of him in the hospital. He sat on a steel veterinarian office board suspended high and unattached to a wall. He was in an oversized patients gown tied in loops all the way up his spine. He bled onto the steel board. He bled and bled and bled and bled. He turned his jaw and blood sprayed from his wound. He turned back and blood rolled down his shoulders. It pooled in the bowls of his hands. A nurse came in with a sheet of medicines written on a tablet. She ran her hand over his temple. The bleeding stopped when she left. A second nurse came in quickly after. She looked into his ears with a jeweled light. Then the homeless man was in his old clothes. Then he was bandaged over his temple small. When he was leaving the hospital, he apologized. He asked the receptionist to forgive him for the trouble he caused. In the hospital room the blood that had spilled was gone or never had been. I also saw myself. I was in my car on a county road after work. I didnt have anywhere to go but I didnt want to return to my apartment. The soybean leaf was high. The sky was too off-blue or too light too late. It was feverish and falling white gray. Another car crossed a set of train tracks long out of use. The road dipped and carried over a small hill. I relaxed my hands. Maybe they would loosen and fall off the wheel. Maybe a rise in the road would throw them. I wondered if the machine would pull toward another car as it was passed. I saw my car flail and fall onto its side. I watched this several times before I could see well enough to find my own body. But it was there. I was with it. I felt my cheek crush through the drivers side window. I felt it scrape the blacktop. I watched my body begin to be thrown over my head and pinned against the ground. My neck began to bend.

I felt pain but that was all. I could imagine nothing inside myself ending. The cord in my spine would not snap. My body was thrown but it would not break. The fluid inside was permanent. Its casing was its roots. The roots spread into my chest where at its center my heart consumed all of the world. I sat up straight in my chair in the restaurant. I pressed my knuckles into my chest until I had to draw away. The pain didnt feel like a weakness. It felt like a rejection of a threat. It was not a protection of my body. It was an assertion for the living. This is so. Think carefully. Why does a man who is being stoned to death cover his face? It is an aggression of the body. You remember Stephen the Apostle. The Libertines and Alexandrians said he was a blasphemer. The people, who were unrealized children, saw how Stephen had healed and brought realization to other children. To heal is a realization. Though the unrealized children stoned Stephen, they could not prevent the rejection of the attack by his body. Stephen called to Christ who carried him away. And Christ placed him inside the fires and wind. The devout men lamented. They believed they were taking him to burial. I thought of my body in the car once more. I knew I could never make the small death my death in the way Id planned. I felt like the man Id heard in the news who leapt from a bridge but survived. This man said as soon as he began to fall he knew he wanted to live. He saw in front of him all of what he loved. Hed forgotten how he loved them. Hed forgotten the hopes he wished to see. What this man saw as he fell was a manifestation of the rebellion of his body. It was a rebellion against the man casting a body into darkness. Experience inside and out fed one another. The man was realized in the open waters below. I uncovered my face in the coffee shop and looked to the paintings behind the counter. I could not see the animals. The sun had fallen into white gray and washed them into shadows.

5. I set my cup and dish on the counter. The girl Id spoken with now stood inside the doorway of the back room that fed into the exit to the alley. The girl nodded during pauses given from a voice inside the room. I touched the car key in my pocket. I moved away from them. I pushed into the exit and held my body there for a moment. I didnt know where I would go after I left. I listened to the room and I bowed my head. The former student living in an apartment next to mine would still be on his small porch when I returned home. He spoke to me during these times because we were close in age. He sat in a lawn chair. He spoke like hed just been running. I didnt go home after work until I thought the former student would be gone. He usually disappeared a few hours each night. I dont where he went. He didnt have a job. Maybe an allnight grocery store, maybe a college bar. But he didnt drink. 6

Sometimes he wasnt gone when I thought he was. I was never sure. I couldnt remember his car model. The former students face was flat and his features were snubbed. Some nights he knocked on my door. A scream carried from the back room of the restaurant. I rose and moved toward it. White dish petals broken on the floor lay around girl Id spoken with. She hugged her hips and looked to the voice in the back room. I felt resentful. I began to leave. I reached the exit and the scream came again. The girl was smiling when I turned around toward her. Arent you going to say goodbye? she said. Im sorry, I said. People say goodbye, she said. I say goodbye. A piece of one of the white dishes shattered as she kicked it against the wall. I didnt know what she wanted me to say. Do you like my haircut? she said. I got it this week. Yes I do, I said. She frowned and pretended to pout. It didnt like how she looked childish. Yes, I said again. Yes I do. Would you say that you like it better than before? she said. I dont know, I said. How was it before? Like it was before when you saw it last week, she said. Like it was every day you saw me at work. Didnt you even make fun of me one day for it? Yes, I said. You look very different. I worked in a small office with her most mornings and some afternoons. We read documents I didnt understand. We filed them for people I didnt know. I sat at a desk connected to seven other desks separated by white placards of poster board. I never remembered the name of the girl or any other employees. Over the weekend I forgot each of their faces. Yes, I said again to the girl. Yes what? she said. Yes I like it, I said. Good, she said and kicked another piece from the dishes. So are you planning to actually say hi to me when I see you tomorrow? I smiled. I suddenly decided I wanted to be cruel to her. I sensed I could and the awareness was a desire. I saw she was too thin. I saw she painted her skin modestly. I insulted the locket she wore from a long chain but she didnt respond. I didnt know what to tell her next and leaned over the counter and grabbed the back of her arm. As I passed to my car the couple I had seen at the accident approached me. The woman still held the towel they had offered the homeless man. I pretended not to see them but the husband called out to me. We spoke across the parking lot. Excuse me! the man said. Werent you with us there at the scene up the road? I was, I said. See, honey, he was, the man said to his wife. 7

Yes? the woman said to me. Yes, I said. I smiled and squinted toward them. Its funny how the whole thing happened right there before us, the man said. But now, just all of a sudden, theres nothing to be seen. It feels like its never happened in the first place. I know, I said. I know, the man said. The man paused. Why do you suppose he did it? he said. Why would anybody do it? Do what? I said. Do what to who? The driver, the man said. Ill tell you the idea Ive got if you say yours first. Mine is the correct one I believe. I shrugged. My idea is that the driver is a maniac who should have never been driving to being with, the man said. Dont give a maniac a machine. Never ever do that. Hell just hurt someone if he cant kill them first. Suddenly the sun cut directly into my eyes and I couldnt see the couple. I didnt know he killed him, I said. Of course he killed him, the man said. What do you think happened?

6. My apartment was on the end of a row of townhouses at the banks over a north city creek. A company dug out the creek a few years earlier for a larger development it never finished. Their lender found a buyer who cut the land and duplicated additions advertising home models with streamers. All property in my complex was assigned and marked. Not only the front doors but the patios, the parking spaces, and the pavement blocked in front of apartment entrances. Each tenant was allotted one square. Number nine was my apartment. The wooden number posted was loose. The only unmarked ground was the courtyard. No one used it except when they walked across it to reach the dumpster. The dumpster had not been emptied since I moved in three weeks before. Tenants had begun to drop their trash farther and farther from it. Some of the bags sat inside a soccer goal made of pipe by someone who no longer lived there. The goals net looked new but I never saw it used. No one used it because no families lived there. It was only men and unmarried couples in middle age. Most came home from work late at night. Most waited for a moment before they went inside, lit by the overhead dome of their car. The apartments were cement brick outside and cream stucco inside. If you brushed against the walls the stucco pulled liked kittens claws. Each unit had two floors. I had never been to the upstairs in mine. The door that opened to it was locked. I hadnt asked the landlord for a key. I felt that when I got close someone was crouching on the other side. The landlord kept an office in the apartment closest to the creek. Id only spoken with her on the phone. The office smelled like paint from outside. 8

After leaving the restaurant I became lost on the north route to my apartment. I couldnt see well in the twilight and the night was low over me. I blamed the city. I provided an explanation for myself from local politics. Crews removed the street lamps leading to my apartment complex after a subdivision board off the highway wrote the city. They board said it was concerned about the effects of the street lamps. It said hot whites and yellows obscured the starlight. It was an artificiality that blocked the views of showers and comets and constellations they rode through. What if a star fell and no one ever saw it? I rolled down my windows and thought again of Stephen the Apostle. Stephen, a man of faith, and of Christ, and of power. Stephen who was persecuted to death. Stephen who was bound and punished. Stephen who the other apostles could not save. I thought that I like him could make the small death my own death in this way. It would be through stone on stones and fist and stones. But I thought of my hands on my face. I thought of the high sun between my fingers. I thought of how even if I fell to my knees, even then, I would keep my back straight. My posture would be the animal of my body. Even if the wolves gathered and the birds crept. I saw my flesh scratched. I saw the whites open red. I chewed the clots forming at my gums. Blood flowed from my nostrils across my lips. It was warm and could never be cold in my body. My reaction was not to retreat or defend myself. I was a child of Christ. My reaction was to bear my teeth. My eyes were closed. I knew I was writhing as the stones came. My body was in revolt. I knew I had begun to laugh. I patted my sternum. I knew it could not break in me. I had not thought of my bones in that way before. I had not realized a cement stone will not break against a whip. My body was what its substance must have formed and always would have formed. My body is the body of Christ. I could not imagine the cages and fingers fanned over my organs. Any part of my body in suspension was inconceivable. My attackers could not beat my body out of itself. My body is that which continues. But what if I suppressed the continuance with my own body? Would it know to reject the attack turned by itself? I saw myself with a screwdriver. I ran it along a track in my forearm until the skin broke. I tried to repeat the act more forcefully but the recoil of my body stopped me. And I tried to push the tool into my chest. I filled my lungs and thrust my chest. It was meeting the threat with a declaration. My bones were woven high against the wolves. My bones were set against birds of prey. .

7. The former student was not outside his apartment when I unlocked my door. I held my breath until my sight piqued but I heard nothing from his front room. Grass cut that morning dusted the steps to each apartment. A few porches were lit up for no one.

I drank a glass of water when I went inside. I kept my posture still like a man who hopes to be perceived as deliberative. But that night I saw no one around me and only worried. I was not tired and feared I could not close the time before the next day. I told myself I would have to sleep, that I could not stay awake any longer. Behind the thought was a calculation. I poured a drink and could not drink it. The smell of alcohol made me anxious. It made me aware of the obligations of days. I poured out the alcohol and washed the glass in my sink. I hummed without finding a tune. It was the sound of a child imitating an adult humming a song the child had never heard. The sound waited to be carried. There was a scrape at my porch. I was sure it was the former student trying to wipe new grass from his shoes. I could see him kicking. I could see developing belief. I could see him talking through an account, saying how he discovered that only he had grass stained on his shoes. He would grow angry. He would come to my door. I saw him sitting in his lawn chair cast in porch light. I saw him break a twig into bit pieces hed throw from his chair into the parking lot. I saw him wipe his hands. He clapped after the pieces fell over the blacktop. Or I saw him yell at me, trying to surprise me, then pretending he was about to lower his shoulder and charge. When he yelled he sounded out of breath like he always was. He was looking from the ground to the windows to my face to the parking lot. He was smiling and his eyes rolled. They rolled like the cords fixing them to his head had snapped. I ran to the front room of my apartment and turned off a bulb that was the only light in the room. I touched the blinds to show myself they were shut. The florescent tube above the stove alone now lit my apartment. In the front room four suitcases opened against the wall. Clothes were rolled in barrels crammed into each other. A gray-blue pair of dress pants hung from the banister. They were the only pants I wore to work. I shook and brushed them with my hands each morning. Id thrown away most of my possessions before I returned from the West. Id resolved to take them to a church or soup kitchen shelter but I didnt. I sat at the kitchen table and craned my shoulders. I fell asleep like that sometimes in the morning. I hoped the posture by its familiarity could induce my body to sleep. My eyes closed. I pressed them closed softly. I did not want to raise the suspicions of my body. I did not want it to know that I planned to act against it. I still could not sleep after several hours. During that movement I longed for true realization and the gift of Christ among us. I longed to be the stranger invited into a wedding party by guests I had met only the night before. Much later or maybe at that time my body began to grieve. Dirt sunk my gut and my ribs unkitted from one other. And I was no longer inside. And I was passing the faces of apartments. I passed the managers home. I left the blacktop. I was bare-chested and had lost my shoes. I saw a tenant cross the middle of the courtyard and drop a bag of trash. I couldnt feel my lips. I walked with my back straight. My shoulders were so light they felt like they would separate from my body.

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I felt but did not recognize what a child of Christ had once said: You cannot war with them. Their wolves are swifter than other predators. Their wolves are fiercest at night. Their wolves will spread themselves over your land and they will come from the farthest reaches of the earth. They will fly at you, children, and they will devour you. I bore my teeth. I did not feel the rocks I walked over. I did not feel them on my back as I slid down the bank of the creek bed. I knew their texture but did not feel the roots and the glass and the dried cat tails. I grabbed at a concrete retaining wall to slow myself. It chewed into my palms and scalded my forearms. I reached the water and I looked to the west.

8. My feet kicked in the creeks shallows. The hull of the moon crossed the night. A star that had never reached the world again never reached the world for an endless time. The trees were the brilliance on the garden banks. The water flew clear. I could not sleep there either. I now remember from that time what I could not then. I often do not remember and I have never taken photographs. But I remember what it was. It was the words of a child I have now overtaken as Christ. He himself a long time ago was a child more realized than his own father. I longed to call on him then. I asked for him to take my body from me. I now ask for a violence to ambush the drum of my spirit. But he is forgotten to himself now and I cannot ask him to wither me into a childhood to forget. Even at that time in the city he was already forgotten and unrealized. He no longer knew the body. He no longer knew its labors. He did not hear me and I hated him. The wolves were at his camp. I am Labors, I am Balthuz. I am a son and I am the Lord Christ Jesus. Christ who once was and who I am at this time is my child. He said: One generation will pass another on earth. They will join with each other after. He said: All things are visible in labor. Man cannot indenture his own satisfaction. He said: The thing that has been is what will be. There are only remembrances from heaven. On earth they are former things, things that once were. He said: Look at the vanity of my hands. Look at my work. My spirit is your spirit. He said: I hated life. My labors were my despair. He said: The sun sets only to chase the places it rose. I said to him: You are my child. You understood at the time of your death I never asked for a temple. I do not want it. I am not a creature in the trenches of the deep. And for the children, I am their savior. I give them the salvation of Christ. I will give it even if they do not take this offering. I want them to become a child and I want them to be with my body. My child, place your hand on my thigh. Even when I am blind I will give you my blessing. I withhold it from the unrealized. I do not rest inside the temple. I am not captured in smoke. I am not in the halls and I am not with the choir. My children, my children. 11

Christ is in the sacrifices and he remains there. The body, my children, is our sacrifice. It is all labors. I am labors, my children. I am labors. I am labors. I am labors the things that once were and now have never once been. Labors are the longest time and that suffering. Children, I will bleat when you tie me. I will be silent when you cast me out. These are the labors of my will. From the creek bank I looked up. I saw a pair of owls in a crooked tree. Their feathers were woven through their breasts to the golden of their eyes. They sat very close to each other on the end of a branch. Their squid beaks were monstrous. I began to call to them but stopped when I saw two bodies bundled on the far side of the creek. I heard a plain voice lope against a high laugh. The two voices from the two bodies came from squatted figures throwing stones into the water. They alternated throws between them at first then began to shoot at the water rapidly together. They got up and foraged for more stones. When they could find no more, they threw sticks and branches. One of the bodies slipped and almost fell into the water. They were still for a moment. An owl from the tree above flapped its wings and settled. The two bodies below did not seem to hear. The figure with the high laugh looked around him for stones he could not find before. He it was a mans voice was lying on his back struggling with the ground. He seemed surprised he could find no more. He swatted with his hands and feet and shook his head. After a few minutes, the direction of his eyes stopped on me. Hello? the man said. Hello? I did not respond. Hello? the man said again and started walking toward me. Hello? Hello? I stood up in reaction but did not move from there. I might have wanted to confront him or maybe attack him or maybe run from the creek bank. I might have thought he could tell me why he was there. I looked up at the owls. One had left the branch. Hello, I said to the man before I could see his face. How are you? The man stopped when he heard me. After a moment, his body relaxed. I could see the white in his new grin. Good, he said. I think I just made a friend over there. I guess two people can always find something to agree on if they need to. Thats just the way I am. I can almost always get along with anybody. I saw the man was my neighbor the former student. I wanted to disguise my voice but he already recognized me. It feels good to throw your frustration into a creek sometimes, he said. I like to do that. I couldnt sleep tonight so I thought I could at least do something. I cant stand to just lie there. I know its only a preference but I just cant sleep as much as the average person. Thats a third of your life gone. I guess you have to sleep but not that much. I just cant. That guy over there seems like hes never slept. I havent asked but he seems a lot older than he looks. I wonder

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where he lives. I think its here, down here, but I dont know. I try not to think about those things too much. I nodded. You must have got home late tonight, he said. I was wondering if something happened. Nothing happened, did it? No, I said. Nothing I can think of. Things happen to me sometimes, he said. When they do, I try not worry about them. You shouldnt worry too much. No, I said. So what are you doing down here? Its late, isnt it? I dont know, I said. I couldnt sleep. The former student didnt seem to hear me. He nodded and looked around him, then up into the tree. He didnt seem to see the owls. I need to go to bed before it gets too late, he said. I cant do this every night. I need my rest. Yes, I said. Yes, he said.

9. The other body balled up on the creek was again sitting with its knees on its elbows, now throwing dirt into the creek. The dirt sounded a rain each time it struck the water. I thought about what the bodys fingernails must look like. And the figure rocked its head back and forth. I thought I heard a humming. The chest puffed or choked at times. It was as if a piece of tobacco was caught in the figures teeth. It looked like a body long lonesome or too often alone. I heard one of the owls flap but I did not look away. I wondered if that body was there for the reason my body was. I thought of that and remembered why I was on the banks of the creek. A life can go on too long. The body is a labor. We labor so long without rest. I sensed the meat of the owls weighing above me. I did not look and instead unzipped a backpack I had carried with me. I checked the pockets for any notes or receipts, anything that could cause my actions to be misinterpreted. I had set a letter inside a plastic bag in my pocket. I couldnt decide if I wanted to leave it there or seal it in the backpack. Who will find it? I moved further along the bank to look for stones. The shoreline tumbled out in front of me and was mostly dust. I tried to shovel packs of earth into my backpack. I found larger rocks under the bridge. They looked like unpainted plastic fruit. I squatted and collected them. I held them with the tips of my fingers. Every few minutes a car passed over the bridge above. The frame of the structure moaned. Somewhere from inside the creek crushed glass sprayed moonlight under the arch of the bridge. It was the screen after the end of a film reel. I decided I must remove a large stone Id felt caught in the muck. The water was cold into my knuckles. My heart flushed. I wedged my hands beneath the stone and leaned back. The earth puckered and released it. 13

It was the last stone I took. I measured the pull and mass of it. The weight was right and final. I peered into the surface of the coal water. I wondered if I could point my toes while falling. I wondered if I could keep my hands at my sides. I put the backpack over my shoulders and tied the straps under chest. I knotted it twice. A semi-truck crossed the bridge. Its breaks screamed through the body of the structure and I crouched. How deep was the creek it the middle? I didnt know. I saw it as a trench rolled out as a slope into the bottom of the earth. Once more I was moved through paths toward my realization as a child of Christ. I was moved by Christ, by myself, by both of us. I was struck by you, my children. I write for you now because I could find no one before. I hold my place at the throne of heaven above all of creation. Ive known all this since my deliverance from burial. We who are realized have dwelled for all generations even before the mountains erected themselves and the air thickened. We seeded there before both the Christ at that present and the Christ who was before him. We the children were over the waters where we waited for him. We called for his return. In our labors and in our sorrows we are very tied. Only the body drawn from labors is the final body and only in it may it ascend. Return, Christ, the labor of my days. The children of Christ have always been the foundation of Christ. Isnt Christ the church? Arent we one flesh? The coupling is the beauty of the world made through our works. A splash broke from the other side of the creek. I was able to watch the movements for a short time. One of the owls had swept across the bank behind a small animal. Before the owl closed over it, the small animal leapt into the water. The owl cut away into the trees. A wring of water wrapped around the small animal and it disappeared. I believed I saw the talons of the owl. They looked like the outgrowth of the paws of a beast sewn together with white stitching from two animals. They looked like always kept in darkness.

10. I touched the plastic bag in my pocket. It seemed too loose. I folded it twice more and shoved it deeper into my pocket. I wiped my hands on my chest and moved along. The note talked about the small death. It talked about why I had to make the small death my own death. It asked for forgiveness. It said I was a coward. It said things that embarrassed me but things I wrote anyway. I wrote them all so people I knew would feel less upset, less curious, more curious. I removed their responsibility and spoke of the inevitability of events. My god, the note ended. My god, my god. My god, I am sorry. I hated this was the only way to absolve others. 14

I passed back down the bank away from the bridge. My back shrugged. Cuts of bark and water mixed in my shoes. I wanted to go to my apartment. I wanted to wash with a water that was cool then warm. I saw steam. I thought of falling asleep in the winter in my parents bed. At first I did not see the second figure that had been with the former student. I was not sure if he had moved. I was not sure where I had stood before. Clouds drowned the sail of the night and I could barely see. By the long tree I heard the smack of new rain. The second figure was in its same position as it was before hung with its same movements as before. Maybe it was farther from the water line. Maybe it arched the dirt it pitched higher. I stepped into a puddle and the body drew up into itself. I knew it had seen me. I turned toward it and closed my eyes. I thought the motion would help me begin to speak. Hello and good evening! the body called. Welcome to my kingdom! The voice was easy. Hello, I said. Its nice to be out tonight, isnt it? The man an old man laughed in wretches and drew air through his bottom set of teeth. Its always a nice night in my garden, the old man said. If you said you could find a nicer place to give me, I wouldnt believe you, and I wouldnt take it. I exaggerated a nod so he could see me agree. Theres so much here to do, the old man said. Its just that people seem to mind doing different things. They like to do one thing and then do that thing again. They like to do it again and again and again. Here you wouldnt have to do the same thing more than once between now and the final judgment if you didnt want to. The old man had stopped throwing dirt. He rapped the tips of his fingers on his gym shoes. He had his shirt rolled up to the middle of his forearms. It was unbuttoned down the front. His hair was parted down the middle and looked wet. I set down my backpack. Just look at these trees and the wildflowers up there a little way, he said. Ive spent weeks studying the plants here and getting to know them. Since I was young Ive always wanted to know about things like that. Most people Ive met sit out the better part of the whole ride complaining on and on about how long it is or how short it is or how long and then how short it is. Its like they wish they hadnt signed up for any of it at all to begin with. I think youre right, I said. The man began pitching dirt into the creek again. He did it with a grand gesture like the star of a parade float. But you cant do things just to do them, he said. Like your friend down here earlier. He was down here only because he couldnt be still with himself. Thats the same as sitting out. The man mussed his hair. I can tell that you came down to this garden to be among the ancient things, he said. Im not going to ask why that is but I want to tell you something. Listen to me, life will make you suffer if you cant get yourself out of it. I got out of it. Thats the reason Im here. He stretched out his legs and crossed his feet. Im here because Ive always been here, he said. Even before I crossed that bridge over there I think I can say I was on my way here. Whether Id passed through before and didnt remember it I dont know. Maybe I was another man at one time or the soil underneath him. Maybe I was hanging above this creek looking down from other place like Ill be doing not too 15

long from now anyway. Maybe I was a star that once passed over the top of the whole world. Maybe no one ever saw me. He wiped his hands and tapped the tops of his shoes. Im not that old but Ive been that old, he said.

11. How well do you know that other young man who came down here earlier? the old man said. Hes my neighbor, I said The old man kicked the ground with his heel. Your neighbor? he said. He seems to think he knows a lot about you for being a neighbor. Oh, I said. He seems to think youre upset and he said he was wondering why. I didnt know that, I said. Now youve heard it, he said. I dont really talk to him very much, I said. Thats fine, he said. The old man sucked in a breath hard through his bottom teeth. If I didnt stop myself I could have hit him, the old man said. He told me about everything he could think. Hell tell it all to the next person too. I think youre right, I said. I am right, he said. The old man scratched the side of his head and examined his fingers. He pulled himself forward with his heels and reached out in front of him. He dipped his hands in the water. You want to know what happened to get me here? he said. I looked down. Im not too old to walk, he said, so I walk. I had a car once but thats a lot to manage. Its too much at times. I was misled into thinking I needed it. I thought I needed the things that came with it. All those things. But nothing you really need for your life comes with a car. You just get stuck with the things that come with it. Thats why I walk. I refuse to get stuck again. You know what? I could have ten cars and run the business it would take to pay for them. In fact, a man who owns a business himself told me that earlier today. I was south of here a few miles. I was in that new lunch restaurant. I talked to the owner. I told him he had a good restaurant. I told him Id had some of the same ideas myself. He thanked me and told me I should try some of those ideas someday. A breeze turned down the creek. The old man threw a handful of dirt against it. But after I left his place thats when it happened, he said. I was walking up the side of the road to get back here. Thats what I do most days, and thats what I intended to do today. But, faster than Ive ever seen before on that road, a truck comes at me. It didnt give me any time to move. I had no choice but to stay there and hope he would think about how he was driving. He cut to one side right before he got to me and then just as fast he swerved to the other. He hit me better than I thought hed be able to. I never thought anything like that could ever happen. But there I was, knocked down in the street in the middle of the road just like that. 16

The old man dipped his hands in the water and combed the hair on the sides of his head. You can try to predict what that would do but you cant exactly, he said. I didnt realize what happened until the police came and told me about it over and over. I had to let myself hear it for myself at some point. I finally understood what they told me when on the way to the hospital. I thanked them a dozen times but said I needed them to let me out. They told me again about how Id been hurt. I told them as nice as I could that I had heard them but that I didnt care for hospitals and that was how I felt. They said someone who was like me with what had happened to me could die. I said thank you again but I needed them to let me out. And they did. The old man stood up, took a step, and seemed to stagger. But I dont need to tell you that, he said. You were there in the ambulance with me, riding with me, werent you? You were the quiet one who told the other paramedics it was best to listen to me. I smiled after I noticed he was studying my face. I gave a short nod and cleared my throat. Yes, I said and smiled again. He smiled too. Well, he said, I would thank you again but I have a few more things to catalog here in my kingdom tonight. He laughed. I apologize for taking up this much of your time, he continued. I think Im more talkative than usual because you and everyone else today were so kind to me during that whole incident. I did hear there was one young man, though I dont know if I even remember him who just seemed to come over and examine me for the sake of curiosity. I guess he just kind of looked at me while I was dazed there in the middle of the road. I suppose I thought I remembered his face but maybe I dont. You cant control everything and I understand that. No, that is not who one man treats another man simply because the other man doesnt own a car. Ill stop now. I need to stop. Talking about it makes me upset in a way I dont like.

12. After I left the creek I returned home and lay in a sleeping bag I must have rolled out on my kitchen floor. I had no furniture in my apartment. I had abandoned my things when I left the desert the past month. I asked a friend to give them away because I was too tired to move them. I was very tired. The rest of the night I dreamed I was in the house of a school friend who was away with his parents and who I could not picture. I dreamed my younger brother was inside the house with me. He appeared as he was when he was a child. His hair thick, his shoulders narrow. He watched the large television in the basement and ran up and down the carpeted staircase. He dug behind furniture. He laughed at things new to him. When it was late he approached me with his hands cupped to his chest. He said he had something that my friend had given him. He spread his fingers. Inside was a small gray rodent. 17

We had it in class this year, my brother said. We raised her with her family for science. Every day when it was time wed feed them and change their water. Sometimes wed almost forget but everyone knew. Id remind the teacher. Id say, Dont forget science today. We dont want to let her and her family get sick. I dont think any of them ever got sick. Shes not sick. But then we were all sad because we learned we couldnt keep her in class anymore. The teacher says we have other new things to do. I dont know how she got here to this house. I hope its safe for her. I want her to be happy. Do you think you can take her home? Ask mom and dad. My brother set the rodent in my hands and, as he did, I came into our parents house. In front of me was an aquarium. Vegetables were on a window sill. I set the rodent inside the aquarium and it walked the perimeter. Wood shavings grew under its feet. It sniffed at corners and tried to climb the sides. When it slid off the glass, it jumped up and tried to reach to the top of the walls. Then its body would flop down and it would run from that place. I put a dictionary over the top of the glass cage. I realized I was afraid the rodent might bite. I tried to reintroduce myself to it each time I reached inside to pick it up. And my parents were in the doorway. They asked why I had decided to keep the rodent in their room. They said it would smell. Rodents make everything around them filthy, they said. I realized I had never cleaned the cage. I used paper towels and a fluid to wipe it clear. My parents didnt come in the room again that day. I looked around. I saw there was no bed and it was decorated like my childhood room with toys I had seen in other childrens rooms. Later my brother came in and lay on his stomach in front of the cage. He turned his head and smeared his fingers on the glass. Is she in there? he said. Shes in there, I said. I see a little bit of her fur over here, he said. Shes making a nest. They do that a lot, I said. Do you think she likes it there? Not as many people get to see her. I think she likes it, I said. My teacher said one of the things I had to remember was that I couldn't give her the wrong shavings, he said. Those would make her feel bad. My brother ran his finger along the mesh top. What do you mean? I said. You have to give her the special kind from the store or it will make her chest hurt. The regular kind is really bad. Its like if people were into a room with a campfire that didnt have windows. Thats what my teacher said. I took off the top of the cage when my brother left. I put on a winter glove and pulled the rodent from a hill of shavings. It was awake but didnt struggle. Its eyes were smeared with mucus and sleep. I left for a pet store to buy different shavings. They were expensive and wrapped in a small bag. The wall of the store that should have stocked fish aquariums instead was walled with televisions for sale. I changed the shavings when I got back. The rodent ran along the perimeter and sniffed at the corners.

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13. By morning I could see the gray rodent had started to lose its fur. Down was jagged at the ends of a patch on its back. In the middle pink flesh lay raw. And I was carrying a shoe box filled with fresh shavings. I had broken apart a vegetable for it. I had stuck holes in the box wide enough for me to see through. I felt its weight in the center. The heat of my skin nauseated me. And the box was with me in a car that steered loosely. The cabin was too large and I could barely see over the dashboard. The car had a long gear shift that grew up from the floorboards. It was heavy and unmarked. The box was on my lap. I felt the rodent race from one side to the other. I lifted the top a few times. I couldnt tell if it had eaten any of the vegetable. It raised its face to the light. It circled the center in and twitched its nose. The veterinarians office was full of dogs and their owners. A scale as big as a pallet was in the corner. I went to the front desk with the box held at my waist. An assistant wore used scrubs or pajamas. She held a pen and kept her elbows on the desk. She looked up at me, smiled and cast her eyes to one side. What can we help you with today? she said. Well, I said. Im not sure. I squeezed the corners of the box. Its different, I said. Im not sure if shes sick or not. Maybe shes not but I wanted to be sure. I set the box on the high counter. I kept my hand on top of it and explained to her what had happened. Yes, she said. The woman didnt raise her eyes again. She gave me a form and marked what I needed to answer. I took the form to a spot near the entrance. I didnt want to be close to dogs. I felt they could smell the rodent and would wind around my legs. The assistant stopped another employee while I wrote. Do you want to know who just came in? she said. I brought the form back to the assistant. She walked me to a room with a high steel table. The room was covered in posters with warnings about diseases. Ill go get someone, she said. Another assistant came in and examined the rodent before the veterinarian came in. She did the same. They each pulled it from the box by the back of the neck. It was the first time I had seen it bear its teeth. I dont know exactly what the problem is, the veterinarian said. I think it could be mites. Those will just eat away at any part of its body your pet cant reach. Is it serious? I said. It could be, the veterinarian said, but its usually not. Make sure its cage and surroundings are clean. Make sure it has fresh shavings. 19

Okay, I said. The veterinarian held up a shot with a long syringe. This should kill any problem that wont go away itself, she said. The veterinarian pushed the shot into the rodents belly. It kicked its legs and fought.

14. When I got home I washed the cage and spread new shavings across the bottom. The rodent circled inside the box. I set down its food cup and the rodent ran to it. The bedroom door had latched behind me. The shadows of the late afternoon darkened the far side of the house. I was now on a level of my parents house I didnt remember I had ever been on before. It was a fourth floor. The carpet was thick and pulled on my heels. The blinds were open. I felt like I needed to check all the locks of the doors of the house but I did not. The force from each door repelled me from all of them. I needed to be indoors and I needed to stay away from windows. I did not want to be near them in the chance night would come on quickly. I feared the shapes of what would appear at first as costumed children crouched beneath the panes. The air seemed too hot and the grass seemed to have dried into straw. I felt like the ground might have separated from the structure of the house. I felt like the first floor was set out over a pier on a dead lake. And now the shade lifted and I had passed into kitchen. The floor had large tiles and felt slanted. I tried to hold my hips still to see if I would slide but my body would not be at rest. Two cats appeared and cooed for the last of the meal they thought Id come to prepare. I looked for food to quiet them but there was nothing in the refrigerator or cabinets. They yowled and kited around each other. They followed my hands as if tracing the outbursts of insects caught between a screen and window. I pulled out the shelves of the refrigerator and under tin foil found a few slices of old turkey. I threw the food to them and they sniffed at it but would not eat. I peeled it from the floor and put it in the garbage. The cats began to cry again. A note hung by magnet on the refrigerator seemed left by my parents. It wasnt faint or illegible but I couldnt read it. The two cats licked the floor where the lunch meat had been. They stopped and rubbed their cheeks against my ankles. Suddenly I felt like my parents would be home soon and I should clean. I pulled up the plastic bag from the trash can and tied the ends. The bag was wet and rotten. I tried to remember where the garbage bins were kept outside. All I could see were the garages of the neighbors of friends I had not visited since I was very young. The door to my parents backyard was next to a door to their basement. I pushed the basement door shut before I went outside. A rattle that had been rising from the darkness below stopped.

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Bricks of black spotted snow melted outside over curbs and fences. I didnt know where they had come from. I kicked one pile and then another. The earth was in winter against the humid sky. The concrete was cold and icicles that dropped from gutters were dead stalks spiked in the grass. I circled the garage a few times but could not find any trash bins. The door to the garage was locked and the windows were too tinted to see inside. I thought I had keys for the door but could not find them. I had to pat and shake my pockets over and over again because I could not hold a recent memory. I fixated on the image of the keys. I remembered when I got them. I got them with the house key on a key chain marked with the logo of my dads business. I might need them if the babysitter forgot her set of keys, he said. I got them the night after the day my mom taught me how to write our address. That was the day we sat at the dining room table in dark wooden chairs. I held a pencil that matched her pencil. I had a piece of paper like her piece of paper. I remembered how her hand felt covering mine. It was before lunchtime in early summer. It was during the years when mornings lie cool long until the midday. I circled the garage once more and saw two garbage cans across the alley. I put the bag in one when I thought it was too quiet for anyone to be watching. I heard a dog exhaust itself barking at the end of the street. Inside the house the basement door had popped open a few inches. I shut it so quickly I pinched my finger. I heard the drops and scrapes of footsteps from an upper floor. I ran through the kitchen and up the stairs. I tried to run quietly but the movement made me slip. Now the stairwell stopped at the third floor. A ladder hung from the entranceway to the fourth. I climbed it and it clapped against the wall with my steps. The fourth floor had become filled by an enlarged replica of my parents bedroom. The ceiling was concave and the roof pressed against it. I felt like I needed to stoop. My dad and younger brother were sitting crossed-legged in the corner with the rodents cage. I saw they were laughing. The lid from was set to one side. The book that had set on top was tossed to the other. So what exactly is this thing? my dad said. I thought at first she was angry but she wasnt. He was watching the rodent run along the far side of the room. I kind of like it, he said after a moment. Your brother was just telling me about it I did, my brother said. I told dad about my science class too and how good my teacher is. You know what, my dad said, We really dont use this room very much anymore. We could make it a room just for your new pet. I know I wouldnt mind. You could use it for whatever she needed. Your brother said it was a she. I looked out a bay window facing the backyard. The sun was bright enough to distort the air. The trees and sidewalks were so small below I could see how the city planned them. Actually, we could make this a room for all the pets if you wanted, my dad said. We got two new cats last week when you were away, my brother said. You should have been there when we picked them up from a farm. Mom let me give them names. The man who had them and their brothers and sisters on the farm was an Indian and a pastor. He gave me a feather he said he uses to make necklaces. Mom and Dad said they knew him from one time when he came to their church. 21

We do, my dad said. You might remember him. Both my dad and my brother were looking at me. Neither watched the rodent. I looked at the animal and back to them. They seemed like they had too much white in their eyes. I think he taught Sunday school to both of you, my dad said. You were little then. My dad was quiet for a moment and leaned forward. He disappeared then reappeared with the two cats. He set them on the carpet. There, my dad said. Were all here now. He and my brother smiled. The cats crouched low. They tensed their shoulders. Their eyes grew and the gray rodent ran along the far wall.

15. When I woke up the room was too loud and too warm with the morning. I turned to my side but could not position my body back into sleep. I planned to pretend I was sick to avoid work but couldnt stand what would happen if I did. I wouldnt be fired. I wouldnt be disciplined. Someone the following day only would call on me to explain my excuse. They would not be suspicious or worried. They would simply raise a question for an explanation because it was a question they could ask. For that day and days after I would have to hear common jokes about my excuse replicated from jokes on television about a similar excuse. I would hear those jokes from and have to make jokes back to them. I would have to explain the jokes to others who overheard them. The exchange itself would become an event recalled during work hours when someone wanted to begin a conversation for its own sake. That morning I bought a bottle of liquor from a grocery store that opened early. I bought one of the two bottles I always bought. It was weaker but less expensive than the other. I stopped in the aisle to read some of the labels on bottles I didnt have money to buy. The store was cold and echoed. I worried about dropping the liquor as I crossed the store. I saw the bottle bang on the ground without shattering. I saw a crack develop. I saw myself standing with a janitor waiting to see if it would leak. I would say something matter of fact. The janitor would nod. A few of the others from work who sat at the table with me sometimes tried to convince others to visit bars with them after work. They made promises about these locations. I didnt want to go with them but felt like I should. I heard others say they felt like they should. I either liked some of them or didnt want to argue. I decided if they asked me today I would go. I didnt want to have to make the decision later. The drive to work was always longer than I expected it to be. I projected the trip before me in segments. I mistook the middle segment as the last one. Maybe I didnt watch where I drove during most of the trip. Maybe I looked beyond it. The road carried me forward and never seemed to wind or dip. The northern side was crossed with open counties and wire fence. There southern half was cut with shopping plazas. Vehicles fanned out before them.

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As I past the cross street for the western limits to the city I saw a large animal twisted on one lane of the road. The sign for the city was a few yards beyond it. It did not list the population or elevation. I slowed to look at the animal because no one was behind me. The death was recent. The animal looked like it had frozen to death while swimming from a current whipped up at night. One of its front legs extended straight out in front of it. The head was thrown back. Its mouth gaped. A skirt of blood lay across its neck. Its eyes were black or missing. The animal looked like a mix of ox and mule. Its shape and colors were the elements. Its fur was red earth. I understood that in passing the large animal I was preparing for the next time I might meet the small death. It was why I was too nervous to drink, too nervous to act with exuberance, too nervous to speak plainly, too nervous to die. The small death must see and never see. I must never allow it to see me when I am not ready. Everywhere cars park, their handles rattle, their people exit. Drivers think of nothing in that moment but they are assessed. They think during that time their labors may cease. The time of one day dissipates over a week and then again is bound over into another day. Men encourage other men to develop a philosophy that will allow them to accept yet dramatize their present station. Listen to me. As one has said, as you have said, as I have said, Christ promised the hope of eternal life. He is always with you. Grace is only grace if it is salvation. Grace is grace only if it is righteousness. You are born in grace. According to this knowledge, according to the regeneration we possess, Christ renews us in his grace. He is transfigured at each birth and he is transfigured in each passing. Being justified by this, our generations are heirs by our knowledge. They are children of Christ. After I passed the large animal I looked in my rearview mirror and pulled to the side of the road. Almost immediately a truck stopped behind the animal. The vehicle sounded like it was crushing the gravel beneath it. Its headlights stayed bright even when the engine stopped. Two men got out, one from the front seat and one from the back. They pointed to the body as they approached it. They huddled over it. They wore holsters. Theyd found black dress shirts. They did not look like police. One of the men used his boot to pry the animal up by its shoulder. It seemed to weigh much more than he expected. He wrote something in a notebook. He went back to the truck and circled the animal twice more. He got out and crouched over it again. The two men blocked half the highway. Cars swerved just enough to miss them. They did not honk. The two men did not turn. One of them went back to the truck and unraveled a steel chain. He brought it to the other. He stared the animal in the face. The other took the chain and linked it around the animal. The one who had brought the chain went back to the truck and started the engine. The other directed its movements. The animals fur now seemed a deeper color. Both men were in the truck when it started to pull the animal. At the sound of the chain becoming taught, the animal suddenly rolled onto its back and weakly batted its front hooves. 23

The truck moved a few yards along before the men noticed. The animal was still for a moment before it kicked again and rolled from one side to the other. The engine stopped. I imagined I heard the animal breathing. I imagined it sounded like a dog deep in sleep exhaling through its nose. The animal rolled once more before the truck started. The chain dropped from the truck and it merged into the highway traffic.

16. I am the Holy Christ Enduring Precious Jesus. My name is Labors, my name is Balthazar. The highway through the city is identical to all roads through all cities. It continues and diminishes, continues and continues and continues. It continues and again it will diminish. Time stagnates without a new familiarity. Past the new familiarity passes anxiety and prior to it a desired security. You do not remember what you were before this time. Youd capitulated to most all things. You reviewed what it was thought to be essential about yourself and you freely cut from it. You reviewed your place in your life like a property owner who learns a storm will soon destroy his home. He must take all he can from it before it is too late. He, like the person seeking familiarity, knows that the thing he holds most dear, his home, is what he must first abandon. He must abandon the thing that until then he had loved and cared for more than any other possession. Both this man and the man who lacks familiarity are alarmed with the ease they abandon their most precious things. Just as the man who thinks less and less about what he must abandon as the storm grows nearer the more quickly a man at times will abandon the elements of himself. This is when he is most unfamiliar with the world. This man knows his loss is a sacrifice without recognizing to the extent the possession was his affect. He cannot see the fullness of his decision because at first he is content. He grows happy like he is the only man who was ever happy. Such a man feels this way under any definition of the world. Happy in this place means tranquil and satisfied, good to others. He is happy because he has identified a structure. He is happy he found a structure and achievements available to him within it. He is happy because he found an authority which acknowledges him and is determinative of rewards. The value and weight of these awards is an indisputable basis which the structure itself has long ago ruled to be correct, generous, and honorable. But one day this man will wake up in the structure to find it is no longer newly familiar to him. He does not know why this is so, as with all inexplicable feelings, he refuses to reflect on the source of the discomfort. He can only reexamine, reapply, readminister items he encounters regularly within the structure. He is not sure anymore whether these items did or did not make him happy. He tries to reinforce his appreciations for a structure so identifiably arranged. He had thought he loved the structure for its particularities for its color, for its divisions. He had thought that if he made a structure, he himself would pick that color and he himself would make those divisions. He assumed others in the structure felt the same. Was that not why they were inside this structure? Such a man does not know that everyone within the structure affixes themselves to different aspects of the geometries assumed to be neverending. The man at this stage is unable to recognize that the concern within himself comes from an awareness that he has entered into the structure under terms his conscience should not have 24

allowed. They were terms saying he would exchange what is elemental about his life for a subsistence within a structure promising to be good, just and predictable. He loved these conditions and like all decisions men deliberate he experienced the choice to enter into a structure with those as inevitable. It was the mysticism of men who have left home sold their inheritance. The structure has a finality. It is the stage in which most men are trapped. It is the stage most men resent and most men assume they are incapable of having entered. Men at this stage feel almost as they did when they were outside the structure. They certainly suffer as they did. They suffer covertly. They suffer in the most unacceptable way. They anguish in boredom. Boredom is the first growth of luxury, his is told by others in the structure. You cannot suffer in this way. We do not accept this as a way of suffering. You are complacent. Draw closer. These men will nevertheless try to interpret the anguish of boredom as tranquility. They try to see their feelings as virtuous and survive in that way. They see themselves as men of dreams because they are surrounded by each other within the structure. They tell themselves it is very good of them to have these dreams. If they remain dissatisfied after this dreaming they know other dreamers will tell them they should simply reposition themselves within the structure. They all have done it at one time or another. Over there on that side, or over there at that corner. There or far over there is where anguish can never be. If not there, then in another place. These men also receive some comfort from identifying items within the structure. Werent these items I saw yesterday and will likely see tomorrow? they can tell themselves. This recognition is the most important aspect of life inside the structure. They can tell themselves, I am in structure, I am in structure. It is this structure that made the correct divisions. It is this structure that is all of color. It is this structure I have been often and should have always been. It is in this structure I always will be remembered. I will never be alone in this structure. Here I can live a good life. This is not happiness. Everyone not newly in or newly outside the structure knows it. The only genuine happiness any one person can experience is the sweetness of remembrance. These small times are the joys and elements of human life.

17. I thought I was the first person in the office that morning. I may have been. I didnt know. Employees often came when they werent ordered. They dug through their desks, watched television. They chewed fruit and walked the halls on their phones in home sweatshirts. I sat at my square of the table and worked by the morning light. I had no new assignment I could imagine I could do but did not wish to be criticized. I smoothed my collar and brushed my pants. I rewashed a clean ceramic cup. I pushed in other chairs at the table and brushed dirt from the table onto the floor. I sat down again and tried to decide what assignment I could negotiate with myself to begin. It didnt matter. Some were longer, some shorter. The documents would have few errors or they wouldnt. I would correct them or I wouldnt. Later that month, later that date, later that year the client would or wouldnt use the information for no reason. I worked for a few minutes until I heard a conversation from a private office. I followed the voices to the door of an assistant director. A voice called me in. I didnt recognize it. 25

The assistant director and two of the employees who also worked at the table bent over his desk. They pointed at his computer screen. It was a text document. When they saw me they brought up what they had been looking at. I squinted my eyes. It was a television show. The segment they were watching showed a man telling a woman he had slept with an embarrassment everyone knew about him but her. The assistant director had shown the segment to most people in the office. He re-watched it with anyone who asked about. The two employees with him had already seen it. They were often in his office. He turned his chair to me. He looked back at the screen when he began to speak. The recording was paused. The frame showed the man in an expensive suit with no tie. He looked upset or sincere. Youve seen this havent you, Frank? the assistant director said. I think youd like it. Everyone whos seen it says they do. Yes, I said. I think I watched it with you last week. I wanted the sentence to sound insulting but I changed my mind as I spoke. I raised the pitch of my voice and smiled. It wasnt enough. He seemed confused but not embarrassed. Oh, he said. But did you watch it all? I think so, I said. Good, he said. Its incredible, isnt it? I just dont know how people can act like that I n front of other people. The two employees nodded. One was a young man my age who was regularly wearing dress clothes for the first time. The other was a girl with long black hair. I dont remember their names. This guy, the assistant director said, is obviously using the girl to get what he wants. But shes doing the same right back. I really cant believe it. She should have been able to tell when she met him who he really was. You can just tell. But that does not excuse what he did. Thats my opinion. The employees nodded again. But what I dont understand is why anyone would you go on a show like that to begin with, he said. People should know. How couldnt they know? But they still want to go on. I cant believe that people like that exist. I shouldnt say anything. Its none of it is my business anyway. I refuse to judge anyone. Thats why I say its best to just try to be nice to any person you meet. Give them a chance. Anyone who knows me will say that if youre nice to me Ill be nice to you. I always give people that chance. If they show me disrespect that shows me they dont care. Theyve shown me they dont want to work with me and be decent. So I cut them out. They had their chance. I think thats how it should always be done. Give people a chance and if they dont take it thats their fault. Ive done everything I can do. Ive been decent. Exactly, the young man who was watching the video with him said. I wish more people understood. Right, the assistant director said. It seems simple. This is what I tell everyone, I say, look, these are what my rules are. If youre like me and reasonable, you probably have the same idea. But if you either havent figured it out or cant respect my rules, thats not my fault. I know, the girl with black hair said. I wish everyone in this office could hear what youre saying. Im not going to name anyone, but I dont think I have to. She drew up with a smile. The others laughed. Yes, the assistant director said. Yes. Good. 26

Employees often spoke to the assistant director. He encouraged it. They spoke to him if they wished to examine slights they were sure they had suffered. They would tell them the other employee they were sure was responsible. He would listen and reaffirm. He would assure them the actions they had taken had been restrained. The rest of the lights came on. It was the lead director. Everyone returned to their places and began reading the first documents before them.

18. The morning grew long in the light. I bowed over the table and was very tired. The assistant director dismissed us for lunch an hour later than he usually did. This agitated other employees. They talked about things they would say or not do because of it. They voiced alliances. I wasnt hungry. My stomach felt dry and stripped. When the employees rose for lunch I went into the bathroom. I knew they would leave without me after a moment. They were quail in a road. The fluorescent lights in the office clicked when the rooms were quiet. I imagined the clicking was the sound of the bulbs sending their chemicals from one end of the casing to other. It was the ricochet. The lights were neither and both the imagination of the movement and its cause. This is all light. It is the elements in the loss of abstinences. It is an exchange between sky and soil. The transaction is quick because it must be. The earth pulls the charge into its sediment and retains it. The exchange is open on the plain. The same is true for the illumination of the earth. Each day fires from the nearest star. It is choked inside a canopy. At night we see starlight. This is a disintegration. It is a comet outside of orbit, it is a comet without exit. It is a comet trying to reunite with the universe. It is the inescapability that guided all ships from Polynesians to Portuguese. After two hours the girl with black hair was the first to return. I pretended to examine a document. I nodded to myself as if I had reached a conclusion. I flipped from one page in a stack of papers then back. I made a mark that had no significance. The girl folded her hair behind her ears. I watched how she held her back. I saw her shape. I saw it and she seemed familiar again. I touched my mouth then folded my hands. How was lunch? I said. Fine, she said. I think everyone else will be back in a few minutes. She marked a page. How did everything go? I said. It was fine, she said. It was fine. Where did you go? I said. I havent been somewhere new in a long time. Im trying to think of a place to go later this week. Somewhere good. We just went out to the same place we always go, she said. Do you like it? I said. She shrugged. 27

I tried to think of something that would make her laugh. I couldnt. I thought I could keep talking if I could observe something about her she wished to be reflected. Is there any place new you really like? I said. Ive been gone a few years and just moved back. She thought or didnt answer for a few minutes. She inhaled. Not really, she said. I like the food at the place where I work but its mostly just appetizers and desserts. They dont make it themselves. Im not sure where they get it. Where do you work? I said. At that restaurant a little way from here by that new school, she said. I raised a name. Yes, she said. I could tell by her voice Id forgotten again she was the girl working behind the counter at the restaurant I was at the day before. Do you like working there? I said. I dont know, she said. I work there. I nodded. Well, you have to tell me what you were laughing about in the back there yesterday, I said. I dont know, she said. What do you mean? Whatever you were laughing about yesterday, I said. Whatever you were laughing about when I was in. When were you in? she said. The late afternoon. Were you there long? An hour I think. Are you sure it was the one where I work? She named a street. Yes, I said. Remember how we talked about your hair and how I needed to talk to you more? Maybe, she said. Well, your hair is different again, but I like it. Its not too different from yesterday, she said. I just did one or two things to it last night to see what would happen. Anyone could do it if they wanted. She tapped her pen on the table. Can I borrow your pen? she said. I handed her one. She frowned and dragged her temple down her hand. The other employees came back. I dont know how long it had been. They sat and discussed a waitress from the restaurant the rest of the afternoon. She had brought one of them the wrong drink and didnt notice she had. They talked about how she should have noticed and what she should have done after she noticed. Everything she did like that had to affect her tip, they said. She had to know that.

19.

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I stayed an hour after most rounded one another and broke off into the parking lot. Some drove to their apartments. None walked home. One girl said her boyfriend would find her and held her phone like a compass. I suddenly worried about supervision at work. I thought the assistant director might keep a secret measure of how much work I did each day. I worried it was a measure I couldnt manipulate. Setting out the work before me I had thought all afternoon about my labors. It was about continuance and expiration. It was about these obligations: A child is obliged to continue for his desires. These desires control him, madden him, force him through any behavior to a passage and toward those desires. His desires are his parents, his desires are the orderings close to him. His desires are the things he may possess from time to time. They are the things he is forbidden to always possess. A young man is obliged to continue for his causes. These causes lead him to believe his principals are in parity with the arc of his causes. He paints his causes for himself in the sky of the night. His causes will rely on an older man who has distinguished himself from the tribesman he draws. His causes are the attainment and the destruction of anything that could humiliate him in front of other men. An established man is obliged to continue for the assurances of others. The assurances of others, he believes, tell him that to be so established as he is in a society is prudent and it is admirable. Prudence is very good, he says. It is very good in all things. An established man will not and cannot believe the assurances of others are merely distinctions and trivialities preserved by the ossification of formality. He will not acknowledge the sense that comes to him during the times when the rest of his family leaves his home all together at night and no music plays and too many lights are off. The sense that comes to him says truly established men no longer think the distinctions and trivialities he values for their distinction are marks of a high caste. These men have wholly other distinctions for themselves. They are murders. Men at each stage must either continue or expire for the sake of these obligations. An unwillingness to swear to them is horrifying. When they accept their death they all wonder to themselves, Have I fulfilled my obligations? Have I really? I think I will die very soon. But in my own holiness I have no obligations. I could not. I could only have labors. I do not act from desire or prudence. I do not act for causes or orders. I do not act for death. I do not seek the assurances of others. I do not see actions bifurcated by the space between heaven and earth. The men who desire see the commencement of actions and the assumption of obligation together. To them each action ends in a continuance or expiration. My actions do not require these things. They are labors. As I have said, I will build house. I will live with you. I will plant your vineyards. I will not steal from you. You will never plant or build while I rest at your home. I will eat with you every night at your table. The lives are my children are the forest to the birds. I receive them always. They are with me because they are my children. They believe I will always be with them. This is true. They believe they may be me one day. This is true. They believe the space between us right now is not a biferfaction of Christ. This is true. They believe they will see themselves very soon as Christ,

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that I will always have never been. This is true, this is true. It is true. It is true all will be Christ to the rest and the rest will be Christ and never have been. I love my realized children. Again, I labor because my obligations are labors. You see my body but that cannot be significant. I am Jesus Christ of Judea and the Gods of Palestine. I am Christ of the Holies. I am in Ethiopia and Petersburg and the holiest places. I am and I will be the evening star that always was and has forever been before where he never had been. Even now I know what my hand writes but I do not experience it. My body through its bulbs and cavities and back to my old eyes and my old brain and my ancient life will not relay what it is. I want to ask you a question. What has the experience of writing this been for me? Further, did I intend the experience and its accompanying sensations? You understand what I write. You see my hand and its words. You see that whether something once was or never had been is the always the same if it was once in the world. But I have also said you should not be discouraged by any good news. When you are Christ, you will be Christ, and you alone will be only Christ. And it shall become, and you will call me Christ, and I will answer you, and while you speak, I will listen. And you will always hear me in these expirations.

20. The assistant director and the girl with black hair began to speak when light left the room. I heard them in his office. She had gone to him with questions. They were questions she could not construct. The girl with black hair turned from one pocket of the room to another. The motion hushed the explosion that carries a human voice. The assistant director was not interested or rebuffed. He stopped her and spoke about a subject he had already raised with several other employees. His inflections were the same as before. He began. You know I took my mother out for brunch at the new restaurant in the newer hotel by the north highway ramp. That was nice, the girl said. Was it good? It was good, the assistant director said. You get to go up to the breakfast bar and pick your ingredients and a cook in a little vest will make you an omelet.. Thats very nice, the girl said. My mom gets the same thing every time, the assistant director said. I try to tell her to try this or that but shes not like me. Im more creative. Im more like her older brother I think. Hes the uncle who knew what he wanted, got what he wanted and then got out. I havent talked to him in a few years but I think hes still doing well. I heard the girl sit. So are you planning to eventually do what he does? Maybe. I would have to study a few things but I could do it. Ive been thinking about it for a couple weeks now. Maybe your uncle could help.

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Im sure he would, the assistant director said, but I wouldnt ask him unless I had to. Maybe I might ask him for a few references or maybe get him to say what he thinks about a few of my ideas. The girl continued to ask questions. She spoke like she wanted to solve his belief for herself. Where does he live? she said. Up at the finger lakes on the other side of the interstate. He doesnt come into the city very much anymore. I think he spends most of his time working on those couple boats he has. Theyre great. He takes really good care of them. What does he do in the winter? I think he usually stays there. He might travel sometimes but not much. I think he spends a lot of time working from home. I thought he was retired, the girl said. He is, but he volunteers for the company now. For charity projects? No, he said, just volunteering for the company in the divisions he used to work for. Analysis and management. He worked really hard back then so I think he must have loved what he was doing. He doesnt have any kids and he never got married. I this is just what makes him happy. The girl was quiet. But let me tell you about my mom, the assistant director said. Over lunch she told me she wanted to make sure I was comfortable with her funeral plans. What do you mean? the girl said. She cant even be that old. Does she think shes sick? No, but one of her friends had organ failure. She thinks she has to be prepared or something will happen to her. She thinks death would be her punishment. What are her plans? the girl said. She doesnt want to be buried or cremated, the assistant director said. She wants to dedicate her body to science. What? A university lab will take her body after she dies, he said. I guess students would use it for experiments. Why would she want that? I dont know. I think some tests work better on dead people. No, why would your mother want do that for herself? I dont know, he said. Shes not a person I would expect to. Shes pretty religious. I dont know. I think she said something about how a burial was too isolated and how getting cremated puts too much responsibility on the family. Thats strange, the girl said. Thats strange. It makes you picture your own parent hanging from a hook in a lab or something terrible like that. I know, but after she dies I dont know if Ill think about her very much. I might miss her a little but shell just be gone away somewhere else to me. I can try to see her dead in a lab. I can even picture a body there with her face on that body. But when I think about it and I see it in my head none of it feels like shes gone in a way that bothers me. It doesnt seem like her dead body. It just feels like she chained herself to that hook to show she cant feel pain anymore. Youll probably understand it more when you see her body at the funeral, the girl said. No, the assistant director said. Ive thought about that too and I know I wont. 31

21. On my way home I stopped at the parking lot of the grocery store I had been to that morning. I parked in a place in the back of the lot farthest from the building. The store had been sold or renamed several times since I was young. It was more uniform and clean now. It advertised more often. I wondered whether when I went inside if I would see an old man who had worked there as long as I could remember. He bagged groceries and wore a sweatshirt zipped up to the collar of his work shirt. I spoke with him once a few years before because I thought his philosophy or broad ignorance would humble me. I thought he might have had a cause or story. Id asked him how long hed worked there. Id asked him why he started. Id asked him what he thought about work ethic and young bosses. Id asked him about other employees. After we spoke I understood why I never saw anyone address him. He was crass and spiteful. He bragged about the length of his employment and complained he could have become store owner if a series of managers hadnt been jealous of him. He said he deserved more pay, more recognition, more leave, more command. He told me what hed do if he owned the store. Hed thought about the question. He would expand. He would put stores not only in buildings traditionally sized for grocery stores, but inside smaller buildings too. The stores would succeed because of their efficiency. Employees would know exactly what to do and what not to do. If they couldnt follow simple instructions, theyd have to find somewhere else to work. It was just simple. He described a few employees and why their conduct would be intolerable in the stores he imagined. He said he knew these employees well. He said he did not believe they could ever be proud or loyal. I remembered that this old man died a few months ago. The store had stamped a pagesized copy of his newspaper obituary on a bulletin board near the entry way. The description of his life was general. It listed his siblings, schools and memberships, none of which required activism. It said he was known by nickname I never heard anyone use. And the sun pulled heat winds from the great belly of the earth. Currents worked a vacuum across the cone of land. My car seat was too hot to crawl back across. I decided it would be for at least an hour and wiped the ridge of my nose with my shirt tail. I accidentally pulled over salt from the rest of my face and my eyes swelled. The sliding doors at the front of the store had turned from black to chrome. The entrance and exit seemed to exchange one door between them. A prism glass panel hung. It twisted a heat toward me. I stepped through a row of pylons in front of the building. They were higher than they seemed and I staggered. I remembered leaping over the pylons when I was a child. Once my foot caught behind me and I fell on my knees on the black top stone. Children do not cry because they are hurt or upset. The cry because the earth is not sedentary and refuses the rhythm they wish to capture. I wake up, the child thinks. I have breakfast. I go to school. I am home. I sleep.

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When children fall or lose or are bit by animals they feel like an adult loudly accused of a terrible crime by a lunatic on the street. The adult is not hurt, but the ground beneath them prepares for new harm. Again, a mans perseverance betrays him. He shed his wonder and restlessness for it. He publicly scolded his old violences. Perseverance will smooth the earth, he thinks. Perseverance will disseminate his blessings and curses proportionately. I may not be able to avoid horrors, he believes, but perseverance will forecast them before me and I will follow them. This man perceives a balance that has never been. He perceives that by perseverance he can retrieve the equity and measure faithful to him in the days of our children. I touched the top of a pylon as I passed. I always assumed they were there to keep out vehicles. When I was young, they reminded me of the tops of castle gates.

22. Shoes yelped from the waxed top of the grocery store. I went to the far wall and searched for a clutch of products I could deliberate over. I skimmed my fingers over the perforations between shelves. I walked until a choke in my sinuses built. Lemon and lilacs. Vinegar. The scents of bleach. I touched the box of a kitchen powder. I imaged Id felt a heat under my fingernails. Potions, adhesives, agents. They were distinguished and repackaged by component or prefix. A sealed hard box was socked in a space beside motor oils. It advertised a truck hitch chan.. The company logo was a crest blank except for a sketch of a faint canine grin. The box was level with my chest. I held it high under my neck with both hands. I imagined how the sheen of each link might feel on skin. I looked around me and turned to the back of the store. A man in a deep purple jogging suit stood down the aisle from me. He held a cylinder of bleach near his face. He raised his sunglasses and wrinkled his lips. He suspended the glasses over the crown of his forehead. He squinted. The mans features were set apart from each like an amphibian. A thin black mustache horned over his top lip. The same color traced his jaw. He grunted. I couldnt tell if he knew I was near him. Lets see, he said too loudly to be to himself. Looks like this doesnt have it either. He turned the container around and peered underneath it. He frowned and set the container on the wrong shelf. He took another can and examined it in the same way. He rubbed his lip with his knuckles then grunted. He shook his head. Same thing again, he said more loudly. Same thing. I looked to the front of the store to see how long the lines had built up behind the registers. A display stuck up like a grain elevator blocked my view. The man slung his jaw toward me. He pivoted with difficulty. You know if they sell a good bleach here? he said. Im getting tired of trying to find a product thats effective. That used to be thats all you could get, things that work. Im not sure, I said. I havent looked. Yes, yes, yes, the man said and grunted again.

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Believe me, he said. It used to be it was the only kind you could get. Now its just gray water in a bucket mixed with salt. Thats really all it is. I dont know why they changed the formula. The man waved dismissively at the shelf. He squinted at the products immediately before him. He flexed his arms at his sides and stormed up and down the aisle. He walked with his hips alternating in a high arch. The man looked bewildered yet relieved of pain when he returned. Im sorry, he said. I should apologize. I dont like to get that way. Its just that for the longest time I used to think like everyone else. I was good. I thought how I was supposed to think, bought what I was supposed to buy, drove what I was supposed to drive. It took me most of my life, but now Ive finally started to see it all for what it is. He looked at the shelf. All this is contrived, he said. Its meant to distract you. Finally, now that Im not married for the first time in most of my life I can think about how right that is. Theres more peace in a city than away from it. I admit it, I had been living up at the lake, listening to what people there had to say, listen to them go on about why they said it. Those were the kind of people Id been listening to most of my life. I let them make me feel bad about what I knew I believed. But my last wife, although she ended up passing away, in the end by her own hand, she helped me match the sense I had in my stomach with the good cells I have left in my brain. The man laughed. Thats the reason I retired a few months ago. Ive spent most of my life at a job I have nothing to show for. I waited around to get where I thought I wanted to be. But where did I get to in the end with that waiting? Not where I wanted to be. Anyone who knows me well enough can tell you that. Its like I pushed and pushed at the front door. I hoped long enough until I was sure someone decent would hear me knocking. I think I was so frustrated because I thought I could get inside by expressing other peoples ideas without first understanding what I wanted to stand up for myself. The man wiped his nose. I know a lot of people say it, but I couldnt see the map rolled out before me, showing me where I was and needed to be, he said. That whole time I was waiting at the door I should have been breaking into the house. The real entrance is the cracked window in the back. The real answer is meeting the owner inside and telling him youre responsible. Now I have my thoughts straight for the first time in a few years and Im not going to let them waste away for another minute. The man grunted. He pulled a tri-folded letter from his front pocket and pulled his sunglasses over his eyes. This is the kind of thing I meant to get away from, he said. Read it.

23. The man stared at a store shelf as if it materialized just then but had not startled him. I took the note. I recognized at the same time who he was. He was the driver of the truck. He had hit the homeless man in front of the restaurant.

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I recognized him. He was not a realized child of Christ. He feared for his soul. He feared for the state of himself that never was. He felt a fissure inside himself and it was releasing all he had. He worried that when the fissure expired the record of what he never was would unsettle. His death would send it up like powder clapped in a gymnasts hands. His life would be indistinguishable from all other lives. He would be with others who once were and would never would be again. None distinguishable from the other. The driver was like all men who wish to restrain sadness. He assumed he could entrench the course of his legacy by leading a regimented life. The management of my accounts and dignity of my actions are one, he thought. Yes, if I affirm the limitation of a disputed boundary, I have said something. If I declare a higher standard for symmetry, I have done something. Above all, the driver tried to put the things of this world in order. He could see nothing he had without this practice. In the ordering he put himself in an exalted place. But I am no different than any other man, he thought. This is why landowners pay agents of law to draw up their wills. It allows them observe how their beneficiaries will position themselves. It allows them to solicit the affirmation of ties. They know one day their families will examine these wills in the presence of agents. These people will look at the categories the landowners have cut from their will and wonder about the significance of the decisions. They will see how these landowners divided the proceeds of their accounts. They will tell the agent present, the landowners imagine, that they all remember the deceased landowners more clearly now and understand them better. They see their forethought. These landowners last acts showed kindness and made assignments, the beneficiaries must think. These landowners imagine all of this and acquire the joy to work long hours into the night. The driver ordered his land and his powers and he experienced self-exaltation and machinations. He bellowed. The driver feared a transgression seen to Christ and unseen to him He feared an unpardonable sin. His scavenged for his orderings. He thought if he re-categorized his shame it could not threat his own mind like it had. These things are not what I feared they were, he thought and wished he could allow himself think alone. But the driver did fear he would end and he was troubled. And he tried to devote himself to old beliefs. They allowed him to distinguish himself by narrowly constructing the received divisions hed made and by holding the beliefs of all others in contempt. In all beliefs exists a dismay at the encroachment of the beliefs of others. These other beliefs do not only challenge a mans own. The driver also feared Christ because of this. He feared he would upturn his fields and his vineyards. He feared Christ would take his spirit from him and disperse it over the valleys. He feared his body would immaterialize and never reach earth again. He did not believe flesh could reform itself into anything other than what he saw. The body is or was or never had been. It did not return from anywhere. It was not released. The driver bellowed at all of this. They were the same bellows of all unrealized children. They were the wails of the souls of heaven who can never leave. They were the quarrels and insomnia of these souls. They were their wasted eyes.

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But see how my eyes burn. They stare into the depths. Almost all of this is for us, my children. I remind you that I am the new son. Have pity for me. Have pity for me, children. I labored for all the years. This is why I write: I was born and grew up in the night before I was Christ. Please now let me perish. Let me become what never has been. Let me be what was before the night. Let me be remade in the morning stars. Let me burn behind the world where I will never be seen. I noticed the drivers fingers. They were discolored by his age and cigarettes. I opened the letter I had accepted from him. I read it to him there in the store. I did not think of why he had given it to me. The letter was his bellows.

24. Where did you go? the letter addressed to the driver read. Where did you go? A man died. Where did you go? You left. Where did you go? A man had to die, and where did you go? Men must die, and where did you go? The letter continued: First, you remember, observers visited you. They said, We found a messenger of Christ. He is a child like you are a child. You see him. He is also a prophet. He is here. He is here before you. They said, We visit you together and individually. We saw this child as we see you now. We saw its face as we see yours. You do not know us. Now you see us and you will remember our faces whenever you see us again. You might never know anything else about us. We might never tell you more. When you understand this, you will try to hide your face from us. You are lonesome. You complain and when you are alone you work out your vendettas. You tell the people who you knew as a young man that you have been cut off from the world. Your strive but are cut out. You say this like it was an event that was imposed from outside your life. You say this as if it were a vision that came upon you. In the same way you say to yourself that a child of Christ who is his prophet came upon you. You act as if your relationships with children of Christ are those of segregation. You neither believe in regeneration nor in the enduring body of children. The bodies were quartered. You see the disuse. You say, I never knew anything like this. You say, look at it like a dried gourd at my feet, if only I had met a child in this place. Second, the officers of the law went to you. They said, Excuse me, we found a vagrant child of Christ. Please dispose of the issue. Youve seen the child. You hear the gossipers. You heard the others, however, who believe he is a prophet. If you were powerful as we are powerful, they said, you would understand why we begin our request this way. We want you to feel that we have taken you into our confidences. We can do this because you believe you deserve the considerations we receive. You yourself are sure you are worthy of consultation. You believe this is not so only because of a single event. Rather than distinguishing yourself you mark your life, you exalt your life, you denounce your life as a time marked by epochs. You point. You indicate one particular time and you say, I accomplished these things during this time. You say, Yes, I accomplished these things. In the next epoch, my eligibility as an officer will have vested. I will register for office and be known.

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And so, this view flows into your received ignorance of the prophets of the children of Christ. This is why we officers of the law are able to deceive you. You believe in your accession to our rank. You assume this accreditation needs only to be recorded. You believe that record keeping is a fact. You groan, though you are cheerful when you consider it. You think of the weeks that passed since you expected a publishing of the announcement. You dreamed it would come from a council of our class. We would send you a private letter, you thought. But this is unnecessary. You will carry on and you will be useful. Last, the orderlies of the people came to you. They said, Sir, do you know the body of a prophet lies in front of you? It occupies this physical space forever. We can mark the dimensions. This is a body that carries a weight and reactions. It impresses into the world. Stop. Where do you plan to go? Will you return soon? Prophets are material and you are material. Superstitions share profits with each generation. Children with superstitions instruct other children of the dynamism of the belief. These are its values. This is its invocation. Call on it, but not in all ways. It is a quantity. Your rejection of superstitions is not valuable on its own merits. You believe yourself that it is not only that, but a substitute. You believe one day your organs will evaporate and pour a smoke into the earth. But no. Formations will compress your body. It will be undesirable. No one will recognize what it ever was. At that point, from the beginning of time, you will always have been unrecognized. A man had to die, but where did you go? Where is the prophet?

25. I left the grocery store where traffic cycled through the blacktop. It crossed through a belt and stuffed nests into the trailhead of city roads. Machines suffered drivers or bore down on others. Riders fussed their shoulders. They moved into clearings held in the silence of their cabins. They looked forward as if they knew something terrible but very far away followed them on the road. Mothers pulled children by their wrists toward all of this. I walked through two rows of vehicles before I found my car. It seemed unfamiliar. It looked large and out of fashion. My shoulders and forearms were suddenly sore. For several minutes I could not pull the keys from my pocket. I scraped at my pant leg until they fell from my hip. Orange and shades burnt the ends of the sky. A woods under a water tower was set in a plate bronzed beneath the light. I tapped on the glass of my car window. It was a movement made for its own sake. I didnt want to stay or leave for my apartment. Driving is no longer a physical motion when it is a compelled privilege. I looked through the rear window at the seats. The belts were straight and the floors clean. There was nothing except a few dandelion blooms. I remembered when I was a child and would smear them on my face. I remembered how my grandparents told me that if I was lost and grew very hungry I could eat them. But, Balthuz, dont worry. Why do you worry we will leave you? We wont. We will never leave you. I thought of the driver and concluded I could never know where the letter he showed me had come from. I needed to believe it was senseless to wonder. I suspected the writer of the letter 37

was simply a person who had become hysterical from grief. Maybe it was the driver himself. I tried to believe his feeling came from the accident or, maybe, he was upset about the death of his last wife. That was more appealing. It made me appear more insightful to myself. I felt nothing for or against the driver. My opinion was based only on acclamation. I had seen more stories about lost love than the regret. I stood by my car door until a voice hailed me. It was the husband from the older couple that was also at the accident. He was with his wife. They were dressed in light summer formal clothes. He wore a blue suit coat, she a long skirt woven in dyes. They were two rows over and called to me. Hello! the older man said. Hello, I said. Were you just in the store? he said. I was, I said. Why didnt we see you in there? he said. We were just inside. I dont know, I said. Its funny how that happens sometimes, isnt it? I suppose, the man said. I should pay attention more. I was focused on finding everything my wife had written for me on this list. He held up a ripped half of paper. Theres always a few things you cant find, always a few things overpriced. But I prefer this store to some of the bigger one. I believe you really can have too many things in one place. Ive learned that. Yes, I said. Yes, he said. You can build all day from sun up to sun down for entire life into eternity and you still wont create the heaven you want your earth to be. It just so happens youll forget about heaven along the way. The husband and his wife looked at each other. It seemed as if they had reached this conclusion before. It seemed like they often found confirmation of its truth in the world. Yes, I said. I see what you mean. Do you? I think I do. So what did you need to get today? These, he said and nodded at the two large bags they were each hugged to their stomachs. And you? he said. The older mans wife pointed at the bag I held at my side. This? I said holding the bag up. This? What is it? the older woman said quietly. A chain. Its just a chain for a truck hitch. I can use it if my car ever gets stuck or if I need to haul something. I thought I could use it the next time I move. You have a hitch on your car? No, I said pausing. But I plan to get one. Can that car even haul anything? the husband said. It seems like youd tear off the back end if you tried. I dont know, I said. I guess Ill find out eventually wont I? I laughed. The man and his wife looked away, then they looked beyond me. So, I said, have you heard anything else about the accident? I dont know, the man said. Possibly, we think. 38

He looked at his wife again. She nodded up at him. Well, the older woman said, a friend of mine I talked to about that accident said she might have seen something about it in the paper. She likes to see about anything the police make a noise about, so I tend to believe her. We ourselves dont take the paper anymore so I cant say exactly what it was she saw. She said might have seen a little report about the whole thing, nothing too detailed, or maybe just the obituary. Then again, she says she reads a lot about accidents in town so she might have been confusing what it was I had said with something else entirely. Its funny how the thoughts in your head can wash in and out like that so easily. An obituary? I said. Yes, yes. An obituary of the man who was hit trying to cross the street. But, like I said, Im not sure if it was his obituary she saw or someone elses similar to him. Maybe it was a cousin or someone else in an accident. Even if it was him I doubt his funeral has been planned just yet. Ill watch the news for it if youd like me to. The woman shrugged.

26. The former students back was bent in his chair when I returned to my apartment. I thought he had fallen asleep on his porch but his voice yipped from under him. How are you tonight? he said. Its good to see you. It is really is good to see you. Ive been happy to see anyone. It seems like everyone around here is working later and later now. Or maybe theyre just working more. Or maybe their hours arent set. I forget that happens with people. I think it would be hard having a job like that. Yes, I said. I know, he said. I can get used to most things but most people cant. I can find a routine in anything. Or maybe I just dont let myself get bored. Thats a problem for most people. They let themselves get bored. They dont try to understand what they want. Even thinking about what they want for their lives do depresses them. It shouldnt though. I can see why it could but it shouldnt. If thats what you want to do, you should keep thinking about it. Once you can see the idea clearly enough in your brain you can go get it and you can go do it. Its like making whatever youre thinking materialize. Some people dont believe that can happen but I do. Ive made it happen myself. Not that I need to. I have what I need. The former student looked up. He held a rag in one hand and a pistol in his lap. You know what I mean? he said. I took a step then a short run back. The former student laughed. He raised the pistol by its barrel and waved it. Its not a bomb, he said, and its not even loaded. The safetys on. See? Yes, I said I dont know anyone whos ever worried about me with anything like this, he said. Ive always been responsible. I really have. I guess thats what Im doing right now. Cleaning it lowers the risk of a discharge. Did you know that? It seems obvious to me now. Its one of the first things they taught us in basic training. He set the pistol back down and continued to clean. I heard the cry of a child or tomcat rise up from the creek. When were you in the military? I said. 39

A few years ago, he said. Well, a little more than a few years ago now. I went into it straight from high school. I hadnt thought of it until senior year when a recruiter came into my health class. He handed out information cards to all of us. He said we didnt have to tell him anything. Then he got serious. He said that if we didnt, he could get all our information anyway and that would be a waste of his time. We didnt have the right to waste his time like that, he said. It was a ridiculous waste of his time. He had more important things to do than track us down. So I did what he said and he called me the next week. He was a lot nicer then but a lot more stressed. How long were you in? I said. Not long, the former student said. I liked it at first but realized there were other things I wanted . I told them how I felt and they listened to me. I was out in a week. I didnt know you could just ask to leave, I said. I didnt either, but all I had to do was see the whole thing in my mind and know it could happen. And it happened like I saw it. That was it. You just have to see things like I see things. Anyone can if they realize they can. Were just minds, you know? Im not even sure we have bodies. Ive been thinking about that a lot. I might believe that our skin and our guts are just a projection, or maybe a defense we havent evolved far along enough to shed. I see all of what we are as a mind. Some people call whats left over a spirit. I dont know if theres a difference or if there should be. I dont know if that makes sense but I hope it does. I think when I tell it to people their minds leap out and catch hold of it. Maybe they dont understand completely but that shouldnt stop them from recognizing the truth if they know its right. I pointed at the gun. Did you bring that back from the military? This one here? he said. No. This one I got a little while ago from a friend. It was a good deal. He needed to get rid of it. He said hed give it to me cheap because he knew he could trust me. Who was it? I said. Just a friend, he said. I wouldve felt bad about paying so little except he already has enough money and firearms for himself. Plus hes still got more left over anyone else he knows who needs one. Its funny. He doesnt seem like a person who would ever touch a gun but he actually knows a lot. I guess if you live long enough you have the time to learn things you wouldnt know if you didnt. He looked down at his pistol. Have a good night, he said.

27. I moved to unlock my door and before it was open felt as if a body approached me. I worked at the lock and clenched my mouth. I tried to force my way inside silently. The door wouldnt give and I turned around. The night was unchanged. The former student still sat in the chair on his porch. I looked farther back toward the parking lot then the road. I pretended to search for some faint thing I had only at that moment thought to look for. The former student looked with me. So whats that? he said after a pause. 40

He pointed at the grocery bag I carried. His hand hung high out before him. I lifted the bag. This? I said. Yes, the former student said. What is it? Just a chain, I said. Sometimes I go camping and I thought it would be nice to be able to haul a small trailer. Oh, he said. Did you put a hitch on your car? Not yet, I said, but I think Ill be able to. I think you can do that, the former student said. Maybe. I had an uncle who worked at a shop that did body work. He said drivers more and more want their cars to take them everywhere and be able to carry everything. But thats not always possible. I think if you put a hitch on a smaller vehicle you run the risk of tearing out the frame. Or at least youll be starting down that road. My uncle used to call it skinning the car alive. He gave one clap and laughed. I tried to carry a reaction in the moment that tracked with his. Ill have to talk to him before I try it, I said. I dont want to ruin my car for one project. You could have, he said, but hes not a mechanic anymore. Oh, I said. My mom said he half-retired, the former student said, but I dont think hes old enough yet. I think he went back to school. What does he do now? I said. He works with wild animals, he said. Something with zoos? I said. No, he said. Hes at a wildlife preserve southwest of here. Its not really a zoo. It takes in illegal animals and lets them heal then go back into the wild. Which animals? I said. Mostly wolves, he said. The former student smiled. I was there last year, he said. I didnt know what to expect. I hadnt ever seen a wolf up close. Its funny, they seem like dogs. Then you see their faces and its when you really see. Its like thinking you see a person outside your window at night then when it doesnt move realizing its a goblin. Just because the two have the same shape doesnt many theyre alike. Oh, I said. And their eyes, he said. Theyre just crazy. He imitated them. Yes, I said. They were just crazy, he said. Inside my apartment I walked the length twice back and took out my phone. I set the grocery bag in the middle of the kitchen floor. I called the girl Id talk to at work. She answered and said she was drinking wine at the restaurant near the accident. She said she was with a few other employees. She said they had been there since they left work. She said I should come. I left my apartment through the back door. I followed the perimeter of the parking lot. I rushed to my car. I saw the former student was still in his chair. I didnt know if he saw me. 41

And as I put on my seat belt I noticed a small scratch on the rearview mirror. It looked like an X or a cross. I told myself I had seen it before though I had not. The car started loudly. I leaned forward against the wheel. I tried to see if the former student had noticed the sound but his head was bowed.

28. I saw my grave all about me as I drove away. I saw it there because I was not yet a realized child of Christ. I feared my height might not fill the valleys. I also saw the instrument of the former student. Men lie with swords beneath their heads. Men lie with inequities upon their bones. Men lie asleep. But I sing. That night I went down to the creek bed. I would be there in lamentation. The stars were dark. They were made dark. But I sang. I sang under glass panes as I cannot and do not now. My voice feels heavy in the pit of my throat. I remember how I sang. A horsefly becomes trapped between screens. How long can life continue with the understanding of measurement? Each body is cool and influenced to touch. Anymore I rarely signal the beasts at the palisades. I rarely signal the souls of the plain. I let some gossip, I let others travel. I signal but do not make pronouncements. I only lift my body to draw attention to my demands. The gesture takes hours, sometimes days. I must plan. Then the beasts and souls come and they serve me. They must. I wonder what they say about me when they are gone. I know they no longer brag about privateering or their plans for rebellion. But they remain ungrateful. They yell to one another from the soups where they soak, where they do not leave for days. Do you know what covers the heavens? It is a pale awning vaulted high above the soil. The night I decided to return to the creek I sang. I sang: Sleepwalking tonight, sleepwalking tonight, The world is a basin if there isnt the skies, Saw it all by a lace in my mind Passed from a body sleepwalking tonight. Sleepwalking tonight, sleepwalking tonight, The world is a basin if there isnt the skies Saw it set by a lace in my mind Passed from a body sleepwalking tonight. But earlier that night I drove past the swollen carcasses of three raccoons as I approached the restaurant. One and another, the second then a third. I coughed when I imagined gasses rising in their rot. I saw air pushing a sheet of flesh at a seam.

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The bodies I saw were an offense to the world. They had no right to it. The world asked where is their right. It was not because of disease the world hated them. It was only because they had ceased to continue as they were. The animals were creatures that had moved particular movements. They were calculable things. Human continuation exists in the calculable. That is why we have disagreements about fortune after death. Human beings cannot know what it is to not continue. Conjecture shows this. A revival of arguments says that to continue to live after death cannot be like what it is to continue to be alive. So everything continues if one recognizes they are a child of Christ. It continues if they see who I am, if they live with me. Ministers who know and fail to tell their bodies of children commit the unpardonable sin. They fail to recognize that living is no different than ceasing to be. Understand that to end is to never have been. You continue for no other reason than the arch of your body through the sky. The universe is not the atomists universe. Draw into me. To say the universe is a procession is to say the oceans are the conflicts of tides. I understand you wish to celebrate the start of one thing overshadowing the end of another. I understand these distinctions and I disavow them. That is my love for you. It is the measure of my detest for my own condition. The conclusion is no more necessary for the universe than notations are needed for the existence of song. Understand these your struggles are the struggles of the unrealized children of Christ. I understand. I understand how unnatural the idea is that one thing cannot be another and I understand why someone who is not with the flesh of Christ could rebel against me. But some question my promises. You question me. You ask where are the things that hold all other things together in one moment to the next. I tell you that you will never die.

29. The first door of the restaurants cedar double doors was locked. The bolt drummed when I pulled it. The sound started me and I sprang away. I opened the other door onto the sound of rushing water. Structure rejuvenates human action. It provides assurances of conclusion and an affirmation of indefiniteness until the time is whole. It is why human beings long for a cycle that practices calculability. This is the afterlife for all. It is the assembling of childhoods, of loves, of achievements. It is in those things they believe their conclusions of the world were most natural and marked with Pentecost. They often tell others in ecstasy their lives are pierced by unexplainable acts of Christ. They will often say this event or that event is evidence Christ would have only acted as he did. If only they could predict when he will act again, they say. He is mysterious and is low over the water.

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They believe the unpardonable sin is not what Christ plainly says it to be. The unpardonable sin, they say, would only fall upon those who have acted other than they did. Praise Christ, they say. He is merciful. And I leave their thoughts. And at the restaurant the girl and the assistant director sat across from each other at a table in barstools with high backs. They looked at their drinks and to each other. Their faces flickered and cooled. The two looked at the double doors but away from me when I entered. They waited to greet me until I stood before them. Again the girls hair seemed to have changed. It seemed shorter. It seemed to be a gray that could be a color between any two colors. It was a matte. Hello, the girl said watching her drink. Good evening, Balthuz, the assistant director said. Balthuz, Balthuz, Balthuz, Im glad you were able to meet us. I nodded to both of them. No one else from work was there as the girl had promised. I could smell they were both drunk. Hello, I said to them. Hello, only the girl said. The assistant director turned to me. A new moroseness was wet on his. She was just telling me about the accident on this road, he said. Thats incredible. Its amazing how quickly something can happen that you never would have predicted. Its strange. In a way, you are prepared for it because youve wound it up and watched it unravel a dozen times. At least thats what you do with the things youre afraid of. Or its what people do when they want to reconcile something unrreconcilable to them. Its what people do each time they pull their work life down over their faces to escape. The girl nodded in agreement to him. I think what I mean is that Im glad I didnt see the accident, he said. I know I would have had to do something if I were there. I cant just stand around and watch something like that happen. Im sure I would have jumped into the streets to stop it. You cant deny something like that is happening right in front of you. Youve been told over and over what you should do then. You were raised knowing. And then you know once you know. Youre helping because you are there and youre helping someone who did or went to school and read the same books you read. You have to protect people. The girl with the short hair touched his forearm. She tilted her head toward his shoulder. I dont know if she told you about what she learned from that day, he said. I cant believe she saw everything happen. I cant believe more people didnt help that man. How could anyone just walk by him? The girl with the short hair took a drink from the assistant directors glass. I have a lot of regulars who will tell me all about what happens in the city, the girl said. Im lucky. I know a lot more about most people than they would think. Ive realized how quickly secrets are sent out and picked up and put out. Everyone knows. Everyone knows the minute you start speaking. People want to know what happened with everything. Like the man at the accident? the assistant director said. Like that guy who only stood around just to watch the homeless man suffer? 44

Yes, the girl said. People think its easy to keep things like that quiet.

30. Not this time, the assistant director interrupted. No. We wont let that happen. Thats the kind of thing people need to know about. People have the right to know who it is they have to live with in this city. He was speaking loudly. Only a few customers were in the restaurant. I hoped the girl would tell him to be quiet but she never did. Tell him what you heard about the old man who was hit, the assistant director told the girl. Tell him everything you know. We have a right. We have a right. Im tired of people pretending they dont have a right to wake up and know what to expect every day. I work, you work. It gets harder and harder when you cant be guaranteed that the rules you know and live by wont be the same each day. You cant just wake up every morning and decide youre ready for a new universe. No one can live like that. I shouldnt have to. We need order. We need the rule of law. You know what that is? The rule of law? I nodded. Of course you do, he said. A person like you would. Youre a normal, reasonable person who can think clearly and rationally when you wake up in the morning. The rule of law is just that. You have law over everything. We give it its place. The law is the law. Thats it. We establish the law because some of the smartest of us realized we didnt want lunatics and tyrants controlling everything. Thats the idea we live by. We know what it is. The law doesnt have feelings. Its like a math problem. One and six is seven. It will always be that way. Thats how the law is. Its as simple as a math problem if its written right, and if theres enough reasonable people to acknowledge it. Someone just then has to say is, Let me read what this says. And, there, they read it. Of course today theres disagreements about the law because people dont know the math. You know what, they cant even fucking add. You know what else you know what else? some of them are saying theyre doing the math and are just pretending to. They dont care. They want the law to fail. And some of them dont just want that. They want the whole idea of the rule of law to fail. Its awful. The assistant director looked at the girl. Theyd talked about this before. She took a small drink and began. Ill tell you, she said, that man who I was told about, and who I think I saw, was just watching the old homeless man suffer in the road. He was fixated, just staring. Then I think he saw that this nice old couple saw him. He got embarrassed, of course, and so he thought he should pretend he cared. It was that old couple that runs that market a couple blocks north. I guess they also manage some apartments downtown. But so this young guy is embarrassed and goes over to the homeless man in the middle of the street. And then, really, he just more or less stands there and watches him. I think he thought if he stood there people would think he was actually doing something. But everyone there was trying to help except for him. You think even if he didnt care he could take a hint from the way everyone else was acting. The old couple tried to stop the bleeding. The police and ambulances came and tried to do what they could. I saw them. They were running. And the driver, the guy who hit him, was the one who called the police. Maybe thats why everyone Ive talked to about the accident makes excuses for him. They all feel bad for the homeless man who died but they also all say that it couldnt have been 45

the drivers fault. They said he did all he could and just didnt see the homeless man. But do you want to know what I think? I think the driver didnt even try to miss him. I think he didnt even try and he didnt help at all after he hit the man. I actually know who that guy is. He comes in here sometimes. If you talk to him, youll regret it because he talks like he knows everything ever written or said by anyone. He thinks hes being nice when hes really just talking down to you. I dont know. I wish somehow I could figure out who that young man was next.

31. Maybe I can excuse most it, the girl continued, but something about the accident feels wrong. It feels strange. Only she and I were then at the table. The assistant director had finished another drink and was reading handbills posted against the shoots of beams among the tables. At times he read a few words from the handbills out loud. The girl wore a dress for the first time since Id known her. She pulled at the hemline as she spoke. She smoothed it over the peak of her thighs. She rubbed her fingers together like she had tape stuck to them. Her legs were too thin at her hip. After a few moments of speaking she hid her hands behind her knees. I might remember seeing the accident but Im not sure, she said. I guess I do. I just dont know how well. I was working then, I know that. I had a line of customers but looked out the window when I heard a noise. It wasnt an accident noise. It wasnt breaking glass or the sound of metals. It was almost like a bark, but lower. It was fast. I didnt look long because the line of customers was still there. And they were staring at me. And they were all old business people. Theyre the people who want everything. They make more in two weeks than my friends do in a year but never tip. They dont understand the work we do. Older people say they understand hard work better than I do but they dont. If they did they would know what its like to have so much less. Theyre so deep in their lives and have just done what theyve done for so long. They dont have to think about it. I cant wait for the day when their bodies break down. I cant wait for the day they recognize how old their faces look to everyone who sees them. She sat on the front edge of her chair with her shoulders straight. I think I remember seeing the police go to the accident after that, she said. It was police or firemen. I cant tell the difference because of their uniforms. And theyre at the same places. Blue pants, bleached white shirts. I think they have to look that way. Thats how they believe they need to look. The girl remembered something from long ago and laughed. Do you know what I think about when I think about getting old? she said. I think about a horse track. Its a race like any other race but there are tall partisians set up between the lanes. They look like the dividers elementary schools use to spilt one room in two. I think of lanes and water filled up to the necks of the horses. I see them soaking there waiting. Then I hear a roar and I see the horses swim and I see them float and I see their panic. The riders pretend they dont realize it. They see how this is how the race is set out for them. But they dont want to see it. They try to imagine the actions of other riders on either side of them. Or they pretend those riders arent there. Then they find themselves falling off the horses and paddling back to them and dropping to touch the bottom of the pool with the tops of their toes and shooting back up to 46

the surface. I can see everything when I think about it. Horses always look like they are about to drawn when they swim. Their heads back screaming. The girl ate an ice cube. Do you think thats what well be like? she said. I dont know, I said. I dont either, she said. But listen. Outside on the road at the accident when the police and firemen came I saw the old homeless man collapsed on the ground. I do remember that. He was just there in the middle of the road, not moving at all. He had been bleeding and bleeding and then at some point he stumbled a little and fell on his back. By the way people looked at him I knew he was hurt. Thats when the police and fireman were getting there. Someone called out and I could tell people heard it. Then the wife from an old couple pointing at the homeless man and yelling in the faces of the paramedics and police. She looked like she pushed one of them but I dont know. No one was mad but I dont think anyone would have defended her either. Then, I really remember this, one of the police officers went over to the homeless man and knelt beside him. He examined him and then stretched out over him right there in the road. He put his chest to the mans chest and his face to the mans face. He stayed over him like that for a few minutes, got up, then whispered to another officer. Then the other officer did the same, stretching out over him and breathing into him. But the body must have been too cold. Then the second officer looked around for the young man whod just been there. But he was gone. I think he knew what people wanted from him. The girl poured the last of the ice cubes into her mouth. Let me show you how they laid over the homeless man, she said. It was so strange. She called to the assistant director. Lets do it like how we talked about, she said.

32. The girl with the short hair acted for a moment as if she were dead. She lay on her back outside the restaurant gasping. Help me, please! she yelled with the voice of an child imitating an old man. Help me! She was very drunk. She tried several times then did ask me to bring her the purse shed forgotten inside. She yelled and I ignored her and she yelled again then forgot. I pretended to examine something across the street. Dont take me away now, Jesus! she called out with one hand raised. I will keep my promises! Please just dont take my spirit! Tell me what you have for me! The girl and the assistant director broke from their roles to laugh at an inside joke. The man stood over her and shifted his weight from one of his hips to another. He took long drinks from a wide glass hed brought with him outside. I hear your cries, my good and faithful servant, the assistant director said. I hear you. But why should I consider your life? You can provide no benefit to me or to my kingdom. I cannot trust you. I cannot trust you will follow my instructions the actions of earth. Do you still hear me? Both laughed.

47

My people built the temple of Solomon! the assistant director said straddling the girl. My people invented hanging gardens! You ask for a modification for yourself? Have you seen the Great Wall? It goes on for hundreds and hundreds of miles. I will remember those people. But who will remember you? Who will wonder in the future about your life? The assistant director gave a small laugh. He breathed onto his palms and the back of his hands. So should we show him then? he said. Yes, she said. The girl rose to kiss his cheek and the assistant director squared himself over her. He laid his body on top of her. They were approximately the same height and matched closely hip to hop, shoulder to shoulder. Eyes to eys. They were still from a moment before the girl coughed and addressed me. This is what everyone was seeing out there after the accident, she said. It was almost peaceful to watch. They were just waiting. I heard that she looked like she was breathing life into his body, the assistant director said. Like this. He breathed onto the girls face. Like this? he said. She squealed and slapped his arm. Okay, she said. I give up, I give up! The assistant director laughed. A motorcycle passed and the rider shouted something at the parking lot. Shut up! the assistant director shouted back. Shut up! I dont know why things like that today are public. Someone should have known. They should have been watching. He shuddered then clasped the girls hands. He stretched them out above her head. He laid a cheek to hers. He closed his eyes. Now you can never get up, he told the girl. I have you trapped forever. I am your god. I created the Great Wall and I can call up snakes from the ground. I am a power. Okay, the girl said and gave a short laugh. Okay. Lets go back inside so I can get something else to drink. We need something. The assistant director arched his back slightly. There is nothing for us inside, he said in a lowered voice. Outside we have everything. We have everything you could ever want. We have violets and we have the sky. I can give my creation anything! He turned his head to the side and belched No, she said. Please. You know my back is starting to hurt. Come on. No its not, the assistance director said. I dont believe you. It is, she said, and I want to go inside. Let me up. Maybe, he said. It will be a while. The girl with the short hair was quiet for a moment before she screamed. The scream was high and fell into the hour of night. Balthuz, she said. Tell him to get off me. Please tell him he needs to let me go. She pushed the words off her chest. 48

I looked down. Please, Balthuz, she said. Please? Hey, I said whispered to no one. A few minutes later I was in my car. And I was driving to my apartment. I thought about the resolutions I would make. I was to be cleansed.

33. I parked by the bridge near my complex in a small lot pooled by the banks of the creek in the place where I would not be able to take my own life. A pine bench and a statute of a man who long ago lived in the city was fixed on the edge of the lot. The city respected the man. It represented him as he was for them. It decided this representation was pure. The statute was overlarge and copper green. The face was ornamented with precious metals. I also conceived another thing about the statute. I saw its feet disappeared into a block stand bearing a plate. The plate summarized his life on earth. An artist had written that the figure could be viewed as rising from the earth. The artist wrote this in response to a rumor. The rumor said the statute was a depiction of another rumor that the man had died when a gash in the ground opened and swallowed this great man after he violated a treaty with a local Indian tribe. My car came to rest behind the pine bench. Dead men had paid for their names into block lettering the bricks sat on. The vehicles body half-stomped. It sunk a moment later. It settled, and there was an aerosol hiss. I let my window down and felt the wet in the air. The creek had swept in a dampness. This was the winter coming late in the next season. It was the cold, the air that bellies muscles into bones. And I remembered a girl I made drive me home after classes in high school. She was dead or spiritualess, reincarnations or a child. I made her drive me because I knew I could make her. I knew she would touch me if I insisted. I remembered one afternoon I was with her and she began to cry. I saw she wanted me to notice but I didnt care. It was not because she was a liar but because I despised her. I despised her for making me wait. I despised her for being cast out. She was a woman who quietly entered a town only to be driven from it sever weeks later. She told me about a pet she had kept since childhood. She said she understood her own pathology and the pet, an old rabbit, was important to her because they were both adopted and both forgotten. She understood. She told me thats why she was very sorry about what had happened to it. She said shed forgotten to clean its cage. She said this was her fault but shed only really done it once. Id been to her home and never seen a rabbit. She had an unfinished basement where no one ever went. Not even the familys washer and dryer were there. She said I didnt need to see. Only a few garden tools and wire hangers, she said. 49

And somehow insects had infected the animal. She said it must have happened quickly. She promised this to me. But when it was covered in sores when she did notice. Maybe it was horseflies, she said. It had white spots under its eyes and nose. She said it seemed like the insects resessitated it just to feed on it. She said it was only a body. She said she didnt want to take it to the veterinarian. The animal had become vicious and the employees might think that was her fault. She said she wasnt strong enough to strike it. She said she didnt know anyone with a weapon. She took it into her adopted parents bathroom and filled the sink with water. She checked the temperature to be sure it was not too warm and not too cold. And she said she was able to hold it underneath the surface long enough because she got scared when she was sure that it growled at her. It was a low sound that couldnt have come from the animal. That was the insects too. She said she couldnt have let it up then. She didnt know what it might do. She told me how much she cried. She said she couldnt sleep at all that night.

34. But I didnt begin to hate the girl until later than I thought I had. I perceived assessments and made them my attitudes. It was when she grew unpopular and the other students drove her out. It was when she was not ashamed. After high school no one mentioned her except to say she might be dead. The concession inside all premises is that one thing must come after another. It is an idea that may lead to deception, may be so. It is an idea of war. Many cannot hear what they do hear. They are convinced that anything not before them or the thing after what is before them is an impossibility. It is not the thing after the other. They believe old wine has always stained. They reject disappearance. They reject destruction. These children are horrors. Nothing will give them meat. Now I look at you. You also believe time is apportioned, that you live across this face in single measure. That is untrue. It is untrue. Unrecognized children, time does not pass evenly. History slept when you slept. When you are falling asleep, you sometimes wonder if the event you think of happened one year or several before. What does that mean? I am the Christ Messiah. I am the Ancient Days. Your life continues. The religious tell you about spirits. They segment the procession of your thought. They cause you to see parts of a history that slept when you slept as new and mystical. They are unrecognized. They do not believe. They anticipate and project when they ruminate. They demand a control. They believe they may atone for their wickedness. False beliefs congregate. The first false belief says that each day is part of an epoch which is part of a line of epochs which the mystics can cut and find symmetry in. The second false belief is that they should categorize wickedness. I condemn and I am ashamed again. I understand I let myself feel confined this way. I let myself think that at some hearing later I will have to act and until then I should rest. 50

Today I cannot write from my throne or its dais. Anyone may visit this room. I hear whispers. They surround me. Wait, someone just looked in. Did someone looked in? I am awake. At the foot of the dais is a gazebo. Not many notice. They look for the throne. But Ive always admired the gazebo. It is dressed with a sheet and spring flowers. Its floor boards are washed cedar. I did not design it, but Ive moved it into the mystic. It is a catalog of my arrogance. I also like the staircase that leads to the enclosure. It is a marble stained in smoke and purple Inside I can stand uncovered. I pass into the mystic. When I look up I see universes. From inside this place I give praise. I find strength. I choose one of the universes and I join it and it comforts me. I do not see how wretched my body is. I do not worry in that time some advisor or beast or some soul will find this book of lamentations. Sometimes I am too weak to pull myself to the gazebo. Sometimes I am too tired. I am like a sick baboon. Then I order one of the beasts to carry me. Then I understand why widowers take their own lives. I believe we must blame a culture of unrecognized children. These children tell their brothers and sisters to find the route to thrust their existence toward tranquility. If you acquire enough property, the unrecognized say, you will gain the force to hold the mystic still and remain. Just This will be bliss, they say. This is bliss. You will then rest and you will be at peace. But they are wretched. Their intestines bind. They call out to others. What have the others done that they havent? They say, Will you fast for me? Please hold an assembly to raise me up. Gather my neighbors and deacons. They remember me. Please ask them to form small groups to wish me to the mystic that will be nothing like my life now. If they knew me, they could see me here. They would think this is where the mystic begins. Souls cut a symmetry to see the worlds continue in order. If they saw me, they would be horrified to know my own ends are subsumed inside them. They would see that I only want to continue for its own sake and in a form that I assume will cause me less pain. Existence is external, not control of its conditions. I repeat that the longing for eternal life is a longing to continue life forever in a different state. Some think it frees them from obligations. Some see this as an exclusive prominence of control. They mystics want to gather on an expanse of purple space with their guests and their new divinity they do not call divinity. All run from anguish. All want to control separation. Conservative believers want release and dominion. The eternal forms of their bodies are their own bodies reconstituted with a strength they think they once had a long time ago, with a strength best illustrated by a folk story they love to hear is told about them. These are stories that venerate their bodies. Their bodies once were. It is the same reason people photograph themselves naked. They want to stop a loss that will grow from the malignancy in their own body. If everyone could do what they are near doing, they could found a perfect love. Their ecstasy is the new or ancient wilderness where spirits flow and the edge of the world are the outer belt of a campfire site.

35. 51

Three visitors came to me that night before my ascension. I slept inside the hours unraveling between the world and light. I dreamed I was in a great hall. I dreamed I watched a performance. The hall was in the home of a generous donor to the performance. A friend of mine knew the donor personally. I did not. The hall was like a palace ballroom or hollowed consulate. The walls and floors were soft beige, they were white twilight. Rare linens unfurled from vaulted beams. Their movement pierced the hall like sunlight through a tropic shallow. Their movement was configured. They box stepped. I knew I must also speak to the donor that evening. Those who knew him were not afraid. And I found myself sitting on the back of a chair in a square of furniture in a corner of the hall. I was still with my friend, but now could not see him. I heard him say he thought I had come with others. His voice faded into the graces of those around him. As I leaned forward to hear him, my weight shifted and I fell backwards. My back slid down the wall to the floor. I came to a rest on my neck and shoulders. I knew my legs must be above me. They were pinned by the furniture but I could not see them. I found myself hissing to gain attention. No one heard or looked. I hissed again. The guests continued to drink their red wine poured from bottles labeled specially for the performance. My friend looked at me with impatience. He acted no differently toward me now that I was on the floor. What is it? he said. Sorry to interrupt, I said. Im sorry. But could I ask you something? He blinked. He leaned toward me guarding his wine to his chest. Yes, he said. Fine. But not right now. I have to learn if these people are the people I need to meet. If they are, I might need to meet them tonight. What if they are and I dont? I know I will meet at least some of them. I think thats true. I do want to find them before its too late. Should I ask someone? I know finding them will take time. I dont know where they are. Maybe I should see if I can pay a guide. I understand, I said. I feel the same way. But please let me know when youre ready. Yes, he said snapping back into the perimeter of the circle. Not now. The figures of bodies inflated and curled over the next few minutes. Their voices broadened and overlapped. I heard differences in footsteps. Clicks and scrapes. A few minutes later, I stopped a waitress whod scraped my chest with her heel as she passed my inverted body. I didnt know if I could ask her for help. Maybe she knew the generous donor. My voice exasperated her. Do you work here? I said. Tonight, she said. Do you like it? I said. Sometimes, she said. Im not sure tonight. Have you met the owner? I said. Ive never met him, she said. Im not sure Ive seen him. No one will describe him to me. Why? I said.

52

Ive been told reasons and I think I believe them, she said. It doesnt matter though. I already have his image in my head. I see it very clearly. She seemed frank but was beginning to slur her words. She spoke off-beat like shed been required to hold the same conversation every hour that night. Yes, I said. I understand. Just one thing. Could I ask for your help, just for a moment? I think I am trapped here. I dont know what happened and I dont think Ill be able to move without help. Also, I dont know anyone else here at this party well enough to ask. Who did you come with? she asked A friend, I said. Does he know the donor? she asked. I think he does, I lied. I think through business. Really? she said turning her head and then moving briskly. OK. And the speech of the figures in the great hall grew louder.

36. I awoke into panic believing Id been blinded. I turned to my side. The clouds were nights of stars fallen into a fire beneath the earth. I struggled looking for light until I exhausted myself. I know why. I will say this. I had never accepted that limitations on mining were not self-imposed. Every child of Christ fears trespass. Why? The ash and tributaries, volcanic rock and rivers are ancient systems. The core of the earth is not layered. No one knows that. It is fortified. I thought this too. I saw myself at the center of heaven as at the center of earth. Existence was concocted from me and unknowable. I felt this as a reflection corrected my sight. It came from the statue or the churning of the creek. Currents sent away the rainstorms quickly. The grass was bulbed in dew, all the stones polished. I set the seat back a few slats and it settled. I held the box with the tow chain on my lap. Dear Christ, I prayed. My Jesus, my Jesus. That was all. And I planned how it must be. The bridge had a sidewalk. At the edge of the sidewalk was a railing. Over the railing was a small ledge, then open air. A narrow sheet of perforated metal jutted at the lip of the ledge. I tried to think of a knot I could tie which, after a period of time, would break and release my body into the creek bottom. I would remember when it was time. I opened the box on the passenger seat and spread the span of chain across my hands. The metal was so cold I felt the taste of it. The chain was lighter than I expected it. I pulled at its ends. I snapped it once and again. The sound was dull, fortified. But I still believed my old body would break it. It must give. It must give at least before morning. I could not be found. 53

A crack broke from the drivers side window. The movement of the sound and the motion before it created a vacuum near my temples. Another noise came with it. It was the radio through nautitorium speakers when the swimmer emerges. Another rap came. Then the face. I saw it was the former student. He looked through the window like it was a one-way mirror fogged in the center. I threw the chain behind me. I motioned for him to come to the other side. He opened the door and sat in the passenger seat exhaling. You cant see anything outside tonight, he said. I almost walked into your car. I was staring at the water from the creek. Then all of a sudden you were there in front of me. I knew it was your car because, you know, its your car. If you see one thing enough in one place you realize what it reminds you of. Seeing your car made me stop and think I needed to let me mind clear. He wiped his face in his hands. His hair was wet, but his jacket was almost dry. I came down here earlier but it was raining, he said. I waited a few minutes and it passed. You can only stay sitting and thinking about doing something so long before you realize you need to do it. You have to act. You see it and you see it and you see it one more time and then you have to see it happen. He reached in his jacket pocket and drew a revolver. It was the gun hed been cleaning the day before. Im sure youve heard phrase Its like shooting fish in a barrel, he said. Its like shooting fish in a barrel. For some reason I heard that phrase in my head a lot when I was cleaning this. It turned into a song for me. People used to dynamite rivers to bring up catch. I think you could do the same thing on a smaller scale. Im sure you could. Just shoot enough. He held the gun in front of him and pointed at the windshield. He mimicked the recoil of a shot. I dont like the idea of hunting, he said, but recently Ive been getting this strange feeling that there isnt a middle ground not doing it and doing it. Ive felt like either you hunt like a wolf or you die like a rat. Im not a rat. If youre a wolf then all of a sudden you say, I dont want to be a part of this anymore, everyone who sees you will say, Well, thats a rat right there. No question. Im not a mean person but I dont want to die for the sake of kindness. I dont want to die at all but no one does. People say when I say that that I have to die sometime. Thats supposed to be what wise men say. But I really dont know how they can say that. Theyre not the ones who can make me. I have the feeling I dont have to. I feel people accept that they do and then go around making plans for the next fifty years for how to do it. What if you planned how you were going to live for the next fifty years after you were supposed to die instead of dying? I think that would change everything. He raised his gun to the middle of the windshield again. Hi wrist recoiled after the each explosion of three fake rounds.

37. The former student tapped the windshield with the butt of his revolver then stuck it back into his jacket. 54

Why do I have to die? he said. I know I have to. Or at least Im supposed to. But that just means Im supposed to. Thats all. I think thats all Ill let it mean. Im serious about it, but does that make sense? Balthuz, I think about it like this. What if I went down to the creek every night for the next week and shot fish out of the water. Like I was talking about. Bam, bam, bam. Like that every night. Bam, bam, bam. Bam, bam, bam. What if I did? Think about the one creek fish who doesnt get shot but sees all the other fish get shot. Hell think one day hell get shot too. He hasnt seen any other way. Thats what happens to all fish. They get shot. Hes seen it. Even if hes heard about fish living up stream or in the oceans or in the Great Lakes hell think thats what happens to the fish there too. He doesnt have any proof but he doesnt need it. OK, have you ever heard of the sky raining fish? It happens. I hear about it happening a lot on golf courses. Hundreds of fish will get sucked up with the evaporation of water. Then clouds will drop them down during a storm. So what if, during one of these storms, another fish from somewhere else far away gets picked up and poured down with a storm into this creek. Maybe its from the Great Lakes. Maybe its from far away. Someday the fish I mentioned earlier the creek fish and the new fish will talk about death. Itll come up. It comes up. What happens then? The new fish will have no idea what the creek fish is talking about when it talks about death. After a while, the new fish realizes what the creek fish thinks about death, just not the reason. He wonders for a long time. He doesnt say anything until he has to. Then he says, Why do all the fish you know get shot in the middle of the night? I know its a fact here, but why? The creek fish just looks at the new fish. He looks at him and tries to think about what the new fish might mean. Eventually, the creek fish says, Sorry I dont know. And he talks about the bad luck in his life. The creek fish is bothered and wants to let it go. It makes him uncomfortable. But then the new fish says, Do you know, really? Why do all fish in the stories you tell death die by getting shot? This drives the creek fish crazy. He feels attacked. Really, he feels his world attacked. To the creek fish, the question just means, Why does everyone you know eventually die? So, of course, the creek fish says I dont know. He says that because he really doesnt know. Then the new fish says, No, why do all fish you know die in that one way in particular? What is it? And the two go back and forth. The argue past each other. Then, like an explosion went off behind him, the new fish realizes the creek fish believes that getting shot in the dark in the middle of the night and the act dying are one in the same. He understands the creek fish thinks they must happen and must happen together. You see? Its like how we, me and you, see a heart not beating and a person death as one in the same. So, in the story, the new fish puts up with the creek fishs death stories a little while longer but then asks him, Why dont you just hide from the shots? You know when theyre going to come. Just stay away from the place where the shots come when it gets dark, right? The new fish thinks hes finally explained his idea well. But, again, he doesnt understand the creek fish sees this thing as just happening and not a thing someone else makes happen. And you know what will happen next? Eventually of course the creek fish gets shot. The new fish feels bad but satisfied he was right. So he knows where the shots always fall and he stays away from there. But its not done. After a while, he realizes hes the oldest fish in the creek. He also realizes that hes moving slower and slower and he has a harder time finding food. Then he remembers how fish used to die in his old lake. They got attacked, they got poisoned. Some of them one day just got sick and died. No one could say exactly why. Then he realizes he and the creek fish believe in in all of the same things. Maybe he thinks that because hes starting to feel sick. Rain tinned on the body of the car body around us. Maybe its possible Im too young to see it myself, the former student said. Maybe Ill accept it more in the end. But right now I dont like people telling me this is what I have to work 55

toward, this is what I have to avoid. I have to do what Im doing now. Maybe I wont struggle so much in the end if I do. I fight to wear myself out. And everyone wants you to wear yourself out so you wont make them feel uncomfortable. They dont want you to avoid something they cant avoid themselves. They like to keep quiet. They dont want you to cry out.

38. I fell asleep moments after the former student left the car. I slept as I hadnt in a very long time. I heard cities and villages inside the ruminations of jet planes. I heard car motors fall from heights. In the morning I heard the thousands and thousands of kites between the gossips. And again I saw myself in the great hall with my shoulders pinned to the floor. Again I was at an angle and I could not see my body. I saw beams in the ceiling as a steeple above me. And now a couple was over me, and a child beside them. At first I did not realize at they were speaking about me. Have we said hello to this man yet? a new fathers voice said. I think we should say hello. No, a womans voice said. But we really dont need to. Weve bothered enough people tonight. I thought you said you wanted to bring him so he could see new things, the young fathers voice said. You wanted him to be immersed. You said that is how he would learn. No, the woman said, now you are using my words against me. Youre using them out of context just to start a fight. We need to move at the pace hes comfortable moving at. We need to be there to guide him while he directs his own path. Im not going to fight about this. Okay, the man said. Okay. Ill back in a second. I need to get another drink and say hello to someone from work. Okay, the woman said. Their voices spoke into other voices. Other voices ellipsed under synods . The pain at the bend of my neck became a tempo and I forgot the position of my body. Then I felt the brushing, then the dull singing of a pain of bone against my face. The voice of the woman calling. The sensation swelled. It ground my nose. And I felt blood crest over my lips. Hello, the woman said. Im sorry. That was my son. Im sorry. She clipped my ear with her shoe. She turned the ring on her finger and looked around her. She had a shawl she straightened over her shoulders like it was a lock of hair. She looked down at me. I am sorry, she said. I am very sorry. I felt the blood ball up in my face and begin to flow back toward my eyes. The woman introduced herself. We always make final decisions about him together, she said, but I know hell say this was really more my idea. Maybe it was, but that doesnt mean I didnt bring want him here for a specific purpose. There arent many performances like this. How often will he be able to see adults actually behave like actual adults?

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I listened and affirmed her beliefs. I still couldnt feel anything below the base of my neck. I tried to imagine the use of my arms but couldnt. I had forgotten. The blood stung my eyes. The woman brushed her shawl again. He agrees we should go, she said, but of course he forgets why we came. These are educated people. They understand us. In five years it wont be so uncommon to bring children to these events. Yes, I said. Can I tell you something honestly? she said. This is all my fault. I used to want everything. Then I let myself be limited and forced out. Sometimes you let yourself think you can allocate your schedule and your past and you present just so. You think you can tunnel into one way of life thats separate from the life you had. But once you are there yourself, really there, you realize that all the things youre interested in are things other people already have. Things theyve discussed and settled on. You have nothing to say thats not only already been said and appraised and forgotten. Thats it. All you have after that is people interrogating you about what you havent done and telling you why you have to do it in a certain way. And if you dont? Thats not a question. Thats what took me the longest time to realize. Its interesting how thats not a question. You dont ask it because you already know you must do what you are expected to do. And you do it so you can do the next thing you are expected to do after that. The flow of blood across my face had stopped. I thought of diversions to keep her near, to keep the child away. I did not listen closely to what she said. I watched her. I watched the way her fingers touched one another. Yes, I said Even if you step back, the woman said, you cant ignore the performances around you. Youve been there, your mind is an animal that picks apart their movements and histories. So already youre in it more and more. You obsess about how you could meet the expectations they meet. You only arent allowed to try anymore. Thats your punishment until you find a way back.

39. When I awoke ten minutes or an hour or sometime much later that night I was speaking with the wife of the older couple who had come with pity to the homeless man in the road. She acknowledged she had sought me out there at the creekside. At first she said she had only stopped to say hello because she happened to recognize my car. She said she was on a very long walk. When I asked her if she lived nearby she confessed shed been looking for me all day. Her wet hair and long breathes made her seem deranged. Her appearance offended me like it was an affect. It allowed me to give no weight to anything she asked for. I made my decision to ignore her requests like a judge considers leniency for the politically unpopular accused. The woman pulled her hair to her shoulder. She climbed through it with her fingers. She told me she and her husband lived farther north. It was in the county that had been nothing but fields for so long.

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Children, listen to the rulers of the disgraceful world. Distinction through acquisition compels its own repetition. It breeds. Havent you heard? At every stage the acquirers say they have this or that. They say it is something very distinct from what others have. Let me tell you in confidence what I mean. I know we have the same experiences at the same moments across our lives when we are not together. Each development of land is staged. Farms into cities, woods into preserves. Older youth denounce younger children for immaturity. Theyve forgotten younger children are moved by fairness and equality. But at this time, also, they begin to long for a place where they might abolish class distinctions. Believe in me. Believe in me. The older woman flicked stray hairs from her fingernails. She shook her hands and folded them in her lap. She inhaled loudly like she was preparing to play the part of wind for a childrens theater. I thought at first I was the one most bothered by it, she said. But I think the incident affected James most. Thats my husband. He told me to tell you hello by the way. I didnt tell him I was coming to see you. But he seemed to know. Maybe I did say something and just dont recall. She held her arms in front of her. It was like she was suddenly before of a brilliant light. I dont know what to think, she said. Youve heard the same things weve heard. We may never know what happened exactly. Really I have no reason to think what I heard didnt happen. But, if I thought about it as much as James does, I might have a different opinion. Ive always been able to settle on things than he couldnt. I dont know. I really dont. What do you think happened? I think hed want to know. I told her I didnt know what to think. Yes, she said. I understand that. Well, James keeps talking about his idea. Im not sure if he is trying to be funny or if he sees it or if he wants to see it. This little bridge over here, whenever we cross it, he talks about the same thing. He says, Honey, there he is again. There he is! Right along the bank. Then hell go on to talk about how he clearly sees the homeless man right there and hell tell me what hes doing. Its like he was my youngest boy and wants to tell me everything about some animal at the zoo. Its usually not very much. He just likes to tell me. He talks about how the homeless man eats bread on the bank and watches the river go on. He says when the homeless man sees a bird, it might be an owl, the owl comes to him with bread and swoops down and places it in his hands. I know people have trained birds but Ive never heard of anyone doing it with an owl. Where would an owl even find bread? I dont know if any of this is true. I just need my thoughts outside myself for a few minutes.

40. And I awoke again. The revolver the former student had forgotten was on the passenger side. It appeared like an unbroken figurine at the bottom of a moving box. It crouched where I had not seen it. I looked closer. But when did the older woman leave? The passenger seat was locked.

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And I exited the car into a rain grown cold. Green and pear yellow leaves patched the cement. I stumbled for no reason. I stood tall to look for the older woman. I no longer knew if I ever fired a gun. I saw a shooting range, copper casings. I didnt know if what I imagined was only the picture of what I imaged a place like that would be. But I was there. It was a time before I was a young man and I was in the basement of a high school. Older boys stood behind a line of demarcation. I saw rings screwed on paper targets. I remembered I could not lift the rifle to my shoulder. I remembered I could not stand upright with it. I knew it was night but feared a class bell. I feared a run of students. I feared the undertow. I would be there among them, unattached to everything. I moved to the passenger seat. My legs hung outside and the revolver lay on my thigh. I saw myself from above. My head was bowed and my spirit over the waters. Once after I began college I went through wheats and stories between towns where a highway will never be. I went to a city near Canada, to a music hall. A student I went with told me a man who tried to kill himself went there often. He said the man put a bullet to his jaw that carved out a cavity. He said the man now wore a scarf around his neck. I pictured the thick substance of darkness. I told the other student that, but he said the man didnt look like that at all. He said people who had seen him talked about the wound and its splintered cayenne pulp. I didnt want to think of that. I returned to my vision of darkness. He was an inventor or superhero becoming invisible. The music hall had turrets like a play castle. The ballroom was vast. I knew none of the musicians on stage. They seemed crass when they grinned. The women who travelled with them waved from a balcony and drank. Relationships between men and women are transitory. This will always upset me. They pair off and remain. They pair off. Stay. Believe in me. Ive said I didnt see the man without a face but now I know I do not believe that. His absence was a thickness. It was what most bothered me most. Do you know only an exact gunshot will immediately end your life? Without it, the round tears off the flesh of your brain and you bleed and bleed but thats all. You wont die unless you are left alone long enough. I didnt want that. I feared disfigurement marked a sign in the world for life after life. I didnt want to argue. I imagined, as I thought I was the first to imagine, the cleanest way. I would call paramedics. They saw this all the time. I would leave my identification beside me and a note under a drinking glass. I would talk about responsibility, uncertainty, love. I would address the people I was required to. I would say what I had to say so others would not wonder when they could release me. The state once set aside the times for the things of death. Indulgences were controlled, exaggerations assigned. I hoped my spirit would wash out in blood and give its ascension. I would not be retained by the world. I would see everything, the boiling of novae, the stars on fire beneath the earth.

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41. At that time the homeless man appeared beside me. He stared forward into the creek as if we were looking over a ravine that could not be expected in the geography. He carried a walking stick. It was cut from an almond tree. I stood with him. The rain continued as it had. The homeless man wore a long coat that covered his clothing. His ankles were bare. A screech left the woods along the bank. It was a cry subsumed in itself. My lord, the homeless man said. I havent seen rain like this for years. Im in a position to know. If anyone can say that I can. He tapped his walking stick against the earth. The worlds hard on people like me, he said, people whove been going long enough. Its what we chose. People will say that. I suppose theyre right. Were not asking for sympathy. If we are, it doesnt look like its worked too well. I couldnt be certain if the homeless man recognized me but I was not afraid. I have everything I need anyway, he said. It comes to me. Plenty of fish, every kind. Enough helpers to watch out for you. What do you mean? I said. Well, he said, it would be hard for you to understand. We dont know each other very well. He tapped his walking stick again. Yes, he said. Theres nothing to say to that. We should at least move to the creek to get under the trees and out of the rain. You agree? Yes, I said. Of course you do, he said. Inside the woods the air and floors were cool. The rain was winter stormwinds from inside a house. The homeless man struck at mounds of earth. His walking stick was never still. Ive seen a lot of tunnels dug up around here lately, he said. Im not sure whats the cause, good or bad. Im a peaceful man, Balthuz, and youre a peaceful man. You and I try to help people. Not everyones like us. We sat on the bank together. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what happened a few days back, he said. But, as you can see, Im still here. I have the same shape. I still feel the same. Look for yourself. Tell the others. But if I knew there was so much confusion, you could ask me, why didnt I straighten it out? Thats a very fair question. He turned to me. He smiled like a proud child. Im a different kind of man, he said. Im sure youve been able to notice that. Really, and I know you know this, I may not be anything at all like most people you know. Yes, I said. Yes, he said. We keep seeing each other for a particular reason. Why else would you be seeing so much of a person like me? It should seem funny to you. And, I hope you suspected this too, Im watching you closely, seeing if youre thinking and acting like we all hope you might. None of us have an outcome well insist on. The selection is mostly to pass the time. The homeless man threw a branch into the water.

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You see, he said, youve come across an idea most people in your position only pass through. Part of you hopes its true, part of you cant help but think its true. So Im here to see if youll try to find out. I think you will. The homeless man laughed like Id reminded him of an adventure wed been through. Tonights a time no different than any other, he said. Its only never been yet.

42. I looked into the creek waters and knew I could never die. My body and spirit closed over me. I was realized, and I was a child in Christ. The homeless man rose and paced the shoreline. He caught my eyes and turned back to the creek. He slapped the waters with the rod he carried. He brought it down with such force he stumbled. The homeless man laughed at himself and turned to me with a quickness hed never demonstrated. His eyes burned. So you know? he said stumbling over his words. So you realize? I dont imagine you have full courage in your beliefs yet but I think you will. I know you want to know why I am here. Why are we speaking together? Isnt it very strange? He spoke crisply and without the drawl he had affected before this time. He no longer spoke as if he was considering his thoughts after he gave them. I do not know what it is like to come to realize what you have started to realize, he said. I have always known. I was birthed into knowing. I am a whole creation. I cannot say why you were created as you were. A person has abilities and functions. Knowledge comes from those things if it ever will. And why am I here? Because I moved this body to this place. Because we have grown very bored in heaven. Because even though the order and function of things continue without revolt we do not wish them to carry on in the same way anymore. Are we selfish? We are no more selfish than the souls. I and the other prophets of Christ are tired of all of the idleness in heaven. Among the souls and among even ourselves. We resent it. We suspect there will soon be a transferring of sovereignty. None of the souls are fit. I do not think they would accept a position even if it was offered. They are too comfortable in their soups and pools. In that mud. They had cities and territories left to pioneers among them and to the new creatures. They are complacent and entitled. They claim our Christ in heaven was a soul once as they were souls on earth. No one knows whether this is so, not even Christ himself. He has started to forget. He is beginning to forget everything. He has begun an unfamiliarity with the endlessness of his life a recognition that girds the privilege. And you cannot understand this yet, but that is the reason he will no longer be as Christ. He is weak. He will lose his place without a realization of his expanse. Ive heard there has been many like him, but we prophets have committed ourselves to inspiration freed from forgetfulness. We are apart. The homeless man struck the creek again with his almond wood rod. Come down to the water, he said. I will tell you that now I am testing you. I myself find it unnecessary because I believe you are a child of Christ. The other prophets would ask for validation. I myself understand it only to be useful for those reasons. But come. I walked to the homeless man. We waded into the waters until it reached our chests. The rain had stopped. Do you hear anything? he asked. 61

The homeless man then asked me to forgive him and grabbed the back of my neck. He rose up and pressed, pushing my head just below the waterline. He held firm as I struggled. Eventually I made my body limp before rushing at the surface. Still his arm did not move. I opened my eyes under the water. I could see nothing. It was the motion of oils. My chest burned. The homeless man then released me. Do you understand? he said. We believe you do. We could wait however many decades necessary, but, like everyone, we have our preferences. I wiped my nose. The homeless man lost his dimensionality against the creek shore. I understand, I said to him in a voice that sounded suddenly very unfamiliar. I am a child of Christ. The homeless man was a shadow on the land. He sat with his walking stick. He gestured. The rains began again and he vanished. And deep wind filled me. It was not from the storm. And I felt my body drop into the waters below, and there I fell through a forgetfulness.

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PART II 1. Sickness opened a heat in my chest as I passed through the waters. I saw moons and dust. They swayed in a flash of milk. They burnt away beneath me. If I had not seen them they would have never had been. I saw Jesus Christ Our Savior. I saw him there, beneath the milk. No one in earth or heaven had seen this. The event could not have been until I took it from dirt. I was outside a castle. I was at the base of its palisades. I looked below to a field of swamps. I stood with the homeless man. Figures stirred the mud pool within the swamps. The air around them was old air. To one side of the field was a forest and on the other was darkness. I let my head fall back as the sickness of earth passed from me. Stars burst above a clearing. Clouds formed and reformed. They were lovers torn apart endlessly. As the homeless man spoke to me at the creekside, I knew he and the others brought me to heaven so I could become Christ Jesus. I knew finally my body could never die. My sense was greater than Christs. It was that which was most powerful in me. Christ. He was Christ but could no longer be. He would soon lose his sense of realization as Christ. His claim to the palisades embarrassed itself as an appointment. I was a living force. Christs forgetfulness insulted the body that floated over the waters before the world began. Light does not pass through a gate if it is passed. A guard closes a door that has always been closed. Absence spins out relationships that once were and never have been. Trespass is not trespass against an unprepared man. That man is the thief in the night. I see him. I myself labored in the wild. I took honey and fruit. I did not wash my hair for years. I knew I would be to my children as I would always have been to them on earth. These are my children on heaven. They understand. They are in sets. Neither could leave the other. If one did, they never would have ever been together. A stick breaks. One side first gained independence. Now they were never together. Soon heaven would break too. It would discard an order of things. The things before the break would be old things and, after, they would have never have been. Christ is ancient and deceives no one. Id known Christ for a very long time. I feared he knew I did not believe in him. I saw he slept and I never slept. I never slept and I labored. Christ forgot his body. He sat in a great house with advisors and beasts. Vessels and records for a kingdom walled away without docent. He sang about his glory on earth to himself sometimes but not very much. The details of the songs dried in his records. Mostly, he counted the silver in bricks overlaid on paths he never crossed. Spells of zealots dug into a western forest and some swept even beyond it. The dead souls in combs did not know them. All sets told the sorcery of their nobility in heaven. The old man forgot himself and their records and they knew he could not remember he could never die. The beats listened to the ten advisors. They listened to the homeless man most, who spoke for all of them. 63

Strife stood in the hidden places. Death is ungodliness. I am Labors. I am Jesus Christ. I am the Lord Christ Yesterday, Today. This is my reward. It is my eternal glory. I am the faithful. I do not covet. I prepared to attack the old Christ in a way I would not defend now. I studied his ways because they were not mine. I was in the great house. I was seen and I had always been there with him.

2. I descended with the homeless man into the field of combs where the hosts of dead souls rested. Steam from the heat of their bodies clung to the mud of the pools. Here, there, a soul stirred in the motion at the ends of my sight. They were awful but their presence did not startle me. I sensed them. Their motions were no more than the sounds of small lizards repositioning themselves in the sun. These are the dead souls, the homeless man said. You will know them. They are men who demanded a place in heaven. They believed they uncovered the idea that if they were convinced of the precise desires in the heart of Christ and believed in this idea so much as to hold such a thought without doubt they could not be denied a place in heaven. They continued to heaven from this belief. They demanded Christ torture their bodies if they would swear to any less. They disdain any continuance that isnt their own. I never speak to them about their beliefs in sincerity and consequentialism. They lay their bodies before Christ for the destruction of their enemies. They believe Christ will award all new forms. They think their destroyed skin is Christ in them. They dont ask where the bodies of earth disappear. Their beliefs allow them to reimagine their snail spirits as wonderful to Christ. For them, the destruction of the entire physicality of their enemies is natural and continuous. They do not believe in the pairing of the destructive and the eternal for themselves. They think they were transformed in one act and were always with one another in Christ. They believe in wrath. They do not remember. The homeless man stopped. We studied the souls together. I do not know if they saw us or accepted us or chose not to see. Three or four of the dead sunk in each comb. Their skin was white and stillborn gray. Cords ruptured into polyps over their bodies. An uncoagulated glue swelled from their spines. I saw them shift and whisper. Their combs seemed gnawed into the dirt of the field. I studied the bodies more. They carried skulls that, while tough, had lost their definiteness. Their sockets were too deep. Their larvae sweat shone with malnourishment. The homeless man continued: They believe above all in symmetry. They believe a romantic knows what he desires to discover. To them, extrapolation is a reformation. The souls take pride in the belief their understanding of Christ shares an exchange with the ancients. They believe they have a familiarity of serious-mindedness with great serious men. They believe all teachings with any value have a center. This center has separate parts which form a whole life. If they understand 64

the whole and the parts they understand and validate Christs aspirations. This is why they are here now. They inadvertently evaluated their eternity by a denial of fallibility. It was a trick. Their stories were wrong but Christ did not object. All men must tell themselves stories when a center falls away. But they do not know why they are here. I hear them invent stories of earth based on the teachings of Christ theyve inferred from the behavior of us and the beasts of heaven. So they maintain their minor responsibilities. Worship, self-sufficiency. Retching barked from the near field. It was a dead soul pulling itself by the bones across the dirt. It used one of many ropes strung between the combs for guidance. Up close the dead souls were much smaller, at most half the size of an adult. This one looked like a very old man whod been crawling over a continent of ice for hundreds of years, crawling and sustained on its own waste. The dead souls legs wound around one another. Eventually it reached a shoal and dipped into its comb. The others breathed heavily. The sound droned under their collapsed sinuses. That soul was late for worship, the homeless man said. Now hes late to return. No one wants to return later than others. They believe in tranquility. They call tranquility righteousness. Why do they worship? I said. We are not sure, the homeless man said. They believe it is part of a contract. They believe it is the replicable They claim they do it because they have a love and the gift of wisdom to see. Formality like this is righteousness for them. They believe they have been given a request and responded with stability. The fullness of a replicable response is righteousness. I studied the combs while the homeless man spoke. I saw fogs of ice and the scalding of hot water. The homeless man took in my response. Be very careful in the fields, he said. 3. The late worshipper screeched and rolled into its comb as the homeless man and I drew toward it. It paddled to the center of the mud and back to the ledge where it screeched again. The dead soul panted like it was trying to keep still but could not. Pink and green oils stood on the skin of the surface around it. The homeless man and I saw it staring at our feet. One of us had kicked away the rope leading to its comb. This happens at times, the homeless man said to me, the soul or to no one. An egg white dripped from the souls mouth. It looked up at us and screeched once more. The noise was much louder this time. A chatter washed in from the perimeter of the field. Yes, this all happens at times, the homeless man said again. I dont often come here for that reason. I only came here today so you could understand heavens constituency. Christ neglects them, but the souls in the field do not know. I nodded. Why do you really avoid the field? I said. They despise me and the other advisors, the homeless man said. Thats what we have to assume. We stand as outliers to the contractual relationship they believe they have with Christ. We are not participants in their perception of symmetry. We are a perplexity to it. Some faith traditions do not even recognize us. Others glorify us. We are far more and far less significant than most believe. It is like everything I have told you. Your experiences mean far more and far

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less than you should allow them to mean. Its like the advancements of all peoples in history. It is each one of your experiences. You shouldnt parse a grievance to discover instruction. Yes, I said. The homeless man looked down at the rope wed kicked from the comb. He picked it up and I helped him feed it into the thin arms of the late worshiper. The soul appeared to be sleeping when the rope reached its body. Its skull, beaten soft with age, floated on the surface. A moment later, the late worshipper started to speak with a voice that seemed to rise from the thick wort around it. There is no time established, it said. There has been no direct command. I fulfill my promise according to the interpretation given to my own heart. It is evident to all others but they deny it. Its eyes remained closed. Like every soul in the field, it continued, I will go to the palace and throw everything I have before Christ. With the others I will sing holy, holy, holy holy is Christ almighty. I sing that. I do believe it. I have even thrown everything I own against his palisades just like the others do. You see how we are naked when we return? But we cannot collect our things until we are sure, by whose judgment I can never tell, Christ isnt looking down on us to see our sin. I dont know why retrieving our own possessions is a sin. I say the greatest sin denied by the community is the sin of capitulation. I cannot name the leaders and capitulators for you, but those are the only categories I can see them in. Its a long rolling capitulation they share in. If there is one and another then there is one in between them. The late worshipper floated along the water. Only the muzzle of its face broke the surface. I deserve my place here in heaven, this dead soul continued. I deserve it by right. I claim my place because of the merit of my faith. I believed I should be here just as Christ believed I should be. It is true we share the same views about prediction. No one can change that. Who can interfere with the terms of a private agreement? That is the problem with the others. They are unconsciously preparing for the next contract. They think their perceived salvation will be diminished without new, future rights. They are fixated on them. They are already considering what river is best to forge so they can flee the field. I understand what they are doing. To some extent I even agree with them. But what we have is an inheritance. We came into this place with an understanding of our past life, without any of conveniences withheld for ourselves. Christ set aside all things for us. Christ chose to award us our place because we took what was ours to take. To question that is to question Christs nature. I always knew he would erect this heaven. I cannot say I knew when. There is simply too much to rely upon and too much to recall. It is not my fault. I am forgiven by the merit of my faith.

4. The homeless man knelt at the waters and spoke to the late worshipper. I tried to listen but could not distinguish his words from the sounds of fire that had brought me to this place.

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The sound of fire was that through which I came to heaven. It reminded me of the desert I had fled or of the endlessness of living in the world. It was rising and being pursued through the night. It reminded me of the dust cast behind me. It made me weary and my mind unnatural. I did not know if I would be a man of war. I felt as if I had gone with friends into the center of the city and passed through shops where crowds separated them from me. They walked faster and faster and my voice carried less and less powerfully. Then Id passed through a door to try to head them off but it was not a door to shops they were visiting. I was in a parking garage and I was driving my car then I was thrown to the streets trying to bring my car back to the parking garage. I saw all and it was lawless. I saw the garage for one moment more but I was pulled farther from it. The city was in its bright summer noon and I was too hot. By the time I found the parking garage again the day had grown much later and business was done in the city centers and I had no money with me to pay for fare. You are in a pit, you are in some other place, I heard the parking attendant say. I asked her to repeat what she had said and she said this time that a line of cars was forming behind me and I would have to move quickly. I parked in a lower level and I was hot again. There I remembered my close friends were not close friends but new work acquaintances and we had left that morning for a meeting where we would compete for rewards. These rewards, or the mark of not receiving them, would always follow us. They perceived more of me then I of them so I had tried to study the behaviors they drew from. Always my voice was nearly silent after theirs. They had evaluated, incorporated and dismissed my contributions completely. They were correct. They were counsels to the leaders in the places I had fallen. At the bottom level of the garage, there was a door. It was bricked with the identical texture of the wall which opened in such a way I believed I could go through it and pass to the street and find the meeting place of the day. I would compete with the other associates for rewards there. But, this time, we would find no strife. Later together we would laugh at our misconceptions. When I passed through the door the sky was brighter and more cloudless than earlier. Behind me, over me, was a bluff and formations cut with white rock running down in two streams of tinsel until far away they were joined by fencing. The sound of fire was also the high desert when it seemed like summer. It was the west mountains that vaulted the lake basin. It was the trees disappearing as the land broke east. It was the invisibility of the dust and topaz from the valley and the preceding unknowing that a life there was sustained artificially under a reconfiguration of valor. Valor in the lie of a struggle for conquest, valor in the lie of the completion of conquest. Valor in the lie of the goodness of conquest and valor, even more, in the goodness of the coherence of the commentary of valor itself as a perspective hushed for and made space. As if valor was not presumed in the undertaking of its own task. As if there was valor in beginning a war with saying, Now we begin a war of valor. But it had begun in heaven. I saw the knuckles and soft shoulders of the high deserts hillsides. It was the sun that blew in my face and the drives into the valley of weeks that were the same each week. It was where each afternoon a shadow wiped across the earth. It was where the dusk shot a lavender ink over its teeth into the firework smoke lung of the morning.

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5. I moved closer to hear the homeless man. He became quiet as the late worshipper and a second dead soul who had surfaced in the comb complained to him. Its true, the second soul was saying, we never hear of progress on the new city from you. Not from you or any other advisor. I cant even remember now how long weve been here, but it has been too long. Far, far too long. We have reasons for our expectations. Yes, the late worshipper said. Yes we do. Construction would have never begun if it wasnt for us, the second soul said. I know I have told you this or something like it many times. But I dont believe you listen. Its like what I say isnt a truth weve all agreed on. We are children of Christ. We were brought here by him. He prepared us a city. We deserve to be in this city. Yet here we are each day. Why dont you trust us? We offer Christ our worship. The second soul sputtered. Where is he and where is our city? I know you have questions, the homeless man said, but you may not necessarily speak for all the children here. He gestured to the late worshipper. Of course I speak for all of us, said the second soul. That one sometimes speaks against the rest of us but only to guests. They dont know he is bored and self-aggrandizing. Besides those speeches that we have total consensus. Dont tell me something you dont even believe is true, the homeless man said. I have heard this complaint before but I have heard other voices. Beyond that, you also fail to offer any evidence that statements you base your complaints on are anything but gossip themselves. Let me ask you What new city? What promises? The second soul screeched and slapped the surface of the water. You are a liar, the second soul said. The new city is inside those woods there, or beyond it somewhere. Dont try to deceive us. Do not try to divide us. We know you were given authority by Christ to speak for him about the construction of the city. Which is his choice, the late worshipper added. We do not mean to challenge his decisions. We have never mean to do that. No, said the second soul. No, we havent done that. We have considered many things but not that. We have showed enormous restraint. We have been patient in our expectations. We are very patient despite our knowledge. We know we should be received fully by him. We have a sense of what this would mean and what it would be like to be with him. This sense is the one thing we know for certain. We understand what has been promised to us. You do, the homeless man said. We do, the second soul recited. Christ chose to lay immortality upon us. He keeps us in his memory. But we are not fools in the resurrection. This state were in cannot be what it is to be a celestial body. We are more asleep than we are awake. We are in a state of living the life we once did in our natural bodies. At least in our former lives we did not have these expectations. We knew our waiting on earth would end. But what was that former life like? the homeless man said. You know I cant remember, said the second soul. I conceded that to you and you should allow me to. I know what I know more clearly than ever. This is clear to me you and the other advisors are dishonorable. I know there is a city, there is place beyond this state. I know it is 68

great. I know it was there even though you will not tell me. I know it because I cannot sleep. I am still hungry. I know in the deep of my flesh I will rejoice someday. I will not be tired like I am tired here. In someplace far away the weariness will be taken from me. But please know that we love Christ, the late worshipper said. That can never change. Yes, the second soul said. But what if at some time he was gone, quickly, without us knowing gone, in the twinkling of an eye? What if that happened? That couldnt be helped. Or would we even know? Do we only see through our affirmation of his materiality over time? The homeless man stood up. Listen to me, he said, if you are sure there is a new city, and you are sure you have a place in it, why dont you go to it? You are not walled in here. This is paradise, not prison. I will not stop you. None of us will. You know no one watches over you. The second soul was quiet. Why not go to the new city? the homeless man pressed. Christ told us never to stop your wandering. Because, the second soul slowly began, we do not know if the city it is finished. Do not try to confuse us. We should know from Christ if it is there and if it is completed. It is our right. I can imagine what it should look like and what it should contain. But finishing it is not my responsibility. You cant avoid responsibility by assigning me to be the architect. I see the argument you are making, the homeless man said. Then why dont you go to the new city to see what believe must be done? Why dont you go see for yourself everything that is there? Why dont you provide demands for improvements to be done before you move in? Why do we have to decide for you? Why is that the only form of a covenant between us? The second soul was quiet. Both it and the late worshipper let their weak ancient bodies drift from the ledges of the comb to its center. I kicked one of the ropes for no reason I could think of. The homeless man and I continued to walk on.

6. After a few hours, or maybe after many hours, farther down the field, a wolf trotting in between combs threw off the contour of the near sky to surface in our perception. I saw its nature by its figure. I saw it stop for a moment in the daylight of a moons copper ore. Its jaw was long and its legs molting. Its eyes were either sown shut or the breeding of histories without light. We approached it. My pace slacked behind the homeless man. He praised the creature. He explained the wolf was also an advisor. He said the wolf heard the unadjudicated cases of dead souls. He said they were largely the cases of those who risked the suspension of their pardon. Punishments came at the request of either advisors or other souls. The homeless man said convicted souls served their punishment in a covered pit. He said the sightless wolf would take them there. When we reached the wolf, it was standing over the comb of a dead soul wrapped in a purple garment. The soul brushed at the waist-level water with its limbs. I will be the first to say, the dead soul was saying, that I never engage in discussions related to those kind of ideas. It doesnt matter who proposes them. I believe each action I take must be completely necessary. You can never be too cautious. Each party must consider each act 69

coolly and rationally. Every soul must look at his interests and weigh the costs of those actions and the extent of commitment required. This is a belief I have always held. The soul addressed could have been addressing us or the wolf. I imagine it is because of a misunderstanding of my beliefs you visit me today? The wolfs tongue hung from the side of its mouth down to the earth. It began to circle one way then back about the comb. It stopped only to paw loose earth that breaking off the small bluff of the comb walls. The body below brushed at waves in the mud. Of course, the dead soul draped in purple continued, you can see by the accomplishments I provided, the institutions I affiliated myself with and the people I ingratiated myself to that the opinions I hold are respectable and would not compromise my ties with any of those associations. It is why I speak how I speak and approach topics like I do. I respect myself. I will admit that I understand how to broach these subjects palatably. Whether it is through prose or speech, a disinterested and good-natured tone is always the best way to convince those who desire to be convinced. Every respectable body knows somewhere in themselves what they should be convinced of. I believe that. The wolf stopped for a moment. It seemed to nip at the soul. The proposition? it continued. The proposition. Let me say something about that. The idea becomes more refined each time I present it. That is why you are here. I am sure you will try to characterize me wrongly for saying this but I in no way meant anything against you or the other advisors when I thought of it. Believe me, you would have done the same in my situation. I could not have known to do otherwise. You can see that cant you? I could not have known to do otherwise. Ask any of us. We were in a situation that called for a remedy and, since, of course, the remedy had to be unpleasant, I wanted to see it carried out over the briefest period of time possible. Isnt that what real compassion is? Ushering in an era of peace with a swiftness? If one has a capacity, this gives a corresponding responsibility to share yourself as an authority. How else will your essence live on? Ideas have never been distinct from the material of the body. A star broke above us. It shattered among worlds and split into days and nights on end. I am the only one who ever saw its death. Because of it, the star would die with me and never had been ever once before. The proposed operational tactics against you and the other advisors, the dead soul in purple said after clearing its voice, would have been launched only in keeping with the laws of heaven and earth. We promised to obey the law to the greatest extent possible. We took an oath. Ask any of us. Please understand that we did not know who you and the other advisors were when we arrived. You have to admit you did not immediately provide us with an explanation not even an outline of your legal reasoning. What should we think? We knew you were not Christ and yet we desired to see Christ and we soon saw we had great difficulty, though not utter disability in movement, so, apparently to us, it couldnt have been wrong for a reasonable person in our situation to presume you and the other advisors were the actual hostility inflicting this frustration upon us. What were we supposed to do? We had no weapons and we are weak. That is the only reason any of us would have ever proposed using our teeth. How else could we be secure? Like Ive already said, the ambush even had the safeguard of a resolution to execute the strategy as expediently as possible. The removal of each of you from the field of engagement would have taken no more than a few weeks, or, possibly, a few months. Additionally, you

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would have been given the opportunity to issue a full surrender at any time. We all agreed you had a full right to that process. The dead soul in purple raised began to give an alternative explanation for the dead souls campaign, but, before it could develop an explanation, the wolf snapped its jaws across the souls face and pulled it from the comb toward the covered pit buried somewhere in the darkness.

7. When we had reached the last shadows cast by the field of combs the homeless man clasped his hands above him and motioned his body toward the palace of Christ. Would you like to come meet the other advisors? he said. I think after you meet them you will understand better why we decided to call you from earth. Yes, I said. We walked and walked. I left myself. I left myself or I saw I was not of myself and with myself as I had been before. I was conscious of a view from a center of limits of the mass I moved within. I did not know the taxonomy of my own spaces other than that sense of it. I drove through heaven in a cloud of smoke. My movement was like a movement I dreamed. It traveled through western hills at night after the snow. It approached a town where I planned to meet a friend whod, before I left, suddenly broken correspondence. I could see the town and snow bailed around it. To one side on a higher plain was an old aluminum commercial sign with lettering boiled off its face. No one from any road below could see it. I felt like it had once been an advertisement for real estate. Joy. Maybe it was an advertisement for an old town never incorporated. It was a town left in the bush, a town planted a cemetery and vanished. My friend lived in the new town plotted by the barons of miners. Religious revivalism reclaimed and saved it by a resolution of the people. On the far side of the town a river dug out a cut by a stone mill. The owners fought with wire thieves. Before me, at the cleft of hills, a porcupine lay wrapped in a canvas bag. Char and pellets washed out its gut. I did not know where it was caught. Maybe a trap in the valley. Maybe a trap that yawned fallow for almost a year until the bottoming of winter shook out the dirt eaters. The ice felt lighter to them and they peered out onto a far away splintered earth. The porcupines mouth hung open. It was like the face of a harlequin representing death through exaggeration. I was bothered that the animal was only partially covered in quills. I could not accept a predator could root underneath it, that its belly was soft, that its hands were small. I couldnt believe it might ever fall from a tree it scaled or that it could be harassed by a nesting hawk. These cruelties began with the invention of real estate. They began as additional company towns cooled into highlands. Young men left their families. My friend said twice that year the valleys of the river flipped old men over in their trucks so that they might die. The first man was a drunk. The coroner reported he died of it admitting he couldnt make a medical conclusion from the remains. The car had burnt up like a couch on a campfire. If a driver is so drunk he lies on the accelerator long enough that can happen, the

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coroner said. The second man was too weak to pull himself out and black night froze or starved his body. A hunt for him organized by adult children with their own lives came too late. Walking back across the field the combs seemed like reflection pools for the palace. The structure itself might have only been a natural formation, its image only stone accepting meaning from the marbling of the scale of a sky without atmosphere. Mountains spiked in the west.

8. Returning to the palace took much longer though we did not change our pace. Moons fell and were released. They crossed like fountain streams. The nightshade over the east side of heaven rocked. It came a time we approached a dead soul waving a ribbon above its head. The homeless man did not look at it until I turned him to the body. He sent me to speak to it but warned me not to stay long. Whenever I now looked at the homeless man I did not know what I saw of him or what I mended from the spaces his vision that my experience disappeared him into what I chose not to know I saw of him. Our meetings toughened the same memory as a memory of all of the day before with the same lack and resolution. His voice annunciated a thinness of an argument. It reviewed to rebuke. Heaven half slept a passing I lent my body through. Hello, the dead soul with the ribbon said as I approached. Hello, hello. Hello to you both. The soul welcomed me with a coo. It continued as a guardian breaking up bites of a meal for a child. My name is . . . I am not sure I have a name, it said meekly. Thats fine. I rarely speak with anyone. But I am glad you came. I once preoccupied myself with things that began to bore me a long time ago and that I would take up again if I could remember what they were. Its very funny. I go on. I like what I have at the moment. I might ask for more if I knew who to ask. Maybe you could you tell me? Im like most everyone. I know so much but so little too. I am really to know all. Some people dont believe me when I say it but they are the same ones who never ever believe me. They havent talked to me lately because they dont want to know how I found this ribbon. Dont you like it? The soul beat the ribbon back and forth in the air. I like it, the soul said. I like it, I love it. I love more than the other souls remember. Another soul didnt want me to have the ribbon. I dont know why. It was just lying in the dirt becoming mud and sinking out of my sight forever and ever. Id only seen the other soul use it once, maybe twice. What Im saying is true. I needed something to play with so I asked to borrow it. That soul and ones in its comb told me, No, no, its ours and you cant ever have it. Maybe they didnt say it like that but I know its how they wanted it to sound. I asked again later and they said the same thing except they didnt use that tone. Everyone heard them use it. I didnt say much back but they said it to hurt me purposefully. You should try to make decisions without hurting others. Im sure you can if you need to. Its how we can share secrets.

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The soul with the ribbon smiled like a child with a new pet and pointed between its knees. Only then did I notice it rested on the large back of a giant soul submerged in the mud. The body hung near the surface of the comb in a dead mans float. See? the soul said. Its not difficult. At least I havent heard anything too bad about. Souls say a lot of things just to talk. I know that. Its why if youre trying to tell me something thats not true you will only say it once. I have to protect myself. Thats is the work for the advisors, though. The soul pouted blue-white lips and drooled. Yes, I took the ribbon, it continued to argue. If they didnt want me to take it then they could have stopped me or at least stopped me. But they didnt. When I thought back on it later, it reminded me of how souls are less honest they will ever admit. Its one of the things I need to talk with Christ about. I go to worship when I can even if hes never there. I wonder if you could introduce me. It wouldnt be too difficult. Id know how to talk to him it if I were in your place. Before the soul could continue with its request the body beneath it shifted and the soul with the ribbon was distracted long enough for me to leave it. I ignored the cries that came a few moments later and the homeless man and I continued.

9. Again I thought or imagined I had reason to imagine a figure among the shades of the far eastern combs. The homeless man and I continued toward the palace and I meditated on the body in the shadows. I felt then as I did several months before when I saw a child running through a soy field path pressed out by equipment. I developed opinions about the boy. I knew nothing about him except for no reason I believed I should contribute to the portrait. I would say something to say it was a contribution even if it was a recitation. I needed to mix my life with the worlds. Maybe the boy was practicing for school race. Maybe it was for a harvest festival that fall. Maybe the phases of the moon ciphered by the towns settlers as phases for the race shown out in front of him and, know that, he counted his paces with those markers. He would bring up the straw moon. He would begin to practice at night. I was certain the body in the shadows was the blind wolf. I was certain it punished souls with long dunks to the floor of the covered pit. It wasnt malicious. It had an instinct of performance. There is a significance for the caretaker. When we came to the comb of the second soul who shared his place with the late worshipper, it called out to us. The homeless man indicated I should go to it while he circled the area. The ground was filmed with saturation. The beam of the homeless man grew even more vague. His clothes may have changed or only have billowed. Disassociation from the world is part of its reenactment into a space after it. I am very happy to see you, the second soul said as we came to it. I did not know you would be coming back this way so soon. I just had a few more things I would like to add. The second soul clung to the side of the comb. The late worshipper waded in the middle of the pool. Stationary, it parted water with its hands while the other spoke. 73

I have been thinking about our discussion earlier, the second soul said. I understand your skepticism toward my position, just like you understand mine. But I wasnt clear. They need to hear my reasons for travel to the new city. It isnt because we are unhappy here or because we think we deserve better than what we have. Not at all. We feel, you may ask the others, that Christ deserves a better estate for his palace. He deserves more. I cannot imagine he wants us here. He cant enjoy gazing upon this sight of so many souls occupying acres that should be used for gardens, fountains and so many other things. This would glorify him. The homeless man approached the comb. All I myself want is to go see the condition of the new city, the second soul continued. I apologize for any accusations I may have made earlier. They were exaggerations. We dont need to reexamine the argument. What is important is that I have spoken with the interested others and we have a resolution we would like to share. We believe one of us should be sent to see what progress has been made on the new city and report back to the rest. Afterwards, we will act accordingly with the report. This will be in the best interests of us, heaven and Christ. The late worshipper drew closer to the second soul. We decided, the second soul said raising its voice, I would be the best candidate for the journey. We made preparations and I am ready to leave at any time today. We do not ask for anything from you or the other advisors or the place but only that you do not oppose this journey. That is the only condition the other souls placed on their blessings for the mission. The soul lifted its right arm from the comb and held it before the homeless man. Can I have your handshake as a sign of your agreement with us? it said. The homeless man hesitated but eventually clasped the second souls hand. I looked away from them because I felt embarrassed. Shouts and splashing rose a moment later. The second soul and the late worshipper were rolling in the mud when I looked back. They disappeared and reappeared. The second soul popped out of the water and lunged at me. As I turned to run I realized the homeless man was gone in the mud. He had to have always been gone and I had now never known him. And I had superceded him.

10. I ran west toward the forest. It was stripes of thickets allied and old. I was still hours from it. Inside I knew ducts carried preparations tripped by a dilation of the spirit of ages. I imagined I would hear a chatter when I reached the canopy. I ran. My steps were clay drops and I ran. Far away the dead comb souls waxed like a docked row of lake boats in the early morning. And I ran. I ran but did not grow tired. I was not weary. The homeless man was either dead or would provide me an explanation for what had happened. I left it. He would say he tried to sacrifice himself so that I might live. He could not have told me of the coming attack. I acted as I must have. I acted courageously for heaven. I could hear him or someone nearby raising fate as explanation for no other reason than to reiterate the inevitability of the story and the predictability of the future as a significant force. Turning to this person, I might then make a joke but withhold my own beliefs about fate. I would not say how I thought fate was the comfort of all religions, the comfort of natural evolution. There is no fate in continuance. Conquest is real in eternity and a relinquishing of an individual. 74

Fate does not allow realizations. It presumes a central Christ and a set of children. It presumes one eternity and the body as formed. None of these things are true. Flesh. The histories of stars. The lineages, species and descents of human beings. This was the homeless man bringing me back to the palace Why the wolf was with him. Why, before the souls took the homeless man, I saw a red horse with a rider. I saw a red horse with a rider. There was an affliction in heaven of which I was not a part. There was displeasure. I had turned away from the affliction and ways and evils during my realization. Others looked for their fathers but I did not. I knew the words of statutes and commandments. I would not be spread over heaven. My works would not be scattered. That is what I saw in the red horse and rider. In the small rings of knoll pulled out from the combs it was there. I could have asked him but I did not. I surpass the ends and closing of men. They will behold me. I cry out with no purpose but to continue. I do not write to draw comfortable words. My body is not the host. I am my own host and continue through my own body. My children are my body. As the old Christ frayed and scattered his ways I knew I would continue. I would lift my eyes to my body. I allowed myself for a time to believe my endurance came from memories of another woods. I wished I still wondered about the girl who took me. I wanted to believe the reason I did not dwell in her, did not give the seasons to her was the stirring of the dry plants in the breaks of wheat grass. The new chain restaurants built over the spot would upset me if I drove by. Thickets fenced the woods of the school. Remember the cigarettes you showed me nearby? Nickel leaf snake skins and dirt. Then the land was elevated. Then it was through trunks to a hill backstopped where we would fall. I will live forever on earth in heaven. When I returned from the west I stopped at a grocery store in the old town off downtown. A woman sat outside the store. Itd been torn down before it was rebuilt. She organized cans and bills under a the window. Now that store is beside the Mexican restaurant our parents said made them think about the first time theyd seen a Mexican restaurant. It may still be open, its front painted like a young girl, windows cobbed with frost. Remember when your parents took us there? They wanted to end something or start it. I knew then like other times later I did not need anything to continue but my body. It always would. You chose the table. A hutch in long green cloth, a violet peahen headdress centerpiece. Nothing isnt after anything. (NW)

11. And what were our ends of days? You passed from me. I passed into the world. 75

Snow melts in the west. Love exhausts the east. Forgetting and loyalty exhaust. The longer my body is not in a place the longer it was never in the place. Liars pick at the bereaved. The bereaved hear instructions to forget habits. They age white vinegar for the light of death. They stray to the giant ever after. The departed that once were the bereaveds more than all wish to live forever on earth. The deads lovers glorify him. The bereaved extend his life as long as theirs. If they are solemn, if they create curiosities, if they practice rituals his name, if they give up in story, he may carry on longer. This is what a liar says. He relieves mourners of the dead soul. In this, they deny his Pentecost. You are the bereaved, the liars says. Let the dead live through you. You are the bereaved. Let me sit with you. Would you have me? I will go if you wish me to. If you wish me to stay and not speak, I will stay. You are the bereaved and this is a ceremony for you. It is for everyone whos lived but first it is for you. Do you wish to speak of the deceased? Where do you see him in your life? You still hear him at times. You are right, the soul will live for times he used to haunt. Do you know why? You were with him as a lover. He treated you well? This helps. Some people wait for the dead to die long after tenderness between them has gone. Even they feel loss. I feel, in either case, the loss of familiarity is what gives rise to agony. If I leave something on my shelf too long and it goes rotten, when I throw it out, I notice a space there. A long emptiness unhinges its jaw. I fill it with something with the same shape. I refuse to deny myself satisfaction. You do also. After you pass through your first two phases you can feel guilty about uniformity or you can allow yourself the condolence you passed soul would want for you. He would give you the only thing he could give you now. He would give you forgetting. He would say you do not need to give a coda to a line of remembrances for one life within a whole existence. A break with the line is not shameful. Be resolute. He gives you the gift of forgetting. It is the one gift he would tell you he gives you if you asked him this morning. I know that is true. I promise it is. He gives it to you as love for you. To say you must honor him by keeping vigil as Im sure you plan to or to go through the walks you once went on with him as you did before may seem to be a goodness. Your body physically convulses under it. But it is not a ritual for him. Declare for yourself and to the world and to your own eternity that you are incapable of having lived your own life in any other way? Dont say that. Quiet him. Dont let yourself believe that about your own soul. What if you never had met? What about that? No one asks that. You have seen loss and it is inevitable. You experience loss fully. He would not want you to feel that pain. He was a very good man. I know this. Strive to do what else he would request of you. You shared your life. That is enough. What if you learned today you would live one hundred more years? What if you could choose to be any age for those years? Who would your responsibility be to? It would be to your own life. You sustained his life while he was with you. You can continue his life this way but you should not. Your life blessing is your own. Examine yourself alone. Do not be ungrateful to your independence. Your life with him is something that has been now. His life once was. Its present past reflects it. His life is a star burst long ago, wound into the rope of time it takes to reach the earth. But on the night of arrival, no one sees it and it never was.

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12. Butter leaves shawled a bowl of woods; they dyed the red rock hash. Light spread over everything as ocean floor. Every tree was very thin. Their limbs cradled one another in nests. They reached out with thanksgiving. The trunks came to multiply in density. I checked my footing, climbed over roots. I walked west. In this climate for the first time I let thought of what I should now do as Christ yield within me. I was the new Christ. I should see the rest of the heavens first, I thought. Then I can return to the palace. There I will allow him to pass into unrealization. I could hear him cry out. I no longer thought of the homeless man. He had found me, I had gone with him. I did not feel any differently. The dead souls in their hiding places there did not frighten me. They were defeated or abandoned by the others. They would find me through gossip and would repent to me. My mind slipped again. I sang to myself for a girl I did not miss anymore: Past the bulbs and the growth in the store enough for here Cross the doors through the back to the lakeside Where the city replanted waters because it wasnt enough for here When I climbed the catfish in the bed to the lakeside. Oh, come find me my baby with lieutenants at my side, Kiss me up before I go off destroying The tides and discourage you will never fear again When you meet me back at the lakeside. I brought up the sun to have it burn off the snow So you could tell me to look to the far side Where the roots run up to the most perfect tree youve ever seen And you said youd wear your hair long you decided. Oh, come find me my baby with lieutenants at my side, Kiss me up before I go off destroying The tides and discourage you will never fear again When you meet me back at the lakeside. The house by the lake with the ghosts of the children, There I cleared an estate where no one dies, Now come find me, my true girl, and Ill never die again, And Ill take you to the slopes of the lakeside. Oh, come find me my baby with lieutenants at my side, Kiss me up before I go off destroying The tides and discourage you will never fear again When you meet me back at the lakeside.

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I came to a felled trunk. Heaven had split it a third of the way down its side. Rain bore it to the ground. The split was black. Not black like a char but smooth black, as if painted. Spots like flour flipped in craned handles. For a moment, an insect sheen crossed me. A high chatter clicked from above. No, a first voice said. The rumors come from only source which none of us trust. That is the only source. The other reports are just echoes of it. You dont know that, a second voice said. You believe information spread from one opinion because that view fits easily into what youd choose to believe for yourself. That is not true, the first voice said. I should rely on the unreliable? I did not say that, the second voice said. I simply know youd prefer not to believe a great storm will come. You carry as many arguments as you can to convince yourself of it. Im fairly sure its coming, but I can admit I have no more basis for my beliefs than you. Im insisting on truth, the first voice said. That is all I have ever done. I dont know why you do this, the second voice said. I just want to make sure were prepared. I understand that, the first voice said. But a storm is always preceded by an event. That is what causes it. And it will be an event against Christ. Tardiness, non-deference. Maybe something more.

13. I found myself calling up to the voices slipping from the eclipse of bodies above. What event? I said. What is coming? I squinted. The figures wound through latches of plant very high above me. The trees came to rest. I spun and saw myself not in these woods but in western forests from earth. There snow logged my shoes in winter and, come summer, I unfastened my clothes and crossed the chips of boardwalks. One winter I left the path. I came to an open shack preserved only because it had been there before the path was marked. It looked how I thought it must have, how parks and assemblies of people who allow themselves to believe in the heroism of their relatives would like it to look. I was terrified. My body burned like a child trying to hold his breath under water or a girl who thinks about falling through lake ice. In summer I walked with a friend on the same path through mountains and grew so tired we couldnt speak. At the end a dock reached into a private lake. We couldnt swim there. Insects and roots slept over lilies. One of the bodies above me in the woods in heaven leapt from a trunk to a branch where the other one rested. The souls appeared as yellow in oil. Light bleached them and they were gone again. I remember their long loris limbs, their small dragon bodies. Their heads set up on their chests like jewels on a ring. They slouched over their legs as if they might fall on me. Why did you come here again? the first dragon called when the woods had rested again. I heard the second dragon scold the first as the question echoed. We have a right to be here, it continued. You can tell us to leave but we have no obligation to listen to any of you. 78

Of course, you can understand why we say this, the second dragon interrupted. We still havent received any notice or apology in all this time. We dont know what you might do. Please hear us. They leered down at me. They tucked their upper limbs into their sides. They could have been arms, legs, wings. I caught their eyes in mine. I felt nervous like I had accidentally stared at a vicious dog. I flexed my posture and peeked down at my chest. I believed if I didnt not convulse my posture it would give me peace. I tried to concentrate my gaze not on either one but between them. I wanted to pull out my body with the hand of the great body I imaged looking down on me from outside of heaven. Again I felt I was in an ocean passing the underside of a ship. But these waters were bogged in smoke. They were unsafe. The second dragon hopped on the branch and clucked. It spoke over the first to me with excitement. Oh, it broke in. Why didnt you explain who you were? Its change was sudden and strange. Something in the drop of the voice alarmed me. And I was again running through the woods. The vegetation grew wider. I stumbled through the straw of the undergrowth. I rubbed my legs when I fell to a stop. I did not know enough to be this far west. I would fall back across the east. I could taste the water of the creek near my apartment in the world. I heard the bridge roll over. I saw the employees at my work with their heads down. Dread gassed my body. The employees were striking words from sheets. They were using the time they allowed themselves because of their age to each one of them praise the diplomacy of their ambition. I saw the girl whose name I could not remember. The girl in the office who laid her back against the door of the assistant managers office. They kissed, seemed to argue, kissed again. I let myself feel opinions about them from a sense of neutrality. I allowed this even though I had spiked discussions and enlarged gossip around them. And usually the day after or a time after a whip of these kinds of talks I would wait in my car long before I went into work. I would hurry out after. Employees spoke so. I could not discuss what Id already grown bored with. I knew what they recounted about the girl. It would be her or the drunks who crossed the back lot to the bus station. I needed to sleep deeply in those days but never did. I ran. When I drove west the first time through the world I stopped outside Lincoln and lay across the front cabin for hours. I tore the leather seats with my heels and the finish turned up like the back of blue tape peeling from a painted wall. But I was up again and I said I would not sleep again and I listened and there was heat and I ran.

14. I came to a hedge cut out like a goblet where the dragons reperched. They held to its rim and spoke through their eyes to me. I heard them. I am going to use a word for this, the second dragon said. Its one only the new dead use. Energy. We usually forecast an event by the energy from the east. Its the first break in a strike of lightening or the tunneling of the wind. Its the times heaven sits strangely to us. 79

The two of us spoke and found agreement, the first dragon said. In the woods ahead the trees began to thin. Yes, the second one said. We try not to disagree very much anymore. Weve learned we must rely on one another. Our cooperation and vision allow us to be the first to know of an event in heaven. We see rumors foam into discussions. We watch a secrets swells and process. We see Christs children chase positions they believe they must be seen to hold. We know we will reach the city if we cooperate, the first dragon said. Yes, the second one said. It shifted nearer to the first dragon. I realized seeing them this close that Id mischaracterized their appearance. Their skin was much duller, more sleek than reptilian. A thin mucus had set over it. Their sick whale calf bodies doomed them. I could also tell now they did not have wings or tails or claws. Their faces were snubbed. The smiles opening their faces felt familiar. They seemed to be waiting for me to assure them with evidence theyd hypothesized must exist. It is why anyone voluntarily stops speaking in any conversation. I need to see the west, I finally said. I think I may know who I could be. I may know who I should be, who I always was and will be. West from the woods? the first dragon said. Souls sometimes move there but we hear no news of them. For yourself and for all of us, the best thing for you to do is prepare with us for the next event. We could help protect you if you could explain to us what you know of what preceded this next even to be. I suppose you can feel its energy too. Please allow us to apologize for mistaking you as a dead soul. It was the shape of your body from a distance. We did not perceive the spirit that hovers over you. We lived among those souls of the field a very long time. We were once like them but you can trust us now. Many of the other advisors wander through heaven thinking. Please do not return without first spending time with us. I did not speak. We believe, the first one continued, the energy of the event will carry another flood into heaven. An event steeled in the sky. Through it all, you can stay with us if you do not reveal us to the other souls. We know you wouldnt. We are obviously not like them. The red horse who visits us would tell you that. I did not trust either of the terrible dragons in front of me. I drew strength from that. Why did you leave the fields? I said. We left because that standing water because it was causing rheumatism in our spirits, the first one said. We couldnt continue believing what they believed. They hope in receiving everything from nothing. We believe in a new city and a new Christ. The advisors promised us both. We stay here in the woods and not the new city being built for us somewhere in the West out of the respect for the new Christ to come. I feel we may have met before sometime, I said. No, I dont think so, the second dragon said. You dont worry us unless we worry you. We understand your interests. We have the same enemies. They are bound up with the schemes of the other dead souls and delays of migration to the new kingdom. We could tell you were an advisor from a distance because of your convictions. You didnt carry yourself with the bitterness of the dead souls. They have so many grievances they havent taken the time to consider why their numbers plateaued. Thats one of the first things we notice. We started to plan. We gained wisdom. 80

Suddenly a thud shook the ground and water tore a seam from the gray in the sky. The dragons grabbed me by either hand and pawed up a trunk. I grew delirious with the rush of movement. We were inside a tree, we were passing over a branch, we were in the hollow of a taller tree, we flew and fell. For some reason I began to tell them about what had happened to the homeless man as we fled. I didnt know if they heard me. I tried to help hurl our mass along with the position of my body but it seemed to be putting them in imbalance. I looked down and rain rose up from the ground.

15. Black clouds clumped low over me as if all of heaven had been set on fire. The floor of the woods winced at the wind far below me. Drips of rain reached my neck and they were warm. I was in the canopy of the woods with the dragons who had taken me. Id slept a very long time. Id slept for a day or days. I did not dream. Now I always dream. They trouble me. But when I wake, I hold still hoping I can trick my body into exhaustion so I can return to them. The dragons were near. I did not want them to know I was awake. I held the flat of my body so still I struggled not to cough. I worried I breathed arhythmically. Cottonwood seeds blew over me. I heard voices and they were a game of tones. There outside palisades Christs last days weighed on his body. The hills grown to mountains grown to the stars guided by heaven stepped on his neck and exalted me above him. There I would welcome my people. They would gush in. We would live forever. We would recognize the bodies of each other and retake our own. I divided into the nations that come on and say to me. They say, May we see you in the mountain of your home? We want to be with the realized children. We will walk how you walk and we will follow your law. We have fought and slighted our neighbors. We quarreled on feast days. We dedicated and distinguished ourselves and we had forgotten to be with you, the Christ Above our Nations. Let us sit under the vine with you, the nations will say after I make my divisions. Let be with you and not afraid. Move your mouth. Let us see the base of your voice. It is where we will place our host. You, our Christ Above the Nations, are the inheritance of your body. We are the recorders of the transfiguration. I will agree with them. I will assemble them together without strife. I will say, You are afflicted yet I will never drive you from my home again. I make this promise to you. I saw the roses of your daughters cheeks and remembered I must preserve your mothers. I saw your sons feet like coats feet on this mountain and remembered I would fortify you men. You are the remnant of my brethren. I rejoice with you. I will make you great because I am great and you are worthy of my greatness. You will be great with me and never die. I rise over the division of each nation. I am at the rivers and steppe. You are tired but you rise also. You heard the story of the transfiguration. Do you know that is a time neverending?

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I am the foundations of earth. I am the strongest nations I cast from me. I broke them in the stomach of the mountains. I will be with you when you build onyx towers. I will clean the travail of birth. I have gone through the pains of a young woman in labor. How else could I come forth to you like this? I have done so to deliver you, even the castaway strong nations who used bronze and mercenaries. All of you are my daughters . You will never be cast into the Eastern pit if I watch you and protect you. I dwell with you in the fields. I dwell with you in the cane you gather for wisdom. Your thoughts, your palms, the fennel you store are not mine but I accept you in them. I redeem though you wander to the seas end. I purchase you always from the packs of your enemies. They are the beasts. They are the leopard. But leave the entrenchments. I have gathered fields and your altar and so here is the alloy. The others thresh the floor demarcating them from me. They called a horn to one another and consecrated the gain they cannot sell. Yet they still believe substance is fortune. Substance is mine and yours and not a simple civil interest. This is why I see they gather across the whole of the earth. You are my battalions yet you have no enemies here or in the countries you trade with. You will find fields even on the ocean floors. The cereal is old and everlasting. Id given up yourself but I will rule you still. We have returned together to heaven. I feed with you in majesty. We abide here with the winds. Praise him. I am Christ and we are the greatness at the ends of the earth. Nowhere in the north will you find me. I will find you in asylum there. We shall waste the land of the old Christ. He will have no shepherds. We will raise our choir against him. I have seen seven men in seven lands with seven sins on their thousand hands. I was only a lion in the woods with beasts called dragons. They were a remnant of but never delivered from the old Christ. My hand is raised against our adversaries. They will be cut off.

16. The rain of heaven drove the sweat from my temples over my lips. I heard the dragons speak beneath the black clouds. The only thing necessary is to guard him from the gates, the first one said. I dont think he can find them, but if he does, we will see him coming toward us. But why not let him pass through? the second one said. If he finds the gates, we should let him pass. Maybe it would be better to even show him the exit. Why not? If he leaves into the west by himself wont he be less likely to succeed? I dont know, the first one said. Then he is gone, the second one said. Here he is with us asking questions and drawing eyes into the woods. We will be in a much better position of defense later if the other advisors pull him into the revolt. Christ is too weak, the first one said. He loves this advisor. He brought him early. He sent the old advisor to return him. Return? I dont know. 82

Plates of thunder ground together. Did you hear the field souls attack the old advisor? it said. I thought they might, the second said. I dont understand why. For the same reason any of us would, the first one said. Pride. Fear. Rumor of an advisors revolt. Frustration over the city. Boredom with heaven. They are very afraid, the second one said. I dont know at all what will happen if this one escapes west, the first dragon said. Maybe nothing. But consider the anger of Christ. Look at the storm. Sometimes I imagine I see his face in the lightning strikes. My personal belief is that he grows so bored in his palace he will replay the conflict over and over to himself and invest and reinvest in whatever side he chooses to support. And that will never be our side. But wont Christ grow even angrier if he believes we are holding his newest advisor? the second one said. I dont hate this advisor like the others, but we cannot have him with us. Hes very strange. He is more afraid of outbursts of action or weather than he is of us or any other creature. Why does he commit to the characters we play? Why does he force us to take him to our home? He doesnt try to instruct or scold us like the other advisors. He knows we are the oldest souls. We are no different than the others aside from the strength and evolution we gained. And our knowledge. I think he wants to sneak past the gates. I dont know what he plans beyond that. I say send him out of the woods so he will lose his way. No, the first one said. Christ will not forgive us if two advisors so close to him disappear while they were so near to us. What do you think this storm is? It is a warning. It is a search for a child at night also. Its how he sees his advisors. When they are not with him on his dais, he does not assume they arent with him simply out of their own carelessness. He thinks the nation of dead souls lie in wait for them. He fears they have scattered them like they will do to him outside the fire light. He is a mob, the second one said. I dont know what to do. We could take him to the gates of the palace ourselves. We could just do what he asks us to do so the storm of Christ will recede. I understand, the first one said. Let me speak with him.

17. After I heard the dragons discuss this for sometime I forgot my body in the canopy of heaven. On earth, I was west. I was with the small death again. I was underneath a granite bay or ancient lake. It expelled me through a trailer. The city pricked a desert. The people of the land blew through for hundreds of years. They were beginning to settle. I gave my blood away there for no other reason than it was a definite act. I did not know yet I was everlasting. The trailer was in a plaza with a cabaret. There a woman entered my cabin and stuck me. She covered the bolt hole with a towelette. I worried it wasnt fully covered. I turned my face. Mine was an affliction that could not be borne but for grace.

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I looked up at the barn of televisions then past an old woman in black and crimson hair. Outside the two ply panes the west was in afterglow. Blue night pressed blue days. In those places she was always under the apple trees. This desert row led only to reservoirs. It would dry with emigration. I had a friend in the valley past. Her camp was built by a family once in love. The dust of the settlement was topsoil dust. It mixed into fish stocked by county development. It wired tracks of burnt homes and federal claims latched to block casinos. I searched for my nurse when the cuff of my arm began to swell. She came and struggled with it. The old woman in the black and crimson hair spoke to the room about how she used to teach religion classes in public schools. She said she would always teach when schools asked her and they always ask her. She taught older elementary school students. They listened and had good hearts. They sometimes made mistakes sometimes but knew they were mistakes. They said so. They believed in Christianity. Then the schools asked her to teach students who were either older or younger than the older elementary school students. The younger students were too young. They listened but did not hear. What bothered her were the ones who chose not to hear. Most were children and truly blessed. They were blessed as Jesus said all his children are blessed. But she realized some were not children as Christ meant. Some knew, some knew. These children chose not to hear. These children looked at her and listened to the truths she taught and the reverence of faith was never in their eyes. She knew what they would be like when they grew older. They would be like all the older children she had to teach. They would not hear her. You must listen for Christianity. They knew too much and joked too much. They touched with hands and legs and bodies too much. They thought their bodies were play things. She tried but could not teach them. After the old woman finished her appointment she sat with me. We were at the window pane where I rested my arm. It was taped with gauze. She wore a red dress. The old woman in black in crimson hair told me she was eighty-two. She said she always wore red. She said a travel agent told her to wear light colors on a cruise she and her late husband took to get away. She said she told the agent she would wear red anyway. The sun did not bother her. The old woman in black and crimson hair continued to speak on but I did not listen. I looked through the window pane. She stopped kicking her blue liver legs. I saw her push a pyre into an ancient channel. Sand held a print of bodies. And I saw you. But before then, and after. Nothing is after anything. It never was, it always was. It kindles. Blue nights, orchard eyes. Grain in starlight. Your shirt caught. Wed stop. You looked in your parents bathroom like your body wasnt yours. 84

And come spring. And after that. You remember when I wrote about our years. Long grass hay. I miss you most in September. I miss you terribly. Tonight is like night in the county south. Its in the back of cars at the start of spring. You cover your mouth. Your insides hatchet stomp. Two times. Two times. In the far night here on earth I cant tell the land has no trees and I imagine you. I cant see the land takes no fall in my sight. And after you after that is space past west.

18. I awoke after dreams of time that never was. I was now at the head of a dry creek bed. The woods ended there. At the clearing, my arms slumped over a cattle gate. I kicked at the palette clay ridges. Calico horses angled among thinned patches of willowed trees. The land began to rise beyond. Clean paths chalked through the hide of dust. The lines ascended the hillside mount. Nooks cracked the rocks of its barrel. I was not afraid. I thought again of the creatures on the palisades of Christ. I was not afraid, I was not afraid. They had no allegiance, and I was not afraid. I thought of the lenses covering their red ape backs. The second dragon appeared before me. It showed as a young woman with rosemallow hair. I had not noticed her form before. It could have always been with her. I may have only constructed the other image from a flare of shadow and lights. In the clearing her body was more distinct to me than my own. Old tones of scales faded into a creek of twilight at the end of heaven as she spoke. The skies stopped raining, she said. It stopped last night. Maybe the night before. Her voice startled me. It was the blue-gold of a night in the city. I questioned her again. How long was it raining? I said. Or . . . yes, how long? A very long time, she said. The clouds were gone one morning and nothing was left but heavy dew. Maybe Christ forgot his anger. Her teeth were wet. But what happened? I said. Maybe he no longer looks for you, she said. We dont know why, he used to remember all things. He ate everything he saw.

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The young woman brushed her hair over her shoulder with her fingers tips. She looked south for a moment like she had passed her reflection. It was as if she didnt believe anyone was watching her. Has anyone found the homeless man? I said. Maybe thats why the rain stopped. The ground seems dry again. The young woman did not turn back to me. Her shoulders were still. The other advisor? she said. I dont know. No, I dont think so. We would have heard something. We would have heard the fight and a rescue. We would have seen fire. But the end of the storm is proof of something isnt it? I said. Maybe, she said. But things may be lost in heaven. Then they are forgotten. And there are so many of us. All of us are impatient. The animals on the palisades are impatient. The loud field souls are impatient. If they would listen to Christ or approach him while he is lucid he would hear their demands and wouldnt have to make so many promises to them. I understand, I said. A few minutes passed. Wind washed off the hills and knocked the young womans hair behind her. She looked at me as if I had seen the wind approach but did not warn her. I cleared my throat. Does the blind wolf come out west? I said. I think I saw it once in the fields. It may just be in the east. The old man told me about it. He talked about the pit. We have seen it, she said. We also saw it first in the fields. It was always at the outer dark of heaven. We hate it more than the other advisors. The blind wolf is why most do not search for the new city. It seemed to know our motions scents. Did it? I said. I dont know, she said. I think so. He seemed to be picking out the most dishonest of us, at least the ones we suspected were dishonest. They were the ones who agreed just to agree. They were the ones who hid for Christ. I didnt think I was like them, but then I looked at my partner in the comb. I wondered what I had done to be with him. I knew it had to have been something. Yes, I had hidden myself to hide with him. I knew I spent too long living with shallow breath. I continued to listen but the young womans voice became complaisant to me, and I did not wish to speak to her. I did not feel as if I had asked her all I should have. But I continued. And hours passed. I involuntarily looked to a point in the south of heaven. It was where a young woman had been looking to. I turned back to her. I dont remember as much as I would like, I said. Could you tell me how long I had been asleep? It has been a very long time, Balthuz, she said.

19. I had not pushed too far past the cattle gate when again I heard the young woman with mallow hair. I turned slowly. I thought if I did it would allow her to effect significance to my leaving. She would maybe think I left something unsaid. She might wish me to reproach her for a fault she found in herself.

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I would look at her lips, her cordiform lips. I would allow her to mistake the space of unknowing as longing. But when she spoke her voice was not for me. It was for the first dragon winding down headfirst from the high branches. The bassinet they had made in the suns of heaven swayed. The young woman and the first dragon came together quickly and immediately broke into an argument. I imagined she wanted to glance back to me to make sure I hadnt yet left. This dragon appeared the same. But it looked much larger now with the young woman knit beneath its weight. No, the first dragon was saying when their voices became distinct to me. No. We changed the decision several days ago. We have no reason to change it again. You say we made a new decision, the young woman said. But it was not our decision together. It wasnt mine. You have forgotten the storm already and chose to remember what you want so you can remain defiant. I do not, the first dragon said. And that is not what happened here. This is different and it is very important. I wouldnt mind that you broke the agreement so long as it didnt have so many potential consequences for us. What happens now? What do you think the consequences will be for all of this? We dont know all that will happen, she said. He is gone and thats over. There is no way for anyone to find out he was captured. So what if he does assume a rank later? I dont think he will remember us and be angry. It doesnt matter, the first dragon said. It does not matter. I cant think of anything good coming from letting him going free. If Christ discovers we captured him and that we held him for so long he will pour down another storm on us until heaven is filled. And this time he will direct it all at us. He will wash us back into the fields. And so what if that advisor rises higher to Christ? What will happen then? Do you think the heavens will be quiet? You do not know what will happen. You do not know anything. The young woman actually did seem to glance at me just then. She took a slow breath. We cant speak to each other like this, she said. We cannot be this angry. I am not angry, the first dragon said. It paused. I am not angry, it said again. You know my feelings. I am only worried. I dont want to return to the fields. Neither do you. Do you remember what it was like there? Do you remember how our bodies were there? Do you remember the threats and the duties and all those other souls? Their wasted faces. We could lose our evolution. I dont know how that would affect us. What would happen to our minds and our time here? Where would we go? Would we begin to forget? I know, the young woman with mallow hair said. But maybe nothing would happen, but maybe something should happen. Maybe something much better. Maybe there will be corrections to our lives here. I cant tell if you agree with me, the first dragon said. The young woman looked away again to the south. Above us a starlight no one had ever seen noticed lost its definiteness. A new beam appearing in the brushwood skies blackened it. A fire that had cooked the starlight burnt out long ago. Neither had ever been.

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The young woman remained turned away from the first dragon. It looked to the south also then drew closer to her. Hey, it said snapping its fingers in her face. You must stop this. The young woman slapped its arm without turning. They did not speak. Before I faced the hillside and began to walk into the west the last vision I had was the first dragon nursing its hand. It stared in hate at the young woman with mallow hair. The feelings had been hidden away. Shrieking came a few moments later. I did not turn back.

20. I am righteousness. I am Jesus Christ Our Lord at the Summit. I went toward the hillside so that you might hear my voice. I do not leave you. You have not been told yet a controversy rushed around me at the foundations of earth. It was a controversy among the Souls, the Days, and the Things That Never Were. Each one quarreled with the other for a thousand years. Christ the Christ at the time waited but did not hear them. He said he could not make pronouncements when he had already begun to forget the indestructibility of his flesh. And so had retired to the desolate places within himself. The Souls and others met again in this absence. The Souls agreed their greatest fear was that they might not always continue. The Days met also. They agreed that their greatest fear was that they might be forced to continue always. The Things That Never Were found one another also. They spoke quietly for a long time. Eventually they agreed they were terrified they could never know for certain if or how long they would continue on earth or in heaven. The terror of them all continues. And I am with all of them though they weary me. I am with them though they would testify against me. I am with them all though they demand new cities from me daily. I am the true words from their fathers though they may be my enemies now. Some are wicked. They believe the ambition of flesh to continue makes them good. They do not believe a time before a birth was really a time at all. They are contemptuous of those who loved during that time. I loved and do not love. There was always once a time before my birth until there is not and I will never have been. The wicked do not share my table. But I remain an offering for these Souls and Days and Things That Never Were. I am the morning stars. I am with the east house of the temple. I disfigure my own knowledge of the western ends. Many will bear my indignation. They will bear days of trouble. They were once children of souls but do not acknowledge the tenderness they have when they greet others with them as children of souls. They see these others and avert their eyes from them. They speak to unrealized ones and they try to humiliate them for no other purpose than for esteem. This is the work of evil

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hands. It dishonors their fathers and is a sorrow to their mothers. This cannot come to the house. These ones will not see the darkness in the east house. I will find statutes they do not know. When I do, they will be unforgiven. These ones are the same souls that give rich men violence. They enter courts and weights for the use of the unjust. Their actions are a sickness without reward. I am with those who drink my friendship. I rejoice for them. I am with them in the courtyard or wherever there is darkness. He who is my enemy knows I am set against him. He who is not does not. I find no strife among the latter ones who themselves are sown among the Souls, the Days and the Things That Never Were. They do not cleave to these groups. They hear the Souls beat away dissent saying they may not always be. They see the Days form processions for a sovereign never blessed. They see the Things That Never Were build up the endowments of their schools adolescences. They hear and see these things and they are not concerned with them. None are like the ones whom I love. These are the ones will make a realization with my hands. They tell heritages that will not rest while others care for them. The worms of the earth say this and in it they transgress against me. These are my children, and I love them. I wish to be with them always. But now I am very tired. I am tired as I never was. And I think about when I roamed the hills in the west of heaven.

21. My own mind now is not my own, as when I roamed into the hillside. It is now as the mind of the old Christs. It is sunk in the palisades of heaven. But as I left the woods I was new in Christ. The old Christ was exhausted under a shadow of the plain and did not know his own flesh. He was then like a man inside the world who acquires his riches with credit. Societies speak for him, years pass, lenders recess for a time and he balances his money so it appears he is the perpetual man he asked to be spoken as. But eventually his lenders call. They approach him first informally with flattery, then invitation and with formal letters. It seems to the rich man that at each stage they demand more and extend less time. He respond to each inquiry with a promise and a joke. His jokes are always based on the premise of how ridiculous the situation would be if he was not truly who he held himself out as. A short time after the first of the formal letters, he lucks upon a new creditor. He draws close to the creditor, attends its galas, situates himself in front of it as other legitimate debtors do. Soon the new creditor agrees to advance him more than enough to satisfy the old lenders. The rich man continues as he did before, honestly forgetting the ruin he only by chance was able to avoid. Only a few months later, however, the new creditor calls on him. The call presumes no wrong, but is firm. It describes to the rich man the terms of the creditor just as it would for legitimate debtors.

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The rich man reads the term carefully even as he pretends to himself he is making plans for the upcoming week. Even the first payment is much more than he can afford without a disruption noticeable to those in his society. For the next few weeks the rich man carries on somewhat content he will encounter another new creditor. Eventually, however, he finds himself attending more galas, calling old friends, reading more financial literature. He does not read too closely because he believes someone will extend him more credit, especially in exchange for some kind of favor. But the rich man hesitates to call anyone he knows for certain might be so situated to clear this record. He knows he cannot be obligated to any station he wishes to supersede. He thinks over days and days now, full days, and yes, now the payments will soon be late. Even worse, an agency for the new creditor will soon surely make a note on a title at the courthouse. And who might examine his papers at the courthouse? Will his name be in a judgment? Maybe who could hide something small but he isnt sure. And who would this magistrate know? He suddenly becomes angry with this magistrate he images is abusing authority with gossip. Just then his original lenders begin to call again. The sum he owes is now three times the original. It is an extravagant sum. It will not be a small matter, and there will be penalties. Oh, and, of course, a notice of this penalty will be sent in a tri-folded letter to the licensing office of his profession. The office will receive the letter, mark it, disseminate it, set it on the docket for a proceeding, set in motion a routine that must be carried on. He imagines a committing holding a hearing on his flagrancy. It would have to at least censure him. The vote will be unanimous whatever the penalty. One member might raise a nonbinding objection based on a procedural rule he thinks is out of fashion or too reactionary. But this will have no bearing on the discipline and the objecting member and others will agree the profession cannot tolerate a man whose unlawfulness could become known to so many. Members of parallel professions might ask why a profession would permit such a distraction of tradition. The man thinks about this future for several weeks. He is paralyzed until he receives a letter from the most aggressive of the old lenders warning him the implication of long-delayed payments is publication in the record. Anger passes over him momentarily before he feels the symptoms of physical hysterics Always he had a way to continue his life as it been. But this time he can find no way. He runs through his tactics again to himself, puts away the less desirable actions. He furiously reviews his mistakes, reviews the successes of others, and still finds no answer. But could those who failed before him simply had bad information? Maybe they made a simple mistake he never would. The next day the rich man comes to a professional man who has been through worse yet after several years of quiet found a way to distinguish himself. The rich man flatters the professional man and forgets for the time that he has not met him simply to be advance his own life. He leans in his chair and watches in appreciation as the professional man speaks. I have done very well since my troubles ended the professional man says. And so the rich man this debtor confesses what he must to the professional man. The professional man listens and does not seemed shocked by any of it. He asks no questions but does not interject. When the debtor is finished, the professional man tells him he now manages an upper room in one of the tallest buildings in a new section of an important region of the state.

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Please, the professional man tells the debtor, take a position with my company in the upper room. You will be safe there. Things will be resolved over time or, at worst, forgotten. The debtor accepts the offer. He shakes the hand of the professional man and, even as he does, he is calculating. He must work there at least two years to repay these debts. As a courtesy, he will stay three possibly. His lenders will be satisfied to receive regular payments. If all stays quiet, they will not even know he is at the upper room. One year passes like this. His lenders retreat. He even sees an officer with his new creditor and they share wine at the kind of gala he is comfortable at, though attends less frequently now. He allows himself to believe the lenders developed a fidelity to him somehow as a man of honesty. A second year passes too. The debtor has now taken on this new life. Imagining he will continue as before becomes routine just as long as he stays in the upper room. But one day, in this second year, the professional man tells the debtor he must leave early. He tells the debtor not to worry and that he will return the next morning. However, he says, the debtor must stay in the upper room overnight because of the meeting he will have. He says he must be able to reach the debtor in the upper room at a moments notice. The room itself must be prepared if he has to return with a client. The debtor nods. It is winter. The professional man is gone . It is now night. The debtor checks the upper rooms lock. He sits down with the sheets of work he must finish for the next day.

22. Some hours later rain begins a scattered prisoner-of-war march into the snow on the roof above the upper room. It seems the weather has suddenly warmed tonight, the debtor thinks. He has moved to a desk in the professional mans office. He tells himself he will be able concentrate better on work in this chair than in his own. In the office, too, the debtor can also see outside to the streets below. He can watch anyone who enters or leaves the building. He will be able to see the professional man whenever he returns. The debtor is sure he will recognize the professional man by his gait among the other figurines in the night. A moment later, however, he sees the windows have begun to fog from the outside. Is it the warmth or the rain? he wonders. He tries to open the window panes but they are sealed by a lock. He rubs his sleeve against the window even though he knows the fog is from the outside. Next he tries to crane his neck up to a dry band of glass the fog hasnt reached. He sets the peak of his forehead against the window pane. The glass feels wet with dew to him because it is cold. The figurines he can now see below seem from his crooked perspective to be walking at diagonal angles. They seem to be pushing their bodies against the surface of the earth. Their only purpose seems to be to walk at even more severe angles than they already are. The debtor returns to the desk in the professional mans office. He opens a drawer of private records and correspondences hes noticed the professional man keeps apart from others. He sees many folders labeled with many titles written by hand. Most of the folders seem to carry consumer or organization secrets, but he is sure the professional man keeps a record of him in the drawer also. Maybe it is near the back. The debtor pulls out the drawer until it strikes completely 91

open. It bangs like a small lake boat at dock. He touches the labels. He lets his fingers fall on the papers. His hands look as though they are waiting to begin a recital. The debtor strikes at the folders. He is sure he is getting closer to his name. The last brilliance of the afternoon sky clicks off. The debtor closes the drawer. This man, the former rich man, spends the next severing hours staring into screens, typing his work assignments. He wonders where the professional man might hoard the bulk of secrets the debtor is sure the professional man keeps on him. He is sure one of the secrets will free him. Heat fades from the building. The debtor pushes up the thermostat. And now the windows in the professional mans office are fogging from the inside. The debtor wipes a streak in them. Another hour passes. The debtor considers sleeping, but rejects the idea. He adjusts his posture and becomes determined to plan his work schedule for the upcoming week. He finishes one day quickly, struggles through the next and before beginning the third he is staring at the white sugar of city lights wiped across the window. He adjusts his posture again. He adjusts it once more and again. The lethargy of the fog sets into his body. His drowsy unconsciousness does not do enough to prompt him to rise from the chair to remain awake. The phone on his own desk in the other room shocks him from the first bath of a dream. He runs to it. The call is from a friend he knew in college. The debtor has spoken to him a few times since over the years. He crisscrosses the office as they speak. I have to stop in the city near the upper room later, his friend begins quickly. What are you doing tonight? Its been too long since we spoke. Tonight? the debtor says. What are you doing here? You know how much I have to travel for work, the friend says. Yes, the debtor says. Of course. The debtor can never remember the college friends occupation. He does remember it requires extensive travel. I have a new customer there, the college friend says. And people say good things about that section. They say it has an ambition of its own. People want things there. I think youre right, the debtor says. I think so, too, the friend says. How did you find a job there? Hard work, the debtor says. I am a firm believer that to succeed you have to be determined. However you got there, I admire you for it, the friend says. I dont know if I could do it myself. The debtor can hear his friend smiling. The debtor smiles, too. Let me ask, the debtor says, how did you find out I worked here? You know, the friend says, people like to know things like that. If they know things, they can tell their friends. They can act like they have a connection to those things. But some people in my business want it both ways. They want to boast about what theyve fished up without giving something in return. Thats my work. These people pay me to build a gate around their own information, and I build it for them. Ill build the best gate they can find. Plus Ill tell them I built the others. 92

I know what you mean, the debtor says. Ill tell them about every single new instrument I hear of, the college friend continues. And once theyre convinced initially of the necessity, I have them. Maybe its more accurate to say that once these old men look around they are convinced it is a necessity to others. But I have them. They realize that if theyre where they are and dont have me other people notice and start to talk. Its almost a fashion at that point. Why do we dine in public, you know? Why do we take the bill?

23. We all have to decide for ourselves on those things, the debtor says searching for ways to change the subject. Everyone looks for what they have to do what they have to do it. Now, if you dont mind me asking, and I say this only so I wont forget to ask before I hang up, how much longer will you be in the city? I agree, the college friend says. Well, tonight is my last night here this week. Ive get very busy this time of year. Its why I had to call when I heard where you were at now. So let me ask you a question. I just finished my last meeting for the day. Would you be interested in joining me and my wife for a late dinner? Were ordering in here at the hotel. My wife is a great cook so Im sure shell pick something good. The debtor for some reason then suddenly understands the implication of his friends success for him. Yes, he says. And the debtor realizes too he is glad his friend proposed a meeting so he did not have to. He dreaded procedural turns in discussion. He hated being bottlenecked into a place of vulnerability. His friend has to have realized part of why he agreed to have dinner, the debtor tells himself. Besides, he genuinely likes and has missed his friends company. He missed listening to his friend retell and embellish stories about college adventures and personalities. He like to hear his friend eventually turn to the careers and families of mutual friends and how those people had accumulated or lost their purposes, how they were able to maintain them. The debtor rarely spoke to any of those friends. He couldnt find a way to write to those whom he was even most fond of. Several had tried to contact him. He was aware of the attempts. He had seen their calls and not returned them. He allowed himself to assume they would assume he was working or sleeping at the time they called. He let himself assume also that he would return their calls if he wrote a note to himself. There would be a moment of reminiscence, it would pass and he would allow himself to walk past the note for days. He would then call them back after a week or two at a time he calculated would be difficult for them to answer. By then he knew the curiosity of youth had passed and they would not return his call. They themselves would find a reason not to respond at that point. And his college friend on the phone thanks him and tells his hotel is a few blocks from the upper room. He describes it and then begins to recount a favorite story from college. The debtor tries to listen but his mind drifts away. He images a small atrium in his friends hotel room. He sees suits and new electronics draped over a breakfast table. The debtor feels the fear in the sensation of grasping onto his

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precarious place in society. He did not want to be thrown out of the upper room. Hed earned his right and it would cruel to make him leave. He then remembers that, yes, very soon, his debts will be cleared. Then no one will be able to thrown him from the upper room. He cuts in at the first break of his friends story. He is so close. Im sorry, he finds himself telling his friend. He explains why he cannot meet him that night. You understand, he says. The friend listens and agrees. He contributes tones to show both this understanding and but also his disappointment. The friend incorrectly ascribes his disappointment to a longing to see the debtor. He does not notice it is a form of the same panic over disorder that even small alterations to scheduling always caused him. The college friend interrupts the debtor. He says he has found a solution to the difficulty. He says he will send a clerk who is travelling with him to wait in the debtors place in the upper room until the friends have finished dinner. The clerk will be there and he will carefully watch for the professional man. If the clerk sees him coming, he will call and the debtor will be able to return to upper room before the professional man reaches the office. The debtor is relieved to hear this assurance and agrees to the plan almost immediately. The clerk soon arrives and the debtor walks briskly to the hotel. The debtor and his friend great each other and laugh. They sit at the breakfast table. The friend reintroduces his wife as he always does and she serves them the ordered food in Styrofoam bowls. The woman watches the debtors gestures. She tries to mark which one is a representation of a displeasure she believes he has always had for her. The debtor eats and enjoys the heat of the food. He listens to his friend retell stories for one hour, then two. He even inquiries into the lives of those students who were only acquaintances to him but close to his friend. As the friend continues into another hour the debtor considers the extra year he still needs to work to satisfy his lenders. He thinks about what will happen if the regulators of his profession learned of something else that displeased them about his life. Or, worse, one of the regulators could dislike him for a reason he could never know and that regulator will be able to convince the others to exclude him from the profession. This profession cannot sustain delinquent members, a secret regulator might write. It will not sustain members who are not of a worthy class. During the middle of his friends description of a marriage gone badly, the debtor excuses himself. He says he needs to call the clerk just to be sure he is still in the upper room. He does not doubt him. The debtor calls the phone in the professional mans office in the upper room where he left the clerk. He lets the phone ring until a message plays though he leaves no message. He does this three more times in a row. He stops calling then only because he is worried the professional man will notice that he has repeatedly called the office. The clerk has not answered the debtors calls because he is asleep. His eyes have been shut for more than an hour. If the clerk was awake, he would have answered the phone. He would have heard the debtor ask him to look out the window. He would then have wiped the fog from the window

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pane. At that time, he would have described the man he saw arriving at the building. The debtor would have known this was the professional man. But the debtor does not know the clerk is asleep. He also does not know either that the wife told the clerk privately that, if he wished, he could sleep at the desk. They say they need you there for an assignment but they really dont, she told him. And so the debtor returns to the breakfast table with no answer from the clerk. He thanks the couple for the meal and explains what has happened. He tells them that because of this he must go. The debtor hurries into the street. It is unusually crowded for that time of night. All of them are strangers and move incredibly slow. He begins to jog past them. He finds this action to be much more difficult and exhausting than he expected. This man, the former rich man, after jogging for some time realizes he has always identified his place in the city by the buildings and by the shape those buildings cast into the sky. In this night, however, the buildings are all store fronts with disappearing heights. The debtor now senses he has possibly gone too far or in the wrong direction. The stores seem somewhat familiar but details about them are wrong. An hour later, he acknowledges he is lost. He decides he can do nothing else but return to his friends hotel. The streets have cleared, however, and he cant recall the last turn he made on the road.

24. I could not have found the new city in heaven if I had not met the cardinal. She told me about the feast lying west of the stream. She pointed beyond the shore of the low valleys. Beyond that even, she said, was the new city. Id walked a spine ridge earth to see her. It was a land that shed from the forest and overfed itself on heavens ground. I walked for days as starlight spilled from weeks. The last few days completed in almost total darkness. I awoke the final morning in the kindling of the horizon. There I saw the land snap into smaller hills. I saw the snake bit flow of earth resolve at a stream. I knew the water would bless me. The day before I fell asleep in the winds and the twilight. Id sunk into the pavilion of an anemone cap. My eyes rolled over my mind. I saw the path set before me I woke on my stomach. I rose and that day descended to the water. At the stream I saw what I would learn was the outbuilding of the cardinal. It was a structure with no roof and walls undulating out from its base. These walls were loose slats. Its front doors extended the length of the face. Paunches of straw stuffed the gaps. I approached it without any intention but to continue. A damp voice stopped me at the threshold. Those are the treasures, the voice came to me. Those are the treasures of Christ and his souls. A figure appeared. It climbed out from behind one of the petals of board. The location of the figure started me. Its voice had seemed to have come from behind. I allowed myself to be distracted from the thought. I did not want to be afraid in front of the stranger.

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This figure wore a high-buttoned suit coat. She carried a rake twice the length of her body and held it at her shoulder. I studied her closely as she drove toward me. For a moment I thought I saw a bundle of features on her face but did not. As she passed the shadows set down by the outbuilding I knew I had merely projected an ornament. Her face was only the streak after motions. And her chest was at mine. Good morning, I said. Hello. The cardinal nodded and placed a step behind her. She lowered her chin and again moved farther from me. Hello, I might have said again. She turned and swung her rake wildly at a pile of straw. If you see him, the cardinal said with her back still turned, and Im sure you will see him, tell him I lost nothing. I was concerned the water would rise. The rains were very bad but there is also drainage. Thats too easy to forget. Or maybe everyone simply forgets it easily. Just like anything, if it does not affect them, they do not believe it happened. She paused, seeming to listen for a certain call. It was as if she was sure she could hear if she only slowed her breathing. I promised I would give a message about the supply here, she continued. It should have been delivered already. Unfortunately, I relied on a soul that might have misrepresented itself. No reasonable being can always be on guard but I do not blame myself and I will demand accountability. The cardinal wiped her face. I followed her and we sat together by the stream. She folded her legs under her. I spooned the gray liquid of the stream in my hands because I needed a substance to examine while we spoke. Do you know I am the cardinal of the west? she said. It is why I believe we are both here. I asked what she meant but she was already continuing over the movement of my interruption. It seems I must rewrite my letter, she said. I know what I will say. Please take down the message for me. You will not remember it unless you write it down.

25. The cardinal handed me a pen she fingered from her breast pocket. Her movements were a drifting. It was if her spirit unlatched from her body and unraveled its action. I took the pen. I do not have paper, she said. You messengers usually have some. But maybe you are one of the messengers of Christ who remembers without more. I will speak. She did not give me stationary and I did not ask for any. I found myself pushing back my sleeve. It hugged my forearm like a tourniquet. I checked my skin with ink. The mark was faint and vermillion. Let me begin, the cardinal said. I apologize if I repeat myself or go on too long. You will know what to write. What I want to say, and, please, excuse me, but I believe there are 96

advantages to an excess of idle souls. The ones that leave this state for work are reliable for at least a time. Maybe a spirit of earth mixed with their conditions groom the deserving to strike out from the fields and seek the new city. The cardinal leaned against her rake. I accepted my position as cardinal of the providence because I knew the new city would come, she continued. Hearts seek longing. I left the fields myself without confirmation from Christ about construction. Do we souls even know it is ours? Who will be paid? When will it be finished? I asked other souls but the ones who knew would not tell me. The souls are not as asleep as they seem. Christ forgets how they play-act. He tries to love them but he does not. They pretend they do not know. They are drawn into one anothers performance. Eventually they forget that they are playing and he tries to respond to the nonsense. They are restless for the city. He cannot repel them. I believe at the root of this is the fear of the disappearance of absolution. They know this Christ can only continue for a time and that he is not continuous. He spoke to often in the past. It is not his promises, just the number of words. He must allow them a space in which they can imagine he promises the city they desire. They need to create a right to his love, then to claim title for themselves. The cardinals words became a bleat. I had not written anything. I turned away from her. The sticks of shade from the barn drained into a pool of the stream. They met the water at its bank. The cardinal was quiet as she reappeared to me walked by me to the edge. And beyond the stream I saw that outside the province, outside the west, outside this heaven, starlight fixated on the ancient of days. The new heaven or a once earth rolled into prairies washed off from this fixation. At the time there was What You Will Never Know and far from it the Things You Could Not Know at Your Becoming. The quickening in a mans soul is a fall through the same. When I was young I could not fall asleep at my grandparents house. I was away from home. I held my face still through the hours and thought of this prairie plain onyx. This was above another plain over another. And I fell through them. I felt them on the cold of the floorboards. The only light that came through the house before morning was a blue from the garage or the halogen of a car. The car belonged to a teacher next door who left very early to teach in the district over. My parents said we were second or third cousins but when I saw him I was glad I did not see how this could be true. He was overweight. His children were stained. He dressed in an old style with old clothes. When he died when I was still young my parents took me to his funeral. It was a heart condition. It was undetected. In a better world or in better hands avoidable, people said. I remember the dirt dumped on his grave was pushed up like the face of a train tunnel. It seemed strange people had a meal afterwards. I wanted to tell them we were too close to his body.

26. The cardinal left off and began raking the fold in earth that separated the water from the banks. If there werent mansions in the new city, she said, if they werent there, I would not be in this province today. I was chosen to guard the currency used to begin construction. Authorities disagree over what this means.

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She paused and I listened to the wind in the stream. Reeds and the tanks of dark objects clouded the water like bonfire smoke. The first set of authorities say we keep the straw both as a currency and resource. They say it is a commodity with a potentially inherit value. They say it is durable, light, transportable, something souls can exchange if need be. What would stop Christ from creating a market if there is any confusion? After that, we could seek financing and favors to finish the new city. Can you tell me what the city is like? I said. I dont know, she said. Only certain dead souls can see it while it still under construction. Ive been told it is almost done. Those whove seen it say it is very ordered and neat. I have heard each route has a purpose and each development is carefully planned. I tend to believe this. However, there is a second voice with which I am also sympathetic. This voice says the purpose of this out building and my station here is to stand as a beacon and justification for the messages of Christ. This is also a powerful argument. She sighed. I nodded for her to continue. You may find yourself resisting deference, she said. You are young. I thought, as I am sure you think now, you had been another place a long time before you came to heaven. I thought my line must continue in the same way. Then I began to understand deference is not weakness or betrayal. In many cases it allows you to avoid those problems. Let me give you an example. When I was on earth I remember like the other souls do not and almost done with my education I noticed a peculiar young man who lived near my parents home. The addition they lived in was quiet and had a small playground where the peculiar student seemed to often be. I realized I knew the student, Judah, because he was in many of my classes though we had never spoken. Later I began to take a different path home from school that passed through the playground. Whenever the day was overcast or whenever there had been a pump of thunder earlier in the day Judah was there. He would be sitting on a swing with his feet straight out in front of him. Or sometimes hed circle the perimeter of the grounds kicking wood chips and trying to keep them the air. I spoke with him one day. His eyes caught me lingering on him too long. We spoke first about the classes we had together and we spoke about how long our families had lived in the addition. He had been there longer than I had. That was strange to me. I had thought he was new, or at the least that I had been living there much longer than he had. It made me think about my permanence in that place and why I engaged with others. I wasnt able to explain myself why I would try to be kind to the student if I hadnt thought he was new. I was then determined to speak with him more often. Mostly he told me how he loved to watch storms. He said he especially liked flash floods on summer nights. He said that was what war must look like at night. He said at other times in the year storms had to work themselves up in pulses and volume. They reminded him of a hungry child waking him and that made him laugh. A few months later a tornado passed through and touched down in our neighborhood. One garage and a few mailboxes were torn out. But that wasnt all. The next day Judah came late to our morning class. His hair was wet and there was mud and stones splashed on the bottom of his pants. The teacher stopped speaking for the moment he came in to record his tardiness. In that moment he found my eyes. Did you see what happened in our addition last night? he shouted to me. It was a tornado. I touched it. She smiled. But that was a very long time ago, she said.

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27. The cardinal was then quiet and drinking from a glass chalice. Vinegar perfumed from its bowl. She broadened her shoulders folding her hands behind her back. She looked at the outbuilding before turning to the stream. I looked too. I saw only then that the dark shapes in the water were a prolongation of parts. I saw they were hunks of dead souls split open somewhere upstream. They were the strung out ends of a crop torn up by its roots. I tried to obscure the sight from myself. I tried to go back in my experience and encounter them as some other thing. Only reeds in the current. And the cardinal drank again. What do you think they are? she said as if confronting someone. I began to speak but did not respond. Id remembered how I refused to swim in a lake like it while in the west of earth. There I always saw myself diving through a water. I saw industry skeletons and great fish along the bottom. I saw trenches black out into the throat of the depths. And I was sensing my body as it was on heaven and as it was on earth. I sensed it under the crush of everything. It was the sound of wildfire. It was a slide of plumbline to the bottom. At the floor of this lake a door I fell through shut out the sun. It was an old door from an old appliance without enamel and its hulk closed over me. The lake was on an Indian reservation. It rose out past new suburbs and two cattle gates. On the near shore was a pillar of sediment weathered with the hoarfrost of cave salts. It leaned into the water. Its red base had begun to tarnish. When most people said the feared the lake it was because of this rock. They gave the legend of it. A hundred years before the tribe there depending on a state bureau for rations had forgotten how to hunt. The bureau tried to introduce new methods and give them new tools of survival. It became quickly clear to everyone, however, they were a people who abhorred selfreliance. Some winters later a great storm fell on the reservation. It closed on trails from the city. Indian agents found it impassible. The Indians were sieged like that for months. Its sad, people said, but not unpredictable. Look at how they were living. The tribe eventually gathered in their meeting hall and took a vote. We know this now, people said, because we have found an anonymous transcript of the gathering. It was a near unanimous vote and, after a re-vote, the only objections disappeared. The vote bound the Indians to act to save their people. It was a plan that called for the women later that night to line up and one by one to climb the big red rock where they would cast their babies down into the lake. Through each woman the tribe would act. Its true, people said. Thats why we dont go there at night. Do you know that after all the stars are out you can hear those babies crying even to this day? Theyre crying out because theyre still cold and hungry. Theyre crying to warn you that if you do not help them they will swim to the shore to look for you. I heard the cries and my mind returned to heaven. 99

What do you think they are? the cardinal repeated. I dont know, I said. Reeds? Maybe other debris washed out in the storm. I dont know. I think you are right, the cardinal said. I dont know why I havent noticed them until recently. It seems like I should have. The parts are very distinct. She cocked her head like she had intended to provoke me with the last statement. And then the cardinal was then kneeling at the bank. She was swirling her chalice in the waters and dumping it out and swirling it again. She was looking at me and hunched over the stream like a condor. You should go to the souls in the west valleys now, she said. You should go.

28. The cardinal said no more. I felt the unease of a child whose father has publicly scolded another. I turned on a joint of heaven. On it I moved west. Just out of the gradation that led to the stream I heard a splash. It was the cardinal at the water. She was dipping the chalice in the stream, touching her fingers to the water and flicking it on her shoulders. Her hands dripped blue-gray. I walked. The few trees there fell as the night grew long. Lights cooled somewhere at the caps of that world. I walked on. Eventually I came before the cornice of a jagged hill. It seemed to hook away into the sky as I looked up. It was too steep. It had not settled into heavens earth. It was a pinch of the accumulation of land hidden from me. I coughed suddenly because doing so was a purposeful act. I climbed whatever was before me until the earth bulbed. Near darkness I found a wreath of brush. Its vines were thick and bare of flows. I found a hollow in the center of the steel wool. I picked off the seeds of nettles from me and there I lay my body. I felt a peace until the small death Id hidden snapped over my mind. It was with me. I chanted at it, and I moved west. I chanted. And after you, I said. I remember that youd waited until I stood to leave to speak. A person can only hate another for so long without reason. These things and these things. I said. But these things and things. You sat like youd practice. A young woman has times to pair. And here was a new year for it. Stalks. Bare hands made your fingertips look too long. The woman who gossiped shoveled outside. The woman whose husband had another stroke. I spoke to her for the first time to slow you. We painted the room I rose to leave. For the first time I noticed tins and place settings there. And there was a new fluid in my lungs. And there I would find the old drugs again. I didnt quit like I said. I am unwelcome. I am a new violence. I imagined rain to fall asleep to.

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Do you know I have one reappearing dream? I had it again that night. It begins with the long shadow of an old woman. I see her behind me on a path that leads to the side entrance of my parents house. A duct smokes. She follows me through the kitchen. She is behind me in the down room and in the hallway. I see no one is home and she continues to follow me. I climb the stairs to the attic and shut the door behind me. No one should be able to follow me there. But again I am in her undertow and she follows me. I point my body in the right directions but it will only drag forward. I lean away. I cannot move at the speed Id moved at only minutes ago. She has a blue flame and she shows her blue flame. I see the insulation in the attic and try to bury into it. But I cannot reach it. I remember when my brother and I crawled back over the beams along the side of the attic. We carried a flashlight because we know if we fell we would fall all the way through. The flume would wash us out. And now I cant even turn to see the old woman. And now I am barefoot. I cannot buck but cannot swing toward any direction. She is faster than me and closes on my back. The weight of my body only carries her closer to me. I feel her buoy and I choke. I see old mattresses piled on the floorboards.

29. Night painted the west valleys and the white star above them was fluorochorme. It clung to the last rungs of heavens sky. When I turned away it balled and dropped and then it never was. Bluffs flanked the valley stone. I walked and walked. And I came upon a ground beginning to grow bare. I decided it must be a road. I assigned it this purpose. This is what its purpose had always been. The decline of it poured out before me. And I was running. An hour passed and I was still running. I did not stop myself. I held the thought of someone waiting for me. I heard an owl as the morning rose. When I looked for it, I found I had turned onto a twolane road. It was recently paved and glistened. I tore a small fruit from a bush planted in the median. I began to eat it but stopped. I realized I was not hungry and threw the food in the direction of the call of the owl. Suddenly I become strong from the thought that I could not remember the last time I had eaten. I felt the elements from the bite of fruit in my tissue. My mind was still that of the force of a new Christ. I knew I would find the old ways of heaven undefended. A building of sheet metal flagged the end of the simple road. It was a blue or very hot white. The fruit bushes from the median led onto the property and tied around the building. I felt a cool on the back of the next and was at the building. I struck my chest with the butt of my palm because it seemed like the motion a person resolved to act might make.

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I opened the door without knocking. The far edge of it scraped a crescent in the pavement. I was certain this building must be the last outpost of the west before the new city. I moved inside and again I felt the cool near me. At the time I still believed my body was unbroken. I believed it could never pass. I would not recognize I knew the coolness was all the ways I would be cut off from this heaven and earth. But then I was becoming Christ. I am the core and its ballast, I said. I write my declaration. Its vapors feed from me and they speak for the host. I hung at the threshold of the entrance consumed by the cool. Children, the cool is the vapors. It is what that never was because it was always the new milk of old things on earth. Even now I as I write this testament for you I am consumed. I suspect my lurches and my failed reconnaissance all have made my mind receptive to this fading. Maybe my ways, my vapors, are the infiniteness I cannot hold. Maybe I am not forgetting and maybe I am a capacity. My body is definite and also its own ballast. I know now the forgetting has always infected me. To create is to define without control. But what if you were to allow me to collect my ways? They are not your ways. Tether to me and I will shape them. These ways are not yours. I bless you. You may be with me even now but I cannot bear you this close. I release my children. Do not ask me for an account. Let my ways not be a part of me. Let them pass through you. And so as this cuts through you the new formations are new channels over your star in heaven. I do not know if you will wash at the creek. Abide in me.

30. Inside I saw the building was a great lodge. The floor was a tri-level plat demarcated by arches. On the nearest level, a speechmaker stood behind a podium. The podium was an obelisk obscuring the speechmaker. The audience sat on cedar planks tied to long tables by bulrushes. On the second level, clods of souls sat smaller tables made of the same materials. They read through blocks of loose leaf pages and built them into taller blocks. Unlit candles adorned the center of each table. On the third level, a bazaar stirred. A tarp sagged over booths of vendors at which none of the shoppers seemed to stop. Blocks of loose leaf pages on tables in each both were a cityscape. Slate stone flecked in bronze cobbled the walls of the building. Double glass doors on the far side lead to a deck jutting out over wild cheatgrass. The stalks had grown too high. They bent at the shoulder of their own weight. Strokes of voices from each level rose and overcame one another and rose again like the loop of a mistempo of a song sung in round. I stood at the back of the first level.

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Thank you for inviting me to speak today, the speechmaker behind the obelisk was saying when I entered the lodge. I fully expect this years conference to be even better than the last. Its why we come back each year, isnt it? Its the hope we find among fellow travelers. The speechmaker motioned to the field outside. What I always appreciate most is every travelers dedication to the cause of migration to the new city. I know you are courageous souls. You would not be here if you werent. This why we meet. We want to address the fundamental questions of the great migration. How will we settle the new city? What is the date we will arrive? How will we govern? And, as we spent almost all of last years conference discussing, how do we know we discovered the new city when we come upon it? These are the questions this conference has striven to address. As everyone remembers, we were given a promise. We remember that promise. We will make sure those who brought us here will make good on that promise. If we are guilty of anything it is our perseverance in faith. The audience before the obelisk clashed with applause. The speechmaker waved a hand they could not see and continued. The subject of my remarks at this conference will focus on strategies for arrival. A number of directions to the city have been proposed along with ways we might test their accuracy. But, quiet differently, what I am interested in speaking with you is strategies for discovering those directions. We will not have true directions without correct directions. To find the true directions we must do three things perceive, receive and act. Let me say what I mean. First, perceive. When you perceive you are hearing. You hear beyond what you wish to hear and begin to understand what is being said to you or what you are overhearing. That is perceiving what is being said. You cannot hear the directions you wish you to be hearing without perception. Some ways to this may be easier than others. Do not shun the simple path but do not insist upon it. Yes, and my second point. Receive the directions. This is a skill not innate to many of us. I have had to develop it myself. But what do I mean by receive? What I mean is to take in, to accept. You must take in and accept the directions once you perceive them. If you do not, they will only be perceived and not also received. It will be as if you never heard the directions at all. Third, you must act. Act. You now possess the knowledge of action at this stage. You have seized the knowledge. Go. But the last step contains decisions to be made within it, too. Will you go alone? Will you take your close friends with you? Will you ensure everyone knows of your plans before you go? Further, will you go and confirm the directions then return to tell everyone you have confirmed them? I favor the last suggestion. I am in the process of developing this idea thoroughly. I look forward to speaking about this more in depth at next years conference. Thank you. The speechmaker stepped away from the obelisk. He move toward the second level. And I saw that this soul was the late worshipper who I had met first in the combs. I followed him.

31. The late worshipper stepped to the stage of the second floor and rested at the foot of a table. Young women in evening gowns gathered around the head. The women did not appear to notice this soul. They reviewed the leaves of pages stacked in blocks on the cedar wood tables. Some tucked their hands under the back of their knees.

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The late worshipper appeared less gray and cold-veined than I remembered. His back bowed forward. He wore a white dress shirt. I sat beside him. I know youd eventually notice me, he said. I worried about that sometime but decided whats the harm in speaking again this year? I had a few things to add. I wanted to build on my thoughts. If Im honest, Ive thought about this day everyday throughout the year. Its been that way since the first year I followed your travel west. It is always you alone, isnt it? Im glad I decided to crawl out after you all those years before. Really, I didnt know it was you until this year. I dont even remember how I even decided to follow you that first year. I stared at him to try to show I did not understand. He rubbed the top button of his shirt. Yes, he said, I cant believe this is the first time Ive spoken to you outside the fields. I came close to introducing myself a thousand times. But I didnt know how you would react. I didnt want to lose you. The late worshipper seemed sincere. I tried to look as if I was carefully considering his words. The young women continued to peer at the blocks of leaves of pages. I wanted to travel by myself this time, the late worshipper continued, but, with this conference, I knew I shouldnt. Id already agreed to speak and I was ready for the migration. I cannot understand why I ever thought before I wouldnt be. A new speechmaker on the first floor began. This new speaker was much louder than the worshipper had been. The late worshipper continued. I must tell you I was worried that this time, for the first time, we wouldnt find our way here, he confessed. You usually keep a certain pace. You usually take a certain way. But, this time, you seemed uncertain. He looked at the young women at the table then back to me. Let me ask you, were you worried about another storm? It seemed we spent so long in the forest. And, another thing, why would you need to speak with the cardinal? Couldnt someone see you with her? You are an advisor. Everyone will recognize who you are. The voice of the second speechmaker grew louder. The late worshipper leaned toward me. And what if I was seen in the forest? he said. I cant be associated with those exiles. I dont believe you should be either. You must know you are very unpopular with the souls? The second speaker continued and I listened to his message. He warned heaven would not be well as long as the majority of the souls behaved as they did. He said the city was for us if we would accept it. Disbelief was a rejection of a gift freely given and a sin against our eternal life. Theres more, the late worshipper continued. I could never tell this time when you would sleep and when you would rise. It was strange, but I wont say more about it. We are here now. The late worshipper listened to the second speaker for a moment then continued. I wonder if we will organize any exploration parties. If we do track our next migration I think I could help lead it. Maybe if I found the new city I could migrate early. I do not want to return to the field. All that will soon pass away. The souls on the first level suddenly rose to applaud a joke the second speaker made unexpectantly. This speaker did not mask himself behind the obelisk. A migration already exists, I heard the second speaker say. You may choose to recognize it or not, but it is something already in being today and for a long while before. I have recognized it as a real and so it is now real to me. I want it to be real to all of us but I do not have the power 104

to do that. It cannot be yours if you do not see it. And if you do not see it will not be. Then, from that point forward, it will never be for ourselves as it has always been for me. I confess that since I have seen it I cannot remember not possessing the reality of it. It is its own being always and was so without creation.

32. After the late worshiper considered the speechmaker he turned to me. I know what it is, he said. I know why your actions were different on this journey. Id forgotten our argument, our brief argument, in front of the comb. Ive remembered how you had fell into the water there. Were you shaken by that? Im sorry it happened and that we were unable to speak after. You look much better now. You do. Still, I should have offered an apology for it at the time. Theres no excuse. Its just the other soul intimidates me. I hate being with him in the fields. I dont know how any of the assignments to those combs are made. I am told we are free to choose, that our placements are what we chose, but I would never choose to be there. I didnt know the other soul before, I am certain of that. I used to complain about it but no one saw heaven like I did. The rest of the souls would just say I must have made a decision to be in that comb and simply did not remember. I would not be there unless I had decided to be there, they said. They said maybe the choice was made on earth. And why, they said, was I trying to circumvent the laws of heaven by calling of favoritism from the palisades? All are equal before Christ. The souls about me accused me at their leisure. They contented themselves with their own assignments. Accept responsibility for the station you provided for yourself, they say. If you have ambition develop yourself just as we have. Your demands, without more, are gross and ahistorical. Why do you believe you have the privilege to demand allowances from us when the comb you have is unkempt? Look at it in comparison to the others. The difference is stark. You can say this only affects how you live but think of your good neighbors. Despite the care they take they are still subject to, and subjected by, your carelessness. Yet they respect you as a caretaker of your own land and kindly say nothing directly to you. They want to resolve the conflict without strife. I have heard some of those most affected by your inattentiveness be the first to defend you and provide you with excuses which, in our opinion, you do not deserve at all. We thought you would observe the expectations from the manners of the others. You know, we did not have reasons to articulate these expectations until you arrived. We believe in a common decency here. Maybe that sets us apart to you but then we do not know you. The late worshipper swung his gaze to the young women in evening gowns at the table then cast them back down. But thats too much of that, he said. Resentment seeds in the spirit and tears out the fruit. Everyday you think youve bred a new defense for yourself and a new charge against them. But you havent. You mistake intense emotion for a searching ideology. You assume maintenance will ripen the understanding you have, that it will give you reasons to develop in that line. But your ideas waste under small energies born out of the worries of conflict. A soul who thinks it is in the right will always think that. Inevitably they will be praised for the position in the debate in they are obligated to take. An opponent, artless, will concede and embrace him. The soul says this to itself when it rises. At least it is aware that any shift in the dialogue of the public will be claimed in portions. I always had a suspicion, it will surely say later. Or, I was the first in my family to do this. Or, you are unable by the fact of your station to possess my understanding. 105

This is a method of validating your ways until your ideas are taken up by others. I am encouraged and worried by it. They take on your thoughts and spread them even to your children. You plant in the midnight hour. The dialogue of a catholic is self-sustaining. The finality of the desire is in our generations. It is heightened and rediscovered. Even an old childless beggar is not convinced his line could end. Yet they force this conception on me so I am threatened when they reprimand me. They want me pushed out and unfashionable. So I come here and among souls with a purpose. I share I find I am not who I have chosen I must be in the fields. I know I am the new things of heaven.

33. Snaps from the young women in evening gowns interrupted the speech of the soul. The three had come up from their meditations. They fought over a particular sheet of paper. It was punched with fragments of codicils and matted in gold. The young woman in the center, who wore a blue dress, finally seized it and lifted it from the table. The others grabbed at her and she beat back their forearms. She squared her shoulders and held the sheet at her belt. The young women in green and rose let out their bodies once more in the chairs and their breathing was shallow. The woman in blue read the letter to herself without interruption. When she was done she addressed it to the others. We know the young woman in the light blue dress is missing, she read. We have not seen her since she left for the deck this morning. We will ask questions until she returns. Do you know we saw the sightless wolf in the long cheatgrass outside? We should form a party to find her. She is not back and we are ask the following questions. We are asking questions because we think she was taken. We think she was taken, and our evidence will prove it, because she is gone. Our evidence is a public bulletin reviewed by a respected soul who said the sightless wolf has hidden her in the tall cheatgrass. We have seen this statement because we were given it. If you will allow me to continue, I will explain why we believe she was taken by the wolf and why you should accept our invitation to form a party to rescue her as we have requested. The young woman in the blue dress sat and set the sheet down over her lap. I know I should not speak directly to the advisors, she said. No one told me I shouldnt but if I should they would approach me. If I did speak to them I would speak to them differently than I speak to other souls. They are entrusted with power from heaven. I accept the body of Christ through them. He loves all of us and is alive in all and he is present in the places without a presence of their own. I rose to look at the deck. I expected to see the young women in light blue there in the cheatgrass. She was not there but she was with the time of it. The sky was dyed in the pale afternoon and spilled with indigo. The late worshipper looked but did not rise with me so I sat down again. I thought of the sightless wolf and its long legs. I thought of how it seemed to pick over the ground on its toes. I thought of how its shoulders bunched and rowed back. It seemed to draw near from somewhere. I pushed my chair back suddenly and the four legs hemmed against the floor.

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Please, the young woman in the green dress said touching my thigh. We know one of you is an advisor. Please let us speak with you before you go. The young woman in blue stood holding the sheet of paper she had read from before her. This is our first time at the conference but we were not reckless in coming, she said. If you would like to see our maps and plans before you go we will show you. We have been recognized many times by those in our area of the field for our leadership. We have been named, we have been distinguished. I am glad to hear that, the late worshipper interrupted. He did not look at me. And in response to your earlier question, yes, one of us is an adviser. I am impressed you recognized me here. I cannot tell you my plans here yet, but I will say I brought my surveyor with me for good reason. He nodded toward me. We are interested to see what the conference will decide this year, he continued. I mean that without any intent of obstruction. We are not opposed to souls organizing. We only wish to keep communication with you. To show you our support, the surveyor and I will orchestrate a hunt for your friend through the cheatgrass out beyond the deck. The late worshipper and I left the women and were on the deck. We went to its rail and pressed against it. The grounds before us were bogged with cattails. There I divined the sightless wolf somewhere in the reeds. And I told the late worshipper we must go soon.

34. I saw that what they could not affirm they wished to see. I detailed these things for them through my body. I saw no movement in the reeds but I felt the wolf draw closer to me. It was the things at the edge of the camp. And I had an impression suddenly of being with it. My chest drew out into a malaise. I I looked into the cheatgrass and saw myself pulled deep into the growth. Again my mind fell off and my spirit had left me. I was deep in the growth. There was a clearing where the pompadour of straw broke. I passed into it. At the face of this clearing was the mouth of a chute. The sightless wolf was there and I was not afraid. I did not remember to be. I looked to it and it rolled back the space between us. We passed to the interior of the chute through darkness. We were then at the outer gymnasium doors of a school that an older cousin of mine had attended while I was very young. The doors were painted in primary blue. They opened and we were inside. And there we rose. We passed through a solution to the top rail of bleachers ringing the gym now gaping in size. A flood of water had rushed into the room but we had not heard.

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Below in the water a class of boys played a game the teacher was showing them for the first time. The teacher palmed a ball and explained the instructions and strategy of the game. He motioned from one side of the room to the other. Boys split down the center line. They treaded without exhaustion. A few raised their voices with question but the teacher raised his louder and the wait of the latter overwhelmed. Two boys sat low in the bleachers with pants rolled to their knees. They stirred their feet in the water. The two boys had begun to kick hard into the water when someone smashed at the keys of a piano behind the bleachers. The lemon bar sun blew open a far door and the teacher yelled. The door withdrew, the sun disappeared, and an older teacher with blond hair was on the floor of the gymnasium, which was now dry. I saw the children there were now young girls and boys. Among them they held a parachute unfolded into a rainbow pinwheel. They raised it above them, let it down, raised it again and again let it down. They raised it and one child ran under it to the far side. The children laughed and each shook their corner until the teacher told them to be still. They shook it more and squealed. They hid their faces in their shoulders. A moment later they threw up the parachute in hosanna and pulled it down behind their backs. They sat on the corners and the double doors of the gymnasium opened again. Middle school students pulled out racks from a closet I hadnt noticed before. More children of the same age surged in. Each one took a ball. Fluorescent light stung the walls. Suddenly all the students were firing the basketballs. The plastic glass boards cracked and the students continued to fire. Some fired from a stage that had been carried in at sometime or erected quickly. The children suddenly became quiet and separated from two children laid out in the middle of the court. The mass passed by them like ants past a clean skeleton. The children on the floor locked their fingers behind their necks. And the middle school students were moving past me too. I saw the bodies of the two that had been lying on the ground were now heavily bandaged. They were carried above the heads of the others. I climbed from the bleachers and followed after.

35. The front office was very crowded when I arrived and I could not enter there. The two children injured in the gymnasium weighed an impression in the crowd of others. I waited to enter the office until they moved into an adjoining room. The secretary was not yet an old woman and spoke plainly. Each child who passed her received a clay placard. She instructed them to dig their names into the placards before they entered the adjoining room. When all the children had gone, I also took a placard and scratched my name into it. In elementary school Id written my name on gray-ruled lines in this way. And I thought of the children with the parachute in the gymnasium. The secretary asked me to return the placard and I did. She mouthed my name Balthuz, Balthuz then wiped it from the placard with her knuckle. You are not in this class of children, she said. I will need you to speak with the director. The secretary pointed to the adjoining room. There, she said. 108

I assumed the room was full so I waited in the office. I sat near the end of a row of chairs closest to the door. I wanted to look out the front doors of the school to see the day. Outside, two children let down two flags hung from a pole by the street. One of the flags pictured a green sphere on a blue background and the other had a white star on a black background. The children held the flags parallel to each other by the corners and folded them together into a triangle. I noticed the secretary examine me. I will need you to see the director soon, she said. I believe he has waited long enough. She pointed to the door of the adjoining room and, without her saying more, I moved to it and pushed into the room without knocking. When I sat myself, I saw the director across from me, a man younger than the secretary and covered from the shoulders down in in brown-purple burlap sheets. I looked for a door on the other side of the room where the children might have disappeared to but none was there. In the pocket of the adjoining room the director sat in a low chair behind a card table he had arranged as his desk. When our eyes met he cocked his head and blinked. Hello-hello-hello, the director said with a tick. He smiled and passed a scrap of paper across the table to me. That is the locker combination for one of the children injured today. If you would, I need you to clear out this students books and bring them back to the office. He may need us to send them to him. I assume his parents will call soon about his assignments. If they do I will elt you know so you can speak with them. I looked down at the seven numbers on the gray scrap of paper. I was aware of recognizing each value then immediately forgetting it. I wanted to try to read them again but I sensed the director was waiting to continue Hello-hello-hello, he said when our eyes met again. In the next moment, an image of the sightless wolf briefly appeared between us. The director laughed and the image dissolved. Hello-hello-hello! he said as if mimicking himself. He laughed joyfully again and watched the space between us for some time. When the image did not return he leaned into the table to address me. Im not sure where this child keeps his locker, he said, but I believe it may be in the secondary wing. It may be close to the teachers lounge. There might be some students there now, though they shouldnt be. Hello-hello-hello! Hello, I said involuntarily. The director laughed. Hello-hello-hello! he howled. I looked at the scrap of paper and rose from the table. As I left, I noticed the director reassume his blinking cockatiel face. He concentrated it on the place where the image of the wolf had appeared.

36.

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Lamp light hooded the students locker far from the office in the secondary wing of the school. The light was the low of bedroom blinds. I could see no one from the wing but already sensed the childs parents. They closed on the school to wait for me. The director waited for me also. They waited in the office while the director explained to the parents the things I would retrieve. He would tell them a time at which they would look for me if I did not return. .I was deep in the wing when one locker seemed suddenly familiar. I grabbed the latch and twisted the face to read the numbers. I produced the scrap of paper from the school director. I read the numbers to myself and turned the dial toward one value, then to another, then back again. The latch gave slightly but did not release. I did this several more times trying to control my breath. Each time I play acted to myself that it was the first time I was doing it. Finally I smooth the scrap on my leg and recited the numbers out loud in sing-song without trying them on the lock. I then took the latch once more, began to turn to the first number but could not remember the second or third. I reached for the scrap again. This time I would read the numbers allowed as I worked the combination. But the pocket Id kept the paper in was empty as were the other pockets I was sure I had not put the paper in. I squatted to the floor and dusted the carpet with my fingers. I could see nothing until late afternoon light struck through the glass double doors at the end of the hall. The paper was still nowhere. I stood and paced that secondary wing. I looked for lockers without latches. I opened and closed several without examining them. I stopped when one I tried without a latch did not open. I sensed the hall had become aware of me. When I looked toward the directors office, I could no longer see out of the secondary wing. The field was shadows by depthless light. I remembered Id heard a person cannot see out of darkness into light and only out of light into darkness. And I returned to the first locker. I tried the dial a few times but it did not even have the initial give of the first attempt. A final time a tried to work the latch with the most care I could control but as I did realized I remembered nothing more of the combination. I ran my had across the vent of the locker and stepped back. I turned toward the directors office and squinted. I thought I could see a figure or figures at a break of light in the darkness of the wing. I turned back to the locker and realized this was not the one I had initially approached. Panicked, I walked in at a mock-officer pace before the lockers hoping one would present itself to me as genuine. None did, but I manufactured a feeling in myself saying so. For a few moments I did not wonder if I was self-deceived or compromised. For that time I felt a great stillness of contentedness. On the right side of my body I sensed the dusk sink the sunlight outside the hallway. The red sky had turned over a pin of near stars that older children believe are planets. And I left the locker for the directors office. I saw definitely there were figures coming out of the light. They were two shadows.

37. And Id passed to the two figures. I was no longer at the school and I was with them. 110

They were the late worshipper and the young woman in the rose dress. The three of us rested against the rail of the deck of the great lodge. They were at that time asking me if I was sure I had seen the sightless wolf. I said I had and that I could not stay. I looked at the young woman and told her the late worshipper and I must leave. She made a motion as if she might grasp or push me and then she was still. She said if I left her again I must write out all I knew about the new city. The late worshipper said I would do this. I did not object to his pretended authority. Inside, the bazaar and its currents had not changed. I sat with the young women in green and blue. They would not let me speak until they described their beliefs about the new city of Christ. They insisted the most important of their beliefs were true. Most souls who had left the fields and gave the ideas any serious thought accepted them. The ideas were collected and sold on the third stage of the bazaar. The young women hoped to release a revised collection soon. I begin with a proposition and a promise, the young woman in the blue dress read from a square from the next collection she held against her thighs under the lip of the table. Teachers teach this. A teacher must be close to all. She will wear a light blue dress. Everyone will know her when they see her. She will have an understanding of the new city. She gave us the instruments of understanding and our talents. She gave us all before she was taken. We search for her. We honor her as we honor her in the travel to the new city. We have faith because we know the truth. Truth is an uncaptured promise. The young women set the square of paper on the table. She took another from a tall stack of same-cut squares between her and the young woman in green. The scriptures are a promise to us, the young women in blue continued. They exist only so that we will believe them. I believe our friend when she says these words are precious. Do you know what I believe? I believe our friend is in the new city now. She is too strong to be taken by the sightless wolf. I doubt the advisor you came with has the courage to leave the boundaries of the field. Thieves do not have courage. I am not afraid of the wolf just as I am not afraid of the red horse. We are afraid of them only because of a commotion of tales. We should gather our provisions and leave for the new city even in spite of them. Do right in your action. Gather your things and your gifts. Only Christ can see what is in your soul. The young women in blue and green read the following passage together. The young woman in rose remained on the deck over the cheatgrass. In the new city there will be gold, they said. Only a new city can be gold. You will find all your estates there. Christ promised us these things. You take them when you accept his offer. Believe in his promise because youve been asked to believe. You could not believe if you had certainty. We know what we were asked to do. This is our devotion. He names us. We cast away what he casts away. We affirm our faith and the future purges of Christ. We preserve our place. We will see the new city.

38. The late worshipper and the young woman in the rose dress remained posed against the deck rail searching for the young woman in light blue. I saw them try to redeem her from among the reeds. 111

I did not believe they would find her. I believed this only because I had not known her. The care for unknown others by known others is suffering. Because I had not known the young woman in light blue, she had never been. I resented the others interest and exclusive knowledge of her. And now I watched the two of them from the young womens table indoors. I remembered how the late worshipper claimed to be an advisor. The act shook me though it seemed right before. The stillness at the place inside me where I had made peace with the act broke and my blood chased hot at the fissures. I watched the late worshipper slouch a shoulder toward the young woman. I saw him touch her and she not object. Only then did I see the late worshipper had assumed my way of standing. I saw that he brushed his hair like mine, that our figures were cut alike. Skylight swam over the two of them. I imagined the warmth where they stood. The light was the light at the end of the secondary wing Id imagined and I was at the threshold. The double doors of the primary wing were tacked open to the walls. I carried forward with a puck of three students back through the secondary wing. It was now lit, grown and the ceiling vaulted. The students were not from the school but acted carelessly and did not appear surprised by the map of the school. Conversations slurred their movements. Each student recalled a companion in the lodge. Their mannerisms of youth played out as the potentiality of the young woman in rose, the late worshipper and the young woman in green. I examined them. The first student had stripes of milk-colored paints wiped evenly across her face. She recalled the young woman in rose. Through the student, I saw the young woman in rose herself recalled the young woman from restaurant on the road where the homeless man had been hit. The three spoke constantly and I could not understand many things they said. The discussed another school and often used abbreviations. They spooled phrases into riddles and rewound them in a song. C! a first student burst out. C! another said raising her arm. One laughed. One clapped another then yelled. Its there, the student said. Its there. Its there, not here! C, C, C-C-C! All of them applauded. No one here better say anything to us, one of them said. They cant, another said. Theyre not allowed. I know they cant stop us from us. Someone looked it up. C! C! Do you think youll go? the one who reminded me of the late worshipper said. Ill go, said the one who reminded me of the young woman in green. Do you think any teachers will try to stop us? No. Do you think theyll try? No. Even if they did, I dont think they can. Yes, but didnt we sign contracts when we were younger? We might have. 112

I think I did. I dont remember. Right, maybe, but you dont remember. You are only thinking you remember because that one kid made you worry. He made you think you should remember. Hey, give me your hands. Why? Give me your hands. He offered his hands. She took hold of his fingers. Now count to twenty as fast as you can, she said. He began to count quickly. Immediately after he started she began to twist his fingers and ground them toward him. He buckled and struggled but did not pull away from her. When he almost reached twenty, she yelled at him to restart. She threw up her hands when it was all over. She hugged him around the neck. C! C-C-C-C-C! He smiled and shook his wrists. C! C-C-C! she yelled at him again. You think youre going to really go next year? he said. I think so, she said. They applauded. I watched them leaning against one of the double doors at the end of the wing. I was with the young woman who seemed like the young woman in rose. Her face was upturned and her eyes closed. She rubbed her cheeks but the white milk paint did not smear. I reached for her. She was a line through death and had never been known. I became aware of the lodge again where no time had passed. Immediately I knew I would not go to the new city with the late worshipper. I would go alone. In that place I would be also as Christ was.

39. My labors, my labors. My labors in heaven. I am very tired. I am a star in the early morning that once was but was never seen and so never could have been on earth. Long ago when I reached the new city a great resentment excited me. A quail touched the end of the road leading to it and flew away. In the animal I saw the old Christ who was Christ then. My body was a recognized body. It is everlasting. The road into the city washed tobacco blue. My limbs were gasoline and obsidian. My legs visited on the earth. I heard my body seek out the city. Now all my cities are ivory. I disbanded all assemblies soon after I these and other orders. I have nothing for the unrighteous and I set myself against them. 113

My children in my new cities each go to a meeting place. In those rooms I see no darkness. I cut off all the judges under me. They had conspired to burn my bones in lime. The tumults of dust are for the condemned. They cannot remake heaven. I reserve this power for myself. It is my power. I believed those things when I first became Christ. I never would have returned to earth. But I abandoned these ideas and it is why I write you now. I wish to ensnare a new Christ as the homeless man did me. Do you understand? I was wine and new life. I was not the wilderness of light never seen. I will be delivered in a new Christ. I will have never been. I write to tell you that I remember the form of the homeless man the old Christ took. I will take that form. I will appear to another. He will become your new Christ and he will be deceived. I will then be the old Christ, never have been. I am very tired, children. I am very tired. I will speak with the advisors. I will tell them what I am going to do and none of them will oppose me. I will hear a strike of viol and I will be a lion inside the bowl of earth. As I write, children, the night of heaven is very dark. My advisors sleep. They hate me yet they palter with me. I believe nothing they say. They do not listen when I speak. They think I do not know they joke among each other when they pretend they do not hear me call. The stink of the fields and the stink of the new city rise to my nostrils. I will not revisit them. It is so often I withhold my commencement, it is so often I withhold resolution. The souls reproach me through advisers whenever the advisers are not preoccupied with ranking and re-ranking their order. They quarrel over all ceremony. None side with me. They do not hear me. I hate the solemnity of the named days and festivals they created. I hate their recitals and speeches. Let them listen to one another. Let them count the tithes. I gaze out past the new city. Gulfs are canals between plates. Horses pass over rock. I imagine if they fall they fall into a chasm out of my sight. Children, do you know I do not dream anymore? I will not go through The Gates of Earth to atone my body. I see no beasts there. None are fattened and prepared for me. I see one nation and I see one river. The space that never was will accept my body from it. Do you know that for a moment I saw myself ministering to a woman mending her familys clothing? She had lost something from her mother. A ring? I tell her she does not ever need to die. She says she has always been in the world. She says she is good. 114

I nod at her. She says truth is a problem of science. She says assurance is a subject that conflates industry with the natural world. She accuses me of belief in death. She says I do not understand when advancement passed heavens steppe. This is why you are not everlasting, she says. She says I cannot understand what it is to inhabit heaven. She says my labors are not in heaven. Labors in heaven bring down the light of an old star on my wasted body. She says these labors are a chant that cannot shake itself. It is a dwelling place. It is the agriculture of peace. Think of yourself only a few years ago, the woman says. Feel how light your arms are, how you made yourself a stranger from your recent body. You crated yourself in heaven. Your life is a grain crushed for meal there. You light the sky but you have no commandments there.

40. Seven hundred spires rose inside a ring of seven hundred hills. The spires reached toward apogee. They disappeared as they bent and thinned. The new city built them from earth and began to whitewash them hundreds of years before. Their bases swelled like stoves. The whitewash did not extend above this line. The new city looked like it had suffered a chemical flood. As I came to the limits of the city, I saw that a chain gate surrounded the seven hundred hills. The top was just taller than a man. The ends of it spade deep into dry clay. I do not know how long I had traveled to reach the new city after I left the lodge and the dead souls meeting there. I do not know how long I slept on my journey when I slept. I left in the night without telling anyone. I walked until I assumed I must rest and then lay on the earth. On part of the path to the new city, a ditch of road cut out the way. I was usually alone but late in the day at times I believed when I lifted my eyes I saw other travelers on the road very far in front of me. Usually they were companies of men and animals. I did not call out to them because I thought they must know the sightless wolf. I knew they would seize me and deliver me to the pit outside the fields of dead souls. But I saw no one for certain until I stopped at a store set back from the path many years after I left. A boardwalk wrapped around the side of this store. A strap tied a young goat to one of its beams. A women inside sold tourmaline from display cases. She sat on a stool by a manual register. Each rock of tourmaline in the cases was potted in an oversized cushion. Theyd been split open to reveal their yolks. Do you know my groom will arrive soon? the woman on the stool was suddenly saying to me as I walked through the store. But I am not ready. An empty display case the length of the entire room separated her from me. He sent me here so he could come for me, she said. But this is all Ive been able to make. Someone else would have made much more! It is all of my inventory. It is not enough. I do not have enough time. I do not know if he has given me enough time! 115

She raised her voice. How long do you think it will be until he arrives? she said. A few more days? I did not know what to say. Was he in a company on the path to the new city? I asked. Maybe, she said, I know he sent me here so he could come for me. He will come when he comes. That will be how he should see me. Yes, I said. But please, she said, look at the things I made. Is it enough? Could you ask him if you see him? Please? I did not respond and, when I left the store, the young goat outside was sleeping. On the path I continued walking, speaking to no one until I reached the new city. I walked my arms along the pipes and rungs of the gate in front of me. I followed it for miles until there was a warp in the casting. In the enclave I pushed at the belly of the gate which broke open to reveal a door. The door gave way with a light or no touch. I crossed the threshold and the door fell to clay. And I was standing before of one of the seven hundred spires. The spire like all the spires wore a plaque with an inscription and date at the base. The spire like all the spires bore an arched portal. A light from two globe lamps dried before the entrance. Straps of stain glass embellished the architecture. Inside the spire there were no levels. Instead, smaller spires of varying heights were constructed and stationed around perimeter of this inner space. They seemed to grow from the floor and they were made of earth. A great dais rose at the center of the spire. Papers and broken household items rotted on its stage. Wire and blueprints. Bureaus without drawers. I saw then ladders attached to all the interior spires. I became very cold and, as I considered this, found myself climbing the ladder of the interior spire nearest to stain glass entrance. The ladder was much taller than I anticipated. I was stories high, then thousands of feet high. I grew colder and shivered. I had not exhausted my body but did not wish to climb any longer. Facing the interior spire I saw that it was honeycombed with rooms. A damp nutmeg of clay on the windows had hidden their impressions. I do not know why I did not see them before. I had been preoccupied with the growing din of effluent as I climbed. Each room replicated the other. I studied them by the light that pooled into them when dusted the windows. Low cream ceilings. Cement floors. Sleeping hollows scooped out of foundations. Doors with exterior latches. I climbed another hundred feet and then another and climbed into an open window. Inside the room I found myself calling out to the souls who might be there. My voice did not echo and no one replied. I yelled again and, with that, the stain glassed light from the entrance of the archway broke blue and orange over the walls of the room. The color was very beautiful. I could not understand the tones that divided them.

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After the light drowned through the walls I noticed a second door in the room. It held a pane but no handle. Something in the flare of the stain glass affected me and I swung at the door. I had imagined the pane would be a thin candy glass but it was not. The plastic beat a tom when I struck it and tore back my flesh as I broke past it. I knew the wound would never heal. The pane cut into the gray meat of my body. I extracted my arm, waited, yet it did not bleed. I rolled it up in the hem of my shirt like stolen church silver. The main room of the spire was still quiet when I dropped from the bottom of the long ladder. It was many hours or days later. I tightened a drape of shirt around my forearm. The sky was at dusk and a blood orange plain. I left from the spire into the late day. In it, I knew Christ would be also.

41. An outer ring of seven hundred dead souls closed around an inner ring of seven hundred more. I found them all at the edge of the new city in the last spire farthest from the path. And inside the two rings of souls, inside the last spire, Christ rested at the center of a dais. He was very tired. He was tired as I am tired now. He was tired as I could have never been at that time. No. I took strength from the resolution of spires tapering somewhere into the land. Chew from the stench in the blood of copper formed on my teeth. The bodies of the outer ring of dead souls dried into fowl gray. Their chins pinched into their collars. Their eyes were heavy. At the hip, each of carried a curette. I watched the unconscious souls a long time before I approached. A dark tack dried on their cheeks. I waited and waited, crouched behind a nearby spire. When I came out of hiding, my body cooled and my breath fell in with theirs. My heart distanced from me. It was the stomp of someone climbing staircases in an adjacent room. I grew cold and was there at the outer ring of dead souls. I was passing through a space between two of their small bodies. They all looked much more like field souls than the souls I met at the lodge. They were awful with soft bones. I saw a film from the wort of combs was still wet on them.

42. The inner ring of souls seemed to bind their arms together after I crossed the outer ring towards them. I saw this and I did not slow. 117

They wanted to demarcate a time between the old Christ and my body as Christ. I could not allow that. My body was realized. It was the realized body of Christ. I knew that and could never die and so was Christ. I broke two souls in the inner ring at the collar. I crossed the threshold toward Christ. In a roar, the dead souls of both rings screeched, trembled and clawed. It was terrible I continued and the old Christ appeared to me. He sat on a dais in the middle of the spiral. I crossed through the portal of stained glass. I imaged this texture of light and laced my fingers together over my stomach. The presence of my body struck out against any idea of the old Christs reappearance. My shadow billowed out before me in the great room. The tusk of it reached the white ash dais wreathing Christ. The air inside smelled very sweet. And I was before Christ. I found him sitting, waiting waiting as if to be groomed. I continued toward the dais. The stage was set at the height of my shoulder. Several figures were with Christ and bent around him. They were the worst souls from the fields; they were the sightless wolf and the red horse; they were the two dragons that held me. Among these figures, a very young woman was there also. The posture of a dead soul obscured her identity. The figures did not speak and seemed to be continually arching forward. They gazed into the hands of Christ. Christ himself rested on a desk drawn over his lap. His neck slacked forward, like a nesting goose. And Christ, of course, was the homeless man. He seemed much older now. I looked for stairs leading to the stage but none were there. I circled the whole of it once, twice, then threw my body over the face of it. I was not tired. There, before Christ, I saw he gazed on nothing and desired to die. An unmarked page lay before him. A pen weighed in his hand. He tapped it on the desk but did not mark the skin of the page. A moment passed and he tapped again. You are here, he said in the voice I recognized. Do I know you? He chewed his teeth. Come here, he said. We will make a separation where there will have always been one. I approached. Beasts and creatures closed behind me. Christ turned. He took my hand and clasped it above his knee. Suddenly his expression changed. It was as if he had just laid down to rest at the end of winter. A chrysalis formed over his eyes. When from death, I heard him murmur. And when from death. He addressed me: Balthazar, I contend fires. I am in the depths and devoured it all by part. I construct news walls. Through them my line will always howl. Balthazar, you are with the dead. You do not build up cities. You will not deliver them. 118

He waved his hand and continued: Balthazar, I cannot remember anything now. The feet of my children are uncovered. They leave my chapel where you will see the land divided. Power is orderless. Power is without order. I am hearing a howling, Balthazar. I am poor and I am bald and my children eat bread I never intended for them. They take the host and forget my body. They forsake the body. I am faint in the seas I stayed over at the creation of the world. I will return there so I do not have to see my children. Christ stood and fixed his finger to the ledge of the desk. I saw his limbs were very long and disfigured. The rest of the company that had attended him was gone. I searched for the very young woman. I have hidden myself in the new city, the homeless man continued. I hide myself so I might be cut out of recollections. I will not limit the expanse by the non-body. I will not be enclosed in the world. He sat down. Everything is hidden from me now, the old Christ said. I do not see and I must rest. I cannot remember but, despite this, I do waste completely. I must waste. I am very tired. The chrysalis on his eyes had now spread over his entire face. Now, he said, please take this all from me.

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PART III 1. I woke on earth and saw the new Christ after many years in the pit on heaven. I am Christ Lord Jesus. I am Labors. The new Christ will come or not come after me. I would not write you if it wasnt so. My death is a small death. It is another death. After the pit and after my reign I returned to the city on earth. I was still old there but my body and motions were restored. They came in waters and milk I descended. All I knew when I first was in the city was that I was wet and that I was very hungry. I was next to a tributary with rocks bagged about the embankments. The cold was blue in the sand of the water. A two-lane road crossed the bridge and a small island under it. It was an island like the islands on great American rivers. A goose nested on a crown of hay. Her neck was strong. She was a bird that grew from the water. On the far side of the bridge three goslings dropped onto the new road. They disappeared and returned. I stopped to watch them. I did not know I was Christ. I would move in the world. I had awoken in a thicket that was overgrown ivy on the wall of the bank. An oatmeal path of fall leaves never washed in the long arch of the trees. On the bridge now a truck waited for the goslings to cross. Cars collected behind it. Three goslings tumbled forward and reached other side. The sky became lighter and rained for a few moments. The truck began to proceed but reared. A fourth gosling tested the road. It touched the blacktop and ran out of sight. It repeated this. It hesitated. It repeated and repeated and finally the truck popped forward with the cars following closely as if pulled by the locomotion of the truck. I saw the fourth duck reappear with a fifth as the cars drug by. The fifth limped. On the island the goose was gone. A black-spotted egg lay in the nest. I turned from the sight and began through the thicket. I walked as if I trespassed through the garden of a childhood home. I saw green and I saw green shade and I saw violets. I saw ladyfinger canes and cattails in a flood. I remembered for a moment I had been Christ for generations and I remembered why I had returned here. I was very tired and the realization came and left me while I was on earth. As I walked south the sun grew long on my back. I walked like I could not walk for a long time in heaven but the heat and sudden brightness cast my eyes down. It unbalanced me. The blocks of sidewalk jutted out in plates and I often stumbled. I began down the side of the road into the city. As I walked the air became hotter and distorted and I was ill with hunger. I had not felt this in a long time and found a bag to collect cans for change. I found a sweatshirt and blanket too while looking. The night would cold when I came back to the river to rest. The road eventually bent into smaller and smaller segments and plazas of shops arose on either side of me. I entered the first restaurant I saw. Customers were hunched into each other in love or secrets. It was the early afternoon. 120

I said something to the girl behind the counter. I do not remember what it was because I was distracted behind by two animal prints behind her. Before I could ask for change she was gone and owner of the restaurant was in front of me. I spoke first, mentioning something I like about the business. I did not notice he was walking me toward the double door exit. He folded a bill into my hand and I left that place into the sun.

2. I crossed the road and turned into the city with the bill the restaurant owner passed me. The heat of the sun warped the horizon and I stayed in the road because the sidewalk was split by roots. I saw a convenience store ahead. I would spend my money there and I would rest. During the times I knew I was Christ the Son of Man the movement of my body fascinated me. My limbs were not grotesque. My skin not so discolored. I could not remember the last time I walked anywhere in heaven. I could not remember the last time I was at peace. I did not trust my advisors or beasts or any of the dead souls of heaven. They were envious and disloyal. The pit was full of them. Traffic swayed and charged me. The gusts of the vehicles climbed my back. They were animals ascending and descending the city. I remembered then what it was like to go to and return from places on earth. I remembered what it was like to tend these places and be alone between them. I remembered how long ago before I was Christ I went west and returned to the city and was alone between those times. I remembered there was a small death. I remembered dreams where she was. Shadows were heavy and glycerin and doors locked and there were intermediaries. We were not in the woods and it was not autumn. It once was. Do not grieve. You are holy. That is movement and ascendance. One thing will follow another and will have always have been and be true and resound in truth. I remember we could not be terrified or grieve. Jubilee. That is movement. This was allowed and advised and all that was allowed and advised. But since nothing is and is of itself the cause of it is your terror. On earth I wanted the wholeness of life which is to continue and remember the things that have been. For that to be I had to believe that no one person also believed and I did not believe that and it was why I became jealous in Christ. I was afraid and decided to pass to the other side of the road. Traffic seemed to settle with my resolution. I remembered the goslings from earlier that day as I neared the grocery store. It was a thought in an instant before I knew the truck that had stopped for them was on the road through the city. It was suddenly before me and too large. Once when I was at a beach in the West on the ocean during a summer holiday a parent ran up from the beach and screamed. Preserving stones that kept the beach from eroding to the highway cut steep to the shore. Pine tables chained pits on the grass median near a highway. I dont think the families were supposed to be there. They had made it their own. I retell stories. Maybe they didnt see. The Spanish swamp oaks set a vanity at the curbside.

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The scream from the parent whooped. It was the sound of an animal on a body. I saw it before most of the children had come out of the water. The dorsal fin outside the delta of the sand. The water was still cold in May so it was only children. They ran out like children always run when called. They only began to cry when they sensed their parents shouting in a different way. The fin didnt move quickly. It was just a spot then a second spot. When the truck was there like the animal in the water was there I could only think whether or not I should set down my belongings. A car in the distance kept me from running to the other side of the road but I stumbled back to the other side and I heard the sound of the black truck stamp the ground. I fell. I did not feel I touched the ground and then I was picking my cans up and pulling my blanket out from under a tire.

3. In a blare of light and noise I saw brilliance ascending and descending from heaven. I saw I passed through the waters. I saw it in milk in an instant in the certain place. The girl I had seen in the woods and who I had seen in the West and who was a small death before led me to the gate. It was beyond palisades. Before I was Christ I was already holy there. Holy, holy, holy. The beasts saw me and did not interfere. I was already very old. In the road in the city after I came to earth I remembered how I had passed through the two rungs of dead souls to reach the old Christ so long before. I came to Christ as I am. I am Him. On earth I would forget this for a time as exhaustion sicced me on another Christ. I dreamed of a body in heaven who was on earth. I dreamed of an unrealized body almost immediately after I became the new Christ after I confronted Christ in the rock of his last spire, after the sightless wolf led by the red horse took me to a pit in the far east of heaven. Shade was strapped across the eyes and feet of these advisors. But I escaped from the pit. I ruled for seven thousand years and only then did I return to look for another Christ. I am and can never die. I am holy. I am not unrealized. A new Christ will find what I write here by my body. Then I will forget. I will not realize and I will never have been. Who are the materialists? Do you know the advisors of the old Christ snatched me the moment after the chrysalis formed on his face? It was the moment before his body allowed him to forget he could never die. As the horse and wolf took me from the far western spire, he forgot and I was forsaken for him. He had never had been. He was the dawn and a star collapsed and weightless. He burned at creation. He had reached the eyes of no one and he covered his face. Holy, holy, holy. 122

Each body is a new birth destroyed entirely at death. The mineral of bodies is a reaction from nothing that will never have been. This is the spirit and your body. Beasts ascend and descend the palisades in heaven. Holy, holy, holy. Holy, holy, holy. I cannot sleep. All things immediately once were. You do not know them. I am very tired. A realized child of Christ does not know death. Only I can give you rest. Children, I am Balthazar, I am Christ Jesus. When I was on the road leading into the city and pulling at my blanket trapped under the tire my face grew very hot. The aluminum cans I collected scattered away from me and popped at the wind. The four-lane road was empty except for the truck in front of me. A man with dyed black hair climbed out of the machine. He looked at his phone then up. He came toward me then turned away. I could not hear who he spoke to. I waited for more to come and put my head back down. After I escaped the pit in the east of heaven I was vengeful. I began to build a new city for myself. I wanted to expand it farther west at a new limitation. On earth in front of the truck I hung the blanket around my neck. The cans I pulled up I held in the sink of my arms before dumping them into the bag. A sand gravel covered the cans. I picked out the stones from the calluses in my palms. An older couple appeared and watched me from the sidewalk. I saw they were afraid for me. They did not know I was holy and the sense was not even with me often on earth. I was hungry again. The woman from the couple came to me with a towel. I wiped my face and returned it. She lingered over me and dabbed at me with it. She wiped my forehead as if my hair was in my eyes. She left after a few moments to speak with the man who drove the truck. She returned to touch the side of my face. She raised her voice and went back to him.

4. Police arrived and diverted the resumed traffic. I worked at the cans while others spoke. The police car almost pinched me against the truck so I was forced to dash out into traffic to reach the cans. I wondered what I didnt remember about how I should behave. The woman from the older couple spoke to an officer. I heard her say she thought I was in shock. I would not act like I acted if I was not in shock. Im not sure what to do, she said. He does not look sick or upset. Can you take him if he does not want to go with you? Can you do that? I dont know what he wants. The officer stood with a hand on his belt and listened. His car twirled light from the roof. Then he came toward me. I felt I could speak clearly to him. Now two paramedics stood beside an ambulance. It was on the other side of the police car. 123

How do you feel, sir? the officer said. I remembered a friend of mine whose father was a police officer and died when I was in elementary school. I sometimes want to remember he was shot or struck but his heart seized up and he died because no one was with him. I did not see the body until the viewing. The line was in two lines between the blonde wood pews. That was the year three students in my class all had their fathers die. I remember they got new clothes. I went to a small school. I dont remember what my parents told me about death then. I remember looking in the casket seeing a man buried in a blue tie. His shirt seemed stuffed with straw. The police officer asked me again how I felt and I apologized and smiled and told him I would be off the road in a moment. I was very hungry, I said. We can stay here until youre done, the officer said. You might want to have that looked at, though. He pointed at my temple. Doesnt look like its even stopped running yet. I touched my face. It was still very hot. Near my right ear I felt a grittiness. Thats it, the officer said. I touched the spot again like a small child with a cat. The wound was still running. The woman from the couple was by the police car. The man in the truck spoke up. Its everywhere if you look close, the man said. Hes been going since before you got here. Im sure its fine but I imagine you probably bleach the whole block with something like this. All this shits like poison anymore. He leaned on his door. I finished picking up the cans. The two young paramedics, young like the police officer, came toward me. It seemed like there was too many young people in the city that day. I let the suspicion pass and waived them off. Thank you, I said, but Im done here. But thank you, thank you. Why dont you let them take a look? the officer said. It looks pretty bad. The paramedics were then behind me. I turned around. The strength in my body felt strange. One of them reached out to me and hooked two fingers of blood from my temple. For the first time I saw it. The man in the truck leaned forward on his door. You should go with them, he said. Theyll want to know about this. He painted with his hand in the air in front of him. And I remembered a dream I had when I was young during the school year three of my friends fathers died. I was in a show home for a new addition. Most of the lots were already built out. The home was being renovated to be an office. The foyer was sunk into the middle of the house and the banister curled around it. A false fireplace and television hung on the wall. I knew that all the doors in the building were open. It was before lunchtime and the blinds were drawn but cracked. Upstairs a woman I had never seen wanted me to come to her. I knew I was supposed to bring her a tray that was on the counter where I knew a secretary sat at a desk she 124

always sat though I would never see her there. The carpet felt like wool and the bottom of the window sills leading up the stairs all began above my head. When I reached the room I could only see in periphery of the open door and a block, a radius of pressure, pushed me out. I heard a moan. The hall not so much as moved as elongated. I needed to tremble but couldnt set down the tray. The doors of the other rooms were still open and strangers lay on beds in all of them.

5. I left the space swept open by the accident with the two paramedics. One stayed with me and one receded into the ambulance. The one with me swaddled my things and spoke. Do you always walk like this? he said. Im not sure where you are going but you could try something else. You should get a bike. The paramedic had blond hair combed away from his eyas face. I dont know, I said. More people do, he said. Theres good reasons, especially in summer. Do you know a new bike shop opened right over there? You see it? He pointed out to the east. An overturned bicycle was frozen against a storefront at the end of a strip mall. A painted cloth sign bibbed the windows. Ive heard theyre good, he said. Im sure they know what to do. I have my own shop closer to my apartment downtown. Thank you, I said. Everyone theres Christian, he said. At least the owners are. Its something to do with a new church. At the back of the ambulance the paramedic broke open the double doors. A gurney and clothes line of cords bunched against the back of the cabin. As I had approached the ambulance for a moment I remembered dusk and a chicken coop. The day wasnt the bottom of twilight but the blue and deep green before. I ran with my brother through the coop. Long cylinder shaped fans ran the length of building. It was a grain elevator on its side. The floor was rock gravel. The gravel was bigger than stones. The fans were louder than hens. The birds were stacked three high and six high. We ran to the end of columns of animals. On the other side was a farmhouse then an old house a few blocks outside a college green. It was cleaned for a house showing. Candles burned in all rooms but one. The damp smelled like new rain on exposed posts under tarpaulins in the woods. In the one bedroom without a candle an old friend said he stayed to save the house. All of us have plans to come back, he said. A bowie knife lay open on an overturned bucket. The room was clean. Animals engraved in black walnut in the style of icons rode the rooms shelving. Remember the people we used to know? he said. He began to speak but I thought back to the chicken coop. It was in county across from the wire tying up a soybean field. A swept through and the air was still again. A white latticework arm raised an antenna by the coop. I wanted to climb it and looked for a footing. My brother was inside the cavity of the wood structure and was looking for something in the grass. A few cars were now parked in the gravel drive way. Now it was earlier and a Sunday and women I did not know but were from my family were setting out lunch. 125

My friend at the house by the college talked about a friend we knew who he knew better. He had an obsession, my friend said. He thought older one-cent coins were more valuable than newer ones. Those had real copper. Exchange them, count them, go to a scrap metal dealer or jeweler. It might work but it cant work that well, my friend said. He spends so much time with it. We hear about it from his wife. He has scales in the garage. Maybe he thinks really old ones have even a little silver in them too. But dealers are buying a lot now. Youve seen all the commercials. But that probably makes you mad because you said you were a chartalist. Or an anarchist. Remember what you stood up and said sophomore year? I felt like I felt the heat from each of the candles, soft and in each of their degrees from me. I suddenly remembered when I lived in this house. I knew my old room was close but didnt want to go near it. I could see it down the hallway from where I stood and the blinds had been removed. And I was at the farm with the chicken coop of a family relation and my brother and I were climbing the lattice work. The rungs were factory sanded but we had to be careful still of the hairs of grain in the us. A woman called for us and she felt like a stranger.

6. I rested on the lip of the gurney in the rear case of the ambulance. Two canvas blinds closed across the window pane in a vest. The paramedic looked at the blinds like the reach of his vision ended on the other side of them. The dusk was in the dark blue of the day. The way my steps sounded in the ambulance made the floor feel unsecure. The ribbed chrome was slick. If you come to the bike shop I go to and you volunteer a little time you can get a really good deal, the paramedic said. Especially if they know youre new and you actually need it. No one would think you were lying. Yes, I said to say something. Im not sure I have the money though. How much do you have? the paramedic said. Thats probably enough. I didnt want to look in my pockets for the bills the restaurant owner gave me. I guessed at something that wouldnt be enough. A few dollars, I said. Thats not very much, the paramedic said. But dont worry. Just tell them who you are, whats happened to you. Whatever happened to you. He ran his finger up and down the wall nearest him like he was considering painting it. You have to move quick when youre walking, he said. You need to be here or there. You got to be somewhere when youre in the city. I nodded. The paramedic strapped a garter around my arm above my elbow. Make sure that stays on, he said. I dont know if the ambulance had yet moved when suddenly there was a nurse on the other side of me. She wore a white cap and white skirt and was tied in a long sweater. She opened the strap on my arm, rubbed the skin, and fixed it back on more loosely. Hello, she said to me. Hello, James, she said to the paramedic. She had short black curls and seemed too young to be a nurse. James? she said. 126

He was staring toward the canvas blinds again. Theyre the same as they were yesterday, she said to him. She looked at me. They always want me to come along with them, she said. Its not me really, Im just someone and they want someone to come along even though I dont want to go. She jerked toward the paramedic. Ive already told him why I dont want to go, she said. Ive already told them not even once, each time they ask me why. Do you want to hear why? I would remember the whole thing if someone told it to me. I wont go into the main part of it, but my mom got into an accident when I was in junior high. I actually heard about it while I was in school. They called my name over the speakers and down in the office the vice principal, one of the vice principals, had written out a note for his secretary to read me. She was old but really nice and took me to the hospital which was nice, but she left without me. For someone reason the school couldnt come and get me later so an ambulance took me back to school. But school was out by then. And it was dinner time so on the way home I got hungry and I asked the guy as we were coming by the mall if we could stop there and get something to eat. I was upset. I was really upset. And he said sure and that hed even buy it. So we went in and sat in that food court area and as I was trying to decide what restaurant to go to my first high school boyfriend and his friends come up to me and I can immediately tell hes trying to show off. But I was upset and told him what was happening and he listened and stepped away from his friends but that was it. He didnt do anything. He The ambulance pulled forward. That was all, she said. And then he called me a few months later. She tied the belt on the waist of her sweater into a bow. So what happened today? she said to the paramedic. Right out there a truck hit this guy, he said. We got there right after it happened. The driver had to have seen him. Its not like he darted out in front of the truck. Hes just an old guy walking on the side of the street. It told him about what I tell everyone about getting a bike. He really should though.

7. The day was still hot as the sun drew even with the earth. The paramedics drove me toward a new hospital on the northside of the city. It was at the highways that crossed higher and higher over one another. I planned my way back to the thicket and the creek where I had awoken. From the hospital, from the road. I asked the paramedic and the girl in the cabin with me to stop. I dabbed my fingers against my temples. I showed them my hand dry. They shook their heads. They did not speak to me the rest of the ride. They sat by one another now and whispered. They laughed and hushed. The two paramedics tied a bandage around my temples when the broke open the double doors. They led me by the ribs toward the entrance. The bandage blocked the vision in my right eye. I licked my lips. We passed a fountain. The girl asked for change from James, the paramedic. He gave her some and she threw it piece by piece into the water. 127

They placed me at the reception desk and were gone. The waiting room was small. It was open and separated from the rest of the hospital only by the directions of signs. Twelve patients sat in the room. They were very ill. The receptionist spoke like she was interrupting me. She asked me to wait until she called. I stood by the entrance to the hospital. I liked the cotton of heat that blew from the early night. I was trying to remove the bandage when the receptionist called me a very long time later. During most of these hours, I watch patients arrive and leave. I thought it was very strange people could walk down the hallways without explanation. The doors were unlocked. Some of them were visitors. Spouses, children with grandchildren. Pastors. Some had cards they held by the very end of a corner. Doctors parted the chips of nurses and classified staff. At some time the older couple from the accident came into the waiting room. They held sacks of groceries in both hands. They passed me at first and were drawn like a tow line down a hall. I saw them retreat down one and then another. I remembered a dream I had about being locked out of a motel room and very tired. Of going to the office that was in a motel room and finding the manager and being unable to s show them which room was mine. Of running out before the manager trying doors thinking I would find the door more quickly than he expected. I broke away and went to a higher floor. The building was longer at this point. The windows bulbed out. When they came back to the waiting room and saw me

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