WIP [Prison]

The prison wandered the desert, it was a wandering prison, build on solid ground it migrated. This is what the rural locals claimed and who was I to doubt them? Facts are easy to come by. I had memorized them, tattooed them up my left forearm, a long list, established 1894, seven square acres, eleven wings, maximum security, three feet of solid concrete reinforced in later years by steel rebar. Ro and I had been on our scavenger hunt for two years, crisscrossing the desert roads west of the coast and its cities. We weren’t the only ones. There were dozens if not hundreds. Curious collectors of living desiderata, people who like a good hunt, who need mysteries to keep interested in their own lives. Yes, the country’s oldest prison never stayed in one place for longer than a day, it teleported here to there without any predictable pattern, never could guess where it’d appear each morning. 

Today we were driving through Sanger Range. We had spent the night in a beaten-down motel in Clazuwel. To save money we’d shared a room, the clerk behind the counter giving us the eye when we asked for one key. It’d been a hundred-plus degrees the past few weeks, dropping below the three digit mark only after sundown, deep in the evenings. The room was sweltering when we entered. We threw our bags on the bed, switched on the air conditioning unit. There was a convenience mart down the road, Ro excused himself to walk off in that direction to buy us some evening beer. I had seen a pair of plastic lawn chairs in the motel courtyard. Cacti growing in a pebble garden, a dried-out pool filled with rolls of carpet. I took a seat and breathed in the heat and waited. Twenty minutes later Ro returned with a six-pack. We cracked the beers and toasted to the desert. People can survive just about anywhere, he said, so long as there’s beer. 

We sat drinking and talking, watching the courtyard’s lizards zip and perch to channel strange currencies of the universe. A gawky species of bird common to those parts landed on a chainlink fence other side of the pool, ugly brown and grey, jagged plumage out the back of its head. It sat in profile watching us, song-less. Occasionally it’d turn its head, switch eyes. Seemed to flick its head to face one direction then the other every few minutes. As the air cooled and shadows began to stretch along the ground, a few other travelers joined us in the courtyard. Soon the unused chairs were taken, the lot of us sitting a whisper’s distance from each other. Some of us sat drinking, others smoking, many blended vices and did both. 

You looking for Coldbones also, one of them asked. He’d walked into courtyard alone and was forced to stand, all available seats taken. 

We are, Ro said. 

How long you been on the hunt.

Third day.

Beginners, eh?! The man held a hand over his eyes, as if looking into the sun, which had set a half-hour earlier. 

If you want to call it that.

The man introduced himself as Big Yosh. Not Yosh, Big Yosh, he specified, what all his friends and people home called him. Where from? New Clerkin. A far bit of way from where we were standing and sitting. How long had he been out in the desert, searching for Coldbones? Off and on fifteen years. By his account he was a lifer. Never one to shirk a good challenge. First five years venturing out into the desert, he’d had a partner, but the partner had grown tired of all their searching without even so much as a stitch of finding, so quit. Past ten years he’d driven from the coast into the interior on his own. Fancied himself a pilgrim of sorts. Instead of a holy site, he was off wandering to find a prison. 

What’s the difference between a monk, anyways, and a convict, he asked, teasing our predicament rhetorically. 

One jails himself in worship of a law, the other for desecrating it. Here his half-toothed smile broke into punchline. So which’re you? Figured that out yet? 

Neither Ro or I put words to that. With a full day of driving behind us, we were too exhausted to jibe with him. Something about his tone suggested he resented us, but for what? Here were two younger guys who’d arrived early and taken two of the few seats available, didn’t they have any sense of honor, any respect for forebears or elders? They were all on the same hunt, or were they? They were not, in fact, his tone told them. They were searching for entirely different things, towards entirely different ends. His was a higher calling, theirs merely schoolboy flirting with a rumor. He didn’t wait long for a response, maybe knowing one wasn’t coming, so coughed a short cough, sniffed, then stepped off into the courtyard to take a lean against the fence, long ago abandoned by its bird. 

Him half-watching, we finished our last beers, stomped the cans flat under our heels. We left the chairs as an invitation, didn’t wait around to see if they'd be taken. The room was cooler when we returned to it. Bearable enough to sleep in.

*

The next morning we were up early, packed our gear in the car, stopped by the town’s one station to fill the tank and a few plastic canisters with petrol. No choice but to drive with windows down, the gas fumes would zonk us. Ro sat on the hood of the car scanning the burnt horizon through binoculars while I worked the pump. This was how most mornings on a hunt began, one of us searching the surrounding landscape three hundred sixty degrees for signs of Coldbones, the other still half-asleep, pumping gas. Once the tank was filled, I’d fill one spare canister then another. They were lined up at my feet, caps off, waiting. After these were filled and loaded through the car’s hatchback, I’d walk to the station to pay. If they had bottled water or beer, I’d buy both or either. If they had shrink-wrapped sandwiches or jerky, I’d buy those also. In the eyes of Lifers, people committed solely to the search, we were Weekenders. We travelled in leisure. We had money and a car and a city and home to return to, once we’d exhausted our patience with the desert. Lifers, people with no money of their own, no car, no city nor home, they prided themselves on their penury and debased condition. All this was necessary, they argued, a precondition for finding and one day gaining admission to Coldbones. In order to one day be considered worthy of incarceration, they had to prove themselves worthless in the eyes of Haves and Weekenders such as Ro and I. As a barb, Ro took to calling them Have-Nots. Many were the Have-Nots of the Great Desert. Weekenders such as us were a mockery to their ambitions, traveling in relative luxury, without desperation or bitterness. 

I capped the gas canisters, loaded them into the trunk. At the station I bought coffee and jerky and two beers, one stuffed tight into each back pocket. The woman behind counter worked a bit of crust from her eye with a finger, free hand ripping the paper receipt from its feeder. 

Outside I found Ro talking with someone. The someone had taken the binoculars off Ro and was scanning the distance, talking. The roughneck from the night before, the motel courtyard, what was it? Big Yosh. Morning to you, Cap’n, he hollered, what you got there, breakfast? 

Ro sent me an eye that said Keep it calm, give it a chance. I greeted the man with a nod and good morning. 

Mr. Yosh has made us a proposition. While we have a car, he says, he has a real sense of direction. By his account, has got a feel for Coldbones, where it might appear next. Plus, has first-hand experience of the place. Spent a five year stint there. 

Ask yourself, friend, the man asked, would you recognize what you were seeing, at a distance, if you saw it? 

With a dirty finger he tapped the side of his head. 

Got it all here, fresh as the next lit cigarette. 

There are other prisons out there, you know, fake ones, mirages. Decoys. 

Oh? He said, sarcastically half-delighted. Never heard that? I can guarantee you two, there’s plenty of echoes of actual Coldbones out there. They’ll trick the eye, fool you to drive towards them. Then will vanish just before you reach them. Takes an expert spotter to tell the phonies from the real thing. With me, that’s what you got. 

Ro and I asked for a moment. The man walked to the edge of the lot while we talked it over. 

Think he’s dangerous? 

Maybe when he was younger. But he’s past expiration date as a threat, wouldn’t you say?

From a distance the man looked stronger than he was. Up close, the work of prolonged malnourishment aged him considerably. Eyes sunken into sockets, cheekbones jagged. Skull prefacing the face upon first glance. 

We called him back over and accepted, on condition he emptied his pockets and allowed us to pat him down. 

Bemused, he submitted to these, arms raised above his head. 

Brings me back, he said. Just like my first day in Coldbones. I’m clean, boys, promise!

Two hours later, driving west we crossed into Sanger Range, land either side of the road flattening to a sheer crisp line, earth and sky. Nothing alive and everything wavering, burning.

*

Where you boys from? he yelled from the passenger’s seat. Ro took the back seat as a precaution, to keep an eye on him. Windows down and wind thrashing the interiors like a trapped animal.   

  

                            [...]

WIP [Night People]

 
The Night People hail from the furthest edge of coast. The locals talk about them as if they were natural phenomena, features of the weather. When morning comes in this part of the country and things turn up missing, a lawn mower or hose having vanished from a back yard, people will look north then east and attribute these thefts to Night People. No one claims to have seen any of their kind in person, word of sightings always arrive second or third-hand. Like rain or snow or, even less eventful, more casual, like dew on grass at sunup, they seem to come and go without permission from eyewitnesses. The Night People, why do they bother? Why don’t they just leave us alone? 
The philosophically inclined among people in Old Brunswick welcome this kind of talk. A few can be found any given day sitting on park benches feeding crunched-up crackers to robins and crows. There’s only ever one true subject among Brunswickians, one of these, a Mr. Shay, is fond of saying. This paranoid myth the whole town has been nursing for six, seven generations, going far back as the second year after it had been settled. Isn’t there a skeptical mind among them? When night passes and morning comes and people step from their homes to notice their prized belongings have gone missing, what is it but a matter of received habit, that they’re quick to invoke this idea of a Night People? In the early years of the town, it was too uncomfortable a thought to consider there might be a thief among them. What would they have to sacrifice in order to allow themselves to become suspicious of their neighbors? Better to blame another town, another people, ones they have never laid eyes on, all the more to believe in them. These were the sorts of wanderings of thought and sentiment Mr. Shay would offer to anyone with enough time and inclination to stop on their walk through the town’s one park, birds pecking dried crackers at a safe distance from their feet. 
There were others among them who were resigned to such losses and visitations. Unlike their more vigilant neighbors, they didn’t bother installing motion-sensitive lights or cameras around their homes. They took basic precautions like the rest, closing and locking windows, shuttering blinds and drawing curtains. But they regarded the occasional theft as a kind of tax, not in support of any intelligible body of government, but for their common fate. If cars were broken into, radios ripped from consoles, catalytic converters sawn from beneath their undercarriages, this was because they could never quite claim full ownership of them. These were property, true, but they were features of the land, parked on streets or in driveways, so in repose were aspects of nature, not apart from it. And Night People, being of the night, were also issuances of a nature come to claim 

Het Molentje

A long summer day on this side of the paper, trees blazing but starved of a breeze. I’m hiking through someone else’s country, studying a reproduction of a drawing The Great Master made plein-air after he’d lost his wife and began a slide towards a famously failed future. Rembrandt’s sketch of Het Molentje. 

Descriptions printed beneath reproductions tend to undermine the mood and mystique borne from close, careful investigation, and in this instance it’s no different. Pen, brown ink, wash with touches of white on oatmeal paper. Now I know how it came about. Circa 1649-51, now I know when. These notes are true for the original but not here, this book opened to present tense sunlight almost four hundred years later. My wife Mia’s traveled to Philly for the weekend, leaving me to a quiet house and four cats. Should I name them here, on paper, for posterity? Fine, I will: Omar, Fela, Coa, Yashu, in order of their birth. Omar is nearly seventeen, Yashu a few months older than two. According to the long-range scales of deep time, they’re already momento moris of a happier afternoon, watching me from the other side of window glass as I travel from our front porch to the outskirts of Amsterdam, pen, brown ink, wash with touches of intimate projection unto oatmeal paper. What am I seeing for the first time, again, what am I feeling? 

A hazy horizon line, the murmur of a village, a large windmill and to the right of it a multistoried country inn. All of it mocked up by a draftsmanship spare and fine, all of it faintly interconnected. A blank expanse of sky above mirrored by the blank expanse of a field or lake below, gossamer of village-windmill-inn threaded delicately from left to right, right to left but evenly through the middle. The windmill is sketched in profile but stands center of the picture. A feeling carries across the distance to register a new observer. I’m standing where The Great Master stood, paused roadside on a walk. The vantage point is posthumous and stills me. 

The water is no more, the field no more, they’re just so much paper rendered unto metaphor, the poignancy afforded by certain distances. A Netherlandish afterlife and this craftsman standing apart to depict it, before he folds his sketchbook and continues walking towards it, to rent a room for the evening. I’ve never been one for spoiling the charisma of a painting or drawing by sprinkling information on it. Like salt grains on slugs, facts about the artist, his weeks and days, business dealings and tribulations and love affairs. Standing at a distance from myself to savor the faintest tremble of Het Molentje, a living breeze stirring again its spiderweb filaments, if I saw only flecks of Rembrandt, I would fail to be released from his life so I could view my own, directed away from myself to wherever I’m looking. Do I need to know, for example, he took to the countryside for long walks after his sweetheart Saskia died? Locate the afternoon along a timeline, work it into biography—just another way to mummify the live thing to paper, defined, definitive, terminal. Conjured that way, facts can fool you. A trompe l’oeil, no, not of the eye, of the mind, l’esprit. The unknown flow of afternoons through a single human person calcified into coordinates of satisfied knowledge. And to think: that’s the most someone flattered by fame can hope for. 

The cats have vanished from the window. They’re off doing whatever they wish out of view, curled into the corner of a couch or lying on the carpet gathered into a sunbeam. Within two miles of where I’m sitting are two parks, one smaller, another larger. Both take their names from cultures immolated to establish this land and city, Seneca, Cherokee. A day doesn’t pass when I don’t walk to both or either, sometimes alongside my wife or brother and sister-in-law, other times alone. I can’t walk ten feet either place without being in sight of another person. As we pass each other, sometimes one of us will be inspired to raise a hand and greet the other. Some faces become familiar across years of walking. Many are seen once then never again. Meanwhile, the paths and trees and fountains and bathrooms and shelters and basketball and tennis courts do the usual work of landscape and remain unremarkable, unchanged. Tomorrow afternoon Mia will arrive back from Philly, push through the door, dump her bags onto the floor. The cats will come running to greet her. How long will she have been gone in their minds, these creatures that exist in a dreamtime not of their making, unhampered by quantitative concerns? Instead of checking their watches, they’ll sniff her. Her feet, her hands, her ankles. 

I’ve often thought: if you don’t have the means to travel with any regularity, make friends with people who do. They’ll do the traveling for you. The cats travel through scents acquired from other locales, and while I can ask questions of my wife, what, where, when, what came before and after, while I can take her phone from her to scroll through photos and videos of people and places she’s gathered, their transmigration is more a felt thing, more personal. No name or dates or explanations for where they'll arrive, sniffing the edges of a wife returned from everywhere, kneeling to get closer to their level. 

Presences. People faint as scents but vivid in their noses. 

*

Cities and towns remarked upon from a distance, this Het Molentje perspective. This comes naturally for me as I guess it must for anyone, since I can only ever be one place any given moment. It’s a quiet afternoon early fall where I’m sitting. The leaves are turning color and falling, sugar maples and Bartlett pear trees. From here I can spy Cincinnati, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, Denver. Looking past those I notice the haze of further cities, Nairobi and Shenzhen and Buenos Aires. 

Something fundamentally mutates between near and far, my sitting in my immediate surroundings versus my traveling beyond them. Here one moment I’m sitting, first person, present tense. Then I turn to look beyond the simple and mortal and very much at hand, this window, the yard, the line of trees changing color, and feel a change roll over me, no longer first person, no, third person, no longer in the present but in the past tense. If I had fully pen and a wide-open expanse of paper, I might sketch those tiny rooftops blended into a quiet horizon. I’m no Great Master but, that said, I can stand apart from a living community without comment, admire it from a distance, the varieties of lives contained within, a windmill and a large inn welcoming of travelers. Who lives there? Who would want to? 

To facilitate uninterrupted travel I’ve closed the door to this room, but a cat has begun scratching at it. Which one? Which of the four? I’d have to open a door to know for certain. 

The scratching snatches me back into the present tense, the first person; almost impossible to turn a knob and open a door from a far distance and in the third person, when furthering the concerns, no matter how minor, of your own life. When the door opens two cats flows past my ankles, Fela and Coa. Surprising, but typical. I’d assumed only one. 

WIP [Non-Prophet on a Wander]

One of the many luxuries enjoyed by the shapeshifter is his anonymity. He lives in plain sight and so subtle is his trickery very few recognize it's a kind of hiding. The fact this is a strategy, one he seems born to cultivate but never quite master, is also one of his hidden features. I’m here, ask me anything, he seems to say, standing or sitting among a crowd, drawing very little notice. Call that skillfulness. Call that cunning. Everyone in his presence should remain natural and unawares, to christen the ruse successful. He is one of them, as he’s always been, even in his difference, his unspecial difference. 
He’s sitting by a window on a train. He’s lounging on a park bench, sipping a cardboard cup of coffee, black plastic lid. An un-intrusive feature of the environment. He’s a man. He’s embodying a life. The largeness, capaciousness of the city, vast cosmos embraces him as a detail of ever-changing consciousness. At the end of their day, the many people who have strolled past him don’t think to remember him. He was unremarkable. He had been that successfully hidden in unassumingness. On to the next man, next day.
The shapeshifter has often asked himself, Which is the real me, the root me? When’m I going to light upon him? The seasons of a self are predictably contradictory, chaotic. One day he’s impelled to take this shape, the next day a very different one. Identity. There’s a great lather of talk on the topic, sometimes it seems in the hope talk will help craft it. Fixed, presentable, solid. Suppose that’s what this personal branding stuff’s all about, he says, history’s vast audience of dead anonymities nodding in agreement. Gotta stylize yourself to be someone, niche yourself repeatedly to survive. Then refresh the niche from time to time, to keep people interested, things interesting. 
So far in all this he’s been afforded one certainty: the past selves he’s shed tend to provide materials for newer selves taking shape from within him. Cliche time: a Bardo. Compare it to something classic and Buddhist. Yes, a Bardo. A Bardo-man of sorts. Identities like souls, they wander within him, fading and filling out, fading, filling out, until one passes through to the surfaces and assumes the new look of him. The guy sitting here this afternoon on his porch, typing this. Quiet is the life that erases its tracks to sustain its knack for invention. Should no one notice what it’s up to, all the better. That means quiet is busy doing its work, released unawares by other people’s innocence and disregard. 

            *

If you don’t have the means to travel with any regularity, make friends with people who do. They’ll do your traveling for you. Like drones they’ll leave the hive, gather pollen, bring it back to you, whose job it is to brew honey. China, Australia, India, Argentina, Peru. Photographs, sure, but better than those are the recollections packaged on the fly as stories. Sitting around a table sharing dinner back in the home country, in company of someone who specializes in secondhand travel. 

             *

Beneath the stadium lights tiny people are playing night soccer. A field in a park a few blocks from the house. The last evenings of a long, hot summer. I leave for a walk, looking for a way down into myself, mix a little of the environs into this mood I’m carrying. Down McCready, cross Lexington Road, busy this time of evening, a few turns through side streets until I’m come out onto Cannons Lane. Take a right on Cannons, stroll a few blocks and there’s the park. A mile-long walking path carries around the field. A chaos of bugs high up around the lights. 
A pair of pup goals have been set up across from each other and young guys are hollering and chasing a ball. I step off the path to watch. One team wears bright orange pull-over jerseys, the other yellow. To be colorblind during a pick-up game, what would that be like? It would mean you’d be terrible, much as I would be, if I was foolish enough to ask to join them, with my bum hip and asthma. 
A mix of English and other languages patters among them. Soccer as universal as sign language, I think, lingua franca between continents. The orange team is winning. They’ve scored twice since I’ve stopped to watch. A few white guys on the pitch, a couple of Hispanic guys, the rest African. From the way the move and talk, the way they weave patterns of play together, they seem to know each other. How many evenings over the past few summers have I driven or walked past the park and seen them kicking a ball beneath the lights? Too many to be counted by fingers or toes. 

        *

His right hip was speaking to him again. Not eloquently, never that. A dull ache that sprouted sharp when he pushed himself up to stand and take a first step after a while in his seat. There was a time when he would’ve mistaken it for metaphor, referred pain from the universe, because he adored the haphazard reincarnation of meaning-on-the-make. Truth is, he’d been born with bad joints, no ligaments, had to wear braces around his ankles when he was a kid so they could fuse correctly. Fool that he was, later he took up long distance running. His body loved the feeling after running a few miles, shedding itself as sweat. For this, his right hip took its revenge, stiffening and crackling, inflamed. 
Eventually he had to admit: if he wanted to continue walking, he’d have to stop running. So he retired himself from the habit and found others that gave him a bit of the same feeling, weightlifting first and foremost. But it wasn’t exactly the same, wasn’t as satisfying. He wasn’t in movement, he was sitting in one place, most of the efforts vertical. Benchpress, curl, compared to running it was all pantomime. He thickened with muscle and in the process even his right hip forgave him, its pain dimming to a murmur on rainy days. 
No small consolation, though, that he could still walk. He could still put himself into movement and leave miles behind him, just at a slower pace. There was a cemetery several centuries old a few blocks from his house and on the long days of summer and quiet days of fall he’d leave the house and walk towards it. Passing through its tall gates he’d free himself from any plan or direction and just wander. The cemetery’s roads and paths laid like loose spaghetti through an uneven landscape and it seemed each time he allowed himself to walk without conscious purpose it was possible to lose his way. Headstones everywhere he turned, grouped by manner of death or century. Civil War, World Wars I and II. Strange habitats could be found deep in its interiors where species not common to such places might be found dawdling about or grazing. Peacocks, wild turkeys. Once even a spider monkey crouched atop a monument, nibbling furtively on a nut. 
On his walks of late, half an hour into the cemetery, his hip had begun talking. “The price for every step, one sharp wince,” it said. When the pain became a little too blunt in its messaging, he’d grab the back of a bench, lean into it, revolve ever-so-gingerly to take a seat. There he’d sit for ten so minutes waiting for the throb in his hip to dim to a faint pulsing. When he was a kid, he’d played soccer; had been awful at it; too scrawny and weightless to make up for a lack of skill or coordination by throwing his weight around. Instead he joined the track team and took up long-distance running, incorrectly believing no skill was required running in circles. He was slower than the other boys and hit his growth spurt that season, often catching pains mid-race, forced to limp-walk the remainder of a race. Cross the finishing line, he tried to make a joke of it, taking an awkward cartwheel before waving to the few people still watching. Solid skill to learn at an early age. How to snatch dignity from the humiliation of defeat, by electing to the tell the very jokes you’re destined to be the butt of. 
He’d sit on that bench in the cemetery, leg extended straight to lessen the pain, another beautiful purposeless afternoon around him. Wrong way to conceptualize it, of course, because he was part of the afternoon, no matter how much the pain was prioritizing itself. His hip was talking to him again, but what was it saying? Nothing particularly interesting. This is arthritis, you idiot, stop putting it off and get it check out by a proper doctor. Earlier that spring a visit to an opthamologist had resulted in the sorry news that his eyes had already begun to show the earliest signs of cataracts. He was besieged by aging from all sides and ignoring its various points of attack wasn’t going to spare him the inevitable setbacks and defeats. This pain had been with him since childhood, adolescence, through every diminishing stage of adulthood. Could be his right hip had been an innovator in that way, avant-garde to full-body dissolution: it’d run far ahead of the rest of him to explore the wide range of complaints common to arthritis. It’d aged decades while the rest of him enjoyed its youth. Now the rest of him was joining it where it’d stopped and waited, serving up aches and pains while the rest of him tried to delay the inevitable by ignoring it. 
He remembered something his ex-wife had told him. Something about an older relative of her mother. When they were young, they’d lost a leg in an accident. The family had money so had plots reserved in another of the local cemeteries. The family paid to have the leg buried in a slender plot next to a patch of grass where eventually the rest of her would be buried. Four decades passed before she died. And there they put her under, next to the leg, the funeral over both a homecoming of sorts. If she’d kept the leg, he thought, would it have talked to her in similar ways? Complaints and insults.

               *

When I was small, but not too small, I couldn’t stand beneath a tree without climbing it. Early collaborations with gravity—I could borrow a tree’s height and take an adult view of the world. Small as I was, having to look up at most people, I suppose I could be forgiven for assuming this was what adults did with their height: instead of looking up, up or around, they looked down at whatever crouched in their shade. Was I barking up the wrong tree? Funny little saying, that, because a dog barks and a tree is covered with the stuff. Both dog and tree, I was a boy who most felt his power through climbing. He hadn’t fallen yet from any kind of height, so hadn’t experienced enough of life to fear it. For the luckiest ones, falling from grace is falling from childhood.