He could see a face in the window, it looked a face, but of a person?  He moved closer in, and it moved too.  Another two steps made clear a distortion of himself reflected on the weather-beaten surface of the glass.  He looked not human, more animal, a kind of cat, possibly a lion in the way the dirt was caked to the glass.  He could see eyes with a crown around them.  As he’d often imagined God, when made visible.  Did melding the human with the animal reflect back God?  He felt himself feel directed to preserve the image on that glass surface, in case to clean it off were to erase God.  He would then see only himself.  Wrong house, his mother called out, dragging him from the window.  Reminder to self, she added, need to get this boy some glasses.  He protested with his feet till, on his last look back, he noticed that the surface he had so badly wanted preserved belonged to one of among quite a many dirty windows.

The department head had buzzed him into his office and had him sit on the sofa at the far end of the room.  Get a sense for what feels odd to you, he said, as he buzzed in his three-man team, still sipping their morning coffee.  Each came around the small conference table with a hand to offer the boss and sat at the table with a practiced ease.  He couldn’t make out what was being said, so he took note of how all three leaned forward when listening and back when speaking; how their hands clasped when leaning in and were kept set apart when leaning back; how their eyes locked in to the boss’s when leaning forward, and yet were freer, in a reach for more thoughtful responses, when leaning back.  The three moved in some precision to each other.  And, on their way out, they nodded in some unspoken agreement.  His boss turned to him with an, Eh?  Uninspired men not being inspired, was the thought in his mind, but a severe arch in his boss’s one eyebrow made clear those words had actually leaked out.  He rose and, in unspoken agreement, nodded on his way out.  He would never land on the disciplined team of three.  He had kept his body too upright, hadn’t leaned forward or backward, and he hadn’t achieved the requisite distance between thoughts speaking to him and those speaking out.

The purple bloom covering the walls of the abandoned cottage made it difficult to find a window to pee through.  He thought it a place not worthy of their personal mark on it, but his friend disagreed.  It’s hiding something, he said.  In fact, his friend declared it their civic duty to investigate — “Some things demand answers.”  He pointed his friend to the difficulty posed by the dense undergrowth everywhere, yet since the investigation was duty to friend so was it to him.  They then entered a parallel world.  Their joint focus coalesced on where the door to the cottage could be.  They would burrow their way through the undergrowth from a spot closest to it.  They proceeded to do just that, in three spots, and each time hit wall.  The third time, they stumbled from out of the undergrowth with deep bloody pricks on hands face and body.  Those wounds did not heal till when they ran into each other two decades later on a hike across a lush river valley and embraced with a, Why so long?  Leaning against a tree, it slowly came to them that an explanation may lie in a habit each had since fallen into.  Whenever either felt confined to duty, they both set off for long treks out in the open.  As they were then doing.  Mostly to feel small, insignificant.  In reaction, they now thought, to it having become duty in their teenage friendship to always play big and strong.  Even now, as they took leave of each other, they tried to execute a big man’s handshake, but caught themselves and shared a simple nod instead, as the friend then continued on down the trail and he looked around for a spur to veer off on.

He had felt a tug in his hand, and so instead of holding her hand he let her hold his.  Almost instantly the pace to their downtown stroll slowed to an amble.  People had faces with expressions on them that now felt transparent.  The expressions were more long than wide, and eyes tended to shift without intention.  Faces had writing on them, with its own alphabet system.  Faces were paint-by-the-dot canvasses.  This he noticed while her words continued to rush past him, too urgent and hurried for the pace of their walk.  Faces were to be looked at, and only to be read for their contours.  Actually, it was as though words perverted faces, placed them in verbal shadows.  Her hand slid from holding his hand into being held.  He hurried her across the street, where her hand slid out again and took a hold of his, slowing them down to a stop.  She was quiet and was turned to him.  Her full face was plain and open and so much more serene from the one of five minutes ago that it thrilled him no end to think he understood why.  He was looking at it without words.

He felt an urgency to move on, to take the next step in his life, and yet, as he was driving past the familiar old town, alongside a series of bridges spanning a river, he caught sight of a slight swaying in the high tops of trees.  He had to stop.  He found the sole bench outside the two-seater cafe, took his seat, and, as he examined three people walk by, noticed that the sidewalk had grown city cracks in it; through them sand had surfaced and spread.  He marveled at how residents had adjusted with denser flat sandals and boots.  The wait for that breeze he had noticed in the treetops was usually never long.  When two more people walked by and he noticed the hem on the skirt of one catch a little air, he leaned back to watch that breeze soon pick up and a trailing wind then hurl dress and sand up into a cinematic reverie of some dusty lane out on the edge of livable.  It was that quick, a sudden gush before the sand and the hem settled with the wind and he was back in his car, set to go, feeling himself in a movie with a heroic role to play.

The trail was punched in by paws leaving deep imprints twice the size of his feet.  In their haphazardness he trod, stretching far out to the next pawprint.  He took to leaping to them, jumping off and then landing on two feet.  He soon began to feel himself less human, more animal.  Was it why his leaps kept stretching farther?  When, then, finally on concrete, the imprints ended, it stunned him how quickly he took on the small and direct walk of an urban human.  The yen to leap from pawprint to pawprint still tugged at him, but how was he to resist the lure of getting into his car, of landing his hands on its steering wheel, and of moving in it out on the open road?

The trees along the left shoulder of the highway looked so drained as to make him turn his head to the shiny billboards on the right.  Shimmering rejoicing faces (made smiley by a car, a toothpaste, a new home, or some medicine) whizzed by, enough of them to soon lose their point and look as drained as the trees on the left still were.  He could cut down decades-old trees with barely an eyebrow raised, but to saw down any one of the always new billboards was sure to land him in prison.  That thought, too, whizzed by.  All that left him was the road to focus on, trying to stay on the right side of its lines.

When we meet good-to-the-core people from anywhere, we acknowledge our appreciation of them in some way, knowing that they, in being themselves, make it possible for humans to be humane.

♦

Who are you?  Are you from whom flowers bloom or through whom rivers flow?  Is your energy focused or open and flowing?

♦

The tree to us is a tree, but, to itself…?  Our journey begins.

Though a deeply knowledgable woman, she didn’t want to know.  Her brother had gravely injured someone and it was to her as if the injury were to her brother.  He sat still.  She leaned away from him as from his bosom to another’s, but how was he to ignore the real harm inflicted upon another by her brother?  She expected it of him to not be swayed by such a fact. He had to walk away.  It took him a couple of days to recover, to embrace her again, to have it come to mind that, in a world grown beyond the modern, a family’s ways remained tribal to this day.

You see it when little animals die, when at a point they go still and wait on death.  The man at the bus depot described it as just the scene happening to a people in a sister village down the road.  Some madman known of only by reputation had shown up with two truckloads of armed boys.  They had ripped apart three hundred years of a village and left it unrecognizable in its ruin.  I worry, the man said, if people survive, how do they live on with stories we as a people cannot bear?  He asked the man if the bus he was taking to the border would still be making a stop at that village.  The man said the bus driver hadn’t been seen since relieving himself in the stand of trees.  We drive bus back to big city, the man insisted; far away is better than close by.  He stepped away from the man to lean a moment against a low tree branch and load tape in his camera and recorder — hadn’t learning of the atrocity made him responsible to document it? — when the man moved to stand directly in front of him.  They are a pack of boys, the man warned.  Don’t be special; everyone — you see — is getting on the bus.  Some young boy drove the bus back to the big city, where, by the next day, it was reported that the village they had retreated from had been run over and looted.  The news jolted him into a search for the man, to thank him for insisting he get out.  He found that man two days later getting off the same bus, loaded with people from yet another village.  When he learned the following day that that village too had been plundered, and when the man then returned three days hence with yet another busload, it became clear that the man was no savior at all.  He was a front-man, cleverly emptying villages, removing resistance to the looting to follow.  Could he be the madman of his own story, and were the armed boys his pack?  He snapped hurried and surreptitious pictures of the man escorting villagers away from the bus, across an open field, and dumping them just within the big city’s limits.  Yet it was clear that the man was not playing out the worst part of his story, for wasn’t he going to great lengths to not have to slaughter people?  He began to doubt himself.  He got himself near to imagining the man a Robin Hood looting corrupt villages bordering the big city when he heard a chime’s ting ring in his mind of a lesson long ago learned:  Evil plays by sowing confusion in minds, to dull their reaction to it.  He had to get his pictures developed.  They could not just be tourist pictures now.  An outsider comes upon only the tail end of an atrocity, when the ill deed can’t be prevented and must yet still be stopped.

From out of the noise coming in through the window, he heard a cat’s cry, faint enough to wonder if he had not imagined it.  He froze to listen for it, to know.  It took minutes.  The first disturbance to penetrate that focus was a feel for how loud the noise coming in through the window had been for all of the two months he had been in the apartment.  A noise that hid every kind of cry.  Listening now, he was able to pick up intermittent cries of children, of an adult, and especially of machinery.  But where was the cat?  He leaned out the window.  There was no ledge for it to be on, no open window above or to the side, nor could he spot any cat on the street or tree below.  Yet, he heard another cry.  A cat’s?  He saw one then, the eyes, for just a flicker, staring up at him, even though he knew there was no cat there at all.  He also knew he hadn’t heard cat’s cries since moving to this nice side of the city.  His mind had to have imagined those cries… a beckon back to the other side?  He felt in him a shudder, and he shut the window upon pulling in from leaning out.

The man stood out in the open market crowd as a Gulliver among Lilliputians, too tall he thought to play basketball.  A boy not tall enough to reach for the man’s hand was tugging at his trousers and the best the man could do in response was lower his eyes.  He could not bend his neck or back.  To walk under an archway, the man bent his knees.  Observing the stiffness in this man made him assess his own posture.  He sensed curves in his stance, his shoulders, back, knees, which he straightened out in a blink by stiffening up.  It was less a gain in height he felt than a surge in stature, enough to feel a tad taller than most in the crowd, enough to size up Gulliver as but a tall basketball player.  He also noticed a change in his own gait, from an amble to a stride, at a distance behind Gulliver, with half an expectation that the small boy would run up and cling at his trousers. It felt to him a peek into what might be true.  It was not flexibility, but rather a stiffening-up, that made men feel themselves their tallest and most towering to others.

You are you not by getting what you want but by not getting it.

♦

We are born holding a key in our hand, with no sense of what it is to open.  It takes a life to discover the locks are many.

♦

Me came to I
in the middle of night
with a challenge to a duel
as if it were something new.

People stood single file up one side of the street and continued on down the other to where he stood at its end.  At the snake’s tip, he thought to himself; he was the only one in the movie line not boxed in by someone behind.  He stepped back, stretched his legs, pirouetted on his toes, did what others would have had to step out of line to do.  But, then, was that a bully hurtling down the line?  He moved farther back, to a distance that made it seem he might not be in line.  But the bully in clear sight turned out to be a lively girl his age hopping and skipping down the line.  He thought to step right back in line before realizing he had already done so.  He wanted to feel being boxed in by her.  The girl neared and then skipped right by with no more than a smile at him.  She turned and swung around the corner.  He took moments to catch his breath before backing off again, to create space, to breathe move and stretch, and yet still, that yearning for a boxed-in feeling clung to him.  He tried to fight it off, but had finally to walk away.  He was not going to enjoy that adventure movie now that he no longer felt a need to feel bold enough to act free.

The boy charged at him with a sword held out, but then stopped suddenly, lowered the sword and demanded he kneel.  He did.  Was any person with a weapon ever really playing?

♦

Material trash now clogs the ebb and flow of rivers and oceans.  What then of cultural trash?

♦

It is far too common for one to expect nothing and still be disappointed.

Enveloping mist had kept the woman hidden till he was almost upon her.  He had to fling himself at her feet to avert a collision.  She shrieked, and yet it was then her instinct to reach down and help him up.  I was blinded, he apologized.  She hesitated, but said that nothing had been all that clear to her either.  He grew to feel that this short exchange had led them to then share a thermos of coffee, and days later a meal, and still later a night, and finally two years of their lives.  It all came to what they both regarded its inevitable end when, out together in yet another dense fog, they nearly slammed into a tree.  He reached for her just as she was reaching for him, and they held on so, so each could confess that when at their first meeting they had apologized for the mist having blinded them, both had meant just that, that the mist had blinded them — and not, as each had needed to hear, I was blinded…by you.  It was a trick the mist had played on them at a time of need.  They concurred on that, too.  And they agreed that the mist would never really lift till they walked away from under it, out on their own.

A middle-aged man stepping into the cafe in a two-year old’s barrel-chested waddle caught his attention only because people in line kept shuffling aside.  He was not big, but his stride took a wide berth, elbows spread, toes pointing out.  He seemed to an uncomfortable degree oblivious to the disorder his gait caused.  He cut through the line at two places on his way down a corridor to the men’s room.  The stir enlivened the morning atmosphere.  People took to each other with comments that elicited laughter, and he, in a corner chair, laughed as if he’d heard the comments himself.  A few leaned in to each other.  Mouths opened wider.  He noticed it becoming infectious.  The line had de-formed into a cluster when the man re-emerged and waddled around it on his way out the door.  He watched that man let the outside traffic react to him as he stepped into the street and crossed it diagonally.  Even though he found it remarkable to notice the cluster in the cafe form into a line again, with now a snake’s flexibility to it, allowing for contact between its parts, he couldn’t pull himself away from watching the instigator of it all disappear somehow out in the open on the other side of the street.

On the map, it showed a bridge, but it turned out to be no more than a pontoon bobbing roughly atop the creek’s currents.  Should he take his shoes off for a better grip on the pontoon, or assume he’ll fall over and keep his shoes on to protect his feet from shards on the creek bed?  As he stopped to consider his options, two men in professional spandex ran up from behind him and onto and across the pontoon in six quick steps.  Had they even looked down?  On getting to the other side, they had looked back to beckon him, which is why he then followed quickly in their steps, over the pontoon — but he had misread them, for they kept on running without even a wave back.  It wasn’t till he had taken his eyes off them that he realized he had actually made it to the other side, and had made it without considering how to get it done.

A sudden unguarded hello one utters to a stranger is often the most intimate one can be, when one knows the least about the other.

♦

Society is driven by its charioteers, by people who love to drive things forward, since forward is seen as the direction of progress.

♦

He knew he was running home to do nothing, so why was he running?

Four camels twisted their legs and folded them into seats on which they sat.  He did the same and sat on his own feet.  Perhaps the caravan was to settle in for the night at this watering hole.  The herders though made no moves to unload the giant baskets their camels bore; they were crawling instead on knees to water’s edge, to drink, it seemed, as must the wildlife around.  They stretched out over the water and peered in.  Ah, inspecting the water, he thought.  Each lowered his nose to almost touch the water’s surface: smelling the water, he thought.  With their knees buried in sand, hands clasped behind their backs, they took on the look of cranes taking inventory.  They were as still.  They peered in, to penetrate water, when one hand suddenly unclasped, and it pointed.  The other herders crawled to — not quick and hurried but so as not to disturb — a vantage point from which they could lean out to the spot to which the finger still pointed.  He took a series of camera shots just as their arms flung all at once up to the heavens, reaching for something, and then back down to cover their faces, to take in, it seemed, the impact of the moment.  He cautiously crawled through the deep sand to a point close enough to barely make out four small translucent fish pooled in a corner of the watering hole and hear low muffled chants of, It gives us hope to see you here, vibrate out to him.  He set his camera aside and let himself fall into the moment the moment his hands covered his own face.  He felt memories being emptied out and with each instant feeling cherished for it.  The herders, perhaps sensing it, opened up:  the four fish to now be enshrined in his memory were the only of their kind on Earth, were to be found in that watering hole alone, were, like the herders themselves, of this specific place and no other.  He heard in their telling an ancient voice speak through of place not as the spot on which one stands as much as a specific locale from which one emerges, on which one grows, and into which one bends back.  Such a place was home to these herders.  He was of no such place, so why then was he, too, feeling so at home?  The herders had by then casually fallen back and molded themselves comfortable seats in the sand and taken to regaling in traditional lore he could grasp only through the measured cadence and tenor of their speech.  It wasn’t this place making him feel so at home, it came to him, as it was the four herders themselves — for, in them, all who had passed through this place had a home.

The elderly woman got off the bus, and yet turned as if to get back on, but the bus was already moving before its doors could close.  She did not step back onto the curb, as he, stepping into the crosswalk, expected; she appeared instead to summon the bus that had just come to a stop across the street.  He waved wildly to catch and direct that bus driver’s attention to the elderly woman, but the driver was already waving out her half-open window, and even leaned to say something through it.  The elderly woman stepped back onto the curb and took a seat on the bus-stop bench.  I’ll wait, she called out, beckoning him.  She patted the seat beside her.  You remind me, she said, how my husband too at your age would naturally help needy strangers.  She told of a few instances, and of how her husband had been a great help in her life for four years before passing away fifty years ago.  Though, he’s still my hubby, she insisted.  He had to look away even though she didn’t.  The bus driver from across the street was pulling her bus into their stop.  The elderly woman took note of it and clapped, and had him help her to her feet and onto the bus.  At the top step, she held onto the bus driver’s arm and turned back to stare at him and say, Fifty years ago — today.  The doors closed before the bus moved.  He ran alongside it, waving, not sure why, and yet, the moment she spotted him and waved back, he let her go.  Their goodbye had been gotten said.

It didn’t take long to catch up to the two old men bumping shoulder-to-shoulder as they strolled the sidewalk like brothers.  Their steps were half as long as his, and how closely engaged they were — while he, at his speed, was out on a walk alone.  Regardless, he wasn’t able to slow down as he passed them.  It was half a block farther up before he made himself turn back for a longer view.  The old men looked as to have been on morning strolls together for longer than he had been alive.  Their hands and arms touched or held or got otherwise intertwined with their each expression; they were woven into each other, and especially so when they both spun to seek confirmation in the face of the other.  He made himself turn away, to continue on.  The old men were on the other side of his reality, and he didn’t want to bemoan his fate through a look too deep.

The mass of people coming out of the office building were pushing the ones in front of them in the way they were being pushed from behind — and he had to wait outside with no way to enter the building.  It seemed best to think of being stuck holding a door open as his role in this tiny slice of life, but, then, what of this woman who, with a poodle, was somehow getting the exiting mass to shift aside?  He made a quick move to follow the poodle in, but bodies closed that loophole and he was back to holding the door open.  He stared at passing faces made grim by the weight of burdens too hard to shed.  But an older man caught his eye and threw him a smile that altogether shifted his view to one of seeing himself as fortunate for being able to live a life so humdrum.  The older man took a turn up the sidewalk when he noticed that his own hand had come off the door handle and his foot now held the door open.  This allowed him to put both hands in his pockets and stand as casually as he would.  He watched the older man disappear into a swarm of pedestrians and heard, Go ahead, I’ll hold the door for you.  A fellow, perhaps a decade younger, was smiling at him — uncannily like the older man — with a sincerity that evoked in him feelings too long unfelt.  He felt that a stranger had his back, was looking out for him.  He stepped away for the younger man to grab a hold of the door, but made no effort to then enter the building.  He stood still instead, next to the younger man, basking, he realized, in a kind of inexplicable and unspeakable bond that gets momentarily formed when empathizing strangers find time to notice each other.

He ran off the road and into the woods to be free of people, and he kept running till he realized he could not feel fully free till he was out of not only the sight but also the reach of anyone.  How was he to manage that?  He was too attached to people and things to feel free of them.  Perhaps running off into the woods could continue to satisfy a sense of the free in him, but, to not always have to run off the road, he did long to be able to feel free when with people everywhere around.  He tried looking at people as trees, and things as foliage, and his movement among them did begin to feel more unrestricted, but that was only till one of the trees slammed into his bicycle.  That person yelled, Heywatchit!, and kept on, leaving him on the ground.  He got up, leaned his bicycle against a tree, took off running — and ran into a perception that to feel free in society was to isolate oneself within one’s own aloneness, or craziness.  That explained why society had a built-in release valve that allowed people to periodically run off the road and into the woods.

The future (like the future tense) needs to go away.  It keeps showing up, not as itself (because it doesn’t exist), but, rather, in some guise of the present, not just to merge with what is being experienced, but, too often, to enforce a hostile takeover.  The present, which has long relied on the past for its character, is being taken over by the future to such a degree that both it and the past have already lost much of their meaning.  Worse, ideas as, It will get better, We will be redeemed, There is a promise land, have helped institutionalize the tyrannical horror suffered by all life that isn’t human.  The future and its tenses are fantastical human ideas about human possibilities that, with the human, need to go away.

All he did was to hold an umbrella out in a sudden monsoon downpour and had then to watch the wind blow it open and take it hurtling with it across the alley, maybe into a gutter.  He stared after it a little too long; when he did move, it was in reaction to realizing that he hadn’t moved: both his feet shifted at once and landed him hard in the mud.  He found himself trapped in a torrential curtain of water surrounding and isolating him from all else. Through a wave of claustrophobia, he rose, imagining a swim against the storm — and yet it took great effort just to stand.  He had to push against the weight and wetness of water.  Was pushing against this resistance what gave fish their perpetual energy and strength?  A sense that resisting water was imbuing in him a deeper feeling of life spread through him.  Just managing to stand up in the torrential pour felt to him an accomplishment worth noting.  He crossed the alley for that reason alone, not as much to chase his umbrella down as to get a feel for the kind of energy needed to push against resisting water — and to then carry that energy over into his everyday life.

He made out a cockroach coming at him with such determined ferocity that he stepped aside to curb’s edge.  It still found its regardless way to him, with its antennae and sensors hard at work calculating the threat of his presence.  As was he, he realized.  Wasn’t he — even if unawares — assessing ways by which this creature could cause him grotesque harm?  It could inject him with disease — or, or — crawl up his sandal and force him to have to kill it — or….  He crossed the street.  That cockroach was not safe around him.  It wasn’t that he could crush it at his whim that upset him as much as that to do such a thing was so normal that nobody would make a thing of it.  He decided not to re-cross the street; he’d go home the longer way.  For all the blocks home, he kept from looking below eye-level.  He focused instead on telling himself to grow up.  He needed to see insects crushed underfoot as just a part of the deliberate, unseen, everyday violence of life.  He needed to see that, to get anywhere, it was best to walk with his head up, not looking down.  How to make himself believe it, though, did not occur to him till he realized that, in not looking down, he had made it home far sooner going the longer way.

He sat at a library desk to browse through one book, and found another left behind — with text under pictures of life in a village very far away.  He pushed his book to the side.  He slowly flipped through pictures of huts with a person in front of each, of women washing clothes at a mud hole, and stopped at a photospread on boys not much younger than him sitting at desks similar to those in his classroom.  Their intense attentiveness, in their postures, their eyes, mesmerized him.  The boys felt to him to be gifted with complete focus.  He longed to be with them.  So absorbed were they that one boy, in a starched half-sleeve shirt, had his chin resting atop his desk, as though to give his neck a rest without breaking focus.  He could feel the weight of learning in that picture.  Strange information was being brought to the classroom from strange places — and, since he had only just read about the Spanish showing up where the Aztecs lived, he wondered how long that village could continue to survive.  There wasn’t much these students could do in their village with the information that had come to them with the new desks.  They would all have to leave for places where their learning had value.  As, perhaps, might have the boy he had seen outside the library?  Yet, this boy was alone, sitting on the curb, cut off from life around him.  That sense and scene lived in him as an image for years, and became eventually the reason why his first attempt at a career had been to leave the city for faraway posts, laden with skills and information he hoped villagers could use in their efforts to keep their lives ongoing for centuries more.

He stepped in to help with the dishes upon observing that the social bee had risen from among the men in the living room and taken a seat amidst a gathering of women in the garden.  This decided it; he’d lost his chance with her.  He was now a part of the background.  He’d need a good reason to step out of the background to become present to her.  He kept at the dishes, and declined help, just to watch, because she was soon painting a story with her hands that had the women reacting in mock shock and awe.  A couple of times, she had even to bend low at the waist, she was laughing so hard.  It was as if the party had just begun.  When he then accidentally shattered a glass in the sink and looked up after minutes of gathering the pieces, another woman had taken to painting her story in a similar way — with the same bend at the waist — to similar mock reactions.  Two others followed with variations on the theme.  When she then jumped back in again, leaning in, softer, the women turned rapt and erect, and took to nodding.  Another woman joined the earlier three this time in taking her turn at leaning in — in the way of the social bee — to get her own story out.  It’s why he finally accepted help with the dishes and quietly slipped out the front door.  He had desired her attention, but he wasn’t about to disturb a bee out pollinating the flowers.

A second-story window flew open and her face looked out blankly, even with him standing directly in the pathway to the front door.  It looked a face that had to have been staring at a tv-screen before it turned to look out the window and found no reason to change its expression.  He looked behind him, and a horse farm lay as far out as the woods, a palate of sand stretching to the distant green and blue border.  What’ve you been watching?, he called out.  She stepped up to the window.  A game show, she said.  He sensed in it a hint hurled at him.  He wracked his brain to decipher the intended meaning, and yes, the word “game” brought back to him the moment when she, at their last — and first — date, had said, Being able to play the game is a quality a mature man ought to have.  He had now to respond.  He surprised himself then, when, before he could hesitate, he retreated, not having to remind himself that though he could be good at the living of life he had no talent to rely on in the game of it.

To avoid the Friday rush, he had taken a road he was not to have taken and had somehow ended up where-and-when he was to arrive.  He must have tuned into some innate homing sensor, and yet to what good when she was not there to appreciate the expertise displayed in making wrong turns, getting lost, and still getting to her on time?  Had he been sentenced in life to experience his accomplishments alone?  He waited for her, musing on his cruel fate — and yet, under it, was busy convincing himself that he had to have gotten the place wrong.  It was not he who was doing the waiting, but she.  Yet, wouldn’t she have also been waiting right where he already was?  He could think of no other place than at their regular restaurant.  He hadn’t known her for long, that was true — and, Nor, he heard himself think, did he know her now!  His eye had just the instant before glanced over the word Friday on the menu board and snapped him back to a reality in which the denier in him had emotionally overwhelmed the one who knew that these Fridays with her had come to an end Friday last.  He found his way to his car; he didn’t try to avert traffic on his return.  Rather, he drove right into the teeth of a Friday rush at its worst, in a surrender, he told himself, to the slowness of the way back home.

You can’t do anything with truth until you put it in a story.

♦

Be wary of feeling sure that no thing has stood as straight as the tree against which you lean.

♦

To survive, you leave the horror where it’s at.

Women often preen for each other differently than for men.  They preen to earn a hand or two or five from each other, but, with men, it’s mostly to sweeten the pot.

♦

To make for a stable life, a woman has usually to moderate the more savage man, and in turn be moderated herself.

♦

A life of emotions is lived on the pity of others; without that pity, life would be one long moan.

All prophets left home and found their inspiration among the poorest, who were and are as they have always been.

♦

We are in controlled mayhem, with a stress on the adjective.  The noun is a slight exaggeration only to better characterize the adjective.

♦

What resistance can other instruments offer when — as with all media — the insistent beat of the drums begins to sound as the ticks of one’s own heart?

He held back from hiking out into the open meadow because birds — a spread-out cacophonous carpet of them — were at a pit-stop on their way to distant lands.  Five flocks of differing birds were grouped as separate islands on the meadow.  A meeting of tribes without the meeting.  Were he to step out, he’d be forcing them together in flight.  He waited alongside a tree.  Half-a-dozen among each flock had necks craned to keep an eye out for danger; one among them had landed its eye on him.  Long neck, short beak, small head, big eyes, at alert.  This was the bird whose criteria for danger he had to elude.  Time passed; in the midst of all that flock-y motion, that bird did not stir.  Nor did he.  In fact, he no longer thought he could.  He felt his arms had somehow lengthened alongside his legs and become dug in the ground.  The bird might have sensed as much, for it did then look away.  He very slowly sat, and then lay, and closed his eyes, letting his ears take over.  The din, however, was deafening.  He had to reopen his eyes to give relief to his ears.  He raised his head and sought out the bird again, but it had blended back into the throng.  He felt as if left discarded, off to the side, no longer a part of the scene…just the distance necessary, it turned out, to fall prey to feeling himself a god keeping an eye over his flock.  Through these eyes, the birds now looked a rabble.  He rose and stepped away from the tree and out into the meadow.  All five flocks took notice — and a carpet of them took flight in an undulating cascade, each flock becoming a fold in the graceful veil they now formed between earth and sky.  He watched until the common feeling of a self, alone and lonely, returned him back to the open meadow and to the thought that he had emptied it out himself.

The only reason he gave up his window seat on the plane was because the woman had expended such effort insisting it was hers that he felt certain she was appearing to be in the right in the eyes of fair-minded observers around him.  He could have embarrassed her by turning to them — or calling on a stewardess — to verify the seat numbers on their boarding passes, but, thinking her to have good reason for being so unglued, preferred instead the peace of simply taking her aisle seat on the last row of the plane.  It quickly became apparent that this seat did not lean back.  Within minutes, when up in the air, people kept bumping into him while lined up for the toilets.  Even the oxygen felt constricting.  The woman must have suffered this very claustrophobic hell at an earlier time.  On realizing that she had been assigned a similar seat on this flight, she must have come unglued.  This thought lay as a balm on him; it kept him seated in wait for that woman to line up for a toilet so that he could ask her, Why pick me?, I was half a plane away from you.  He kept an eye out for her.  Even in Baggage Claim, he watched nearly everyone spot their luggage on the belt, aim for it, retrieve it, and leave, before he accepted that she probably had had only a carry-on.  Yet, when he asked, Why me?, of himself again, it was now crystal clear that she had picked him from among passengers busily claiming their seats and their spaces because he had been, like he then was, just standing there, looking around.

The dogs were tied under separate cafe tables and had their chains stretched taut to where they were a foot away from being able to sniff each other nose to nose.  Their owners were up the sidewalk looking in a store window in a way similar to how the dogs were now evaluating each other, up and down and around, as if the other were a window display.  From three tables over, it struck him this way.  He sensed that, like their owners, the two dogs were out shopping, checking out doggie merchandise.  Dogs rarely got to roam free, everything was staged for them, so they liked to make a big deal out of chance meetings. As he noticed the owners approach, he caught the dogs make long noses at each other before slumping out from under their tables and facing their owners with wagging welcomes.  He had only a week before felt himself “5-stars” smart in school for having written four paragraphs on the happy life of a dog, and yet, somehow, he felt himself far smarter now — grown-up smart — for being able to see that a dog’s life was not anything to want to wish for.

He hadn’t seen it, but a car had high-jumped the curb and hit the tree.  Now, three weeks hence, the tree still looked as if it should have long before keeled over.  Traffic continued at a crawl to theorize on why it hadn’t — but, it was nighttime now.  He had climbed to where the upper trunk had nearly snapped off, and, there, to put it out of its misery, he mustered courage enough to walk out on that dangling trunk for at most five steps and have it break off under his weight.  As it was, seven steps out, just out over the curb, the overhanging trunk felt as sturdy as if it were lain on the ground.  There had to be more alive in that tree than just wood.  He felt himself to be intruding in the tree’s life.  As he watched that tree from the vantage of his school bus the next morning, he sensed a sturdy living being already adjusted to its bent condition.  Yet, by the morning after, it was gone.  A hole in the ground was barricaded.  It was a different justice nature lived under than do people.  He rushed up to his adult friend the bus driver and complained that people help people who are bent to be able to stand.  The driver patted him on the shoulder with a, Not to worry, and then with, Nature will win out in the end. He let himself be hurried off the bus by other kids this time, under the spell of an undertow of nausea that he suddenly worried would be lasting.  He hadn’t known that people were in a war with Nature, or that he was on the losing side.

A sentence paints a different picture in one’s mind at different speeds of reading.

♦

He had not known wine was not grape juice till he was offered grape juice.

♦

What is peripheral is not just on the edges but also everything in sight that one is not focused on.

From his cafe table, he caught sight of a dog’s tongue flapping limp and dry.  A leash an ardent bicyclist had tied to the handlebar of his bicycle pulled against the dog’s neck at a speed that kept the dog on the verge of plummeting.  He’s a dog!, he yelled at the bicyclist.  Loser!, the bicyclist shot back.  Huh?  Was he a winner to push a dog to extremes to — why? — make a man out of it?  What can make sense to the mind, he reminded himself, is too often too ugly and cruel to see played out in life.

The cot he was offered was for a smaller and lighter person, but still he thanked the elderly official for his gracious hospitality (the alternative was the hard dirt floor) and curled up to fit the cot, dreading what was to come.  He wasn’t at all surprised though when a light mood of being cocooned filled him like air.  If he could somehow stay fetal for the rest of his life, he’d feel just as alive as he then did.  The first lash across his back was more surprise than pain.  No elderly man could have put such force into a whiplash.  The second stung him.  It was expertly lain across the first.  A professional at work.  The third and fourth, one upon the other, felt like bites into flesh, stiffening the skeleton.  One more, and he’d be done.  He waited for it.  Why so long a wait?  Had he already been lashed five times?  The fifth froze him in place, from which he did not thaw with even the official’s help.  It was intended to leave an imprint, for life, to ensure no outsider take five lashes to be a minor or tolerable penalty.  Two helpers dressed him and walked him to the vault-like door.  No talking to females who are alone in public, the official reminded him.  And, putting a finger to his lips, added, No talking about anything in cement headquarters.  The elderly official insisted on an explanation that sounded too glib to believe and did not become clear to him till after he was let out of the only cement building in the village.  The building was of cement because the government (the official meant the regional power) was kind-hearted: it did not want the village to hear — or be told of — the screams, for would the villagers not then feel a little terribly terrorized?  It was far less cruel for them to remain ignorant, and wonder — and, it came to him then: had he screamed?  It took his complete focus to make it to a bench at a tea vendor’s, but, the answer, he quickly realized, lay already deep in his bones:  he hadn’t let out screams — or had instantly forgotten that he had — for fear of being terribly terrorized by them later on.

He slowed to a soundless walk and stayed a respectful distance behind a mother and young daughter out on what must have been a rare jog together.  The daughter was being dragged by words of encouragement to continue on, You can do it!, You’ll feel great having done it!, words to make it possible for the daughter’s limbs to propel her daughter forward.  The mother pivoted into a story to pull her daughter into, and, all at once, the daughter’s limbs stopped to question a specific detail.  The mother didn’t slow down; she made her daughter catch up to the answer.  The story must have turned aspirational, for the mother’s arms started to swing out and above, with feeling, as though to entice her daughter into joy, into feeling what accomplishment can feel like.  The daughter too raised an arm, but to grab her mother’s, to fling it down and, with some strength, spin her around, yelling, You said till the end of the block!  The mother was now facing him.  He stopped.  She gave him an exasperated smile as she said, Let’s jog back.  No!, the daughter protested — but, on seeing a man suddenly present, chased her mother and, as he watched, outran her to the other end of the block.  There she broke into a dance, thrusting her arms out and above in accomplishment.  As her mother joined in, he stood — as though appreciating the art in a painting — till at last they entered their house.  In the play of a magical stroke, had not the mother made use of a sudden male presence to get her daughter to surprise herself with what she can naturally do?

He put a stamp on the thank-you letter just as he decided not to mail it.  He’d hand-carry it instead.  It would be a short flight; he’d leave it under her door and be back by night.  She’d open the door, look up and down the corridor, feel his still-present absence.  She’d read his letter.  She’d appreciate it.  Five years after her, he felt aroused to reconnect with her, not as much in person as in memory.  He needed to bring to mind a life of his that had been lively when with her, anticipatory, active, not one to wait around.  Writing her a letter had rejuvenated that mind in him, and shouldn’t the first step be to thank her?  Yet, would hand-delivering it to her four hundred miles away not feel creepy for being extreme?  He ought to mail the letter.  But, he flew with it instead.  He was of a livelier mind now, a mind of his that she’d know would not be able to thank her any less exuberantly.

He sat at a restaurant table a professional acquaintance had an hour earlier invited him to. He would have shaken his acquaintance’s hand had it not been busy crafting exaggerated gestures for the attendant.  He resolved that his acquaintance was custom-designing his meal with his posing of questions as suggestions.  He’d say, Don’t you think…?, and follow it with ways meats and vegetables and fruits could be attended to and combined to create a treat for his palate.  The acquaintance spoke in the foreign language of cooking, and so the specifics — ah, he had just grasped “sauté” — were not words to him but sounds, music even, orchestral, that, over the twelve minutes his acquaintance was able to hold the attendant’s attention, suggested to him the composition not of a four-course meal as much as of a four-seasonal one.  For himself, he requested a menu.  There was none.  He had to place a request.  He felt as confused and tongue-tied as when in a foreign country.  He hadn’t been forewarned.  He knew how to select a meal off a menu, but to originate one?  His words would make harsh sounds, as may the sound of “ketchup” in such an establishment. Under pressure, he heard himself utter “Eggs?”  Before he could recover, his acquaintance winked and began with hands and mouth to shape a short composition, one that when it was put in front of him was an omelette with accessories.  The acquaintance refused to shake his hand till he bit into the omelette; when he did taste half-a-forkful, he stood at once and leaned over to proffer his hand.  It was an exaggerated gesture, he understood, but how else was he to surmount the encompassing pleasure of the moment to convey a gratitude?

He was escorting her only up to the bus-stop at the end of the block, but there were so many interludes in the going.  Almost anything distracted them enough to make them stop and investigate and talk it through:  it was the slowest he had ever strolled that block.  An oversized flag got them talking of violent movies, a cone of icecream about their love for snow, the ATM about feeling forced to relate to machines for the good of the economy.  When the block did quite suddenly end, the bus-stop got them talking about places they yearned to visit.  He wished for this stop to be a comma and not a period.  As though flowing from that, she reached for his hand to cross the street.  The distractions they had been sharing moved as if to a periphery.  Their hands were in each other’s, and nothing on the remaining blocks of the boulevard had the magnetism now to distract them from that.

It was a battle to be himself at work, so that when he got home he escaped by taking his focus off himself and putting it completely on her.  It took a late-night walk months hence to notice that he had rare opportunities left at work or home to feel himself being himself.  It was after all no more than a feeling of himself that he sought, not a knowing; knowing himself had never been worth the effort to create a knowable self.  Still, he felt trapped in a sensation that a self was his right to be and feel and fight for.  Why he then jumped into the traffic circle and dodged cars to get to the center island did not become clear to him till he got to the lone oak tree that spread out and dominated the circle island.  Just to feel its bark was feeling something unlike anything.  He roughened up his hands against it, climbed the oak, swung off it, hopped branch to branch, his breath sounding as it wouldn’t otherwise, short and deep with slight arrests between — the breath, he at long last recognized, of he being relaxed being with himself.

Each day up the majestic mountain was a tap-dance of four seasons, with mornings of spring, afternoons of summer, evenings of fall, and nights shivering of winter.  It was a leisurely climb, a thousand feet a day, but then it became winter pretty much all day.  It was a winter still comprehensible to him, until — a further three thousand feet up — it wasn’t.  Everything here felt extreme, a scream to the senses, not winter but some season beyond.  There were still four thousand more feet to the summit.  He stopped to consider that he wasn’t extreme enough to venture into such an extreme situation, not alone.  And, yet, he had made it this far.  Still, though, no thing lived up here, tree or creature, for a reason.  He couldn’t feel the sensation of life return to him till, on his quick descent the next morning, he felt Spring again. He made himself stop and take a look back upon the visible part of his long descent, and felt, as he might have in a revelation, that there appeared to be enough energy in life to survive all the seasons, but not enough to make it through an endlessly extreme one.

A falsehood can easily be sold in the face of what’s true because of the ways it can be dressed up.

♦

The young are also subservient, though not as much to an authority anymore as they are to some ambitious task.

♦

Humans (n; pl.):  a species that builds things and leaves a lot of litter.

A person of one shade of color had beaten up on another shade and a melee spread through the marketplace.  People around him took to swinging and flailing, inflicting superficial physical harm while landing what he thought were sure to be deep emotional wounds.  How would it be possible for people who only yesterday had shopped side-by-side to face each other tomorrow after seeing the rage on the faces they were swinging at today?  On his dodge towards the periphery, he got hit in the shoulder with a shopping bag of groceries.  It was a person of one shade of color, joined then by a person of the other.  At one point, both shades flailed at him in synchrony.  He saw himself at his desk more than eight thousand miles away with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pen about to touch paper in the other just before he realized he had dropped to the ground and was fingering the dirt.  He was fighting off a jumble of emotions to make sure he would later recall that his response to sit down had been the calmest place he could take himself in that moment.  From this vantage, a few others were also squatting or sitting, all children.  The look on his face had to have caught the eye of the one nearest, for the child showed him a little reassuring wave.  This, to him an extreme experience, was to the child a normal one.  He saw in his mind the pen in his hand touch the paper on his desk back home and write “extreme normal” as a reminder.  As the words got written, a pinpoint of clarity flicked in him:  He was in this region not as much to help mediate conflict among factions of grownups as he was to bring to children a normal that wasn’t extreme.

Where had he last lain his keys?  As he took a seat to help him remember, other memories flooded in, of other keys, from as far back as when — at eleven — one had fallen from his pocket into a storm drain.  He had in a flash dropped himself halfway into that drain before passersby pulled him out.  He couldn’t get them to accept that of the many things he was responsible for he was his most responsible with keys.  As it turned out, he never lost keys again.  Was he now in his advancing years growing irresponsible?  Does it start with losing keys?  The very ones in his hand?  He was in a waiting room.  He’d already seen the doctor.  He had his keys in his hand.  He could see that he had gotten disoriented on his way out of the doctor’s office, and that this was now habit.  The dread of an update on his own inevitable end momentarily blurred the real.  In going after the key as a boy, he had simply lain flat on the street and dropped himself into the drain.  There had been a complete disregard of a fall into a deep hole — which is why, as was also usual, how light he then felt on his way out the doctor’s waiting room door.

He at first thought that he had noticed her only because her shoes were red.  They were tall and red to the very tiny tip of the heel, and they moved with a precision only unerring focus could make possible.  He imagined in them a woman already tall, with hair that bounced and clothes that flowed, and when he looked up from the shoes he was right on all but the hair. It was bunched high atop the head.  She looked as tall as she could be and not be on stilts.  He wondered if it took people being completely absorbed in something about themselves to draw the attention of others.  He wouldn’t, after all, have followed just any pair of red shoes.  It must have been the tiny tip of the heel, which, in making her focus so thoroughly on herself, made her alert, alive, so irreducibly seductive to him.

The tall grasses he had trampled through on his way over were back to standing tall on his return — propped up by the wind, no doubt, since they looked helpless and beaten up on their own.  He avoided trampling over the same ones till he realized he was doubling the damage.  He took to leaping to minimize damage to the already damaged grasses.  On one leap, he landed on a shell and fell, not by losing balance as much as in reaction to the crack of the shell.  He jumped up and didn’t stop to look back.  He forgot about all the care he had been taking with his leaps and simply lay low again the tall grasses he had earlier trampled through.  He didn’t want to know the bad that was likely being done.  He just wanted to get home and have his mother explain to him in a magical story the way good often kept itself hidden in the bad.  It would take such a story to have the kind of force on him that he had seen in the wind holding up weak trampled-on grass.

A car swerved around the old man in the crosswalk so brazenly that he felt he understood why that old man then hurled his cane at it.  But now the old man stood, unable to cross.  Feeling himself an accomplice to weaponizing that cane, he dashed from his cafe table to offer the old man a hold of his arm.  The old man paid him no heed.  He was still in the moment of his confrontation with the car — in a rage, glaring at his own shoes as if he’d hurl them too if only he could reach down to them.  Sir, he implored, we’ve got to cross.  The old man strained to move on his own, but in chase of the car.  He even pointed to that car now four streetlights down, and only then did he realize that the old man was actually pointing to his cane a few feet from his feet.  He fetched it, crossed the street alongside the old man and, then, back at his table, stayed a while, lost in how easy it was to overlook that a weapon before it is used is often a crutch.

Manners matter.  The urgent news is that manners aren’t working.  The Ill-Mannered One has the chair at the head of the table, and no one has seen so many ill-mannered ones to be sitting or standing around.  The handful of Mannered Ones, at the table out of necessity for their expertise in getting things done, swivel their heads and small smiles from side to side, awaiting petulant orders they can translate into mannered language.  They believe that their fellow mannered ones had become so mannered that they had altogether thrown the ill-mannered off the table.  They feel resentful for having had to issue warnings against inciting the ill-mannered ones, for having in return been mistreated, and they now sit as rebels of the mannered kind alongside fellow rebels of the ill-mannered kind.  At the table, they all see the Ill-Mannered One as their slingshot, capable, in a few hurled words, of smashing to smithereens spaces and safe zones good manners have opened up to people over the centuries, and they fantasize storming in to wreak havoc and exact revenge over slights that are by now as if in-bred.  Poor manners feel authentic to them; they suspect the special effort it takes to make good manners feel real.  Yet, how easily they overlook the necessity of good manners in the sports and military they fetishize, and in which their feelings of belonging are grounded.  They forget that manners allow the game to be played.  One doesn’t just grab the ball and burst it and have the players charge at each other instead.  Manners allow a meal to be shared in peace with all at the table; manners allow for hope.  They don’t ask of one to be good, only to be nice.  Much more becomes possible with people acting nice to each other in ways the other recognizes as nice.  Being nice is grown-up behavior.  Grow up!

He knew he was in a dream from which he could easily awaken with a snap of the fingers, but his fingers wouldn’t snap.  How was he to leave the crying dog?  Two men who had been leaning over a lagoon’s edge were disappeared when there surfaced, from the waters of another dream, first one dog, and then another, their faces hoods he had to look under.  He spotted nothing in a peek under the first hood and so reached in for a feel.  There became present to him a snout to touch.  Eyes emerged from behind the length of that snout, slits that suddenly opened and shed tears.  He snapped back his wet fingers from under the hood and battled to make them snap him awake, but the effort only disappeared the first dog and brought forward the second one, with an even larger hood.  It was much darker under it, and so he stuck his head in for a closer look and shrieked himself awake.  He could not recall what he had seen under that hood, or even if he had seen anything, but a terror now clung tight to him.  He heard his fingers snap, and, once aware of it, kept at it, softly, wanting to snap himself back into the dream, to face and nullify that terror.  He got no closer than imagining a monk’s hood, and stopped trying altogether when he admitted to himself that it was in the nature of terror to linger, distorting everything to keep hidden the dream that had released it.

A self-annihilating hour had passed.  Cars were moving at a crawl; it was still the same fuming driver on his left and the same stoic on his right and he a volleyball between the two.  Others in other cars sat stiff in anticipation, leaning forward or to one side.  The driver in the car behind, though, was she dancing in her seat?  Bobbing her head, flapping her shoulders, making of her mouth a whale’s blowhole, she felt to him lit-up with childlike energy.  She looked older than him, too, yet more tuned in to contemporary beats.  He leaned in and peered into the rearview.  She had been bopping nonstop for longer than songs last.  The music charging her up was not from off the radio but from in her head.  She was as if unleashed.  And when had he shut off the traffic updates on the radio?  And why was bopping in his seat suddenly so easy to do?  With the radio off?  He wished she could see her affect on him.  It had been usual for him to feel himself a loner, alone in traffic, but that felt expunged now — for if he was in traffic with everyone, then it wasn’t traffic, it was life.

He had been raised on falsehoods and so only falsehoods sounded true to him.

♦

We are in a transition from out of nature and into one of our own design.

♦

The present makes of the past a fiction.

He pressed a button and lost the sense in that instant of who he was.  He had intended to press the button below the one he did, getting him down to the street, but was instead heading up to the executive suite and feeling it most natural.  The ascent was slow, and — when the elevator doors opened at the top — well-dressed people moved about the suite in slow motion.  Their gestures were familiar; he could read their acquisitive behavior, intuit their roles.  Nothing about them felt mysterious.  They worked for him.  This certainty he felt would have kept on feeling natural to him had the handful he could see through the doors not then turn quizzically to him. Was that his immediate boss off to the right?  He tried to look away but her stare held him.  The elevator doors closed. He blinked.  He tried — out on the street — to imagine himself back into the moment before that stare, before he grasped that he was a rival.  He couldn’t.  He craned his neck to take in the tall buildings, and felt all at once their weight upon him.  In the mistaken push of an Up button, he was no longer an employee in some job at a company but a professional in a profession instead.

The dog, prone, face flat to sidewalk, was tied to a passed-out homeless woman.  She wouldn’t look at all alive if not for the look of resignation on the dog’s face.  He stepped up and knelt and reached out his hand to make the dog feel obliged to lick it.  The dog raised its head heavily and did oblige with the lick before dropping its face to the sidewalk in a fall.  He caressed the dog’s nose and ran his hand up its length to the forehead before grabbing the face with both hands, scratching the sides, lifting it as he lowered his own, saying, You’ve got to keep the cheer, into its eyes.  He had to rub the length of the dog’s body to finally get it to its legs, and, in only a few moments, the tail took to wagging.  The dog leaned over and licked the woman’s face; when that made no difference, it pushed against the leash.  The woman sluggishly rolled her head skyward and awoke at a sudden to the harshness of light.  The licking began again, the dog’s tail now in flight.  The woman moved to reach up and wrap the dog’s neck in a hug, and that took a few tries, by which time he was looking out from inside an office, feeling achingly a dog’s burden to keep people up and about and on the go.

The fourth door on the right happened to be open, but was blocked by a dog of the kind that attacks.  He announced his appointment through the doorway, and the dog attacked that too with a vicious growl.  Alta!, a voice rang out.  And just like that, that mauler transformed into a submissive puppy, dropping to, and wrapping itself around, his feet.  He knelt only to acknowledge the dog with a pat, but minutes must have passed before he sensed hovering over him the lawyer he had come to check out.  I’ve been watching you, she said.  If so, she must have then been watching him pet a dog in desperate need of it.  He rose to apologize and, rather than follow her into her office, stole off down the hall, fearful all at once of a door that had been open where others weren’t.

He saw a wheelchair across the street, in front of a shop, and stepped to curb’s edge to make out that the old woman in it was looking outward to help from anybody.  The pace of pedestrians walking past her felt hectic; he sensed she might be in a panic.  He looked around, what traffic light to cross at?, when a pedestrian dropped two bills onto a pile on the old woman’s lap.  Was she begging for money?  Another two in quick succession dropped a couple more.  She shook from side to side; something was wrong.  He ran for the light to the right just as a middle-aged woman rushed from out of the shop.  He held back when she grabbed at the wheelchair and struggled to pull it backwards into the shop.  Bills scattered in air.  The old woman lunged and nabbed one, but then hurled it down, hard, as if to expel it, he thought, for butting in and rendering her invisible.

The big bird next to a little bird was as if completely still on the pond’s dusky surface.  He thought it the reason why the little bird floated unmoving as well.  Yet, quite suddenly, the little one fluttered its wings and took off on a swooping glide over water.  He watched.  At one point, it almost hit water.  His heart leaped into an acidic taste in his mouth, for, at that speed, the little one would be hitting a wall.  But the unaffected bird took off instead at the trajectory of a jet towards the rising sun.  The big bird didn’t move a feather, looking alone, taking in as if its fate.  It took him a moment to find the little one again, higher up in the sun’s rays, and see it then arc around and descend at a trajectory steeper than a jet’s.  A nosedive into water?  It slid into a sudden flat taxiing above the pond and came to a stop at its station alongside the big bird.  The big bird didn’t budge, as if deliberately, and he knew then that he had all along been witnessing the two of them as one acting in a duet with the just-dawning sun.

The area was restricted.  Keep Out.  He couldn’t tell why.  It was fenced because it was owned.  Actually, well-owned; he could find no break in the fencing.  The fence posts were of wood stronger than those holding up his bed. This land was so well-protected that he felt himself a trespasser standing outside its boundary, and he wondered why.  Yet then, why the Why?  Accept that anything or anyone well-protected makes him feel a trespasser and move on.  Why must a response meet some very rational litmus test?  That got him thinking about litmus paper, and the girl with whom he had put it to the test so many years ago when his best friend lived right on the corner of a street that still in his mind was as stately as the one in the movie about a tree on a street….  He turned and walked down the street, the one in the past while actually on the one in the present, hanging on tight to his mind taking flight, allowing the past to rush in to keep the present out.

He knew he was on a trail animals likely considered their own, but he was desperate to get to water before dark.  He had already hallucinated himself into an alien come from a waterless planet; it had helped him navigate a good distance, but its illusion wore off.  He felt again exposed to his intense thirst.  It was why he had then veered off onto a barely detectable animal trail, assuming it a shorter cut to water.  The effort to traverse under and around its obstacles very soon drained the last of his courage.  He felt himself at a line in the sand.  Turn and go back, or was that a whiff of wetness in the air?  He chased the whispery whiff the few strides it took to find himself on the lip to a narrow shallow canyon.  He saw no stream down below, no pooled water, though low vegetation did cling to the canyon floor and animal tracks climb the sides.  He reckoned he’d have no problem making it down, but, if he found no water, the climb back would be challenging.  A decision, though, never got made.  Without intending to, he stepped into the hooftracks leading down to the canyon floor.  If land could belong to anybody, he told himself, it would naturally belong to the animals, and so it was their way he was going to follow.

She realized in their accidental meeting at an airport that she could still recall the exchange that had ended their week-long relationship some thirty years back.  He had opened the door to her dorm, and she had said, Goodnight, and he had said, The coldest thing to say to me is always on your mind.  What could he have possibly meant?  She said it took a decade to realize that his remark may not have been an attack upon her as much as a voicing of extreme desire, but that, in the end, both had felt as thrusts upon her.  He had been the first with whom she had stood her ground.  Did he remember?  He replied with a No, that he did not remember, and picked up a feeling he was in some way standing his ground.  Well it’s true, she snapped, and as abruptly grabbed her carry-on, threw him a good-riddance wave, and rolled off.  That feeling of standing his ground lingered in him.  He kept digging around it till he sensed that it could not have been him with whom she had been involved, that it had to have been his roommate at the time, and that in this chance meeting he had been but a substitute to blame for the sins of the original.

He understood that people loom large in small spaces and small in large spaces:  it was why he had rented a small sports car.  Yet, when she got in, he loomed so large that only the span of a hand separated them.  It felt to him a divide disrespectful of him to not bridge.  Simple words, a generic “hi, good to meet you,” would only grow the distance; a slight welcoming touch, perhaps on the arm, felt to him the truer way to begin this date.  He surprised himself when, on its way, his hand then landed on the gear shaft between them, thrust it into first, and, as quickly, he was in traffic, scolding himself for not having borrowed his friend’s larger car.  He was more of himself from a distance; this was way up close, where girls roamed more.  Shouldn’t she bridge the span?  He did lower his arm to make it easier for her to touch him, and, in time, she did, but only when he had to veer into a sudden left turn.  His arm had instinctively flung out to shield her, and she had touched it, and it made possible the kiss they then stole at the red light.  It was her touch, though, that still lingered in him months later, and a recognition that it would not have been possible if not for that unexpected and sudden sharp turn.

He had been standing a while in the phone booth when he heard a man in the next booth conclude his call with, The money’s gonna come, with or without a job, it’s gonna come, believe it.  It was said so flatly that he held back to catch a glimpse of someone bedraggled, or fearsome, but saw instead a tall angular formally-suited man step out of the booth with purpose to his gait.  Did one stride as a lumberjack in a suit so fine?  He followed that man for near to a street block before he sensed his suspicions ring true:  he noticed how ill-suited the man was to his clothes, a villager in a corporate suit.  He stopped at the corner and watched that villager cross the avenue.  He strode not as one being drawn to a promising opportunity as much as one pushing himself to it with a determined story in mind.  He even felt a whiff of a breeze from the man’s efforts, which is why he thought he had then turned back to the phone booth, intent on making his call, on allowing a story to carry him forward when nothing in reality would.

In the sounds of the local dialect, his was a long and noisy name.  He could tell in the effort made how distasteful it was for the local official to have to pronounce it.  He offered an abbreviated version, which, in the way the official then sounded it out, got shortened but kept the noise.  The noise irked him; he found himself feeling protective of the pleasing way people back home sounded out his name.  The official, smiling, pointing at him, said, Doe.  It meant “temporary name” in local shorthand. The official turned to the side and even introduced him to the three others at the border station as “Doe.”  He loved the sound they all gave this name, with even a whiff of fresh money.  With that, the official stamped his passport, granting “John Doe” a three-day stay in the mountain kingdom.  He did get treated as an exotic object by the locals, but how could it matter when he was as anonymous to them as are any of the other John Does hidden in the world?

He felt sure of a connection between the tiny crack he had noticed snaking across the sidewalk and his mind splitting in two, with him now on the side of himself that didn’t want to go to this interview.  He pivoted just as he stepped off the sidewalk and headed back.  Even before he completed that pivot, he was asking himself how it was possible to change in a flash a decision he had so long and deliberately considered.  In his mind had flashed a man, seated, leaning forward, head erect, asking him about his aspirations and what they said of him, as a set-up to getting at his great disappointments and what they said of him.  One had to be in tiptop shape for that, to tell the truth or to lie.  He knew he needed a few more days of clean thinking, and was why he had pivoted.  He was past the crack in the sidewalk by now, looking for another one, or any marring of the surface, but it remained smooth underfoot, confirming to him the innate wisdom of his retreat.

Was it the first since they met that he noticed a tablecloth on the center table they ate at?  He gasped at its improbable whiteness, its deep sheen, a white to be kept unsoiled.  My brother, she said, without even a look at him.  Can you make yourself scarce this evening, she added.  He did as she asked, roaming a market, and recalled — perhaps it was the white bread of his sandwich — that he too had once been given that white tablecloth treatment, at his first invite.  That was months ago now, and not likely to happen again, as he was no more than water and could never be blood.

He heard the woman at the table over say that reminders needed to be written, yes, but that what was written had also to be gotten done.  She was helping her husband make a schedule of his responsibilities.  She said there was no more practical a way to get to that feeling of accomplishment that he always says he wants.  Her husband had strewn in front of him pieces of paper, presumably scribbled reminders to himself, and she was helping him organize them into four groups with groupings within each.  He’d move a piece of paper into one grouping and she’d drop it into another.  If both agreed on the same, then that piece of paper was dropped into one of four envelopes.  Somehow, from those four, three pieces of paper ended up in one envelope, and his priorities were all set.  That’s what they both said at just about the same time, and was why, he thought, they then fell to bubbling laughter.  It had devolved into hiccups and chuckles by the time he got up and took a last glance back at the intimacy between them that had allowed the humor in her husband’s disorderly life to overcome the dreaded reality of it.

The five numbers on his new license plates turned out to be his birthdate.  The two preceding letters abbreviated the day he was born.  Coincidental, yes, but too much of a self-advertisement.  That’s what he told the young woman at the license department counter.  But you’re only advertising to yourself, she said; no one else knows those numbers are your birthday.  It took him a moment to realize she wasn’t joking.  He felt himself a boy in a woman’s presence with no counter to allow him to walk away a man.  She handed back the license plates and, referring to the numbers, said, You don’t look that old.  The obvious became then apparent:  his objection to the plates was actually that they had stamped on them his advanced age, to stare at, to recite, to remind him all the days that he was older than he felt and was on his way to the dreaded day he would feel his age.  It sapped the energy in him to insist; he found that he simply walked away with a, That’s sweet of you, dear, and it wasn’t till later that he saw how like an old man he had been.

Alone in an overnighter, he helplessly flipped through TV channels of people presenting news, or talking about it, and for the first time perceived that gabability was the skill most treasured.  One had to gab so singularly well as to make knowing much to a depth wholly unnecessary.  Rather, to know much could make one appear officious, a background player, a piece in an orchestra, less delectable to the viewer.  “Let’s be real, what’s there to really know?,” a gabber on one channel happened to ask a presumed knower of scholarly studies.  The knower suggested there was an endless amount to know, but an inability to gab about it shifted the gabber’s focus to the standby gabber on the panel.  It wasn’t long before he discovered he could no longer follow what those two went on talking about, or, as though infected, what he was himself thinking about.  The flicker of fear that then passed through him stood him up to shut off the TV, and didn’t let him turn it on for a few years yet to come.

Bred into the species is the making of wrong choices; being human, we perfect that.

♦

All departments get corrupted by the patterns their occupants fall into.

♦

To survive, bacteria leech on, people leech on, and realities do as well.

Everything old begins to feel new again, lifelessly new.

♦

What lives deep within us is a misunderstood story of a misunderstood story someone told someone.

♦

We, by our existence, are obnoxious.  Any exertion compounds the matter.  Why we regard self-restraint as holy.

Time makes of nothing a matter.

♦

There are freedoms only the confined can experience.  A freedom to imagine a window where one isn’t, or a door that opens out.

♦

Everything that we are is inherited from nature.  We march to its destruction only because we prefer to believe that we stepped out of an alien pod.

He was all set to buy his first car for three thousand, but a man with advice said a car for three thousand would need work done to it.  Buy a car for a thousand instead and use the two to fix it up.  How was he to resist that suggestion? — it was too good, it made too much sense.  Yet, considering that life itself was barely making much sense to him then, wouldn’t something that made too much sense be too much — too calculated, not to be trusted as at all accurate?  That very thought, once it pierced him, plunged him into such uncertainty and indecision that the only way back to a clean slate was for him to throw caution to the wind and buy a car new for ten thousand.  It put a severe financial strain on him then, but that strain didn’t survive into later years as one of a couple of memories about that car. He never let himself forget that first time he got — rather, fell — into that new car seat and felt a want to hug the road and drive it to a greater freedom, and he never could keep from remembering the terrifying realization that he was now responsible for protecting his car from cars being driven by all the stupid careless drivers on the road.

The cashier had said something, and he had responded, and she had responded to that, and he had had no response back.  When she was handing him a receipt and said, Hope you enjoy them, he said nothing back since his immediate reaction had been, Enjoy a box of toothpicks?  Another instance, he told himself, of losing his feel for chitchat and throwaway humor.  Had earlier that morning not been the sixth time he considered how mediocre a friend he had become?  This fading facility for banter had been alienating him; he was already little more than a bookshelf friend:  when in need, friends could simply pick him off their shelf.  Time with friends had become time spent listening to them.  “Toothpicks,” he heard.  The cashier was thrusting the box at him.  He felt someone yawn and take hold of the box and mutter, “T’keep the eyelids open.”  Her laugh was instant, light and true, and that someone’s feet didn’t land till they became his own back out on the streets.

She had greeted him with a surprisingly genuine smile.  She explained that her name Naleva was a word made up to rhyme with the word for ‘honey’ in her language, and that, despite having gone through the trouble of conjuring the name, her family called her by that word for ‘honey’ anyway.  Naleva got forgotten by even her till she came to have need for it:  being called ‘honey’ in a workplace wouldn’t do.  Naleva became her professional name.  With it came a professional persona, she added, “which is a work-in-progress, so don’t be put-off if it suddenly acts up a little strong.”  She escorted him into a small office and pointed him to a seat across her desk.  “My truer nature,” she assured him, “is closer to ‘honey.’”  He noticed the smile remain genuine.  He thought to defer his demand for a refund on a malfunctioning refrigerator to another time and another person, but took the seat anyway.  He was too deep into how he had so ably been disarmed and forewarned with a greeting and a smile sincere enough to be intimate.  He was in the presence of a natural professional, he felt, and he’d just sit there and take his licks.

He saw his age on the street sign; it pinched him at how advanced a number it was.  The street itself looked faded as he compared it to the low numbered streets he had visited earlier, and yet that fadedness did not deter him from walking a block into it, and more, as he began to see it a place in perpetual transition.  He had seen a moving van on each of the first three blocks he walked; the people were of a variety, young to old, and the stores were cheap.  A vibrant street, he felt, and, with it, permission to step into a store to enjoy himself a debilitatingly nasty delicious ice-cream.

He spotted a field of horses outside the porthole, hidden amidst the snow-capped peaks below.  His discovery — was he peeking into something that should stay hidden? So many horses on land for them alone? — felt suspicious.  He stood on his seat to check the reaction of others on the plane and saw not even a ripple of interest.  His mother next to him had her eyes shut, and stewardesses were collecting cups and bottles; all seemed normal.  Out the porthole, there the horses still were, little specks, so little now that they could be anything.  He took a quick look at his sleeping mother.  Back out, even the mountains looked small enough now to actually be waves upon an ocean.  It sparked a need in him to tell his mother that his eyes kept losing what they were seeing — just as her arm reached over and lowered the window shade shut.  He turned back to her and her eyes were still closed, and he saw her parked outside his school, resting at idle, waiting on him.

It looked to him at first as two animals aiming for each other in a showdown:  coming from the left a tractor plowing a field and from the right a bullock-driven hoe plowing that same field.  He got off his bike to watch the collision.  He could see that the man on the machine was not all that different from the man behind the animal, but he knew that the man and the bullock was about to get as crushed as a roach when a heavy foot rolls over.  The man on the machine could continue on if he wished and crash through all the fields and only a stronger machine could stop him.  Still, just when he sensed the collision was to happen, it didn’t:  the man on the machine passed by the man behind the bullock.  Back on his bike and cutting through fields, he knew that that image of the crossover would linger in him, and would likely surface whenever he needed to remind himself that the old and the new don’t necessarily collide as much as they pass each other by.

Just as he was waking up and realizing he still felt tired, he saw in his mind’s eye a ticker-tape scrawl across his vision, giving him fair warning in red that Life…is…the…distance…you…must…run…to…catch…up.  This waking dream would revisit him in later years, and he had to keep reminding himself that he had — that first time — closed his eyes, let out a big yawn, and fallen then back to sleep.

The insides of the mud-and-brick homes and shops were lain open to weather and wildlife, and all seven dirt roads and narrow lanes connecting them were left pock-marked by vehicles not meant for them.  The village that may have had three hundred people in it when he last visited had two now, a couple already elderly in their forties.  The woman and husband stretched themselves up from their shrunkenness to greet him, raising themselves off a bench next to a table that served as their kitchen pantry.  He sat on the ground at their feet so that they could remain seated.  They had survived because half of their house was underground.  Their village made a wrong choice, the man explained, in choosing to stay neutral in some big fight out there that had become local.  Over months, it had been demolished by both sides.  Bad people, the man explained.  His wife shook her head as if to correct him and said instead, People bad.  Anywhere outside of the village, he would have agreed with the man, but there, at their feet amidst the ruin, what the wife had said — by simply reversing her husband’s two words — felt far closer to what is true.

The man across the aisle from him on a near empty train didn’t think of himself as homeless since he was always riding the rails.  No brag, he said, I could’ve been good at anything, but what to do?  No paying job he found had been worth the effort to do it.  He had kept himself on the move in hopes of finding something to settle on, and over time got used to needing a change in scenery every day.  It’s a specialty life, he pointed out:  people on these trains meet me and my stories every day, I bring them together, pass personal notes between them, news down to the very local, put a cheer in their ride — I’m better than public radio.  This is Pledge Week, he added.  He pitched for a hundred.  The man’s every gesture and posture exuded a professionalism, a confidence in the idea that he knew what he was doing.  It was clear he was entrepreneurial, working at a job he had made up and was good at.  It didn’t take long before he paid the man outright, but what stayed with him, after the man moved down a few rows to set up his next pitch, was why he had then felt obliged to tip him an extra twenty-five.  What beyond the professionalism of the pitch had he paid the man for?  When later his eye fell upon a tired couple leaning against each other in their seat, he sensed the twenty-five may well have been for the man just being there, across the aisle from him, on the same train, a fellow traveller.

He was dancing to music that made him jump and hop while she stood aside to wait this dance out.  It wasn’t clear to him why he was jumping or hopping.  And why were his jumps straight, erect, like rockets blasting, and his hops like leaps over streams?  This behavior was not him; something in the music was doing this to him.  If she’d join in, he might be able to tame himself a bit, but, then, he saw that his jumps were being noticed on the dance floor, and his hops laughed at, and he sensed these responses quickly become the reason for his behavior.  In an accidental moment, he was being given a chance to perform, to be not himself, and he was taking it.

He had handed her a set of ear plugs and change from a twenty just as their train departed the station.  She checked the change.  You brought back more than I gave you, she said, handing him back a ten note.  He caught glimpse of the station store slip by and handed her back the note.  Yuck, she said, you keep it.  He did hold on to it, uncertainly, and tried not to think of it, till — upon disembarking — he realized that the sensation he had been enduring must be what is meant by money burning a hole in one’s pocket.  It wasn’t an insatiable craving to spend that money as much as to have it be disposed of, to have it be taken from him as accidentally as it had been given him.  He pulled out the note.  Some in the station looked needy, but he wasn’t about to walk up and offer it to one not asking.  Why this self-torture?  He reacted with a shudder — and a “Yuck” — and, all at once, as if with a wave of a wand, a spell lifted, and it made sense to him to pocket the note and return it to the station store the next day.

While still a little frazzled, she had quickly lifted the lid off a pot of simmering potatoes and dropped it on her bare feet.  She hadn’t screamed or yelped, but had instead turned to him and said, I deserved that.  He rushed her ice from the freezer.  She refused it: I need to slow down.  Staying injured would certainly slow her down, but… Was this what she meant by being a practical person?  That if she felt a need to slow down, she would make use of whatever was happening in the moment to get herself to do it?  That she had found herself in pain and was now using it to slow herself down?  That pain was not just to be felt, or fought off, but also something to be used?  This kind of practical, he saw, could reverse a frown into a smile, and few would notice the lingering strain.  Still, he later recalled, he had kept the ice in hand in case the welt on her foot swelled up.

She would not look at him; she then said she could not look at him as it was forbidden; and then she said that she had even forbidden herself from looking at him.  No need to, she said, because I can see you very clearly without looking at you.  He thanked her for her frankness, but asked for clarity.  All your manners, she said.  He asked for a specific.  You ask questions, she said, you put yourself in a position to listen.  She slowly shifted and then turned her back to him, ending their exchange. In a borrowed tone, he thanked her for helping him understand how his manners meant more to her than what he looked like.  And, surprising himself, he thanked her again, his head in a low bow as he retreated.  It was an old custom in her culture which he had picked up that had all of a sudden felt apt.

Her dress covered her neck, arms, and flowed to her feet; her hair was a cape over her shoulders.  She stood at the entry and her hand rose to her neck so haltingly that he quickly realized he had already given her a slight bow.  It was clear she had come to the wrong room, yet she must have noticed his bow for it seemed she stood expecting him.  He rose and made it halfway across the dance floor, till no, she hadn’t been looking at him, as she then turned and left the room.  He found himself spotlighted on an empty dance floor surrounded by patrons seated to dinner.  He promptly approximated a two-step to acknowledge his embarrassment and retreated then to his table, to slow down, he told himself, to reorient, for he had just been caught seeing something that hadn’t really been there.

She had walked right through the doors.  He had followed her, but stopped at the entry as to await permission.  There was no ticket-taker, no host.  The room in which he had been told her friend was to hold a private engagement ceremony was somehow a cavernous concert hall.  He would be crossing a border into life only a few can live.  She was already halfway down the rows to the stage on which an orchestra awaited and stood to greet each guest.  He noted in her a comfort on such rarified turf; already, she looked distanced from him.  The dozen or so guests down on the stage looked as stick figures dressed up to be told apart.  He watched her join them, staying to their outer edge, touching their shoulders from behind, moving through them and, when done, moving on to the orchestra.  She had no boundaries.  Here he was still at the entrance, and by the time he’d meet up with her she’ll have been through everyone there.  It was this thought he recalled that got him to finally cross over, to go down the rows and join her onstage.

By the time he befriended him, the man was a few years removed from having completed a twenty-six year term as a political prisoner, and his face when listening still settled into a cold stare.  One thought became an obvious concern:  Did he show that face to his two-year old daughter?  He kept on saying things, didn’t let the man answer, kept the man listening and in his cold stare.  The eyes were so empty of expression, of life, that he sensed in himself the man’s child as a seven year old finally turning away from them.  This image disengaged him from what he was saying, enough that it surprised him to hear himself going on instead about the importance of a father’s face and how it was often the face of judgment in a child’s mind. He went quiet and apologized to the man.  The man reached out to his hands.  My face is broken, the man quietly conceded, but my daughter says my heart is wide wide deep.  He grabbed onto the man’s hands just as his own eyes felt all at once so heavy that of its own their gaze dropped to the floor.

He sort of liked the Neighbor Man, as his mother called him, for installing a high wooden fence around the back of his property.  It was strong and sturdy and without anything to grab onto to help him to its top.  It was a true challenge, unique among the more scaleable fences around the neighborhood.  He and two boys had figured out how to stand on another’s shoulder, but they now practiced having him stand on the second’s shoulder.  When he finally leaped over that fence and fell a distance into flower bushes, it deeply disappointed him that Neighbor Man did not celebrate the feat the boys had pulled off.  Rather, Neighbor Man, and later his mother, treated it as an actual violation.  Fences, it surprised him, were put up to protect people, and were not like park equipment erected to be jumped over.  He took to reminding himself of that as a grown-up whenever he’d fall back upon a tendency to jump over people’s self de-fences and expect from them a hearty welcome.

He couldn’t see the far end of the bridge that bent down to the river’s other shore.  His blind date was likely already there; so, even in his Saturday-night best, he ran.  He was in sweat from bus stop to bridge, and there was the entirety of the bridge still to cross.  He slowed down.  He didn’t want to arrive all sticky and wet.  The bridge was long.  He reckoned she’d wait no more than fifteen anxious minutes.  As he walked apace, he took to waving both arms high.  She’d surely look for him before she left.  Midway on the bridge he was back into a run, waving still, though certain that the trust which seeds a relationship had already been damaged.  Their first date was sure to be a going-through-of-motions.  Regardless, he waved his arms still more furiously.  He felt a need to see himself as one who sees things through.  She wasn’t there when he got to the other side, but, on the way back, at the point he had earlier broken into a run, he saw her across the road, as sticky and wet as he, going the other way.  It stayed with him, then, that sound of screeching brakes that caught her attention and made her see that he was coming and was going to get there.

He mumbled something to himself, and a minute later suspected that he may have actually said something he’d want to remember.  He chased his thoughts backwards while speeding on down the road.  The last thing in his mind had been an image of a boy and a ball on a beach.  Just before that he had driven through a puddle in which he had for an instant caught a flash of the sun, and had before that unpeeled an orange with his teeth. He could see himself lining up these events on a string of time, and in his head he heard, The aim of every straight line is a point to stop at.  That was it! — his earlier mumble — come to him whole — as if to explain why he was now looking for a place to stop at for a bite.

In opening the envelope, he tore the letter on which she had drawn a heart with its bottom tip balanced on the tip of an arrow.  The arrow remained untouched, but he had torn through the heart.  He watched himself scour the envelope for the name of the manufacturer.  Finding it, he surprised himself then by having an operator place him a call.  He questioned three people on why their envelopes were made so difficult to open, and no one quite understood.  It’s when the last one said, But they’re made to be difficult to open, that he first felt his fear that a tear through the heart she had drawn might settle in him as an omen.

The road felt to him to be too straight, unnecessarily so.  It was after all cutting through fleshy rolling hills.  How had that escaped the attention of the road’s engineers?  He would have loved to wind his way through a child’s feeling the hills gave him of his parents’ ruffled bed on early mornings.  Neither was there room at road’s side to stop and take in the sight.  He had to cut straight through.  It made the hills look timid to him, hurled off to the side.  The road he had taken, he remembered reminding himself, was shaping the landscape he saw.

The first time he veered off that dense trail, he got lost getting back to it.  The second time, he used a budding tree as trail-marker.  It proved not enough.  The third time, he leaned a flat rock against that tree.  By the time he returned to it hours later, someone had used mud to slap a smily face onto the surface of the rock.  Time for that instant stopped for him: he was as if at the beginning of human time witnessing a habit be born.  Someone had come across a tree and a rock and, by adding an expression, made a first kind of art.

He could tell that he was trying to create a pattern out of nature’s parts to get himself to feel how he wanted.  There was the sun, there the mountain plateau, the tree’s shade and the cool breeze, and there was he trying to feel himself a part of it all.

The boy explained that he could easily learn about people on the internet, so why when he met them had he to suffer through being told what he already knew in better detail?  It’s boring to meet people, the boy said to him — or to any of the other three looking on from their tables, except when it’s a surprise.  Like meeting you nice folks.  It’s my pleasure, he went on, to bring you news that the crazy have been discovered to be sane.  Turns out to have been a definition problem, he said.  Think about it.  You’ve got to become crazy to stand up to a bully and do the sane thing.  He recited a list of such crazies, mostly well known names, all persuasively relevant to him at the table.  He was about to compliment the boy on his intelligence when the woman at the next table jumped in with, Where’re your parents?  The boy pulled up just a moment before leaning down to grab first one leg and then the other, and then rise to say, They’re around.  Where’s your mother?, the woman persisted.  I’m standing on her.  He rose to look down and caught sight instead of a smiling man in uniform appear and reach for the boy — and apologize with, He tries to get away….  The boy allowed himself to be pulled by the arm all the way to the door — when he suddenly leaped into a performer’s bow and then onto the back of his uniformed caretaker with a, Carry me out!  He didn’t see — through now wet eyes — the last of the boy slip out the door.  Neither did he notice when the other three left their tables.  It took a while before he decided that his still-welling tears weren’t as much a response to the beauty in the boy’s performance, or to the cruel fate clinging to him, as to a sudden sense in him that the boy would heroically manage his difficult fate.  He had after all found a way in his mind to keep both his absent parents with him — one as his left leg and the other as his right.

On a city bus to school, he was the only one of his classmates listening to a man going on about why children should be vigorously taught what’s right from an early age.  Society cannot be slapped together, he was saying, it has to be built.  All things that last have to be built, and the mind is the first thing to build.  He, at whom the man had looked once, was on the verge of agreeing when the man’s friend next to him said, You’re focused on what gets put into the head; I pay more attention to what comes out the arse, to what a person leaves behind.  Is it toxic or is it fertilizer is what I ask.  You calling me fertilizer, the first man asked.  Only ‘cause you’re my friend, the friend said.  Yes, yes, the first man repeated, and laughed, and then started on sports — which even he, then still a boy, came to see was fertilizer for their friendship.

The child approached the cat with its hand held out — wanting to shake hands?  He watched the cat focus on the child’s hand and hold its ground as the hand grazed its head. The child — having overrun the cat — made then a wide U-turn.  This time it was the other hand the cat was wary of, and still yet it stood its ground as a smack across its ear turned its face to him.  It looked at him a split moment, then spread its legs out to the far corners and flopped its belly on the ground.  What could that mean?  He felt all at once a part of their scene — even responsible for it, in fact, since he was the one watching.  The child and cat were after all captive to the moment and capable of behaving in any way.  It was his responsibility as the one observing to prevent harm to come to either.  He reached out into the scene and grabbed the child’s arms — after the child had made yet another U-turn and raised, this time, both its arms.  Passive onlookers, he told himself, actively permit the harm they can stop.  As it happened, the child then kicked him, slipped out of his grasp and ran to its father four tables down and the cat rose on its paws, stretched itself out, and, in a mysteriously indeterminate direction, walked away.

He wanted to know why the clock hadn’t chimed when the hour needle had struck twelve.  His grandmother stepped off the bed, shuffled to the clock cabinet, jiggled in it a bit and said, Sshhh now, like you the clock’s lost its voice.  Just like that, he felt in himself the vibrational suffering of that tall standing clock’s struggle to speak.  It surprised him then when the minute needle suddenly clicked forward:  the clock had lost its voice but was still working?!  He snapped up in bed without in the least intending to.  Keep your rest, his grandmother warned, and yet he was filled with energy to run up and down long fields.  He hopped off his grandmother’s bed, out the bedroom, halfway down the stairs before he knew he would stumble if he didn’t in that instant sit down.  He did, — and then helped his grandmother help him get up the stairs and back into bed.  The minute needle had by now moved seven more spaces.  He caught his grandmother’s eye watching him, and watched then each word — Don’t Compare Yourself To A Machine — get formed by her lips.  He felt his empathy for the clock fade away and dissolve, though the visual memory of those words on his grandmother’s lips continued to live on in him, to visit him whenever he worked himself to the bone, and always, he one day realized, upon first hearing in him a chime.

The drive up the hill was steep, but this time he had a big rental car.  The way he first felt the steepness of the climb was in the sudden power surge and thrust of the car, and it is why, when the engine then got quiet and the climb appeared to level out, he was stunned to discover that the car was still climbing.  Though going up a steep hill, the feeling in the seat was of coasting over flat road at a speed he had in his car only been able to reach going downhill.  The power in this car had just erased the steepness of the road.  It had leveled out all obstacles, made a climb that had always been difficult, sometimes improbable (in his own car), seem barely perceptible.  He realized he had just answered why two years before a friend had walked off with the girl he had thought himself to be wooing.  He had imagined obstacles to her that his friend in a power move hadn’t.

He knew that what he remembered was not what had happened, and yet what he remembered meant so much more that it was hard to give it up for what had actually happened.  They had been walking riverside, under drooping trees, the sun reflecting on them off rippling water, mildly discussing — almost in whispers — a mutual break-up, and not, as had actually happened, having broken off in a snit in a city alley.  He had over time turned the alley break-up scene into an ideal in his mind for how break-ups ought to play out.  How else was one to improve?

Curtains of airborne insects too small to see thickened the air and he still had half a cliffside to descend to camp by the creek.  He turned off-trail instead, and climbed.  He had been feeling overwhelmed by an urge to fill his aching lungs with clear air.  Could be he last took a deep breath two days back.  He would need but a handful of whole inhales to feel himself again, hopeful, able to get to the creek, set up camp, get through the night, move on.  Yet, still, should he be climbing off-trail, tiring himself, risking injury?  He recalled later that he took a moment to consider this, even though he had sensed no doubt in himself.  It was far wiser to do whatever was necessary to keep himself sane.  It wasn’t till he had climbed to the hill’s top, though, that he was able to take in those deep breaths. And as he did, he felt himself swoon into a light-headedness so all at once that he dropped to his knees, a little off, and in the snap of a finger came to realize that he had just slept through to morning, and woken born again of hope.

He had turned off the road to fill up in a town with the word “living” in its name and found it deserted.  Its one-pump station was unattended.  He feared a plague had swept through, though quickly realized people may still be at worship at block’s end.  The building’s parking lot though was empty.  He felt an uncertain shiver and took steps to leave, but, then — in the movie-gait of one come too late to the rescue — he ended up surveying the four blocks of town, till faint joyous voices led him to look upon a party dancing up the path through the fields.  People dressed in their best.  Still in bowtie and muffler, the elderly attendant at the gas pump later recited in a monologue how the celebratory ritual had begun at the gravesite:  We first honor the deceased and we then joyfully leave them behind in their resting place.  We let them go, we can’t have them continue to live with us.  You’ve got to think always of the living; new relationships must get formed.  After bringing him his change, the old man added:  It’s how a faraway town like ours has survived more than sixteen hundred years — the living always before the dead.  He was a long way down the road when he came to feel a quick urge to turn around, to return to “living,” back to the glimpse he had gotten for an end to a need for the past, but he let it pass.

After a half-hour of searching for his car, he could no longer tell whether he had — only a half-hour before that — parked on the first or the second or the third level of the parking complexity.  He had already looked down all long rows and was now following an intuition to focus on the second level.  The make and model of his car was common enough, but why had he always underestimated its everywhereness?  His own was only distinguishable for being of the oldest models.  He started to check license plates and got soon confused by the order of the numbers on his — and yet he continued to fight off every impulse suggesting he wouldn’t find his car on his own.  Yes, it was lunacy to be walking past each car down each row, but this feeling was no match for the obsession in him of, How is it possible to lose a car when it hasn’t been moved?  As if his faith in a reality would itself be called into question were he not to find his car.  Could reality opt to be present in one moment and absent in another?  He heard then a voice.  A man in uniform, in a security cart with a red light on top, saying what?  Investigating suspicious behavior?  He got instantly real:  he apologized, explained, — and still yet, while being driven around to find his car, made sure to assert that people, when made to function in a complex maze, were bound to get disoriented and thus to appear suspicious.  The man in uniform slapped the steering-wheel in whole-hearted agreement, and insisted, It’s why we need more cops!  He didn’t then comprehend the response, and was not able to till, when back on the road, his mind wandered to how life is so dangerously mis-lived when it relies on appearances.

He could see that though she was asleep, her ears were alert.  So he whispered her name.  Nothing of her budged, but he sensed her ears may have gotten more pointedly alert.  He thought to speak up; what better moment than this to say all he had to say.  He stepped in closer.  He noticed that there wasn’t a bulge in her closed eyelids, so placid was her face in sleep.  Not at all the frown she’d find on his — of that he felt sure.  Perhaps what he thought he had to say to her was a result of troubled sleep.  He said nothing, and leaned in instead to take in her face to put on his own when trying to fall asleep the next time.

Through a soupy fog, grazing horses were visible as outlines in gray against an almost white wall.  The head of one lifted to its height.  Upon sensing him?  He first waved one arm, then both.  That alerted another horse.  Those two seemed to him at a distance that couldn’t be gotten to and were yet reacting as though he was nearly upon them.  He’d have to retreat, — but he’d get lost in the dense fog, unable to spot the landmarks to guide him back to the hotel.  He felt himself left hanging.  There was only he and the jittery horses inside a lit-up cloud and, except for a distant siren, no sound.  Utter isolation, separation from the environment.  He knew instantly to stop and take in the moment that would be brief — for, in an instant more, fog did move in to cover the horses, and he awakened, able to remember it all.

The light outside was of the murky hour of day turning to night, and nothing was very clear from the shaky slow-moving bus.  There were flickering lights scattered in the distant hills to the right, perhaps bonfires on native land.  No roads led to them.  To the left was a fast-moving river bordered by a dark wall of trees lining its far shore.  No bridges to get there.  Such good fortune, he reminded himself, to be on a road going somewhere when so little was clear.

He had been in the aisle seat listening to a tiff between a young couple in which, though they agreed that no one is all of what they say they are or are not, each felt the other wasn’t doing enough to help narrow that gap.  It came out over the long flight that they thought the task of love (which each felt deprived of) to be to help close the divide between who each claims to be and in fact is — a far tougher effort, he recalled then thinking, than to simply accept the difference and move on. How were they going to become a twosome if their story together wasn’t allowed to begin?  He gazed sideways at how they kept their voices low, spoke to each other in profile, touched elbows on the armrest separating them, and could see for the first time that it was indeed possible to argue one’s way into a relationship if a relationship was thought of as a problem to solve and not a seed to grow.

Her strut down the sidewalk was of such a feat that he wondered if she knew what she was doing.  She was on heels too thin to see from his cafe table; high on the far edges of her tiptoes, she was falling a little forward.  At one point she stopped, found her balance, looked up and spotted his gaze.  He felt he smiled, and knew he gave a little clap.  She took one foot out of one shoe and the other out of the other, picked up the shoes and carried on, her bare feet on the ground.  A little clap, he long recalled, had been what it took.

She said he hadn’t taken any been-there pictures of their weekend trip, that all he had were what’s-there pictures, and what was the point of documenting all he could about the place but for the fact that it was them who were there?  I could’ve flipped through a brochure, she said.  He pointed to her presence in those pictures, but she saw only the shape of a body in a distance dwarfed by some edifice.  She was right; her face could not be seen in the pictures, but wasn’t her body easily recognizable from its angled head and leg?  To me, he said, it’s unmistakably you; you give a picture the comma it needs.  He saw her hesitate a moment and let out a sigh.  Am I a point of grammar in your pictures?  He worried over that question a long while and — back at the cafe table on the day it would have been their first anniversary — reminded himself that each relationship was inherently about itself and that that was all there was to say about that.

He was walking the expanse of an open field and noticed his arms swinging back and forth as though on parade.  He had finally found an open field that hadn’t been manicured into a park and still he sensed himself being glared at from the grandstands.  He was in the openness of higher elevations before he felt himself able to be on a private walk.  He knew he was getting to an age where he couldn’t so easily get himself this far out.  He’d either have to move out to the hills and mountains or simply accept that change had set in.  If he wanted to continue on with private walks, he’d have to adopt and adapt.  Technology was making his perennial efforts to meld inner-space with outer-space so much easier by creating yet another space.  It was time for him to now learn how to be out on private walks in cyber-space.

The teacher had talked about how nature was wild and humans tame, and had pointed to several pictorials in the textbook on how the process of taming nature had led humans to realize that they too could create beauty.  Art is the taming of the wild around us and in us, the teacher had said.  He long remembered the rage that had then risen in him.  Had his classmates heard?  Was it left for him to remind the teacher that humans are nature’s big mistake, that nature has long paid a price for it, that she was starting to not hold back from showing us what we’ve made of her — that our efforts at taming were making the wild wilder?  He felt a strong conviction to then physically stand up to rebut the teacher, but how to when he was as comfortably stretched out in his chair as the classmate next to him, and when that classmate was finger-drumming a beat to a song he knew he could name if given half a chance?  Yes, there was a rebuttal to make, but how when his own fingertips had already taken to drumming in rhythm to his classmate’s?  He later forgot the song he had then named, but could long remember the onset of a fear in him that he no longer had enough wild left in him to help preserve the wild.

Amid trees lined up as a marching band in front of Government House, a young woman sang a protest song far too beautifully for him to hear the protest in it.  He had mistaken it for a love song till, as those gathering around became a small crowd, he heard protests break in.  He drew closer to the periphery to hear the two men shouting, Cry babies! Cry babies!, drowning out a group of four yelling, Stop the deaths! Stop the deaths!  It was impossible to hear the singer.  He sidled past the protestors, closer, to take in the latter half of her song — of a mother speaking of her living love for a son lost to a faraway war.  He felt himself made weak and weaker by the singer’s elegiac rendering of the mother’s words.  He wondered if the singer’s way of protest was to induce this very weakness.  When, then, at song’s end, the singer turned instantly and abruptly away, he knew.  Her way to change hearts was first to break them.

He had his forehead resting on his left forearm atop a library table as he paged through the brightly-colored photographs of a magazine in his lap, lingering over images of a sand-colored city livened up with colorful ornaments.  It was the stark blue sky in them that truly caught his eye:  in some, outer space appeared to begin right above the layer of roofs at the bottom of those photographs.  He felt a scare.  Life was stuffed into such a thin layer between earth and the vast expanse.  (An image of scum left at the bottom of an empty coffee cup flashed his mind.)  He could feel in those photographs the all-pervasiveness of space, in and around everything and nothing:  Was space the inspiration to how an all-everything God was first imagined?  The class bell rang as he was deciding that God must not then reside in simply a heart or mind or soul, but also fill space, or be space.  He closed the magazine and lifted his head off his forearm.  How lucky he was.  The space he lived in was air, and it was breath that kept him alive.  “Was air God?”  That is what he wrote in the back of his notebook before he ran to class, and he never returned to those words again.

She was peering into her own eyes in the bathroom mirror, and it didn’t matter that she could have moved them almost imperceptibly and seen him watching her through the slightly open door.  She was absorbed in a ritual of checking the mood in her eyes before turning her attention to the blemishes on her skin.  She would then have given her hair a slight brush, but stunned him instead with drops of tears on her cheeks.  The moment felt so personal and intimate that to enter it would have been to kill it, and so he left a note instead, that he had been at the door but that it had not been open wide enough for him to enter.

He watched three boys — reflected in the mirrored walls of a street-corner eatery — kicking a ball on the far sidewalk of the street behind him.  They were passing each other the ball by kicking it high over the heads of pedestrians.  He would have swiveled around on his counter stool to take a direct look, but he wanted not to miss the instant someone did get hit, for someone was sure to — and, when someone was, or rather when a pedestrian intercepted and volleyed the ball high off his fingertips, he did swivel around in time to catch yet another pair of hands volley the ball farther still, and on, till one of the boys ran to it and volleyed it back.  Volleying became the way the boys then passed the ball — with here or there a pedestrian joining in.  He later recalled that he had stepped off the stool just then, as if to join in (change had yet again been initiated not by the one looking on critically but by the ones joining in), yet he hadn’t been able to recall till much later that he had then sat back down on the stool instead, back to his meal and to the street life reflected in the mirrored walls, noticing this time how separated he sat from it all.

The noise he heard turned out to be a deer’s nose rubbing against a windowpane, reaching to get at the apples on the table inside.  Seven were stacked in a small bowl, one for each day.  He had absent-mindedly decided on the redder the riper, and so the reddest three were on top.  The deer licked at them on the pane.  Were he to move to open the window, it was sure to scurry off.  If he later left apples outside, the deer would want to make a habit of it.  So he watched instead the smudges of breath and saliva the deer kept slathering on the windowpane in what grew to seem a pattern, as though making smudges was what the deer was thinking itself to be doing all along.  He became convinced of it when the deer took off.  The smudges had been grouped into the rounded shape of an apple with its stem still on.  Had the apples been inspiration and not food?  He stepped out to look at the pane from the deer’s side, and never forgot that without a debate with himself he had then put all the apples out to pay the deer back.

He felt himself being received as a special guest, being driven in an old sedan down the only flattened-out road of an outpost town, the driver dispersing all in the way with an authority the dispersed were honoring.  He’d already been served tea under the regal tree that was the bus depot, and his driver had gifted him an ancestral bone.  All within sight became infused with a majesty, a nobility:  the greeters under the tree, the driver, the huts and shacks lining the road, even the feeble animals and weary people turning an eye in traffic.  Yet when the driver then stopped to respond in a bellicose exchange with a face in the window of a shack, and he found himself soon forgotten, he turned away and struggled to recognize the rundown and withered village out his side window.

In woods, two short tree trunks not far from where he rested suddenly moved and two others followed and a camel came all at once into view.  A young girl riding it jumped acrobatically to her feet atop the camel’s hump and greeted him with such child-like glee that he got up and ran to catch her in case she fell.  He saw her then see that she didn’t know him, and she let out a shriek.  It stopped his next step by a tree.  He waved hurried assurances, and watched the camel carry her away, but he couldn’t shake off being haunted by her shriek.  Had she let it out because there had once been a man who had not stopped?

He was riding a scooter between two distant villages when up ahead an elephant emerged from out of a roadside thicket — the trunk, the head, and then the mass of it.  He screeched into a quick turnaround:  where one, there many.  Yet, the elephant turned out to be alone, and its expanse now covered the road.  It took note of him, no more.  Was it waiting for others?  He quickly scooted back a little.  Were they her children?  He hadn’t heard any rustling, but still he rolled his scooter farther back.  The elephant then swung her curled tail twice in succession.  Playfully?  —  Was it even a she?  It now looked to him to be young.  He noticed that he had shut the scooter off.  He needed to slow himself down, to stop warding off terror with rapid-fire questions to himself.  Yet, when the elephant then turned and headed down the road, he, without a warning to himself, started up the scooter and sputtered loudly forward in a charge of such deliberateness that the elephant did indeed opt to retreat back into the thicket.  He did it, was his later recollection, because he hadn’t felt it safe for the young elephant to be like him, out alone on an open road.

He watched a little boy running in circles around a slightly-frightened puppy, showing the puppy the way he wanted it to play.  The boy fell to the ground, belly up, flailing away, his tongue licking his arms.  He then threw a bone and ran to fetch it and brought it back to the puppy.  He hid behind a tree and yelled “I’m here!” to get the puppy to seek him out.   The puppy kept to its haunches.  That’s not fair, the boy said, and went over to tie the puppy to a chain.  As the boy began to pull the puppy around in circles, he tried, from his end of a park bench, to look away from the tautness in the chain that was connecting the puppy to the boy.  He had watched that chain become necessary the moment the boy had thought himself more deserving, and he definitely didn’t want to catch an accidental glimpse of the strain in either the boy’s hand or the puppy’s neck.  So he closed his eyes instead and opened his face up to the warmth of the sun.

He had a while ago lost his way amid dense mountain forests, and was at one point so exhausted as to question the point of continuing on.  Take a final look around, he had told himself.  He sensed, soon, in and around him, without a definitive way of seeing them, millions and billions of the littlest of shimmering bursts, all alive in some way, sparking to stay alive.  This sensation lingered on in him as a peer pressure too great to fend off, which he realized was why he had then stumbled up to his feet and ventured on.

A young girl gave him an exaggerated nod he thought was usually given to older people, and then, from among choices on the metro car, opted to sit next to him.  She pulled out what he was by now able to identify as a smartphone.  Did she do anything? — for suddenly the screen on it changed to an image of her — no, not an image, a movie? — of her as she actually was, sitting next to him.  She leaned into him, and the screen showed her face come next to his.  He tried to match her smile, but hers was too much a smile.  Say hi, she said.  High, he said.  She laughed and said hi back.  And, then, quite suddenly, he was no longer on the screen, only she, filling it up, and — her thumb moved! — the screen zeroed in to a spot on her chin that had a redness to it.  Ugh, she said.  She froze the image and analyzed it minutely, just before clicking off the phone and looking away.  Hi, he said.  Her hi back lacked her honed style.  He trusted his senses and stayed with her till they got off the metro and the smartphone again displayed them both.  It showed her walking away with a wave to a bent figure behind her.  He wanted to wave back, and yet held up.  Just because he had found himself in a movie didn’t mean he had to get so deep into his part. He straightened up instead, looked for and crossed the bridge over the tracks, and took the metro back three stations for his slow walk home.

How could the small man at a table across from him have working hands so big and square?  The fingers appeared welded, the thumb a right-angled stump.  What hadn’t those hands held and molded?  Involuntary mental images flashed then of those hands unremittingly holding, or clutching, or even slapping him each time he’d overlook passing the football on charges to the goal.  He looked up from the hands to the man’s not-so-small face.  He didn’t think to avert his eyes when the man looked back.  These eyes were not hot and piercing, or shrouded over, or quizzical; they drooped in exhaustion.  He had to look away.  He had to accept that this man’s face was just another to add to his collection of faces that-go-with-those-hands — and accept that this collection would continue to grow, for it was only the hands of his coach that he was ever able to remember.

The inside of his head was mashing against its outer, an ache of a severity so tortuous that he knew he had to finally hold himself accountable for it.  How had he inflamed it so?  Had it been what he ate?  Drank?—Didn’t?  The environment he put himself in?  Stress?  And what was that crash?  In his head?—or car-on-car?  He lifted his head and forced open his pained eyelids.  A young man was bicycling around a traffic accident, upright, arms folded at the chest, swaying it seemed this way and that.  He even stood up from his table to follow the abandon in the bike rider’s flow through dense traffic, and followed it till the hurt in his eyes began to lose the ache.  The rider hopped onto the sidewalk a little ways down, and then back into the density of traffic with an ease that thrilled him.  He smiled to himself at one point.  He had yet again caught himself distract himself and sidestep accountability.  To keep from having to obsess over what had caused the tortuous headache and have then to change cherished habits, he had abandoned himself to the sway of the rider for those few moments and found the ache somehow relieved.  That joy and surprise, he reminded himself, remained still for him gain worthy of the pain.

He had come upon a lake under the moon and stood a while at its side, long enough to feel afloat in the way of that slim tree branch he was watching drift on down the water.  It stunned him to consider that the lake may instead be a river.  It was flowing unseen; and, in the focus it took to see, that branch began to take on the look of a boy floating, floating from his boyhood bed all the way to the moon in order to take a look back.  He stood at the lake now, decades later, and took again that journey, and turned by habit when he imagined himself at the moon.  A faint weakness swelled so alarmingly in him that he quickly retreated to his car and got on the road.  His look back from the moon had fallen not as always on Earth in its complete wholeness, but on that branch, which, softened now by the water, lay weightless on what looked a lake but ran as a river.

He felt calmer if he repeatedly thought of reality as exhalations of the actual that have taken on their concreteness by being thought and spoken of.

He once hummed an explanation for what go with the flow meant to him.
If you take what you want
if you keep what you need
if you live out your dream
you’d be so busy
you’d just be stuck in the stream.

The recipe asked for a little less of everything he liked; he followed it, but in amounts to his liking.  The immediate aromas surprised him with their fullness and weight, their subtleties already lost.  It was not what he’d intended for her.  That recognition flowed into a pictorial memory of a mountain hamlet that had on a visit given him his first stark sense of the simple taste.  Its handful of people lived in like huts nestled against boulders of similar hue.  They wore wraps that fit in one of four basic ways.  Their faces were as blunt and of a kind as their tables and chairs, and their food — it came to him — as curtly flavorful as what he had just created.  It had been easy to feel at home there, in a foreignness without its subtleties.  But now was different; he’d have to start over and follow the recipe precisely.  He was being visited by one whose subtleties would keep her foreign to him for a long time yet.

He had been told to wait out in the lobby, but he could find only a narrow hallway with two identical chairs placed opposite each other.  He sat in one and studied its twin.  What more could he say than that it was a plain hardwood chair with a cushion nailed to its seat?  The cushion he sat on had no cushion to it and two of the nails holding it in place pinched his thigh, but he understood.  In this poor country, it was the cushions that made this hallway a lobby.

The photograph he was being shown was clearly of him, his full-on face, but he couldn’t recognize himself in that unruffled all-knowing look — with its slight raise of an eyebrow.  It had been snapped at a dinner in a moment of feeling terrorized by the woman whose hair filled the lower foreground of the photograph.  She was going to move to another country, to start a business, meet a man, build both business and relationship for the one child she would have, and would then give back for being given all she had wanted.  Her life’s arc would bend to her will, and she believed it.  In fact, believing it was crucial to making it happen.  He recalled thinking she had powers true for her that in him felt false.  He never could muster the necessary belief.  He considered it a lack in him, and often cowered from the certainty of believers, but he could see that the photograph had caught him expressing an altogether different response — which he now had to catch up to.

He should have turned off towards the camp, but the wild hills he was driving through folded into each other so calmly that he rode on till they flattened out into a valley he couldn’t see the other end of.  The road became an arrow aimed at the horizon.  He took his hands off the wheel, folded them behind his head, stretched an arm out the window and the other over the side seatback, ‘held up’ the roof, sat in positions he wouldn’t otherwise — till he noticed the car had all along been veering imperceptibly to the right.  The tilt might even be in the road.  He straightened the car and again let go of the wheel.  He estimated he had three minutes before the car veered off the road.  He sat with his legs crossed on the seat, or with his knees on the seat and hands drumming the dashboard, or with his head out the window, and so on, changing positions with free abandon, for he could now sense there to be a natural tilt in life, too.

As he contrived a way, he watched his shadow get fractured on the split and crushed boulders that littered the narrow valley floor.  This shadow led him and yet he couldn’t recognize it as his own.  Its length was greatly diminished, its shape heavily bloated.  It had no head nor legs, was but bits and pieces of arms and torso undulating along.  He looked ahead, down the valley floor.  He felt a yearning for the calm of being led by his long, lean, and gliding shadow, but it was rocky surface far into the distance.  He made himself wait.  He leaned against a split boulder an hour before continuing on, his fractured shadow now on the landscape behind him.

Since parking was disallowed in the neighborhoods, he had been circling downtown’s five blocks for a half-hour before a car’s reverse lights flashed on.  He stopped and backed-up, giving over three car-lengths of space for the car to back out into.  But another car crept quickly in from his left to line up ahead of him.  He about hurled open the door in a flash of fury, but took instead a quick grip of himself.  She may have been circling longer than he.  If not, she may then at any moment look behind and realize her mistake.  She did happen to look back, but it was to get him to back up a little.  The car backing out of the parking spot had stopped halfway, fearful of hitting her car from two car-lengths away. He felt a burn to lash out at both — but, in disgust, drove off instead, and down the road felt his fury find its target in him.

As he sat down on bed’s edge, his eye glimpsed a pocket-sized tape recorder on the carpet near to the bedside table.  It wasn’t turned on.  He turned it on, rewound it.  From among overlapping voices, he could make out a man’s laughter, a woman’s jovial corralling, and three other excited voices which were young enough to be those of children.  It soon became clear the five were celebrating the littlest voice’s birthday.  He quickly shut off the recorder.  It must have been left behind by the guest just prior to him.  He ran from the room, down the elevator, and dashed across the lobby to the front desk before he fully realized that the mother or the father on the tape must have checked out hours before — and might even be back in the bosom of the family missed so much up in Room 9-0-6.  He didn’t make it back to that room for a while.  He lingered in the lobby instead and let his mind wander back to when — many years and miles removed — he must have once been that lively and aroused littlest voice.

A man had just stepped up to a framed painting on a lobby wall with an eagerness that caught his eye.  The man peered into the painting, and then stood erect, as though having spotted something.  He fetched a necktie from his back pocket and proceeded to tie it on, and then leaned in closer to check his reflection in the glass as he pulled the tie-knot up to its place between the collar tips.  He fiddled with the knot a bit, as if it mattered, since his untucked shirt looked as tattered as his pants.  Finally satisfied, the man made a hasty retreat across the lobby and stumbled through the front doors just as he was about to be chased out.  His workday too had begun.

He had almost not answered the door…the knock had been too hurried.  He felt himself in a motion too slow to catch up to anything that demanded complete and immediate attention.  He had energy enough for gazing upon a resting dog or cat, or upon people moving about the street below, or even at his coffee mug as the coffee in it got sipped, but he couldn’t ignore that the more insistent knock he had been expecting hadn’t followed.  Only silence had ensued from that initial knock.  He looked out the window, hoping for something to catch his eye and stop him, but it was to the door he went.  He knew that in his mind two or more hurried knocks meant a furor, but one all on its own had to be pain.

As he climbed into a jeep for a ride from one outpost to another, the driver was pointing him to a puff of dust in the distance.  Not friendly, the driver added.  The driver must have already shut off the engine, taken off his shirt, fashioned it into a pillow, and lain across the front seat before dropping into the snores he heard when he turned to point out that the puff was now a cloud.  They’re getting close, he added.  In this vast wilderness, could he be the target, and had the driver just delivered him to them?  To whom?  Who’s coming?, he asked out.  The driver turned away onto his side, but did mutter, Dust storm in desert — we let it pass.  Oh.  His dread of being hunted down didn’t though lessen any.  The cloud of dust had indeed started to swirl into a funnel, and, by moving in that way, was becoming a force of nature capable of burying everything.  He closed his eyes, stopped looking out.  He was in the desert at the witching hour.  It was best to roll up his shirt, lie down, and turn his look inward to a more stable world.

He thought the train was moving too fast to be on a bridge, and yet the woman across the aisle sat casually reading a book.  She seemed to him not quite present.  He tried to imagine what so absorbed her — perhaps a story of a woman warrior working her way through a success-jungle with a code to which she is true, or of a well-settled pleasure-monger, or — but the train was going way too fast to carry on.  He knew he had to fight his way through the traincars to alert the driver.  As he rose to his feet, her book’s title became unexpectedly plain to see: Imagining Toys for Kids.  Would she be so casual were the train indeed traveling dangerously fast?  He found that he then sat back down, even while continuing on in his mind to rush through the traincars to warn not the driver but himself to put on the brakes.

He had been living in a basement apartment with a front door he opened by sliding a lever and pulling heavily on it.  It took both hands.  But, now, he got to keep his satchel and groceries in hand as he inserted a key into a lock and pushed open the door to a newer apartment on the main floor.  The first step in felt instantly different:  instead of a climb into the apartment when he’d pull open the door, pushing in the newer door felt to him a ride on a wave in.  Maybe others might now see progress in his life, he thought.  He made himself believe it, for what if progress was indeed measured by one’s having to push more than one is made to pull?

He had heard the sound of typewriter keys clacking from the lit room down the dark hall. It set off a fear in him that he was approaching not the school clerk but the writer of his fate.  She’d know his entire future, to his death, and all she had to do was type it without even a look at him.  It came to him that the longer he kept her from typing about him, the longer he’d be free of his fate.  Somebody had then stepped into the hall, and then a couple of others, and all soon got back to normal, but he pocketed his guardian’s written excuse for an absence and ran, and recalled – years later – that he had run far, out into the wide open, and had, for a night, made room in it for himself in the hollowed-out belly of a tree, in a place fate would never have thought to put him.

It was odd to see a boy his own age showing off a shoe to tourists disembarking an ocean liner.  And then a tourist suddenly dropped coins into that shoe.  The boy kept his head down, and even lowered it slightly.  Was the boy actually panhandling?  The shoe was held out in both palms, as an offering.  From behind, two security officials called out and approached, but the boy kept his head down.  He wanted the boy to quickly pocket the coins before security got to him, but, just as they did get to him, the boy dashed off with shoe in both hands.  He didn’t go far.  Just farther down the dock, he held up again the shoe in his palms, his head in its perpetual bow.  The same tourists passed him by.  One of them dropped coins into the shoe.  He, watching from a bench at water’s edge, felt sure it was the same tourist.  He got off the bench and followed, as the boy was shooed farther off down the dock — and that same tourist gave a third time.  This time the tourist also patted the boy on the back — as might have a father, he felt, and as the boy may have felt as well, for he had already raised his head up from its bow.

He had been running around breathlessly this way and that when he told himself to slow down to the pace of the ant working her way up the wall beside him.  What he needed was to imagine each thing he did as a climb up a vertical surface.  Even walking would then slow to a languid pace.  He’d enjoy himself more.  He’d do a little and stop, just as the ant was doing, do a little and stop.  He felt the spell of the slowness of the ant’s pace work on him.  He told himself to get his life uncluttered and to start slowing it down in a week’s time. When months later he still hadn’t started slowing down, it at last brought to mind the overlooked moment of when his eye had veered off the ant’s slow-moving body to its legs climbing vigorously under.

He was sitting at a cafe table amid women at other tables, but his eye was on a young man growing increasingly agitated each time he tried to make himself approach the bank next door.  He’d retreat towards the curb, to his car, and then back, halfway to bank’s door. His hands were in front pockets, pushing down, his shoulders slouching in an effort to meet. And then he stopped.  A decision had been reached.  The shoulders slid back, the hands pulled out.  He retreated to the car, opened the door, and just about got in when, suddenly, he threw his arms up into air, as in celebration, and hustled back quickly around the car, to the — young woman just come out the bank and rushing to him.  He watched them drop into each other’s arms, the spasms from it making a kiss difficult to coordinate. The young man wrapped the young woman in his arm and stepped her to his car.  It surprised him to see them this together and intimate.  He had sensed otherwise.  It would have been goodbye had the young man and young woman not made that run to each other.  He watched them get in the car in the way they likely had their first time — he holding open the door, she gazing upon him as he closed it — and thought to think of a relationship as the unavoidable running away from, followed by a running to — which, the deeper the relationship grows, becomes unavoidable, too.

Two elderly men sat side-by-side on separate benches.  He sat across from them just as one man said, The way to look is to take in the wide and then telescope in.  The other said, There are those who keep the wide in their peripheral while they are telescoped in. But, then, said the one, you’re looking at something out of its context.  But what is anything if it is not looked at closely?, said the other.  It is what it needs to be in the time of our experience of it, answered the one testily.  The other almost stood up, but didn’t. How can you know what anything is without knowing what is happening in that moment? The other turned sharply to the one.  It silenced both.  He watched till — while turned away from each other — they both agreed that it was a very important thing to do, to look at things.  They then turned their gaze on him.  Go ahead, said one to the other, telescope in on this specimen of a college student.  The other held up an imaginary magnifying glass.  To play along, he took out a thick notebook and, years later, having thought he had written all that the two seniors had said about him, discovered only a piece of advice given: Don’t tell yourself you have to know something, because that is not possible; tell yourself instead that you have to understand, because that you can do.

When crossing a bridge from old town to new, he was blocked by a flock of birds pecking away across the sidewalk.  Even the birds on the periphery most alert to him returned to plucking morsels.  He thought to cross the street instead, but traffic in both directions sped as though released from the talons of an insane red light.  He’d have to head back and cross at the light at the far end of the bridge.  But what of the woman coming from there?  She’ll just scatter them, he thought.  It felt to him disrespectful.  He walked back toward her, maybe to stop her, and only then noticed that she had been waving him to her.  He slowed as she approached.  She pointed him to get behind and follow her.  He did.  She walked slow and steady, and — instead of taking flight — the birds simply waddled off to the sides, opening them a path.  She stopped at the far end of the flock and pulled him to go on ahead of her.  Shoo, shoo, she said.  He felt himself propelled.  He just about flew to his mother waiting on him at the other light, but stopped to turn back and yell, They didn’t fly away!  His mother grabbed his hand because the light had turned green, and years later, in her notebooks, he read that he had the whole while crossing the street insisted on telling her that just because he had seen birds scatter in the past did not mean it was in the nature of birds to scatter.

The taxi driver seemed to be doing him a favor he hadn’t asked for.  He didn’t need to get to the airport in half the time.  He had already hit his head on the front-seat headrest once and been thrown prone twice.  Street noises stormed in through open windows and the radio was blasting drummy patriotic songs.  He had no way to get heard.  He had one hand on the door handle, the other on the seat, and he knew that removing either in order to grab at the driver would cause him harm.  And so he did what he had heard elders say to do in life. He nestled in the nook between the door and the backseat and rode the ride. It gave him chance to notice how hard that aging man was working at the wheel.  The driver was on seat’s edge, taut and jerky, muttering — it took moments to make out — a devotional prayer between tight flattened lips.  It was clear.  This man waged war on each ride to carve passage through anarchic streets.  Perhaps it was to give his days a reason, perhaps to sacrifice himself at the altar of his family.  Riding that ride, though, had nauseated him, but just his guts — for otherwise he felt a sense of true admiration. At the drop-off, he made sure he stood opposite the driver to hand him double the fare, and later recalled that he may also have bowed ever so slightly to acknowledge the driver’s devotion to the work that he believed himself to be doing.

It was easy to tell that the boy and girl were brother and sister but not why they so clung to the other.  They had been prancing behind their mother, holding hands, when the boy suddenly let fly a superhero doll and ran to retrieve it.  He dragged his sister along.  She resisted, to reposition to the top of her head the little hat that had been thrown askew, but he redoubled the force and pulled her on.  She resisted a second time.  The effort dropped her hat to the ground.  Her brother pulled harder.  She snatched her hand out of his, and would have succeeded had he not in a quick snatch grabbed it back, throwing both off their feet.  They fell; he harder.  The sister had now a chance to free her hand, but instead got immediately to her feet and pulled him to his.  The brother waited as she picked up the hat and one-handedly positioned it atop her head; then together they ran up to fetch the superhero.  Back behind their mother they then got, back to tugging at each other as they pranced, till, suddenly, the girl plucked her hat and hurled it toward her mother.  She pulled her brother to it.  He didn’t resist.  Instead, he let fly his superhero at the hat.  In trying to pick up both at once, they stumbled and fell, she harder.  He got to his feet and pulled her up. By the time the mother turned down another aisle, they were back behind her, pulling each other along, putting to a test the limits of a bond so tight.

A while after his first divorce, he explained: When your shirt gets impossibly snagged on a nail, you stand there to that spot for fear of ripping it, till, at last, just to leave, you remove the shirt and walk away bare.

The small cockroach marched on all legs in a straight line across the vast expanse of an old wood floor, going where?  It halted at spots here or there, but he couldn’t discern its business at those stops because there appeared to be nothing there.  It then turned away from the direction to the wall he thought it was headed and made a couple of more stops before going diagonally in reverse.  A couple of turns with intermittent stops brought it back to its original straight line, which it crossed over.  He watched more turns and then became suddenly aware that he had turned back to his newspaper a while ago and lost track of the cockroach.  He stood immediately and stepped gingerly around the floor.  It had to still be in sight, but even on knees it could not be seen.  He sat back down.  He had been tracking a story in the newspaper for three days now and it too had suddenly disappeared from sight, with nothing left explained.  Was he just not seeing?  Surely, the roach and the story were still there in plain sight, but could it be that focusing on them made them retreat, appear too small to see?  After all, things we haven’t seen yet, or have just seen, do invariably loom large.  Could its reverse also be true?  Could focused seeing lead to blindness?  He dropped the paper and left the room.  He’d return the next day, not focused on anything, able to see afresh, and there they’d be, the roach and the story.

He came to feel that he had learned to be free less by being free than by being bound and having to work himself free.

The cat had been snoozing on the carpet, snoring out human sounds.  She was spread out on her back, open to the sun.  He ran to fetch his camera and yet could not get himself to snap a shot.  He felt as one snooping.  She ever so slightly opened one eye.  Had she caught him?  He felt nabbed.  Her eye didn’t though plop open.  It stayed ajar till slowly it closed.  The snore softened.  He had to put the camera aside.  How else to take in the living face of trust?

He stood at the door while she followed the real estate agent into her childhood home and slowly stepped around in it, intermittently intoning, It’s not how it was, or, It’s been changed, till, distraught, he heard her ask, Are you sure the inside’s the same?  The agent assured her that any changes made were purely cosmetic, that the interior had not been altered since the years she would have been in elementary school.  He heard her deliver the agent a sigh.  He quickly stepped in to ask her how the interior had been.  She couldn’t be specific, but was sure it was not what was.  She was heartbroken to feel she could not make herself buy the house.  I wanted to preserve what was, she said.  It is what it was, the agent reassured her, but, he could see her mind was made.  The house that she had lived in no longer had relevance to the house that lived in her now.  Her childhood home was, in the moment, becoming history to her, becoming another standalone fact of the kind one collects, the way all history is collected.  She was getting older.

By the time he felt the pain in his back, it was distant from its source.  He understood that only in retrospect.  At the time, he had leaned down to touch the floor, hung heavy from a branch, twisted his torso this way and that, to stretch his back, to subdue the pain, and had managed in this way to aggravate it further.  When he next noticed the sun streaming in through a bedroom window, five days had passed.  His head felt clear.  He wanted to step out, take a walk, climb a hill.  His mind, he decided, had been so cluttered with thoughts and obsessions as to have become unmindful of him — and of the body that held him up and cradled that mind.  When next he’d feel pain in his body, he’d make sure to first check on how his mind may have in some way been its source.

Half the railway station platform housed refugees from many elsewheres, who, along with the local homeless, happened to be blocking four of the five doorways leading onto the platform.  He should have stayed in the flow to the open doorway, but veered off and walked to the very last door against which a mass of humanity was pushing.  It was an instinctive turn that surprised even him, so he assumed in himself a desire to take a closer look at the people.  Quickly enough, authoritative voices began to redirect him, and he managed only a split-second glimpse through the pane glass of the last door.  He was stunned by what he was able to see in that fraction of a glimpse.  He didn’t see the seeming docility of the people; he saw two sides on the verge of assaulting each other across an imaginary line.  It was in their postures.  They were a bedraggled and exhausted people on too acute an alert.  All the same, as a ticket holder, there was also the urgency to walk through the open doorway to catch a train.  The moments till he settled into a seat eluded him later, but what didn’t was the promise he then made, upon looking out the window and seeing his view blocked by trains, to never shy away from a look, however quick or slight it be, to stay always aware, even when achingly impotent.

He was debating in his mind whether the boy he had been watching lean stylishly against a lamppost was tough-looking or actually-tough when all at once that boy broke into a charge towards him — or so it seemed — because the boy then stopped an arm’s length from another boy who stood frozen in fright to his spot.  The frightened boy whirled abruptly to him at the cafe table — or so it seemed — for he then heard a voice from a table behind him call out a name.  He made to look behind when he caught the dread on the boy’s face melt off.  It was as if the boy had suddenly lengthened his posture and casually put a hand in his shorts pocket.  That boy who had been scared now turned back to the tough boy, who, in a retreat all the way back to the lamppost, kept pointing a threatening finger.  He took a sip of his coffee and did then turn to look behind. A newspaper hid what must be the father — but, when he turned back to the boys, he couldn’t tell of which.  The tough-looking boy was back in his pose against the lamppost, and the casual-looking boy had now in fact a hand in his shorts pocket.  Each had simply been playing out the behavior of the pose taken.

He was crawling in the dark, up narrow crumbling steps, his butt up high, legs cramping, back tightening, round and round, so as to sneak in a view from the top of a rarely-visited six hundred-year-old tower.  He was also holding back an attack of claustrophobic dread with a strength of mind he didn’t think he possessed.  His chest had tightened, but he was not letting it — or his thoughts — constrict.  He kept himself focused on feeling for the next step and placing his foot right atop that hand before moving it to the next step.  He did this till his hand hit a clearly rusted-through upright metal bar.  It turned out to be one of ten barring access to the top.  His self-possession dissolved the instant he realized he had to get himself back down.  Minutes later, under a tree, tending to wounds from stumbling and falling much of the way, he thought that it was more difficult to locate one’s steps going down than when on the way up because going down turns a little too often into a quick and precipitous fall.

He stepped to a seventy-first floor balcony’s edge to take a cautious look at the street directly below.  He became so disoriented that he had to grab onto the railing. He couldn’t place in his mind those miniature moving parts down below, or the fact that many of them were people — and that he had been just that tiny only moments before.  He could feel no relation to what he saw — its scale had been reduced too much.  What would it matter to him up here if a flood wiped out everything on the street down there?  Those moving parts would soon be replaced.  Up high, he’d have the privilege to hold out till the cataclysm cleared up.  He stepped back from the railing and heard her say, It takes a little getting used to.  She appeared so used to the canyon view that she was able to lean against the railing with glasses of wine in her hand.  She offered him one.  He demurred and apologized for feeling wobbly already.  From a dread of city heights?  He expected to hear himself say a yes and leave it at that, but heard instead, I blame the elevator for bringing me up so high so fast.

Between the pages of a library book on trekking in the far distances, he came upon a passport-sized photograph of a woman he had long yearned for.  He had succeeded in keeping out of her way, but kept bumping into her in these other ways.  The picture must have been left there by a present-day suitor — and wasn’t it interesting that, for a woman who sought a home-centered life with all its sacred practices, she took to men who roamed?  He would have given it more thought had it not then become obvious to him that two men who roamed the far distances had both sought a home — and it was she.  But this too slipped his mind when he saw how he had just then insinuated a present-day suitor into the story to play yet another obstacle in his path back to her.  He realized this tendency in him would not stop.  He needed the hands of fate to wiggle their fingers.  He rummaged in his office for a passport-sized picture of himself.  He inserted it with hers in the book and returned the book to the library.  If ever she came across them, he reasoned, fate’s fingers would then be wiggling, and he’d have his consent to act.

Once he realized the voices weren’t coming through the vent but from under the door, what he heard changed: the two voices weren’t conspiring, they were being intimate.  He had already imagined the woman sitting at her desk, the man on it, but now their hands were about to touch, to result in sudden silence — when, all at once, a drill bored into his diseased molar.  He felt himself tense up into a body fist.  Why had the sound of a metal drill on enamel not yet been banned! — and he felt his mind turn back to imagining that the hands had somehow touched by now and maybe the desk had become for the man and woman their forest floor.  Their bodies were so deeply entwined into an almost ball that he could not tell whose feet were whose.  If asked, he couldn’t have identified the man separate from the woman.  They had merged and seemed unable to separate.  He had to do something.  How could they continue to love each other if the other was not separate? He had to warn them, and then all went blank…till he came to, with the dental assistant — the very woman he had imagined at the desk — wiping around his mouth and letting go his hand.  Years later, she reminded him that the first thing he did when the anesthesia wore off was ask her, How’d you do it?  He had no recall of that moment, but, upon hearing those words from her, the story just told leading up to those words came to him as if it might have been his own.

Peddling on a bicycle in a sea of men on bicycles, off to seek work in the city, was the safest he thought he had ever felt doing anything in crowds.  They were at a slow pace.  The distances were long, the heat could be merciless, the air airborne sand.  The men bore it together in words shared or shouted — so that it alarmed him when their voices got suddenly engulfed by a cacophony of bicycle bells ringing and getting louder.  Pretty quickly, he too was ringing for it was all he could hear.  The men bunched up so that the sea turned into a river and took an almost immediate turn to the left.  The ringing grew deafening and propelled the river into yet another turn, and then another.  When the bicycle bells then ceased and the chatting and shouting returned, he learned that they had simply managed to avert an “accident” of two trucks “bumping” (certain violence) and were now safe, back on the main road.  He never forgot how he had almost thrown his arms up in a Yay! but had instead melded back into the sea of men, into the mindset of his fellow riders, to accept that what to him felt memorable was but an incidental part of a workday ritual for them, to be repeated at workday’s end.

He got to his feet after petting a dog on a leash and caught sight of a store window across the street displaying a befogged Amazonian jungle – it seemed – and life in it.  What specialty could they be selling?  He crossed over, imagining it to be outdoor wear, and it was, but outdoor wear for apocalyptic times.  What he’d imagined a jungle was actually various erect objects shrouded in “smog” and interspersed among mannequins costumed in brightly stylish pollution masks and form-fitting body suits, right under a ticker display scrolling the composition of pollutants in air and water and damage from the sun.  He felt frightened by its optimism:  it showed color in the grayness.  The mannequins were shown to be doing what people like — shopping, eating, sporting, coupling, to make obvious to any doubter that life will regardless continue to go on.

The tall and muscular columns the old villager shuffled under had survived from ancient times and yet not once did the old man take a look up.  Instead, he watched the man look out for – and work – his each step.  He watched till in the distance the hunched figure shuffled out from under columns into blinding sunlight.  He kept watching through watery eyes — as if more might happen — till he made sure he heard himself say, It is a privilege to be able to look up.

He had been strolling the early morning streets of an old city in which the old had been absorbed into the newer and the newer often into the newest.  Most of its buildings had been recycled generation to generation for centuries and centuries, and the sun was about to light their tops for about the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousandth time. That thought was why he stopped to watch: he might unwittingly be celebrating an anniversary.  He luxuriated in the breathtaking beauty of new sun on old walls, but hadn’t anticipated the reverence that suddenly gripped him — reverence of the kind he’d feel when, in the open, the sun first embraces a tree or a meadow or a mountain peak for the one-billionth time.  Hadn’t walls given shape to his life and mind?  Hadn’t they marked the boundaries, sheltered and protected him, provided him with solitude, and been on what he hung the best mirrors?  Why then his constant urge to break them down?  Yet he gave it no further thought, for, standing amid walls, he had to revere the old ones for the very fact that they still were still standing.

He suddenly heard — and later said even felt — the knock on his driver’s-side window. And how brave it must have been for the young girl he saw out the window to have dared it.  She very calmly said that she had lost her mother.  He drove her around the vast parking lot, and then together they decided to retrace her mother’s steps through the galleria.  Along the way, candy on a string was the first thing the girl wanted, then icecream on a stick, and after he bought her a tall tube of purple sugar water he learned, with a suddenness, that she had to go.  It was her mother’s night out and her hair was likely done by now.  She gave him a quick and incomplete curtsy, turned, and ran off down the shiny galleria floor with an abandon so nerve-wracking as to suggest a fleeing.  From him?  Though he saw her start to jump and flail her arms and legs, the sting that she might have even for a moment feared him didn’t stop smarting till he saw the tall drink still in her hand.  He heard himself use Oh My! as a sigh.  He felt he understood.  He had followed her lead all along, and she was now running back to her mother after having orchestrated for herself — at least this once — her own little night out.

A bulbous shape was clinging to a doorway in the hazy distance.  From here to there was half a street block, but the wind had suddenly picked up and was carrying things.  A tricycle slammed the wall behind which he stood.  It struck him: could the bulbous shape be a child?  It wasn’t likely; the streets were barren.  But the idea had bit into his mind, and, worse, released in him a remembrance of his cat floating away in the flood.  He had to chase down the child.  The wind he’d step into would force him to a standstill and make of him a target, so he got flat on his stomach and crawled, across the sidewalk and into the street, getting hit once by a plant and then by soda cans before the wind calmed down and he could see that the bulbous shape had never really been a child in his mind but rather the cat he still had need to somehow rescue.

He felt uncertain about a meeting he was hurrying to when he sensed that a man crossing the boulevard was aiming to do him harm.  The hands were fists in each front pocket, the eyes surely taking the measure of him from under the brim of the cap, and the mouth was sucking in air as when one readies to jump.  In reaction, he stared straight at the brim of the hat and said a “Hello” when still ten feet away.  That mouth seemed to gasp in air now, and that’s when he saw the feet bleeding through torn shoes.  One foot was missing a big toe.  The man made a sound, maybe said something.  He looked up just as they were to pass each other: the man’s near eye appeared dead to him while the other eye veered off its own way.  He passed by and didn’t turn to look till he made it to the other side.  The man was stopped in the crosswalk.  Cars were sneaking in right turns in front of him.  How was that man managing, just standing there?  He yelled to the man to Go! the very moment the last car passed.  The man did cross the last lane, but as if it were his intention.  His last step off the street was a hop onto the curb, a hop so unexpected that he suspected it might have been for him.  It had to have been, because, when rushing on to his meeting, there it was in his own gait as well.

(Your place or mine?)

He was once booed away from the podium for suggesting to parents that it was no good raising third-rate successbots in threatening times when first-rate dillydalliers would do better.  A guard thought it his duty to escort him out the hall.  He felt too baffled to resist, and didn’t understand till the guard, in letting him out the door, told him, Why you express your private opinion when your public opinion is what they want to hear?  He could feel in his bones even years later how he had then stood outside in the cold to imprint this incident as a remembrance — to help him guard against dropping his face in public and discovering he had become overly transparent.

From under the overhang of a thatched roof, he watched an old man on a small stool sit to one side of the dead-end junction of two dirt roads.  The old man had not shifted on the stool or readjusted himself; he hadn’t moved.  Yet, suddenly, he did turn and look right at him.  It seemed clear the old man hadn’t the eyesight to see him from that distance or the ear to hear him walk up to the hut and yet his presence had been sensed.  He felt as if invited.  He walked down the one dirt road to where it met the other.  The old man’s gaze didn’t follow him.  He felt shy, beckoned and then ignored.  He called out to the old man, a greeting.  The old man’s ear didn’t turn to him.  He thought to step up to the old man, but hesitated at the thought of village eyes on him.  The eyes would be expecting him to continue on down the other dirt road, to not poke around.  He replayed in his mind for days thereafter that he had at one point looked back and been surprised to see the old man still in the position he had turned to.  Had the old man simply shifted himself on the stool?  Had he made of the old man a story — of an invitation — which essentially got him thrown right out of town?  Was he developing a habit of voicing answers as questions?

He first thought of memory as that which was written on the blackboard of his mind.  He tried hard once to erase a girl.  He kept imagining a blank in one column on the board, but her face kept popping up in that slot.  He put hair on that face so that she looked a tyrant, but her voice kept leaving a hint of something said.  He took the ears off that image of hers, and now she looked less like herself than like him.  She lived in his mind a long while for he felt a little fear he’d mistakenly erase himself.

He found nothing more self-absorbing on certain days than standing at an open window. Looking out felt like looking in.  Bathed in gray or shine, his thoughts felt potent.  On this one spring morning, he felt it as a certainty that he’d put the pieces of his life back together — not by fixing anything that had gone wrong as by giving root to newness.  He didn’t know what quite he meant, but he knew he was right.  He moved countries and put himself in a gentrifying neighborhood of an old foreign town.  He felt immediately the newness of doing the same old things, and especially of walking streets, of imagining where he’d settle, where he’d work, what he’d buy, whom he’d meet. He became alert to how alive and renewed he then felt — and never forgot that he had been standing at the open window all along.

He opened the door to the restaurant and people were coming up steps that led down.  He stepped aside, and held open the door.  It seemed to him a family that passed by, a number of people, and following them combinations with only here or there a family, even the kitchen staff it seemed, till, up the rear, came a fireman — who took the door from him and told him to, Get going.  He fell in line behind the others and crossed the street.  As he looked on the sidewalk for the one he was to meet, voices shouted back demanding answers to, Why were we evacuated!  I’m not the manager, nor the owner, he told them. Then stop acting like one, someone shot back.  I was just holding open the door, he protested.  Still, a couple kept badgering him to undeniably deny any culpability in any part of what was happening.  “Is it a bomb?” a frustrated woman finally screamed at him. It was a mini-explosion in a tense moment that then quickly abated, but the question lived in him for weeks.  He’d wake up, take a step, sit or rise with “Is it a bomb?” demanding an answer. Unlike the moment the woman had screamed it at him, he’d have an answer, but the question never felt itself answered.  It clung to him.  He grew to feel it to have meaning he couldn’t get at.  Then, in the shower one morning, he blurted out, “Ask the fireman,” and — just like that — the question disappeared.  He felt “Is it a bomb?” get itself wholly answered.  The answer was perfect: it fit the question so well that the question disappeared.  This didn’t happen to him often.  It was an ecstasy, ever so lightly felt.  He felt as if his mind had released him to feel free of it, for but an instant, but an instant that felt to him to answer why people never give up on the search for the perfect one.

He had put on overalls for the very first time.  They were baggy all over; he was surprised how free his body stood in them.  He felt he weighed less in them.  It was the tightness of clothes that made fixed postures necessary, he said to himself, and its the postures that carry the weight.

There was a flat-topped boulder in the center of the stream, but to lie on it he’d first have to get wet.  He’d have to leave his shoes and clothes and book on the shore unattended, brave the hurtling waters and scale the boulder some fifteen feet to get onto the desired plateau — which was surely too hot from the sun to put skin to.  And yet it was clearly a landmark, and it beckoned.  He made it to its wall, but furious attempts couldn’t locate fingergrips to scale it.  He didn’t feel the pain of it till he made it back to shore — a gash in his toe, another in one calf, and the broken fingernail on his left hand.  With no forethought, he hurled himself back waist deep into the stream, and it was only another step before he was chest deep, a step more to get to neck deep — momentarily, even submerged under turbulent waters, and like that he stayed.  It felt to him he needed a good cleansing, that desires and appetites were weighing him down, were turning on him, beginning to injure and harm him, and that he wanted to step back on shore a refreshened boy.

He chose a park bench because on it sat a man who was intermittently being animated, in need of an audience.  He sat on the left-most corner of the bench to keep from crowding the man.  Still, the man threw him a quick glance and delivered a disapproving grunt.  He did think to leave the man alone, and later told himself that he would have had he not again heard that grunt, only deeper and graver.  It was thrust at a professional woman high-heeling by.  And there it was again at two suited men speeding on wheeled boards. At a couple being walked by three dogs.  At girlfriends handling boutique-size shopping bags.  The most disapproving grunt was delivered to a man who had his belly somehow fitted into young jeans and t-shirt.  Bah!, he blurted finally, waving off the parade passing by with, “Too successful at being successful.  Not impressed!”  The man stood, stepped behind the bench, turned to him and muttered “I’m sorry” before tramping off toward a stand of trees.  It took him months to decide what the man had been sorry for.  He made the decision only because he had been unable to imagine what else the apology could have been for if not for issuing a verdict that the man felt he would not have issued had not a young man sat on his bench and given him an audience — and, most importantly, listened.

He watched as she focused on her reflection in the gold-plated coffee urn, shifting her jacket, her shoulders, her purse, her hands, even her body, he noticed, to settle into a pose and reflect on it.  He watched her watch herself.  She was being self-critical, but only in order to perfect the smallest details, not ever to be shy in any way.

Masked men, dressed as extravagant women, and women as herculean men, were loitering, awaiting the start of the carnival parade.  He noticed then a tall and broad figure in dress, heels, and floppy hat round a corner in the wide and sturdy gait of a giant of a man capable of a debutante’s grace.  That’s when the parade began.  The “women” and “men” started to fawn over and “compete” for this masked figure, but his own joy lay more in watching that leading figure stay upright in high heels that were here or there getting snagged in cracks in the concrete.  Each foot trembled at each footfall, but nothing in the body betrayed that strain.  Perhaps the face did, he thought, but it was behind a mask, and perhaps the body would too were it not an athlete’s.  He heard this thought in his own voice before it then mingled in his mind with the fatigued voice of his long dead grandfather saying, as he often would, All you need to get a lead in the carnival of life is an athlete’s stamina and a good mask to hide behind.  This time, he took it to mean, “Don’t show the pain.”  There wasn’t a flicker of it to be seen on the figure leading the parade down the boulevard, while the hovering “men” and “women” still fawned and the parade onlookers applauded.

It was a long pool reflecting back the government buildings encircling it, and he sat on its perch at its one end.  Thousands and thousands in coins of all kinds covered the pool floor.  It had to be traditional for those summoned to the government to use the pool as a wishing well, so that he understood when he then saw a woman kiss a bracelet and drop it in the water.  He too had come to this government office, but — before crossing the street to climb the steps — had first wanted to spend time gathering himself by the pool.  But that is not what the woman had done.  She too had stopped poolside before the climb, and yet made no fuss of it — she had simply sacrificed something of value and moved on.  In his memory, he then aimed for the steps and ran them two at a time, stunned by how little he suddenly cared whether he got pardoned or fined, or for the watch he just left behind.

He had the whiff of a sense of being watched through a store window behind him.  He whipped around and saw himself reflected in the glass — right beside a generic female mannequin on display, her arms akimbo, delighted to be dressed for the ball.  He didn’t look a fit next to her.  That was the sum-and-total of this heartbeat of an experience, and yet, years later, he thought it the moment when he had gotten off the direct path and meandered his way to a career instead.

A novel was open in his lap, but he had for a while been distracted by planes taking off and landing, by passengers walking tarmac to or from parked planes, and by hand-pushed or motor-driven vehicles taking gasoline or air or food or luggage to or from these planes. He had been watching all this without noticing the people.  He had somehow gotten focused on the straight or bent or serpentine patterns it was taking for all these movements to flow without people or things colliding. He felt he was seeing how different life was from art.  In art, all movements flow toward a collision.  The thought tired him.  It was quite involuntary, he later recalled, when he then closed the novel in his lap, slid down in his seat, and let himself feel how truly tired he actually was.

It wasn’t far for him and her to get to Lover’s Lane, but they heard it was up a hill.  On the bus there, they imagined a long trail weaving through quaint trees and over streams, with he seeing benches here and there “for romance to be played” and she sensing canopies of overhanging flora oozing scents and fragrances and aromas.  They debated the differences in their visions for only a couple of blocks from where the bus dropped them off before they all of a sudden realized that the line of cars parked right up to the edge of the cliff was it.  Lover’s Lane was a parking lot?  And people stayed in their cars?  She urged him to ask around for the lane for lovers without cars.  He walked the front of the first few cars, looking in, working up the nerve to ask, but boys and girls in them were so busy showing each other they were lovers that they paid him no mind — till a boy in a small topless car did.  And then it was as if all boys had.  He froze, exposed.  His reflex was to rush back to her.  They can tell we’re not lovers, he reported.  They debated their differences a bit more, and then she said, Let’s take the bus back, and he said, We’ll sit in the back, and she said, Near the window, and he said, Just like lovers.  They said nothing more because for the first time they were then walking hand-in-hand, on their way to catch a bus.

He sat on the chair under the gargantuan oak because it was there.  He knew the moment his body settled on it that this chair under this tree had a history.  The chair felt stable and sturdy.  It was solidly embedded in ground.  From it rays of sun and shadow fanned out on the ground in all directions, shimmering in a breeze, so soft on the eyes it made his head spin.  He let it, let himself go, let sprinkles of light and dark spin him out of his worries, his mind, into a feeling — not the idea of it, but an actual feeling of — being grounded, and he was feeling it right through the seat of his pants.

How had it gotten so filthy outside his window?  He thought this, till he wondered if the filth were not the Y-shaped netting a spider lays out on which to suspend its web.  He had stepped into a work-in-progress.  He didn’t open the window.  Damn the heat.  He’d photograph the craft of web-making instead.  He felt it his duty to then watch over the netting on which the webbing would hang.  He ate and worked by the window.  He woke up at intervals to sit in vigil.  No spider showed.  A couple of flies escaped a web not yet formed.  He waited for the artist a long time, till he simply knew that he had been summarily dismissed.  The spider had abandoned the site outside his window.  It truly was filth clinging to it.  And he was oh-so tired and bored that it had taken all this behavior for him to finally open the window.

He came upon steps somebody had carved into the rock down the steep side of a young and unstable mountain.  He took the first step and immediately braced himself.  He felt himself standing on world’s edge, about to plunge into an abyss.  It was clear to him that the sensation on the second step down would be still more intense, and that by the fourth he’d feel himself no longer tethered to reality.  It was not his day, he told himself, not the day to step over a line from which he may not be able to return.  Still, regardless, a person had carved these steps down this steepness.  From their timeworn condition, perhaps even a thousand years ago.  How had the carver managed the carving?  He thought to take the second step down, in the carver’s honor, but had later to remind himself that, with the keen focus it then took to climb back up the step he had come down, he had appreciated the work of a god/dess among people from a respectful distance instead.

He had been leaning against the open front door to his house puzzling over whether to join his friend on a quick run to the bookstore.  What else could have been happening? For, suddenly, he and his friend heard him say, Reality is vapor which radiates from the actual — thin and ephemeral — and is the closest we can get to the actual — a divide impossible to fathom.  Yeah, his friend had then said.  Years later, when he again met up with his friend, they were able to recite it verbatim from among the many youthful outcries they had shared.  They departed shortly after debating why this particular outburst had survived intact.  It had been a really impulsive insight, they decided, which endured because it suited well their actually wandering minds.

He heard a knock and snapped up off the couch.  No sound followed.  He stood hyped to pitch alert with no way to make use of it.  What if he called her?  This alert, he’d stand his ground better.  He made the call, and got put on hold by her sister — but quickly hung up when he heard yet another knock.  This knock was on a second door.  Because the first had felt ominous, this one frightened him.  Yet no other sound followed.  The windows were shuttered.  He felt himself entombed, capable of no voluntary action.  He dropped in a lifeless sprawl into a corner of the couch, and soon, when dozing, even experienced a breathless moment of passing into his death.  So that when the phone rang, coming-to stupefied him.  It was her, temporarily tabling her decision to break up.  He gave no thought to the sturdy knock he then heard, knowing now that it had all along been a tree branch thrashing about in the wind.

He came upon a chair in the many-leveled department store and sat on it.  Women’s lingerie went off in all directions.  He felt too tired to chance his luck at finding another unoccupied seat, so, instead, he leaned forward, lowered his head, and sat as though absorbed in himself.  It is why he didn’t hear her call until her shoes appeared under his gaze.  He looked up.  It was another woman in his wife’s shoes.  I’m sorry, she said, turning and retreating.  They had mistaken the other for each’s own partner.  A little too flimsy, he called out after the woman.  She turned to him, holding out a thin-lace babydoll in her hand.  It was for only an instant that they caught the other’s eye before she hung up the lingerie on the rack closest to her and walked off.  He never forgot feeling then that by marrying his wife he had also become relevant to all the different versions of her spread around the world.

To cite an example of the range in human adaptability he had been witness to, he’d sometimes tell of discovering that people who live as though there is a continual eye upon them are able to act so precisely as to hide from sight and sense anything that would reveal even a flicker of themselves.

At a street corner, he held a man who kept struggling to hang on to life after being hit by a bus, and yet, when the sense must have come to surrender to the inevitable, the man wasted no time in letting go.  It was as though his embattled self was making a hasty retreat, out of the way of the body shutting down.  Yet, right before that self vanished, the man closed his eyes as if closing a door behind him.  Thank you, thank you, a woman’s voice said from above him.  As he turned to her, she pirouetted to address abusive remarks hurled from some behind her.  He, though, understood; her words could have been his very own.  He too was deeply moved by the kindness and generosity of the dying man.  In his hasty retreat, the man had taken a moment to close his eyes and release all who felt helpless to prevent his death from feeling obligated to him any longer.

While chasing after his hat, being blown down the platform by gusts of wind off two trains speeding by, he began admiring how it was staying airborne, hitting nothing, floating even, waiting out the trains and then landing, descending almost, smack in the train tracks, ready to be slaughtered by the next train.  He had lost a few hats in this way, but none before had taken as majestic a flight to its own annihilation.  Nor had any before made him feel that it should be rescued.  The hat continued to look as good between the rails as it had when on him.  Had it been cut up or in the least marred, he would have let it meet its fate, but it had survived intact where other hats hadn’t.  It pulled him to it.  He’d have to drop onto the train track, cross two sets of rails there and back, and scale the wall back up to the platform — with his hat on.  He checked the times of incoming trains.  He stepped to platform’s edge, looked up and down the rail tracks.  He knew then that the next step forward would be as if a director had called out, Action!  The movie would start, and his fate would be surrendered to the needs of the story.  He had to repeatedly remind himself — moments later on the train home — that the story would have needed him to rescue his hat for its own dramatic purposes, with not a care for him, and so it had been best for him to have thought it through beyond that.

In a piece of reportage that he on a whim had sent around to colleagues, he claimed that at an international conference of species, with all the world’s species and he attending, the human being was declared the only species which, if two other species were seen crossing a path, would aim some vehicle of its invention to kill both at one go — just for the challenge in the sport of it.

He pulled up alongside the road and kept the engine running till he could get the driver’s door opened.  He waited for that moment, but traffic kept hurtling by at speeds to blow the door in on him were he to push it out.  A sudden impulse to pull off the road to skip down the slope and relieve himself in the bushes had now left him marooned.  He had no choice: he’d have to climb over her and out the passenger door.  He shut off the engine.  He whispered her name, then again a tad louder — yet not loud enough to be heard over the traffic.  The soundness of sleep had thrown a calm over her face that he didn’t think he could disturb.  He had taken her on a long wet trek to a spot behind a waterfall, and now even the skin of her face looked settled in for a rest.  In the story he came to tell his wife years later, he had then continued to remain so completely absorbed in her face that he had forgotten the dire need of his body, forgotten that he was marooned, forgotten that he had only moments before been an unattached man.

We’d love you here to feed and care to hold you one more time
to have you look at us and paw and fuss and want from us our time.

We do feel the scare of our little dare to cling so tight to time
even tho’ we’ve talked it through and faced what’s true for who can hold back time?

Still, be sure to hear we’d love you here
us three a pair
together now and in a forever time.

She lived in the alley for as long as it took to be taken in by them.  Once in, she lived with them as their child, full of her own freedoms.  She played them out for him and her to see, and be of.  And when she returned to the alley, she left through the door in the deepest part of their home.

Tire tracks had suddenly veered off-trail.  He followed them, hoping to come unexpectedly upon some breathtaking vista it would take half a day to take in.  He didn’t stop for the open meadow to the right or the precipice overlooking the canyon to the left, or later for the water gushing down flat rock or for the pool it had formed.  These vistas had somehow become familiar to him from other like places or pictures.  He didn’t stop till the tire tracks ended and, a little farther on, the trail behind him was no longer visible — for he then sensed a ravaging presence lurking in the open wilderness before him, in which he had not even a name.  Anything could happen out there, and nothing in that wild would ever seek to identify him.  He’d be his most anonymous, to himself as well, the deeper in he went.  He was as if standing on a border between himself and his irrelevance.  And was that his mother calling out to him?  If she had been other than a voice in his head, he would have told her that he was stepping outdoors to catch the light of a setting sun on the magnificent side of a mountain… and, conjuring that was what he later said had allowed him to cross the border and hike deeper in.

Very few will think, make decisions, or act based on what they themselves think — most do so based on what they think the others think.  In this way, he felt, we stay linked to each other, even when the door is closed.

He could always recall the day he once again picked up a cup by its handle.  For a time, he had forsaken handles of all sorts in a desire to feel whatever he touched more personally, but after scalding himself a time too often, or cutting himself, or spiking, or discoloring himself, or inadvertently breaking off a piece, he, this day, standing at a cafe’s counter for a quick cup of coffee, put his forefinger through its handle to lift it to his mouth.  The first thing he felt revealed to him was that he could be sitting in any position, facing any direction, and, by its handle, still be able to bring the cup to his lips.  Till then it had been a drill to face the cup, to cup the cup in both hands and just about hunch over it for a sip, yet now he noticed his free hand reach out to casually rest on his hip and give his body a posture. He continued to bring the cup to his lips, shifting postures, as he watched a man escort his wife out of the cafe (first by taking her left hand, then her right elbow as he swung open the door, her waist to shepherd her out the doors, and her shoulders to drape an arm around) and reminded himself that handles make things easy to hold onto — not so much for the actual holding as for the using of them to more easily maneuver through one’s day.

He had been under the bed when his aunt walked in with a man.  He knew to be quiet when her feet and his shoes turned to each other.  He looked away and found his cat also watching from under the chair.  The feet and the shoes stepped closer, then stopped. The feet turned around.  Was his aunt feeling okay?  His cat had no interest in her.  He was in a crouch, his eyes on him.  Playing hide and seek.  Expecting him to make his next move. Which was why he reached out from under the bed and tickled his aunt’s feet.  Just as his cat turned to watch the feet and the shoes scurry out of the room, he made a run for it, to the next hiding place from which not a thing could be kept hidden from him or his cat.

It is very easy to dislike anyone.  Just come up with an expectation the other doesn’t measure up to.  This works beautifully because it matters little if you measure up yourself. He had come to regard this truism as one of those things about the species that, while widely known of, lives among people as a secret of the sacred kind.

A car door with its window all wet from the inside suddenly flung open. Inside, a boy and a girl from school — who he knew did not like each other — were doing it.  He felt sure that that was what it was when one was atop another in such close quarters.  And just like that, the door slammed shut.  What a stroke of luck he just had to have such scandalous news drop in his lap!  It’d be the first time he’d have the most mouth-gaping news to tell on the playing field.  But what had he seen?  Would the boys believe that the little flash he saw was them doing it? He could be adult-like and explain it as, They’ve been putting on a show of not liking each other so that no one would suspect them of doing it.  Or, They are doing it to figure out if they can like each other.  He could give the news even greater significance by attaching it to the question, Is sex the first step to love, or is love the first step to sex?  He kept at it, thinking of ways to make himself more believable, more grown-up-like, till, in due time, he came to see that his fixation with how to say it had crowded out from his mind what he had actually seen.

He stepped on a cockroach unawares and crunched it flat.  He kept on walking, but did suddenly turn to check if its brutal end had by chance been witnessed by other cockroaches.  He saw himself lain out at a cockroach tribunal, but quickly shut out the image in his mind in order to make it to school on time.  It revisited him half an hour into his night’s sleep.  Roaches had piled one upon the other to address him.  They told him they wanted to punish him for the killing, but, other than multiplying their own numbers, could come to no consensus on how to go about it.  Had he any ideas?  He offered at once to leave them extra garbage by the back door every day.  The thought, though, that he ought first to check in with his mother, did then, almost as reflex, wake him from his dream.  She was already there in bed by him, wiping his forehead, smoothing out his hair, with a look so open that he closed his eyes again and tried to re-enter the dream — to go ahead and face his punishment.  He tried and tried, but could find no way back to the tribunal.  It had disappeared so mysteriously that, years later, in a corner of his mind, he still thought of it as unfinished business.

He understood the valuation rendered an artist who surrenders himself to his art, but himself gave greater value to the person who surrenders himself to others, animal or human — or even to nature itself.

On a hot afternoon, he had ordered soup.  He sensed it had to do with the heft and roundness and, especially, the deep cavity of the soup spoon lain in front of him.  He could well imagine the spoon emptying not just sips of brothy vegetables, but mouthfuls of them, filling his mouth with a completeness of salty taste.  But, the very first spoonful revealed his miscalculation.  He couldn’t open his mouth wide enough to take in the deep cavity of the spoon; half the soup in it dribbled down his chin.  He tried coming at the spoon from above, the front, and even had the spoon drop soup into his mouth from on high, but it wasn’t till he stopped filling the spoon to its brim that the dribbling dwindled. Half a spoonful of soup proved to completely stop the spills.  In this way, he tasted and savored every drop, and thought it a spontaneous demonstration of “less is more” when it had the actual meaning of less giving you more.

He listened to a talk he had written be translated back to him in a language once spoken within a periphery of a continent.  The translator seemed to be stringing words into ever longer ones, stringing them so tight as to, in effect, deliver a long wail that took no breath.  He was even then aware of being sometimes guilty of turning his talks into pleas, but that he may have moved on way beyond that alarmed him.  He braced himself for how the very end of his talk would sound.  He anticipated a breathless collapse in the way the translator was reading, but got, instead, the last few sentences of his talk read in a whisper, as if the translator had by then taken to muttering to herself.  In fact, he missed the end when it did all of a sudden come.  He hadn’t anticipated it; he only suddenly realized it.  This was the first time in his talks when, after rendering the story of a problem in all its factors, he had proposed no solutions, resolutions, nor options.  He had just ended it.  The translator was clearer about it:  The period punctuates too suddenly, she had said, as if The End is in a hurry.

He saw an assertive and altogether regal colleague take his shoes off before stepping into a temple, and then watched everything else that flowed from it transform him into a humble subservient devotee.  Even his body seemed to him to shrink to half its size as it bent and bowed and lay forehead down.  What stunned him, though, was the ease with which that body then reverted back to its princely-ness the moment they hit the street, as if his colleague had just risen from the dead.  Once a week, he explained, I get in the temple, get rid of the crap, and come out reborn — as quickly as possible:  I am a practical man.  In later years, it was this moment with his colleague that he pinpointed as when a wariness had first settled in him, that it took years more to recognize was of practical men.

He sat slumped at a cafe table making himself revisit a high school scene he had vaguely recalled only a week before.  All he could sense about it was a circle, but was it the wheel to a bicycle, the waterwheel to a windmill — or even the moon itself?  It quite suddenly felt to him to have been the knob to a console radio. And, that’s right, it was being turned — Off.  Whose hand? His father’s? A girlfriend’s?  Regardless, the radio was turned off, and, then, nothing.  He strained to recall what had then followed, and grew bone-weary from the effort when, suddenly, he bolted straight up:  The “click” of turning the radio off was the actual substance of his memory!  It had been a psychological device he had once often used.  He’d get himself to hear a loud Click! in his mind and would then immediately — as if helpless to it — put a needed change into practice.  It’s how he had stopped smoking.  Over time, that Click! did start to fail him, and, soon enough, even fell from memory — till, when at the cafe table, he heard it in him again and knew that he was not going to leave her or the city he had till then only been visiting.

It was the only spot left in the vast parking lot to the music festival, and so he took it.  He knew from the moment he started to pull into the very tight space that he’d be able to open neither door, yet trying to find a spot to park in the surrounding neighborhood would take far too long and result in too long a walk.  When he then sat with windows down and no way to get out, he questioned his decision to pull in, even its intent.  Was he deliberately sabotaging his own desire to attend the festival?  Because it cost too much? He went on, and just about succeeded in cornering himself in — and thus out of doing what he wanted — when he saw there was room enough to climb out his window to the roof of the car and then slide down the back.  As he did just that, he spoke out loud in his grandpa’s voice, Don’t just look down or to your sides dear boy when there’s always a way to look up.

She put her teacup not on the table but in its saucer, and yet kept a finger wrapped around its handle.  That finger suddenly popped out — sending a ping to his groin, but he made himself see that her mind was made.  Her finger shifted then to the rim of the handle, and he was again suspended, this time on whether it would at any moment re-enter the handle.  It did not.  He long recalled that it was only when her hand had slipped off the table that he was able to shift his focus back to the outer world, and to the fact that the cup was at last placed back in its saucer.

He was in a rush, but still he had poured a batter of milk and eggs into a pan to make himself an omelet.  His mind kept whipping through its concerns as the batter took its time on a low flame.  His distracted mind soon noticed that he was no longer smoothing out the batter in the pan but was whipping it.  He also noticed that he had whipped the batter well past the stage of an omelet, and even past what would be thought of as scrambled eggs.  He was actually now slicing and chopping the scrambled eggs into pea-sized balls, and they were hardening into pellets he thought he could poke someone’s eye with.  He decided that this was as far as he could go with eggs on a low flame; to go further would be to burn them.  So he sprinkled powdered sugar over the egg pellets, let them meld, and delighted in realizing, when eating them, that he had made candy.  He got to the office very late, but he took it in stride.  He couldn’t have otherwise come to realize that a high flame would have burned the eggs way before he could have turned them into candy.

A ball had unexpectedly come his way on the fly, and he had caught it, and there had been applause from those in the stands.  It was expected that he hold high the ball and take a bow.  His host explained that it was also ritual in this little section of fans in this part of the stadium to then hand the ball over to a child.  He stepped up to one, offered the ball, and instinctively reached out and also ruffled the child’s hair.  Weeks later, his host wrote of how the fans of that little section had added another step to their ritual:  after handing a child a fielded or caught ball, “the adult doing the handing over should also gently muss the child’s hair.”   The tingles of pleasure he felt soon faded, though, after a follow-up letter told him of a fight that broke out when a father had taken offense to the way his child had been touched.  The practice of handing a ball to a child had since been ceased.  In a p.s., his host had added, “There is no longer any joy for us in going after a ball that may unexpectedly come our way.”  He knew he’d archive this letter in his trunk of saved letters — and, in order to better recall when he had had the thought, he wrote at its bottom, Don’t forget that society’s laws aren’t as imposing as are the personal regulations we impose on each other.

He dozed on a float in an expansively luxurious beachside swimming pool, listening to ocean waves curl under the hotel's overhanging platform, when his mind's eye saw that a car had — upon having climbed round and round the outside of a hill — taken a sudden right, away from garden-variety views and towards an ancient "white city" of broken stone that shone in the sun.  This image came to him first, and he then saw a young boy (whom he felt sure was him) walk its crumbled streets, stepping beside or around collapsed columns and walls to escape a brutal sun, recognizing the city from storybook pictures of how it looked in the long ago of fairy tale times.  These two images came in succession to his floating self — and were followed by a memory of the boy wondering if the newer city he lived in would also, after a while, become a broken ancient city nobody lived in.  Could it be that he was living in what would be a fairy tale for a boy like him from the future?  The boy hadn't answered himself back then, or since, which is why he, drowsy on the float, tried to open his eyes, to look around and answer the question once and for all, but he felt himself too close to sleep to muster the strength.

He watched a young boy weave his way through a sidewalk's rush hour crowd, shoving against hips and legs to make his way up to block's end.  Instead of crossing the street, the boy stopped and stood, looked this way and that, and began then to backtrack down the block in now hesitant and uncertain steps.  He avoided bumping into anyone this time — which soon forced him to curb's edge, alongside parked cars.  The instant he questioned if this boy going south was indeed the same boy he had watched going north, he realized he had lost sight of the boy altogether.  In the time it then took to turn away from a third story office window to beg off a superior's query, he saw get imprinted on his mind an image of how different the same person is when he has lost his direction.

The border exit was blocked with multiple gates across the road.  He had already been puzzling over why his was the only car in sight.  When he stepped out, he discovered he was also the only person around.  He returned to sit on his car’s hood, to stop, to anchor himself, for he had never before come across a vacated border post.  No national holiday could have been its cause, nor a foreign invasion.  It became increasingly difficult, then, to rein himself in.  A sense that he was present in a post-apocalyptic moment began to overwhelm him.  We have done ourselves in, he thought to himself, and I may somehow be the only one left.  He felt stunned by the suddenness of the end.  He had never before imagined technology’s titanic capacity in so personal a way.  Technology had become so innovative that, when man finally felt trapped in his inevitable helplessness, it had helped him achieve mass suicide in an instant.  The aphrodisiac was the hemlock.  He dropped himself back upon his car’s hood to imagine all this, and to take in the last of the engine’s warmth.  He woke up an hour later, and woke up knowing that the road he had traveled to get to the border had been closed off years before.  Why hadn’t it come to him at any point on the drive out?  Was he starting to forget, to forget things he knew well — and, worse, forget even to try to remember?  He got back in the car and felt himself turn a corner in his life as he turned his car around.  He’d call her from back at the hotel and tell her he couldn’t make it because he had mistakenly taken a wrong road all the way to its dead end.

Wind had blown open the door and slammed it against the side wall.  Its framed glass shattered and punctured the face of his great grandfather in the tired portrait of him nailed to that wall.  He had watched all this from his desk, and sensed more was to come.  That ‘more’ did come, but more as a wave of breathlessness passing through him, returning and then retreating, till it all of a sudden settled in as an unnerving nausea in his gut.  He had not known his father’s grandfather.  All he had ever known was that he had died in a flash flood when still a young man​.  The frameless hand-painted photograph of him had since been handed on down.  He hadn’t been alive at the time of the drowning, but he now knew that he no longer had the portrait to pass on, that in life there is a second death when an only reminder is finally lost to the wind.

In day’s-end colors, the clouds were as two monsters at each other, seeking to subsume the other and emerge ever more monsterish.  There was a red one and a yellow one, and there was nothing congenial in the way they converged.  The red monster was gulping down the yellow one.  Still though, even when wholly consumed, the yellow one shone through the belly of the red.  Till it didn’t.  And yet, as it faded, the yellow dragged the red down with it.  Soon, the horizon was dark — only indefinite outlines were left visible in the faintest moonlight.  Do not forget, he reminded himself on a postcard he mailed to himself, that there is also given to us the storm before the calm.

She asked if she was in front of a given building.  He said she was.  She asked if he could describe it for her.  He told of the building’s exterior, and of its familiar interior.  She asked of the buildings next to it, and then of the landscape of the block. He told her things he noticed only upon describing them to her.  It’s the place, she said.  She asked if there was a spot for her to sit in front of the building.  He said it had two steps.  As she felt her way to sit on the top step, he thought her to say, I’ll wait — which, hours later at workday’s end, he saw that she was still doing.  She must have heard his approach for she knew it was him.  I misunderstood thinking I was in a relationship, she said.  She had been in tears.  It’s taken a while for me to end it in my mind, she added.  He was able to vividly recall years later how he had then escorted her to a bus, had watched the bus take off and, when it had slipped his sight, felt in himself the deep ache of having been left once and for all.

He was in bed on a cold morning, and he didn't want to rise without first having had the curtains parted to let warm light in.  He was struggling to accept that, if he wanted them parted, he'd have to do it himself.  A thought then followed that he may have by now — with a nature differently oriented — easily worked his way to having someone part the curtains for him.  For a moment, he did try to imagine them being parted (he couldn't tell by whom), but the feeling was not sublime.  They were parted at a prescribed time instead of in the moment he would have wished, and the way of the parting lacked care or grace. No, for him to bring in warm light, he'd have to rise from the bed he was in and part his own curtains.

The single mother of two who ran a five-table restaurant had shopped, cooked, and served lunch and dinner all by herself for a number of years before he came in with his college books one day and could not take his eyes off he wear and tear of responsibilities on a woman not much older than he.  He offered to be her lunchtime server in exchange for a free meal.  It would ease her burden, and he’d savor a wonderfully complete meal for but two hours of labor each day.  In a few days, though, she said she’d prefer to split the tips with him than to have to cook him a meal.  Every day I worry about what different thing to serve you, she said.  It’s too much.  He thought to cancel the arrangement, but, instead, watched her go right back to work to do what needed to be done.  So, he went along and split the lunchtime tips with her.  Each day, he’d order from the menu and pay from his share of the tips.  The money left over made for a huge tip he’d leave her.  She’d return fifty percent of it on the next day, which he’d give back as part of that day’s tip, and then get its half back, which he’d give all to her only to get half of it back again.  When some two months later the children’s father reappeared, he paid her 8 for his last meal, and the tip he left was for 68.27.  He’d be gone; she’d have to keep the tip.  He had finally figured a way to give back to a giver in a way the giver could accept.

He had heard said that each experience was unique, was a separate dot on one’s map, and that attempts to meaningfully connect one dot to another, and still another and another, led one to false conclusions.  He was dating a girl at the time, one date succeeding another, each standalone, and he realized that there could be no relationship without first connecting some dots.  So he did, and found himself falling in love with the story she and he wove.  They would love each other by dedicating themselves to the service of the other.  That story didn’t go on to come true, but it survived the relationship.  He stayed loyal to it and hoped to make it one day come true with another girl.  The story had traveled better than had any of the individual memories, and thus deserved to live.

After a long read, he had lain the open book on his chest and dozed off into its world.  In no time, he was in the smallest of apartments — in hiding, yet feeling completely exposed.  And a little shy.  He sensed a female eye might be observing him.  But, unlike others who tracked his every move, she was focused in on his stillness.  And, so, still he stayed.  He wanted her to know he couldn’t be made to divulge anything, not even on his sleeping face.  He dared her to look closer in.  He imagined her eye lock in on his face.  Had he ever felt more alive?  He didn’t give in: he refused to breathe.  Long enough to feel he might soon pass out.  In the dream or in actuality?  To know, he’d have to awaken, and her eye on him would be lost.  He stayed still, and would have continued to had the book not then fallen off his chest and possibly spared him from death.

She was holding the sculpture by its phallic end and explaining its significance with the greatest ease.  What she held was not to her, as to him, the thing itself.  To her, it was a symbol of a "governing principle."  To him, anything held by a woman in that way was as real as if it were real.  He had to look away.  He would have even wandered off had he not in a scold remembered to remind himself that life which is felt is meant to bear only a little resemblance to life as it is thought up.

His hand cupped hers, with only their fingertips touching.  They often swung their arms high to test the limits of holding the touch, or swung them way back, and yet, throughout their walk around the lake, at least two fingertips never lost touch.  He sought a significance to this after they had ridden off separately on their bicycles.  Wasn’t their feat a sign they were a good fit?  Shouldn’t he chase after her?  It was then that he noticed how unlike himself he was being in steering through traffic as through an obstacle course, in a hurry, taking risks, trying to get somewhere sooner than was wise.

He had seen wind snap a piece of cloud off a larger one.  That piece came straight at him, feeling powerful enough to blow him off the 101st floor and drop him hundreds of miles out.  Was that why he had then suddenly felt himself plopped into his grandmother's kitchen of decades ago?  Plopped down at the very moment he had stopped eating — with food still on his plate?  His grandmother's back was to him, and he was hurriedly stuffing the leftover food into his pocket.  When she turned to him, he was able to enjoy the satisfactory sigh of one who has just licked his plate clean.  I won't ask you what you put in your pocket, she quietly said, if you don't ask me what I put in your food.  He had to know.  I put food in my pocket, Nana, Did you put yogurt of a goat in my food?!  Carrots, she said.  Ah, he had won.  She had finally accepted that he didn't like the sliminess of an animal's yogurt.  He felt himself made independent just by being listened to.  But, this was not the reason why the memory had come so dreamily back to him, leaning as he was against a glass wall of the 101st floor cafeteria.  That piece of memory still lingered, he realized, because she had gotten him to eat carrots after that.

He walked into a streetcorner debate and surprised himself by taking a side.  All at once, he was full of the fervor necessary to match that of the other side.  He thought to hang in there and commit to the debate, but then noticed that it wasn't his side of the argument, or the other side, that he was taking.  He had jumped in with a third side that questioned the very premise of the debate.  And no one was hearing him out.  He considered walking away, but got louder and more insistent instead.  And still he felt ignored.  He hurried across the street then, and yet couldn't help but take a quick look back.  He saw the debaters ignore even his absence.  Something, though, felt different:  there appeared to be an unmistakable escalation to their fervor.  The four of them were arguing at the same time.  Could it be that they had earlier been somehow tempered by their efforts to ignore him?  If that were true, then he hadn't been so irrelevant to the debate after all.

He stopped by the young girl sitting on steps that led to a tomb sacred to the villagers.  He had money to offer; the girl took his hand instead and ushered him up the remaining steps.  At the tomb, a thatched hut, she plucked the money from his hand and handed it to the man on the bench at the open entry.  My father blesses you, the man said, pointing him into the hut.  On the seat of a bamboo rocking chair rested a sizeable black-and-white photo-portrait of an old man's lifeless face.  There was nothing else in that hut save for two standing candles on either side of the chair and a small rug in front.  A magazine photographer had months earlier told him of a village where a photo had transformed a deceased peasant into a local deity.  That news had brought him to now remove his shoes and step to the rug to kneel and look intently at the old man's portrait.  He could not tell if the old man was dead or alive: the face had to it the soft dreamy suppleness of serenity.  He wanted to say that the old man had come upon a light and chosen to follow it as a way to slip into death.  This manner was common enough, but it was rare to be photographed in the actual instant of slipping away.  Separating a photo from the person in it was not something the villagers had yet worked on.  To them, the photograph was evidence that the old man remained in passage between this life and what came next, enduring in order to help them with their own future crossings.  As it played out, this quickly formed belief about the old man helped a people — who were naturally prone to worry about crossings — feel a form of inner peace.  Even he, kneeling uncomfortably on that rug, could feel a restfulness in that tomb, in that when he got up ten minutes later, a couple of hours had already elapsed.

He had been driving around and had by now forgotten to where he was headed.  He was all in his head and was there to stay, at least until something pulled him out.  This aimless touring of a city known for its steeples had taken a good part of an afternoon before two girls in frocks and in-bloom flowers bobbing in their hair stepped suddenly into the crosswalk in front of him.  They were identical, and, when they quickly glanced at him, made haughty-princess faces — as if in response to something.  They then burst into joyous open laughter and hastened on.  What had they reacted to?  He looked around him and into the rearview mirror.  All he saw to grab his attention was a peek in the mirror he had taken of his right eye.  Something was different.  He tilted the mirror to take in both his eyes and saw then what the girls saw.  He still had on his face the look of a boy in amazed glee.  He peered closer into the mirror.  It would be clear to anyone that he was old enough to have fathered those girls, and that was why he then took the time to observe the boy’s look on him melt away.  But, just before it did, before he saw his adult eyes return to him, he determined that he too had an identical twin, and it was the boy the girls had seen.

He sensed he was being watched and only then discovered it was by children.  Four preteens were hanging in a tree he had just stepped under.  At first, he had glimpsed the hem of a girl's dress.  Not wishing to unnerve her with his presence, he thought to simply return to his office — but held firm when he heard a boy's voice hiss, Sssshhhh!  Before he could think of it, he had pulled out his long wallet from his back pocket and held it to his mouth.  He informed Secret Agent X on this walkie-talkie that he would wait under Tree Number 438.  He re-pocketed his wallet, and pretended to then hear something from above.  Ah, there you are!  He looked directly up at the three boys and a girl with no show of surprise.  I gave Secret Agent X the wrong Tree Number, he whispered to them.  This is Tree Number 1.  He pulled up the collar to his raincoat, fastened it under his chin, pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, and scoped the scene.  Coast is clear, he said to them.  He stepped away from the tree as if to disappear.  He couldn't shed that cloak of SecretAgent-ness for the four blocks back to his office.  He even strutted into the building elevator as if on a classified mission.  He knew that that feeling of self-importance would linger with him a while, and all it had taken was a Sssshhhh! from children to pull him into their game.

He watched a very old man scatter seeds and then stand to watch the pigeons surround him.  He would stand the entire time the pigeons devoured the seeds, and then sit back down on the busstop bench.  A sudden impulse would soonafter shake him out of a stupor.  He’d reach into a pocket of his cardigan for seeds and repeat the pattern.  Or so it seemed to him from a cafe’s corner table.  He finally rose from the table and advanced a quarter of a block for a closer look.  It became apparent that the old man was tossing seeds only to favored pigeons, and perhaps even scolding the unfavored.  He stepped closer in, almost to the backrest of the bench, and heard the old man exhort the unfavored to, Walk Walk, and, alternatively, Get Exercise — as if they needed to walk off their last meal.  The unfavored would find their way to the scattered seeds anyway, but, inexplicably, the old man didn’t waver from his repetitive pattern.  It was not till he stepped back and returned to his coffee at the corner table that he sensed a larger pattern.  The old man had presumably walked to the bus-stop bench from where he lived, and then had, for half an hour, sat down-got up-and stretched out his arms enough times that, with the return walk home, would have managed as much of an early morning exercise as was fair to expect of one so old.

The wind was blowing, and he thought to move with it as he might to a command meant to be obeyed.  The wind was not very direct, but there was a thrust to it that kept him propelled.  It happened once that he got whirled around and found himself facing into that wind.  He felt all at once an ardent wish to walk against that wind’s every rage, to feel more of that cool naked freshness upon his face.  Even then, he surprised himself when he did step into that hard wind.  He didn’t go far, but he did go into it till he had to turn his back and return, into it and back again, over and over till the wind began to feel just air he was breathing in.

He was trekking across a wide boulevard when she waved at him and mouthed something — an arm-in-the-air wave with words forming from within a wide smile.  He made it to the curb before sensing that, in being so focused on making it across before the light turned red, he had walked past her and given no response at all.  When he looked back, she had almost made it to the opposite curb.  He could not put a name to her high hips and their pronounced swing, but her clothes and shoes and hair could have been worn by any number of women he knew.  She climbed the curb in her heels and stopped as the traffic behind her moved on green.  She looked to her left and waved again, most likely to the arm waving through the sunroof of a car driving away.  Just as he realized that he had had no part in the scene with her, she looked back and most certainly did wave at him.  Yet, as abruptly, she turned away, and he watched her high hips swing on down the boulevard.  So it was true; he had in fact had a part in that scene.  He was the audience, and she had known.

On his way to the restroom, he had taken a peek into a small door-less library of glassed-in bookshelves.  The host's hand on the small of his back had then guided him in and flicked on a light switch, and the host then said, Let me show you.  The host slid open the glass door to a shelf and pulled out a luxuriously-bound book.  The host told the story of how he had come to learn of it, of the circumstances around its publishing, of its eminence in its field of study, of the author's life and fate, and did then the same with the next book and the next one.  He said it took some doing to find books that had managed to sustain or grow their standing over decades in the various genres and micro-genres of the writing arts.  At one point, he stopped himself to acknowledge that he was indeed a connoisseur, and that he valued these books more than any one who had actually read them.  The host had then flipped off the light and guided him back out towards the bathroom.  When, while washing his hands, he looked up into the mirror upon his slightly disheveled visage, he wondered if it had been the host's way to make him see that not all value resides between the covers.

It was as if he were in one room and his emotions had been left in another.  They were being kept there against his will.  He had not minded a break from them, but it had turned into an absence.  Had they been hijacked?  He couldn’t simply open a door to his emotions because the door to them was a wall.  So, he sat at the wall and bided time.  Every now and then he’d sense a vibration through the wall, but soon came to realize it was from his mind addressing itself: Who put this wall here?, I should climb it, Maybe dig a tunnel, Why no door?  His anxiety did not abate till he stepped away enough to be able to ask:  Isn’t it love when one’s emotions are hijacked and reside in another? — and when one feels no choice but to charge out of oneself and claim those emotions as one’s own?

He knew the solitary ancient wall he was standing at was from before the time of the first historians, but he couldn’t get a sense for that long ago a time until he reached out to touch it and had crumbs dislodge in his hand.  Those crumbs of brick dirt soon began to weigh on him.  They had survived in a wall from the early days of man civilizing himself within walls, and would now be lost to the wind were he to simply brush off his hands.  Were he to make the entire wall disappear in this manner, also lost would be the pictures of caravans it evoked in his mind, of animals grazing nearby, of people stopping in its morning or afternoon shade before making their crossovers towards the town (going one way) or into the wilderness (going the other).  Without the wall, without these pictures in his mind, time would feel shorter and lighter for having lost all that weight.

He strode cautiously amid shattered furniture strewn on the street, here and there hopping over shards from broken toilets and sinks.  Residents had hurled anything that could come unhinged out windows and over balconies onto people marching in support of the opposition. Security forces had anticipated some dousing or rock-throwing at worst, but over a hundred opposition supporters had been injured, two critically.  He took account of the litter and estimated that, in the distance between the first two intersections, fifty families would seek to replace their furniture.  There were seven more intersections worth of residential street to traverse, a potential 350 more customers.  He could already see an incentive offering each of them 15% off furniture with every successful referral.  He stood at the first intersection lost in a reverie of belief that his boss would finally recognize his head for business.  This could earn him enough for a year of college.  This was that moment of "when opportunity knocks."  He walked the next block and the next.  There were clearly going to be many needy customers, and he had begun to wonder what in them had made them hurl their own furniture just to see it get broken.  By the fifth block, he felt overwhelmed by, What kinds of hurt do people — who don't mind injuring themselves just to make a point — thoughtlessly inflict on others?  By the sixth block, he was imagining himself in a war zone, seeking escape.  It took a week before he let himself think again of his business proposal, and for only a moment at that, only to suggest to himself that a head for business was no good without a stomach for it.

He trekked into an old forest a hundred miles from town, far enough away from people to still be surprised by what one may find in it.  A corridor that had been hacked through the trees soon narrowed and abruptly led into a vast opening that soared to a high cathedral dome-like canopy.  Through it streamed in light rays of unnameable colors.  Some rays were suggestive of a specific color at the top and then bled into other such suggestions a time or two before hitting ground in smoky golden explosions; some entered the canopy and fizzled or dissolved into other rays.  With senses now acute, he thought to walk through the cathedral, to continue on into the old forest, but all he did was to trek the circumference of this cathedral opening in the forest to hold on to a faint feeling of how light must invariably seep in from the outside if the inside is to be set aglow.

He thought she had walked off for a visit to the powder room, or perhaps to make a call, or that she had spotted a friend, but it was beginning to seem to him that he had altogether misread a goodbye.  She had looked away from him for just a moment, and then stood up and turned her back to him, and had then hesitated another moment before striding off.  That stride made him think she had gone off to the powder room, till he wondered if her standing with her back turned to him was for a call she realized she had to make, and yet had that look away not been to a friend suddenly spotted in the restaurant?  As minutes crawled by, he began to see that the gesture most relevant may have been her moment's hesitation before striding off.  In it lay the goodbye.  As in an entire film scene the truth is often hidden in just a moment, and in one line of an entire essay, so her hesitation with her back to him must have been the goodbye that she hid inside her response to his, What's next?

The vast open landscape looked shorn of substance, as if by eons of gale force winds.  There was a lone bent tree, human-sized, at which he stood, wondering whether to venture in any farther.  He’d meet no people there, or creatures; a friend claimed he’d meet himself, a different one, one likewise shorn of substance.  Out of curiosity, he had made a two-day hike in from a dirt track, but the starkness of what lay ahead made clear there’d only be suffering.  The one hopeful note he could hear in him was that he’d be in and out, a few days at most, and not be, as with the tree, stuck to suffer this harshness for its entire age.  But he also knew he felt this hope only because the weather was still.  Ominously still.  Enticing him to expose himself.  He may still have, had he not then, in lifting his backpack, reached out to grasp onto a branch of the tree and have it snap off as would a bone of one long since dead.

Many attempts had been made to re-impose a rationality — with its built-in core notions of progress and success — on the people of a once-colonized town.  Once, when passing through, he overheard of a behavioral trait being cited as resistant to change: the townspeople continued to leave the colonizer’s language back at their offices and shops and go home to a seemingly inaccessible version of their own.  They’d revel in it in streets and eateries in the evenings and nights.  As one night reveler explained to him, The time I love language is when it lets me sing and I can tell stories.  That’s when I can control how I use language.  At the job or in many formal situations, someone else has control of it, and, through it, of me.  The reveler’s words long kept in his mind how rationality was not of one kind, for the rationality which argued for progress and success was other and different than the rationality that sought to live for story and song.

He saw first the taut leash of an old man pulling behind him a dog with its legs splayed out.  To call it a leash would have been to call a mansion a lean-to.  It was leather and etched and bejeweled and yellow.  The dog had one end in its teeth, relieving strain on its neck while the old man’s right arm pulled almost straight back, straining far more.  Yet his eyes stayed with the leash.  Without it, what he was seeing would not be possible.  Without a leash, one would not be able to pull and drag another.  A man and dog to stay together in public places would have to get to know each other better.  He felt a truth to that, a sad one — for, as with many sad truths, he knew it to be quite irrelevant.  After all, he thought, doesn’t the story of man start with, “There was a leash,” before the human characters are introduced?

He was sitting on a bench watching children get their first look of an elephant when he heard a child yell out, Why does he have a leg on his face?  This unleashed the children.  He was able to hear, Why does a pig want to be that big?,  Does it know it is a girl?, before his roving eye fell on a boy among them who had turned away from the elephant to look at the children instead.  The boy looked stiff and to be holding his breath as he glared at each child who spoke — Does his paws tickle?, It needs lots of teeth, Make it say something.  He had a growing sense that he could feel the boy's thoughts.  In fact, there was the absence of any — only a feeling of being flooded by deafening sounds that could not be stemmed, of being submerged by them, made meek, unable to yell out, Show respect to Uncle Elephant!  He was on his feet before he knew it, and was pointing at the boy till the boy noticed him.  You are right, he silently mouthed to the boy a few times.  The boy stared back at him as he had at the children.  Where are the wings?, Can it stand up?, I love you Mr. Elephant!  It was the boy!  The boy had taken a breath and spoken out.  The tears that had then flooded within him were to become the sensation he'd experience each time he'd meet a child of his who had been born to someone other.

A quarter million in a tertiary country had died of starvation in the year prior.  A gang of primary countries met at a mountain resort.  He was to follow a photographer who told of a village people too weak to fend off predator animals.  She showed aerial photos of wolves and hyenas and vultures loitering among helpless humans while some among them took bites.  She told of a man not strong enough to react to a hyena’s bite till his thigh had been torn into.  It was within moments that he, sitting next to her, first felt blood flowing hot from his thigh.  Such that he knew he needed immediate attention.  No, he could see no blood seeping through his pants, but could he trust his eyes?  These were dark pants.  He quickly touched his thigh, felt around the body, recalling an infantryman’s instructions to ‘feel yourself completely’ when something horrific cuts one off from being conscious of where he was.  It quickly brought him back to the real, back at the long witness table, looking up to the gang on the dais, and leaning forward to subject them with answers they already knew.

He was over feeling stunned because he could now see how it had happened.  The taxi driver had pulled up to the curb (1), set the brake (2), ignored the large banknote he was handing him from the back seat (3) and stepped out (4).  He had come around to open his door (5) and let him out onto the curb (6).  That's when he accepted the note (7).  He then returned to the driver's side to fetch the change (8) and, in a flash, had gotten in (9) and taken off (10).  The jovial and quite intimate conversation the driver had initiated on the ride over, the sharing of photos, and even — at a red light — the exchange of phone numbers, were preparatory to this quick act of ten small steps performed in smooth succession.  He had been primed by the driver to trust enough to let the ten steps be played out, and to feel stunned by the take-off — time enough for an escape to be pulled off before he would think to snatch a look at the license plate or taxi number.  He was surprised to feel relief.  A deceit had been pulled on him — not a theft.  The driver had worked for his bounty — he hadn't simply taken it.  This difference had allowed him hours later to call on a taxi again.  It's true, he was more on guard, but he felt safe — perhaps why deceit was understood to be different from theft, even if in effect it wasn't.

As he drove up, she was waiting in front of her hairdresser's with arms folded and locked under her breasts.  It struck him that she couldn't have found a better pose if what she wanted was to exhibit her breasts.  Was this his first time of seeing her as she may appear to the public?  It was her breasts he noticed and kept his eyes on as he pulled up to the curb.  She seemed to notice him among other things her eyes kept moving to, but she was seeing nothing.  He thought to honk, but stopped himself.  It had to do with her hair.  She must not be happy with it.  Perhaps it was too straight.  He could later recall this moment only because it was his first time in the ritual of picking her up at the hairdresser's in which he had put to practice what he knew to do.  He pulled out and drove around the block.  He saw her see him even before he made his next approach.  Her arms flung out,  and she scuttled on the tips of her toes toward him, a smile lighting her face enough to light his own.  How special that extra little moment had been, he thought.  A drive around the block was all the extra time she needed to come to terms with the emotional affect her botched haircut had wrought: she was her face again, private to him in the way it looked at him.

He felt too many people too easily dismiss the ideal (One has to be real!).  They too clearly understand why the ideal never becomes real, and stays forever a story, but these folk forget that this story of the ideal is the only contrivance there is to implore humans to be less human and more humane.

The old man had only the day before taken to the street corner with a placard that advertised a restaurant two doors down from the cafe in which he sat.  By the next day, the old man had the placard nailed to a long pole that he held onto.  He was immediately noticed by the cafe’s patrons.  Stories filled the air.  The only fact he heard from his table was that someone who had seen the old man stand there from eleven to seven the day before had taken him water and been rebuffed.  There were suspicions he had suffered a deep loss, his wife perhaps, or that he had been driven crazy, or had long been so.  One thought him homeless.  Deep sympathies were expressed, which led to stories of other unfortunates the patrons had known.  The old man stood, oblivious to much, with every so often a straightening-up of himself as soon as he sensed himself sagging.  At a point, he began to wave the pole every two minutes or so and flash a quick false-toothed grin before, again, shutting down into a sag.  It was as when air is blown into a balloon and then slowly let out.  But, how was he, when lacking in air, able to blow himself back up?  He had later stepped up to the old man to ask just that.  Just doing my job, son.  Yes, Sir, he had said in reply, and known then to get back to his seat.

He had stepped down an embankment to get a clear night view of a majestic bridge over a legendary river and had instead been taken in by a man sitting on a stump, fishing off the quay.  From mere feet away, against the grand lamps and the night movement on the bridge behind, the fishing man looked to him iconic of one alone with his thoughts.  His one hand held an umbrella over him while his other held the rod anchored between knees and feet.  His body leaned forward, his head rose high, focused, it seemed, on an area other than where the fishing line met water.  Expecting rain?, he called out to the fishing man.  Not a twitch in response — till the man suddenly lowered his umbrella, blocking their view of the bridge, and took a look up.  I see what you mean, he said.  And then, in a youthful voice, added, It rained on this day the last seven years though.  He knew it to be true the instant he wished the fishing man a Happy Birthday.  Again, silence.  It was not till he took his first steps down the quay that he heard a Thank You.  He continued on, having still not taken a peek at the face of the fishing man, and not wanting to, for the fishing man had felt ancestral to him, had felt known to him, and he wanted to do nothing to lose hold of that sense, cradled as it now was in the golden glow of the bridge.

Sitting in a leafy park in autumn, among animals and humans together, he heard himself spontaneously say to a parkbench friend, Don’t you think there has been given to animals an almost pure ability to experience unmanufactured, unreserved joy — Watch the birds, the squirrels, the cats and dogs, and us when babies…?  It makes me sad, his parkbench friend had answered at some point.  Then, with a quick look at him, his friend had added, But why focus on that?  He never forgot the utter surprise in his voice when he had answered, Do I?

He at first thought the heavy thud he heard against the other side of his wall was a body slammed against it, but, in a hotel, it could have easily been a suitcase.  He quickly hung up the phone, quietened his breath, put his ear to the wall.  He was able to make out faint voices, but it could have been the TV.  And, then, that second thud.  It felt as if he had just been thrown against the bed.  He thought to call the front desk to whisper his alarm, but then saw how it could lead to a knock on his own door.  He wanted his anonymity till he was certain that something had happened.  He got himself up and again put his ear to the wall.  A small scream, a cry of anguish was all he needed to hear.  But, nothing.  The silence felt final.  Was life back to normal?  Could he continue on with his day?  He quietly tiptoed his way to his door and stepped out the hotel, but on his way did stop at the front desk to report smoke seeping out of the room next to his.  There are other paths one can take he told himself to intervene when one must.

She had wanted to visit the city of romance, thousands of miles from them.  He took to collecting pictures and posters and recordings by which the city was known, and then on a weekend covered the walls of his room with its images and filled the air with its sounds.  He then fetched her and led her to his door.  There he placed a little city hat on her and placed in her hand an empty suitcase with the city name’s painted on it.  Then, he gallantly opened the door.  Taking his cue, she wafted in on tiptoes.  He continued on: he took the suitcase from her hand and lay it down, brushed it off and helped her sit on it, and then presented her with an itinerary of their stay in the city.  She oohed and aahed as he aptly pointed to pictures and told the day and time of their visit to each sight or locale.  Only so short a time?, he remembered her repeatedly feign.  She then took to jumping in with recommendations of her own; several visits had to be rearranged.  It took an hour to cover the itinerary.  The music had run out, and he was next to her on the suitcase.  Want to go have ice-cream?, she asked.  How simple and do-able that sounded.  They walked down three blocks to the vendor on the corner for their cones.  How much sweeter and fresher the ice-cream tasted.  How at home it felt after an enthralling and exhausting day in a foreign city.

The cat was on his lap, on its back, quite like a baby.  A stiff hour had passed.  Time to get up, he said repeatedly to the cat.  He added a few other things, raising his tone, but the cat seemed to him to have embraced his voice too into the cocoon she was then inhabiting.  He thought to give her a slight shake of a leg, but quickly sensed that it would startle her.  He only wanted her to awaken from her wonderful slumber.  Perhaps he should say things much closer up to her ear?  He leaned gently and whispered in a spontaneously contrived cat language that he was already late for school and would she please think also of him.  He added a couple of purr sounds to soften the blow.  One of her eyes did then slowly slide open, and then the other, and her head turned to look him in the eye.  I have to go, he said.  He did feel that she had then jumped off him a little too hastily, but what stayed with him was:  When you are ready to say what you mean, you have to get close to be heard.

He had been following the flight of two birds that were perched on the lone tree in the open meadow.  One would fly out while the other hid within the leaves, or they would burst from out of the leaves and fly a few patterns before returning, or they would hop on the ground around the tree for morsels, or, as at the moment, sit perched on a thin branch inches from each other.  These were the only four activities he had so far recognized over the prior half-hour.  He would have labeled the bird’s life a bore had he not also noticed that each activity was not repeated the same.  There were different speeds and patterns and points of contact; there was the great spiritedness.  He was beginning to think this is what grown-ups meant by living life to the fullest — pick what you like best and do it to its best — till he saw both birds fly off, but in separate directions.  When they did not stop, he felt a fright.  He turned and ran back to the campsite — and, even though he could see his sister in the distance, he kept running because he had to warn her that people can meet, get very close, even live life to the fullest, and still leave each other and not come back.

The baby kept crying in gasps, and the old man in whose lap it was kept patting it with one hand in step to the cry and its sudden staccato stops.  The other hand lay poised — as if to pick up the baby — but he could see even in profile from four tables over that the old man had little confidence in making the hands do what was wanted of them.  He thought to make himself step up and help, but, as he later told a friend, the baby’s crying had struck terror in him.  Its extreme unhappiness was palpable:  the baby was terrified for itself.  He’d only be another frightening presence.  There had to be a parent.  He stood and looked around.  Then, a sudden gasp, and the baby went silent.  He noticed the old man’s hand had fallen on the baby’s face.  He made to move when from right beside the old man a young boy leaned in and lifted the hand off.  He watched the boy gently place the old man’s hand so it could continue its patting, then kiss the baby’s forehead, and finally lean back against the table bench and be again hidden from him.  He shifted a few steps to take in the boy’s face, of a boy who had already a way to administer to the needs of the hopelessly dependent.

He had been walking a raised dirt path amid surrounding farm plots, and then, in a sudden deluge, he was stomping through a muddy stream.  It had taken all of half a minute.  In this instant, he had gotten as wet as it was possible for him to get, and nothing farther out than his hand was visible.  He couldn’t make a run for it since his boots sank into mud — deeper than did the bare feet of the dancing naked boy suddenly passing by with a smile too wide and bright.  He turned to follow, but going back was a farther distance than going forward.  The hope that an adult might soon follow the boy, from behind flickering chainlink-like sheets of rain, held him a while, but, too quickly, he was having to calm himself with assurances that he was on high ground and could not drown.  He’d wait it out.  He positioned himself sturdily, feeling useless as his boots sank till they no longer could.  He raised his arms up and stood thus; it gave him a purpose, despite knowing of the uselessness of a scarecrow in a monsoon rain.

He watched preschool children trail behind their teacher on their mid-day walk around the block .  She held onto the hands of the two sternest, while the remaining dozen or so rollicked behind.  His eye fell on the boy with a forefinger in his mouth.  He appeared intent on something.  And, soon enough, the boy’s left foot stepped off the curb and onto the street.  He hobbled in this way, left foot on street, right on curb.  Two girls holding hands cackled in glee.  It was clearly the warning system the teacher listened for because she then turned back with a loud, Stay on the sidewalk at all times!  The boy obeyed, but started slowing down.  He thought it because the boy wanted to separate from the two girls, but the boy kept slowing till he was the last one trailing.  And, then, that left foot landed on the street again, and, for only two steps, so did the right.  That forefinger came flying out of his mouth as he raised his arm and hurled it to the sky.  He watched the teacher and each child turn and then disappear around a corner, and it felt as if he had come to understand why so many of the little victories must be won in private.

Wasn’t the line too long?  There would only be single seats available when they, on their first date, stepped into the movie theater.  He’d be looking at the love story on the screen and then at her wherever she’d be sitting, and enjoy neither.  It would be ninety minutes of torture — tame perhaps by comparison to other kinds, but not for one who had just come to believe that good results come from good beginnings.  What if in the theater he kept sneaking looks at her and she didn’t look back?  Wouldn’t ugly feelings settle in and color all others that followed?  Yet, if instead of a movie he offered dinner, he had money enough for only one person.  That would feel humiliating, worse than torture.  Why don’t we go for a cup of coffee?, she suddenly spoke out.  When he turned to her, she was already looking at him.  He wondered, How had she…?, but said instead, That’s a grown-up drink.  Let’s be grown-ups, she said back.  They spent much of the evening looking for a place that would serve minors a cup of coffee. He’d think a cafe, she a restaurant, or he’d think a hotel and she a market, and soon enough it got silly to where he’d think a dress shop and she a movie theater.  That brought on the second look they shared.  Because the love story was by then halfway through its showing, they got into the movie theater for half price and had money enough to enjoy a cup of coffee in the lobby, sitting next to each other under posters of grown-up lovers.  Ahh, he said at one point.  Hmmm, she said back.  Next week?, he asked.  Next week, she answered.  These two words mattered so much to him so suddenly.  They erased all anxiety about what was to come after, and allowed him to believe that theirs was a good beginning.

He had passed over four countries at 37,000 feet and not one thing had changed out the window: there were the clouds, and then the peaks, the treetops, the sky, and then the clouds again.  This view — it came to him on this occasion — had not been available to his great grandmother.  In fact, he was flying in space in which she had once imagined her Heaven was placed.  Were she next to him, he would be explaining that science and technology held all eminent domain rights now.  He'd lower his voice to add that her gods have had to relocate:  either deeper within people or farther out than the sky they see from the ground.  Was it any wonder that people were trying so desperately to hold on to them?  Losing himself in the clouds, he sensed his great grandmother — whom he had met twice when seven — clear it up for him: Darling boy, science and technology is trying to find God just like the rest of us.  Only difference is that their god is less personal than mine.  A deep memory would occasionally surface in which he had then asked her, Will this pursuit of God lay waste to what there is on Earth?, and had then gone very still in order to sense her response, but she never did let herself be heard again after that.

He had made it three-fourths up the tree to the level of the second story window.  He sat on an unstable branch and waited for the curtains to part and the window to open and for the girl to return to him his letter of love.  He had thought to have her set the letter on fire and watch it become ashes, but had had a strong sense that he may never again feel the love expressed in it and ought thus to preserve it for the museum to himself that he kept in a large shoe box.  There was more of him in that letter than he felt was within him at that time; he would need to read his own words to awaken himself to feel again.  She thought the letter was in her room at home.  As it would be too public to hand it to him at her front door, she said that she’d instead open the window to her room at 3:45 pm.  He had climbed the tree to keep her from throwing the letter out the window — but, her voice he then heard came from below, at the foot of the tree:  I forgot it in my locker.  He felt a deep disgust roll into him, and an even greater loathing when she added, I’ll give it to you in the cafeteria.  It was a sudden jolt he felt in him, enough to make him grope for support.  He grabbed a hold of a stronger branch and looked back down.  She no longer looked to him the girl whose every real or imagined facet he had devoured with his eyes; she seemed rather the distant mask she had been before they had ever spoken.  He found he was able to climb back down and even walk right past her with a, Thanks anyway.  He had achieved his objective, and it had not taken the forever he imagined. It happened in a little more than the second it had taken to feel the jolt.

He had been speaking to a town hall gathering about ways to stay on guard "against the species to which you belong" when he allowed the thick plum slung at him to hit him on the shoulder.  He had watched it almost all its way and was stunned when it took on the size of a bloody cantaloupe right before hitting him.  His fear had grown the closer and more purple it got, but then vanished the instant he was his most helpless against it.  The gathered, instead, seemed to take it on.  They sat frozen in silence, and then erupted in a noise of protests so loud that a fright struck him: had he just presented himself as one to guard themselves against?  But, as quickly, he realized otherwise: the gathered had turned their backs to him because the plum slinger was stomping out the hall.  And, then, almost as one, they sat back down to face him.  Their faces grew polite.  Taking cue, he politely continued on to finish his talk.  Not another cross word was said.  At the end, a woman did come over to ask, Are you bleeding?  When he looked down at himself, he was able to say the blood was plum juice.  The woman gave a slight shake of her head, and the gathered then started to filter out of the hall.  He stayed uncomprehending till he discovered that he had given the wrong talk to the wrong audience.  The attendees had expected to hear about ways they could help unfortunates in distant places and had heard instead on how they were culpable in creating the circumstances that crushed untold species of unfortunates.  On reflection, he regretted not adding that it was nothing particular to them, that it was in the nature of the species, and thus his plea to stay on guard "against the species to which we are born."

He thought when young that the difference in the stories of the rich and the poor was that the poor believe there is a reality and the rich believe you make your reality.  He couldn’t understand how all the mad rich geniuses would fend off what will be real.  With what? Their self-centered visions of what’s real?  He felt they’d eventually cry uncle and seek escape.  This laid to rest all doubt in him.  The meek would inherit the earth after all, however poor its condition be.

He heard rustling among branches and, in the reverie of a streamside doze, thought it to be raindrops pitter-pattering against a windowpane.  When the branches then crackled, he felt himself snap out of it.  He stared into short distance, wanting to hold on to the vanishing dream, but saw rather a brown bear cub step up to the water downstream.  He froze, stretched out between two boulders as on a hammock.  Even then the cub must have sensed him because it looked his way.  He looked back, but in a way to convey that he wasn’t really seeing anything.  The cub raised its snout.  He knew: where a cub, there a mother.  He slowly lay his head back onto the boulder to ponder a second, and fell almost instantly back into the reverie he had tried to cling to.  It was now thundering against the windowpane: his mother had him in her arms: he could feel her woolen sweater print its pattern on his face.  There came a little tickle in his nose.  When he quickly shook his head to ward it off, he saw the cub was gone.  Had the bear even been there?  He knew he had been straddling between alertness and reverie, but felt himself in that moment to have lost a sense of their difference, and what could be more real than that?

All that had happened was that she had stepped up to his coffee table and asked if she could "borrow" the extra chair and he had taken to his feet and carried the chair to her table.  Wow, she had said.  He didn't then know what to say.  Back at his table, he realized he wasn't in a country where what he had done was expected behavior.  She was probably thanking him.  He looked at her, and though her attention was on an appointment book in hand, he still waved a You're Welcome back — as if it would be there awaiting her when she next looked up.  She didn't look up, and he never again saw her the three other times he visited the cafe — but, on each visit, he would sense his You're Welcome still hovering unattended over her table.  The third time, he saw a small boy — at the table with his mother — look up and stare into air, and then look at him with what seemed to him a smile.  The thought that later struck and stayed with him was that he did not return to that cafe after that because the unfinished business there had been attended to.

She, once regarded the beauty of the village, had two years earlier been brutally molested by a wave of government soldiers passing through in retreat.  She was now sitting on a flimsy metal chair under a shady tree, and he could not help but bow and touch her feet in greeting.  She was frail, but had to her the stature of a living monument.  Her lips barely moved, but the interpreter reported that she wanted her only child, a son, to be reared by a family in a country more fortunate.  When she then raised her eyes to catch his reaction, he was clear she was issuing a command.  And when, in lowering her eyes, she then seemed to hold an instant on his hands, he knew that he would obey.  He knew that he would take her son away to find him a family and give her something to believe in.

He was known to himself from an early age as one who delivered self-lectures.  One that he would now and then orate to himself in bits and pieces was from his college years.  He had been sitting across from a monument to a leader — whom a prosperous people had first proclaimed their savior king, then an autocrat, years hence a true democrat, and finally incarnated evil — and he had been reflecting on how impossible it was to know the true nature of any one or thing.  He then lectured himself, in silence:  If you ever feel that you know — just that, that “I know” — know that you are imagining yourself as other than human.  To know, in that sense, is to be in the realm of the gods. The odds of that are closer to zero than to any other number.  You can observe, you can make guesses, and you can make up stuff in attempts to manipulate the odds.  It is reason why your kind feel confident that mathematics will finally get us to the realm of gods, to knowing.  But remember that it was once the gods of nature who helped us see.  The gods of man’s own nature followed them.  Gods of the nature of numbers have been moving in.  Keep this in mind, but remember most that other gods await us.

He looked forward to stepping out of professional meetings with no further obligations, stepping into the breezy — least self-critical — version of himself.  His feet would feel like wings; he could follow his whims.  This one time, the elevators weren’t functioning, and there were thirty-two stories to descend.  While others settled down in the lounge with wait-it-out drinks, he bounded down stairwell steps too narrow to land securely on.  He told himself to slow down, to see clearly each step in front of him, but he had built up a momentum he couldn’t overcome.  His hands had taken to grabbing the handrail to fling himself down a set of steps, again and again.  He was delighting in the flight of his feet, from takeoff through being airborne to the landing.  His body in its full swing came to feel it a greater danger to fight the momentum than surrender to it.  Fortunately, his fall, when it came, came not on steps but on a landing:  a twisted ankle, a sprained wrist, but no damage to the head.  He limped and hopped the remaining twenty stories of steps in pain — and yet, by the time he made it to the back of a taxi, he knew he’d do no different.  The one he trusted most to get him through the consequences of boyish whims was still the boy in him.

He had kicked the ball back to the boy, and would have continued on his walk down the upscale street had the boy not booted the ball back to him.  He got to it just before it bounced into the street and kicked it back.  He watched the boy give chase down a long driveway, and, as he then turned to continue on, saw the boy give a look back at him.  He stood and waited for the boy to catch up to the ball, and then stepped a little ways up the driveway so the boy could hit it back to him, but the boy kept running and ran right into a house.  It took only minutes to realize that he had not hesitated a moment to make it back to the safety of the main street.

He had introduced a male friend to a female friend over coffee and then watched them talk each other into thinking they had known each other in childhood.  He knew it to be untrue and, yet, by allowing themselves its sanctuary, they were soon able to share confidences he had never been privy to.  His male friend had cheated on his wife with a woman and his female friend on her husband with a man and a woman, and both had since been in and out of relationships in which their partners had cheated on them.  It took but minutes after that for both to feel that much in life had conspired to get them to each other, then and there.  That was when he took his leave, feeling convinced the two would be good for each other, and delighting in how they had expertly wound their way to the story that could hold them together in ways facts never could.

His eye happened to land upon her as the subway train pulled in to the station.  He watched her get on his subway car and move to sit four benches in front of him, but then stop herself and stand by the door instead — in an essentially empty car.  He thought it because she may have been feeling too tight in her clothes.  But, soon enough, she was bending over — he thought to look out the window, but she bent lower than that.  Then she straightened up and started to bend backward.  She took her body through a geometry of steps with her arms fully extended out from the pole she was hanging onto.  Her clothes could no longer contain her, but it would not have felt right to him if she had noticed that herself.  The other two tired-looking passengers had taken no notice.  After all, her movements had not been wild; in fact, their mildness probably camouflaged them from eyes not focused on her.  He had been watching her, and it took him time to see that she was conducting a strenuous series of highly-controlled exercises.  She carried her work with her at all times.  He noticed that even her exit at the next stop was on tiptoe.

He understood the scientific method better when comparing it to photography.  Each scientific inquiry is a picture snapped in a sudden moment, and the many pictures are then arranged into a collage to give shape to what may be true, or to what may have been true, or to what one can imagine could be true.  The only real difference is that one undertaking stays fixed and inanimate, mostly on paper, while the other devours most everything in sight — so it may amend and advance each thing, ad infinitum, to its limits and beyond.

His driver was making a hasty retreat to the country’s border, slipsliding up a sandy artery that snaked through scrubby desert.  Since his colleague beside him in the back seat had taken to living deep in the anxiety of the moment, he thought to let his body go limp and live only through his eyes.  He felt then a sudden need for a bird’s perspective.  His eyes could see, but they could not telescope enough to inspect the particulars.  Except for a dune or two, the landscape to the horizon looked unvaried to him, with nothing to focus on, nothing to really identify.  He couldn’t capture a sense of anything having been approached or passed by: it was possible the 4-wheel drive was merely drifting in place.  That’s when he felt his colleague’s anxiety seep into him, and it would have overtaken him as well had he not then forced shut his eyes.  If it wasn’t out there, he would then have to look within for that place to land safely on.

It took him a moment as he walked into the room to realize that the dress on display in a dimly-lit corner had a woman in it.  Near to a dozen people were amassed on couches in the center of the room, but she seemed to him to be in hiding in that corner, in her dress.  He slinked unnoticed to a chair deep into the opposite corner to study the room before joining in.  He had been invited, and thought now he understood why: it was he who had been keeping her waiting.  He had a different view of her from here.  An irresistible impulse to apologize had him then bounding over to do just that — I am so sorry — to a woman who turned out to be married.  Not one hunch he had had from across the room turned out to come true.  Yet, he came to feel that it was not for being late that he had apologized, but for what he had seen.  There had been the hair, her face, and her hands clasped against her belly — the rest, from neck to toe, was blacked-out by the very dark dress.  Her seemingly disembodied face that looked from where he stood to be suspended in darkness — with those hands holding onto each other — had let loose that urge in him, and he had followed through and apologized for the man who hadn’t yet come around to doing so.

They were both watching a girl woo boys with her poses.  He found the poses funny enough to laugh at, but his friend saw in them manipulations he resented.  His friend felt that she deserved what foul play came her way.  But look at her, he had said to his friend, she’s almost dancing.  Like it was for money, his friend snapped back, and that’s wrong!  He turned to his friend on the next tree branch, but got no look back.  His friend was glaring down upon the scene.  He saw then that he didn’t know how to see the girl as his friend did, or how to have his friend see her as he did.  And after the girl flaunted a whole-body shiver, he had to laugh loud at the goodbye kiss she threw to the boys before catching up to her friend, and to normalcy.  His friend was now glaring at him.  He tried to glare back, but gave up when he sensed how stark the gulf is between a different opinion and a different point of view.

On a busy downtown street, he stepped up to a street artist who was the art he was making.  The artist stood barefoot, still and silent, in a suit of money.  Any of the gathered could have peeled any number of bank notes off of him, pocketed them and gone on their way, knowing that the artist would have remained in his art, still and silent.  Instead, they stuffed bank notes into the gallon-sized hat by the artist’s bare feet.  The shoeless feet helped him see that each bank note peeled off would lay bare the artist’s nakedness.  Yet, each peeled-off note could also easily be replaced by bank notes left in the hat.  The artist was using his body to recycle money!  That would have been true, though, were anyone peeling bank notes off of him.  He knew he himself wouldn’t, perhaps to keep from exposing the artist’s naked body to the public?  To keep from exposing his own greed or perverse sense of humor?  Meanwhile, an onlooker knew to lift the stuffed gallon hat and separate a second one from under it — and this one the onlooker placed atop the cash bulging in the first one.  He never forgot that he had then turned his back and slumped away from the scene.  He had just been shown that wealth is not amassed behind the scenes but out in the open, and that people won’t expose the amasser for fear of exposing themselves.  Rather than the usual trick of turning art into commerce, the street artist had managed to turn commerce into art.

He had been handed a flower, its five petals so white he thought they sparkled.  Along with a social offering of cash for the bearer of traditions who lived onsite, he was to place the glistening flower as a personal offering at the feet of a statue of a goddess.  As tall as he, her feet accounted for half the sculpture of her.  He could not have in the moment been able to explain why he had not bent low to lay his offering at the bottom of her feet rather than to reach up to place it at the top of them, but, once done, the pilgrims queued up behind him cast down their heads as though to avert his searching eyes.  He had elsewhere seen pilgrims touch the tops of the feet of holy people and assumed the same for their statues, but the difference turned out to be as wide as the one between being visible to others and not.  He quickly corrected himself.  He retrieved his offering and placed the cash and flower at the foot of the goddess’s feet.  No eye lifted up to him.  Could they be offering him a helping hand instead?  He aped them and cast his own eyes down.  An enveloping sensation of being embraced flowed into him, of being nestled in collective arms, and he understood it, because his mind had in a snap switched from being respectfully curious to one offering its deepest respect.

Where possible and when needed, he would wait around for a low sky of clouds to float off and return to Earth a high and bright sky.  In that transition, he could feel the earth grow boundless, and could in no time at all feel himself a bigger self.

A family of six and a family of four were clustered on the beach quite a bit more than a respectable distance from each other — because, he felt, one was of color and the other not.  Both families wore similar swimwear and were stretched out on similar spreads.  From ice coolers that might have been the same they pulled out food and drink that would have been recognizable to the other.  He, from a parked car, watched a boy suddenly split off each cluster and dash to the shoreline, the both noticing the other only when one got there ahead of the other.  They seemed to him to be about to veer off in opposite directions when they — and then he — noticed a short low wall of wave coming in from just to their left.  Without hesitation, the boys made a dart to it.  They hopped and leapt through the water till it got high enough to drop them.  One emerged before the other, and he was naked.  Did he yell out?  The wave was just about upon them before the boys ducked and disappeared for too uncomfortable a spell.  The naked boy emerged first again, on all fours, a way up the shore.  He looked around and then suddenly flung his arms triumphantly high when he saw the other boy's arm thrust up from under water with his — the naked boy's — swimshorts in hand.  The naked boy ran to his swimshorts, grabbed them and threw them to the side in order to help the boy still struggling to get out of the water with his one arm still raised. He remembered later how breathlessly alert he had become, leaning forward in his car seat for what was to happen next.  The boys surprised him: they simply shook hands.  They had used both hands to shake the other's two before each had then very naturally stepped away toward his cluster.  He dropped back into his car seat with a thud, having convinced himself it was such vivid little moments that etch out a human heart, that leave an imprint on a mind's way with the world to a far greater degree than all the discussions and debates one has in one's years, that a handshake early in life can live in oneself a lifetime without ever the memory of it.

He had been driving mile after mile of open road, looking for a spot to pull into each time that he wanted to take a picture.  He saw a mountain peak embraced by clouds, a stand of trees huddled as a family, a hut all alone in a vastness, fields of rowdy flowers rising up into the foothills, but there had yet been no place to stop to allow him to snap a shot.  The reason seemed clear:  Everything from the road to the distant horizon was owned, marked with warnings against trespassing.  Years later, the image that still clung to him was of how he had then defiantly stopped the car in the middle of the open road.  He had been struck by the notion that to walk in such awe-inspiring locales was beyond fantasy for him, was delusional.  These scapes had become sights, were there merely to be photographed.  And, yet, how valued those pictures had become.  His relationship to Earth was through his snapshots of its vistas, and to not be able to snap shots was to be denied the only relationship to open land still possible.  He reached for his camera and looked back before stepping out of the car.  He saw distant headlights.  He saw distant headlights up ahead as well.  He had then lain the camera back down on the passenger seat, closed the door, and released the handbrake.  He was on a paved road after all, and he had to keep moving on.

He felt that the only true secret to always having new ideas was to listen for them without having any ideas of one's own.

He thought that his mother saw him as a good boy who could be doing a lot more to reach his potential.  He kept telling her that if he were already a good boy, he had then reached his potential.  This made her say that he belittled her with his fancy talk.  His sister thought he used being “good” to stay in small and defensive poses, that he was basically afraid of real life. His father thought he needed the help of professionals to reconnect to the stronger traits in himself that he long ago subverted with make believe.  These professionals took their time, and worked to create an equilibrium and a balance in his life — quite the opposite, he came to realize, to what he most required.  States of disequilibrium and imbalance were his occupational stomping grounds.  What he needed most was stamina — for, as it turned out, though work to do good was understandably difficult, the work to be good was an extreme act.

He was in a city he wanted to explore, with eight days of nothing else to do, and he got sick.  He felt a nagging ache and sapped of energy.  He had strength enough to explore the street outside if he had wanted, but instead, to still feel he was out and about, he ensconced himself on a highback chair in the hotel lobby.  It didn’t take long before he, with a question or two, began to compel tourists and natives to deliver complete reports to him on the sights and sounds and doings of the city.  Though he could have stepped out by the fourth day of illness and explored a few blocks around the hotel, or looked upon the city from the back of a taxi, he preferred instead to stay perched on his chair in the lobby and have the city be brought to him.  Tourists were starting to check in with him: he had taken to recommending places and experiences which had been recommended to him.  By the sixth day, he was even recommending to natives places that tourists had discovered.  For much of the last two days, people had taken to hanging around that corner of the lobby, attending seminars as it were on aspects of the city.  He had to return to work, but how eager he now was for his return to the city, to explore it as he had when, after years of listening to the lore, he had first visited his grandparents’ ancient ancestral home.

The pages of the journal left behind on his cafe table were blank, but there was a street name and the phrase Yellow Door printed on the inside of the lemon-colored cover.  An hour later, what he had thought would be a street turned out to be an alley, and the alley turned out to be steps all the way up a hill.  Colorful doors opened up onto the steps, and his directions were clearly to the yellow one.  He soon enough realized that he was ascending among dark-colored doors, and that the people coming in and out of them lived in more comfortable circumstances than the ones coming in and out of progressively lighter-colored doors higher up.  He had to stop.  Yellow seemed then too far up the hill to go to deliver blank pages.  On his way down, he did take a last look back.  He then had immediately spun himself around and strained and panted his way up to the yellow door — all because he could suddenly see that the yellow door up there was but one down from the white one.

He was looking down the arrival gate for the girl seated behind him on the plane.  Only at the last instant did he notice, passing just by him, the actor — his idol.  His worship of the actor was complete in that, when he pictured himself in his mind, he was the actor.  He couldn’t have conjured up an image of himself as he actually looked in the mirror.  But, then, here was the real actor, and his head was twice too big for his so short body.  How had that fact been kept hidden from him?  And where — sandwiched amid taller people moving guardedly in unison with him — was his commanding presence, the gaze that spoke, that suavity?  Just as he began to feel that he was being thrown back to a start line for a new “Who-I-am” self-image, the girl from the plane seat behind him had stepped up.  You lose something?, she asked.  Without an answer, he held her look.  Myself, he finally said.  She laughed, as at a flirt.  In such an instance, his actor-played self would have broken into an anthem of smart and jokey wooing, but, as he later would recall, he had quite simply laughed along with her instead.

He noticed a man in a worker’s uniform sitting on the edge of a chair near the front of the cafe, his feet set to pounce.  When they did, the man leapt to open the cafe door, to hand folded money to the first of two goonish-looking men ambling up, to nod — and to continue on to the parking lot.  The goons, though, stepped in, the one with two bandaged hands holding the door open for the one in crutches.  From a dozen tables over, he could see them place an order, but he couldn’t tell till they hobbled up to the center island that they were more his age, too old to be goons, and getting paid off.  He could see that their long black overcoats hid threadbare sweaters and pants, and knew they were homeless when he saw the man on crutches pour an unbroken stream of white sugar into his coffee.  He never later forgot how he had then pounced to his feet: perhaps, he thought, to catch a last glimpse of that man who — though made uncomfortably late — had waited, had handed folded money to help kickstart the day for two beaten-down older men, and for himself of course, and for the one who from the side had all along been contemplating them.

He often told a dated joke of an old villager who on his first visit applauded how advanced the city was to allow him to see the air he breathed.  It was one of the few jokes he could ever in any moment call to mind.  But, a woman behind a counter had stared at the haze outside glass walls and said, It can’t be a joke if it is real.  He stopped telling it as a joke till, months later, he heard it in his mind and laughed.  He realized he’d gotten thrown off by that woman’s response, for what is a joke if not when something dead-on real as pollution is seen as something other?

From two tables off to a side, he watched a very shy young girl hover around her father, touch his arm on the coffee table, snuggle against it, drop her head on his shoulder, all along trying to pull his eyes off a newspaper story.  At one point, she ran off, and stood in thought a distance away, but it too went unnoticed.  That’s when her head fell to the side, as if a key had been turned.  She paced her way back to her father as someone much older, and older still when she then locked a look on him.  Who was she?  Her mother?  She held the look, with hands now on her hips.  With eyes still on the newspaper, her father’s one arm did come off the table, wrap her up, pull her in — but she didn’t give in to it, she didn’t lean in or snuggle.  Instead, she let him hold her while, still a grown-up, she took a good look around the cafe — and directly at anyone looking back.  He watched her catch the coffee roaster’s eye.  She instantly broke out of her father’s grasp and ran with such energy to the woman with the beans that she almost ran into her.  He watched the woman let the girl explore the roaster, even finger through the beans, and felt surprised at the thought that the little girl had perhaps not been seeking her father’s eyes after all but rather his arm, seeking only to be held onto, long enough to summon the mettle necessary to step away and explore on her own.