Chapter Thirty Seven

Intimacy for a whore goddess.  I wanted to espy her as she snuck away from the village.  I wanted to learn the workings of her art.  She padded softly over the autumnal leaves, and before I could even draw a breath she and her witchery were in the forest, leading some other man astray.  The trees were tall and spare.  The air was thin.  And with each breath she sent up a cloud of smoke.  Along a game trail into the Absence.

        And when the man above his station returned again to the periphery of the crowd he found her waiting there, and her husband, occupied in another fashion, occupied in the writing of these words and in the dissemination of his lies, did carry on, and did carry forth, into the remote recesses of the gallery wherein the voices of the most loud are heard and then forgotten.  And when the man above his station reached out for her he realized that she had been a corpse the entire time, and that his own life would soon be at an end, lacking any reason to continue.

        The Indians of history will be aware of this fact.  They are dedicated to maneuvers that are nonempirical, and victories only in the past tense.

        While boys wade through textbooks and girls are made to sit.  A world so much larger than an enclosed reflection upon a piece of glass.  No matter how you might try to enlarge the view.  No matter how many powers of ten you might employ.  The crank might wheel and the wheel might crank, but at the end of the day you are looking into the same world, from the same point of view.  And she was not made free.  And neither am I.  Or are we?

        Beginning the Long Count, the Short Count, and the Great Season.  Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the unenlightenment.  Standing upon the shoulders of dwarves.  He would have thought the same but you were speaking another language.  It was late, so late, but she carried me through my ambitions.

        The umbrella smile continues, the same.  A long ago road through a country that is an island that may not be either a country or an island.  An umbrella hoisted to hide a smile.  A handsome man is waiting.  A lonely woman and all of the promise therein.

        Americans, to take the oil, to harvest the oil, to sell the oil, to exploit the oil, to rape with the oil, to overcharge the oil, to defile the oil.  None told them that the body of their goddess had decomposed beneath the earth on the shores of a long extinct ocean or perhaps it was a lake, and that this decomposition was indeed the oil they are continually seeking, ever since the dawn of time, ever since God imagined Arabs engrossed across the length of the wide wide Sahara or the Empty Quarter or else quartered in splendid cities long gone.

2

        Her smile from the line around a rock concert.  I am angry, so angry.  I am angry all the time.  And this asshole faggot in front of me, with all his smart remarks and weak faggoty ideas inherited from privileged parents.  I want to smash his face tonight.  I want to hurt him because I cannot have her.  

We were sitting or standing underneath the overpass, passing a bottle of Jim Beam back and forth.  David had just come along for the ride.  David was fucking weird, and liked weird music.  David would talk your head off about some guy named Philip Glass, but no one bothered to find out who Philip Glass was.  I say that David is a fag behind his back.  Most people believe me.

        “It’s like this,” I say to Dave, “We’re the greatest country in the world, right?  And I’m not going to hear you bad mouth it.  We beat everybody because we’re the best.  We have the best food, and the best bands, and the best everything.  And that’s why those fuckers in Vietnam and China and those other towelheads in the Middle East all want to copy our shit.  We’re fucking free, man, we’re fucking…”

3

        Israeli, if you prefer, and living on the West Bank.  Barbed wire hospitality.  She never tried to learn Hebrew.  She never tried to participate in their ceremonies.  She said she wasn’t ashamed of being Jewish.  She only said that she couldn’t see the point.  Hiding in plain sight, like many other Jewish things.

        When she took her course at the university, the course in World Religions, and when they talked about Us she pretended not to know what they were talking about.  She pretended to be no one for a semester.  She always sat in the front of the class, and when she wasn’t thinking of sleeping with her professor she looked over her shoulder at the halfway handsome boy sitting to the rear of the lecture hall, sitting by himself though every seat was full.  What could such a boy do for her, she wondered.  Could he help her keep a secret?

        Then, on a certain day she pretended to be a Mormon.  On another day she pretended to be a Jain.  Everyone was confused.  Everyone was out of kilter.  She talked about going back to see her sister wives in Salt Lake.  She talked about starving herself to death.  She thought of how her father would be ashamed to hear her disown everything he had taught her.  Thinking of her father in this way made her happy, because she knew that she was free.  Fucking free.

        Her father says that he is sick and she should come “home” soon.  She waits for him to die, and when he dies, she will not be moved.