He bought a room. The sheet at the top of the bed was folded over the rayon blanket like a tourniquet bound across a sleeping child. All the turned down sheets of every morning stopped here in meaningless indexes of passing life, stopping to be shown all at once like a wall of crown coffee filters, dated and behind glass. These are the places a new man runs to because they are furthest from the immaculate deed physically, and closest to the evaporation of loss. They are undoubtedly stages or scenes where some former version of him has left something for him to find, but only its shadow or its code, composed of the memory of the room and how to use it, through color or style, a memory that he has never formed, or the teichoscopic scent of a recent meeting in this room that heaves his chest. All the rooms are still. This one is dying a laminated death. The door was turquoise and when he looked just away from it the color flickered like burning salt.

John recognizes his intermediacy. As quickly as his role swelled he could easily augur with his fully armored wisdom that the preserved quality of smooth furniture and its symmetry were his pinnacle, his hinge point, and that if he stayed here in its embrace that his middle act was endless, but endless without change, with only the life cycles of the flies eating his dust, was not endless, but instantaneous and it made him freeze.

A cold cascade ran down from within his chest, behind his lungs, of the breaths he hadn’t breathed, from days before we recognized him turning liquid, and like liquid can never find in nature, somewhere for unmixed repose was unrealistic, or the feeling that his body is too full with cold blood that makes his fingers swell and his skin taut and dappled like black pudding. There are no stock ballpoint pens at the long desk in the room but he knows the only way to sleep or move, although he doesn’t want to move or dislodge himself, is to bleed out the cold dead blood settling in his feet, legs, and groin. He went into the bathroom to break a glass ashtray on the tile floor but found a small thicket of rusted pins and slender nails on the rough grout below the window sash like brown dark writing to be deciphered. It meant nothing. He sat on the toilet and saw through the obscuring rhythm of his routineless last days, pushing the most slender pins into is perineum and raphe, and the small nails into the undersides of his thighs and left them all there as clarity like fire lit his flesh. He had no drive to escape from himself but to sustain a raging stillness, like the mindfulness of death in dreams of immolation can welcome the being early to eternity as it lives on with the cold peace of its secrets. He closed his eyes, or noticed they were closed and traced his finger around the entered flesh where clotted blood found the powder of rust kin and when he pulled the lances one by one but quickly, the collars of blood remained bound to them and dripped them reddening into the toilet bowl, at first marbled with the immiscible blood clots but quickly a solid opaque form in the bowl that he let grow long as it could from the rush beneath him, not overflowing but rising high enough as the apertures scabbed to radiate a coolness on the undersides of his thighs and testicles.

He looked down between his gray legs. There was a black sky, the blood in the toilet not reflecting back out the ceiling and the room but singular opacity, like a wall before another room or half of a red egg-shaped stone cleft to a flat surface. John breathes shallow half breaths and looses his eyes for his breath to come easily and without context. Instead of the throb of blood against his tight skin, the waves were geographic, from his groin in empty rolling concussions between his skin and organs, giving him a center through which shadows could be cast.

John pulls the chair to the built-in desk. It is very long and unadorned. He sits with his chest pulled hard against its flat front and elbows and forearms on the desk with palms flat. A space manifests itself around him, around the John of blood and bile and black wax mucus that is the shadow of the skin, by the sagging in of the skin, a contraction whose spectrum runs from preening to starvation, but across John registers the immediacy of an historical object, something carved from a rock hill thousands of years before but not real or empathic until I finally set my eyes on it like a brown skull in a vitrine. Only in that hollowness are fear and panic actualized.

He would sit at the desk for untethered echoes of time fluttering slowly lost in a vast trance of a cloud, in the dullness of the textures under his fingers or the luminous plate glass mirror that was wide like a sky reflecting asphalt. Beneath the sky he occupied the space that was not sky and not earth. Every line running new from the nacreous downturn of his aged eye, before the luminance of the surfaces of the desk or the paneled wall, was out of focus, and looked far away as if he were wandering a high plain of skin colored grasses that smelled like sweet youthful breath, and gazing into the brown chafe of a shadow back behind him would emerge, as a clear window onto his heart framed stillness, the terror that in his short life he had already made some enormous irrevocable mistake that was even now escalating towards the forfeiture of his freedom and past. He couldn’t admit in silence what it was, although part of the terror was knowing that it was an act that was finite, elective, and fresh, and forgotten.

l’ll take it to the grave. A quotient of the guilt was paralysis. He liked the throb of healing, it was a beautiful product of pain, where the hallucinations of trauma taper into the living so gradually that the senses communicate in the narcotic language of hypnagogy. Then suddenly it is cold. There is a breeze in the room. Not a draft, a full body of a breeze, like someone in the room. End with something. See the motel room through someone else’s eyes, the mirror’s. Start over as a worm or a plant or as the breeze. Something short enough to hold onto for the whole of its breath, with one name, with one unchanging conflict. It starts at the tips of his fingers. What was a superficial burning becomes a full transmittance of his pulse, the merest quiver, unflinching, unslowed, and then a ring of coldness circles the knuckles where the fingers meet the hand, and the feeling in his fingers, the presence of the fingers, stops registering. He sees across his arm that they are there, but slowly they are something else, an indescribable difference, both from the table they rest upon and the hands that they fan out from. They aren’t gone, they just don’t belong to anything. The coldness then cuffs his ankles below the calf. It is slower. It isn’t visible beneath the table. He recognized in the elasticity of the cold sheathing him that he was not plunging into its grip, but sliding out of bloody warmth through the sphincter of afternoon’s meridians across his body into an empty room of which he became part. The dark plastic of the desk against his forearms became familiar to his skin. Is this birth finally. He is not first born into air and arms, as a man is, and perceiving the fullness of life as drowning in humors and the wash of space like ooze when the eyes are constantly released from parallel, that brings warmth outward to the skin and across the senses in a womb of age, he believes true birth, onto plastic and into hot shade with its cold blood, to be Death quickly. When feeling stops short memories stop. The lack of sensation washes over him, not in a wave of numbness that is recognizable in each region of his body dislodging, but in the cancellation of that relationship in the tissue of mind. Can the body be burned. Can the mind believe that the body is being burned. Can the mind believe that there is an end without there being one. As every moment ends, people, their detritus, and weather and time sneak into them.

A muffled voice makes plans through the wall. In each room equal to each showers run with the thick beaten water. A fan in a box below the curtain lays embalmed behind aluminum foil and celophane tape. A shadow running beneath the bed is a solid baseboard below the mattress where hangs dust in the nylon thread quilting of the relentless fabric flowers. No light falls on the bedside table or bible. Two swing-arm lamps share one switch to operate both bulbs presumed beneath the semiconical ribs of the shades, then a pad of paper and a package of paper matches across which the name of the motel or the name of the city appears to move with the tectonics of age’s magnetism. His arms peel away from the vinyl arms of the chair. The funereal pleats of a drawn curtain behind the desk drool beige light from their inverted hoods. Don’t bother to look at the sky out the window. What would it situate. He flowed down into those days as they happened. Before and after are guesses. They happen outside of him, in other people. A phone, tan with square gray buttons, looses its cord coiled with a soft skin of dirt twirled about previous fingers, below one red light.

He slid out of the smooth and dry sheath of a tomb into the moonless night like soil. There was a murderousness to setting the door shut, the sound killing a week-old dream, in which each name and face was still young. He couldn’t be young and old together. One always watched the other from some point in time. He was old in the dark. He looked old if he couldn’t be seen. He couldn’t breath while he talked low. His voice struggled to ride little bits of air that leaked out and fell uselessly into his new beard. He had nothing to say luckily. When he thought about an ending, was it quiet, did he find peace in the violence of chance, did he want it to announce itself like a business meeting, or did he want, from one second to the next, to begin the exhale, and be left at its beginning. The car was gone and the pavement and a gravel and dust yard vast and upswirling like steam even in the black fell away from the overhanging blue roof above the closed door into the earth’s shade and then to a glowing cloud island beneath an old pole light like a radioactive dye spilled beneath a table. He couldn’t gauge the distance in the dark as he walked, but immersed in the dark just halfway between the motel room door and the pole light, each out of the darkness seemed safe enough to run back to. He ran for the light and stood within its volume. The motel and even the darkness beyond it disappeared and around the frontiers of the light’s space a living wicker was described in the warp and weft of bats in ambling flight, their mousy sheen shown green like a waterspout of phosphorescent diatoms lifting you above the sea in their escape. A bat would intermittently loose itself from the edge of the light and dart like a sword through a basket into the cloud to catch a wilting bug. A bat came tottering unstoppably toward John’s face until its sonar read him and it stopped to turn in midair, its snout lolling before him and its leather wings air-braking and he called out, the first noise, the only shout I hear, from the edge, just in the darkness where he can’t see me and I wait a moment before pressing my face into the light, while he regains composure, breath, and decides if he should run back to the motel, which he can’t see through the light.

I said: Are you OK out here? It didn’t come easily. Words don’t, off my tongue, sometimes lately I feel like they take my last dry breath when I whisper in bed, and I choke. I heard you cry out. I’m not used to hearing voices like that out here, just night or sand washing from one side of the valley to the other. This is where I ended up from the final millions of contracting gyres. My room is right out beyond there. I can’t see it either, but I know the drab green eave line and the row of beige doors appears when I step back out of the light. The fan and air don’t work. I have a bottle of wine. Death Valley, empty but for me, seems to have gotten closer to everything, where I saw the edges of it rise up to chew the moon began the edges of another final tract where the decaying orbit of the deserts and plains and nations and highways around it tightened us in with distant rumbles and fogs of brown light slinking below the horizon but not moving. The other side of the light might be the whole rest of the world tonight, all equidistant from my motel room.

Look at the ravens. Those two swollen ones wheeling around the eave of the motel. They are each other’s shadows. For them, anywhere they set their talons during the day, that is their spot, across the whole world, they know exactly where they are at that moment, there is no relative, only points in a sequence and each point is the whole story, before and after drop away. It has to be constant stress right? No safe place, no destination, nothing to aim at except night when it can crawl into the crook of a tree branch and put its beak beneath its wing, and even then it is just where it stopped, where the night caught it, until its inevitably unkind fellows pound the night air to his branch to claim the spot from him.

We drink the bottle of wine from glass tumblers with thick odd bases that divert glimmers that run lost and diminishing on dry surfaces. The light in here is black with another person. I can see the ceiling in white shade like a thunderstorm on the highway arises endless from mountain to mountain of the valley and beneath it, not on the earth, but in the purely luminous darkness of day, fixed only to the relative passage of time and not the senses, light that reveals every follicle on my hand and arm and here every windsmoothed line on John’s face and neck but with no color or depth beyond the shade of the perimeter of the room and John was a black chiaroscuro that in my silent moments sometimes is taking the form of a black mountain. I look at him, to try to wrap myself around him.

I have a floating feeling with you, talking always gives me that distance from myself, except instead of floating between a dreamlike offset of the real world and my everyday real world, I am thrown off of myself on a sort of elastic tether into a strange made-up place, trying to grab things to hold me in place, trying to reconstruct something familiar, where time is independent of home and my clocks and routines, it is the symmetrical pull of the elastic, slowing to its limit and then yanking me back toward the rest of the world, racing by beneath me, I get to a tipping point where I stop being in the place and its time, its rhythms, and start projecting myself back into my habitual existence. It is at that point that the traveler says to their company, it “feels like the trip is over already,” fellow traveler. If I would have a kid out here, I would want it to be ugly so it knew that only I loved it. At night in the room when it was home it would feel secure like this was the only place on earth that it really existed and I would hold it in my arms as it was able to sleep and not want to wake up, when I would leave it to the world again. I would have to, so that home meant something.

As John is drinking, as he fills with wine his features become soft, recognizable by liquid, with the flat shimmer of quivering exposed fat, as he is slipping into the consciousness that belongs to the body. In the corners, those aren’t shadows, they just aren’t anything. John is becoming incapacitated, almost not able to lift the tumbler to his mouth and wine runs down his neck. It happens quickly, like a river becomes the horizon, and he breathes, slowly, all he can do. I listen to the ravens clicking in the bark of the pinyon as their beaks draw in distant sleep through the immense bowl of early morning. John whimpers, and looking into the brown darkness blindly calls out with the offkey moan of a downed cow that sees your shadow, Death, the center. To say that animals aren’t conscious of mortality is to ignore the primary fiber of instinct, of perpetuation, the urge of extension and the panic of yielding. How close is he to animal? He hadn’t yet become human enough to recognize that the panic in the cells of his body was the fixed struggle of the animal in the isolation of the human spirit.

It is hard to slap yourself back into this kind of consciousness. I think I had stopped being completely human. Human was an interaction, a structure, a logic that I relied on to create lineages, even the lineage of a look from one to another through the day, like a yawn, was dependent on some human structure, a distance between me and him that allowed us to see the whole context of the look. Now there are less of us, now we are in the dark, and with less space, and less time; I haven’t seen anyone in years, or acres of desert, and all in one breath I need to be human again.

Did you notice that everything has spiraled into this singularity, where you and I and the few others in a Brownian quiver try to occupy the same space, that we have shed more of the paranoia that drove us to withdraw into our own chambers of geography, maybe enough to let you flicker into mine, have you lost those feelings, have you come here that way? I only started writing when people started disappearing, as if each new emptiness was a word, I didn’t want to fill them with the words, because I didn’t want the people back, I didn’t want to bring them back, or invite them, or effigize them, I wanted to press them away. When I wrote it helped me recognize how I changed. Not like an index, but like an evacuation. There was something human in me that I didn’t want. A structure that had meaning only through its relationships, and as the words became unctuous, and slid past each other, or drooped, and lost their friction, or attraction, they weren’t words, or the echoes of conversations, but the passing of time alone, the unblinking afternoon sky, when the sand in the wind falls away and the empty air so inscrutably erases my recognition of my self as some thing apart from it, some thing eternally in motion that appears indivisibly still, like sunlight, so that I can just quietly pass into the paper white sand in a prolapsed breath, and completely animal, only alive, not dead, and only recognizing that. It was a struggle to recognize what I saw under the lamplight out there, you apart from a cloud, apart from light, sharing my footsteps for the desert’s pure sake. I could only reason that we were on a collision course, or asymptotic intertwinement, because we were the last in the contracting of space , by choice, or by ignorance, or silence.

A moment later, an instant, John pulled you from the car at the head of a prie dieu of a parking lot below Zabriskie Point and ushered you down beneath the moon’s blade again on scratched trails further and further below the badlands. He was out in front of you with his arm thrown back and his fingers around your forearm.

The exposure of the blue night for day was held in the spongy runnels of the formations where shade became shadow and the bruises on you both became sunken pits and the sky, showing like a torn pennant out over Badwater Basin at the outlet of this lowest wash was the deepest afternoon blue without context over the dim canyonette.

The large gravel turned under your feet and you leaned against the steeply sloping wall to breathe through the sand and phlegm. You breath crackled. John faced the opposite wall and you traced the seams of his jacket stitched in the blue glow as his shoulders tensed forward and then fell backward as he ran black falling his heels racing toward you until his back pressed against your chest and his ass against your pubis and his heels ground into the large gravel by the sound. The back of your head yielded slightly into the soft sedimentary wall and stopped, then your face began to yield to the back of his head, your chest to his back, and your burned soft flesh opened like the glistening tongue of a shimmering mollusk being folded open and wrapped around its own crumbling shell until it slid into John with oily force until he ground against the wall and not Jack any longer and his heels had dug through to the crusty mud below the gravel.

The valley was swollen with morning when he scrambled up the back side of the point and over to the car. He felt something like burning salt water rushing in a torrent down the back of the inside of his ribcage when he sat down in the driver’s seat.

Your features began to feel like applied dry cakes that cracked as you twitched. Fissures ran deep into your sinuses and into your mouth and throat and your breath sizzled as it leaked in and out of your hot sieve of a head.

You could have construed so many songs and omens from the dunes, so many metaphors to live in, but there was nothing in their movement beyond the pull of the wind. If this was the dark stretch of road where you lost Jacky then, it wasn’t now, and if the sand were to unfurl the peaceful grimace of his white teeth broken through the sunburnt scab of his face, it was becoming familiar, it would only prove your sensitivity to the return orbit of the arc you had inscribed in space by leaving him out here.

The low sun’s rays slowed in the air and battered your skin and features with a more throbbing deep heat that softened what had become dried and crusted of your appearance. You wish you were somewhere unfamiliar, for it to be possible to find somewhere unfamiliar, but from every point the same context closes in. The landscape features vary or decrease in their proportions, they edge closer to you as the sun draws down and the valley flattens and your relationships contract and anywhere you could escape to would be just a short distance from the crest of the dune. You see John moving closer to you in calculations of distance and emotion that follow the mathematics of panic and anxiety. He stood next to the car calmly running his fingers through his hair into the night.

As dusk soaked the valley and the light was inhaled back into all of the landscape’s crevasses, your face, digits, hair, and pronouncements of bone slide away like wet dust on glass and you walk slowly through the sand listening for sidewinders. John had lit the dome light of the car and it showed hugely in the complete darkness like a city as you crested each dune rolling towards the road.

No still quadrant of the North American spiral has consistently larger radii than the other three. Only in the shifting identification of the moment is there something greater behind and lesser ahead, and not in a connotative sense, because the crispness of resolution and focus can be seen as a crowning attribute of the trajectory, only if it is kept in motion, and only from a distance, and assuming it has a constant center.

Being spun outward from a drain, again on smooth feet, you arced into the cafeteria in cosmically expanding radius, to a table by the wall, and sat facing in the direction of your travel, at a barely acute angle to the wall, which, in repeated ellipsis, was dotted with telephones along its entire length. The mysterious dark planet of your own cloaked innards shares, in its overwhelming struggle against clawing yourself open for them once to glisten like your damp eye in the light, the latent desire to pick up a telephone after months of mute shallow breathing, in which you indulged yourself with the device nearest your chair which you drew to your ear, and as you breathed into it John looked across the room and its now empty flat of fatty flat tables. While the faces of his charges unendingly howled, four short tones, or one echoing, like the yawn of air being pressed out of a boot, and a distant receiver, all phones are distant, uncradled to a familiar voice, which all became, facelessly, demanding in a brisk but unaddled cadence, Who is there with you?

John, the man in denim with pressed white seams, walked toward you in the din that once again rose with the silent corporeality of a single body meeting itself, like the cat walking her back legs toward the front until she was seated, and without asking he was at the table. He sat with his back to the room and his knees touching yours.

You cleaned rooms at the Marquis,

Yes.

Or your were here in the hospital a while back, one.

Yes, both.

Are you feeling better?

A bit. Bit by bit. But the last step…

Tell me… a sinister silence, you feel…

That…

You…

See two worlds at once, or see the single one from two different vantage points, and, the sea rises…

You are…

Coasting closer and closer toward the horizon, but…

You know you…

Won’t be able to breach it…

Because you…

Know the point where it began, but not whether…

You…

Went downward or upward.

From where?

In Death Valley. The end of where single things overlapped,

Where you…

Left him to die.

You…

Need to know…

Which side of the horizon your are on.

Beneath the black ocean you swam toward the scent of the buoyant sky, the moon or pale, and with your lungs collapsing into the tightest curls of diminishing breaths, you touch the bottom. The lights of Las Vegas like knives in the side view mirror pulled out of your black flesh into brown breath and you and he were in the flying darkness buttressed by the last house in the sprawl, draining away itself in the paws of desperate coyotes, where there are only your voices across the highway of night teleportation.

He was the center.

He was the edge.

Of what?

Of himself. His life was like a closed circle that I encompassed the entirety of when I left him.

Maybe he is still there?

No, he couldn’t be, you can’t be unless you find a different center, for even an instant, to throw yourself into a different spiral.

Why couldn’t he have?

Because I was his center.

So what’s inside the circle?

Me, and then you, and then someone else. But really, for him, it doesn’t exist, it barely does for us.

Is this the darkness you remember that night?

You can’t remember darkness.

So you don’t expect to find anything?

No. That night was different. A different black. His.

So why come back.

For my darkness.

Arriving back in yourself is the feeling of something dripping, of the slowness spoken through a stopped up ear, of distant thunder that isn’t thunder, of never knowing where the irritant is, but feeling the irritation like shorn skin under clothes, and new cats sleep with their legs jutting out in a posture that would stiffen or paralyze a man, with their paws over their faces in the most minute curl of a being, all the love that any human could give in their most tender dying looks, and feeling the car still moving, you know it is hours before sunrise as headlights begin to linger but never arrive like unspoken words you know he is saying in the dark. Sound only grew from inside you in a way that made speech patterns not align with mouth movement and you assign effete sounding male voices to all speaking roles including train horns and creaking doors. People like him only speak when you can see them so they can hypnotize you, the headlights like the edge of a written word without a center, words don’t need to complete themselves to linger with you, or control you.

You will see. Nothing. Then it will be over. You’ll see. Then you will go on. Without it.

Your hip was sore from sitting through the night. Darkness to darkness, no light, Atlanta to Death Valley, one long night drive, miles dripping into you and distances contracting, the universe grows smaller, but unrecognizably changed until you move through it again, and for miles, or minutes, the lights of Stovepipe Wells loom joining the mountain-masked gibbous moon in describing the dunes to you with lines for the first time, rather than sounds when they sang in the dark, and you choked inside, where lost landscapes hold stronger sway over the memory than photographs or names, in the dark star fog where those sands had shifted over Jacky, you saw in the length of your fingernails in the moonlight the ends of a man clawing his way out of you.

The car glowed green in the motel parking lot. You could see, from within, and before sunrise in the arid ice blue dawn, a drifting person or two pushed open the door of the cafeteria of the old motel compound where light the color of preserved wood steeped. John bought a room, it was still hot from the day long ago. You turned on a ceiling fan’s stationary spin and the wildly contained air conditioner and slept like a hum or vibration while John sat in a vinyl chair picking at his scalp and tracing his hairline, still a stranger, where we are at night with others, until day plying wide the window to accept the desert panorama birthed John into himself, as you saw him, in this setting, for the first time since the room below the hospital, as an unselfconscious body, a silent tenuous benevolence belonging to your chapter, and a bridge of sorts, across the sand, or over the night. As he slept with his throat arched two ravens strode across the low wall of the arcade outside the window with their beaks inquisitively opened.

When it is full reared morning, for the first time in so many turns, you then were born into the day with its promise, and with breath and with fresh emptiness that allowed the dustless air of the valley breeze to swell within you as you pulled open the black door of the shadow motel room. John awoke.

Let’s find him. We start at the bottom.

You exhale audibly and the ravens cock their heads. The lowest point. Badwater Basin is white death endless, no more alive than anywhere else. The shadow of the east wall of the valley inked a cool wash between etherous damp past full of people, swarms, hiding in vast communal groups divided by windows and curtains and this walls, and the white hot present, with ten acres to a man. You stepped into it with salt crunches and whether vision or memory, you named off the dozen people you had seen in the past five years. All the years were silent, but this was physical, an inconsistent daylight silence muffled by the entire valley of captured air. You could hear your heart and stomach in your ears, and in your swelling fingertips and your thoughts spoke the words of a removed man, a character whose separate reflections were more clear to you than a logic you tried to assemble parallel to them for why you were standing baking in the flat sun with John’s shadow nudging your feet. And as if it were easiest, the man thought about death, or its opposite, white death, a forever sustained brink. Life wasn’t the opposite, it was part of it, it was a changing surface upon which death also existed, but what he thought about was a pinnacle, or rut, in which he neither lived nor died, but sustained, and looking at terrain level across the salt flat, let the beige sky happen to collapse all times into one faintly pulsing rhythm.

You two returned to the car and you felt again as if you were leaving someone out there in the white or the black, bodily only a whisper inaudible, but a man instantaneously formed inside you, unnamed. When you name a man, or the thought of a man, he is quickly as whole and beheld as the sun behind clouds or the mystery of the earth’s center, and where he lay continued to sink even as you left it, and things in your past continued to change long after they had been fixed in your memory.

Do you feel anything yet?

Not here, just to speak.

Your chest began to bilaterally contract. Both lobes of your rib cage unable to yield at your sternum bowed. The fault lines all around are silent until their potential energy is able to yank one side into submission below the other.

John drove north, up out of the flats, back toward Stovepipe Wells. As he drove it grew closer at a rate faster than that at which you had approached. The entire emptiness captured in the valley, empty of sky and air, was, without content, a homogeneous solid, that once you were within it, performed after its own principles. It was a delusional mechanics, that is why outside of it, in Atlanta, or wherever, you became fully apart from it, the mechanics even of your memories born there did not function without its dimensionless fluid. So distances became emotional measures, coiled up by fear or cast out by longing, but not in a relative sense that those experiencing the tedium of the road or the sprint of love might recollect, but a physical diminishing in which time pulsed regularly, night and day spun, but the nation’s topography was cinched.

The sense that you are no longer sick may never root your vision.

As you arise through still waves of your senses as if you are growing from a smaller man inside, coming closer and closer to the skin in lessening muteness of the throbbing it transmits, but never quite to the surface, only enough to see what you might see with rigidly parallel eyes fixed together in space. After some hours you hear footsteps in the silence and a fingertip trace across the doorknob in the hallway and cascades of silent televisions down the hallway and trees aflame in the end of the day with wordless lullaby and when dark sets the not quite white wall you still face is brighter than the moon and emptier. Where it meets the floor is a straight line severing space. You notice the absence of the old cat and her striped stockings and her smile in profile and the messiness of your vision through her fur on the wing. She couldn’t have escaped, but slowly disappeared, waiting for you to stop her.

You were afraid he would come to your door, open it and see you standing against the far blank wall, that you might meet him on too familiar grounds and be too revealed, so you escape on foot with the hospital booties under your shoes back to the hospital where, if they were dead, or confidential, or green in the indirect pallor of sickness and fluorescence, people leave there traces. The more you chase transience you recognize the impossibility of not chasing it. The chase is the inevitability of reflection on the things you have left in your wake, the sacrifices you have made to consider yourself from recognizably different vantage points, over your own shoulder, but never eying a destination, only backward.

Different events punctuated what wore on to feel like a continuous thread of footsteps, if they could be passed off as such, barely lifted from the carpet, terrazzo, and asphalt, that your legs chased only to keep you from falling into nurses or propped up besheeted waxworks that might have brought you more attention than the efficiently empty and wide hallways would allow. There was never more than one person between you and the single vanishing point in the distance, and they were rarely the same person. The hospital was so large that the variables of shift, day, ward, and rotation, when you speckled upon their manifestations, presented you with an endless cast of monochromatic figures to impress in the hallway with your distracted purposefulness. You didn’t watch them long enough at awkward proximities to see if they were attentive to you and after they passed or you passed them or you passed by each other you stopped and watched over your shoulder to wait for their return glance, what you would use as a confirmation of distance, but they always found a door or side passage. No one ever walked the entire length of a hall. Although your beard grew and was caught in your mouth and grew into your nose, you began to grow suspicious whether you had returned fully from the syncopic hinge or whether the fluorescent light and the continuous green tile of the long hallways absorbed you in a way that only other people could register, although their recognition of its properties upon you was only possible through their inability to locate you in space.

You still slept in your apartment but never turned the lights on or walked there in the daylight. It was a dark secret. Your routes around the hospital swept outward over the days like an archaeological dig or the pattern of a masochistic jigsaw puzzler, from its tetherless core, windowless and still, the two-souled perpetual night of the morgue’s environs, the heart of the hospital where bodies go into recirculation, to the steel doors of labs and private rooms with small windows all flanking wide intestines of hallways with continuous plastic chair rail moulding that you sometimes tapped your finger along every few steps to hear the punctuation of the living across the hum of the fluorescent ballast, until weeks having gone by, you loosed your stroll from the ceramic subconscious of the hospital to its periphery where hopeful and ruined people passed with whispers of confusion through consistently indirect sunlight carrying mimeographed maps of the hospital layout, a collection of pavilions interconnected in some way that never revealed from within that it was not a single partitioned tomb until a morning, having appeared from your apartment refrigerated by the blue dawn onto the hospital campus, you began to walk in a wide loop around its periphery, and could see the markedly different buildings, infrastructure, and parking decks in various states of age and stylistic obsolescence. Where the sky and trees became visible between them similarly dressed people gathered, some crying, others shuffling in small groups that seemed reproduced in each furrow as if they hung at the hub of a radial pattern whose empty spokes you flickered past. At the far side of the complex, below a gravel embankment that rose up to a railroad track you found a steel door ajar at the base of a windowless cinder black wall that stretched up and across the breadth of the ridge without detail.

A train roared by above at the bend and looking north up the track before the curve you could see it lining up into the distance straight and imminent, barreling directly toward you before expeditiously hitting the bend and diverting away from your finale, and as the train kept plummeting through and the leading edge of each car hit the bend you felt anew the sensation of smothering in tons of steel. The hooting of the engines didn’t jar you like voices in motel rooms, but the vision of the countless wheels sliding clearly along the rails southerly, where the space between the wheels, a space of time sliced through by wheel after wheel bore in each split of second the cleaving your body in twain, head from body. It was the fear of no control, of the accident, the fear that you are not finally in control, and that the seconds that that train carried beneath it, were the same seconds that separated you from it, and you from the someday inevitable. The words lose their gut; you turn your back. It wasn’t you that diverted it but the tracks. In the segmented distance the sucking sound of the last car was audible in advance, as much as the last care was visible, and as it drew nigh the physicality of the roar increased and bore on your ears and its proportional increase terrified you of the approaching apogee more than a feeling inside might have drawn your senses inward and as you focused on expanding yourself outward against it the train was gone leaving a vast hole in the air, a place more empty than if it had not existed, but filled suddenly with grey light and a green spear long and tenuously diffusing across the gravel from the ajar door.

You felt it dividing you in all future moments enormous, containing all people in rabid sleep and smaller than yourself with your flesh dream inward, or more appropriately pressed inward by the anaerobic stomp of the train’s vacuum and by a tenderly automatic squeak that had the irregular rhythm of code. As you focused on the squeak it began to yawn, not growing louder, but filling its place as the single voice of morning. You were inseparable from it. You wanted to be deceived, pressured, consumed, enveloped, drawn into all the separate worlds of banal morning realizations at once, misconstrued, misappropriated, stricken with etches of ink out from your eyes to your fingers, and indirectly obscured, like the new moon, or a ghost is from life.

You pushed open the door swimming into the room with aquamarine dampness in the air that was electric filling a space not much taller than a man erect but slouched keeping the man who occupied it, sunken there, partly burdening his knees on the geographic stains of the concrete but also back assing the rhomboidal wooden crate that he rocked in a metronomic arc tasting the air with his eyes as if he was reading a script written into it or intently transcribing coded grave wisdom from the fluorescent lights, some gaseous instructions wrote you out of existence and passed right through to the silver sunlight and the cinders. His eyes widened and he pulled the skin of his face across his teeth and neck.

The movements that created his rocking sway were boneless, and although he was slender there was a cool gelatinousness to the thickness of his flesh that in that moment, in yourself briefly, placed you in front of a dated studio photograph of an aspic molded salad in the dubious lighting of some childhood’s brown kitchen.

The room was like the space behind a waterfall, useless for anything but hiding. It had an electric verdant odor.

His face was proudly present in the liquidity of the room’s light. The features were singular beneath his skin, but as he rotated his head from side to side stretches of wrinkles, finer than the grain of the light, cast a scrimshaw of delicate webbing that from certain presentations looked as if they held together some sort of soft apparatus with built up features over an unforgiving armature.

Although the moment was mediated by his distraction and the paste of light your skin felt a dusting of warmth like a paresthetic leg prickling out of tonic immobility whose awakening you owed to him.

He faced the door inscribed in black denim. Black liquid of immovable viscosity doubled beneath him.

His eyes tracked from corner to corner of the room, across you standing there, with the light directly overhead aligned between you as the darting of the reflective whites of his eyes from side to side of his face. He could barely keep his head up. It fell loose back behind his shoulders when he periodically shut his eyes and lolled there in the stupor of an awakening illness.

So many secret places exist in each transposition of narratives, bricks fall loose, words are misprinted, the sun breaks through illuminating dusty passages where you might have passed entranced by normalcy, you stumble to the ground fortuitously, or terror turns off your logic, you pretend to have family secrets, and you fill the empty well that becomes a smear to others, sometimes a crease in the air, sometimes a tic on your face, but never a visual destination or bearing on the compass of conversation. You and them stumble into each others secret places and in them, seeing the eerie glisten of the skin’s silent adhesive, you make your own secret place in its mystery where all the travelers are blindly collocated. The opportunities in higher level probability infrequently present themselves in the infinity of secrets, yet here you and he were in the purity of ritual, in the happenstance of geography, with absolute comprehension and empathy for this momentary private tragedy. Which I understand from a distance to have been inexplicable.

As his pupils crossed yours in interlocking tunnels connecting black soot stained catacomb territories, the purity of satanic introversion opened to you like a warm heaving throat inhaling the fog that was your body’s material. When they passed you felt the terror again of corporeality, and it swelled again and again in the text of his gaze until you felt the power to step away, feeling the gravel and cinders in the arches of your feet and cleavage of your toes.

You stumbled through cinders and long grasses divided and on rounded feet like bearings, your heartless panting swayed you like bellows in a stand and you rose again into yourself from where you and he had been with a conversation whose constellation was footsteps and voicelessly and without trail or immediate history to grasp, you were deep inside the hospital again, through a spatial warp like a coin operated billiards table and you sat in a ganged row of orange fiberglass chairs outside, or inside, a windowless metal door, where you were unable to move from the black, skinless, magnetized posture that trussed your limbs in stung obdormition. Another waystation to tell the story so that causes like births, deaths, chance encounters, and pandiculated admissions could continue to transpire as you loitered without feature. It took a mutability and deathlike stillness that matched yours to dislocate the centrality you felt fixed around you in order for other events to unfold prior to your reintroduction.

Blowing through the warm nonsense you felt cold black air filling your lungs and making you darkly buoyant. It was night in the dam that had been erected in time by your collapse. It wasn’t a dam in time that collected all of these visions into an inscrutable oneness; it was the opening of yourself to begin retaining what you passed through, and instead of it washing past you as it had, you were overcome with the inability to sort the rapidly populating clog of momentary blossoms.

There was no empty space in which to see the night where it lives in framed holes in the sky, but you felt it in your lungs and on your tongue and you felt the release of all of the air in the world let out into the sky and away from your chest and felt yourself gently rising from the foam mattress of the gurney. Did you see things in it? Did you make out things constellated from the glimmering edges of overlayed cells in your visual retention? The visual manifestation of the text, in your attempts to free yourself from the individual moment as it rode forward unchanging in its vacuous carriage, you ended up physically trapped in every moment, your body, the same body innumerable, stuck in the scenario of every second of sensory consumption. The things that you began to see as you grew accustomed to this new perception were untrustworthy because they seemed to be aggregations of moments of other things that had become completely lost in the stack and although you learned to recognize familiar things in the transformed milieu, you were not growing able to believe in them, or believe in yourself relation to them.

A chilled fog of light was captured by the ambulance. Every surface was lit and fell into singular alignment through your immobilization. You chewed children’s aspirin and the black back window became illuminated with the receding skyline as you went north. You recognized it with the skepticism with which you would weigh, upon seeing yourself as a child in the street through a store window, from a parallel world, the forgotten poses and gestures against your own reflected in the glass. The empty highway looked like your entrails loosed into the night as you were pulled backwards through space.

You are fixed in position in relation to the small window. The way the city unspooled behind you made you feel destined. You knew your destination and not recognizing the buildings, lights, and reflections that became the foundation for it did not diminish its finality. Any terror in the sensations that had pulled you to the floor had been let out into the past like exhaust in a steamy cloud through the dark.

The hospital is across the street from your apartment tower. To leave your driveway on foot you would pass its yard where spinal patients were immobilized on gurneys taking in the sun to whiten the greyness of their eyes. Behind the yard from the street, and the water oaks that probably creaked in the night where the hospital stood in orange darkness, you sank into the mattress in a windowless private cell in the emergency room. The lights were dimmed and you were administered morphine directly into your IV port. You weren’t in pain and it shut nothing down in you. It was a wash back to just beneath the surface, the spring at the end of the tether, and you felt nausea in your body rising and then felt your teeth loosen and your blood flow fully around them, covered in nerves and pulsing, as it warmed your mouth. The same warmth swelled from the walls of the room and you could no longer distinguish the sources or limits of the fluid sensations. Immediately next to you from out of brown pillowy shadows a man’s hand towels at the corners of your mouth and an archipelago of features, as if partly arisen from thick old coffee is traced by the sea green light of the equipment in the room. The features could belong to separate faces, each in the same place at different times in the dark, but when they pose or express, they do so together as a divided unit or a stranded family. His was a face that contained several faces in its singularity, one beneath the edges of the next. As his face diminished into darkness you felt again as if it was you being pulled away or sinking. The morphine made your skin roll in waves and as soon as it tingled out of you with the pricks of oxygen pixelating your flesh back from its beige flumes you were walking the louring dawn in hospital issued booties.

Your steps printed lightly like a partially conscious scrawl. Once cleared of the immediate threat to your existence in time, in a world of motions you knew, and started to slip back towards it, you were comforted and at peace with the interstitial medium of seeing things through daze, recalling the peacefully distracting burn and nausea of the morphine, and walking shoeless through the dawn in a parking garage, somewhere apart from what that Friday morning had habitually or had in store for you in its routines. That dazed look of the recovered, of the sack of a human being breathed out of the doors of a hospital, that limbo of their consciousness and internalization of time is a recognizable feature in their appearance. It is almost enviable because of that time, you know they are seeing something completely different than you, in their own fragility they see the fragility of the things around them, the sunrise, all of the other lives with their momentum, skating across the underpainting of the stable life and time they have been plucked from, but see slowly rising into place.

The floor of the parking garage was coated with a sealant that made it look wet and you walked across it with faint disbelief as the booties stayed dry. You carried all the layers of clothes they had found you wearing in a drawstring bag that hung in your hooked finger and swung heavily. You wore only the broad soft hat, loose grey trousers, a worn flannel shirt buttoned in two distant holes, and the hospital booties. It was a short walk back through the service roads of the hospital, across Peachtree and to your apartment. You moved around the buildings and they seemed smaller and worn down where they grew out of the earth.

As you step out under the sky you taste the bloody imprint of teeth on the inside of your lip as if you had bitten from the inside, and a swelling cut in your moustache that feels like a smooth burn. Still everything lags just behind you like the dislocation of the senses found in deja vu, but you and your physicality are the latecomers, you pass into each moment as its own history as if a crew of men are erecting the next follies just over the horizon as you approach.

It is terrifying in a silent way, like awakening in an open grave on a hillside, to open an apartment door in daylight having not had a night to deliver you. The cinching together of days rivets your temples and the spots where your jawbone connects and self-posed questions about the lost night and the arrogance of the morning sunlight diffused through broad dusty clouds provide an inclusive name for the host of other absences you can’t immediately register within the single room.

You lean your belongings against the wall inside the door and sit in the chair facing the blank wall perpendicular to the window and breathe in slow convulsions through your mouth while turning your head slowly from side to side.

In the blowing air you walked to your apartment through the immense hush of the vacuum left in the absence of your written words, your dry voice, the desert still air. The night silent of voices so that every creak in the air shocks your heart like a distant gunshot tamps the impulse to live backwards into the words that name the sounds. They were all gunshots. You have cultivated an ear for expressive quiet sounds. The gentle pat of folded laundry falling onto the stack or the shiver in the joints of the stretching cat standing to acknowledge you, creates silence, even through the throb of unfamiliar solitude. They don’t overwhelm it, but they create a small spatial echo of peace.
You bought spiral pasta and a can of corn downstairs and ate in the window. When you sleep you don’t see the space of the silence as you thought you might: a broad valley with tangible air, where space and container are one, like molten glass filling a sand mold. You have been conjuring the feeling around your face of emptiness, like a silent shell to your ear.

In the apartment again you disappeared. The cat had shed so much fur in your absence that you could hardly see your arms stretched before you. You knew in inarticulate sparks what you meant, what form the expression of your physicality would take, how it would be uttered, its tone, ethos, rhythm, you knew how it would be measured and what its perimeter would engage and what it would envelop, it was always changing through the spiraling and undulating phases of a liquid galaxy and you could never stop it to live its representation, or to put your arms through it and bring it into language. You felt like if you screwed up your eyes enough a face to match yours upon would turn up out of the fog of scuffed cornea, borrowing colors from the bland corners of the room. You saw a bare lit window in the facing leg of the cruciform building. Deep in the blank apartment the minimal contours of a man’s familiar face like wax were pulled out of the room’s light into the hallway by three men’s shadows. You turned away and searched for something real you could have done for him. There was no gulf between you. When you end, he ends. You are continuous beings. You experience the dizziness of the night together. You foresee the hours ahead in which he would tremble in the too bright sun of fast morning, knowing you would come back for him, like he would have for you, but you didn’t, and the skew life you had in that hopelessly exchanged look didn’t seem to add up to anything that excuse the way you left him alone. He had skin that disappeared in sunlight, it became the sky.

That winter you were receiving hearing aid and retirement information in the mail. You start dressing like an old man. The way you had fabricated your insides. It was a disguise to force your skin to catch up to your flesh. There was nothing recognizable in your experiences. One thing passed the next and all of the days sat atop one another, obscuring their predecessors and drifting like a boat frozen into an iceberg, your hair and beard frozen into place around your blue eyes and peacefully toothy snarl.

You layered on your clothes on a dim winter morning with longjohns, flannels, sweaters, cowls, mufflers, gloves, a wide soft hat, and at midday on the swept bricks of the plaza downtown, sat in the crook of a wall and read your written logs all the way through. The sky drooped between the skyscrapers and was siphoned towards you and enswirled the bases of the buildings in the same soft oiliness of the cat fur bunnies that overtook your room. You felt like a pill in a bottle. You read what unfolded in stipples as a vaticinating argument you once had with yourself siding against your existence in time and your existence in your self, it was a wandering verbal picaresque catalog whose implicit protagonist never moved from a single apartment and prattled in a voice with no body and fifty thousand hooked black legs. They reached out from beneath a white door to a locked room and began tickling down your throat, enough to make you smirk at first, but after hours in the cold they had filled your lungs and run scaly beneath your clothes. The voice didn’t say anything, it just bore you down into the bricks. You looked up from the ground into the gentle sound of the rattling dry leaves, wanting it to sound like the pollarded plane trees in breeze but it didn’t. Your feet are blood heavy and heavy shod, and you fear about that the involuntary perpetuity of your circulation has been corrupted. One-footed pigeons swelled and stumbled across the bricks.

You make your way back into the belly of the hotel. The cold air sweeps in through an unseen vestibule with an ozonish timbre. You consider when you began to exist. You at that moment and you walking to a beach as a thunderstorm sweeps across the Atlantic let the light from the low ceilings against the ribs of the hollow clear your skin. You are polarized, there, in the past, and here, in body, experiencing the past. The cleavage allows you to exist around the middle ground which is necessarily erased. Before him and after him, but not having to live through that short passage. You have forgotten that you chased the emptiness here, and then were stranded, because time begins branching out from that chasm of choice in divergent directions collocated.

The roil of stimuli around you stopped immediately, only in the nearest pocket of air. Beyond it people chased their voices with an impression of their certitude within the motions that their hands followed and their eyes tracked that came in framed spurts, well lit, with the intent of an analogy. Behind each act, each breath, was a question of what you wanted it to be. You reached to your breast pocket, but inside you the black and gray blood flowed down your back from a pulp of an anatomy, into your legs and out of your head and suddenly the air upon you was filled with a drowsy salon of faces.

You stayed inside during the day with no treatments on the windows watching people come and go. You saw a man beaten with a stick. You saw a single-engine plane fly into a distant tower and you watched the sky with suspicion from the fifth floor of the brick building. The cat sat in the window the whole time, watching the stacked windows across the far leg of the cruciform building for other cats or watching back into the room with her tail curled into a hook at the end. The sound of her blood filled the room. Tall buildings were erected and the forests were consumed by a sea of railroad tracks, all running parallel through a gulch from jamb to jamb of your window. A clammy motel grog whose pathology is the single room medicated the sunlight that happened into the apartment swelling your eye sockets like ice slowly splitting your skull open.

The changing moments passing by your skin didn’t hoist time across it with them, it was the passage of a still world over your moving body. You registered its changes against the index of yourself but it was recorded inside, where you began to decay, but the shell of you that touched the world stayed immutable. You found ways to register those changes in you onto the things around you, to crash into them with the hopes of injuring yourself, of breaking your skin with the schism you rent in the fabric of stillness.

You took a job you could walk to, on the housekeeping staff at the hollow hung whale of a hotel downtown. Each midmorning you are in a wide basement hallway lined with doors. One of the doors would have led outside, but not one at either end of the hallway which were both occupied by elevator doors, one of which had brought you down, the other would take you with your cart already stocked of soap, towels, sheets, newspapers, pens, and blank Marquis stationery, from a painted berth scuffed to a blur on the smooth floor. The elevator only fit one person and one cart. You were far behind women in line at the elevator door and waited for them to take their turns on the elevator before being taken up.

The double strings of doorways to the rooms on each floor are rent by a wide chasm described by the far arcs of slung circles that reaches all the way down through each floor. An entire wall of doors forty stories high is visible from every door on the opposing side. Women in grey chino dresses are stationed in degrees of foreshortening at their carts on several of the floors. It is impossible to see if there is anyone on your side. Echoes of groups in the lobby become the buried song of sand inherent in the air of the chasm. Glass elevators bedecked with clear spherical lights sail like driverless cars.

Housekeeping, tinkles in an amusical glossolaliac chorus that is followed by the opening of doors seen and unseen. You chime in and open a door.

You found the scattering of identical rooms through the day in variations on the disarray of their same contents. With the sheer curtains drawn the rooms weren’t differentiated by views and the sun filled each room like packed cotton, old and still around the abandoned crescendi of the life that had been concentrated there. Never righted by the occupants, this disarray is the only completed act in those lives. Your methodical struggle to return the rooms to a state of preoccupied emptiness erased the attempts of the occupants to register the entropy of their lives on the stability and efficiency of the hotel room with their disguise over its archetypal neutrality. But they never saw its ultimate loss. You found and recomposed points in the experiences of the inhabitants in each regressive pass, until the embalmed interruption as he turned to walk from the room is again the latent expectation and the giddiness of an untouched room.

These outlines of a person are reduced to the significant peaks of habit in their briefly staged lives. Each one of the accidental juxtapositions that you find is initially a tableau of mystery, at the end of the act but before its resolution, and you allow the narrative to unfold the chain of effects interrupted by the person’s departure as a sunlit hypothesis. But it is dust. As you work, traces and suites of actions are undone, finding the narrative in earlier undecided states, until the host of rescinded actions makes it impossible to unite cause with even the provisional end whence you had entered.

In the evening you brought pillows into your windowless kitchen and wrote lists of the things and settings strung together into prose chasing your recent memory back through the day until you met that lost morning with the next. If you fell asleep you would take the bus out in the morning where you kept writing. The black characters were fastidiously small. You made a pile of string rather than a string of words. Each moment of the day had its analog here. You didn’t play them out in order but you captured them all. You had a visual gestalt mosaic of the day as thoughts, complete in your mind, but tenuous as a granted wish. Every bit, each day breaking into finer grains, was a free visual impression tiled together into a silent and tepid model of cavern networks you bored with your eyes. Specific nouns, usually in the floret of adjective spirals were spun together with the connective tissue of prepositions reaching out to define the edges of the day’s space, but lacking verbs or adverbs that would kiss them to life. It was still and solely visual. You could see into it, but not back out. Voiceless faces exchanged looks without context, meals without taste posed, nothing animated, shadows without shivers, stalled men forever in thought, finished structures on the horizon and landscapes immaculately conceived.

In the hotel, in the action of it, you were aware of your presence there in large increments defined more by the duration of an action than the passage of a character or the masonry of impressions. When you were released from duty like an awakening newborn it was a consciousness without antecedent. You knew that it was part of a continuum by the familiarity of your body and the familiarity of the lost feeling, a familiar amnesia, but you emerged from the blackout only long enough to find yourself again in your kitchen alone as the cat dreamed of running through clover in the black window.

In the basement passage a woman in a grey chino dress with her hair tightly pinned to the back of her head leaned with her palms flat against the block wall behind her. The fluorescent lights down the hallway were absorbed into the colorless paint like the still glow across an empty city highway where green things in the landscape appear more as the surface where the light, as a volume, ends, rather than where the solid begins. She watched you slowly pass as if she had been painted over and her flat eyes tracked you like those of a haunted portrait. An empty cart was stopped against the wall across from her and you pushed your cart between she and it. Several dishes in decreasing size were stacked on the floor by a dirty sheet which ran stiffly up the lower part of the wall. A wisp of air from the slot between the elevator doors fed out as the elevator shuttled past and was inhaled in the vacuum it left.

Babe, it whispered, are you starting or finishing?

Starting. The cart’s full.

Is that your cart back there.

You look back at the empty cart behind you. It’s been there for days.

Each room was different but the same, the same staged life with different human residue: a bed swirled in the vortex of a failed sleep aid insomnia, rafts of hair across the vanity counter into the sink from solitary dreams of woolen forest men, the smell of yellow skin and greasy cardboard, a bundle of furniture tracks to a toxoplasmotic bunker amassed against the immovable bedstead, the small turned back coverlet sheathing a sick child, and in the daylight and after the days all manners of black stains, perfectly beneath rutted furniture, still, flat and deep in an ashtray, and a sticky lamination awash across a bathroom floor in which you could see your face as you strigiled it into a bucket. It was pure and even and impossibly undisturbed, his footsteps in haemophiliac blood are flooded by the thin uncollectedness of it. A black bloodletting to make space in his body to feel himself move within himself, for solid thoughts to float between his skin and flesh to know his extremities and introduce them to the rest of him. That much blackness poured out of one man would leave no man, but a beautifully perfect shell that could receive any man and transport him beneath the sediment of ages he cannot attain through rotten deeds that coat the back of his skin like the inside of an oven. There was no trace of time after an act, no wallowing body, no lifeless eyes, no hurried nudity; those discoveries came under different titles.

The shift would end abruptly in the same way every afternoon, with an empty cart, partway through some floor of the tower after an interminable tour of some number of rooms. You left your cart on one of the middle floors and watched it duck below the guardrail as the elevator went down. There was no quantity to your efforts.

You made your notes on the hotel stationery you kept in the breast pocket of your chino coveralls while sitting in the vast gullet of the hotel. The writing process began creeping earlier into the day as the grain of the mosaics was refined. You preserved the waves of dust, of the cat’s fur shaking out of your clothes in the varying shades of light as it stalked the air and as you gesticulated slowly to watch yourself move, each in the precise but increasingly frenetic focus of your eyes. The avocation crept across the day fully. It replaced the experiences you had begun describing so completely that your writing became solely about its writing, what you saw in the movement of the pen, the distorted reflections in the polished silver ring you wore on your right hand, the shadows of the hair on your wrists like high grass interlaced, in less the physical calculus of life lived, of time passed through, than the thievery of that life.

Those still moments in which your focus trained on an object, heated by circumstance, were the morsels of a past that you couldn’t cling to, once they were transcribed and discarded from memory, they sat forever in the present. The words eliminated you in the moments, with feelings on your skin, and retained only the things as if they contained all of the secrets and causes of the trauma or pleasure of banality found in the digestion of life. But there come moments, when all that has been invested in the object, or the setting, or the person, all of the power is unraveled, when it does not reproduce its charms at your request, or the anguish to which it was meant to be the cure persists even in its presence, and the bottom drops out of your past.

You have coffee again for the first time since the edge of the desert. You stop writing. The lists repeated themselves and you began falling asleep before completing them and in the morning believing it was the same day as the last. When you stopped writing things started happening. The list was ink in a chrysalis. Somewhere in it, not in its meaningless parts but in it as a heap, was the mantra that removed you from time.

You stay in the hotel lobby a year. Clouds of visitors part around you where you find spots to linger. They watch the distant edges of the lobby with the same incurious thrown gaze that made you strangers to youth. It was a look that didn’t see anything but merely acknowledged that eyes can see. The flow of people rang the passage of time, not as they moved, but as they became new people. A face would shimmer out of the undulating groups and drift away on its own. A man with black spots in the corner of his eyes. Until you meet him, a man’s face is a talisman. It shone like a projection from a group of matching faces swirling from the dim scalloped light to bind into consistent and familiar patterns over their short hotel lifespans. The carpet wore smooth between ballrooms, interstitial gathering spaces with tables, to small coffee smelling meeting rooms, to elevators and tapering up in laces to the room doors. In their intermittent absence the ghost of the trail would linger in the stain of white shirts in the air. After a final confluence into a broad low ceilinged panorama, they, as a singularity, would tick out of the register followed by what felt like the low breathing of concrete and the emptiness of light falling alone on carpet. Then followed another increment.

Faces would emerge out of only some of the groups. The eyes would light up once and then never again. Yet, when someone came alive enough for you to hear their voice you would move to a different vantage point. When someone caught your eye you looked away. You passed through time like melting fat in the sand, less your initial form each day, but cooling into intermediate attempts at recognizability. The air was so cool and moist that a small splash of water on a wood table stood inert for days.

From no point in the continuum of chambers and halls could you see the sunlight. Several hotels were connected by interior passageways and bridges that drew a pattern just above the city but unrelated to it. The public elevators smelled of lotion. It was a warren of moments. Its geography as a whole was baffling and you could only visualize it in the constellation of these moments. Paths that felt straight teased you by veering unquantifiably. You learned how to get from one to another strategically coordinating a suite of paths between them. You were conspicuous in your familiarity, but after the wandering allowed you to sequence the experiences it let them feel as though they were happening to you, lost in habit, but never in geographic confidence. You drew a map and located all of the places you could be, weaving a net of connections tracing routes from one to another, relationships suspicious already by the trickery of the passages, but floating groundless and slung over bold solid marks illustrating the churning openness of the lobbies. The imperceptible deviations in transit were lost in the drawing and you found spots in your world separated by only short distances, although you knew of no way to get from one to the other without retreating to a far earlier landmark. The empty stretches of the map, although certainly a continuation of the constructed terrain, and possibly populated, had no geographic presence to you; you didn’t know how to reach them at all. You stayed in the network of rooms and threads like the hands of a clock, never occupying positions but always still in relation to the pulses of people. They drew you through the passing days.

You followed the faces that wandered from their groups through the bowels of the buildings until your double-backs brought you face to face with them too many times or until you came to a spot or moment in which you knew they would be but weren’t. You felt the loss of familiar faces materially, but only within, and when the face that had shown through to you was gone its void was clogged with others that you supposed might be feeling that same loss, as though it was the air you both breathed, and you couldn’t understand how they were living as you thought you might have lived had you been able to find your way out of the interior a sickness.