ft ground

This is another artifact. I can feel when one gets caught up in me, physically, in a layer of my skin that feels sore in a continuous dull sheath around my body. I have thought, at the onset of the feeling, in the past, that I could not physically soothe it without clawing through myself, and I didn’t know what I would find. I shivered like there was an old man in me, right below the surface. If I bled myself he would seep out and dry onto paper his real voice, when, every so often, I feel him struggling to whisper through my skin. An ink wash of some time out of sorts. (more…)

In the autumn you got an efficiency apartment, found the ditched car, and unpacked all of the contents, including a large, wise, brown cat. You hadn’t noticed how much had been left in the car. It seemed to be everything. Everything was just barely enough, for a long time.
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Jacky never had hair on his chest but for in the late afternoon sun, the last time you saw him in daylight, standing by the car in the gas station parking lot, the sun painting his edges white and the down on his chest shimmering like its own worried breeze. The two of your broken magnets turning aimlessly around the asphalt and wind burned plastic, one hundred miles from Los Angeles. Jacky’s car had coasted into the gas station in disgrace. There were two more jokes in Barstow amidst the drift of folks who looked like they had been thrown into a window looking over Los Angeles. Teenage hitchhikers and runaways, lot lizards, and men with fossilized comb marks in their hair stood against walls in the shade with a waxy hopefulness that came from greasy night sweats flash drying on their skin at sunrise.
(more…)

In the morning you drove across Colorado. Your upset stomach caught up with you in a mountain pass before Denver and when you sneezed in the thin heights you shat yourself and threw your underwear away in the pit toilet at a scenic overlook.
You drove through the tabletop of the country into central Kansas, determined not to be stuck in one geographic spot for longer than it took the sun to pass between clouds in the enormous sky, and stopped way off of the highway to camp at Tuttle Creek State Park. The campsite by the reservoir was quiet. Before setting up the tent you walked to the water next to the dam and skipped stones until your knees started to burn and then went back to set up his tent. The sky was plastered with a single cloud but the air was bright beneath the trees. There were two girls there. Their tent was already pitched and one was playing a guitar. They were about fifty feet from his car and they looked small. The wind was gathering into a mass. It filled the trees and the reservoir and hauled over the ground beneath the trees like a tide rushing. You cooked a can of beans directly on the camp stove in the shelter of the open car door and when one of the girls asked you to join them for dinner you declined and crawled into his tent. It was dark and the wind had greatness of an unseen bear. Wind in the dark, they are inseparable then. The tent leaned until its surfaces touched you in his sleeping bag and you thought about every time that you and he camped in the cold how he told you about camping in the Blue Hills outside of Boston, in the snow, and he slept in his underwear so that when he got up in the morning and put on his clothes he would have the warmth to look forward to. “Whoever told you that just wanted to see you in your underwear.” He thought he would die. The zipper didn’t work on the sleeping bag. It still didn’t.
You didn’t know where you were going. Kansas is the middle of the universe. You could feel it being drawn into the earth. From the middle you are equidistant to every final destination. You drove further east and made it to eastern Missouri. The next day you drove one thousand miles as it all fell away behind you.

You left early and left the bed made, you slept on top of the bed clothes and left the lamps on. They show through the curtain and the milky condensation. Jacky’s car was still there. It looked blue in the morning. It didn’t matter to you if it was the same car or a different car, his, someone else’s. What had mattered quickly seemed like a weight in your thoughts, like a lead apron draped over the breathing of days. He hadn’t been anything more than passage to this moment. What mattered now were the uncertain, shimmers in moments.
You weren’t far from where Interstate 70 split off, a huge divergence in flat open space, and you were heading due east. It was still before 9:00 a.m., still before breakfast, if you had been hungry, or aware of it, instead of aware that every other wash of feelings that a body could have pooled into the room you holed yourself up in at the Book Cliffs Lodge in Green River. The sun and air were hot but they looked cold, they were clear and pure but you believed them dusty. It is easier to think everything else is corrupted and ruined. You pulled back the oil cloth curtains and leaned back in a chair in the enormous room.
You tried to nap. It was too early and regardless of the solid curtains and doubted lamps, it was too bright and you felt your eyes on display. You lay on the floor underneath the table, held its wood cabriole feet and looked beneath the bed. There was a note stuck on the carpet. Someone had written “blood stains” on it. You found more of them around the room. Some merely described the things they were stuck to, others might have pieced together a history of deficiencies so local and anaesthetized that you wanted to be sure not to be recorded. The objects or their losses didn’t have significance. They had to be named, and you wanted to take names as you ran, and you didn’t want to tow a suite of new visions with you.
You had been in the room for hours without eating or seeing the sky and was impregnated with motel grog that you felt in the back of all of your senses, the back of your throat, the back of your eyes, the inside of your skin. Night woke you. You dialed Jacky’s number from a payphone in a cloud of white light. A lantern hung from the wall above it that made your hands yellow. A different voice spoke. It had a southern accent, it sounded tired, it sounded ceramic, from a room full of hard surfaces, and narcotic, like the mouth and lips were gauze, all in one word, “Yes?” and you hung up. You bought a huge bag of corn tortilla chips and a jug of orange juice and shut yourself back in the room.
When the lights at the road came up and the joint in the oil cloth curtain went from orange to diaphanous turquoise, you pushed open the door and walked along the row of cars parked outside the windows, each for each, and around to a detached building with more rooms. It smelled like paint and carpet. Only a few lights were on in the double breasted hallways and they had red dimpled glass shades, like a pizza parlor dipped in night’s blood, and each door, below the peephole, had a sticky note with the same handwriting on it as the one in my room. Each one listed what was missing from the room. You read down the hallway until you could piece together a rather complete picture, from what was missing, of what embodied the minimum semblance of living. The room was what made you exist. It was the least you could tumble into and allow yourself to fall asleep for six hours. You never touched the bedside table, or turned on the teevee, but its absence, a blankness there, would have awakened unknown unease, a misalignment in your charade of stability, and when you returned to your room to get sick on tortilla chips and orange juice, you sat wondering what was missing from this room.

You stole Jacky’s car in the desert. It was late afternoon. You wanted to feel the world race and stop. You had made a promise to yourself that you would leave and see what happened. It wasn’t an opportunity, it was just a will, and you didn’t think it through. Once his breathing stopped you made a decision. He would disappear. You stole his red car from the dust and were on the highway in very early evening, a bright summer evening. The vacant attentions of dry sweating blank back sides of Las Vegas casinos made you feel thin and oblique.
You stopped where you could just breathe, in Wann, at a chain bookstore, and looked in a guidebook for some place hidden to camp. A bookseller referred you to some public land off the highway. You rolled down the windows on the farm roads, the two lanes, that’s what you did on those roads and you pitched Jacky’s dome tent right next to his car.
You didn’t have a fire or dinner. It was silent and the sun went down unceremoniously. Darkness in a tent is doubly dark. In the darkness you heard voices without lights in the scrub, then drums and a fire glow arose, then you laid awake. You counted to two hundred and breathed and they didn’t stop. You left Jacky, you could leave them too. You rolled out of the tent and put on your boots filled with sand and rocks, slipped out the tent poles and pressed the tent in a pile on top of Jacky’s effigial remains in his trunk, and rolled like water running down the wheel tracks with the headlights off until you reached the main road and then even a bit longer, until you saw the first oncoming headlights far off, and lines flash between questions from the asphalt.
You drove through your sleep on Interstate 15. You beat on the steering wheel and listened to his cassette tapes, the ugliest things he left for you, that you took, for 150 miles and slept in a tidy motel in Beaver, Utah filled with brown lamplight and stars over a dark parking lot. Planets hung blue in pairs above the horizon. You held the phone against your head and thought of calling him, thought of wanting to talk to someone, but he wouldn’t be there. That couldn’t be your concern. Enveloped by the room you fell into the new distance from him, greater than the immediate miles of darkness you had unspooled, and slept with your feet on the wall.

This is another artifact. I can feel when one gets caught up in me, physically, in a layer of my skin that feels sore in a continuous dull sheath around my body. I have thought, at the onset of the feeling, in the past, that I could not physically soothe it without clawing through myself, and I didn’t know what I would find. I shivered like there was an old man in me, right below the surface. If I bled myself he would seep out and dry onto paper his real voice, when, every so often, I feel him struggling to whisper through my skin. An ink wash of some time out of sorts.

You said you weren’t going back to Los Angeles. You felt old there. Even the old people you saw in their cars and out of the high window were youthful in a lubricated way. You told yourself that in this moment you were old, but that time had built other yous, you just couldn’t find them here or now.

You and he fled to the desert for its silence and you faced the dark on the hood of his car in the night. Jacky’s voice was silent. It was a pure evocation of the past, as silent words and looks only can be. You augured his breath. It was a whisper to the future built from your shared memories. It grew louder by indivisibly small increments as he slowly mouthed airy tendrils and your name, Jack, a hesitant filament blooming forward into future reminiscences. The name was emptily alien, as if it was inhaled. It was the epiklesis that would summon something other than a person, the cool lunar breeze and the summer fog of stars. Jacky’s voice never quite captures the fullness of the moment as you chase it. It echoes back to you the thought you just had, the chill you just stifled, from the silence of rock chasms and sand dunes in night. When the words drift away you don’t search for them. When he follows them you will leave him in the desert. Yet here you are, you and he, silent night and long day, in each breath a length of time.