ft ground

At the stump of a routine severed, a pliable waxy consciousness forms. But out of the homogenous pillar below not a repeat percolates. He had left the Nite Lite too abruptly. The numb choreography and scene of the room that fashioned its own dull story was now apocryphal, yet so was the drama of his evacuation. The routine of that room had not been allowed to dissolve into the more fluid uselessness of his flight. Thus he was listless in his freedom. For its excruciating opacity, routine is at least a project. It bundles experience. Even flight at its most inhuman and ruthless, in the palette of the furnished room, soon stacks into insidious routine. The sedimentary reclamation of the Nite Lite emerges through the changing light and patterns of fabric of rotating motel rooms, shadow, and sleep, as a constant. However constant, it never crystallizes to describe in detail what it lacks, or what he cannot remember. He notes in some appellations the connoted belief that he has fled the Nite Lite so abruptly simply so he could construct its memory from scratch incorrectly, or more simply, to forget it correctly.

Each room he leaves is the most cluttered emptiness. In their initial states they are too full of distractions to dematerialize. At dawn before the sun hits his window Jack slips from the night’s room with his sack. Although adding to his repertoire of evidence he also adds a hole that the answer to the apocryphal question fueling his dull picaresque will never match. Less than that he finds not even the form of his question. He considers that it was posed by someone prior to him or was overheard, that he had not forgotten it but that he had never embodied the longing that perhaps spawned it.

Each room and beyond it, like an embrace, the adulterated night, is irreducible. Yet each is for want of some concrete participant in its theater. Even sorting them as he does, finding the specific lack and plugging it in by name, each night so that he sleeps in almost a house and knows how almost it is, always a further thing, an irritant from without the perfect domesticity sets the flawed equation off balance. He is kept awake by a throbbing that isn’t part of him. That pathogen of decorating who tonight is a sheer curtain with a bowed plastic wand beyond the standard issue oilcloth is the hidden source of a concussive thump obeisant to none of his mind’s rhythms, as if someone watching him, measuring his waves of muscular tension pounds on the wall at his most wound. He notes that the percussion is a transmission to that thing which is missing from the room, tonight a second tumbler, and pointless though they are for nothing can summon the mistakenly absent or know its name in its absence, he cannot suffer to sleep. A dawn comes early when the timed lights of the court arise oddly deep in the night. He sleeps then tentatively as though in silent day. True dawn washes through without his notice.

A storm unfurls over the piedmont like a black register tape. The land remains marble white. Jack starts too late from the Snug Bug. A full day of desert sun is stranded beneath the thunder sheet. The front tucks in across the opposite range and begins to hang low across the valley but does not open. Jack’s ears pop. Ink washes down the bajada tailings and the horizon such that only the desert parchment remains. The blue of Jack’s get-up is a small sky, a conduit between drained opposites.

Jack sees an operating theater in the luminous floor. It is empty and bright. The lights hum. A sheeted table is bare. He picks up the sheet to look at the table, perhaps recognizing it. A thin white mattress is covered by another sheet, fitted. He doesn’t recognize it. At the far horizon, before the black dome meets the floor, light swells from the windows of another low building. Rain has not yet begun its attempts to wash him from the valley. The air is dry and not electric. It still is hot so that cool oil slakes his skin as he runs to the building. The chalk road falls away to a great broad bowl hooked in by the funeral mountains on one side. The Atlanta Motel sits at the precipice back from which the storm retreats.

Adrift in the soft shoebeaten chalk court the pad foundation of a scraped outbuilding wavers as a tethered raft might emptied of bathers. Two steel chairs, one for want of seat, stand side by side facing in opposite direction in what spot of earth dreams of a former parlor. A bled, bland mosaic and territories of melanomatous linoleum foster the uneasiness of a shipwreck. So loosed from their trappings of reason floor treatments haunted by the delineation of their purpose are never to be found at rest. They shift as if part of the sands. Jack touches his nose to see if it is in shadow and runs the two fingers across his cheek to his ear with relish. Lengths of baked steel pipe zag out of the bare concrete to breach the absent partitions. Jack eases the leg of a chair into the tail of the most jagged and wavering pipe and watch it list like seagrass against the sky. He pulls the poised chair against the tired elasticity of the pipe and releases it tumbling into the white air, to the white chalk with an assumed puff.

The dust brings quickly a chill and a wash of color to the landscape that the chalk train of a man walking across the court toward the office is visible. He is presumably the motelier and does not wear blues. Jack slides for the other chair, the bareback and still standing, which he threads similarly into the pipe awag. “Ahoy,” he musters vaguely toward the shuffling motelier. “What are you doing there?” barely reaches back to him with the floating, tossed chalk itself, into both of which Jack launches the cocked chair.

The motelier changes course toward the pad, retrieves both chairs and scrapes them back to their original tête-à-tête upon the apocryphal parlor before speaking again. “Get off my house.” “This is no house!” “It was. Back then,” pointing with his maroon watchcap toward the chairs. “Do you have any real rooms?” “Of course I do. Meet me at the office.” Jack leaves him in the dust and leans against a post in front of the building watching the night swallow the motelier’s path and then he himself. After a lengthy blackout several lights come up in the arcade and the motelier is upon him. “I’m the night manager.” “Might I take a room?” “Of course you can.”

Released back down the arcade with a key marked 2 Jack opens the door tenderly, as he might the moist flap of a wound, with two fingers. Murky plumes of darkness soil the arcade sidewalk for just a smudge outside the door. Without waiting for his eyes to adjust from the lithic fluorescence of the chalk court he drops his sack inside the door to where a table belongs; it falls to a table. He steps flatfooted through the valley that would separate credenza from beds; his feet spirit across carpet. At the immemorial T in that arrangement he cuts right quickly a few more steps on carpet and reaches his hand through ink as if through shadowless, brilliant dusk toward the perfection of a lamp’s location; he turns the thumbscrew there. It is brass. The entire wall over the beds is paneled in mirror squares that meet at milky rosettes. A man is standing in the room. His chambray uniform is loose as they are worn. A warm beard, though not quite cut to code, covers his lips from above and is bare beneath. He is still. The eyes, first inhuman in the gibbous lamplight, grow narrow and empathetic as Jack recognizes his black and less black irises. The room flattens in the mirror wall. He surveys the ideal relationships, chairs at table below lamp by beds facing credenza leading to water closet, so ideal that they cannot be occupied, like a an archetype. The room itself, full in space, scattered away with the opposite level of precision. He sits on the bed against a heap of all pillows. Instead of a flat convergence of all rooms this is the end of a divergent tendril. It is somewhere definite in space, something definite in name, yet he could be anyone in it.

The rim of one eye is chafed and pink with orange crust. It is raw and he shuts it like a hatch. The other eye draws everything toward it like a geographic magnet or a dark room. When he walks he kicks bases and legs so he sits and from one spot surveys the terrain. It is perfect.

A weak knock that nevertheless tosses the burglar chain in a jingle awakens the door to his room. The day manager identifies himself with a strangled voice that was able to thread the weak point of the peephole. He falls silent following his salutation. Through the peep Jack combines his odd glow and darkness into the form of a white face with vertical lines of invaginated grizzle that lead all the way to the maroon watchcap that forces white eyebrows out of plumb where they comb into still black lashes. Jack sees these because they glow. Below his chin he strangely diminishes, which is to say, all told, he looks precisely like the night manager.

Jack pulls the door to chain length and stands in his own darkness. The day manager is ensorcelled by green iridescent insects standing centered before the door and says “When you came last night you left no deposit with me.” “You said you were the day manager.” “I am. I’m also the night manager. You said you’d pay in the morning. I need the payment at this time.” “It is still night.” “It is not, it is morning. I need the payment at this time.” Bugs enter his mouth. He spits out papery wings like tobacco specks. “I don’t have it.” “You were going to leave before dawn without paying. If you believe I haven’t seen that before you’re mistaken. I see it all.” “Maybe I can work to pay the payment? I can be your night manager.” “No you cannot. I am the night manager,” says the day manager, “you can straighten rooms. Can you straighten?” “I suppose.” “Of course it would take you more than a day to recoup this payment. There is so little to do here. You may stay here at a reduced rate until you are even with the accrued payments.” “I guess I don’t have a choice.” “Not if you want to stay above ground.” “Fair enough.” “Very well, come to my office in the morning.” He slides back out of the arcade into the darkness.

The plastic stitching of the bedspread and the other bedspread run together, seem to roll out to the walls and fill the room. A pressure not unlike the eerie weakness of distant thunder tightens his skin. He grows and swells like a voice forced to fill empty ossuaries or bleak circular conversations. The release of gritting his entire body, or punching himself in the temple doesn’t loosen the skin to equilibrium with the swelling. He turns quickly to ear the wall. Some form of voice is always present even in the pure silence of the air conditioner. In its motor and compressor is some complex human song evolved from the loss of biology and form that exists only to flay Jack alive, Jack who thinks of silent places even in the dark, unthinking intercellular spaces of his brain. The desert at night doesn’t hum with the sun. On walks before dawn Jack fabricates some shelter of sound around his new life as an author with no one listening. He has a dry studio shack of silver boards on the tail of a silver bajada. Flat files with vast drawers fill most of the one room and they filled with undated manuscript pages. So that each page desiccates evenly they are not stacked. He pulls one caliche drawer out with faint grinding to see a filmy array of days that bore the same punctuation, or that replaced one another out of order. A bird flies into the seedy float glass. The spare, airy sound of its feathered head against the glass masks the weak click of its breaking neck. Each day in artifact suffers a fate not unlike the edge of suburban dawn he has stepped into. To be forgotten by force of the next day. Arising yawn mouthed faces or self absorbed eyes of melancholy habit transmogrify the silent ink into a loathsome cackle by existing to read aloud. It was enough to keep pencil from paper just to silence the voices of the future from ruining the day that he could soon allow to be gone forever. He chooses to pass one more day in a bed beneath the pattern of a simulated rainstorm or at least fabricating himself there.

Secret dusk is drawn over the valley in its own sandy paste. It floods from where the chocolate mountains bolt, at both ends of the valley, for the opposite wall, where both curve away out of sight. Various evenings Jack calls it an oxbow valley from the small chalk road. This night he begins to walk toward that clench, already on the road’s gentle curve, calling it where the earth falls away. Leaving the Nite Lite, whose dark, bleary room had based him for more than months and to which he had not returned after leaving by dawn, is certain at least to find a new motel to replace it, if not the end of the earth.

The convergent mountain ranges at the brink of the road are unchanging throughout the fall of dusk, which lasts hours and thickens strangely due to the false horizon of the peaks. The road curves with precision as does the valley. A chord of sight is long severed back to the Nite Lite. Night clamps down. The chapped glow of Living Waters Inn is upon him immediately, having perhaps not existed in any trace of errant daylight.

The chalk court of the motel lets onto the small road, both glowing prior to moonrise in the exposure of mercury lamps. Jack takes a room. He closes the door quietly with the latch withdrawn and slides it into the pocket by turn of handle. The hot silence haunts him. It is the silence that can exist only to precede muffled voices. The monologue of the air conditioning is quickly spirited to shape a new, more vast silence. The room has the aching Spartan clarity of a murderous impulse, as well as its dutiful restraint. Something then is missing. The dark lake of carpet only shows its green beneath three lamps. Jack adds two pillows from the far bed to the two on the window bed and sits hard facing the glazed over, dormant television. The reflection in amaranthine monochrome is still. Jack waves to it and looks over to the disrupted far bad. Something is missing.

Nose was single brown hole sifting down to black in the depths of the head in a funnel sort of a cascade right down from leathery mummified gums and enormous wind-bleached and moonlit teeth lacking saliva that glitters for the living. This trustworthy face couldn’t cast shadows on itself. But as sand creeps it crept in tangential wavelets with leading edges like the hems of sheets being drawn across the sand and the face and feet begin to disappear in tomographic phases. Each wave was preceded by the telegraph of a shallow crunch through the mantle of the dune. The plods were far enough apart as to divide the rhythm into the dives of isolated desert creatures into the sand as the rising moon stole the cover of their night shadow, each separate and forgotten in a distinct world whose only cosmology is the distant memory of the last crunching sound which may or may not have been the fore-echo of a single escape. Each sang more perfectly the shape than the last, more imminent until they ceased altogether as much as an interrupted sequence can fool the reverberant surfaces to forget it. The moon at its apogee rang over the dunes without shadow, without error, trustworthy. The face and feet are gone. Only in the acceptance that flaws, even sunken, are enduring, and although in the flash of the believable homogeneity the body, or the feet and face, are now questionable, a hopeless breath-high sand geyser puffed and built a shallow crater above the repressed nose hole.

Inverted, a partially buried body head downhill and splayed legs protruding from the sheet of sand ending in the wrong bare feet, blinks flat beige eyes. The sclerae are beige. If the skin were not a luminous dusk pale the eye spots would appear swept away above their thin wax eyebrows. Sand has pooled smooth in a drape down around the body. Elsewhere nearby ripples are blown. A flannel collar point in gray and shell tartan stands like a sail up from the sand a distance from the face possible if it were wildly unbuttoned or not worn at all.

Cold dry night can sink eyes. Cold dry night holds fast its forebears’ received aspirations. Hopes hopelessly tossed to the obscure confessor of the ether are burdensome still. Sky without horizon is no relief. It fights the texture of consciousness like an iron mask. No longer flesh faces watch one another with painted mirror tentativeness. It is a tease of some opposition to the sealed head.

If the sky is an indigo dome from pronely below with sometimes blowing fogs of starlight, that dome has a base of deeper value oft circumcised by mountains that trap areas of traveling sand. Sleeping there is a tasteless, odorless type of burial. Most confluences of matter change so little that they can be named; they can be owned. The sand bodies that a night captures, that one moment’s breeze sweeps take new names in the day, claim new tenants in the day, and afresh repeated come again night. Those eyes and grasps claimed one night are given over to strangers the next until both wave and memory have lost sensation for one another.

All blushes of ruddy clouds devour the sky in the blinking eyes, slowly, like decommissioned mining equipment almost appearing functional in a coaxing wind. That creak of saltsplit wood over the lost slickness of the eyes from inside the skull gives no outlet, no escape, to where vision and the mind can name and know a face as mountain, mountain as dusty closet, and dusty closet as the unequivocal center of the galaxy when the world fails the eyes. These dry eyes were frail screen doors to this head and nothing human is pent behind screen doors. A perfectly faint sound like a balled handkerchief patting to the sand and a spectral translucency in what skin is exposed accompany the moon’s crest over the Funeral Mountains above the silver dune peak. The rising light addresses this face and this face is less than human in its finishing.

However many changes of venue pass, the transaction of the investment positive from night air to tumbling tomb happens but once. Sand more like powder and powder like liquid doesn’t cut the fragile imperceptible film binding together the fluid of the eyes into a weird sphere like big crystal dagger grains would or had. It flows more that it tumbles or grinds. It had ground in the way other simple structures blur into some things less than their components and the way that all bits that had once given themselves to mountains cannot without them be anything but loss.

I take three laxatives, the pill kind, even though feeling the robbed grave of my viscera smooth into a telescope view of fog in night sky, purple and undulating, I know it will turn me inside out more than empty me. Sitting sunken and waiting a hum like an organ or a terrain of twisting elastic grows into groaning. I don’t see phases in phenomena. I exist in binary. Start. Stop. Between start and stop is passage so uniform it isn’t even causal; it isn’t sustained by will. I can’t even shit. The apartment is too still. It doesn’t groan loud enough. Light, when I open my eyes after salivating to suck the pills down, stops but leaves a redness where it had slowed. Can I slow passage? Feeling the medicine fan through me like fish scales without fish clouding the still surface of a sea brings up a breeze in the obscurity of my bowels. A cool wash of winter air on an unbandaged wound crystallizes across the inside of my skin and eyelids. I pretend for myself that I can recognize what is happening in bigger arcs and increments but when I stop to have that vision back toward myself it is clouded except for stationary bits. The living life and the lived image are irreconcilable to me. I can only stop to recognize myself stopped, my mind stopped, cooling, fading. My own humming brings me back to consciousness. I press my face onto the cool tile of the bathroom floor and it slides in viscous chilled sweat. Fine hairs cast into my mouth. The toilet seats are both up. My eyes drift up off of the floor slower than my head. Passing time has few indices. The toilet bowl is empty but for clear water smiling.

Before he disappeared Constance was told by the women in the coffee shop that M. J lived locally. He arrived at the hotel when he did on foot through its Courtland Street cloaca. She dreamt it a martyrs hike up from that abject dust bedeviled undercut. Nobody came from its murk without some cloudiness of vision lingering like clouds caught up in the eyelashes. He only appeared in the throngs of conventions on the floor of the atrium, surfacing in some key point on the first day of the proceedings at which the population, upon first encountering it, would provide him the greatest instantaneous burst of people, and would stay, infrequently floating around the hotel for the entire duration of a convention once wordlessly sleeping beneath an outcropping of stacked stacking furniture in a disused ballroom enfolded like a cramp around a frail Constance whom the train had left weary on the platform. (more…)

The next stratum of furniture I move stacks above the guardrail and I can’t see the doors across the atrium at all. I clamber over what is left in front of the door, turn on the light, hesitate, the voice still hums. The form isn’t moving. The curtain bulges in more detail with soft square edges like broken limbs. Hello. Why did I wait so long to speak back? I don’t speak to empty rooms, sometimes not for days anywhere. Nothing. Just pulling the leading edge of the curtain away from the tile I slide my head in slowly. A silent tumbledown column of bedding, cushions, and towels fills the tub and limply offers a drapery hand over the curb between porcelain and oilcloth. Mandalas on the bedding of felled cypress clearings burned so black as each shivered in funereal drafts everything in my eyes was swelling with an empty white light. It made my face ache like daysleep and my eyes dry and the wall of furniture where the front doors were and the wall still whispering to me, louder now, I am disoriented and breathless in a rhythm of words that repeated like a chant, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be. Between the two identical walls of furniture I rear back. All paths are the same, all accidents but I choose and throw myself into one rickety mess that topples into the sunlight like powdered milk on death rattles floats. The television in the room sings to me, a chorus of women and men that I ignore, that I can’t help but ignore. My limbs hurt and my lips are bleeding onto my tongue. A lumpy long form is bound down in the center of the impeccably made bed I dream of in the final moments of each night of sleep, when I sleep in the summer sun frozen with panic of this failure. I fold my arms in some sagging arch over the furniture scree, put my face in my hands, the sunlight skin red, and sleep.

Inhale a voice muffled not sharp enough to form words. Spirits deep beneath a grave or people in next-door rooms don’t speak in words, they speak in masses like tides invisible but creeping and irrefutable because the ocean is so black and silent without them. I would have screamed but I do this job alone. I threw the doors back open. Although a voice with no face floats through my mind and eyes without wake, and I couldn’t articulate something in this way if I could stay it, I knew the voice came from behind the furniture. The wood grain in a low desk quivered with its vibrations. I reached the front edge of the bathroom door jamb about six feet into the room. The dislodged furniture now formed complete barricades on either side of the door in the ambulatory. Only a running dive tumble over the guardrail absolves me of putting all the furniture back in place. Right now is the time for a choice. To excavate the bathroom door will fill the niche in front of the doors. The voice from the furniture has grown clearer. I don’t recall which side of the bathroom doors opens. If the voice is coming from the bathroom and the handle is on this side of the door I only have to move a few pieces of furniture. A circular writing table on a metal pedestal, a bale of cushions, and two luggage racks and there is the silver handle. It swings in and through the slot of space between the sculpture and the door jamb the full mirror reflects obliquely back to the shower curtain, bulged out, the mass slumped over the curb of the tub I think is moving but the voice is still lost and sexless. The sink is filled black and slick but the room is dark, it is probably water. It smells like soap. The lightswitch is over the counter not on my side of the jamb; I can’t reach it.