I.
Milo tried to tuck his fisted mittens into inflated parka pockets, but the left side ribbing had come out in the dryer and never returned to inversion, so despite the swinging slush lashing his cheeks, washing them cruelly currant, he sticks fast to the pavement in winter moon boots like Obstinate Smurf, while probing the unexpected with mitten-tips’ synthetic stuffing inconclusively.
He’s thinking privately about the irredeemable car oil bruises, forever retaining the course of their original spill, and how unevenly clotted the aging down has become from years of mishandling. Tumblers of mother’s white wine [“You gotta drink like ‘um, if they gonna luv you, bae!”] often found their way into the clean laundry and they’d come out smelling of gasoline and mold. His young “old man” would prowl the living room carpet in a crucifix and cotton wife-beater, angrily forcing out expletive-ridden insults to compile into a compendium of focused societal rage that would ultimately remerge transformed in lyric, but only injured and incessantly haunted little Milo’s imagination.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at, boy?’ His heart sputters its truth: I was only trying to find my father. Or even a remnant of him. A relic of our time together — one small glance that might possibly recall the pouncing beam of pride that gleamed even deep into his smile when he first beheld the infant Milo, and swayed him gently in his tattoo sleeve. Something that could remind him now of then.
The squall dies down enough, though little more, for Milo to get some idea of what was happening. He sniffled powerfully enough to haul back a long tendon of snot, and squelch it in a swallow (What the fuck you lookin’ at?!) — are cameras watching me? These field cameras to capture rodents cavorting in their native habitat, or our CCTV networks posted on every streetlamp, watching incessantly as old days turn into new days, driven by small solar batteries and wi-fi, the proceedings must go forward as planned, please pay no attention to the man behind the camera’s curtain, for as wonderful the penetration of the all-seeing all-father, he shall never gain access to the interior soul, the pilot of this ship, the pilot of this mind. Only the authorial voice can penetrate into the skulls of their creation. So this is how I thought to see the boy’s thoughts. And how you chose to receive them.
“How old are you, boy?” They are both kneeling Baptist on the mortar of Milo’s pew. Beside him a very sere and beleaguered visage, pickled in wrinkles that fail to carry the angle of his youthful jawline, drooping in wattles and responding delicately to delicate breeze. His pew is outside, nailed to the grassy patch of field to the left of the church house, peeling nostrils with fresh coats of pure white paint waiting for the full-bright of summertime.
“Am I dreaming, good Sir?” A that’s-the-right-way-to-treat-your-elders rickety hand grasps Milo’s shoulder, but an I’m-asking-the-questions-here glower ties Milo’s rickety voice in knots with the taste of dusty broom bristles.
“How old are you, boy?” The question drags him queerly off-keel; he doesn’t know. He nervously looks down at his hands, but he finds only recognizable sinister generic facsimiles. Milo feels a tense tickle in his cowering penis, and wants to pull the head from its sheath before it is fully devoured, but something weighty is being yoked around his extended penitent neck.
He’s done something grievously wrong. He frantically struggles to answer the man, but Scylla is the lie that, once uncovered, brands him an unreliable reject and Charybdis is the truth which would strip him immediately, allowing all to see his confusion, until he was summarily relegated to rejection so that none may suffer his useless internal distortions. He was never meant to look upon the message nor help craft an answer; such is the weight of inherent poverty, slamming down like a hangar door once the last refugee is inside, and the structure can withstand no more.
— How… how old do I seem to you?
After a terse ejaculation of something between a cough and a titter, the old soul confesses to Milo that he cannot see very well [Wal*mart didn’t have no more glasses. Big sign, big enuff to read, anyway, says: Sold Out!], for tiny shards of icy carriage glass had long ago splintered into his corneas, infecting his pupils into an ashy-white placidity that scanned a blurry horizon a hundred-times over in the myriad prisms of insect eyes, complicating his world indelibly, none clearer than the last. And unclear as to whether the differences were related to the passing of time or merely in the delay of his mind trying to image each scene of reflection both separately and together? In one of them, regretfully, inartfully, a man with his hands strangled his weary-worn lover above the ledge of a chasm, as her larynx crinkled and gasps under the pressure, and she clawed manically at his face and shoulders. But several nightmares later, there they were again, he and his lover, tumbling in the sheets, as live as day, as buried as night in one another’s arms and scents. Each of his visions explain some truth about himself, he wanted to impart. These are the reflected memories of infinite selves, all acquired and compiled into memory. There was no way to tell the timing of any of them, not because they were eternal without beginning or end, but because it mattered when you picked them up in your focus and examined them.
{ It’s the theta-wave of being human, pronounced the Rat God to a class of empty nestlings, that we engendered in them as mammals that gave them the capacity for rational thought.
We, Ratkinder, are the pulse of the brain-beat that evolved the entire universe!
With that, the Rat God fell frenzily upon a saucer of tepid milk, lapping uncontrollably, almost viciously, tapping the ceramic bottom with his bent tongue as he neared the last of it, and yes, this will be on the test. }
( — hold again for just a moment: How do you watch such a thing unfold? That it would brutally and wholly lacerate your vision, how did you not turn simply and instinctively turn away? How does it come to that point?)
The old soul confesses to Milo that he cannot see very well, but he can never resist telling, or even living, a good story. That given the hood Milo’s wearing, there’s no way to tell from his features, but the low stoop to his posture makes him look like an old man like him. Once again he apologizes for his poor sight, but he sounds like a youthful man, with vitality and energy still bristling in his blood, cargoing oxygen from limb to limb effortlessly…; long before the systemic embargo begins, and cells need assurances before they embark on delivery. So many generations crammed together in one small little node, you can certainly tell the geezers apart from the upstart idealists. The geriatric cling to their stories and canes of how things used to be in the dark ages, before the days of telephone wires converted into data streams [Ach, the Water of Life!], back when it was just a lumberjack against the wilderness, decked out in grotty flannel in the back of the recesses, scar-scissored long-beleaguered dog faces drinking thick stouts, cigarette burns for decorative mutilation, swearing and fussing over the true pacifying nature of death that can never come to blows, and the young pink and purple studs in tight blue and orange mini-shorts, offering up their entire plate of meat for display, saunter over to the pricy section, bending over and whispering into the ears of mafia millionaires, fat with bombast, and looking right at you…
(What the fuck you lookin’ at, nigga?)
Milo feels a tickling at the top of his spine that combusts into a ripple of fury that drops forcibly into his musculature and prepares him for battle; the tingling of being watched, because you’re aware of your own mirror-motor reflexes, and that they know your pain. Or at least know of it.
The pain of our first experience of being dropped by a parent, of which we, humanity, quickly learn: when Gravity calls for you, you shall Fall.
Everything else, the entire rest of existence is what we’ve made of it.
Me and you and everyone else together. This old man, and his trusty canine, and the birds in the air and the sun and sea and me. We are the conceit of our deceit. We little mongrel beta-goldfish of encapsulated words, paralleling around one another in profane vessels, confused and caustic. If I told you that I’d protect you always from harm and pain, the lie would forever brand us rejects. Me for having said it, you for having heard it, equally conspired. But together, all of us together, yes, we can. Most of the time. For most everyone. This hazard tape of promise and gold, heaps and heaps of gold, for devouring like gibblets, maize-haystack yellow gold. And each of your souls, dear ones, name by name are engraved on the rear, and cached deep in a Sierra (or was it Reno?) range are the razor lines of our naming plates, las-R’ed into granite tablature, the price of our souls freed once found.
(It’s getting to them, that’s the problem.)
(’What the fuck you lookin’ at, boy?’)
Before I answer, let me take my best stab at the question, the way it felt in my right arm. I remember voices. They were all muffled because I hadn’t understood what focusing meant yet. Everything competes for your attention — just don’t let the cursor blink, for it will betray its brethren…[Which one of you fuckers wants to be next? Growls a hooded man rhetorically with a revolver.] — undulating lifeward with abandon, but then, something took command of my mind, and required all of my essence, nearby, so close as to bathe me in hot minted breath, the control of sound. Molded into a melody, the likes of which punished me back into the darkness, but only briefly, as I learned what memory felt like. I had been exposed to these sculpted curvatures before, but as if from a distance, as if from a haze of anythingness crawls a sound, like angel wings unfolding from skin, warm like food in the belly, the smell of crisp ionized air by a carbonated brook, a figure of sound that I could attach to, engage with, and twine to, and see, from the amplitude of its crescendo, that which comes. For through the access of memory comes intuitively the epiphany of the future. I remembered this, father. I remember you singing to me. Not the unjust social woes that bind you like Kong in the white man’s carnival freakshow as you holler at your prisonmates for some unspared shred of decency and amens, but just an old standard lull-a-bye, sarcastically threatening violence and bodily harm and boughs breaking [I forget the exact ordering of things, there’s so much to sift through here in this rift…], like your mother cooed to you from before her grave, and like hers before with so many others, an ocean of lost but returning tides of ideas. It’s the ideas that mean the most to us that survive and evolve. That the ideas that mean the most to us are the ones we first had. Like humanity’s slave song, drummed and dumbed on by cell battalions from one poor longing mother to yet another. As a resonance fades from memory, they disappear, unstrummed by God’s holy harp until the refrain returns.
My father is in there somewhere, and I want him back the way I want him, cradling me in his arms, swaying me to the genuine joy of history’s verse.
(And all I got was this damn: ‘What the fuck you lookin’ at, boy?’)
And thus Milo felt looked at, always and everywhere. There must be some invisible camera were always hitched to his hood, or at his waist like a phantom scythe to carve through the marsh to meet, illicitly later under the bridge, the reed thatchers, the papyrus makers, the fastidious scribes, the note takers, the paparazzi, the security cams, the video stores, the internets, the clouds, God. Someone was always aware of his position. But he couldn’t really see into the dark, there was never anyone around, as if he were entirely alone, and when he called out to them, they always failed to respond.
← Previous: The Third Day, Boulder (weight)
Next: The Third Day, Boulder (barrier). II. →