Cornacopia

Cornucopia (Lemonade+Applesauce)

David Santin Kilday DSK

8/14/2026

Copyright 2023

I self published the book Lemonade and then the book Applesauce with Page Publishing under my initials DSK in 2023.  

I composed and heavily revised Lemonade and then Applesauce by myself high on vaporized medical marijuana and jacked up on copious quantities of coffee and cigarettes.  

I have been an Ohio medical marijuana patient since 2019.  

I am literally prescribed marijuana by physicians (with additional training) as a medicine for a doctor’s medical diagnosis of Chronic Pain.  

I am getting old and I suffer from Arthritis.  

So, in my creative process, I write while drinking coffee and then ascend to my smoking lounge in the garage for cigarettes, medical marijuana (which I must refresh), inspiration, and thoughts about what to write when I return to my basement quarters to continue on with my coffee propelled typing.

Here is where I composed Lemonade, then Applesauce, and then the rough draft of my memoir.

Here’s how the First Editions of Lemonade and Applesauce appear after publication.

I have decided to publish a new edition of Lemonade and Applesauce. 

This new document, a combination of Lemonade plus Applesauce, will not be a simple transcription of the original publications, but a complex revision in which the resulting text will be an overall improvement.  

I will title this revision Cornucopia.

When you read this document, you may come across words that leave you puzzled.  

I am uncompromising.  

I seek the perfect word among many synonyms that come to mind.  

I proceed from revision to revision in search of simplicity of expression.  

I strive for concision and the well-turned phrase.  Ideally, the words I select are precise in rhythm and sometimes rhyme, allusive, ironic, symbolic, and even coded (in code, the word “him” might signify “him” and “hymn,” and Jesus Christ all at once).

If you come across a word whose definition leaves you puzzled, look it up on your smartphone dictionary app.  

Make an unknown word an opportunity to learn a new word and to expand your knowledge base.  

Make a memory.  

I recommend that all readers have a dictionary app on their smartphone.  

It makes word searches in your online dictionary a matter of seconds.  

You can take minutes if you want to linger on the permutations of the definition of a previously unknown word.  

I like the Oxford University Dictionaries but there are many free alternatives with which you can start.  

A free three app smartphone research suite for your smartphone should include Etymonline (for the history of words), The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (an American English dictionary), and Wikipedia (an indispensable, online encyclopedia).  

Your mental life will be enriched when you learn new words.  Never stop learning!

David Santin Kilday (DSK)

Cincinnati, Ohio

BOOK ONE

TUMBLEWEED ON THE FARM

Knee-high by the Fourth of July, some say you can hear the corn grow.  We had a wet spring and a late summer so the corn was stewing in its own juices–not yet knee-high by the Fourth of July.

In this region, the mechanization of farming had led to depopulation.  It took fewer and fewer people to work the farm as farm technology modernized.  Over time, large operators, who could afford the new robotically controlled and satellite guided machinery, bought up the smaller family farms.  Our town’s population had been gutted, but we still kept to the tradition of a Fourth of July Parade.

On the street, in front of the grandstand, there were beauty queens with batons.  There were old men riding go-karts in serpentine formations.  The high school band played martial music while a parade of vintage tractors, organized by date of production, trundled past on the pavement.  A calliope played harmoniously.

There were floats.  The first chicken wire and papier-máché float was in the form of a dragon eating its own tale.  Omphalos.  The float was very detailed.  The dragon’s eyes had red pupils.  Each shiny black scale of the dragon’s body had been applied by hand.  This resulted in an overlap effect, an imbrication, that made the dragon's hide seem to be sinuous and alive.

Our town was a conservative town.  It was a red state, red meat town.  Love it or leave it–here–seemed to be the order of the day.  There was tension in the land.  The leftists called the right wing fascists and the right wing called the left wing terrorists.  But this was the Fourth of July and a temporary cease-fire had taken place in the politics of the region.  Everyone enjoyed the parade.

The first float had been built to shelter babies.  It was a carefully walled playground upon the colorful floor of which babies crawled to and fro.  Above the new babies, a fan blew ribbons into and out of a multi-colored tube.

The middle school float contained the figure of a boy on tiptoes pressing his nose to a white chalk X marked on a green blackboard.

The high school students eschewed a float.  They opted instead for a squadron of convertibles driven by pomaded jocks accompanied by platinum blondes.

After the parade, we drove home to the farm beyond where the pavement ended.  We had a roast beef dinner with baked potatoes and braised carrots.  The beef was from our feedlot; we had fattened the cattle ourselves.  The potatoes and carrots were from the garden.  After dinner, we washed the dishes and retired to the front lawn to launch fireworks.

The children were given black worms and sparklers.  When the 500 milligram pill size worms were lit, they expanded and produced an acrid odor.  They left black marks on the gravel driveway.  The sparklers white hot cores blindingly blazed as we kids ran back and forth, laughing, leaving comet trails in the night.  The adults of the group took control of the bottle rockets and Roman candles from the children.  They feared a fireworks war.

STORIED PENCIL

A voice over the loudspeakers in every hall and every room of the middle school said, “No more pencil wars.”  Broken pencils littered the hallways.  They collected in the corners.  In a pencil war contest, one combatant, the challenger, would hold a pencil between his fists.  The other combatant would then flick his pencil down vertically onto his or her opponent’s horizontal pencil (held between two fists).  The goal of pencil wars was to break your opponent’s pencil.  If the horizontal pencil didn't break, the opponents would switch sides until the loser had his pencil broken.  The winner kept the intact pencil and would play again with his now storied pencil.

TUMBLEWEED IN THE SUBURBS 

After he lost his wife and sold the farm, my father moved us to a cul-de-sac about 25 miles from the city.  We kids pivoted around the dead end’s open space like dervishes.

My neighbor had built a skateboard ramp in his driveway.  We would ride up the ramp, switch directions at the crest, and then ride down and back into the cul-de-sac.  It was my own personal wave.  It was the epicenter of the cul-de-sac; it was my own personal interface with agility, gravity, and grace.

Frisbee was my favorite activity.  The connection of the perfect throw, one where the catcher didn't have to move to catch the Frisbee, was as close as I liked to get to my neighbors–the perfect balance of companionship and detachment.  

I was always identified and self identified as “from out of town.” I was wary of my neighbors.  We had moved from a rural region where our nearest neighbor was fifty miles away to a suburban neighborhood where the nearest house was fifty feet away.  I never got used to this situation.  

My father didn't either.  Newly a widower and flush, he started to drink.  At first, he would wait to drink until after dinner, but soon he was spiking his morning coffee with liquor and drunk by noon.  He had sold his truck and bought a television set and a luxurious passenger car when we moved to the suburbs.  He would rant, rave, and gesticulate to the new television set while he drank.  He had become a crank. 

TUMBLEWEED IN THE CITY

The bus finally ground to a stop at my destination in the city.  I left the bus as it kneeled when its air suspension bled air with a woosh.  I grabbed my bag and lurched to my feet.  I felt exhausted and a bit giddy.

I found a recessed doorway in an alley in which to crash.  It was early morning and hours before dawn.  The city, at this time, was nearly silent.  A low electrical hum was laced with distant sirens, static, and horns.

When I awoke, I could feel the contours of the doorways press against my body except where the pack on my back had acted like a shield.  I was keenly aware of the vulnerability of my situation.  I slept deeply because of my exhaustion.

I was lost.  I began to pace forward.  I groaned with pain, but when I settled into a steady tread, my muscles began to stretch and the pain began to subside.

My stomach felt like it was the size of a pea.  It pulsed painfully.  A hungry man is an angry man, I recalled, but couldn't recall if it was Tosh or Marley.  I sensed the smell of meat on a grill and pursued this scent to a burger franchise.

An old man sat on a cane seat on the sidewalk in front of a food truck.  This cane device was a cane with a flip down seat.  The walkers with attached seats were better.  The user could flip the direction of the walker and then sit on the wide, cushioned bench seat for hours.  If you were old enough, you could linger for hours, just one more citizen in the street parade.

But the cane seat man was waiting for a burger.  The man wore a green suit buttoned to the neck and a teal tie.  His suit was cut loose.  I had noticed the narrow gap between his leathered neck and the top button of his dress shirt.  He was comfortable in his suit.

I walked to the only homeless shelter in the outskirts of town.  It was closed and unlit.  I sat down befuddled on the ground.  The spell had passed; I was uncertain what to do.  

I was contemplating bivouacking right there on the shelter’s front lawn when someone came around the corner and said, “You can't stay here; everyone has been fed and put down for the night.”

“Oh.”

“I'll take your name and number for tomorrow's access lottery.”

I shook my head.  I didn't have a phone.  I walked slowly back to the center of town.  “Got to get me a phone,” I muttered.  With what? I wondered.

In the center of town, I found an empty bench.  I leaned my backpack against the bench.  I sat down on it.  I was fatigued.  My feet hurt.  I raised my throbbing feet and curled up in a ball on the bench.  I fell immediately asleep.  

I was awakened by someone who shook my shoulder.  It was a young man in uniform who held a clipboard.  He said, “You can't sleep here; this is private property.”

I rose, threw my pack onto my back, and began to stagger towards a park whose well lit amphitheatre illuminated the night.  Three people sat cross-legged in a circle on the amphitheatre’s stage.  I had to look closely.  There was a woman and there were two long haired men.  The three had unrolled their sleeping bags on the stage.

I sat down in a cold audience chair under a snowy bough of a pine tree.  I watched while the amphitheatre's lights blinked three times and a police cruiser drove slowly off of the road and parked on the cement pad between the front row of seats and the stage.  The cruiser's lights illuminated as the amphitheatre's lights extinguished for the night.

Two cops exited their cruiser.  One leaned against the front quarter panel and the other ascended some stairs to the stage.  He casually addressed the group of three.  

They gesticulated.  The cop got formal and retrieved his ticket pad.  The three began to pack their sleeping bags into their backpacks.  The cops waited for them to leave.  They had missed him where he sat in the dark under the bough of a snowy pine tree.  He soon fell asleep.

TUMBLEWEED IN THE MORNING

I awoke stiff and cold.  One rib ached where I had slept on it.  I rose and tried to shake the ache from my limbs like a scarecrow in the wind.  I slowly pulled my pack up and over my head so that it rested on my shoulders.  My shoulders screamed with pain until I cinched up my hip belt so that eighty percent of the backpack's weight rested on my hips.  This relieved the pressure on my shoulders.

I began to walk towards the river that divided the town.  Before I got to the river, I saw a group of people setting up a big tent farther into the park.  I slowly trudged towards them.  When I approached within speaking distance, two people peeled off of the rest of the group and approached me.  One said, “Do you need some clean socks?  We have a barber coming if you want a haircut.”

“‘I feel like letting my free flag fly,’ but I'll take a pair of clean socks if you don't mind.”

“How's your appetite; have you eaten recently?”

“It's been awhile, but I can only take so much.”

“We've got some bagels now.  The food trucks should be here within the hour.”

I looked at my watch.  A unicorn with a rainbow horn leapt across the face of the watch.  There would be food trucks.  I decided to wait.  I dropped my backpack to the ground.  I suddenly felt light in my shoes.  I lit a joint and took a hit.  Pleasant euphoria filled my brain and my body’s aches and pains subsided.

Someone came around and gave me a bagel with cream cheese.  I wolfed it down while he took a couple hits from the joint.

One of the adults said to his kid, “That is how the homeless eat, son.  Thank me now, thank me later, you will never be homeless.”

“I prefer it,” I said loudly to the old man.  “You and your son are already homeless.  You're a paycheck or two away from total ruin.  Homelessness is the true American condition.  It is only when you have nothing that you are truly free.  The 1% has taken everything.”

“I have responsibilities,” sputtered the old man.”

“I have none.  No responsibilities.  No wife.  No kid.  I am unattached and I like it that way.”

“How old are you, kid.”

“Eighteen,” I boasted.

“There’s a bucket of free condoms in that wagon.  Get some.  You sure as hell don't want a kid.”

Actually, I am celibate.  I am not governed by passion, desire, or emotion anymore.

“You're not?” the old man asked.

“No.”

“You're the only eighteen year old I know who isn't a constant horn dog.”

“I passed my peak long ago.  Romance, slobber, and fuss disgust me.”

TWO FOOD TRUCKS

Two food trucks slowly drove over the curb and onto the park’s field of grass–one after the other.  One, judging by the giant head about to devour a burrito painted on the truck’s flank, provided Tex-Mex food.  The other truck probably provided French food because it had copulating snails and mating frogs painted on it.

The French truck was purely a fantasy piece because frog's don't have sex in the missionary position (like the frogs painted on the truck).  Instead, male frogs fertilize the female's eggs where they lie suspended in water in a kind of egg jelly.  Then it is survival of the fittest for the tiny, translucent tadpoles.

The drivers of the trucks got out and unlatched and propped up the truck’s windows with poles.  The open windows of the trucks revealed gleaming countertops and cash registers.  The cash registers would remain quiet today, for the owners were working for free–valiant volunteers.

I smelled frying potatoes and, leaving my backpack behind on the ground, I approached the French truck.  The chef was turning lumpy potatoes into gleaming French fries by squeezing them through the wire lattice of a levered guillotine.  The raw french fries would then tumble through the air to splash down in a vat of clean water.  

I wandered over to the Tex- Mex truck.  On a frying table, a woman was frying eggs.  A man in a white cowboy hat and pressed white apron ladled some salsa onto two fried eggs in a bowl and handed the bowl and a plastic spork to me.

“Come back for more if you're still hungry.  We have plenty.  There is no reason for anyone to be hungry in the USA.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said to the man in the white cowboy hat.

After I ate the eggs and salsa, I walked over to the French truck.  I was given roast beef on a baguette which I consumed with a bowl of au jus at a nearby picnic table.

I pulled my pack onto my back and began to waddle towards the river.  I met people coming from the direction in which I was heading.  Many homeless congregated upstream at the source of the river where the police cruisers with their search lights could not reach.

At the river, there was the semi-circular flagstone floor of a park at the same level as the surface of the river.  I sat down heavily on a bench there and contemplated a mother duck and her brood paddle around in sequence on the water.  I lost track of time.  Finally, I rose painfully and left the peaceful park.

THE BRIDGE OF TWO DRAGONS: BARNUM WOULD BE PROUD

The dragon bridge had been given to the city by a sister city in Asia.  The handrails on either side of the bridge formed long, snake-like dragons.  Their four heads, at all ends of the handrails, revealed jaws stretched wide under angry eyes.  Their red nostrils flared.  Their faces were distorted by aggression.  Their black cheekbones were sharp as knives.

Tumbleweed placed a hand into one of the dragon’s jaws.  He felt sharp teeth and a coarse tongue.  Then he felt a kind of primordial fear.  He let his hand drop out of the dragon’s mouth.  He wandered to the top of the bridge’s arch.  Looking upriver there was the snow capped mountain.  Downstream, a city glittered in the distance on the plains.  He peered in the direction to which he had climbed.  In the near distance was a library made of glass planes.  His heart struggled for a few seconds.  He loved libraries and bookstores.

A LIBRARY IN THE MOUNTAINS 

Tumbleweed entered the library through two sliding glass doors.  The vaulted glass ceiling of the vestibule was formed by three intersecting glass plates.  A glass countertop, solid, maybe two inches thick, formed the front desk.  He nodded to the librarians there and sat down in a carrel near the entrance.  Tumbleweed found the spaciousness of the library comforting.

He activated the carrel’s computer and plugged his portable radio into the carrel's electric socket.

The computer hummed and an internet operating system appeared on the computer’s monitor.  Tumbleweed put his hands on the computer’s keyboard and thought, I need an email address.

He found a free email application and created an address.  When he was prompted for an address, he typed in Dragonbridge4: the country, the suburbs, the city, and, 4, the mountain valley.

He felt like he had accomplished something so he plugged his earbuds into his ears and turned on the radio.  The radio’s tiny digital screen illuminated in the color lime green.  He heard static from the earbuds.  He pressed a ruggedized button and the radio began to scan;

“New and improved…”

“God watches over you...”

“Red meat is good for you…”

“Nicotine is poison and tobacco use leads to an early grave…”

“Their cattle are considered sacred, never eaten, roam the cities freely, and are treated as gods.”

“The enjoyment of a single cigarette is underrated.”

I turned the radio off.  I then shut down the computer.  I had a new identity, a new character, a new name, a new pen name, a new incarnation, a new creation: Dragonbridge4–or was it more of a place than a name?

THE PERIODICAL SECTION

I moved from the carrel to the periodical section.  I selected a magazine from a bamboo wall rack and sat down in a comfortable chair.  The magazine was about yachting.  I paged through the glossy pictures of multi-million dollar yachts.  I liked the trawlers.  They were slow but sure.  I could not decide if I was acting in bad faith.  Barring the lottery, I would never be able to afford one of these yachts, yet I admired their engineering and design.  I particularly liked the Sea Piper 37 a humble but slippery coastal cruiser with a reliable engine and a thousand mile range.

I thought my old-thought fantasy about taking a bus to a port and shipping out on a container ship.  I had nothing to lose.  I had no attachments on land that would be painful to sever.  I was an eyeball equipped with consciousness and now that consciousness was thinking about the sea.

I would be an owner-operator, I decided.  If the Sea Piper featured in the magazine, why not a Northwest trawler or a Hampton Endurance.  I decided, I didn't want a crew, just me, my present companion, and my guests exploring the gunk holes, bays, rivers, harbors, and coastlines of America.

Somewhere, a pressure gauge let off steam.

I returned the glossy magazine about yachting to the magazine rack and selected a magazine about new cars.  I read an article about two sports cars and decided which one I would pick.  The one that could endure the daily grind of being thrown into corners unflappably was the one I needed for myself–the most durable one.  I was happy when the authors concurred with my selection.

Somewhere, a pressure gauge let off steam.

I would need to learn to drive.

CHARACTER

Call me Maestro–everyone else does.  Since my father died, I have been living on the street with the flotsam and jetsam of society.  I wear a ring, my only inheritance from my family, that is in the form of a skull.  The skull ring is pointed at one end.  It could leave a nasty gouge or slice out an eyeball.  As a melee blunt force instrument, the deeply engraved image could leave an image of itself.  It would stamp a mark.

BOOK TWO

MIDNIGHT 

ONE MORE SATURDAY NIGHT

Soft tones tolled over the rooftops of the city.  The bells in their towers rang midnight.  The city smelled of tar and automobile exhaust.  The starlight was washed out by the light from the city and the light from a full moon.

The breaths and caesuras from two lanes of intermittently noisy traffic gusted occasionally across my chest.  The staccato sound of horns echoed and reverberated between the buildings.  I had my sleeves rolled up and three buttons on my chest open to the night.  Headlights glittered on chrome.  I leaned forward and my eyes blinked and squinted to counter the debris in the dusty atmosphere.  Broken glass ground under my boots.  The wind wove through the corridors of traffic.  On the loom of life, we weave the wind.

In his right hand, he held a Greek sandwich called a gyro wound in a newspaper.  He took a bite of the juicy gyro and savored the warm pita bread, the blend of marinaded meats, and tangy cucumber sauce.

He stopped in front of a weathered building covered with insulated vinyl siding.  It was named in the style of the computer nomenclature of the postmodern Internet period.  The only window to the bar had been spray painted black and a sign hung over the window read @Sea in a pulsing neon light.

Farther down the street, beyond an alleyway, an intersection, and a tall tree with a wide bower, a pier stretched shakily into the stinking summer river and on into the night.

The bouncer, who I knew from some regularity, nodded at me as I approached.  His name was Kim.  One of his knees was supported by a hinged brace.  When I asked him about it once, he made eye contact and said flatly, “IED.”. He had been in the military and had the blank stare of someone who had seen too many unrelieved combat missions. The doorman leaned on a heavy cane.  I never crossed him.

With practiced footwork and deft quickness, the doorman wedged his cane beneath the weighty door’s massive handle and opened the door for me.  He smiled grimly.  His knee brace clanked and rattled as he moved.  I turned, faced the bar,  and the street became invisible to me.

@Sea

I stepped through the portal and into the bar.  When the door closed behind me, the here-and-there road noises were replaced by the rhythm of bluesy rock from the jukebox.  A few people turned and scanned my face.  I recognized several nightlife personages that were sometimes described in the little broadsheet for which I wrote on occasion.

I felt alone in the crowded bar.  The jukebox played, “One More Saturday Night,” by the Grateful Dead.”

The bar was dimly lit.  There were red covered lamps on the bar.  There was indirect lighting in red, orange, and yellow.  There were booths on the wall opposite of the bar.  Smoke swirled like a mist in the space between the bar and the booths.

A man in cowboy boots crossed slowly through my field of vision.  I knew him for the bar’s detective. Pajama pants bunched at his heels concealed two pistols.  He wore a sheer black T-shirt that covered his sunken chest.  Pitching his voice so I could hear him he said, “No rest for the wicked.” It was midnight, Saturday night.

The bar itself had two available seats.  I crossed to the bar, my boots treading on peanut shells, and plopped down into a cherry-red vinyl bar seat.

A man crossed me in full bondage gear.  He wore a leather smock and a leather cowl that zippered up the side.  He flaunted his hairy buttocks.  He was said to only answer to “King of the World” and he made me uncomfortable.  Torture was in this year.  Bondage didn't appeal to me.  I didn't even like the costumes.  Maybe bondage appealed to the jaded, but it seemed like a perversion of intimacy to me.

What was true intimacy?  To my mind, it was simultaneous orgasm.  The many iterations of The Beatles’ “Come Together” suggest I am not the only one to value the intimacy of mutual climax and the shared pinnacle of pleasure.

HOW I LOST MY APPETITE 

One of the two bartenders working the bar, Fin, set a cup of black coffee on the bar in front of me.  She knew, from long the night, and Saturday nights were usually a bender, with a cup of Joe.  Fin’s eyes met mine through the drifting steam of the coffee and she said, “Look what the cat dragged in.  My potted plant.  You're usually here at eleven.  You're late.”

I took a sip of the coffee.  It was warm and fortifying.  I unrolled the newspaper, spread it on the bar, and took a chomp out of the gyro.  I couldn't help but read the newspaper headlines on my makeshift placemat: THREE MILLION AFFECTED BY FAMINE IN YEMEN.  STARVATION IS A WEAPON OF WAR NOT PEACE.  I chewed slower.  US MANUFACTURED BOMBS DROPPED ON STARVING YEMENI CIVILIANS.  I stopped eating.

I peeled a bill off of the thin roll in my pocket and set it down on the bar.  Fin quivered all over when she came to rest to set a shot of whiskey and a beer down in front of me.  I took a sip of the whiskey and felt it jolt my brain and then ebb through my body.  Did whiskey mean the water of life?

I quaffed the whiskey sensation down with a mouthful of lager and ate some more of the gyro.  The news got worse.  I stopped eating.  I had lost my appetite.  There was nothing left to do but to proceed with black solemnity and mourn the thoughtless brutality of the world.  

I slowly scanned the rows of bottles on their shelves ahead of me.  The rows formed sinuous patterns.  They were lit from below to produce a rainbow effect.  I could see my ugly face in the mirrored wall behind the rainbow rows of bottles.  I had dyed my hair and beard black.

I shifted my eyes but not my head.  To my right, sat an assassin.  I had seen him here before.  He was part of the intrigue in my world.  

Bad luck.  Looming over the rows of bottles, the television tuned to a baseball game, up top near the ceiling, was the clock.  This was the “clock seat.”  I had seated myself without thinking.  The seat was considered unlucky because the last thing one wanted to think about in a bar was the passage of time.  Let the good times roll, is proverbial.  

The ratcheting second hand on the clock counted down our time together staccato second by staccato second.  The clock was considered bad luck and I had sat down next to an assassin.  He lived around town, parked on the side of the road, sleeping in the back of his hearse.  He always reeked of sweat and blood.  

It was this clock on high which counted down the time to closing time, two hours after midnight when, day after day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, it was the end for the night, cast out, banished, when you can do what you want, but you can't do it here.

IN CHESS, IT'S CALLED A CASTLE

I finished the whiskey and nicked the stout.  I left my half empty coffee cup upended on the newspaper with the partially eaten gyro.  A circular mark spread out on the greasy newsprint like a ripple in water.

I left the unlucky clock seat next to the assassin and moved deeper into the bar where I sat down in an empty seat.  I had a good view of the baseball game on one of the bar’s live television monitors.  There are few sports I enjoy more than the American pastime, a treasured memory: a childhood three RBI triple.  On the screen, a pitcher bunted a curve ball down the third base line.  It was a lucky bunt, because it is difficult to bunt a sharply breaking curveball.  

The pitcher had a higher probability of bunting successfully, than hitting successfully so he was directed to bunt instead of swing freely.  

It was all in the numbers and their strategic and tactical interplay.  This bunt advanced a runner from first base to second base.  Second base is considered a scoring position because any subsequent hit will score the runner on second.  

Pitchers are usually slow and can't hit well but they are all trained to bunt.  Advancing successfully to first base on the bunt was a bonus.  As long as the runner advanced to scoring position (second base) the fate of the pitcher was of secondary importance. 

The runner stole third.  He slid face first, arms outstretched ahead of him, fists clenched like Superman, past an opening in the defense.

“Bad luck,” said the bartender.  Finn set a whiskey and a beer down in front of me on the bar.  I dropped a bill on the bar from my thin roll.  I let the bartenders calculate what I owed them and tipped them reasonably for they had never cheated me.  I enjoyed computing the phantom sums in my head while I sat there and stewed.

I was present at @Sea every night from 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM like clockwork.  The bartenders at @Sea liked to tease me: they called me their “Potted Plant” because I was rarely in the mood for conversation.  All the bartenders had to do was keep me in drink like watering a potted plant.  

Finn went on intently but evasively, “Everyone has been superstitious since the Lotto came to town.” Maybe she was referring to the assassin who was tonight said to be parked near the boat ramp less than three blocks from my apartment.

There, reflected in the mirrored backsplash, amidst the multi-colored rainbow rows of bottles, I saw a couple I knew sipping highballs behind me.

THORN AND TOOMI

I picked up a basket of peanuts and my beer glass from the bar.  I carefully stepped over to Thorn and Toomi’s booth and sat down across from them.  

Thorn, I knew from the broadsheet.  We were occasional lovers.  Toomi taught part-time at the local community college.  He subbed in Literature 101 classes and taught with the fervency some reserved for saving souls.  He was known as “the Preacher.”

Thorn and Toomi were from this eastern city while I was their freakish friend from the West Coast.  They were close.  Thorn and I were close.  They both started talking at once.

“Are you drinking alone?

“How long have you been here?”

I raised my hands palms up in the air like, who should I answer first?  Thorn and Toomi swiveled their heads and looked at each other.  Then they turned and looked at me.

“What's with the black hair dye job.”

“It's for a mission.”

“I do recall you as a missionary man,” flirted Thorn.

“It's Saturday night.  I might want to branch out.”

“Front and center, baby,” moaned Thorn with a moue.

‘It's past midnight and already Sunday morning,” I said.

Toomi said, “We are meeting up with a couple at closing time.  Then we're off to the after-hours-club where I am a member, and from there, we're going where the night takes us.”

Thorn reached across the table and squeezed my hand.  She said, “Drink with us, we're on our third drink.”

A murmur went through the bar.  Someone from the home team had scored a run in the baseball game.  On the screen elevated above the bar, the fans cheered and began to perform the wave with its ululations of sound.  The scoring runner returned to the dugout where he was celebrated with high fives, a light punch on a million dollar arm, and general approval.

Thorn said, “A run.  It's not like I haven't seen one before.  Thorn had the misfortune of being conventionally beautiful.  She was either madly adored or deeply resented by the men in her life.  There seemed to be no middle ground with the men.

With the woman she was a damned Jolene so she was feared and hated by her own gender.  Sometimes she would pal around with other 10s with devastating romantic impact, but tonight she was with us, and she was letting her hair down.

Thorn and I worked on the nightlife broadsheet together.  We each reported on the club and live music scenes.  The broadsheet was a free weekly scroll of mimeographed timely text interspersed with advertisements.  It was delivered to the city's hotspots on Thursday afternoon.  The broadsheet reported on the restaurants, bars, and nightclubs of the city.

Whenever I needed cash, which was often enough even though I worked constantly, I would visit a club, write it up, and present the draft to Jack, my editor-in-chief.  I was essentially a gig worker.

Jack would read the draft slowly and then hem and haw on the price-per-word.  Then Jack would pull some twenties from a stack of bills in his office safe and hand some over with a morose expression.

“Get anything out of Jack today?” I asked Thorn.

“No.  Like blood from a stone,” Thorn replied.

“He liked my piece on the trangender beauty contest so the next round is on me.”

“Who won?”

“The heterosexual ideal of beauty.”

“What do you mean?”

“The winner won a modelling contract.”

“Is that a victory?” There was a long pause and then Thorn asked, “Could you ever?”

“No.  I can't get past the cut.  Don't get me wrong, multiple orgasms and the ability to give birth have their appeal, but I like my male role and would never change.”

Thorn brushed the inside of my thigh with her toes and said, “I'd hate to lose your junk.”

I blushed and smiled happily.  “You should have seen the judges.  The straight judges voted based on the new women’s conformity with the heterosexual beauty ideal.  The gays and party people voted based on costume.  The winner had an incredible lithe body and wore only a thong and vivid red boa for the swimsuit contest.”

Toomi said, “Gender can be a costume, cut or no cut.  In Shakespeare’s plays, women were often played by boys or men in drag.  Boys with high voices were favored for some roles.”

“Just like the Greek philosophy students.”

“Or the Catholic choir boys.”

We all groaned.

Thorn said, “Should I be jealous of this contest winner.”

“Her legs went on forever but I still have a mental block.”

“A mental block?  They're functioning women and people should be able to choose the gender of their choice.  I see choice as part and parcel of American freedom and liberty.”

“They certainly aren't hurting anyone.”

“No they're not.  Don't hurt their feelings, take a transgender out to dinner.  Wine her and dine her.  You have more hang ups than anyone else I know.  You know I make no claims on you.”

I caught Tomi's eye and said, “I guess you see people like me come and go.  It's good for Thorn that she has a steady friend.”

“You're her steady friend too.  Steadfast?  I stray, especially here, but we're flexible.”

“I'm just glad we can keep the drama to a minimum.  Now about that next round…”

FINN AND THE FAST LANE

I got up and crunched and slid my way to the bar.  It was getting crowded now and I had to wedge myself, one shoulder to the bar, between two other patrons.  I dropped a bill on the bar and waited for Finn, hyper and thin, to come to rest in front of me like a human dynamo set to neutral.  She said, “M’Lord,” and I doubled over with laughter.  I was of the lowest order:  highly educated, but always broke in the tradition of Fleet Street.  I ordered three Mezcal.

“With or without the worm,” Finn asked with a gleam in her eyes.

“It's Saturday night.  Let's have those weird worms!”

Finn giggled with delight and filled up three shot glasses with golden Mezcal.  She then set a gigantic jar of Mezcal worms on the bar and carefully extracted a worm for each shot glass with a large pair of tweezers.

Finn held the tweezers over her head and let a worm drop into her mouth.  She masticated thoughtfully for a few moments.  Her facial expressions quivered.  Her eyes bored into mine.  Could she be on the cheap LSD that fueled many of this night's late night revelers?  

Finn was thin and rangy.  She was hyper-stimulated.  She burned calories at an elevated rate.  She was constantly stimulated by LSD, Methyl-amphetamine, Cocaine, Coffee, or anything to keep her active and awake.  Finn slept at dawn.

LIL AND THE WILD SIDE

Lil, Finn’s bartending partner, hove past in torpid turgidity.  She was deceptively slow, for she worked steadily and without pause.  Finn liked uppers.  Lil liked downers.  Lil was quicker moving slowly than Finn was with her herky-jerky style.

I had seen alcohol ruin people’s health and prospects.  That mean wreckage passed through @Sea like tidal water.  Heroin addicts like big Lil just floated on the surface of disaster with no apparent damage to their health.  Heroin tended to preserve the body in ways that weren't popular to talk about.  Heroin was healthier than many drugs if you didn't die before you learned your dose.  I couldn't hold heroin against Lil, especially now that all illegal drugs had been legalized and submitted to the purview of medicine.  

I was an experiential learner so I had to try heroin.  I liked the Lou Reed, Rock & Roll heroin soundtrack that accompanied the drug until I learned that heroin was a dance with Death.  It is as in the late Lou Reed’s tune, “Life is just to die.”

I'd only overdosed once before I quit the drug for good.  I learned something about Death.  I had snorted a line and later taken a pill.  It was enough to kill me.  

Locked in my heroin-immobilized body, my emotions ascended from fear to terror as my heart slowed and came to a complete stop.  The oxygen bled out of my brain as my conscious mind narrowed to a point.  

Then everything disappeared and I died.  There were no angels or demons or pearly gates; there was nothing but the empty void of nothingness.

ONE AM IN THE MORNING

I excused myself from Thorn and Toomi saying I needed to get some fresh air.  I struggled through the crowded bar and let myself out through the heavy front door.  

Street noise greeted me.  I heard intermittent horns, echoing voices, and the single bell tolling Saturday night one AM; the night was young.  

Outside, the doorman stared at me with his uncanny gaze.  “Smoke?” I asked him, pulling a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from my breast pocket.  Kim the doorman just shook his head and appeared more dejected than usual.  

I pushed the pack of cigarettes back into my breast pocket and withdrew a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from a thigh pocket of my fatigues.

I tamped tobacco into the pipe’s bowl as I wandered down the sidewalk towards the pier.  The alleyway loomed.  I peered into it carefully before I walked on.  No one was in there.

I continued to the cross street where I stopped and waited for the light to change.  I waited beneath the wide arbor of an ancient tree.  

Engines revved.  The sidewalk smelled of oil and gasoline.  Headlights blinked in the night.  The light changed and I hurried to cross the street.

A massive flow of melted metal had been stopped in its molten flow here when it was quenched by the waters of the wide river.  It was locked in time.  

An old crane hung over one side of the pier.  The pier itself was made of aged and warped wood.  I walked carefully to the end of the pier.  

At the end of the pier, the noises and fumes of the city were attenuated.  The stars were brighter in the darkness at the end of the pier.

I circled the tip of the flame from my torch lighter around the inner circumference of the pipe's bowl to light my pipe. 

PERCEPTIONS

I perceived, so suddenly that I jumped, an old man sitting on the pier next to me with his feet dangling into the empty space above the river.  

I shifted away from him.  He held a spinner fishing rod in his bony hands.  His face was wrinkled by worry and laughter.  His face had the consistency of a dried raisin and was tanned a deep walnut brown.

The old raisin drew the tip of his rod up when he felt a nibble and the hook at the end of the line sliced through the fish’s cheek.  The old man reeled in his line until the fluttering fish broke free from its aquatic element and hung, flipping and flapping in the air, transfixed by the baleful gaze of the old man.  The old man licked his lips like Sylvester the cat or the Acme Roadrunner and seemed to think, “Should I eat this one.”  

He laughed and in one motion unhooked the carp and dropped it back into the river.  The old man shook his head and stared at the ripples from the fish’s splash disappear into the nighttime black surface of the water.

The old man withdrew some extra large rolling papers from his fishing vest and laboriously rolled a double length, double wide joint.  He lit the tip of the joint and the pungent scent of burning, cured marijuana blossomed in the air around us.  

I scanned the pier out of habit.  There was no reason for paranoia because marijuana, along with all the formerly illegal drugs, had been legalized.  Drug addiction was now treated as a medical issue, not a legal one.  This was in accordance with the views of the majority of medical professionals and the majority of police.  The fumes and outflows of the joint whirled and swirled around me.

I touched my torch lighter to the tobacco in my ebony Sherlock pipe and inhaled.  The orange ember bloomed in the pipe’s black bowl.

A boat approached beyond the pier gliding upstream on the surface tension of the river’s waters.  Its rebuilt diesel engine hummed and coughed as it moved implacably upstream.  You could hear the pistons drum in their cylinders.  I watched the river craft slowly power upstream against the current, while I pulled on my pipe, until the boat’s navigation lights diminished and then disappeared in the distant darkness that awaits us all.

EXPLORERS AND COLONISTS ARE INVADERS TOO; HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORIOUS

The history of this river was the history of invasion itself.  The indigenous people had been there first.  They had carefully dug irrigation channels with well tuned tools in the rich loam of the river valley to water their seasonal maize.  

Then the explorers came with their pistol and ball.  They radiated out from the coast with their disease and coin.  The Native Americans had been murdered off and moved by these invaders in forced march exodus after forced march exodus until only a few remained in isolated reservations like prisoners hemmed in by a hostile Empire.

General Custer had been told, “Don't burden your command with prisoners,” which meant kill the Native American enemy without quarter (even women, children, captured, and wounded).  As so often happens in war, warfare is rarely fair.  Custer was ordered to wage a war of extermination against the Sioux tribe of Native Americans.  He did.  Famously, the Sioux won that round and killed Custer.

My mind marvelled when I perceived that the ancient tree preserved at the intersection beyond the foot of the pier might have been a sprout or a seedling during the time when hunters and gatherers with some domestic, agrarian, and foraging skills, ruled North America in loose regional affiliations of Native American tribes.

A branch had been blasted off of the ancient tree at the intersection.  Now there was only a black wound where the branch had been broken away.  The branch was gone and so was its foliage.  There was a missing swath of leaves in the arbor of the tree. 

The trunk of the tree was black from burning diesel and steaming creosote that had been splashed up on it from the soupy, summer pavement.  It was cooler in the nighttime moonlight of one o’clock.  That day, the Fahrenheit temperature had passed one hundred and twenty five degrees in the shade. During this super heated summer, on this small planet Earth, global atmospheric temperatures had increased in exponential correspondence to the rise in industrial pollution and other anti-environmental events like the madness of burning trees.

In this near future utopia, or is it a dystopia to some, the war on drugs had been eliminated in the name of civil liberties and medical addiction treatments soon after the filibuster was eliminated.  There was even talk of re-writing the Constitution because weren't the Constitution and the late filibuster homages to white male power?

The old raisin was smoking legally.  With the complete end of Prohibition in the US, people now had the legal right to medicate in public and it wasn't unusual to see people partying in the parks.  Cannabis,  opioids, psilocybin, and cocaine were now available over-the-counter.  

I had an ounce of psilocybin, magic mushrooms, in a wide mouth pill bottle, wedged in the rear pocket of my jeans.  I had felt the need for a psychedelic and psychological reset when I had bought the mushrooms at a pharmacy but I didn't want to trip alone.  

I whacked my pipe against the heel of one boot to clear its bowl and then lit a filterless tobacco cigarette.  My head cleared and I decided to rejoin Thorn and Toomi back at the bar @Sea.

There was a crowd around the entrance to @Sea.  The doorman asked me if I already had a seat because everyone else had to wait for someone to leave to get in.  I replied I did and he heaved the heavy door open for me.  I understood.  I guess I was an over capacity fire hazard.

@Sea finished strong and was busiest just prior to closing time when rich assholes, to the distaste of the regular patrons, waved twenties in the face of Finn and Lil.  The bartenders called this time Pick’n Twenties and relished both rewarding and snubbing aggressive guests.

Thorn and Toomi had been joined by their friends Trip and Shia.  I slid into the booth next to Toomi and cleared a space in the mass of glasses on the table.  I placed the wide mouth pillbox in the center of the empty space.  

I perceived the two new people.  Trip had fine, long hair joined into a cue at the base of his neck.  He was very pale.  Shia was chestnut brown and showed it off to advantage by wearing a white cotton motorcycle jacket.  

Shia caught me staring at the contrast revealed by the white jacket collar and the chestnut nape of her neck and said, “Vampire hungry?” with a laugh.

“No.  I'm not a bloodsucking aristocrat.  I work in my own way and my means are humble.  I only declared $13,254 last year.”

“How do you survive?”

We began a conversation about Bram Stoker’s Dracula and an English royal whose jeep had been flipped by an angry mob.

I asked, “Does anyone want to do some magic mushrooms?  I have enough to share.”

A cheer went up from the table and the jukebox started playing Jefferson Airplane’s tune White Rabbit.  The jukebox’s amplifier had been turned up.  Grace Slick’s voice echoed throughout the bar wailing “feed your head.”

“I will remember that cheer when you all puke,” I said, for everyone knew vomiting up the mushrooms was just part of a later stage in the psilocybin trip.  One usually purged, especially with a heroic dose, both physically and psychologically when one took a magic mushrooms trip.

I carefully chopped up the mushrooms with my pen knife.  Then I divided the mushrooms into five neat piles.

“The kitchen is closed so we're going to have to eat these raw,” I said.

“No way,” said Toomi, “Aren't they grown in shit?”

“Like pearls before swine.  Where do you think the delicacy ‘truffles’ grow best?”

“I really don't want to know where they came from.  I just want to get off tonight,” emoted Thorn.

“Haven’t you heard of the concept of “reification” or the concept of the “commodity fetish?”  You have a smartphone.  Look them up.  Anyway, the mushrooms came from a pharmacy.  There were several options.  This is the bulk brand Millcreek Psilocybin.  It fit my budget.”

Thorn caught my eye and ran the pink tip of her tongue along her upper lip.  She picked up one of the dessicated mushrooms between her thumb and her index finger.  Her eyes bored into mine.  Then, she leaned her head back and let the mushrooms dangle over her mouth.  She consumed the mushrooms and then finished her beer.

One at a time, we all followed suit 

TWO AM

The doorman stepped into the bar and unplugged the jukebox.  The Rolling Stone’s tune “Sympathy for the Devil” slowed and came to a stop.

Kim the doorman shouted into the momentary lull in the volume of the bar caused by the silence of the jukebox, “Last call for alcohol!  Fifteen minutes of fame left, kids.  Drink them up!” The crowd surged heavily against the bar.  

Our group got up and left through the gap on the floor formed by the publicians surging the bar in the hope of one last drink before closing time.  

Thorn and Toomi, Shia and Trip, followed me outside of the bar, safely past the mouth of the alleyway, to the lightning blasted ancient tree at the intersection, and on, after a brief delay, to the warped and wavy floor of the pier.

We sat down in a circle at the end of the pier.  The old raisin was gone.  The mushrooms kicked in and we all reported what are called tracings.  Matter in motion, like the vehicles on the street, left blurred trails behind them or traces.  I reported a hallucination of two skeletons dancing on the surface of the river.  Shia said she could see my nose extend like Pinocchio.

Then we all began to sense a feeling of impending doom.  I felt the intensity of my dread fray my nerves.  I could feel the unused parts of my brain illuminate and come alive.

These sacred mushrooms in indigenous communities had been administered by shamans for tens of thousands of years.  Taking mushrooms, usually in the form of a stew, was a communal and sacred rite.

When the emotional weight of the psychedelic trip began to weigh on us, Thorn proposed we make love under the pier.  

Trip noticed the time and suggested we should get going if we were to make it to the after-hours club.

THREE AM

After-hours clubs were open from two until they closed sharply at four o’clock.  They were open to members and their guests.  Toomi’s club was in the basement of an old brick building.  

To enter, the member had to present his or her membership card to the bouncer and then walk down the stairs between two metal clamshell doors which rested open on the sidewalk.  We all entered as guests of Toomi.

The basement was cool.  Fans kept the air moving.  A bar, clad in stainless steel, extended across one wall.  I ordered a cocaine cola.  I drank it down and the uncomfortable sensation in my gut was washed away by a pleasant tingle.  This cocaine cola had more cocaine then Coca Cola did when it was introduced in 1886.  It was a reliable stimulant.  I only took it occasionally because it was highly addictive.  Overuse turned people into ranting goons.

My brain seemed to come alive again.  I had received a reprieve from the long night.  I experienced a second wind.

Suddenly, I was speaking a blue streak with Thorn.

She said, “I can't understand you when you talk so fast.  I'm stretched.  Why don't you buy a girl a drink?”

“Sure, Barkeep!”

The bartender had heard.  He popped the top off of a cocaine cola and set it down in front of me.  I slid it sideways to Thorn and she lifted it to her lips and took a long pull.

Thorn smiled and said, “A fizz.  Thank you for the drink.”

“You're welcome.”

Freelance journalism was rarely steady.  It was frequently a feast or a famine.  Together, the artists, bands, and chefs we wrote about in the broadsheet formed a kind of community.  

Many began in our provincial city.  A few went on to break nationally.  Most, around here, were folk artists with sophisticated lyrics and a modicum of Rock & Roll.  

When the artists got popular enough in the large national markets, they would break like a wave at sea.  The trick was to surf that wave of popularity, articulating it here and modulating it there, until it diminished and you rode briefly on momentum alone before either sinking into the sea or riding another wave you had to create for yourself.

The broadsheet articulated the local scene for everybody.  There was transparency to the scene itself.  Most who succeeded would continue to play the local clubs.  They were greeted by a detached curiosity as if the audience was wondering what was their secret and could they still rock?

I began to describe the basement room on my smartphone.  It reminded me of Cheers, Ellison’s basement, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.  I alluded to all three in my description.

Trip and Shia were sharing a banana split farther down the bar.  With global legalization, all drugs were legal and permissible.  Trip was sculpting lines with a credit card.  I blinked.  I was unbanked.

FOUR AM

The after-hours establishment closed at four for the night.  The five of them formed a conga line as they proceeded with some hilarity towards the river where Trip’s liveaboard boat was moored to the riverbank near a jetty.  The riverboat was long, narrow, and appeared to be made of aluminum.

From the riverbank, they boarded the boat by walking across a plank Trip called a passerelle.  In the part of the boat called the salon where the guests congregated, Trip sat down heavily in a recliner and said “There’s beer in the fridge, a stout and a lager, sparkling water, and there’s food in there too so help yourself.  ‘Be my guest,’ said the spider to the fly.  If we’re still up at dawn, we’ll have some champagne.”

Trip lit a cigarette and I soon followed.  I shared my cigarette with Thorn where we sat captured by the concave embrace of a loveseat.  The salon of the boat began to fill with smoke.  Tony and Shia sat on the divan.  Tony was showing Shia how to roll a double wide joint.  The fragrant scents of burning tobacco and burning cannabis mingled in the air.  

Trip leaned forward, stood up, and opened a porthole above his head.  He stepped across the salon and opened another porthole there for cross ventilation.  The smoke in the boat’s salon began to dissipate.  

Thorn had some liquid LSD and suggested they do it now.  

Trip said, “Wait, let’s set the mood.”  He fished a wired remote control from a wicker basket next to his recliner.  He pressed a button and a television slowly rose from the bulkhead behind the love seat.  Trip concentrated on his remote control and a video entitled “The Hardest Trip” began to flow across the television’s screen.  A pulsing music filled the salon with surround sound.  My heart began to beat in time with the music.

The image on the screen formed a whirlpool made up of multicolored, fractal patterns.  The viewpoint descended into the vortex.  Trip said, “Don’t be afraid to look away from that one.  The hardest trip.  You can really get lost in the zooming perspective.”

I stared at the Mandelbrot zoom through patterns of infinite irreducibility for some time.  I began to feel as if I was falling.  A sense of unease overtook me and I had to look away.

I unfolded myself from the love seat, stood, and made my way to the boat’s kitchen.  A boat’s kitchen is called its galley.  I opened the teak veneered door to the refrigerator and looked inside.  In a crisper drawer there were lunch meats and slices of cheese.  The morning’s fresh bread was on the counter.  I sliced three pieces of bread off of the loaf and fixed myself a triple decker with roast beef, cheddar cheese, pickles, tomato, and lettuce.  I spread mayonnaise liberally on the sandwich so it would slide down easily.

Tony and Shia were rolling another joint.  Soon it was circulating and we were all elevated again

Thorn and I decided to take a walk together.  We passed over the passerelle to the riverbank and climbed a steep berm to a lighted path.  The lights atop their light posts created nimbuses of blue light where they were interspersed on the path that followed the rivers contours as it arced through the busy city.  I said to Thorn, “Take back the night.”

There was the public, blue lighted river path and branching off from it, a private path that arced through the university.  The university was a cloistered space that was surrounded by walls that were pierced by gothic gates.  Thorn and I took the path to the university.  We walked up the steep path, passed through an aperture consisting of a groin vault between two archways, and emerged on the grounds of the university. 

The campus was nearly empty at this early hour.  The two cardinally oriented paths intersected in the center of the grounds.  At the four points of this intersection, four students sat cross legged and tended a small vigil fire.  We walked around these vigil keepers and left the university through another archway.  We found ourselves in a carefully tended park.  Topiary lined the path and any hint of disorder was purely for contrast as in wabi sabi.

There were no lights on this park path so we paused and waited for our eyes to adjust to the light from the full moon.  Thorn slung her arm around my shoulder.  After a while, I could see better in the moonlight than I had in the blue light on the forested path.  Thorn took my hand.  

We paced together as the path descended into a swale.  The temperature declined as we descended and the air grew thick with a chilly, opaque fog.  Finally, we began to ascend.  We cleared the fog and rose into the moonlight.  A grassy incline spread out before us and we decided to rest for a moment or two.  I noticed that Thorn was wearing all white tonight.  She usually dressed like a crow.  All clear, I guessed.

I asked, “Why are you wearing all white today, Thorn.”

“Why do you think?”

“Are you ovulating or something?”

“No.  You’re too poor and too much of a free spirit to have a child.”

“Aren’t you a bit of a free spirit yourself?” I asked.

“Oh, hold me.  I don’t know what I want.”

They reclined on the glassy incline and intertwined like two amorous snakes in the moonlight.

FIVE AM

While the bells tolled five the man and the woman pressed feverishly together.  Afterwards, they embraced and reclined on the hill.  The grass on the incline was wet with dew.  They embraced, but grew chilly and soon rose.  They held hands while they walked down the hill.

They would return to the boat, they decided, but they would take the urban route.  Thorn said she wanted sausages but no eggs so they agreed to dine at a twenty four hour diner on the urban route back to Trip’s boat.  

They could see the restaurant from two blocks away.  A pulsating, neon rooster lit their path to the front door of the restaurant.  The neon sign seemed to enlarge as they approached.  “I could eat that rooster alive,” quipped Thorn as they entered the warm restaurant.

Thorn dropped into a booth with an exhausted groan.  “What da’ ya’ got,” she slurred sleepily.  I emptied my pockets of notes and change and combined them with hers on the table.  I counted our cash carefully and said, “We can’t afford fizz sunrises.  Are you sure you want sausages?”

“Quite.  I want sausages.  I have to have sausages.”

I ordered a carafe of coffee and Thorn ordered some sausage links.

While we were waiting, I drank coffee and proofread my article on the afterhours club.  I decided to fax it to Jack so the article would be on his desktop when he arrived at the office.

When the sausage links arrived, Thorn delightedly ate them with the tips of her fingers.

I paid the bill from our cash pile and added a tip.  I stacked my dishes and we quietly left.  

We walked slowly among the looming buildings.  We paused carefully at every intersection and scanned for traffic.  At this hour, we only encountered a lumbering motorcycle.  Its shock absorbers nullified the pavement’s buckles and potholes.  The motorcycle’s tall tail lights traced through the miasmatic night like swords.

The motorcyclist could be anywhere in the city in minutes.  He rode slowly through the curves but surged uphill, when passing, and through every green intersection.  He was an experienced rider and a master of time.  He could ride through the city without encountering a single red light.  He was uncanny.  He had the traffic lights all timed in his head like he was part of some grand symphony.  He was a legend in leathers and when he wasn’t riding he wore a pet parrot on his shoulder.

He took walks with his parrot on his shoulder.  He could often be found at the park.  He would cross the street from his rest home to the park, sit on a park bench, and feed the parrot on his shoulder peanuts while he read the papers.  He had earrings through both ears and a beard that covered his chest.  He was a regular at @Sea.  When he wasn’t in the park or at @Sea, he could be seen in all reaches of the city on his heavy motorcycle timing the green lights in his old, uncanny way.

His heavy motorcycle had one, solo seat.  He looked like some Centaur when you saw him on the road anticipating the lights like some positional pool player.  The motorcycle fairing screened his forward progress and kept the bugs out of his beard.  He sat erect like a Centaur and guided his machine with skill and grace.  In those mildly idyllic summer sojourns, his long white hair would steam behind him flapping to and fro like a flag in the wind.     

BLIND LUCK

There were other legends in leather, besides the Centaur.  There was Streak whose long, ballet legs were clothed only in black, leather chaps and red, thigh-high boots.  There was Lil, the big, steady bartender from @Sea.  Wearing a lavender leather one piece, Lil reclined against her glossy pink and lavender painted motorcycle.  Lil held a box of chocolates.  Then there was Fin, the thin, wiry bartender from @Sea.  She straddled her black low rider where it leaned on its kickstand.  She was never more at home than behind its stretched handlebars.  She liked to be in control.  

Together, Streak, Lil, and Fin formed a punk band called Blind Luck.  Lazer Streak was the front woman.  She played a vintage electric Fender Telecaster guitar.  Lil played a funky electric bass guitar.  Fin played percussion with whatever came to hand with precise ferocity.

All Fin owned for gigging was a tambourine, a pair of maracas, and a set of claves.  On principle, she owned nothing but what she could carry on her motorcycle.  When it got cold, the band rode South.  In the hot, out-of-balance summers, they rode North.

Fin had an acute personality.  She worked as a bartender wherever she went.  She rarely slept so she was always available to work an extra shift.  Fin would just take something to wire her up for the next shift and then proceed to work double time.  She was a very useful bartender and a precise, frenetic rhythm keeper.  

The band Blind Luck was parked near the river in the parking lot at the base of the jetty.  Their motorcycles firmly on their kickstands, the members of Blind Luck leaned against their motorcycles in states of repose.  At the moment, Fin was wailing in disbelief.  She couldn’t believe Lil, working slow and steady, had earned more tips than she had bartending the gravy train of Saturday night at @Sea.  “How is it even possible to make that much more than me in the same amount of time?” she wailed.

“No wasted motion,” replied Lil.  “I bought a box of chocolates.”  Lil popped a bon bon into her mouth and began to masticate it slowly.  “Want a chocolate?” she asked Fin.

“Sure.  I’ll take two.”

Lil tittered.  Lil and Fin were old friends who moved North and South with the weather and working as a team.  They couldn’t be more different but they formed an effective pair.  One was the yin to the other's yang.  Together, they really rolled.  Fin snatched two chocolates from the box and popped them both into her mouth.

 Lil was a happy lesbian with many friends and lovers.  Everyone loved Lil.

Fin was painfully straight.  She only dated losers.  Fin was a sucker for melodrama and often confused drama with love.  She was always getting her heart broken.  Then she would lose herself in her work.  

Soon, she would be rolling in cash.  She didn’t know what to do with it at all.  Her few, motorcycle-bound, possessions had already evolved from good, to better, to best.  She delighted in miniature objects like her camp stove, her inflatable, solar bubble lantern, and a military grade power bank.  

When Fin slept, Lil watched over her with a pistol grip .410 in the crook of her arm.  Fin slept in brief, deep bursts.  Her active life consisted of bartending, dancing, and banging on the tambourine.

Fin and Lil made a good pair.  The percussion and the electric bass established the rhythm of Blind Luck’s music.  Streak performed with intensity on her Telecaster.  She could pick, bend, and slide with the best of them.  Together they were a sexy band: Blind Luck: denizens of the night.  Blind Luck slept during the daytime.  They only emerged with the fall of night.  

Streak handled most of the vocals.  She was quite a showstopper with her rainbow mohawk, leathers, and shaved and oiled legs clothed only in black leather chaps and thigh high boots.  Her voice ranged from the most uninhibited soprano scream to a bass whisper of unrelenting lust.

Together they were rock stars.  Together they formed the three fingers pointing bank at you when you pointed at them, they liked to sing.  They were more raw punk, then post-punk so they always entertained.  They were the hand become fist.

They were all parked down by the jetty near where Trip’s river boat was moored.  The lights were still on behind the drawn blinds of Trip’s river boat.  Jazz music poured softly from its open portholes into the night.  Blind Luck, where they leaned back against their motorcycles, were illuminated by a single streetlamp.  The streetlamp shown down on the dead end next to the jetty.  

Thorn and I, unobserved, watched Blind Luck step away from their motorcycles and walk carefully out onto the jetty.  There they began to pass an ember orange something back and forth between them.  They were sisters in smoke, sisters in arms and sisters in music.

The birds were beginning to chirp and trill as they do before dawn.  There was a lightness in the inverted bowl of the sky to the East.  I didn’t need my watch to understand that I was about to witness the dawn.  The sun rose fiery red.  It slowly breached the horizon with a liquid inexorability.

BOOK THREE

#

Konflagrations: A Blast from the Past: The Definitive Revision of the Original Konflagrations and the Revised Konflagrations Combined

David Santin Kilday (DSK)

Copyright 1995-2024

This novel is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Cobain.

“You have destroyed it,

The beautiful world;

Build it again,

In your breast, rebuild it.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust: a Tragedy

1808

Author’s Preface

Chapter 1

It is only now that I begin to see things clearly.  As I sway in this hammock at the bottom of the world, my state of paralysis contrasts with the whirl of events that I must narrate.  I need to reveal the truth to the survivors before they come for me.  They would silence me.  They would configure my actions according to their own code.  They would cast the blame on me.  It is not that I am without blame, it is just that guilt and blame are where they want the inquiry to stop.  Do not stop there.  Guilt and blame mean nothing.  Guilt and blame are used to obscure the truth and to sanction the victors,

I am still alive.  I will not go quietly.  I will write.  I will destroy their house of cards.  The reader can not help but have heard of me.  I am public enemy number one.  There must be a bounty on my head.  My notoriety must by now have spread to the most remote regions of the earth–though I can not imagine a more remote region of the earth than this one.  They want me alive and out of the way until, at the moment when they need a scapegoat, they can retrieve me for the gallows.  I will not wait passively for that to happen.  I have been passive long enough.  I will write.  Marked for death, I will pursue this narrative to the end.  I will destroy their version of events.  They will be exposed.

I should be dead already.  No one survives ground zero.  I pressed the button.  I heard the click.  I remember a blinding field of white.  Then I remember nothing at all until the fall.  

Inexplicably, I live.  I have lived beyond a seemingly inevitable demise at least twice now but, like the undead, I have been condemned to live.  For me, death and annihilation have not been the same.  I might be said to cheat death, but really it is death that cheats me of its final consolation.

I fell.  I certainly did not fall joyously.  Bound hand and foot, cursing my fate, I now surmise that I was hurled from an aircraft.  My parachute opened beneath me and I fell into it.  I struggled to free myself, as I plummeted towards the earth, but my efforts only tightened the nylon shroud around my face, arms, and legs.  

I had cheated death once too often and this was to be the final end.  My terror reached new heights as I fell.  My bowels gave way.  I had longed  for death, but at the mercy of gravity, I found only terror.

It is said that people who fall to their deaths lose consciousness before they hit the ground.  I was deprived of that consolation.  I fell awake, out of control, spinning like a top, covered with shit and piss.  I fell headfirst towards the earth.  When I smashed into the jungle’s canopy, I whirled head over heels through light branches and soft leaves.  I tried to scream, but the nylon parachute bunched between my jaws.  When I crashed into an immovable object, probably a large branch, I felt something in my neck pop.  Then I blacked out.

When I regained consciousness, I found that I hung upside down encased in the parachute like a butterfly in its cocoon.  I struggled to free myself, but my efforts only tightened the parachute around me.  Cold urine puddled at my shoulders.  The pain in my neck overwhelmed me.  I descended into oblivion.  I hoped never to awake.

Chapter 2

I awoke.  I am cursed to awake.  I always emerge from these little deaths more dead than alive.  Someone had released me from the parachute, cleaned my body, and placed me in this hammock.  I felt the rough weave of the material from which the hammock was strung together with the fingertips of my left hand.  I could feel nothing with my right hand.  I could not feel my legs or feet.  In fact, I could feel nothing below my neck except my left arm and left hand.  They alone functioned.  I had been partially paralyzed.  When I tried to move the paralyzed parts of my body, I felt only phantom pains.

The jungle emitted a crazy murmur.  The murmur grew, as the animals awakened, to become a patchwork din of calls, trills, and strange noises that I had never heard before.  The sound of the rainforest crescendoed to a painful level when, suddenly, an animal of some kind produced a resounding rattle.  I say it was an animal, but the rattle it produced didn’t sound like it was produced by a living being.  The din of the jungle submitted briefly in the wake of the inanimate rattle, as if the jungle paid it homage, before the sound of the jungle surged again to its customary cacophony. 

I experienced an uncanny perception that the rattle was more than a morning cry.  The rattle was directed at me.  It welcomed me to this jungle.  But that is not quite right.  The rattle was less of a welcome than an acknowledgement of my own partially inanimate existence.  For I live, my mind is alive, but, physically, I live the life of the paralyzed and dead.

I ran my fingertips across the coarse weave of the fabric and felt a sensation of erotic intensity radiate up my arm.  The libidinous wave caused me to flinch away from the weave of the hammock as if I had been burned.  My good arm strayed outside of the space of the hammock where I felt, atop a wooden stump, a pen, a pad of paper, and a pistol.  The pen was of the ubiquitous type.  The pad of paper was of legal dimensions.  My hand lingered on the pistol.

I carefully placed the weapon on my lap.  It was a snub nose revolver.  I snapped open the cylinder and felt five empty chambers before I came to the butt of a bullet in the sixth.  I cautiously removed the heavy bullet and weighed it in my hand.  

I closed the cylinder and clicked off the safety.  I pulled back the hammer and pulled the trigger.  When the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder, I sent my own inanimate noise into the jungle.

Who brought me this weapon, this pad of paper, and this pen?  Who cut me down from where I had hung?  Who had cleaned and suspended my unresponsive body in this hammock?  I could attribute these actions to compassion, but my experience has led me to believe compassion is the least likely of human motivations.

I loaded the gun.  The bullet slipped into the cylinder with a cold snick.  I rotated the cylinder to align the bullet with the barrel.

Chapter 3

The savagery of nature reveals itself at night.  When night fell, the din of the day subsided to a dull undertone of twilight sounds.  I had begun to relax when the relative quiet was shattered by an eruption of violence.  An animal bleated and thrashed wildly in the underbrush.  The animal's final bleat ended abruptly.  Something slithered.  

The violence was contagious.  In the direction that my feet pointed, an animal began to run.  I heard it scamper lightly to and fro through the underbrush.  The distance between my paralyzed body and the location of the scampering animal left me with some illusion of security but that illusion of security evaporated when, with a crash, something big took up the pursuit.  The two animals ran towards me and then away from me until they ranged out of earshot.

I breathed deeply to quell my panic. Perhaps my phantom attendants left me this pistol to defend myself from the savage violence of nature.  But, if so, what good was one bullet?  Further, how could my phantom attendants be certain of my amicability?  Might I not turn the gun on them?  Moreover, what use is a weapon to me?  I can take no aim.  Since my fall, I am paralyzed and blind.  

Overwhelmed by these ambiguities and the pain in my neck, I lost consciousness again.

I awoke, in the dark, to full clarity.  I knew for whom the bullet was intended.  It was intended for me.  I felt a freakish sense of gratitude to my phantom attendants.  They had provided me with a choice.  Imprisoned in my paralyzed body, they had given me the option of complete freedom.  Wracked by suffering, they had given me the option of the permanent peace which comes only with death.

I was tempted then and there to discharge the weapon.  I pressed the barrel of the pistol against my temple.  It felt sharp and cold against my skin.  If I pulled the trigger, my head would explode.  That explosion would end my suffering.  The sound of that explosion would resound for a moment in the jungle.  The din of the jungle would subside, for a moment, before it resumed its customary cacophony.  

I made a choice that night.  The roar of the weapon did reverberate in the jungle.  The pistol kicked in my good hand.  

In the moment of relative quiet that followed the explosion, I imagined the bullet cut up through the forest’s canopies and shoot up into the night sky.  The bullet sped up through the layers of the rainforest’s canopies until, streaming free into the night sky, it slowed and turned on its axis.  Again a prisoner of gravity, the bullet fell to the earth below.

I was curious.  I resolved to await the break of day.

Chapter 4

I aim to produce a narrative to convince the reader of the truth.  Now, I fear that the reader has had enough of my morbid sensibility, my melancholia, and the ecstasies of its despair.  This story is necessarily about my life.  I write it with a pen, blindly, on a legal pad of paper.  The story is also about conspirators and adversaries, their characters, their agendas, and the decisions that they made.  I hope this narrative is about something beyond our wretched lives.  As an intellectual, I hope that it is about history, form, and the perils, the false redemption, of violence.

As a counterweight to my morbid sensibility and learned tone let me present Urian Blitzblaum.  She did not feel about violence as I did.  I first collided with Urian Blitzblaum in a coffeehouse downtown.  The coffeehouse, Moldi’s, occupied the first floor of a midrise building that had been constructed in the nineteenth century.  The builded listed slightly on a decayed foundation.  Its street level facade was composed of two bay windows that flanked a revolving door.  The coffeehouse’s owner once told me that the revolving door had been added to save on heat.  

In that case, the intention was not realized for it was always cold in the coffeehouse in winter.  That is why I liked it.  I preferred the cold to the heat.  It was coldest at the tables enclosed by the bay windows.  That is why I usually sat at one of these tables.

A curious design, in the art deco mode, was engraved on each of the four lead glass windows of the revolving door.  The design was of the Christian cross surrounded by a filigree circle.  Three triangles, boldly formed in contrast to the filigree circle, radiated from the hub of the cross.  These triangles, boldly formed, contrasted with the arabesques of the filigree circle; they extended beyond the circle’s circumference.  The ornamental icon signified to me the inability of the coffeehouse to retain its heat.

One feature of the coffeehouse was a bar that covered the back of the main room.  There, a bald street person, dressed in a saffron robe, counted out change to the bartender.  The bartender sneered at the street person’s request for a mug of joe.  When the bartender poured the man in the saffron robe’s coffee, he spilled the coffee over the lip  of the mug so that it soaked the coaster beneath.  

The man in the saffron robe sipped at the brimming mug of coffee and set it down on the stained coaster.  He stared vacantly into the mirror behind the bar.  With a frenzied movement, he drew a doll from a deep pocket in his robe.  He set it on the bar next to the cup of coffee.

The doll was composed of two ovoids.  The benevolent and symmetrical face of the Buddha was represented on the upper ovoid.  The lower ovoid was dyed saffron.  The street person inhaled deeply and when he exhaled he pushed against the doll.  The tumble doll rocked backwards and knocked against the surface of the bar.  It bounced up from the bar and oscillated for a moment before it resumed its vertical stance.  

The street person muttered, “struck, not falling,” and smiled a misshapen smile.  The bartender stared at the street person and moved to the other side of the bar.

Ceiling fans anchored in the tin roof churned the smoky atmosphere.  Bookshelves crammed with books, mostly paperbacks, extended from the hardwood floor to the ceiling along the length of each side wall.  The bookshelves were equipped with ladders on rails.  

Several tables in the space of the room were filled with patrons.  Most of them were smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.  The tops of the tables were constructed out of uniformly perforated steel.  A table in the same industrial style sat in each bay window. An elderly woman, the narrator, me, sat quietly smoking at a table in the bay window.

The woman’s extreme pallor was accentuated by a black wool sweater that she wore over black silk trousers.  Her white hair was cropped close to her head.  An obsidian pendant in the form of a question mark hung from her neck by a fine silver chain.  Her fingers, as she drew a cigarette to her thin lips, were without rings.  Her dark almond shaped eyes rolled back in her head as she inhaled.  The smoke warmed the core of her being so that her body became an island of heat within the cold bay window.  When she exhaled, smoke swirled from her  nostrils like a dragon had exhaled.

Though the chair she occupied was designed for lounging, she sat with an erect posture on its forward edge.  She smoked with languid movements but the fixed stare she directed at the chrome ashtray in the center of the table betrayed tension.

She drew the ember to the filter and with a violent gesture snuffed the cigarette butt in the ashtray.  At that moment, a van careened over the curb and crashed into the bay window opposite of the bay window in which she smoked.

The bartender’s hair stood on end.  The man in the saffron robe dropped his twisted jaw.  The woman in the bay window paused in the act of stubbing out her cigarette.  Glass shattered and wood splintered as the van smashed through the window.  Its momentum carried it halfway through the window frame before it ground to a halt with a  final screech of steel against steel.  

Chapter 5

The shatterproof windshield of  the van remained in place, but  the entire surface of the windshield was covered with fine cracks.  The windshield had become opaque.

A fist smashed through the windshield.The fist opened into a hand that spread wide as a forearm emerged behind it.  A bellow reverberated from the interior of the van as another fist crashed through the windshield followed by another forearm. With a roar, the creature in the van smashed its head through the cracked glass that remained between the two arms.  The creature shook her head and shards of glass flew from her matted hair.  Her face was warped by anger.  Two dark eyes glared into the room from under a heavy brow.

The stunned occupants of the coffeehouse remained frozen in their tableau until the woman in the windshield cried out, “Can’t you see me?  Am I invisible to you?  What would it take for me to see me.”

“Well,” she continued in a more subdued tone as she pulled her hair away from her face and looked into the distant mirror behind the bar, “I am here for my poetry reading.”

The man in the  saffron robe cackled maniacally.  The woman in the bay window slowly rose.  The bartender pressed his palms against his temples and screamed, “What the fuck are you doing here?  Are you insane?”  The bartender scurried around the bar and stood tenselly next to the pay phone with his fists balled on his hips.  A bearded man wearing round spectacles entered the room and cocked an eyebrow at the woman half in and half out of the windshield.

“Just a minute,” the woman called to the bearded man.  She threw herself through what remained of the windshield, slid head first down the hood of the van, then stood unsteadily on the coffeehouse’s parquet floor.  

Her feet were bare.  The soles of her feet were lined with inch thick calluses.  The woman was tall.  Her height was accentuated by the loose fatigues that hung from her angular frame.

“Are you hurt?” asked the bearded manager as he approached.  His voice dripped with concern.

“I’m alright,” the woman mumbled as her shoulders slackened and her eyes slid to the floor.  ‘I had to swerve to avoid a man in the street.  I know.  I know.  ‘There are no crosswalks downtown.’  Look,” the woman met the manager’s gaze, “this is Moldi’s, right?  I am here for my poetry reading.  I am Urian Blitzblaum.”

The man flinched when she mentioned her name.  His hands fidgeted with his glasses and he ushered her behind the bar and into the rear office.  The woman in the bay window watched them go with an absent gaze.  The bartender’s confused eyes met those of the man in the saffron robe.  The man in the saffron robe stuck out his tongue, then pushed himself away from the bar, retrieved his backpack and shuffled up to Zeverin, the woman in the bay window.  He stuck out his tongue.  Zeverin stuck out her tongue in reply.  The man in the saffron robe reeked of smoke and butter.

He said, “Rebirth, do you believe?”

Zeverin shifted to the edge of her seat.  She extracted a cigarette from a silver case and lit it.  She examined the man in the saffron robe warily.  There was something wrong with his face.  One half of his face sagged lower than the other around the line of the nose.  

The man in the saffron robe said, “She was killed by an alligator.

Zeverin regarded him neutrally.  His eyes were unfocused and bright.

“She was walking down the path in front of me.  She was collecting flowers in a wicker basket.  The alligator jumped out of the shrubbery.  It flew through the air.  It grabbed her between its jaws and carried her into the estuary on the other side of the path.  They disappeared beneath the water.”  He snapped his fingers but the snap made no sound.

Zeverin exhaled a long stream of cigarette smoke in the direction of the man in the saffron robe’s face.  The man in the saffron robe smiled his misshapen smile.  

“The alligator wedged her beneath a log on the floor of the estuary and disappeared into the deep water.  I could see her down there through the water.  I could see the whites of her dead eyes.  Her blood dispersed in the water.  The blood was swept away by the current.  When there was no more blood, I realized there could be no rebirth.”

The former monk turned abruptly and shuffled to the revolving door.  He pressed against one of the door’s partitions so that the door was forced against the direction of its rotation,  The door could not move.  The former monk threw his shoulder against the door.  The revolving door rattled.  When he stepped back from the door, he tripped over his own feet and fell backwards against the next partition.  The monk picked himself up and pressed wonderingly against the partition he had fallen against.  The door rotated smoothly away from him in the propper direction.

Zeverin watched the former monk cautiously until he disappeared in the crowd on the sidewalk.  She breathed a sigh of relief.  Then Zeverin shrugged.  It was best not to escalate strange encounters.  It was best to let them pass on.  The monkish one was gone.  Zeverin never expected to see him again.

Chapter 6

Zeverin left the coffeehouse.  The revolving door rotated so smoothly away from her that she missed the open space to the street on the first go around and had to follow the door through its rotation once again before she managed to exit.  The sidewalk was full of pedestrians.  When she noticed a break in the flow of people, she inserted herself in the flow of the crowd.  Her left shoulder bumped against bone.  A heavy boot crunched on the heel of her foot.  The crowd swept her in the direction of her building.  She could see it just ahead.  

When she tried to disengage herself from the crowd she bounced off a corpulent man.  The angle of the bowler hat he wore on his head shifted slightly but he did not appear to have noticed the collision.  Zeverin hurled herself against the edge of the crowd.  She carrommed off a pair of fleshy buttocks and sprawled against the handrail of the steps that led to the entrance to the steps that led up to her building.

The handrail swayed out into the open space.  Zeverin experienced a moment of panic.  ‘Handrails should be firm and supportive, not elastic,’ she had once written her super.  When the handrail finally caught and held, she felt her heart resume its pulse with a thud.

The bulb was out in the foyer.  The daylight from the street failed to illuminate the cramped space.  From habit, Zeverin clicked a long fingernail against the aluminum door of her mailbox.  She shrugged.  There would be no more real mail.  She could anticipate the current contents of the box.  It would be filled with thin sheets of glossy paper.  Sales prices.  Brightly colored advertisements.  Brash invitations to buy.

Zweverin climbed the narrow flight of stairs against the wall and paused to catch her breath on the landing.  The floor of the landing was covered with a tattered carpet in an orange check print.  A putrid odor of cooking meat combined with the scent of decay that the carpet emitted.  The landing was not the ideal place to refresh.  As she continued up the next flight of stairs, the scent of meat intensified.

The third floor corridor was lined with knotted trash bags, discarded junk, a tricycle without a wheel, a cast iron skillet with a hole melted through its center, and the dented remains of a plastic coffee maker that had been pulverized by a blunt object.  

The scent of charged flesh nauseated Zeverin.  The odorous miasma was visible as a pink haze that eddied through the atmosphere of the corridor.  Zeverin scurried down the corridor and in her haste to get out of the meat mist, struggled with her key to unlock the third deadbolt on the door to her room.  She jiggled the key frantically until it finally slid into the slot.  She let herself into her room and quickly leaned against the door to close it.  She felt queasy and weak.

Zeverin remained propped against the door until her nausea eased.  The air in the room was refreshed by a narrow opening in the wall opposite the door.  The opening, through which the brick wall of the adjacent building was visible, was interlaced with thick rusted bars.  A rocking chair was placed beneath the window so that it faced the door.  Zeverin clicked on the bare bulb that hung from a frayed cord over the rocking chair.  She turned back to the door and locked the bolts one by one.

Zeverin extracted the revolver from the holster under her shoulder, clicked off the safety, and padded to the plywood wardrobe.  When she unlatched the wardrobe’s door, it shrieked as it swung outward on one hinge.  The wardrobe was unoccupied.  Zeverin stooped awkwardly and looked under the bed.  Noone was there.  She peeped into the thin space between the empty bookshelf and the wall.  Nothing.  Zeverin stepped around the low table next to the bed and sat in the rocking chair that faced the door.  

An upside down hubcap filled with butts smoked to the filter wobbled as Zeverin dropped into her rocking chair.  A legal pad lay face down on the table.  Zeverin set her pistol down on the legal pad.  Zeverin began to rock.  The radiator behind the rocking chair emitted a series of bangs and clanks.  There was a clock over the entrance.  It had stopped long ago and it had never been started again.  Zeverin picked up her weapon and sited on the center of the clock.  Zeverin whispered “Ka-pow,” and set the weapon down on the table again.

The texture of the door fascinated Zeverin.  The door had been painted over many times so the layers of paint did not adhere to one another and the aggregate shifted with temperature and time.  While Zeverin stared at the beige surface of the day, a black triangle peeled away from one layer and hung limply. 

Zeverin was terrified of the door.  At any moment, a gigantic foot might crash through it.  The foot would be followed by a bearded man with hair on his back and unpleasant body odor bent on theft and rapine.  

Theft was not really probable.  There was nothing in the room worth stealing.  Zeverin had gradually discarded everything of value: the coffee maker, the transistor radio, the hot plate.  Last to go had been the books.  Mostly she had given them away, but there was still one bookshelf left.  The room had once been a fortress of books.  Books were stacked in its corners and lined up in its bookshelves.

When Zeverin retired from the university, she gradually cut herself off from the outside world.  The faces of other people had become too horrible to endure.  The faces shifted and changed.  They melted.  They warped.  They transformed to form horrible visages.

Zeverin rested her eyes from the book she had picked up and began to read.

The facial transformation occurred for the first time in the park.  Zeverin sat on a park bench and gazed absently at the passersby.  

One man had a furrowed brow.  His eyes squinted.  His lips scowled.  He bent furiously as he strode into the wind. When he clenched his jaw in resolution, his face began to alter.  His jaw elongated.  His eyes sank into his head and disappeared beneath a mushrooming forehead.  When his mouth pursed and disappeared into his face like a widening hole, Zeverin flinched and rubbed her eyes in disbelief.

Several days passed before the hallucination reoccurred.  A cashier’s face began to evaporate as she reached into the cashtray to get Zeverin’s change.  First the woman’s nose and ears dissolved.  Then her cheek bones flattened.  Finally, there was nothing left of her face but a pink oblong of flesh marked by a hole lined with a circular row of sharp teeth where the mouth had been.  When the mouth projected towards Zeverin from the fleshy oblong, Zeverin turned and fled in horror from the mutating cashier.

So, Zeverin retired and secluded herself from the world.  She immersed herself in her armature of books.  The faceless authors did not threaten her.  Their faces did not project hungry mouths lined with teeth.  They did not twist to take on expressions of animalistic ferocity.  They had no jaws to jut or hungry mouths to project.

She filled her empty days of retirement moving from one book to another.  Poe suggested Walter Benjamin; Walter Benjamin led to Baudelaire.

An endless ribbon of prose wound through her mind.  Her anxiety subsided almost completely when she submerged her identity in the protagonist, heroine, or author.  The black marks on the white page did not change.  They flowed through her mind and displaced the anxiety of her tortured subjectivity.  

Chapter 7

During this reign of reading, the interface between the text and her consciousness became so seamless that she did not notice the constant breaks of line skips and page turns.  She experienced the text as an uninterrupted flow.  At the end of each chapter, Zeverin winced and dove immediately into the next chapter.  At the end of each book, and the longer the book the better, Zeverin grabbed the first book in her personal research library that came to mind and began reading at the first black mark on the first white page.

She had passed several years in this way and then the books betrayed her.  The books that had for so long been her society (Her best friends were book characters and author personas.) began to exude a menacing aura.  As she rocked in her chair in her book-filled room, the bookshelves towered over her.  They tilted toward her.  They loomed.  At any moment they would collapse and crush her.

When the books began to vibrate on their shelves, she struggled to move but remained paralyzed in space.  At any moment the books would fly from their shelves and press against her body.  The layers of the books would accrete until where she had been, only a sphere of books would remain.  Zeverin gasped for breath.  She felt herself recede within the massive aggregate of books.  She felt herself diminish, as she was crushed, until she was squeezed against the boundary with nonexistence itself.

When the books vibrated on their shelves, when she felt herself recede from the world, she clenched her eyes together and pinched herself hard.  The sharp pain from the pinch alerted her to the presence of her body and stopped the books from vibrating.  

When Zeverin felt lost, it was through pain that she confirmed her existence.  Pain brought her back to herself.  Pain was reliable.  It was much easier to create than pleasure.  

Zeverin’s arms were covered with welts from where she had pinched herself.  When Zeverin pinched herself again, Zeverin experienced the pain as something akin to pleasure.

When Zeverin clenched her eyes together, colored whisps swirled across her inner eye.  These whisps brought her back from the realm of nonexistence where corporeal sensation fades into a featureless night.

Zeverin opened her clenched eyes and lit a cigarette.  The smoke rasped against her throat.  When she exhaled a plume of smoke, it flowed through the empty space of the room to swirl against the inner surface of the patinaed door.  

Zeverin’s mind felt blank and numb.  Her forearm ached from where she had pinched herself.  The room full of books had become intolerable.  She inhaled deeply to fight off the urge to scream.  When she choked on the smoke, the pain in her throat brought her completely back into the world of the room.  She inhaled deeply again and forced herself to think what was to be done?

Zeverin resolved to dispose of her library.  Frail and of advanced years, Zeverin had long ago read every book in her library.  Now she was re-reading books and passages from books that she had already re-read many times before.  She felt that she had nothing more to learn from the great dead.

—

Here ends what I will share so far of my definitive Konflagrations.

—

BOOK FOUR

DIOGENES QUITS

STASIS

DIOGENES IN MOTION

DIO AT REST