The lights are off and it’s near dark. Early evening gray-blue keeps the windows alive until late, until the street lights take over, when headlamps animate shadow scenes, running back and forth over the walls, an elegant avant garde cinema.
The back of my neck is damp, sweating from scalp, down to the mane, soaked in with my shirt.
My appearance is in need of editing, but not for anyone else to examine or review.
These are intentional, functional, personal edits of a human being, trying to survive summer.
What I’m trying to say is that I think I just sold my imaginary Corvette.
Plans drift in the dog days. Tomorrow fades into the future at awkwardly stuttering speeds, the flashing moments of a spark, the long hours, the listlessness, heat waves rising from the pavement.
Laid-back children laugh, sirens call from midtown, mourning doves murmuring in the building dusk, pure invocations of our hotness.
I was going to get it all done today. There is a path of muddy tracks leading through the kitchen, calling for a thorough cleansing of the mind and body.
These tasks were at the top of the dry-erase board list and yet they drift, walking all the way through the night, until tomorrow.
This living room is the sea and I am the withering sail conquering sleep in the swelter as plans continue to drift.
The lazy passion of exaggerated actors is all around me. The postman poses, leaning against aluminium siding, wipes the sweat from his brow with heavy arms, hoping somebody sees. A middle-aged woman with both a boxer and an american bulldog stares at the sun and shakes her head disapprovingly, mouthing the simple mantra, “Damn you, damn you.” Two kids, writhing side-by-side behind a manual lawn mower, they’ve reached the limits of their insubordinate bodies, there’s nothing left for them to fake — we are entirely full of it.
They are all convincing in their roles. I know; I amateurishly embody myself doing the dishes, watering the garden, laundering my undergarments, rereading the same Murakami paragraph while the heat ties me to the couch and pulls me down into a startling nap.
I know myself best in the movies that whispered about summertime adventure, summertime lust, summertime freedom.
Do The Right Thing, American Graffiti, The Endless Summer, Stand By Me, Dazed and Confused, The Graduate, Rear Window, Jaws.
Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. I would’ve committed any crime just to be with her for a few moments inside the screen.
The humidity won’t break. It is an inescapable liquid.
There is a twist. Liquid is also the only answer. I have done it all:
The bodies of water follow one another like supernatural grades. Each jumping through to the next ring of maturity. Pond, pool, stream, lake, sea. Somehow, I graduated this portion of spirit school.
Hoses worked when our families would congregate in Greenbank, West Virginia, when water moccasins were seen slithering in the creeks, everybody shrieked and clawed back up the banks.
Aunts and uncles, the amateur firefighters, sipping beer and spraying everyone, making sure it stung as much as much as it cooled. We’d dry off in the stuffy cabins that were canning pantries the rest of the year, lingering scents of dill, pepper, grass, laughing as we fell asleep to a Steve Martin LP. Half Lit and unsarcastically happy.
The above-ground pool behind the house in New Hampshire.
Underwater. Merging completely in the chlorine, surrounded by pale blue plastic siding and the undulating branched firmament above.
Five feet deep was deep enough to return to amphibiousness. I don’t remember eating and sleeping in these summers.
I remember chicken fights, cannonballs, holding our breath whenever the horse flies and bats swooped past our ears.
Nothing else made as much sense as being my subaquatic self, sound and vision were all mine to interpret and own. My brief life as a pre-teen salamander.
Everyone vanished from the valley. The heat wave emptied the streets, leaving a living simulation of a science fiction matinee.
I hide out, waiting for the clock to circle around and match the numbers of my address. Digital ticks til the figures line up — ephemeral numerical mirrors — as if minutes were something to survive. Then the empty event evaporates, leaving only lengthening signs of sleeplessness.
Clocks, clicks. Perhaps I’m lost in a loop of endless distraction, reading about rabies on the electric web. Fear is a thief of hours and hope is a lazy mistress, but I am proud to have discovered that the disease doesn’t exist on the island of Hawaii. Somewhere, there is safety.
Beneath a cool wall of air conditioning and clean sheets, I maintain a nudity for no one to see, a nudity indifferent to any thrills. Alone, my clotheslessness is neither arousing nor absurd. (When all I have wanted is to be arousing and absurd.)
Up in the Adirondacks, mysteries hide high in the mountains, still and quiet under damp rocks and on patches of ground that no foot has touched. From above, in flight, bioluminescent lichen marks the spot. The wings dip, circling closer until maybe there’s a glade to touch down and explore, to investigate what it’s all about.
(This fictional bush pilot should probably wear proper trousers in order to get enlightened.)
When the sun breaks in over the top of my blackout curtains, I’m hoping to have found songs in my sleep. Something to sing to myself as I brush my teeth in the morning, foaming at the mouth and naked.
Cotton dashes punctuate pink sky, lightly sunburned clouds, deeper by the minute. Shy trees become soft silhouettes turning their backs on me as the day decreases, finally faceless.
It is a celestial dressing room up above. And I am suddenly eight and washing my feet at Old Orchard Beach amid a swarm of creepy ogres, salty men with back hair pelts, the concrete keeps my soles and mind cool til I find my family. I have blisters on my back and several x-rated rashes — the treatment: fried dough, sad pizza.
I will sleep in a stuffy attic with my soon-to-be stepsister. I am fine with the floor, a pillow and a polyester sheet. The more I am ignored, the better.
To change and let go. To let go and change. Overhead, the show shifts into the final act, giving way to millions of weightless blazes. Through the night, back to light, when the whole sky comes together, lifting the sun, composing another stunning, natural revolution.
I am both burning jealousy and thrilled to be alive.
The mountain laurel is blooming in the Catskills sway. Small white flowers, with delicate pink dots and springing stamen. A cascade of cottony bubble umbrellas pouring through the greenery, noiselessly roaring in the forest.
I can say anything out here. I am all me. Violet hues circling baritone eyes, finally forgiving. Loud and lonely, wild theories and imbecilic jokes. Lambent sunlight mimics slow rolling eyes, yet nothing walks away. Nothing can object to the honest expression of another form of life.
The trees themselves, it takes more time to understand or misunderstand them. Hello is spelled out over an entire season. By the last syllable, fall will have opened up the sky.
When I ride my bike at night, I don’t stop for the sidewalkers, the echoing hellos, shiny pale skin under mourning streetlights, the call for acclaim. (The urgency of our words could destroy us. But not tonight.)
Flying on bent pedals to the edge of town, all to feel the texture of your bark upon my lips. Together, we form a silent ridge smile .
There will eventually be a need for firewood. You poison me to protect yourself and we laugh and laugh up to the very last gasp.
The window is partially open and I hear half sounds.
Birdsong echoes, a motorcycle idles at a red light, children squawking, unintelligible words, natural laughter, beer bottles clink into faroff trash cans, a steering wheel whines.
Reverberations weave together as though a net spun to shield, to keep me solid and alive inside the synonyms. A gossamer wall stitched with sidewalk heat, blowing seeds, leaves of grass. Late afternoons, my eyes half-open, my mind set at a righteous, easy frequency.
The only fear is to fall asleep and wake up in pitch black. To forget where I am, to forget who I am. Where shapes are visually buzzing and unfamiliar upon rising. Where the unknown equals the possibility of aggression.
(Stand by.)
An overhead fan dances with the ceiling light, scripts rewritten in overwrought scenes, camera angles to accentuate tension, beads of sweat build into a flood and, ultimately, exultation. Maybe it’s better than the weak-kneed movies I made in my memories:
The pokiest thrillseeker alive neglects to televise or commercialize any part of his imminent feat — to sleep straight into the heart of the uptown evening and climb out of the darkness. Bold, motionless moves for the disheveled wizards who will never let go of their classic rock presets. Action.
I fell off my horse last week.
You can laugh, I can take it. The cloudiness of humankind crossed the prairies of my backyard and blindsided me. Large, blue-black cumulonimbus brain folds swept in and unleashed their fury on me. In the swirling squall’s stroboscopic confusion, spurs and bandolier collided as jodhpurs split along the ass crack that evolution granted us all. The genuine comedy that accompanies a broken human.
Reeling thoughts of dark intentions overtook me as I fell. I believed evil was reaching out in the lightning strikes, through flashing man o’ war tentacles extending down from heaven. I might have even mistaken you for a demigod intent upon my destruction, undoing the definition of all that is good.
To be fair, I wear weird glasses that sometimes see a cloudiness that isn’t there. The focus gets stuck on films of what people might think. B-movies specifically crafted to induce doubt.
I fell off my horse and lost my mental footing for a few moments. (Suburban cowboys cluck lightly, both understanding and impatient, always anxious to get back out on the range and reawaken to a plate of beans, the coffee grit stark upon a clean porcelain cup.)
Metal music rattles against plastic and steel panels in the asphalt valley thaw below my windows. A discordant guitar solo shifts through pitches as the unseen car moves from left to right and ultimately disappears from my ears.
Fickle vision with only a vague sense of shapes. Sounds are the real signposts. They give definition to the ambiguous scene: shrubbery becomes a barking collie in stark auditory relief.
At night, when the scene is heavy and hushed under the static quilt, locomotive air horns howl across town. They are answering questions that weren’t asked. Barging into half-awake dreams, punctuating drowsy desire with innocent impractical jokes. The trains are always saying goodbye.
And you are always beginning to tell your life story on the edge of the mattress and immediately passing out. I follow down deep into dreams, on a corpuscle to find you. But I’m lost in the sinew of sub-unconcsiousness. I cannot find you in the comedy, murder, chairlift line, gym floor, test score, music awards, fence post, hymnal, shipwreck, windy nude beach nor armageddon picnic — whichever you prefer.
The trains pull us back up onto the bed. The fuzz of an early morning bedroom awakens to the horns. The cocoon comforter wound the wrong way around our legs. There is dew on the ground, there is sweat in the small of our backs.
This is really when you know that we’re alive. Sour, strange and real. Almost innocent, almost giving.
When was this and why can’t it happen again? Sometimes, when my head is awkwardly smashed on the pillow, there is only the embryonic sound of my own heartbeat. Sometimes even the smallest sounds are too much, even when they emanate from my chest, from my brain — a fight to remain both focused and unfocused in the arc of a delinquent diver.
Before I devoted my life to fictional claims of solving make-believe crimes, I was just a human being. I popped popcorn on the stove, watched old films and wrote music in an attempt to make sense of my existence. It was a way to circumvent the parts of my personality that I dislike in order to connect with other human beings. Probably no better than a decent ventriloquist. I loved cracking the codes of sorrow. I loved singing about irretrievable sentences, the wrongly worded runaways of regret.
I’d sway in the shower under the magic rain of modern plumbing, singing these songs to myself. It was all I needed.
Times changed, the perspective of purpose and understanding shifted. My interpretation of humanity had to shift accordingly. So I became a fake detective.
As a law-abiding phantom, I had to define the parameters of my unreal reality. The same way that ghosts need to go sheet-shopping every fall, I needed to understand the length and width of my nonexistence.
Fake detectives are not licensed to perform any particular duties. We merely follow the voices in our heads, a bargain-basement higher calling. Some might say fake detectives are creating a new religion. Others contend we are insane. (If the shoe is an appropriate size, I am generally amenable to placing it on my foot.)
Fake detectives are not meteorologists. We cannot stop the cold fronts that continue to bash the Catskills. But we will yell at the wind for a small stipend.
Fake detectives are often and easily confused. Meaning was once believed to be meaningful, and love was indefinable and everything. People created and coexisted in order to create and coexist. Money and fame weren’t the pinnacle of human achievement. Brilliant thoughts, hard work, eloquent debate, generosity, empathy, talent, trust and sick guitar leads were tops. That was that.
The Popularity Contest used to be an empty, looked-down-upon pursuit — at one time understood to be a vapid enterprise for kids of all ages just trying to fit in, forgoing the risk of individuality for the sake and safety of social ascension.
Now that living and breathing have been numerically repackaged, bubbling to the top is the goal of nearly all our actions. We trick and treat ourselves into believing there’s an organic purpose to our virtual world rather than facing the facts. As if we could control the algorithms that are developed to control us. And we submit willingly — advancing toward an age where we’re defined purely by what we like and buy. Simultaneously disregarding truth and beauty by doubting and deconstructing their value. Truth and beauty are out smoking cigarettes on the bleachers, black and white and eternally awkward.
I don’t mean to be a downer. I have to report my findings because it’s a part of my fake job. It would be wrong of me to shower myself in Monopoly Money without telling you the truth.
In the soft murkiness of a warm night, I am drawing near to fearlessness. Words follow words without motive or animus. Simplicity makes the most sense inside a backyard realm constructed with cedar and concrete. The arms of an eastern hemlock wave overhead, shadowplay on the fence panels, the small tight cones sporadically fall, springing off shoulders, resting in the patches of grass below where we nobly plié in a pile of beer cans. These unassuming walls retain tolerance and repel inequality. A freestanding fence, justifiably self-righteous and stoic. We exist for each other.
This warmth is a treasure that cannot be quantified. All across the Hudson Valley, we are staking out our spaces on the soil, waiting for the full roundness of green and heat to come crashing down upon us. To surrender and submerge in a deluge of humid, sweet breath.
I’m on a new case. It caught me off guard like a summer storm, weightless, then suddenly stung by the earth’s electricity.
With my inbred insomnia in bed beside me, I couldn’t ignore the knocking at 3am.
Downstairs, I cracked the door, grumbling. “It’s a little late for the mail.” The slight-figured apparition brushed past and inside as though my impatience were some kind of colloquial invitation, as if she were the one paying the mortgage.
Except for the ugly hour of her arrival, she was a class act, through and through — pure cut glass topped with wavy bay cilium. White gloves popped out against the backdrop of her slim, short navy dress, two glowing paws nearly floating in the near dark — the vague collaboration of dim lamplight, moonlight and streetlight.
She mistook me for one of my dream personas: the private detective trying to make ends meet in the sleepy seed of a rusty upstate crossroads. A landscape coughing up suburban houses, further and further across the countryside.
“I’ve recently lost my husband,” she said without introduction. “In the sense that he’s dead and the dead tend to stay that way.”
“Pardon my naiveté, but it appears as though you’re searching the wrong tomb.”
She extended her hand into the space between us. “Mrs. Richards,” she said. Then, quickly, the hand rescinded and lit a cigarette. “I guess I can eliminate the Mrs. now. Maybe even the Richards. I guess you can call me Pamela — Pam.”
“I don’t smoke in the house, Pam.”
She drew on her cigarette again and flicked the ash into the empty fireplace. “My husband had many friends. Most of them were the type that wanted him dead. Maybe that’s how everyone is these days. Do you have many friends?”
“Oh, I would say almost all my friends these days exist electronically. All that matters is that we always agree and never see each other.”
She sighed. “You’ve exposed the motive before I even dished the scoop. Maybe you do know how to put words together without a thesaurus.”
As much as I enjoyed a little predawn gambol, I wasn’t primed for wordplay. I went into the kitchen, poured myself a tall whiskey without an offer to my uninvited guest and returned. “Mrs. Richards — Pam. Is there a reason you’ve driven me to imbibe past my bedtime? I’m generally pretty strict about my wanton behavior.”
“I would apologize if I thought it truly necessary, Mr. Pound. But I think you can handle what’s happening here and now. In fact, from your reputation I believe you could even be pleased by the sincere and abrupt reality of my visit.”
I finished half the glass in what I trusted was an elegant gulp. “Go on,” I said.
“Mr. Pound, my husband was a political activist. But he took no sides, in that he accepted money from all sides. His intention was to agitate the masses out of their assertions. Both left, right and the middle. An instigator, a rabble-rouser, ultimately attempting to bring the narrative back to a semi-civil conversation. Somewhere along the line, out among the online, he agitated someone capable of murder. I want you to find out who killed my husband. More than that, I want you to find out why.”
I apologize.
Sure, it’s a blanket apology. But blankets are what keep us alive in this bullshit never-ending winter. I wear mine as a cloak, as I clatter against the keys.
I’m sorry for fighting outside of the Drake Hotel. The partial nudity was definitely unnecessary. I’m sorry I can’t remember any birthdays. I hate mine, but that’s not an official certificate to be an asshole. This brain will not stop running in strange directions, impossibly tuned to a frequency promoting secret rebellions. Birthdays and numbers have no elbow room in here. Forgive me for my congregation of agitation. I walk through the valley of corrections, fixing every wrong word and note after it’s too late. I feel your resonating pain. There is a portal through my Xiphoid Process. I can see what I did to hurt you. But I’m distracted by the marimba sounds from the ribs surrounding me. I’m dancing to the accidental calypso music my chest makes when I travel through time and space. I don’t know how to stop. I wish I had a parachute to jump out of here. I’d fall two feet down, land on my lawn and wait for you to pick up the lip of silk and uncover me. Another blanket to raise and say it’s cool. We’re cool.
I have done it all wrong, many times. It’s always just a different pair of fear’s trousers. Low, low fashion. The thing is, there were moments when it was all right. Warm, purple afternoons with blankets beneath us, when nothing else mattered.
There is no complaint, there is only stirring: eggs cracking from the inside.
Streetside ditches hum with restless, racing heartbeats. Sentimental truths, unashamed, scatter and sprint through tall, dew-heavy grass, thereupon bent empty paths. First life dwells beneath the ground, under the ShopRite circular enshrouding an empty orange soda bottle.
Up above, moon and sun share a few blue minutes together. The brief commingling is seen from a second floor window, displayed below in a flat bright puddle. A static piece of misshapen glass, refreshing brown water with an oil-slick rainbow on top.
A traffic light clicks and cycles, hues yellow, red and green. One eye sees, two eyes elaborate into full spectrum. Nakedness doesn’t have to hide from cold or light anymore. Hallway human still life from the bed, to the bathroom, back to bed.
Six am on a Saturday. A quiet so hopeful that it would be unfair to keep it to myself.
Charlie.
I fail to remember so much. But I cannot forget how we carved spears out of old lumber in the barn. We were eight, whittling and laughing, the shavings curled and floated down to the dirt, twirling like sugar maple seeds. I guess we believed this was the best defense for kids with single moms.
I hid my spears next to the door frames in our house, straight and precarious along the molding. Stomping, slamming, or just a strong breeze through a window screen — almost anything could make them crash to the ground. A startling, wooden smack.
My family hated the spears but tolerated my fears. Fortunately, I never impaled my sisters, nor did I face the visceral reality of having to stab an intruder.
Apart from the weaponry, you cannot imagine how much has changed. I am taller, I have a beard most of the time. The fantasies of fast cars have grown to include mysterious women in sunglasses.
The eyes and brain behind them remain the same, though. They close, and I’m returning to Franconia. Pebble fights and broken windows. Our collie, Patsy, the constant sidekick. A brief history of mindless abrasions and knee blood, all upon the neighboring church sidewalk peninsula. I worried so much about the possibility of LSD in my Halloween candy. I was always terrified of being kidnapped and brainwashed by a hippie cult.
It’s taken me this long to stop being terrified of everything. Sometimes, I even go so far as to relax.
I coped by being belligerent. I still struggle to keep my words light. I think I scare people when I sputter through sarcastic gloomy valleys, the revolving fixations on how I could’ve done it all better. Sleepless and arguing with a million hotel room ceilings.
I think my new amigos would prefer that I delivered dreamier punchlines. It’s difficult, to both pronounce and be insouciant.
I think of you in this forgiving weather and pure purpose. The spring will never stop being an adventure of new life, snapping turtles escaping the ice, cardinals popping out against the drab branches. I wonder how you have survived the seasons, now that the face has fallen off The Old Man of the Mountain. To me, you are exactly the same. The kid with the coolest action figures. Brown eyes, understanding, whittling, laughing at stupid shit. Watching and waiting for the wiggle in the gelatinous clusters of frog eggs. No words. I miss our ancient and basic friendship.
I’m awake after dreams of raising a translucent salamander.
I was completely committed to caring for the delicate beauty. Black spots, black veins, moss green see-through skin. Right before daybreak, a pack of faceless teenagers chased me into a shed where thousands of frogs sang their sorrows in unison. All my friends were once amphibious.
The calendar in the corner is stuck on January. Flipping the pages would validate these months of boreal torture, a tacit acceptance of tyranny.
It’s a motionless trip, to push back against the winter waves. I stand, wearing running shorts and a blank stare, in the window’s brief solar heat. My vague reflection blends with the snowy outbursts dotting soggy, brown grass on the other side of the glass. Condensation ultimately obscures the scene.
I’m awake and there are questions about the degree to which wakefulness has meaning. Though my actions don’t always demonstrate the pinnacle of humanity, I am no better or worse by design than the next one in line. (Desire, empathy, reason, rashes. I’ve got it all.)
Noiselessly, I thought our disagreements made us remarkable, that critique cleared a path to truth. I was convinced our conversations were open pastures to speak and misspeak freely, to apologize, to offend, to swerve and rear-end. I thought we were supposed be able to disagree and then make a gasoline fire out of wet wood. Maybe even a weird, chance hug.
Sputtering flames in the encroaching gray, March nights bring continuous tones of cold to our bodies. Deep, drenched, scrabbling up from a crawl to a walk.
I have only ever wanted to learn from my amphibian friends.
I speak in secret and endure the phony waves. The practice doesn’t always match the premise, sand and salt water pummel and spray.