Category: literature

The hiker who found her tangled in the brush at the foot of Gorgola Hill told police that at first he thought the body was an exposed tree root. Her skin was just as pale as bone, he said, and she was all twisted up like.

And so resulting from the hiker’s quote in the local news media the dead woman came to be known as the Tree Girl, and her case, through the various channels of law enforcement and the bureaucratic fog of the D.A.’s office, invariably and unofficially became the case of the Tree Girl. All around Neophalia in the business offices and on the construction sites, at the fitness centers and in the kitchens people were talking about the Tree Girl, did you hear about the Tree Girl, who was she and where was she from.

But no one seemed to know. In a pocket of her shredded and bloodied jeans police found an identification card and a folded piece of paper upon which a short message was handwritten: I’m doing this because art is dead. Detectives quickly confirmed the woman’s identity as Norma Jean Brown, 25, the resident of a small studio apartment in Neophalia’s Garden district, and they cautiously treated the Tree Girl’s plunge to the base of the steep and rugged cliff as a suicide.

The police found the Tree Girl’s apartment dark and nearly empty save for a bare mattress lying on the floor in the center of the room and paints everywhere, paints of all types and colors, in cans and tubes and crusted dry and cracked upon plastic palettes. There were brushes and chemicals and handcrafted art materials and there were canvases and woods in varied states of completion. After a thorough search detectives could find no trace of friends or relatives of the Tree Girl, no working associates and no leads as to why this young woman would either jump from the summit of Gorgola Hill or become the focus of someone else’s violent designs.

After a week without anyone claiming the body, police appealed to the news media to help locate anyone who may have known the Tree Girl. They used the photo from her identification card and splashed it all over television and the Internet, in the newspapers and on billboards, the image of a frail girl with pale skin and large eyes, her smile forced and diffident perhaps in a vain attempt to help conceal her bad teeth. Plastered to the sides of local transportation vehicles and on the tiled walls of the subway tunnels the people of Neophalia were continuously reminded of the Tree Girl and her tragically anonymous life and death.

Then a young man came forward to police and told them he didn’t know the Tree Girl but he had seen her in a night club about a week before her body was found. She was inside the club, he said, painting some sort of picture on the wall. How can you be sure it was her, the police asked. I’m sure, the young man said, and described how he’d stood against the wall watching the Tree Girl paint that picture for hours while the room at her back strobed with light and sound and heat and movement, he stood frozen amid the fury of flesh until after the music stopped and the last of the dancers had gone, until the bouncer or the door man or the owner of the dance club came up to him and said, Dude, seriously, you gotta go. He told police that he walked out of the dance club with the sun just cracking the surface of the sky, feeling oddly connected to the young woman back in the dance club with her paints and brushes and harried concentration.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

I was a tank mechanic in Nam, Surly said. “Such a massive instrument of destruction, but remarkably easy to operate.” He drank down his gin and motioned the bartender to pour him another. Soft music flitted about the edges of the shadowed room, an oddly liquid sound but consistent enough to make the few lingering souls in the bar with their slow orchestra of whispers seem like background noise. “Those old M46s, you should’ve seen em. The things they have today make our old babies archaic.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ninety-mil cannon gun. I never got a chance to fire it in combat but I did in tactical. Just two shots would vaporize those three-story buildings we had dolled up to look like commy churches. If there are such things.” Surly’s gaze deepened and landed on the mirror behind the bar and then swam past it, beyond his own worn reflection to a place shorn of time. The bartender brought him his drink. “Anyway, that was a long time ago and I was a coward back then. My father was a congressman in Pennsylvania and I had him pull some strings to get me back home. Day before I left the bush one of our aerial teams miscalculated and napalmed my whole unit.” He uncuffed his right shirtsleeve and showed me his hand and forearm, the skin warped and melted and patched in odd visceral tones, as if the insides of his arm had burst through to breathe.

“That goes all the way up to the shoulder,” he said, and rolled his sleeve back down. “They grafted the skin from my back and thighs. Only two in my company lived through it and the other guy shot himself a year later. I got a discharge and a medal and came home to a parade, like I was some kind of hero or something. Wasn’t anything heroic came from that war, though.” He looked at me and I looked away but not before seeing in his eyes a flash of deep lasting shame and the force of its decay, but also strength, as if in the wayward course of his life and his incredible sufferings, both in and outside of war, he’d learned to accept that defeat was imminent but dignity was not.

“Forty-five years later, eighteen surgeries, law school, three marriages, a career in politics—I sit here and say with all honesty that I feel like my life’s finally been validated.”

I began to wonder if this was some sort of elaborately staged pep talk to help pedal me through the grief of losing my brother or if it was going to turn into some rambling soliloquy on suffering and the virtue therein, and so I asked myself if I could get away with leaving under the pretense of using the restroom and then never return, just abandon my frail little glass of bourbon and this old man with his scars and his bedtime stories and go upstairs to crisp hotel sheets and fragrant dreams and those meandering songs of night that follow you deep into your own bones.

“I have this memory,” he said, staring into the mirror again. Talking to himself or through himself. His former self. “I don’t know if it’s a memory of how things actually happened or if I’m recalling a dream from back then. But I remember lying in a clearing on my left side and there’s fire and smoke and screaming men all around me. The ground in front of my face is on fire, my body is on fire, even the sky is burning. Fire crawling and hissing and snapping like an alien jungle creature or some other ageless thing suffocating down there in the molten innards of our planet for millions of years and finally come to the surface for air. Fire roaring. I remember lying there melting and knowing I was dying a painful death of slow torment, suffering and agony beyond words or even the thoughts of words, and yet I was calm, relaxed, submissive. Then I suddenly had this feeling that I wasn’t in the bush at all, across the world from home. I wasn’t at war, I wasn’t fighting anything. I don’t know how I knew it or what had brought me there, but I was in the great city of Rome, burning on the ground in the middle of my street in the great fire of 64. This was nineteen hundred years earlier to the date, my friend.”

I finished my drink. “Quite a story,” I said.

“I looked it up years later after thinking about it for so long and found out the dates coincided. It’s almost like the fire had melted into the earth some type of time tunnel or something, I don’t know. Very strange, and I still can’t explain it. I know you don’t believe me, and of course I don’t have any evidence to support it. I don’t even know if the memory is from the waking world or the dream world. But it was real, I’m sure of it. I can still smell it, feel it bubbling on my skin.”

The bartender brought me another bourbon without my requesting it and then Surly said, Do you read literature?

Yes, I said. What are you reading now, he said.

“I’m reading Nietzsche. The transcripts of our enslavement. I’ve been going through his entire catalog again, looking for things I’d missed the first time around. The human mind matures in giant leaps over the course of ten years.”

Yes, indeed, Surly said, studying me. Have you ever heard of Desmond Paul?

Yeah, I said. I’ve never read any of his work, but I know he’s been in the news a lot lately. I’m not even sure what he writes.

Surly took a long pull from his glass and said, He died a few months ago. This is one of the reasons he’s been in the news. Controversy surrounding his death, rumors involving the works he’s left behind.

Was he murdered or something? I asked.

Possibly. No one knows for sure. The initial reports said he died of a heart attack. He was very young for a writer of his potency. Plus there are some people that think he’s not really dead.

I raised my eyebrow at him.

“There’s a lady sitting alone in a booth behind us,” he said. “Go ahead and take a look.”

I turned slowly and saw a woman sitting at a table, watching me. She looked to be about my age, thin with a very potent gaze. She nodded at me and I turned back around. Who is she, I said, and took a drink.

“She’s a journalist from D.C. A very good journalist, actually. So good that she was fired from her magazine for a story she wrote about Mr. Paul. What I want to give you, her and I have to give it to you together.”

“Man,” I said, exasperated. “I ain’t talkin to any reporters right now.”

“She’s not here to interview you. Don’t you understand what’s happening here? You’ve been chosen for something very important, very unique. There are only a handful of people in the world who’ve had this opportunity.”

Then the woman was standing behind us. Hello, gentlemen.

“I’d like to introduce you to Pamela Scott,” Surly said. I turned and shook her hand.

“Let’s all three of us go back to my booth,” she said, and Surly set a fifty on the bar and excused himself while I followed Pamela back to her table. I began to feel like I was treading water except I was meters beneath the surface, unable to breathe, unable to move in any direction, and there were these massive water creatures of immense power and intellect hovering or hunting in slow circles about me, studying me in the dark abyss. Pamela was telling me how she’d recently heard my music, how Surly had bought her one of my records.

“Pretty impressive, but jazz isn’t really my thing,” she said. “I’ve never understood it. I need music to move me, to drive my body into motion. Jazz is music you think to, not necessarily music you move to.”

If you’ve never made love to a jazz record then you’ve never really made love, I said, and Surly, carrying a small package wrapped in brown paper, sat next to Pamela, directly across the table from me.

“In this package,” he said, sliding it toward me, “you’ll find some studying materials along with a novel written by Desmond Paul. You’ll also find contact information for both Pamela and myself, which you’ll need, sooner than you think.”

Why are you giving this to me.

“Well,” he said, sighing deeply, “I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve traveled the world. Countless times. Trying to find peace, find solace. To seek validation. As I told you before, I’ve not always been pleased with my decisions or behavior. And I’ve certainly not been content in my nature. It’s only due to this gift,” his gaze dropping to the package, “that I have finally found that validation. And now I wish to pass it on to you.”

But why me?

Surly leaned forward so that his head burned brightly beneath the white glow of the hanging lamp. His skin was spotted and stained, faded and elasticized, almost translucent. He smiled and brought his burned and deformed hand up above the package and waved it softly in a gesture of indifference and said, “Because I love your music. It’s as simple as that.” Then he leaned back in his seat, smiling.

“Read the materials and then most everything will begin to make sense,” Pamela said. “Then read the novel. It won’t just change your life,” and then both she and Surly slid out of the booth and stood to leave. They shook my hand and wished me a pleasant evening, leaving me alone in that dim room with my eyes trained on the package, waiting for it to shudder and then burst with the black crawling madness borne of it. After a few minutes nothing happened and so I took the elevator up to my room and sat on the bed and just listened, listened to nothing, listened to the atomic rumble of dust like waves of souls gliding in and out of the open window, listened to the sounds of the city and the asphalt burning cold and lifeless in the howling chorus of night. Then I turned on the lamp and ripped open the package and found some papers folded in half atop a bruised black book with an odd radiance seeping from it, the words Jade Visions stamped in faded green foil upon the cover. I began to leaf through the papers and then decided just to read from the beginning, a printed copy of a news brief:

Famous writer found dead

(AP) CHICAGO, IL — Award-winning novelist and short story writer Desmond Paul was found dead in a Chicago hotel room early this morning, according to Chicago police.

A hotel service worker found the body at around 7 a.m. and notified hotel management. Though official autopsy results are pending, the cause of death is an apparent heart attack and no foul play is suspected.

Paul, 40, had been widely recognized in recent years as the leading voice of his generation in American letters. His most recent novel, The Death of Time, was nominated for the Pen-Faulkner and National Book awards after its publication almost a decade ago.

The rest of the papers were stapled together. They looked to be photocopied notes, scraps written by hand and typeset. There was a brief message on the first page:

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

There was a gibbous moon up in the black winking lazily and I timed my ideas to the sounds of shovels scooping earth. It was cool and there were insects laughing their lurid laughs and I was sweating, I was afraid. I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting there, watching, but it felt right. I couldn’t leave until the last of them was gone, a shadow in a shadow world, walking away from me and the freshest of his wages with his shovel slung about both shoulders.

I stood, finally, holding the drum sticks and stretching my legs. I yawned. It looked comfortable, that new mound of dirt. I walked closer and kneeled and stuck both sticks deeply into it, like antennae. Then I walked away from my brother’s grave for the first and final time, away from darkness toward some darker mystery yet.

*

Saul laughed and told me to keep my pants on this time.

“That was my brother, man. Not me.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forget. I can’t tell the two of yous apart unless you’re up there,” he said, nodding to the small stage. “Or, I couldn’t tell yous apart before. Jesus, kid. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“You sure you’re up for this?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s good.”

“Because I’ll pull you out and take the rap, myself.”

“No, it’s cool,” I said, breathing deeply and looking at my trumpet up there on its plunger, gleaming golden scales of color. Reflections of light and sound.

“I’m gonna go check on the kitchen. You need anything? Bourbon, a beer?”

“No, thanks, Saully,” I said, and stood to greet the band. I’d played with the piano and bass players before many times, but never the drummer. He was sitting off alone at a table going over the sheets. I walked up and shook his hand. He was just a kid.

“It’s a pleasure,” he said. “No, it’s an honor. I’m sorry about your brother, I was a huge fan of his.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m a huge fan of yours, too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You ever play any of my tunes before?” I noticed he was drinking ice water.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just practicing. Nothing at a show, or anything.”

Shit, I thought.

“But it’s cool,” he said. “I got this.”

“Listen, I’m gonna talk to the other fellas. We’re going to change it up a bit tonight. I just wanna lay down one cut, the first sheet there. The blues in minor. I’m gonna shift a lot, might even end up dismantling the chords as a whole. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen or how the music’s gonna progress. You’ll have to listen for the changes. You up for that?”

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

One night my new wife admitted to me through a veil of tears that she’d been sleeping with my father, so I got in my Jeep and started driving, just to clear my head. I drove through the city shimmering beneath that crescent moon and I drove through the rural towns and half-towns bathed in blue shadow and before I realized what was happening I was in Ohio and it was daylight and I couldn’t remember how I got there. I refueled and kept driving west through the gloom and the wide barren fields sodden and infertile and I drove through the rain and the endless stretches of farm and highway, our American pastoral spread out in pastel yellows and grays and hues of green and brown. Into Missouri and then Kansas where so much of our nation’s young blood had been spilled, but then in the Earth’s advanced age, hasn’t blood been spilled just about everywhere? My wife kept calling me and calling me, leaving messages at all times of day and night, pleading and sobbing, and so I tossed my phone out the window somewhere in Colorado and kept driving, driving, until I woke frazzled and soaked in sweat in a Las Vegas hotel room wearing the same clothes I left my house in.

It was evening and so I showered and went down to the lobby and asked the desk clerk where could I get a good escort. Something clean, you know. Something nice. Nothing too rich, but nothing cheap, either. The clerk stared at me for a long time and then said, You really ought to use more discretion. Then he pointed to a suited man helping people with their luggage and I walked over and asked him, Sir, do you know where I could get a decent hooker around here. What kind of girl are you looking for, he said, leading me to a quiet corner of the lobby. Something clean, I said. She’s got to be clean. And I don’t care what she looks like as long as she’s not too hefty. Any skin or hair color, it doesn’t matter, I continued.

No, the man said. I mean money. What type of girl are you looking for? Five hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

“Holy shit,” I said. “I was thinking fifty bucks, tops,” and the man walked away from me without another word. I paid for the room and found my Jeep and drove west through the night frustrated and exhausted and feeling more alone and damaged than I ever had. By the time I got to the California border I was so fatigued that I pulled off to the side of the highway to get a few minutes of rest and when I woke it was daybreak and a patrolwoman was at my window. What are you doing here, she said. Sleeping, I said. You can’t sleep here, she said. I’m not sleeping anymore, thanks to you, I said, and sat up.

“Give me your driver’s license and registration,” she said, and so I dug through the miscellaneous paperwork in the glove compartment and handed it over to her. She walked back to her squad car and sat inside for several minutes before returning and handing the paperwork back to me. “What are you doing here?” she said again.

“I was sleeping. I’ve been driving across the country and I was tired.”

“Why are you driving across the country?”

“Because I’ve always wanted to.”

“Are you carrying any weapons or contraband?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I’ve been sleeping.”

“No,” she said. “Before. Were you drinking before you were sleeping.”

“How long before?”

“Last night, ” she said.

“No,” I said. “I was driving through the night.”

What do you say you step out of the car, she said, and so I got out of the Jeep and succumbed to very prolonged and rigorous roadside examinations. I stood very erect with my feet together and touched my nose, I counted backwards from eighty-six while patting my head and rubbing my belly, or maybe I was patting my belly and rubbing my head, I recited the entire Greek alphabet in Japanese while hopping back and forth from leg to leg, I sang the words to Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” while standing on my head in a patch of weeds, I urinated my name into the dirt at the patrolwoman’s request, after which she arrested me for public indecency and put me in the rear seat of her squad car and drove me back to Las Vegas where I sat in a small solitary jail cell for a few hours, brooding, worrying about my Jeep, imagining my wife and my father licking and sucking each other’s asses, thinking about the quiet discomfort of living life beside those other species blessed with less intelligence and far less cruelty.

I asked the guard in the jail if my Jeep ever got towed to the jail, is my Jeep here yet. We don’t give that type of information to prisoners, he said. Then he unlocked the cage door and said, You’re free to go now, and he let me out. I asked him again about my Jeep and he just pointed to the exit door of the jail and I walked out into the sunshine, alone, not sure where to go, and so logically I walked into the first bar I saw, a tiny dark place just off the strip. I ordered a whiskey and a beer and drank them and then I ordered a cheeseburger and began talking to a man about my age two stools away from me. He said he was a journalist sent out here from back east to cover race riots, but so far he hadn’t run into any race riots or even heard about them happening. “See this empty glass?” he said, rolling it over in his hand. “I’m going to piss in it and airmail it to my editor.” He said it with such sober conviction that I believed him completely.

Do you know where I could get a decent hooker for twenty bucks, I asked him. I’m in the mood to use a woman. Use her and discard her. I don’t mind paying.

Twenty bucks? He said, and laughed. Twenty bucks wouldn’t get you one bedroom eye, let alone a pair of them. Haven’t you ever bartered women before? No, I said. But I want to. Well they’re not cheap, he said. Not anything worthwhile, anyway. If you want anything of quality, you’ve got to pay for it. What do you need a hooker for, anyway? You’re a decent looking guy. If you want to get laid, all you have to do is try a little, especially around here.

No, I said, it’s nothing like that, and for the first time I felt stupid about wanting to hire a prostitute. I felt stupid about being so far away from home, about running away to this shithole in the desert with its luminous depravity and musical currency, everything bought and sold and gloss and subtle wickedness. I felt stupid about everything and I wanted to go home. Then the bartender brought my cheeseburger and I ate in silence and ordered a round of drinks for me and the journalist and I also bought a drink for the bartender. Then the journalist started talking about time travel, about how he’d been having these dreams about building a time machine and traveling to the farthest reaches of time and space, and as he was telling me this I looked behind the bar at a bruised hardback book, its cover all black and scuffed and stained, and there was an odd glow seeping from it, as if the pages themselves were made up of the flames of candles or the residue of those flames, and I leaned over the bar to get a look at the title of the book stamped into it ever so faintly in green foil, Jade Visions, and then the bartender dropped a glass at the other end of the bar, shattering me back into what the journalist was saying.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

I watched her fingers trace the angles of my chest down to my abdomen, deep ridges of muscle and bone and patches of coarse hair and skin darkened in thick tracks of scars. I watched her hand grow timid about the stained edges, as if touching the scars would bring back the memory of what had caused them, as if my seeing them each day and feeling about them with my own fingers wasn’t memory enough. What happened, she said.

I thought of lying. I fell drunk from a window and landed on some rocks or broken glass or maybe I was in a fiery accident or a knife fight and needed surgery to re-stitch the deeply shorn tissue. Something that might make her nod or smile or laugh and then forget it all. But she was gentle and seemed forgiving and so I told her the truth. She listened and was silent for a while and her fingers grew still and rigid on my skin and I regretted telling her almost immediately. Are you serious, she said.

After a few minutes she rose and walked to the bathroom and I breathed the warm air of her departure on the sheets. There was innocence and deep acceptance and years of hurt in her scent. She was like most every other woman. Light framed the closed door, a symmetry of knife edges in the dark. I heard the toilet flush and then the hiss of the faucet. She opened the door and stood in the frame, half-lit and exposed to the darkness, her nakedness stark and emblematic and teetering between the shadow of here and now and the verity of past light. I’d better be going, she said.

She gathered her clothes about her and put them on methodically, gracefully, like I wasn’t in the room. As if it wasn’t my room. As if she had done this a thousand times in a thousand different rooms just as I was certain she had. The clothes had come off in haste, without ceremony, the sole neutralizing obstacle to will. Now she stepped into them just as quickly and callously but with robotic calculation, like the clothes were a requirement and nothing more, as if they reminded her of her life before she took them off and how this new life was exactly like the old life and nothing like she thought it would be or perhaps hoped it would be. The clothes reminded her that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change. The brief nakedness between lives was her hurried respite from herself, from both lives. It was nice meeting you, she said. Call me some time.

She sat and the edge of the bed sagged beneath her. She reached into her purse and rummaged through it and I wondered if the bathroom light was bright enough to kill moods and strains of moods or if it would even stop there and I could hear the wind whipping through the city outside my window but I could hear nothing more save for the wail of bedsprings as she stood up and put a folded piece of paper with her phone number inside it on my nightstand. She crawled on the bed toward me and kissed me softly on the cheek and then the side of the mouth and for the first time I understood her intense sadness and its brutal dominion over her young life.

She walked out the door and shut it softly behind her and I could still smell her pale nomadic skin and her scalp and her breath woven into threads of the moment now lost to us. Her ghost haunted me through the night and so my dreams reverted in myriad to that lonely face at the far table in the coffee shop, that dark, worm-like body of abandon atop mine, shivering with the brief delight of self-sustenance. I closed my eyes and traced the scars on my stomach and torso with a sudden longing, for I never even thought to search her body.

The painter was tumbling down a well of creative stagnation and so he uprooted his life and moved to a strange town and got a job working nights as a cook. But even with the change of scenery and habit he still couldn’t create anything of merit for weeks and so he began to doubt his abilities as well as his decision to move and begin anew.

He had a crush on a girl at work. She worked the morning shift in the back office of the restaurant and never talked to anyone and so he watched her tentatively for about a month before finding the courage to approach her. Hello, he said to her one morning at the end of his shift, smiling, I don’t want to embarrass or offend you but I think you’re a beautiful woman, you’re quiet and reserved and you seem smart. I noticed you might be a bit younger than I am, how young I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve learned through the years is that when a person reaches a certain psychological maturity, age becomes an illusion. You’re negotiating those initial years of adulthood and one thing that’s important to remember is there are some things we can all share with each other, whether they be stories or curative methods or lessons fashioned from time and experience and certainly pain, always pain, but often times each of those things can combine into one cohesive package. And so being an adult, finding another person to connect with mentally, emotionally, spiritually, has nothing to do with how old or how young a person is, but what they have to offer, how they receive and interact with the other person.

As the painter was telling her this she shook her head at him and then she passed on a rather peculiar series of hand gestures and said, as only a deaf person could, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.

That morning he didn’t feel like going home because home was bleak and filled with blank canvases and bare cuts of wood and unused oils and acrylics. He walked down through the commercial district toward the water and he passed through the faith district and all the churches and mosques and synagogues of varied persuasions and denominations stacked next to each other, people walking dazed in and out of them and all of them dressed alike and moving in like manner of attitude and posture, and he realized the only difference between each lot was the architecture of their respective structures. He made his way down through the district of Neophalia and the vast network of bridges there and he stopped to rest in the shade beneath one small bridge and when he looked up to its undercarriage he saw one of the most amazing works he’d ever come across. It was a mural large in size but much larger in scope, a work stretching the entire length of the bridge’s belly and painted in the humble dialect of a master. It was a curious but potent narrative compressing all stages of thought and sprit, an idiom splashed in shades of shades as a volley to the gods: This is the human mind rendered true and real and composed of its own colloquial rites, and how beautiful this truth is, how sacred such offerings are. The painter sat and stared though the mural was faded with age and wear and the spattered shit of birds and other creatures. He was immediately cured of his creative obstructions and walked briskly to his apartment where he called in sick and began work at once on a piece that took him well into the night hours, an oil on wood that he finished feeling utterly alive and exhausted and relieved before finally falling asleep with the title of the work twisting and burning behind the fluttering lids of his eyes, Mirrors.

The next day he woke up in the early afternoon and walked to the kitchen around the corner for lunch. He sat at the bar next to an older woman drinking a martini and he introduced himself.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a painter,” he said.

“Oh!” the old woman said, delighted. “It must be my lucky day! My house needs painted, and who sits down next to me for lunch but a real life painter!”

“I’m afraid I’m not that type of painter,” he said.

“Oh,” said the older woman. “I see. You’re an artist. I don’t know too much about art. What sort of art do you do?”

“I’m a painter.”

“Well yes, of course,” she said. “But what do you paint? Do you paint people or landscapes?”

“I paint states of mind. I’m more or less a painter of the avant-garde.” And as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t, for he knew better than most that all art was nothing if not avant-garde, that art by its very nature was at the forefront of humanity’s march across the steaming mouth of the unknown, and what is art if not the light and the bridge, the shield and the key that sanctions and endorses humanity’s greatest leaps?

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Well—”

“Last night an episode of my favorite television program—or maybe it was the night before or the night before that. I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s the program about the talent show full of famous people with unbelievable talents. They dance and sing and oh, how talented they are! Last night there was a famous actor on the show, I can’t remember his name. But oh my, what an excellent painter he was! He painted these beautiful cottages and he painted scenes of grass and he painted portraits of other famous people. Talk about a real artist! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Really, that’s the type of painting you should be doing, young man. That’s what I call Art.”

“That’s really not my—”

“Think about it,” the drinking woman said. “Don’t waste your time on this ‘avant-garde’ hullabaloo. In my day when something was ‘avant-garde’ it just meant that nobody understood it.”

The lady finished her martini and wished the painter well and walked out into the sunshine.

*

The painter wasn’t feeling well after lunch. He’d been having bouts with his allergies and so he looked up a doctor and made an appointment. When he got to the office he sat down and bobbed his head and tapped his fingers to the muzak and then he dug into his bag for a paperback and started reading it and after a while he noticed a man dressed in a suit watching him.

“Pardon me,” said the man in the suit. “I’m always curious what people are reading.”

“Oh,” said the painter. “This is a book of poems by my favorite Australian poet.”

“The title,” said the staring man. “I’m only interested in the title, not the contents.”

“Oh,” said the painter again. “Identity of Circles.”

“Thank you,” said the man in the suit, and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Then the doctor’s assistant called the painter’s name and led him down a long narrow corridor of empty rooms and into the last room on the left.

“What’s seems to be the problem,” the doctor’s assistant asked.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

The young man dismounted his horse in the mad clatter of battle and forgot everything about his life, the unwritten codes and reverence of the land and deep honored traditions. He forgot about his young wife and the lump in her belly and he moved swiftly through the fog of rifle smoke trailed by his own long braids and the mad shrieks of wounded men. He approached the white man with red hair lying supine and staring at him from the mud. There were men upon wild horses weaving incoherently through the smoke with their guns or war clubs raised and there were fleeting visions of other men riding boldly and bareback but long ago killed on the battlefield and a small white sun directly overhead trembled each time the white men in blue coats fired their wagon-gun.

The young man stepped over the men strewn across the sodden prairie field and unsheathed his bowie and crouched down next to the white man. He took a handful of the man’s red hair and looked into his eyes. A bullet whistled over the young man’s head and another screamed by his left ear and he sliced the white man’s forehead from temple to temple and said to him quietly in Lakota, “The wind does not cry for you.”

Then he stood and tore the scalp from the white man’s skull and held it up to the sky and screamed while the white man in his final moments of life watched his own blood drip down the young man’s arm, his torso, lean and brown and heaving muscle in the gray light.

That night the young man sat alone in his tipi and thought about the mystery of battle, the subtle violent leanings of men and the power to forget one’s self amid the jolts of heightened awareness. Outside, the red fire glowed bestial and the hypnotic throb of victory drums brought to life the dancing ghosts of many dead men both white and red and the young man agreed with the ageless wisdom of his ancestors that warfare was indeed more spiritual than physical, that courage was an extension of the self but that acting upon that courage according to honor and principle was integrally selfless.

The young man reclined onto his blankets and listened to the chanting of his people and breathed deeply to remove the walls of his mind. He remembered what he had said to the white man with red hair and he reminded himself that the wind cried for no man, especially not the man who honored and defended it with his own life.