“The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred;
No matter who it is, it is sacred;
Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well-off—just as much as you;
Each has his or her place in the procession.”
Leaves of grass. I sing the body electric. Walt Whitman.
Please stay tuned for details.
There was some kind of festival in the streets when I returned. The pedestrian mall was a thick gauntlet of people wearing assorted costumes, some obviously homemade, others more authentic and elaborate, and none of them with any discernible unified pattern or theme. There were live bands strategically placed across the walkway playing all types of music, there were jugglers and fire-breathers, cowboy contortionists and dancing Saint Nicks, the throng thick and fluid and jovial in the midday sun. There were women dressed as brides and holding giant margarita-filled glasses, a crowd of policewomen in short shorts, a huge marijuana smoking koala bear, a man on stilts wearing nothing but an inflatable donut, women in bikinis, tanned college girls in lingerie, an Eskimo, The Beatles, two or three different men dressed up as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, all of them holding some type of drink, most of them in plastic cups of assorted colors and sizes. I asked a fireman if he was a real fireman or a fake fireman and he said, Are you a real triathlete or a fake triathlete, and I didn’t know what he meant so I said, What’s going on here, man, what’s the occasion for this party? He looked around and pushed his fire hat back on his head and said, I’ve got no idea. He handed me a cup of beer and I took it, riding slowly down the walkway. The smell of grilled meat and spices floated about my head and a roaring cheer burst up from the walkway a block down. I made my way over there, past the old women bumblebees, through the arching balloons, a cover band playing a tune from the Zombies, past Ichabod Crane dancing the tango with Margaret Thatcher, past the cast of Reservoir Dogs playing cards at a folding table, I walked through a choking-thick cloud of marijuana smoke that brought me immediately back to the shadows beneath the Santa Monica pier and I shuddered so violently the cup of beer fell from my hand. Down toward the other end of the mall people were assembled in a giant circle cheering on a wizard and a David Hasselhoff look-a-like break dancing in the middle. The band up on the nearby stage was dressed up as the Jimi Hendrix Experience but they were playing Fight For Your Right by the Beastie Boys and I felt very happy but very confused. I noticed a man standing in the doorway of a deli, smoking a cigarette and watching the phenomenon in the walkway and I walked my bicycle toward him. What’s going on here? I asked him. A festival, or something?
This ain’t no festival, he said indignantly. This type a shit happens all the time. Then he threw the cigarette butt past me and walked into his shop and closed the door. The band stopped playing and the people cheered. A man wearing a brown colonial wig and a Denver Broncos jersey said very loudly: Everybody listen up!
He handed out yellow pamphlets at random, to anyone who would take one. I reached out for one but the man was too far away. He turned and said something to the members of the band and soon he was up on the stage with the microphone in his hand. This ain’t your momma’s America, my friends, he said, his voice booming from the speakers. A few people cheered, others booed, someone next to me said, Now who the fuck is this guy? Someone in front yelled for the man to shut up but still everyone began to listen to what he was about to say, their eyes down in their pamphlets, the speaker’s face scanning the crowd in front of him.
This should be a party for homeless people, he said. They’re all around you. Go ahead, take a look.
The crowd grew quiet.
Or maybe it should be a party for Mexicans. They’re not hard to find, either. Tell em, say, thank you, sir, or thank you, ma’am. Go ahead, you know you want to. Deep down, you know you really want to.
Whispers. A few boos. A handful of cheers.
I’m not talking about these gang bangers with broken English, rags on their heads, shooting up restaurants and killing cops. No sir. No way. I’m not talking about the guys who get drunk and drive their pickups onto the sidewalks, killing children. They’re not contributing anything to society except fear and regret. No sir. I’m not talking about the rapists, the sex offenders looking at every chick that walks by, the perverts dressed in their cheap black threads, no sir. No way. I’m talking about our friends, the real, the worthy Mexican immigrants, the workers, the proletariat—
Shut the fuck up, someone yelled.
—the people in the shadows, the invisibles that make this white utopia of privilege possible.
Then everyone was listening. The salsa dancers and 1980’s revivalists, the homeless men and women huddled in the alleyway and dressed as themselves, the musicians and street performers, the real police situated thin and random throughout the crowd. Everyone stopped talking and laughing, everyone except the college boys dressed up as disco kings or pimps or 1970’s basketball players, shouting, Yeeeaahh!, because to them everything is a party, everything has to be a party, and the man said:
Many of you think you’re oppressed, many of you think you can feel the weight of power burying you deep into your featherbeds, your comfort zones, the things you work hard for and earn, the things you were handed, whatever. Your things. You’re feeling buried by the power structures, the elite, the unmentionable dangers your leftist teachers warned you about.
Shouts for the man to get off the stage, for the band to start playing music again.
They’ve rendered your weapons innocuous. Government, media, corporate greed. Your lives no longer take live ammunition; they only spit plastic darts.
Shouts for the crowd to overtake him, shouts from the college boys.
Plastic darts. You know what a plastic dart is? It’s freedom-proof, that’s what. Just like the ones they supply at the university up the street.
People chuckled. Someone threw a ball of white yarn up onto the stage and the band’s guitar player picked it up and threw it back into the crowd. I set down the bike and moved my way closer to the stage and reached out for one of the yellow pamphlets.
Don’t listen to a word I’m saying, he said. Don’t listen to me, no sir. No way. Just look in the mirror. Look hard, like you’re trying to look past it.
More people shouted for him to get off the stage and the college boys told him to go fuck himself, which only seemed to make the man more confident, give him more presence. A few people walked away, clowns and a princess, a tiger and a human lighthouse. Scattered boos growing thicker, more prominent.
Your so-called education leaves you feeling fully locked and loaded, doesn’t it, he said into the microphone. You feel like you’ve developed an arsenal of weapons in your mind, like you’ve got something other than plastic darts to shoot. But let me tell you something, my friends. You’ve got nothing. No-thing. Plastic, fucking, darts. Because if you really looked in the mirror you’d see that you were the oppressor, not the oppressed. Thinking you’re oppressed, held down, obstructed, impeded, this gives you an excuse as to why you’re not productive, why you’re not doing anything with your lives.
—Fuck you, man!
—Let’ get some music, I came here to dance!
—What is this guy even talking about?
—Holy shit, something’s in my eye. Is there something in my eye? Oh my god, oh my god.
A few people clapped. I stood there motionless. Something was about to happen, I could feel it in the air, growing hot with the sun angled slightly toward the mountains in the cloudless blue. I looked around for the police and didn’t even see any fake ones.
You gave all your weapons away and now they’re using em against you. You gave them to your enemies, for them to use against you—
—Somebody get him off—
—and now you’ve got nothing but third and fourth generation rifles tucked under your arm and they don’t even fire, they’ve been stripped from the captives, the indigenous, and used to beat their owners, you, the lucky and sun-splashed oppressors, the horde chosen to annihilate the true chosen ones, the African-Americans, the American Indians, the Mexican-Americans, the Vietnamese-Americans, all of us, you and me, the recycled dead—
—I’m gonna kick your fuckin hippie ass, said a college kid close to the stage.
Ladies and gentlemen, the speaker said. Look at this sad young man. He pointed at the college kid just below him. One of their cowardly hit men! In the flesh!
The crowd around the college kid thickened and he got up on the stage with the speaker. He was taller and much bigger but the speaker didn’t appear to be intimidated at all, he was actually more calm and also more willing to agitate the young man, who, according to the estimation of the speaker, had already made two mistakes: the first was saying anything to the speaker at all, and the second was climbing up on the stage, because now a physical confrontation was inevitable and it wasn’t just between himself and the speaker, he was confronting the speaker and the entire crowd, who would invariably second-guess his every decision, his every gesture and expression, they would mock and ridicule him if (when) he made the wrong move, the incorrect decision, and the speaker was prepared to face the college kid’s barrage of fists and kicks to the face, he was prepared to get thrown off the stage because, to him, this would justify his message, it would solidify his place in the party’s lore, in the history of this town and his cause, it would render his little personal and unprepared speech true, even if he wasn’t sure what he was talking about, and the college boy knew all of these things as he stepped toward the speaker with adrenaline coursing jagged through his system, he knew all of these things and more, including that this situation could not end well for him, it would not end well for him, it was impossible, because somehow he had surrendered power and control to this hippie asshole and now he was forced to react either with force or humor, the latter being almost entirely impracticable, as his body was primed for physical confrontation more than anything else, and then he thought he could simply walk away and risk being derided, booed by the bloodthirsty onlookers, fodder for the jackass with the pamphlets, and the college kid said, Who the fuck do you think you are?, which was the entirely wrong move despite the young man’s conviction that it was right, it was the only move, and in a flash he no longer cared he was on a moving billboard, bullet train to nowhere, his front-row seat with a prime view of the carnage.
I’m your friend, man, the speaker said into the microphone, and reached out to put his hand gently on the college kid’s shoulder, and the young man slapped the speaker’s hand away and the speaker raised his hand with the microphone in it and the young man head-butted the speaker, knocking him backward a few steps, blood spraying outward from the speaker’s face in a fine mist, and for a brief second a few of the spectators thought it was all a joke, the speech, the confrontation, all of it a ruse, because these two were actually friends, classmates in the drama school, and they were nearing the end of this charade, where, with a hug and a bow, they would exit the stage one after the other to the applause and amazement of the crowd, but what actually happened was far less fortunate, for the college kid charged the speaker, wounded and dazed still by the head butt, and swung a ferocious right haymaker into the face of the speaker, who, if he weren’t knocked immediately unconscious, would have experienced a full two seconds of total weightlessness as he flew backwards off the stage and into the crowd, his sleeping body bouncing abruptly on the concrete, and the pamphlets swung up into the air, hundreds of folded yellow papers raining down upon the city block stunned into silence save for the sharp inhalation of disbelievers and the razor-electric hum of microphone feedback, and it was almost celebratory how the pamphlets floated and flipped back down to earth in slow motion, atop the concrete and the heads of onlookers watching rapt and excited and yet disappointed that cooler heads couldn’t have prevailed, some spectators walking away from the scene to refill their cups, smiling or indifferent, others swearing under their breath at the irreverence of the human condition, the young man’s friends cheering him, praising his actions. A woman dressed as a witch kneeled down to soothe the speaker back toward consciousness, back toward the light from whence he came, and he woke slowly, bloodily, with a grimace as if from some painful nightmare that was not physical nor at all dreamlike, and the college kid stood watching from the stage with fire in his eyes despite the flood of regret seeping into him, and nobody stopped him from jumping from the stage and running from the scene, the block, our lives, the sun ducking for relief behind the clouds.
To read this chapter in its entirety, you’ll have to wait for the novel to be published
Beyond the windows the city suffocates and inside the airport an improvised social order has emerged, people placing themselves in like company within the first few hours, migrating either toward others or slinking from them, watching suspiciously. The snow continues its relentless entombment, mountains of snow, so much snow that it seems like a joke, a cataclysm and a joke. Families cluster and gravitate together, a kindred alliance in the struggle to raise children in such an unpredictable world. The erudite, greatly outnumbered, concede space to the philistines, retreating to their darkened corners where they can read or sleep in peace. Lonely travelers linger about the fringes of the terminal and three concourses, sitting in bars desperate to spread the microbe of random discussion. Outside the world is gray and cold and buried in fifty, perhaps sixty inches of snow and ice but inside travelers of exotic speech and color band together and sit against the walls with their luggage next to them, the contents unfolded and unused.
Situated throughout the entire airport there are precisely 891 people, 28 of which are reading books, 41 reading magazines. Only one of those books would be considered by bibliophiles and some librarians, not to mention teachers and many linguists and of course writers and readers of particularly rigid standards, to be a great work, and it sits open faced to pages 384 and 385 on the lap of its sleeping lord. Five hundred and twelve people attend non-literary electronic devices such as television or portable phones and music players and video games. Among the sources of such rapt attention are popular films and pre-recorded sporting events downloaded onto small digital screens. Fifty-four people throughout the airport at this late hour are engaged in dialogue with other people or with themselves, speaking at this very moment, 30 of which are connected to their partner via cellular satellite. Forty-nine adults are staring into the screen of their mobile computers, reading, studying, communicating, formulating their private mathematical balances, chatting on their preferred discussion boards, all of them drunk with fatigue and boredom after two days of near complete immobility. Four children run in circles of Gate 3C, chasing one another and yelping gleefully. A dog sleeps snoring in its plastic cage, another metaphor for the ennui that defines this frozen city in miniature. Two women kiss very passionately in a secluded corner of gate 21A and a young man smokes a cigarette in the bathroom stall in concourse B, fanning unsuccessfully at the smoke with his hands. Of the 412 people fast asleep, 408 of them are dreaming about death.
In the terminal of the airport an impressionable young man has filled his head with ideas of revolution and armed struggle and other romanticized concepts he doesn’t fully understand and yet he’s certain he’s carrying with him all sorts of mental weaponry and knowledge, he’s enlightened, he is the guns of his generation locked and loaded and primed for destruction, and he gets into a bickering match with a much older and equally obstinate man about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or maybe it was Catholics and Protestants or perhaps warm water and tepid water, and the confrontation of words quickly escalates into shoving and pulling and then rolling about the carpet and two armed guards intervene and haul the fighting men into the underground lair in the belly of the terminal, and government men in suits interrogate them one by one for hours, nearly torturing them, and the revolutionary, or the self-proclaimed revolutionary, rather, begins sobbing under the pressure and he tells the suited government men that he needs to speak with his mother, please, just leave me alone, I just wanna go home.
There is a doctor in the terminal, actually there are two doctors. One of them waits patiently and attentive in wait until his services are needed, the other sleeps with avowed designs of concealing from everyone the fact that he is indeed a trained doctor. He will not deliver any babies tonight, no sir, and no matter what, he will not put his mouth upon another’s and breathe, breathe, unless it’s the soft sugary mouth of an attractive woman, perhaps even a teenage girl with glossed lips and the tiniest of blonde hairs rimming her mouth. He smiles and his hips shift and then thrust slightly as he sleeps.
To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.
Sometimes I recall those memories of my father and me in his garage and view them cinematically. Jutting images of deep emotional warmth, close-up frames of his pallid head, his face folding in wrinkled gaiety. The stories we shared were the background music of our film. Quaint abstract close-up of my fingers holding a cigarette, smoke rising in creeping braids, the lens focusing past the smoke to my father’s face, his head bent forward in meditation, listening. In the garage we were safe. The world had its troubles, its violence and fakery, its small-mindedness. Our world was in the garage beneath the bright fluorescent glow, it was the two of us learning, reaching into parts of ourselves and pulling out the truths, extending them out for the other to take and digest. The garage was retreat, lectern, prayer room. I view those deep moments in montage, powerful imagery flashing about the screen of my mind, the moments before the credits roll up from the disconnected abyss.
Then in the garage one Saturday afternoon he collapsed to the ground and couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t support him. He was conscious but his brain wasn’t communicating with his limbs. The overhead door was opened wide to the sunshine. I’ll never forget his face, that expression of shock, understanding, submission, helpless analysis. My father knew in that instant that he had been beaten by his own mortality. It had stepped in front of him and choked him down. How sudden and jarring death claims our attention. How strange to be alive and commanding one moment, a sycophant the next. He saw the rest of his life spread out thinly before him, the decay, the mindlessness, the vibrato and stink of his organs shutting down. He realized in that flashing madness that he wouldn’t live another month.
I helped him to his feet while my stepmother called the hospital. He was still stunned in silent thought. I could see the fear and awe on his face. He knew he was looking straight into the heart of that wide visceral truth. He thought he had envisioned it, he told himself repeatedly that he was ready. As I set him in his folding chair and lit him a cigarette, he realized he hadn’t even known what ready meant.
Just before my stepmother drove the two of them out of the garage and down the driveway to my father’s sun-soaked reckoning, I took off my necklace and placed it in his hand. He was almost too weak to hang on to it. I said I would meet them at the hospital and watched them drive away, the car shrinking away from me into the luminous maw, my hand where my chain had been and that naked, vulnerable feeling there.
My editor called me into his office and when I got there I could hardly see him behind the great stacks of paper on his desk. I want you to go to Las Vegas to cover the race riots, he said. What race riots, I said.
“Don’t you read the papers?”
There’s nothing in our paper about any race riots or anything in Las Vegas, I said. Not our newspaper, he said, a real newspaper, our paper is shit, and I nodded and drove to the airport in the dizzying heat wondering why he sent me to cover race riots when my beat was local government. I stopped at the airport newsstand and bought copies of all the major dailies across the country and then I started to think about how hot Las Vegas was going to be, sweating, the shimmering heat vapor, and the thought made me very tired. I got on the airplane and once we took off I began leafing through the various newspapers looking for the story about the riots in Vegas and I didn’t see anything. Hate crimes in Georgia, a school shooting in Des Moines. Death in Denver. An airplane crash in Beijing, all eight hundred aboard dead, and I thought it was impossible to fit that many people on a plane, but then again you learn something new every day. Broadsheets and tabloids crinkled and folded, my hands stained black from the ink. Nothing about Las Vegas, nothing about race riots.
When we landed I called my editor and told him that I checked all the papers and there was nothing about Vegas or any riots. Well you’re there, he said, start asking around. What races are rioting, anyway, I said, but he had already hung up. And what are they rioting about, I said to the dead line.
I checked into a cheap motel and showered and turned on the local television to see if I could land any mention of my assignment, but there was nothing about any races or riots in the Vegas area, and I lied down and told myself I could afford a few minutes of rest before making calls and before I knew it I was dreaming of time and madness and I couldn’t convince myself they were two distinct things, I dreamed of open sores and boils on the skin and that my brain was baking slowly inside my skull and I dreamed of bruises and lost loves and poetry written on walls with giant brushes made from the hair of dead babies, and then I dreamed of race riots in Cleveland, race riots in Vancouver, race riots in Buenos Aires, race riots everywhere except Las Vegas, and in the dream I was running, I was always running, a guerilla journalist looking for racial strife and other violence but also the hidden meaning behind news terms like nut graph and lede and kicker. Then I dreamed I was coughing and I didn’t know why until I put on my glasses and noticed the air was hazy with pink and red and I realized I was breathing vaporized blood, choking me, and there was a terrible taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I tried to wake myself up but I just fell deeper into the dream and there was a dancing woman, a woman trained in classical ballet and she was twirling and spinning and contorting her body in myriad ways and it was fascinating, mesmerizing, hypnotic, and then I noticed her hair was on fire, her head leaving a smoky trail wherever it dipped or glided and swung, and then the woman stopped dancing and stared at me with her hair on fire and her eyes mad and she said she could see death everywhere, she could see death on television and in the malls, she could see it emerging from the crowds in the street, she could see it in the jumbled letters of newsprint, she could see it in elevators and on the subway and she could see that death knew she saw it and it didn’t care, it didn’t try to hide the fact that it was death and not just some strange or ominous thing, and she said that death was neither a male nor a female presence but completely androgynous, and I told her that made sense and she got angry with me and said I could never understand something as beautifully complex as death and then she walked away, muttering under hear breath as her head melted. I imagined that death probably looked like a man or a fish or even a church, and somehow I knew that I was not afraid of death regardless of its appearance. Then I dreamed of Haitian kids creating rainbows out of feet fungus and I dreamed of people machine gunning their own in the streets of some strange country, I dreamed of closing doors and baritone saxophone players with their eyes closed and their bodies writhing with their improvised emotive forces, and then I dreamed of race riots in Pamplona, race riots in Seattle, race riots in Las Cruces, I dreamed of worms, I dreamed of giant brown worms with legs like humans who stood upright like humans, wormus erectus, and I dreamed the worms were bred to commit suicide at a particular age and I thought it tragically out of their control, the suicide gene written into their slimy genetic code, I dreamed of all the pain in the world condensed and concentrated into one small room, and then I dreamed of time travel.
To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.
The room began to burn around them and the oldest of them said, So what are the prevailing themes of the work. So far, I mean. If it’s not too early in the story.
The other three looked to the flames spreading quickly about them, orange and yellow and red pulsing light and heat. Billowing flames upon the wide raftered ceiling and floor and white walls. They sat in silence and studied the force of the flames and then they dropped their heads into the text, scanning mindlessly, listening to the fire snap and lick carnally at their world. They tried to remember what the oldest one had just said and couldn’t and then what.
I know it’s early, she said. But surely we can identify at least one thematic element.
The flames carried a truth of their own, a rogue life force born of circadian breath and sustained by thought, thrust outward to the realm of awareness, attacking each of their senses and spreading violence and destruction and misunderstanding. Regeneration. Someone cleared their throat and the flames grew larger and doubled in heat, smoke whirling mad cyclonic threats about their heads.
Violence, said the second one. Violence is a theme, I think. He had to shout to be heard over the growl and whine of the spreading fire.
Please explain.
Well, um, he said, trying not to focus on the dancing fire but the topic at hand, the discussion. Not just overtly, he said, With the brutal beating at the beginning of part one and the shooting there at the end of part two. But also the implicit violence. The interaction between characters. There’s violence in the language, the dialogue, even without being profane. Especially without being profane. The author has chosen to create a dialogue of what seems to be constant agitation between parties.
Hmm, yes. Interesting.
And darkness. Darkness also seems to be a prevailing theme, I think, though I’m not quite sure how yet.
I was thinking of that too, said the third one, flames lapping at her legs. Her face was wet with sweat, hair matted to her forehead in knotted clumps. There’s obviously something complicated going on here with the use of light and dark, she said, Illumination and shadow. It’s like a dichotomy, like the author is using light and darkness to set up some kind of dichotomy.
Between what. Give us an example.
And the entire room was burning now, flames affronting physical and metaphysical laws alike and consisting not of individual bodies of flames but of one churning mechanism roaring godlike and ferocious and the people of the room watched transfixed with the glittering vortex tattooed onto their dark pooling irises amid the sounds of crashing wood and stone and screaming steel.
Well, for instance, said the third one. The narrator’s not really explaining anything he sees on the highway other than what’s revealed in the Cadillac’s lights. It’s almost like nothing really exists on the Highway Six unless it’s bathed in light.
Okay, yes. I see. Hmm. Interesting, yes.
It’s about revelation. I think. And the highway itself is very intriguing, said the second one. The highway itself is a character. There’s something very strange and fabular going on here, I think. I hope we’ll encounter more as the story progresses.
Well the story is named after the highway, said the oldest one. So I imagine the narrator will get around to enlightening us before long.
The ceiling crashed down around them, sparks and flames shooting up into a black void, deep chaotic vibrato and a loud hiss of smoke and pressure being sucked upward into the hole.
I think it’s too early for theme, shouted the fourth one, the skin of his arms bubbling in the heat. His hair was on fire, his eyes glowing red and orange with swirling rings of white. But symbol, he shouted. There are symbols galore. The Cadillac is a symbol, I think. It’s a transporter, a protector. I mean, the only time we haven’t seen what’s happening are the times when our narrator is in the car, driving. We don’t get to know his thoughts, his doubts. This is when the world slows down enough for him to think, to assess his world and situation, and we’re not even there.
Excluded.
Yes, but if this is a coincidence or on purpose, we don’t know.
Everything in literature is on purpose.
This narrator, anger rules his world, said the fourth one, and then his body was swallowed in heat and glow, liquid flame of autonomy, his former body impossible to distinguish from the rest of the throbbing blaze.
We’re not even real, the oldest one said, and then nobody said anything, they all sat watching the blaze reach its howling culmination of size and depth and menace and they listened to its biblical crash and wail and they felt the heat abate as the walls fell away into black, total black surrounding them above and below and layers upon layers of dark nothing through to the very core of the universe and they all were able to breathe and all was so very silent as to hear one’s heart beating somewhere in the heaving cocoon of their chests, so very human and fragile.
Part two seemed to have a small meditation on police, or being a policeman, or the perception people have of policemen. Or something. This was the second one speaking again. She had her head in the text, a lone finger probing a page in repose, back and forth, back and forth, her eyes following the finger’s march through words and phrases and thoughts and messages both innocuous and incendiary. Trying to recapture a message or image burned forever into her mind with the power that only the written word possesses. Silence engulfed them. Playground of gods, landscape of the cosmos. Black on blackest. Infinite clarity.
What type of police officer is this narrator, the first one asked.
A complicated one, said the third one.
No, I mean a good cop or a bad cop.
He’s obviously a bad cop.
I think he’s a good cop, said the second one.
Maybe he’s a conflicted cop, said the Author.
You can’t do that, said the oldest one. It’s against the rules. Or something.
The interpreters interpret, said the Author. They do this because they cannot create. The creators just create. They do this because this is what they do.
Someone tell him we’re not discussing theory.
So you write for readers, then?
Who said that, said someone.
What are you trying to do, what are you trying to prove.
Who’s that speaking, who just spoke right then.
Why don’t you ask the creator, the Author said.
I parked the van in the alley behind the building and went in the back door. The bar smelled like hickory and smoke, rich autumn sunlight flooding the place. There was no one there, or at least that’s what I thought. I walked around the bar and poured myself a glass of orange juice and stood there drinking in the morning silence, languid dust particles shoaling in the sunbeams.
“Where’s the stuff?” I heard someone say. I looked toward the end of the room on the right and saw Sal leaning forward on the bar, smiling, his bald head gleaming and slick and tracked by veins.
“The place looks good, Sally,” I said, and drained the juice. “You ought to lock it.”
Sal came back behind the bar and we shook hands and hugged. We stood there for a while holding each other at the elbow, two old friends frozen in the aging light of morning and studying one another’s age spots, the wrinkles and other flaws fashioned by gravity and time. He was much older and he didn’t look well. I tried to put his appearance into context, weigh it against my memories of him as a young man, flamboyant and indestructible. To stare into his eyes long bereft of their luster and see the irrefutable residue of his strain, the effects of life’s bitter charm, his youthful gloss wiped clear away and replaced with irony, it made me wonder how bad I looked.
“How long you been here?”
“You’re the first person I come to see, Sally.”
“Followed?”
“They’re listening now, I guarantee.”
Sal grunted and picked up the bar phone and dialed a number. He muttered a few words into the receiver and hung up and said, “Let’s go.”
We walked out to the alley awash in fluid morning hues and I swung open the back doors of the van. Sal looked up and down the alley and shuffled his feet and neither of us said anything. I climbed in and pulled the two suitcases toward the rear of the van and got back out, stealing a cigarette from my jacket pocket and lighting it and then snapping open the suitcases one after the other, the objects inside coming to life as if illumined from within, deep reds and browns and stark blacks of exotic hides with the names of men and women stamped in glittering gold and silver upon the handcrafted spines. Sal inhaled audibly and climbed in the van, leaning over the suitcases.
“I can’t tell you how beautiful,” he said, one hand reaching and hovering over the titles. “They’ll torture us, they catch us with these.”
“First editions,” I said, and sucked on the cigarette. “Each and every one.”
“Reminds me of the old days,” he said, and climbed back out of the van, his eyes wet and large and rendered frozen upon the books. Another van peeled into the alley and I had a brief moment of panic, my hand at my hip and the steel waiting there. Sal waved for the driver to park behind my van and a young man of maybe twenty got out and walked quickly towards me, his hand stretched out before him.
“Mr. Guy, holy shit, it’s an honor,” he said, and I took his hand. “How long it’s been, I’ve followed your career.”
“What’s your name?”
“His name is Billy,” Sal said. “And he’d better get on.”
“Good to meet you Billy,” I said, and loaded the suitcases into his van. “But Sal’s right.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “I’d better get on.” He reached out for my hand again and I shook it, feeling the coarse strength and energy in his skin, thinking back to when I was his age and wondering where the virtue had died between the people of my generation and our own shadow-leaders. None of us are safe, I thought. Not then, certainly not now.
I watched Billy drive out of the alley into the radiant unknown and I could have worried about our precious delivery but I pacified myself in knowing that some day in the future there will be large hallowed libraries again and there will be books lining their shelves protected from the destructive clutch of tyranny and those books will forever provide testimony to man’s most sacred ideas so long as courageous young minds like Billy and his peers continued our honored struggle of liberating them to the grueling end.
truthfront 
