truthfront

Category: violence

  • verve/violence/virtue

    The young man dismounted his horse in the mad clatter of battle and forgot 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.

  • We communicate

    He had to remind himself to breathe.

    Sitting there in the truck, liquid daylight leaking into the city, he couldn’t breathe unless he thought about it. Counting backwards from thirty. He reached forward to the radio and turned the station. He turned again, and then again, trying to find a balance, something to soothe him.

    “Hey asshole. Stop with the radio.”

    “I’m a little on edge, is all.”

    “Yeah, me too. Before I break it.”

    “All right, jesus.” He reached forward and turned the radio off. “That better?”

    The driver didn’t say anything. He leaned his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes.

    The guy in the passenger seat looked out the window. He didn’t care to watch the dark monotony of night slip away to another day’s luminous truth. He didn’t notice the ravens swirling stark in the rectangle of sky above the alley. He could have rolled down his window and focused his attention on the sound of morning, the crisp regeneration and cool yawning concrete. That might have calmed him. He picked up his Walther instead, slipped out the magazine and then clicked it back in. Out and in. Down and up. Click, click. Click, click. The smell of the city never changes overnight and for some men the sound and feel of a loaded gun is worth a thousand dawns.

    “You know what I was thinking?” the driver said.

    “You were thinking.”

    “We’re isolating ourselves.”

    The guy in the passenger seat stopped playing with the Walther.

    “I mean, not like, you and me. I mean all of us. The world. Americans.”

    “How’s that?” Click, click.

    “The technologically advanced.”

    “Please elaborate.”

    “There is movement toward isolation in the wake of technological advancement. This happens on a personal level, but also culturally. People shrinking from each other. Less face-to-face contact. The more technologically advanced a culture becomes, the more its parameters of communication shift. The modes change shape with each new wave of progress. Think about it.”

    “The Internet.”

    “Think about the language. Dialects. Think about means of expression. The invention of words and terms.”

    “You’re thinking about the Internet. People shop for anything from home. They don’t need to go out, spend hours in the bookstore or trying on a pair of pants.” Click, click. “They don’t have to go to the bar or to church to find a date, to sample the talent.”

    “Notice how almost everyone has a mobile phone now,” the driver said, lifting his up and looking at it. “We use these phones to communicate in a myriad of ways.”

    “Less standing in line. The Internet has made standing in line an endangered species.”

    “Text and e-mail. Voice. Video, photo. Imagine if we could see the streams of communication going on all around us. Even right now, at this hour. Imagine all the invisible voices and coded language, all the hidden data. Slender rhythm of radio and television waves. Digital binary information, little ones and zeros dictating the pulse and flow of all the world’s knowledge.”

    “The prayers.” Click, click. “Imagine if we could see all the prayers.”

    “I wonder what it would look like, if each mode of communication was a different color.”

    They looked through the windows to the alley set in cool morning shadow, the chinked and stained concrete, old brick facades of buildings left to derelicts and huddled runaways. Dumpsters ahead and behind them filled with waste matter. The driver looked up through the windshield to the sky, a snatch of cloudless pale blue emerging stridently to claim another awed human rumination.

    “The change is so gradual that we can hardly scrutinize it,” the driver said. “I mean, we go from a megabyte of technology to a gigabyte. We go from cordless phones to cellular phones.”

    “From Playstation 2 to Playstation 3.”

    “We don’t graduate straight to high-def television from shortwave radio.”

    “Self-deification takes patience.” Click, click.

    “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the transformation is dense and tangible enough to observe and study, maybe even to manipulate. Maybe this is what the guys in lab coats and power suits are thinking of next. Clustered in places called Washington. New York. Los Angeles. Cairo.”

    “Las Vegas.”

    “Sitting around a table, men wearing gleaming white ghoutras and women dressed in paramilitary fatigues, guerrilla-clad luminaries with mysterious backgrounds and red smiling faces.”

    “Calculating the science of communication in order to control it.”

    The guy in the passenger seat clicked the magazine free of the gun and clicked it back into place and he looked down to it black and reassuring in his hands and he imagined how he would react if the people in the bank mutinied or if the cops came in with their guns aloft and he tried to imagine pointing the Walther at one of them and pulling the trigger and he told himself he could do it if he had to but he wasn’t convinced. He pictured his wife of twenty-four and in his mind he saw their son with his mother’s curly blond hair and his father’s stone gray eyes and he tried to imagine how his family would survive if the action this morning went south.

    “Do they even have record stores anymore?” he said. “Are there such establishments as record stores, and are they operational? Quite frankly I haven’t seen one in at least a year.”

    “People on the subway. Most of them plugged into a music player. The others with their heads buried in a shiny magazine. Maybe there are books. I think people still read books.”

    “Nobody burns books anymore.” Click, click.

    “Nobody talks about how the ball team is doing. Nobody asks about the wife and kids.”

    “The discussion board is the new subway.”

    “People assume the wife and kids are fine. The wife and kids are healthy and plentifully drugged.”

    “People assume.” Click, click. “People shouldn’t assume.”

    The driver reached forward and flipped the radio back on. He changed the station to a news program and the two of them sat listening to the hurried headlines until the sweeping brand of day lit its distinct mark upon the world and the cellular phone buzzed in the driver’s pocket.

    “We’re on,” he said, and started the truck.

  • Marquee

    In the town of young men and women voices could be heard shrilling in the quiet pocket of night. Streetlight glow painted the walls of the closed brick shops on main street and the young men and women walked drunkenly by them clutching at one another and laughing at nothing but the levity of their shadows and the understanding that this world belonged to them under some unpenned contract with the figurative constraint of time looming somewhere indiscernible. The young men and women came from privilege and knew that privilege would be awaiting their immersion back into the real world and clouds danced swiftly in front of the oblong moon so close and yet so distant from their lives.

    They lived in shared light and they spoke of the dreams they often had with nothing but youth in their guises and the young women drank and danced and the young men drank and watched the women and all of them were living deviations of those people they otherwise always were. They fell in love with the poisoned facades of themselves and squandered their summer days and nights and some of them discovered the nature of their childish rue while others glimpsed clear and firm into their future and saw a formal departure from the very youth that bound them. There were many days of heat and stupor but there were even more nights of blithe abandon and the recklessness we tend to tolerate until a particular age or experience of life’s revolving strain has been reached.

    The sun or the scent of a friend awoke them in the afternoon and carried them through another boundless and eventful evening worthy of their potential narratives in the far-off and same but somehow much different life. They knew they were constructing the future diagram of their fondest and most bereaved reminiscences like the perfumed skin of all their favorite summer romances, like the collective delight of all their twilight laughter. The young men and women operated beneath the protective shroud of the town’s own undemanding regulations and flourished in the narcotic bliss of being young and knowing it and heeding to no authority save for that which lives among the tanned hide and billowing hair and rampant nubility of its hormonal supplicants.

    I knew this town and I lived there as witness to its mystical lessons. I grew disenchanted by its charm for I was no longer young nor free of responsibility and perhaps I never had been. The tension swelled within me so that soon I grew to imagine a world where the town of young men and women no longer subsisted but burned steadily somewhere between the iron gates of perdition and the subtle snickering memory of those who had escaped the wrath unforeseen. I imagined the young men and women running naked and hairless through the smoldering streets beneath a bloodred autumn sky with their skin bubbling from the heat and their eyeballs liquefied and melted to their cheeks.

    There was caution in my rumination but I believed the agonized fate of the young men and women to be taut and certain. Each night I dreamt the same horrific dream where the town collapsed in fiery ruin and the sky turned black above those callow heads and all the smiles and all the town clocks were washed away in sweeping conflagration while sparing the select few dramatis personae compliant enough to withstand the terror and each morning I awoke from that same dream smiling. I would walk to work and see the young men and women in the town still awake and poisoned from the night previous and I knew that God would play the role of god in the film version and I would direct the cataclysmic beauty of the tale to the visual medium and watch orgasmically while the young men and women of other towns across the cosmos sat mesmerized into silence by the film’s searing truth. And I knew my name would appear on the marquee just above the title of the film in thick red letters and that the earth would ultimately swallow that black hole of loathing where neither future nor past was ever paid any deference.

  • Scars

    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, about how I fell drunk from a window and landed on some rocks or broken glass or maybe about how 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 artificial 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 but gracefully, like I wasn’t even 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 screaming 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-sustaining sovereignty of soul. I closed my eyes and traced the scars on my stomach and torso with sudden longing for I never even thought to search her body.

  • Labrynth

    The piece of paper was a perfect white rectangle on the desk in front of me, an empty shape too intimidating to breach. I tried to think, to collapse myself into thought the way I so often do, communicate the credence of my ideas through swift and elegant pen strokes, angry letters and words, sentences and jutting symbols of association. Maybe it was the shape of the blank white sheet obstructing me, its precision so taut and unforgiving, deconstructing the creative process into pure barren silence. Or maybe it was her, the woman to whom the ideas were directed, my love for her so sightless and violent in nature that all rational language died prematurely in my mind prior to its exposure to the influence of the pen.

    My dearest Brooklynne . . .

    No, this is wrong, this is all wrong. This type of beginning is an instant showcase of hollowness. I never speak to her like this, nobody alive speaks like this. If it is practical sentiment I want to relate, defragment these complex thoughts into common meaning, I must find a practical vehicle with which to exchange them.

    Brooklynne, I cannot . . .

    A negative proposition at the forefront sets a malignant tone for the entire letter. I must begin with an authoritative propositional phrase, an affirmation of love. I must lean on the theme of our love, our history together, and push the apology aside until later in the letter, when nothing but an apology would make sense in its reinforcement of the aforementioned.

    *

    I tried to stop thinking and went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine, and then another, a formal release of mental strain, drinking down the crystalline purity of deflation. Then I went back to the study and wrote the letter, discarding the burdens of message and meaning alike, diving headlong into the chasm of blank whiteness, my thoughts stretched outward in time and place until the entire letter was suddenly finished an hour later, lines and curves painted on the page exactly as I wanted them, truth without restraint, love in collusion with purpose. Then I sealed the letter in a blank white envelope and dropped it in the garbage.

    Who reads these letters, I wondered. There must be a thousand letters in this world written each day that just get thrown away, the messages sealed and signed, adoration and violence and meaninglessness perfumed upon the pages. Someone reads these letters, the evidence of our irresolution, our frail whims. The moment we dispose of our ideas and rear them to the heap, the moment we place the neat folded parchment in the trash and expel it from our conscience, someone on the other end is already waiting for it, a reader far more astute than we imagine, the sole cultivator of our discarded feelings and suspended emotions. By not delivering them to the intended recipients we feel as though we’ve rendered the meanings in the letters harmless, we’ve absolved ourselves of our reactionary blunders. But someone finds them and reads them and thrusts meaning back onto the messages. Maybe this person finds pleasure in what they read, as though each hypothetically failed correspondence is a valued discovery, an unexpected unearthing into another’s private life, a magnified examination into the social machine of our culture. The person who finds these letters and reads them keeps them for self-edification. The words on the page and the page in the envelope are raised up to semi-iconic status in their lives, brief but genuine illuminations into the world of private conversations to which they otherwise wouldn’t have been included. He or she who reads the letters finds it much more difficult to discard them than the person who wrote them. For the man or woman who finds the letters and digests their content, their subtle meanings painted in abstract and concrete idiom, these letters are the battery of their operative hopefulness. A line wrought from love and sentiment becomes their personal shining juxtaposition with disenchantment. The pain splayed across the page, the heart-shorn emotion from a love askew, the tender eulogy and the apologetic logic, these are the most vivid and tactile reflections for the reader. The letters were of course written by strangers with the intended audience as strangers and yet the reader feels as though he or she knows them both. The letters strip away the mystery and put a profile to the writers, they put a garbled and imaginary face to the name at the top of the page, the salutation at the bottom. The reader invents living people from the names because the written emotive force is too profound and real to keep them from identifying humanity with the language. These letters are at the vanguard of everything that makes humanity such a tremendous communicative current, they unite us in our solitude and mystery, these letters bind the likes of community and individual, they fully replace the very things the writer of the letters was trying to avoid, that subtle inward heartbreak of not being understood, that feeling that the words didn’t, and possibly couldn’t accurately navigate the complicated labyrinth of feelings within. For the lucky or reluctant reader, the letters are more descriptive and enlightening than the writer could have imagined. This is the only language either of them could ever possibly understand. Some will tell us to bury our pain, others will instruct us to express it. But this is really the only way to learn, the proper way to heal from our emotive wounds. If only we were instructed to recreate our pain in language, construct our meditative ailments out of idea and paper in letter form and then ceremoniously place our arrangements in the garbage rather than the mailbox, this world would be a world of deep committed understanding and empathy. It would be a world where the letter was exalted above all else save the human condition.

    *

    Back in the kitchen I finished the bottle of wine and shattered it on the linoleum floor. After careful consideration, I decided not to remove my clothes and roll around on the wreckage.

  • Pretender

    trident.jpg

    I opened the door halfway and peered into the shadowed hallway, rows of closed doors disappearing into the darkness, rain splattering on the roof above. I came to investigate the mysterious scratching noise but it was gone, nothing but silence and dust in the hall and so I closed the door, my back pressed against it. Solid shafts of white moonlight shot through the alley window into my kitchen. My feet were cold on the linoleum. 

    Those were the days and nights I pretended at life. I wasn’t actually living. I heard noises that weren’t really there and saw things that were hundreds of miles away or thousands of years in the past. I was a sickly Roman guard in the time of Augustus or I was a truck mechanic in Barstow in the mid-eighties, drinking cheap whiskey and threatening my wife with a butcher knife. I was an apprentice Panther in Chicago the night the cops stormed in and killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. I had all these dreams, I was living vicariously in my sleep, breathing through unfamiliar faces with a stranger’s lungs, seeing things as though I had adopted their histories and experiences and somehow suspended my own. I believed I had control over this. 

    I walked to the bathroom and swallowed another pill, water from a glass on the dusty sink. A brief glance in the mirror was all I needed to know I’d rather not see the real man, the real face. 

    I went back to the bedroom and slipped in between icy sheets, wincing at the muscular contraction in my back and legs. I settled in and lay on my stomach, the spare pillow tucked tightly in the crook of my arm, rhythm of breath, mouth twisted into a beautiful crescent-shaped lie. I wondered what I was going to be next, where I was going to live, under what circumstances I was going to die. I wondered if I would experience love and what type of woman it would be  and what time would feel like on my skin and I didn’t think about my real life, laden with taciturn responsibility. I ignored the bills that had been collecting for weeks in my real life mailbox and I didn’t care when I had last eaten real life food. What concerned me ultimately was descending back into some parallel existence I could occupy without the needless truths and trivialities of the life I really had but never wanted. 

    I had this idea, I told this friend of mine that mental waves are just like radio waves, man, only they travel on a different plane in a separate dimension, all around us. They’re out there. Just like radio and light waves, our thoughts can be intercepted if there is something to receive them. Something that recognizes the data and catches it in flight. I was sure of this. It was my personal scientific experiment. I was the receptor, the gifted one, my life completely fulfilled in subordination to the lives of others. I was the ultimate spiritual medium. I wanted to unstitch time and experience history first hand, catalog the memories, document the universe as the stories were told to me by the people who actually lived them. It would be an endeavor unrivaled in the history of the universe. I told my friend that ever since people had unlocked the mystery of the solar system and defined the hazy and ubiquitous machinery of time, they’d been trying to subvert it. 

    This was the premise. All those other lives were so much better than mine. I was enthralled by the magnificent uncertainty of it all. Each time I swallowed another pill and laid to rest I was frightened by the possibility of not knowing what to expect, where I would end up. 

    I was just happy because I didn’t have to be me. 

    * 

    There’s a cock crowing somewhere nearby, darkness, the smell of animals, dirt. Lying on my back, thick hay needles stabbing my ass, my legs. The sound of running water, chill of morning, eyes adjusting to thin beams of light fighting through cracks in the wall. I’m in a barn. I look around, stand up, acknowledge my nakedness, the wide door opens, giant rectangle of sunshine exploding inward, blinding me. 

    “Well, well,” a man’s voice says. My hands in front of my face, eyes scrunched to fight off the excruciating light. Large silhouetted figures of people. “If it ain’t the great pre-ten-dor.” 

    There is women’s laughter and I feel suddenly vulnerable, exposed. I drop a concealing hand to my manhood but the organ feels too large, it’s humongous, ridiculously grotesque. Violence and death are present in the room, living beings, tangible shadows lurking. 

    “Do you think this man went and got a horse’s dick, or this horse went and got a man’s body?” the man asks the women. He’s moving toward me, holding something long, thin. A rifle or shotgun. The women laugh again and there’s an aura of diamond fire about the man’s silhouette. He wields considerable power, celestial power, and I know without seeing him complete that he’s a traveler, he’s a receptor like me, a dreamer but a killer, perhaps something even more grand. Wanton and unscrupulous. 

    “Horse-man,” the killer says softly, moving toward me, the giant gun in his hands. I can’t see his face. “You should be fuckin’ horses. Not women in this ‘ere county.” 

    He keeps moving toward me and the women loiter in the background, squealing with girl’s delight. The man approaches nearer, nearer, and I’m still standing naked and bare with one hand shielding my eyes and the other hand hovering around my giant snaking sex and I have a sudden lucid understanding of the man’s nature and his influence on history, the spirit of the murder-at-large, transient violence for all occasions and without discrimination, the embodiment of darkness masquerading as brilliantine light. 

    “Go on, now,” he says over his shoulder and the women take a final lasting peek at the freak standing naked in the barn. They leave in quiet reluctance, two dark figures shuffling out of the light, out of sight. 

    “What are you?” I ask the man, and my voice is something like a man’s but not really. There’s an animal resonance in it, a throaty tin shriek boiling up from my chest, the words barely discernible as they leave my mouth. I realize the sound of running water has stopped.

    The man walks in close and his head eclipses the bright light and I can finally see his face and I drop my hand from my eyes. It’s the same face from all dreams, eternal in its youth, a study in perfection, a million arcane and familiar likenesses of everyone that I’ve ever known, the face of those select scenes from all the books ever written in time, the man from the light, the same face that paints every decimated body  hanging on every crucifix in every building and revelation, the same eyes of the glittering mad as they pay reverence to it. 

    “Forget it,” I say, and I close my eyes and the man’s light swallows me entire, the life of the transient dream traveler, my real life as it was lived without moderation or truth of spirit.

  • Dreams

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    I don’t know, doctor. Things just aren’t right. I think the overall problem is compounded by these dreams. 

    So you’ve been having dreams. What type of dreams? 

    Well …  I guess I really can’t describe them. I mean, I’ve never tried to describe them. I probably couldn’t even describe them to myself … 

    You can try here. Just relax, lie down. Close your eyes. Think of yourself as resting easily. Think of the world as black, your body melding into the blackness. Think of the universe as a giant sponge-like void. Think of yourself as water infiltrating the sponge. 

    Infiltrating the sponge? 

    Infiltrating the sponge. Try to control your breathing. Focus on your breathing. Slow. Deep. Easy. 

    This is helping. 

    I know. That’s what it’s supposed to do. I’m a doctor. Think of the world as a giant mound of ice. Think of yourself as a flame, melting into it. 

    Okay. 

    Now try to tell me about these dreams. 

    It’s like I’m in the future, I don’t know when. I’m married to some woman, but I never see her. There’s just this sort of implicit acknowledgment that I’m married to her. 

    You’re not married in the waking world? 

    I’m not. But I’m married in these dreams. 

    How often do you have these dreams? 

    Every time I try to sleep. 

    Are you having one now? 

    No. I’m not sleeping. I don’t think I’m sleeping. Am I sleeping? 

    Tell me about these dreams. 

    Well, there’s this woman. 

    You think you’re married to her. 

    Yes. And I think she’s plotting to murder me. I don’t know how I know this. I’m paranoid in my own home because I’m certain she’s trying to murder me. 

    Are there children around the house? 

    No. 

    What is the house like? 

    It’s just a house. 

    What does it look like? How many rooms does it have? Is it in the city or the country? 

    It’s the house I live in now. A two bedroom one-level in the suburbs. 

    And there’s this woman you’ve never seen that you think is your wife and she’s trying to murder you. 

    She hasn’t actually tried yet. But she’s plotting. I’m sure of it. This is really hard to explain. 

    Go on. 

    And so I lock myself in whatever room I’m in. In any room in the house. To keep her out. I go to the kitchen to cook something or get a drink of orange juice. I lock all the doors I can. There’s a hallway opening in the kitchen that has no door. I turn to face the opening, always within reach of some weapon. The kitchen is the safest even though it can’t quite lock me in completely. All sorts of instruments of death in the kitchen. One can always feel most at ease in a kitchen, even without a crazy wife plotting to kill them. 

    So she’s crazy. 

    I don’t know if she’s crazy or tall or fat. I’ve never met her. I say she’s crazy because crazy people plot. This is what crazy people do. 

    This isn’t true. But please go on about the dreams. 

    I always feel most vulnerable in the bathroom. I feel exposed. No deadly weapons in the bathroom to protect myself. Just a little razor I use for shaving. There are two doors, I lock them both tight. I can’t hear her walking or laughing or breathing but I know she’s there. I can feel her on the other side of one door or another, standing with her eyes closed, plotting. She’s waiting for me to come out of the bathroom because she’s not going in after me. She’s holding a knife. She’s very calm and patient. She will wait until I die just so she can kill me. 

    How do you know it’s a knife? 

    I just know. It’s a giant knife. It shines, even in the dark. Like it gives off a certain amount of light. 

    To be cut is the most invasive of violent acts. Body raped by steel. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    How do you leave these rooms in your dreams? How do you get up the courage to face whatever is on the other side of the door? 

    I don’t. That’s the thing. I wake up because I’m so frightened and tired. I’m tired of waiting to be killed. I’m tired because I wake up, because I have no courage to face her. Each time I try to sleep is a different room, same wife. I wake up still stuck in whatever room I’m in. 

    By not facing our fears we allow time to control us. 

    Sometimes I wake up and I’m holding something tightly. I’m clutching handfuls of bed sheets. I’m holding a book. The pages are creased and torn in my hands. One afternoon I woke up holding a knife that I must have got from the kitchen. I had no prior history of somnambulism. It was a huge knife. I could have killed myself in my sleep. 

    Dreams of violence and paranoia as inward manifestations of our primary urges.

    I always wake up sweating, dying of thirst. 

    Our brain matter absorbs the body’s nutrients and uses them to sustain our doom. 

    These dreams are in the future, doctor. I don’t know how I know. I just know. 

    The future frightens us. We cannot control it. We are fascinated by the violence around us. 

    I want to wake up, doctor. I want to sleep without being frightened all the time. I’m so tired. I want to live in a world where the future doesn’t matter, not even for a microsecond. I want to be able to dream peacefully, forget my backward flaws. I’m tired of stretching out on the crux of this world. I’d rather operate as a vigorous fixture of my own rules. 

    The world we know is created by us. It’s not the real world. It’s the world within the larger world. 

    I can’t sleep during the night because it’s too dark. I can’t sleep at day because the noise blinds me. 

    When we fail to mesh with the world we create, we lose all identity. 

    The strangest thing is that I’m deeply attracted to this woman. My wife who’s plotting to murder me. I see myself making love to her facelessness. She’s silent and holding a giant knife, the shiny point scratches my temple while we screw. 

    Desire is destruction. Our most primitive truth is not to reproduce, but to destroy ourselves. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    Every conflict forces us to either run or stay and fight. 

    I think of what type of offspring we would create. Me and this mad wife. I wonder if one night or day I will wake up and I’ll be on top of her, strangling. I won’t be able to disprove her existence. I wonder if our children will plot with her or against her. I wonder which of the forces of good and evil they’ll adopt. 

    Our identity lies in the liquid shape of our actions. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

     We are the sum of our dreams. Take all the maddening irregularities and add them up. 

    I’m in the bathroom again. I’m locked in. 

    We cannot hide from the truth. 

    The walls are bare, doctor. Pure white. I smell gasoline. 

    Take all the lessons about life you’ve ever learned and watch them burn. 

    The mirror is rimmed with fire, doctor. 

    Our strongest moments of clarity reside in complete submission. 

    So much blood in the tub. 

    We see what we never thought we’d see when we simply allow it to take shape before us. 

    My throat is dry. I’m having trouble breathing. 

    When we are too afraid to kill ourselves we thrust our imaginations into guilt. 

    I’m bleeding, doctor. My throat. 

    Our lives flow away from us in pigmented thickness. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    We spend our entire lives speaking to ourselves. From idea to thought. From thought to language. 

    I’m dying, doctor. 

    Our voices carry eternally. They are the tokens we keep. They add substance to our memories. A whisper becomes a breeze in the cold night across the galaxy. 

    I think I’m falling asleep, doctor. 

    Death is a state of eternal subconscious activity. I think you’re cured. For now.