In the black car with a sunroof.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Neither of these; sitting on the side of the road, sign in hand.
Borrowed cigarette hanging out of the mouth.
Acrid smoke singeing the throat.
I cough three times.
The black car with a sunroof went by an hour ago, then it went by again. And again.
Hard to tell if it's the same car or if they just appear the same.
The driver reminds me of someone I know.
Today the heat is so intense it can almost be seen, and seen through. Its clear, diamond-tipped presence actually somehow makes the day a little more transparent.
The roof of the world is bluer, somehow.
Nothing else has changed.
The trees are full green, no stop.
We are in the throat of summer.
The inside of my nostril itches and I scratch it with a fingernail.
The driver of the black car is my friend Freddie.
It's entirely possible that it isn't.
Though he looks somewhat like him.
Not-Freddie is wearing
a green Celtics jersey with white outlines
a black baseball hat (brim forward)
dark sunglasses
He has tattoos.
He drives by too fast for me to see the detail.
Perhaps he is driving by because he knows I am there.
He can't know that I'm there.
He's driving by too fast.
It's entirely possible that it isn't Freddie.
There's that story about the farmer who goes to the market and sees Death.
Death makes a threatening gesture.
So the farmer runs away to Samarra.
The farmer's neighbor goes to the market and sees Death and says, “Why the threatening gesture?”
Death says, “That wasn't threatening, it was surprise. I was astonished to see him here in Baghdad, because I'm supposed to see him tonight in Samarra.”
That story hinges on Death's gesture.
The Ford F-150's gone by a few times too.
Brown exterior.
Three different drivers.
I think.
One's a woman, one's a man.
The other one, I can't tell.
Though when I was a kid I jumped off the barn.
Cracked my skull.
That's when I started forgetting names.
Faces just don't stick in my head.
How some people say, I never forget a face, I'm the opposite.
The heat of the summer crowds in.
The highway steams, the asphalt is brand new and blacker than black.
The yellow lines are brighter than neon.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Someone is asking me if I'm all right.
Voice from the backseat.
Static interferes and is replaced by the sawing of an electric guitar.
Freddie Front-Seat is wriggling behind the wheel with his lips puffed out.
He does that when there's a song he likes.
Priscilla in the back is handing me a joint.
I know it's not just a joint.
Acrid smoke singeing my throat.
I cough twice.
We are going to the coast no we don't know which one.
I don't ask questions I just get in the car.
The things that are true provide a framework for life.
Without the things that are true life has no framework.
I light up a Pall Mall and it takes a full five minutes to spark the Zippo because I'm staring at the flame.
The rumble of the engine like a captive, simmering beast under the hood.
Its breath seeps out around the edges like paint thinner against the day.
The colors wobble and slide down the canvas of the world.
So hey I say this isn't happening huh some kind of dream.
Must be the drugs they exchange like a handshake with their eyes and burst out laughing like a sunshower.
It's Green Day on the radio.
Night, rain falls.
Boston-bound from Maine.
F-150 truck rattling over the bridge.
The city growing up from the bay in front of us.
My left ear abruptly goes deaf.
The driver is Anja, a blonde with a nose-piercing.
Too much mascara.
She's crying, that's how I can tell.
It's been a week since I've had a drink.
I am missing the fourth and fifth finger on my right hand.
It makes things difficult to grab.
For three days I have been coughing up black sputum.
Despite all the vitamin C.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
She doesn't even look at me like I'm not even there.
I look out the window.
It's not a dream, it's a music video I saw when I was twelve.
Hard to tell which one.
Once you realize it's a dream, it's so much easier.
Permeable world.
Walls you can walk through.
Must be the drugs. A sick bloom of laughter.
Laying flat on my back at the beach.
The surrsurrant roar of waves breaking.
A breathy noise from nearby.
The steady beam of the lighthouse, sweeping sternly around.
Up on the widow's walk we clash like armies.
Lips, teeth, tongue.
We are ocean-wet.
The salt dries on our skin, shrinks us together.
Lightning against the black, way out to sea.
God's Holy Camera.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
The smoke from something burning on the beach.
A few houses down.
Could be some madwoman with a grudge.
And an ax.
A can of gasoline and a cigarette.
Tomorrow's papers tell the story.
She walked out to sea and didn't come back.
This is the story I tell my friends at the bar in a froth of drunk.
The stories we tell our friends are lies.
The only thing holding the framework of the world together is lies.
The rivets in the girders of truth.
The only cigarette I have I bummed.
Funny how you smoke a bummed cigarette so much more delicately than any from your own pack.
All the way down to the filter.
I cough three times.
The cigarette I bummed was a Marlboro.
The tips of my fingers tingle.
When I was twelve I saw a drowned ghost in the river. It was all in black and wore a hood.
Everything in the world seemed to point to it.
Everything in the world turned gray around it.
It didn't make any threatening gestures.
I have this fear about the deeper dark.
The dark behind the dark.
The dark of the hallway and the dark behind the beds in the rooms in the hallway.
The dark you can't see.
No light escapes but the wobbly red LED lights of the digital alarm clock.
On my mother's side of the bed, on the nightstand.
Beyond them, the shades are drawn, but I know the woods behind the house are on fire.
I can see the flames reflected in my father's glasses.
When he turns around to face me, the reflection doesn't move.
When he grins, the fire moves closer.
Like a game of red-light-green-light.
And he won't turn back around.
Green light.
And Freddie Front-Seat is talking about his girl on the coast the one who left him three summers ago.
I ask him if she's the one and he says
She's one of the ones.
His grin is wolf-like.
He doesn't slaver though it seems like he could.
My selfish heart murmurs something to me.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
The murmur is the sound of the shadow in the river.
It got inside of me.
The sound of someone drowning.
At the beach.
On the widow's walk.
Laying flat on my back.
Fireworks overhead.
In the future, Nevada will be the new coast.
Nowhere Beach, NV: Come to Where the Water Is!
On every sign in the desert.
The highway crumbles into the water.
On the shoulders of the road, children make sand-castles crowned with asphalt diamonds.
I take a smoking spliff from a friend's hand and suck greedily on the tapered end.
I cough once.
If you think about the deeper dark you invoke it.
It comes rushing out of the blindness.
Like a car without headlights.
Turns them on at the last second.
Before it hits.
Or like a silent train.
And you're balancing down the trestle with headphones on.
Unfaithful husband vs. the Eumenides.
All kinds of horror come about when you're not looking.
When your back is turned.
When your eyes are closed.
Underneath a closed eye the eyeball moves herky-jerky.
As if struggling to see beyond a membrane.
Not-Freddie and Priscilla are the Grim Reaper and his gun-moll.
Freddie smiles at me, though he looks surprised to see me.
When they pull over.
In the black car with the sunroof.
We are driving full-throttle, no stop, towards a bloody horizon.
Where the sun settles on its haunches to lick its wounds.
Everything else is memory.
I am on the side of the road with my sign.
The sign reads Samarra.
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