The Bright Lights of Sin

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales . . .
-- Acts 9:18

(For all Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)
-- Acts 17:21

For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner.
-- Acts 26:26

And some believed the things which were spoken, and some believed not.
-- Acts 28:24

And the times of this ignorance God winked at . . .
-- Acts 17:30

Darla went over to Jesse's house and Jesse wasn't there. She left a note with Jesse's brother for Jesse to call. Jesse called Darla up later on that day. Darla said, "Come over." Jesse couldn't come over. The next day, Jesse went over to Darla's house, but Darla wasn't there at the time. She went away and came back later. Darla still wasn't there, yet. So she left a note on the door because she wanted Darla to get in touch with her. Darla was going to one show with Jason on Friday and Jesse was going with some other people to another so they wouldn't see each other then. On Saturday Jesse didn't call Darla. Darla thought she'd see Jesse somewhere that night, but she didn't. Jesse ended up hanging out all night with a guy she'd been flirting with, so she forgot all about Darla. Darla thought she'd find Jesse at the Tavern that evening, so she went there to hang out, but Jesse wasn't there, so she was just there sitting alone.

The Town Tavern was central station, where you might find someone if you didn't know where else to look. People passing in and out of there all day, looking for each other, just stepping in. Sometimes they'd sit down for a while, drink coffee. Of course sometimes people were there to eat. Well, you know, the people that mattered. Certainly not for everyone, hell no. In the winter it was a place to sit all night.

So you'd be sitting there and someone would come to your table or booth and say hi and then they might say, "Have you seen Jesse around?" Or maybe you'd get one of those people that just start talking about anything, even the most banal or personal things, no matter how strange. Hardly get your name and they're telling you

anything about themselves, some anecdote, where they once lived, some old flame, whatever.

Like the time me and this British girl were sitting in this old coffee shop in New York and there was this old man sitting alone near us and he said to us that we must be from England, because we talked with the proper English, you know, the real English. My friend said she was from England, but we were chuckling when we told him that I was from Oklahoma. He said, "Oklahoma? Well, that's near England, isn't it?"

A Steinbeck Okie in King Arthur's Court. Technicolor homesteaders singing Broadway hit songs, dashing across the border to rustle Scottish sheep. You're sitting alone in an old countertop diner, pointing at pictures of 40s movie stars in some old magazine, on the lower East side of New York that you may scarcely have left your entire life. Or you're barely out of high school in this college town in Oklahoma, in this tavern, surrounded by a history of football scores.

You're sitting alone and you see these people come in and perhaps to them it's a strange new place like all those places out there you haven't been, sitting alone as you have for so long. Sitting there with your friend in your familiar old place, you see a person sitting there alone, someone you haven't seen before and you're thinking to her it must be a strange new place and perhaps you make some comment to your friend about that person sitting there alone and you want to put yourself in the place of that person sitting alone wondering whether it is lonely sitting alone and sad because it is so strange and there is no one to talk to except maybe strangers who start talking about anything, strangely familiar, across bizarre mistaken distances,

across the mis-symmetry of strangeness and familiarity, from the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, and perhaps it will turn out that you will meet this person sitting alone some time later and you will then later remember that strange person you saw sitting all alone that now you know, or perhaps you will then sit with that person in a restaurant and seeing someone sitting alone, she will say to you how sad it makes her to see someone sitting alone in a restaurant, how it is the saddest thing in the world, and she will still think this despite what you say about how you can't be sure, perhaps the person sitting alone may be so glad to finally have this moment away from everyone, this time alone.

So you're sitting there alone in another. It's so strange this world of another, the other, the others, if only you could be in with others, but if you just went up and started talking to someone it would be so strange, even if the others are sitting there alone feeling alone and wishing they were in with others. And you're sitting alone thinking about how sad it is to be sitting alone, how it's the saddest thing in the world to be sitting alone, if you saw someone else sitting alone you'd feel so sad, and you wish you didn't have to be sitting alone, even though it might be much sadder seeing that other sitting alone over there. And you wonder what she is thinking, what she is wondering, and if you were her what you'd be wondering. Wondering in and out, looking at her wondering, wondering at her looking, wondering if she were looking at you wondering, wondering at you looking, you wonder her, she wonder you, you I, I is she.

What to make of her. Wonders crazy man authors. Sitting over there,

Sitting alone. Wondering.

She takes a sip of Coke. She has a Coke glass with ice and a straw, there with her at the table. But while her lips are on the straw, her eyes are still far off, some place inside and beyond the horizon at the same time.

Like the time they were sitting in the Tavern and Darla asked Jesse if she ever thought about having kids, not like she would or wanted to do it soon, but just if she ever thought about it, what did she think about it, was it scary or was it something she really felt a deep kind of, I don't know, longing for.

Jesse said, "There's a party at Carson's house. Do you want to go?"

"Carson?" Darla was more confused about the jump.

"Yeah, you know. That engineering student."

"Do you like him or something?"

Jesse gave her funny little nervous bleat of a chuckle. It always made Darla think of her as a scruffy little kid, even in contrast to this sort of subject.

"I don't know," Jesse said.

"Does he like you?"

"I don't know, but John Coffee Hays does."

"Is that his real name?"

The next morning Darla went to have breakfast at the Tavern and Jesse came in a little later.

"What happened the other night? After the party?"

Jesse laughed. "I don't know if Carson likes me, but . . ."

Then would come the time when everyone would spill in. You couldn't be alone if you wanted to. A bunch would clamor in together and all pile into your booth or one next to you. Like that time Irwin and that asshole friend of his came in with some other people they didn't know, and Jesse and Darla were trying to talk, but were overwhelmed.

"William Faulkner hell."

"William Faulkner sucked my dick off real good."

"I greased his literary asshole."

"He rides Shetland ponies naked."

"But he combs his hair like he's waiting for some 14-year-old with juicy red lips."

"When we play hide-and-seek, we count like this: one-William Faulkner, two-William Faulkner, three-William Faulkner, four-William Faulkner, five-William Faulkner . . ." (the voice getting higher and higher)

"Do you want anything else?" James their waiter asked suddenly.

"No thanks."

"Thanks."

"eleven-William Faulkner, twelve-William Faulkner . . ." (higher, still, a falsetto, now, and faster) "twenty-William, thirty-William, forty-Will, fifty-Will, sixty-W-, sixty, sixty, William, William, ninety-seven-eigh-nigh-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

The booth rang with laughter.

Darla and Jesse spit out giggles.

Hardin came in.

William said, "Well, I'll be damned if it isn't Hardin Buttrace."

Some skate punks darted by outside.

"What are you going to do tonight?"

"Annie and Beth want me to go to a movie with them."

So Jesse went to a movie that night. Annie and Beth wanted to see this movie about the complex emotional drama behind the scenes at a David Bowie look-alike competition, when a bright young girl desperately in search of something meaningful falls in love with one of the contestants, who turns out to be only a rebel, a Sid Vicious fan, exploiting his own genetic coincidence for an opportunity to do things on his own terms. Jesse has already seen that movie, so they opt for another that all of them want to see but none have, a movie about the most gorgeous fashion model in the whole world who becomes a professor of philosophy at a prestigious Ivy League school, then takes it upon herself to carry a big, heavy gun and track down a mysterious villain responsible for the cool, calculated murders of prominent academicians. Pitted in a game of wits against a criminal genius with his own freak logic, the heroine finds herself the protector of the halls of knowledge, of the very gatekeepers of erudition who had opposed her entry, intimidated as they were by her great beauty and trying to foster their prejudice that such beauty was only skin-deep. Jesse sat and watched the movie and that's when she got an idea.

After this movie, books became very attractive to her, and she began a new project of desire by which a person was attractive to her according to the size of his book stacks. Martin had a pretty good stack of books. Jean-Clyde had boxes and boxes full of books. But Bennett had the most impressive accumulation of books of all, and she became infatuated with him above all the rest.

"What ever happened to John Coffee Hays?" Darla asked her.

"He only has one favorite author," Jesse replied. "But Bennett . . ."

Darla wondered how Jesse could be so -- well, how Jesse could like so many boys. But before she could really think just how weird it was of her friend, she was as likely to turn it back on herself in another way, to wonder what others thought of her. What did others think of Darla? Darla had Jason, but what did people say about them, about her? What did they know or think about Jason that she didn't, or what did they think of the way she thought about Jason? What did Jesse think? She wondered. There was another time Darla went over to Jesse's and Jesse told Darla about history, how she was really interested in history all of the sudden, reading all these really neat books about all the wars there had been. Not just the big wars, but there were all these really strange little wars, scattered all over history like, oh, some metaphor.

"Do you realize how many wars there have been?"

"I never really thought about it."

"There's some kind of war going on all the time. Even right now."

"I know that."

"But do you know all these wars? Have you ever heard of all these wars?"

Jesse rattled off some stuff on wars she'd read about, or just heard about. But they were, indeed, wars Darla had never heard of, to the point that she didn't believe they were real wars, just wars that Jesse had made up, or had gotten wrong, forgetting what their real names were, what she had read or heard.

"And there were all these wars in Europe where big countries would make little bitty countries fight. Like, these guys from the big powerful nation-states would just be the officers and make some little place that wasn't even a real nation, yet, do the real fighting. There was some war where Russia made all these guys fight against these other guys that Austria made fight. And that's sort of what World War One was like, cause all these dukes and things had some argument and they made all these men go to war and these men didn't even know what they were fighting about."

"Yeah, I remember reading about that in high school."

"Can you imagine that? These people telling you you had to go to war because you're supposed to be upset that some government official from another country insulted your country?"

Someone leaned over from the next booth and said, "Yeah, that was before we had systematic causes for war that transcend national boundaries."

"What do you mean?"

Somebody else leaned in and said, "It doesn't matter. It's all just who has the biggest dick."

There were a few guffaws and chuckles.

Jesse thought about that, though, thought about some great war waged somewhere over who had the biggest dick. Could something like that really happen in the name of proving it, uncovering the fact, or would all the force be to fix it so? Would it be a war to unbutton, unzip the truth, or would it be a war of espionage, all the common men fighting in the ditches while, in the meantime, secret intelligence agents carried out schemes of espionage and sabotage, seeking to steal into the palaces of the opposition and lop off the enemy's penis with great garden sheers.

She imagined a triumphant crowd parading with a giant penis held high on a sword, or a bayonet, or a great lance. The Kaiser pronounced emphatically less-endowed than the Archduke, or the Sultan, or the Tsar, or the Prime Minister. Indeed, she thought quite a bit about the different kinds of royal trousers that must have developed for the dual service of concealing yet celebrating the noble phallus. And she thought about all those guns and swords, erected for what but the phallus, the slick metaphors making their insertions, seemingly twisting things in the representation, giving death instead of life, but of course they would be creating new orifices in the name of propagation, one nation over another, one people over another, wars of potency waged, wars of castration, and all those battlefields with blood and semen spilling onto the ground and the metaphorical

activity going on here was damn well overwhelming her, these men in the trenches having to go months without sex because they had to wage violence instead, non-reproductive activity in the name of reproduction, expansion, erection, battlefields full of men against men viciously latent in grandiose homosexual representation, then soldiers raping the women of the enemy nations, giving them the undesired cross-breeds, or simply fucking them off and killing them and oh, the burst of the cannon, grander phallic symbols yet, spraying the foe with bigger bursts of life-switched-for-death, death in the name of life, sex and violence, war and sex, life and death, birth and death, water and fire, loud bangs, banging, inserting, raping women men land homeland female abstractions of nationality virtues the skies specked with nasty little manmade clouds lights and colors hope rage desire etc. and etc., work work work sex and war is work and production and reproduction activity full clash fierce and frothy desire fear will love hurt all pounding together in the names of each other all the names clashing trying to stand for each other standing for each other superimposing slosh slosh slosh and all the time the stacks of books are getting higher and higher and higher, books piling up with all the reasons, so many reasons, reasons to wage war, reasons to fight, reasons against reasons, reasons to superimpose over reasons and all in the name of the reason.

And here is what Darla wonders, and wonders why she wonders it, when she is alone, why she would want to wonder. Here is the nasty truth at the bottom of all the books in the great stack. For Darla, the problem is the book, not the stack. All the books in the stack are simply the books on top of the book. Book after book piled on top of

The Book, and it's nasty for a very particular reason. There is one book which keeps on being a battlefield for Darla.

It's nasty for a very particular reason, like the light suddenly thrown on what was going on in dark places, the light revealing the little passion play, the bigger light wiping out all those little lights. It has to do with a very particular book about a very particular man, talking about a very particular truth and a very particular way, and because she has fought little battles a thousand times in her head over some particularly nasty thoughts.

It's all confusing, wondering about this. First she was 14 or 15, but that's not right because first she was older and then she was younger, because she starts out as older going back to younger. Before she is young, she has to be so old, so much older looking back. Because, sure enough, you think, you wonder, and things have already happened, things have already got some way. She is sitting in church, next to her mother. This has happened before, in so many churches. Her sister is sitting on her other side, trying to whisper something in her ear, something that her sister thinks is funny and is trying not to giggle about. They don't know what irreverence is. Funny thoughts come easy against the right angles of the long wooden benches which seem to know nothing about the shape of the body, and when there's a figure up before them telling them things which they cannot fully attend.

They do not know a father. They have a mother and there was another, other than their mother, who seems to have had something

to do with them, but not much any longer. He has floated away to some far outpost, and there are references made. He lives in the land beyond the horizon, of adults' conversations, storybooks or sermons.

Later, Darla is sitting in church again, like a favor she is doing, next to her mother. Her sister is not beside her, as she once was, once always was, every time, and she misses her sister's suppressed giggles, though she does not wish for them now, wishes for them back then, as they were, before there was an understanding, a call to understand, a necessity to understand. Now the man before them is understood all too well. It troubles Darla. The light coming in disturbs her. But she does not want to fight a battle. Again she is thrown back, and now she calls herself to the moment to think to herself that she does not want a god, only a mother sitting beside her, now, after everything else.

Her mother has quieted, now, Darla thinks, as she sits quietly, as they both sit quietly, Darla next to her quiet mother, both of them quiet in the service, in the service of the less noisy bombast, the less bombastic noise of this mellower preacher. Her mother has chosen another church, one less angry, one less vindictive, and Darla feels that her mother is truly passing into middle age, the later part of that middle age, that will surely mean old age soon enough. Darla does not want to call it, or think it, old age, but she knows that because she does not want to think it, she thinks it already. They sit quietly and Darla thinks it feels like the rain and thunder have passed and her mother sits quietly like the calm after a storm.

History. And his story is the way, the truth and the life. Darla didn't know a father and didn't want to know one. Even the other one her mother had taken on.

"Will you ever marry again, Mother?"

"No, dear. The Lord Jesus is my husband, now."

Her mother tried to explain. But there are so many things that mothers think they'd better explain and explaining does no better. Darla, in the meantime, had preempted several explanations. She didn't know, for instance, how automobiles worked, but it was in the back seat of a car that she and a boy took off the clothes that had lately become so important and she thought it was going to feel so good in spite of how it felt, and afterwards it was such an amazing thing that she wasn't sure she wanted to do again. She knew what it was. She'd heard enough about it. It. "It."

This is what "it" means. This is what it means. But what did it mean? She knew, felt quite convinced after the circumstances, that it didn't mean that they had to get married. Well, she knew it could come to mean they had to get married. But it didn't mean they would feel like getting married, automatically. For god's sake, what was all the torment about? Causing someone -- like her mother -- to rant about somebody leaving her.

Her clothes back on her again after the act felt like the residue of a great bubble which had popped. But they felt good, and not at all like

something which had to be accommodated or which had to accommodate her. Which had to be worked out the right way. Just leave them on, for a while, for god's sake. Now, she cannot remember whether it was in church or in the car when the thought first occurred to her. She didn't understand the way men and automobiles worked (or why, for God's sake, men worked so much on automobiles), but for some reason, having sex meant that afterwards women had to put on clothes again, only certain clothes that men called for, like wedding dresses. Or perhaps it was that women had to put on the men like clothes. Anyway, there was this marriage thing, the burden of women apparently much more so than for men, for men only a nagging concern to be sloughed off like a bad jacket. But women kept having these husbands. And then it occurred to her that her mother's husband was Jesus Christ, and after all she had learned of this blessed savior, the next thing that she imagined was her mother having sex with Jesus Christ.

!

It might have been the stiff board of the church pew, or the not-quite-comfortable vinyl of the back seat, but somewhere it occurred to her, somewhere it occurred. (Where would Jesus have sex with her mother?) It caused her great anguish. This thought would flash into her mind so fast, she didn't call for it, it would just flash (like the boy, he opens his pants and there -- no, don't look) and then she would have to try to knock it out of her mind. Good Lord -- no not the Lord! How do you knock something out of your mind? How do you call on any thought? Then what would the next thought be that she would

call upon to superimpose upon THAT thought? Something, anything, to get it out, for-get it. And she remembered seeing that boy's thing, for the first time she saw a boy's thing right there in front of her and there it was, the thought of Jesus Christ revealing himself in all his splendor. A vision! No, no.

For some years she struggled to block this thought from her mind. But it would force itself upon her, Jesus pounding into her imagination to reveal himself to her. It might have ruined church. And sex. And it did for a while. The fear of the thought, not wanting to see Jesus, not wanting to see a thing.

Then, later, the thought began to creep in with that fascination of the creepy, a compulsion, all the temptation of the forbidden thing, and there was the possibility of Jesus extended towards her. And there began to be cool evenings, later on, when she was oh 18 or so, when she would imagine, and this imagining would make her feel, feel -- feel, and she would touch herself, hoping for a vision. The perfect Jesus. Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. Jesus with rocks moving away, Jesus rising, unshrouding himself -- oh, God! Yes. God. No.

But she knew, had known, that the act did not mean husband. What sin was she committing, here? Fornication? Jesus was not her husband. You had to get married. Her mother did. Her mother's second husband was Jesus. That meant sex. Or sex meant marriage. But that was adultery. Jesus wasn't even the first husband.

She fled church. She could not bear herself, the thought that had

occurred, would occur beyond her control.

"Mother, I can't go to church anymore."

"Darla. Do you know what you're saying?"

"I can't explain it, Mother. It's just not right for me to be in church."

"Oh, Darla. Darla."

And her mother cried and prayed. Her mother locked herself up in her room with Jesus. In the bedroom with Jesus. Oh, stop it!

And Jesus was her mother's husband. But Darla's mother did not know what Darla was doing with Jesus. Did not know the sins being committed, the things going on behind her back with her own husband, the fornication, the adultery, the action that was all in thought. The father and the son and the husband and the not-husband -- and Darla with just herself -- how much sin -- what incomparable, powerful, uncontrollable sin.

This was the nasty truth. It's too awful to think about.

Jesse went over to Darla's house, but Darla wasn't there. So Jesse went over to Bennett's house. Bennett was just getting out of class and was walking up to his house from the other direction, just as Jesse was walking up to his house. He had such a lot of books in his arms.

"Hi."

"Hi, Jesse."

They went in to his house. There were books all over the place.

"How was class?"

"Okay."

"Do you need to study, or anything?"

"No, not at all. I need a break."

Jesse had hoped he would say that he needed to study, that he had some reading to do, or something to that effect. She loved to watch Bennett read. But Bennett wanted to have sex. She could tell.

He put his books down on a table. She went over to look at them. He went off into the kitchen. She opened a book, flipped through it, slid it off, opened another.

He came back in with a beer in his hand.

"Would you like a beer?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

She took the beer.

"Aren't you going to have one?"

"No, not right now," he said.

He stood there, really close to her, she was thinking. She took a drink, a little too self-consciously for her comfort.

He moved off.

She looked down at the beer. She thought of a cartoon, the roadrunner zipping up and matter-of-factly handing the coyote a bomb with a sizzling fuse. The coyote takes the bomb, a receptive reflex. The roadrunner disappears, with a beep-beep. The coyote looks into the camera, so to speak, with the droll, almost sleepy realization that he has been duped, that he has yet again been duped, that once more, as inevitably, he has been duped, the pause stretches absurdly long enough for you to think that he will have the ridiculously easy good sense to snap out of his role of the dupe, even the self-conscious one, and toss the bomb away -- bang! He stands with the same expression, though he is now scorched black.

Well, really, she’s carrying it a bit too far that she had been handed a bomb. She has been thinking about wars and battles so much lately. But she felt that she had been handed something even if it was just a beer that she accepted self-consciously as a dupe. He was putting her under a spell, whether it was the spell of beer, or of his hospitality,

or of her own culpability, or of his desire or hers or both, and she was accepting, or she was making the sign of acceptance whether it was really a spell or not. Because, really, she was carrying it a bit too far with “being put under a spell.”

How do you just take off your clothes? How do they do it in the movies? She was thinking that the perfect trip-up for this Bennett now, the perfect foil of his give-her-a-beer seduction, would be for her to just take off her clothes, right now. To just matter-of-factly, even self-consciously, dupishly, start undressing, and not even suddenly be naked, but have to go through all the awkward, tactical problems of undressing in front of someone for whom you're undressing. This would be such a capitulation beyond capitulation that it would take him completely off his mannered, cryptic-seduction guard. Maybe Bennett had been reading too many books after all. Or maybe he wasn't reading enough.

There had to be a hitch, right? She'd done her reading and she knew that every love, every desire, had to have a hitch. There has to be that something that keeps you apart. The seduction has to be unwitting. And when the seduction was witting, willful, she wanted to foil it. The hitch, here, was the wrong one. She wanted to have to push her way through all those stacks of books, to fight her way into the mind of Bennett. But then, perhaps she would find him sitting on the other side of all those books with nothing but a dry, dusty shelf for a head, a stuffy little nautilus shell of a cranium with passion tucked too neatly into the folds, lined up and worded properly and bound and

stacked, with a creaky hinge of a binding that would squeak awfully should she be able to open it. Then he wouldn't really have the fiery passion. But he didn't have it, now, either, just the dumb push of passion. He wasn't perfectly balanced between burning passion and something else, some contrary force, some opposition, whether within or without, some antagonism.

No, she had grown accustomed to all the wiles of the dumb push, to all the stupid seductions that for her were only absurd contradictions to the blunt fact of the want. She didn't want the playing-up-to. She wanted the always volatile, always ready to explode, that was constantly postponed, put off, causing the passion to burn ever hotter, to become ever more volatile, the pressure to rise and churn and control its holder. This dumb push was too easily controlled by such modest restrictions as tactical aesthetics: the players of this game seem to be constantly trying to work into the act in a way which seems fitting, trying to slide smoothly into the passion, as if they are uncomfortable or as if they do not yet feel that it is natural or agreeable to clutch. But, thought Jesse, if the burning passion were there, the real passion, then only some other force could prevent the lovers from erupting in a spontaneous frenzy of passion, the way they do in the movies.

She was still thinking about this as she worked his stiffening penis out of his pants. She clutched it, held it there for a moment, to look at it, as she always liked to do, but this time, this time she was looking at it a little differently. She savored the warm extension in direct contrast to the image of it lying cold and stiff in a muddy ditch, the

body, the heart and veins which pumped and conveyed the blood to it, nowhere to be seen. She imagined this stiff from pleasure in contrast to stiff from rigor mortis, in contrast to its being cut off at the instant of fear-struck erection. She touched her lips to it, stuck out her tongue imagining that she were to taste the very hot blood that was rushing into it, then she gulped it up with all the desperation she could work up, imagining that this was the last time she would taste the life in it, and that sucking it, working it, so desperately, but so cautiously (she must prolong this, this is the most agonizing of ecstasies, because, now, while they are desperate with the most desperate of desires, this will be the climax to end all climaxes, and she must prolong it even more, desperately more, than any climax, must eternally suspend him between rushing to and fighting off ejaculation), she would be swallowing, finally, his last trace of life, his seed before his death. And he spurted into her mouth and she swallowed with a desperate, piteous hunger to preserve him. But wait! She would have to give him more! He could plant his seed in her, and she would give to the world his offspring, that here, in his final act before he was to be castrated and killed, she could join with him in bringing birth. She stripped herself, the clothes falling away almost unnoticed in the storm of her passion, straddled him, and took him in, this time deep into her body, it pressing and extending into her as if in a mad attempt to get as far inside her as possible to touch and join her soul (sorry, it's the heat of the moment), and now, as she moved up and down, she imagined that death was creeping up on him at this very same time, that she was racing death for the chance to spark new life. She pumped, more and more desperately. He arched his back, the imminent climax, the clutch of pleasure or

the throes of death, or both? His breaths cut short. Then stop all together. Has death claimed him? She cries out. Then she feels a burst of warmth inside her, and she collapses on top of him, only to find him lifeless.

He gets up and pulls on his pants. He leaves the room and she hears the refrigerator open, then the shpop of a beer can. She wants to lie there for a long time, thinking of thick charcoal clouds churning slowly and monstrously, rumbling now to themselves, more faintly, as if turning from the smitten, seething world to gloat on themselves and digest their own indignation. It's the ghastly soft twilight of the battlefield and a dumb silence blankets out even the last pitiful moans of the dying.

But it's over now, another little masterpiece, just for her.

Bennett, having no idea that he had died, drank his beer. She put her T-shirt on, felt she was just hanging there underneath it, a bit silly. But she didn't know whether it was for herself or for this boy happily slurping his beer. She could not hide all of her embarrassment and the two of them just sat, like they were supposed to be relaxing. So she got by with another dumb push.

He tried to say something to her, wanted awfully bad to have something to say to her and she began to feel uneasy about herself, like maybe something was showing and he might read it in some way that would be all wrong, because she didn't want him to know what she was thinking, but she didn't want him to have to assume

anything else. Oh, gosh. It occurred to her that she might even have to say something really awful, something really gross, like how much she enjoyed it. No, surely, he wouldn't want her to say something like that, but that was just it. She knew he didn't want her to say something really stupid, like the kind of thing people that use oils or body paints like to say to each other, people who really jive to hamming it up. She felt that he wanted her to say something else, something more, something that would suggest that there was more to it than sex. Well, for her, there had been something that wasn't just the sex with him, but she couldn't tell him what was going on in her head. She wanted him to get up and go read or something, only not because it would be such a wonderful thing for him to do, but because now she wanted him to go off to his dumb old books and leave her alone.

Then, it occurred to her that life had to go on. You could think about death and pain and suffering, try to anticipate them in the right way, cringe, wince, despair, get caught up in being able to imagine what it would be like without them, think god, how horrible -- God! How horrible! -- torture and death, I can't even imagine it, what would I do? You know? I mean, when you think about awful things, like unbearable suffering -- that's it. Unbearable. How and by what, for what are such things unbearable? Bearable they are, exactly as they are borne. You can read about torture, read some newspaper story about some awful sadistic thing that a murderer did to his victim before killing her, and think how unbearable. But you refuse to bear such awful things, refuse to bear them from your vantage point of safety, from your tidy little spot from which you have worked out

comfort and rights. It is my right not to suffer. I shall not be made to bear such suffering. But then some monster killer breaks in through the window and grabs you, or busts down your door and arrests you in the name of something, ties you up and starts kicking you and shoving broom handles up your vagina and branding you with hot irons, and you are bearing it, bearing it precisely as you bear it! It hurts like you cannot imagine. But you imagined it, imagine it from your safe place, as being unbearable. And you suffer death. The living are left to go on about how spooky and unimaginable death is, precisely because they can imagine it. The dead die, are dead. She thinks to herself, now, that history is the word of the survivors. How many "ifs" can be imagined? No matter how many "ifs" can be imagined, no matter how many people can be imaginarily handed "Get Out Of Death Free" cards, it is the dead who die, who have died, and it is the living who imagine their deaths, their own deaths and the deaths of those others, the dead, who write their deaths and speak their deaths and say what death is and profess the truth of death.

So, anyway, Jesse was sitting in the Tavern with Darla one day and Darla asked her what had happened to Bennett.

"Oh, him? He died in the war."

Jesse had come up with this reply before this moment when she spoke it to Darla. She knew Darla would not know exactly why she had replied this way. With Darla she could say exactly what was on her mind, even if Darla would not really think that was what was on

her mind. Jesse said it like it was some bizarre little joke she had with herself, even though it wasn't a joke -- well, even though it was something she had really thought, which was kind of another joke in itself, although Darla might not think it was funny.

But Darla didn’t skip a beat. She said with a little grin, “Which war?”

It seemed like Darla was trying to play along. But, now, Jesse was thinking, really thinking about the question. Which war indeed? She could play along with the “joke” as far as the conversation were concerned, but up in her own head, there had been a little tumult and she hadn’t given much thought to the setting. Was it an imaginary war, or one of those historical ones left playing over in surviving imaginations? The image flashed into her head again, but jolted her. Sitting in the Tavern, across from Darla, she wasn’t quite ready to think about that penis lying in a ditch, but, on the other hand, Darla had sparked something. Jesse sort of wanted to go away by herself and be fascinated for a while. She wanted to be sitting alone wondering.

Wars past, or wars present? Wars in the future, the “real” future of wars anticipated? Real wars or imaginary ones? Which was which? Couldn’t Jesse imagine a penis lying in a ditch for any war? And what was it about war that was fit to imagine? What were the “facts” of any war that had to be got straight? Was it the fact of war, or the imagining of war that was more terrible? Everything scrambled suddenly. Jesse hadn’t read enough, or something. Names of countries and kings and premiers and generals flashed through her

head. But were any of them “right”?

She didn’t know her wars, at least not like she was supposed to. She hadn’t learned all the right names: names of generals, countries involved, treaties, even the names of the wars themselves. And as all these names buzzed in her head, it got worse and worse, so that she could not remember which were names she had ever heard before and which she only imagined and she could not even remember or fix it in her head what she meant by “right”: did she mean right by the history textbooks, right by the forces brought to bear, right politically, or right in the context of what she had been thinking recently, of her relationship with Darla, the conversation they were having and all of those things, one laid over another, one strained through another, in light of another, in the shadow of another.

“The war,” She said.

Darla didn’t really understand why Jesse had put it like that, but she took Jesse to mean that she and Bennett had some kind of falling out or something, some dispute, no matter how small. Perhaps Darla also thought that Jesse was being particularly cynical just now, saying it the way she had, as if implying -- but she started thinking about this time she went over to Jesse’s and Jesse got out this blue notebook from her dresser and opened it up and showed Darla all these symbols that she’d gotten out of bubble gum packages.

“What are they?”

“They’re ancient symbols from Incan and Aztec civilizations.”

And that for some reason made Darla suddenly think of the time Jason was lying around reading comic books and she was going to really get up her nerve this time and just ask him right there, while he was lying there reading some comic book and she was just sitting there and he wasn’t paying any attention to her and had no idea it was coming -- she was just going to blurt out and ask him if he thought she really loved him and that if he did, what did he think she thought that meant and what did he think it meant for someone to really love someone.

“What are you reading?” she said.

Darla remembered her sister’s drug problem. Darla and her mother pulled together in those times and they had to and they had to do what they could to help her sister. Darla’s mother went through a period where she was full of indignation and spite despite all of her concern for pity and forgiveness and mercy, or perhaps because of it. For some reason each hinged on the other, and Darla’s sister was caught smack between. Darla was close to her sister. But Darla also felt that her sister was strange to her, that her sister had gone off to a strange place and come back as some kind of refugee. Then Darla realized that her sister was caught between Darla’s own scales of judgment: Darla weighed her sister by familiarity and strangeness, the sister she had always known and loved, and the sister that was now strange to her and she feared for, perhaps just feared. Darla had left the place of her mother’s religion (don’t think about that other

thing, she doesn’t want to) and so it was Darla who was caught between. She did not want to stand with her mother on the side of righteousness and condemn her sister. But she did not want to stand on the side of her sister because her sister was too ready to be standing on the other side, precisely, of her mother’s righteousness.

And one day there was a terrible explosion in the house, Darla’s mother and Darla’s sister screaming and pleading and crying, and it was Darla who moved out.

“Do you and your mother ever get into fights?” Jesse asked her once.

“Yeah, but not like we used to.”

Darla was still trying to figure out what the difference was between her and her sister, or between her and Jesse.

“Does your -- do you think -- or feel like -- your mother understands you?”

“I don’t know. We get along pretty well, nowadays. Sometimes we can have really good talks, you know, discussions. We can just talk and talk about anything sometimes and I really think that my mother’s really understanding. Pretty cool, even. You know?”

They chuckle a little.

Jesse wonders why Darla is asking. Jesse knows that Darla has had it

pretty rough. Darla has never really come right out and told her everything, but Jesse knows. Just being around Darla and Darla’s mom and sister. They were deserted by the father, in a worse way than Jesse’s parents breaking up. Darla and her mother and sister had some real struggles, even fights, Jesse knows.

Sometimes Jesse just looks at Darla and wonders about her. She thinks Darla is really an amazing person, working most of her life, all her life since high school, still caring for her mother and sister. It seems those bad things made Darla and her mother and sister close in a way that Jesse and her mother were not. Jesse looks at Darla and has such pity and admiration for her, sometimes. It’s kind of weird. It’s like something you’d read about in some old book, Darla’s struggling like the bleakness of an earlier era. Darla’s the real version of that crap parents are always wagging: “Why, when I was your age . . .” Darla is Jesse’s age -- well, a couple of years older, but in her camp, not the parents’ -- but working, not going to school, having worked before she left school, having to help support her mother and herself, dropping out and going on to just work, in restaurants, mostly, the way Jesse can only imagine people in the old days.

Once Darla had a rare day off and Darla and Jesse sat in Darla’s apartment, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Jesse hated to ask Darla the questions she has about Darla’s life. She’s afraid it will make Darla feel bad. But Darla said something about her father calling her, and Jesse couldn’t help wondering. What is Darla’s father like?

Jesse’s had this chance, this chance that she just feels she’s taken for granted, now that she thinks about Darla. Because Jesse grew up in a house with a backyard and a father who, sure, divorced her mother, but paid his dues faithfully and supported his kids and wanted to help them out and was a father to them, he just couldn’t live with the woman he married any longer, and some kids, lots of kids still, had mothers and fathers who kept living together, it was just that Jesse’s mother and father couldn’t live together, but they kept right on being a mother and a father. A mother. And. A father. The “and” seemed

bigger, that’s all, since they were living apart.

Jesse got to go to school and to college and got to take classes and learn things and her father was going to pay for her school and Jesse had all these chances that nowadays it seems any girl could have. All sorts of opportunities. But when she looks at Darla, she realizes that maybe she has taken it for granted that any girl who grew up in a house with a back yard in a row of lots of other houses, who got to go to camp, and camping, and got to go on all kinds of trips, would get to go to college and take classes and maybe work in some field that women didn’t used to think about.

Then maybe sometimes Jesse thinks that Darla is just too pitiful.

Darla works and Jesse doesn’t, until what time and circumstances Jesse decides to get a job to support herself, or to say that she is supporting herself -- but not really supporting because she has so much to take for granted -- but she gets a job so that she can make

her own spending money, so she can have extra money on top of all the money she takes for granted. Darla seemed more diligent and Jesse more a drifter. So Jesse often wondered who was the better student. Or what was a student as opposed to a worker, or vice versa. She wondered, because, you know, what do you know?

Like this one time Jesse went over to Darla’s one day and Darla wasn’t there. So Jesse kind of wandered around for a while. She rode her bike. She just rode her bike around. She saw these guys walking along. She stopped to say hi. She couldn’t remember their names, they all had the same kind of name. It was Jeff and Keff and Leff and Meff. She stopped to say hi. They stopped walking and said hi back to her. One of them said, “where have you been?” -- and kind of pushed her shoulder with one of those gosh-shucks, chumsy gestures and threw her all the way back to Miami. Because she had been there and for some reason she suddenly thought of that.

Miami.

“What’s it like there?”

“Oh, they’ve got palm trees there.”

“Yeah, palm trees. And old folks.”

“And Cubans.”

“And Haitians.”

“And crime.”

“And pink flamingoes.”

“All those motels with palm tree signs.”

“And college students thinking about breasts, one way or another.”

“Yeah, and Walt Disney World.”

This brings an awe-inspired hush.

“Yeah, well I’ve been there, and it isn’t anything like that.”

“Where have you been?”

She’s been in Miami, where do you think? But she’s sitting in the Tavern, now, looking at them, and they’re all looking at her, waiting for an answer.

Well?

Four guys looking at her.

“Oh, leave her alone, Beff.”

“My name’s not Beff. It’s Keff. Keff!”

“Oh, sorry Kuh -- ass wipe!”

“Excuse, me, miss, could I have some more prayer water?”

The waitress goes off.

“What’s that supposed to mean, butt-cycle?”

“It’s a joke, buttritude.”

“Oh, some joke. Like maybe you were supposed to mean holy water and we were all supposed to get it. Like, get it and laugh right out our butts.”

“Shut your big rectal sphincter muscle, you talking butt. Maybe I used to be in some religion and we called it prayer water and it was very dear to me and we gave ourselves enemas with it daily and I haven’t gotten over usage of the word.”

“Yuck, yuck, yuck, butt-stopper.”

“Anyway,” says Jeff, “I don’t know what religion any of you once believed in or still believe in, but there’s no such place as Miami.”

This brought a chorus of “ohs.”

Some of the “ohs” were inquisitive, others were incredulous. Still others were annoyed.

Jesse wanted to say that there was certainly a place such as Miami, in fact there was precisely the place Miami, or a place called Miami, but she felt it might be such a statement of the obvious that it would bring another chorus of “ohs” and make her the biggest butt of all their jokes. Then, after she had quietly checked herself, she suddenly realized that she could not remember when she had gone to Miami, when she had been there, and just what it was really like. She wondered if all those things she remembered, those images and ideas were really Miami, or some other place, or only what someone had told her was Miami, or what she had read in a book, or what she merely imagined about Miami because she didn’t really remember it.

“Miami,” continued Jeff, “is a figment of the imagination.”

And with that all of them were left dumbfounded, and Jeff, silent and smug, leaned to one side, lifting one bun off the booth so that he could reach under himself, pulled a Sunkist orange out of his anus and began to peel it.

Or like another time Jesse was riding around on her bike and rode over to Darla’s. She got off her bike and started to walk up to Darla’s door. She stopped. She heard these voices coming out of a window.

“Do you understand me? Do you understand me? Do you understand me?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes!”

“Are you sure you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“You feel very certain you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Or do you just think you understand me?”

“Well, what do you think? Do you think I understand you?”

“I’m asking you. Do you understand me?”

“What can I say? I say ‘yes’ but do you think I can ever understand you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you want me to understand you but then you just think that I might only think I understand you. So what’s the difference? What’s the difference to you? How will you know?”

“I want you to understand me, that’s all. It’s as simple as that.”

A car passed by with a lazy swish sound trailing off in the distance. There was a bird chirping. Summer was setting in.

“Well, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. When you say that there is a difference between understanding you and only thinking I understand you, as if that wouldn’t be the same as understanding you, I don’t think it could be as simple as that.”

“Well, then, maybe it’s just that you don’t understand me.”

“No. I think I understand you all too well.”

She heard music come on somewhere in the distance. Someone had started up some Jimi Hendrix. She decided that it was a terrible misunderstanding and that the two people, whoever they were, just needed someone to mediate, like maybe someone standing outside the window.

Jesse knocked on Darla’s door. Darla opened the door. Jason was there.

“Hi, Jesse, come in.”

“Hi, Darla. Hi, Jason.”

“Hi.”

“Man, you’ve got some weird neighbors.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, they were having this discussion about understanding and one of them wanted the other one to understand him and kept asking ‘Do you understand me?’ But the other one -- I think it was the girl -- kept saying ‘Yes,’ she understood him but then he didn’t think she did and he thought maybe she only thought she understood him.”

Darla chuckled.

“Yeah, it was weird.”

“Well, did they come to an understanding?”

Ha, ha.

“Sounds like they were having a bad trip,” Jason said.

“Yeah.”

They chuckled a little.

“You want a beer, Jesse?”

“Sure.”

“What have you been doing, Jason?”

“Oh, man, I’ve just been being a bum. I haven’t done shit all week.”

“Have you seen Pterodactyl? He’s in town.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“I saw him a little while ago at the Tavern.”

“I know, man. He’s been hanging around. I don’t really want to see that fucker.”

“Oh. How come?”

“Man, every time I see him he says, ‘Jason, let’s go get fucked up,’ and then we have to go over to that asshole Jingo’s house and start talking and smoking and then they both start giving me all kinds of shit. It’s like he gets this big kick out of hassling me when he’s stoned or something.”

“Oh, but that’s just the way he is. He’s okay.”

“Yeah, but who needs that shit? If I wanted that I’d just go find my dad, or my mom.”

“What does he say?”

“Nothing, man, I don’t want to go into it.”

“All right.”

Jason went back to reading his comic book. He was reading the latest issue of Mystery Man in which the hero was up against a fanatical religious villainess called Bible Doll. Jesse picked up another of Jason’s comic books. It was an issue of something called “The Projectile.” She started flipping through it.

The main character, whose name seemed to be Johann, was in the middle of one of those old European wars, somewhere in the 19th century, and seemed to be primarily concerned with getting himself unscathed into Switzerland. She flipped some more pages. She came across a panel that was a big splash of yellow and red with “KER-WHUMPF” scrawled across it. There were several panels of black following, each one with progressively more streaks of color encroaching upon the dark space. She flipped some more pages and found herself in the middle of some kind of space battle. She flipped backwards. She was looking for some kind of divider, a title page stuck in the middle of the comic book that separated two distinct stories. She didn’t find one.

“What’s this?”

Jason looked up from his ’zine to see what Jesse had.

“It’s ‘The Projectile.’”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about this guy that keeps fading in and out of all these wars.”

“Really? Like how? How does it happen?”

“Well, you’re not sure, really. He’s just some poor sucker soldier who has this terrible fate of hopping from time period to time period, but always smack dab into the middle of some battle, and always as some soldier in it. Like one minute he’s in the middle of some maneuver in the Persian Gulf and then, bang, he finds himself marching into Russia with Napoleon. He just dematerializes and rematerializes into the next war, past, present, future, another world, another dimension, who knows what’s going on?”

“How did it start?”

“Who knows, man? It’s like he’s some kind of ghost who has to go through this hell of living out all these battle scenes, over and over. He charges some hill in some totally lopsided deal and gets gouged with a bayonet, then -- poof! -- he’s landing on some band of renegades on a distant planet in his atmosphere assault craft.”

“Wow.” She flips back through the comic with greater interest.

“His name is Johann,” a box reads. “He knows that now. The night before he had heard the name barked out behind him in the dark. He kept running with the others. He did not know what the call had meant, did not understand that quickened, menacing call that had turned slowly into an impassioned plea; that drew out until it was almost a moan and then faded away. But now he knew. He knew what it meant and who it meant. He was Johann. And he was now a

deserter.”

“Do you have any more of these? Do you have earlier issues?”

“Sure. I have every one that’s come out. That one in your hand is number six. That’s the most recent.”

“Are they here?”

“No. The rest are at my place. I’ll get them for you sometime. I’ll bring them over here.”

“Great! Thanks.”

Darla gives Jesse a beer and asks her what she’s been doing today.

Somewhere else, somehow, the Projectile fights on. Tracking down a long corridor, dissolving and the details of the corridor change ever so subtly, dissolve again, tracking, moving and suggesting greater movement, the enormous time and distance of a labyrinth of halls compressed into lush filmic convention, turning a corner through mammoth doors, towering with institutional presence, on through a giant ornate room with an icy floor and walls shafting up to no apparent ceiling, more walls on hinges inching back stoically, dissolve on like movement, a fat vault door humming open and on through rows and rows of industrial shelving, more dissolves, tighter focus, one structure is isolated, then one shelf and somehow, after all this, one spot is singled out. Somewhere among all these halls and

shelves, these layers and layers dissolved through, a metal canister begins, almost imperceptibly at first, to hiss. There is a little spume of smoke. The camera eye has singled out this item, this one thing, object, catalogued and filed in the vast stupefying lexicon of accumulated, appropriated, comprehended, constructed things, one pedantic little pair of metal cylindrical brackets, a micro-subset shoved off into some overwhelmed crack in the looping, puffing omnibus of subsets, engulfed and engulfed again, exponentially, by bigger, bigger still, sets of brackets, subsets, fish swallowed by fish swallowed by fish . . . one fiber in a strand in a stitch in the weave of the great fabric, perfectly subsumed, labeled and left to wonder beyond the fringes of association. This has been singled out by the camera eye, but that camera eye has suggested a wily, taciturn automaton, sliding smoothly along after all the warm, caring bodies have gone; not sneaking, but humming beyond smugness, suggesting the solitude beyond solitude, trapping everyone now on the other side of the impenetrable screen and slicing in with some kind of chilling post-consciousness trick. No one is around. No soul stirs. No attractive carnal delegates busy themselves in the aisles. No stock extras file past ignoring the camera. Human existence has been followed; an iron rat has rolled in after them to catch what they will not know.

Somewhere in the halls of graduate cultural science, a canister leaks. Long after the last issue has gone out of print, long after the series has been catalogued in collectors' specialty books, the racks of issues dwindled, cut down to priceless rarity by the completion of garbage cycles, by incinerators, by space limitation and microfiche, by decay

and decomposition, biological or cultural, trickled down into the soil or to the bottom of dust-conquered cardboard boxes in attics, trickled out of circulation into idle storage, trickled out of value in minds that know nothing of collectors' specialty catalogues and rare comic exchange, some freak accident befalls the historical imprint, the alphabetized fossil of the stencil and ink existence of a protagonist. A filing clerk, perhaps, had dropped the canister and dented it. Some freak chemical accident, a janitor perhaps had run out of the prescribed floor scrubbing agent, and taking dutiful initiative, had gone over to the next venerable hall of learning (perhaps the English department unconcerned with the chemical composition of their cleansing fluids) and requested from the fellow janitor a surrogate cleanser. Neglecting to read the label on the borrowed container, or perhaps reading it carefully but failing to comprehend it, to foresee the solution to the chemical equation that might be obtained should dirty film-busting agents meet precious film-coating agents, or perhaps knowing these equations precisely as a highly qualified sanitary engineer but being confident entirely in the efficiency of design of airtight metal canisters, indeed having the tight gridwork of knowledge that janitors of some ideal not-so-distant future should have, completely covering himself efficiently and intuitively, perhaps, in all details, he goes ahead, forges on, not grasping precisely some fluke, some oversight or error made by another employee, the tiny crack allowed by the dent in one of the canisters.

He pours the trusty, albeit backup, liquid and sets to scrubbing. The cautious, invisible reaction, undetectable even by that otherwise omniscient camera, takes just long enough under the given

circumstances (what with the size of the storage room as compared to the size of the crack in the certain canister and all), for the janitor to have completed his task and long ago retired from yet another day of faithful service, trailed off through the long halls away from that one impossible-to-have-been-thought-of metal container; in fact to have long ago lazily made his way in a long path that the camera will later reverse precisely, follow backward step for step, dissolve for dissolve, until it reaches the fateful room, where it will proceed to perform its exacting function of focusing on detail, of drawing a precise ever-narrowing path of cinematic fine-tuning, of drawing a bead on the crack in the canister, directly contrasting the casual, routine, even though gently thorough, circular motion of the janitor's mop, the janitor rightfully, efficiently, looking down the whole time, ignoring even the generality of the canisters. And with those last detergent traces of humanity remaining for the day, the little hiss commences, finally, its timing so subliminally precise.

What leaks from the canister? Could it be grabbed hold of and held tight in a headlock of equations? What sort of freak is it, even among chemicals? After all the years that have fallen on the Projectile as dust or as preservative plastic wrappers and bindings to lock him, entomb him in his paneled memory, now this one microfiche shrine warps, slurs badly, oozes dumbly in this chemical consumption, and the microscopic inscriptions are transformed into an exhalation of fumes. And what else?

The Projectile sputters out, lyrically awkward, like the essence -- gas, anyway -- counterpart of the sprout pushing through the soil in time-

lapse photography. What form does it begin to take? What content, what "else" behind all the forms, all the forms it has been given, the forms paneled and stenciled out for it, the forms meted out in careful linguistic exercises, exegesis swathed out for it in casual, routine, though gently thorough, essays, forming and structuring, meta-forming and deep-structuring, piercing his formic construction, deconstructing and pushing him to the vortex of his cultural polarities, assumptions, essays brandishing and wielding form, spearing and rupturing content with form, essays which have long already done away with the privileged other of form, the sanctified spirit behind the face, the transcendent meaning behind the word. And it leaks out still? Does the Projectile leak out a sallow ghost? A hollow ghost? A trace of a ghost? A ghost of a ghost of a ghost . . .

He leaks out like an infinite regress.

The Projectile flits out and catches hold of a draft, then transfers to the swell of a breeze and moves on to higher wind. He floats along on the scent of carbon-14, that long ago familiar scent, what had become a household scent, made everyone feel so at-home in time. He drifts high, high. He blasts along the jet stream. Something else catches him up. Something like that carbon-14, like it, but . . . There is a scramble, a scramble of subatomic particles which have already slipped out of the fingers of conception at exactly the moment conception had reached them (but then, there had already begun the scramble of conception). Up there, high in the atmosphere, right at the edge of that big placenta mothering Earth with all her gases, there is some mix, some thing, some deal, some equation which

cannot be equated with equations, but can only rock violently, race imperceptibly between equations, leaving the equations left standing like two Old Physicists trying to swallow each other, and the sub-what-we-have-figured-some-thing-less-a-thing-cracking-thingness-apart simply races away, has already always raced away, leaving only what are hypothesized as imperceptible scratches somewhere behind the retinas of the two Old Physicists.

The Projectile has meshed out and subsumed and been subsumed by the suggestion of the threat of mankind having already long ago been superseded and displaced by a great metaphor cloud; having proven himself wrong enough and right enough, he has long ago already made himself be made to eat his own words like mushrooms.

He drifts down like soft, sweet fallout, through a cloud. He is spun around and then a bubble forms around him. He is captured in an instant of condensation and falls on down with the rain. He splops onto the soil, into it, he soaks through, and now he is trickling down, literally trickling down into the soil. He is not fully absorbed into some great globe, some vast planet of a sod particle. There is something about this bubble of his that makes it resilient. It changes shape, conforms to nooks and crannies, tiny shafts of the earth, but only enough to continue oozing downward. It is sleek and tenacious, like a drop of mercury, still fluid but resisting complete breakdown. On he slides, slithering down from one capillary to the next. Finally, he comes to a rest, and when he nudges up against something, something more solid yet, something not part of this extension of soil surrounding it, he no longer has, has not yet, the faculties that might

be realization, the realization that might have been faculties, to appreciate the irony of this meeting. He touches bone. A bone from which the capillaries have been burned off in a flash. A bone that has been bleached clean and has a kind of splendor even here beneath the soil.

It is a splendor that is not unlike the Projectile's own bubble. And there is a fusion. Another kind of fusion.

What fusion is this?

What camera eye has afforded such a view, has been purged of restrictions and dependence to follow this trickling down? What presence is this? Is it the fusion of body and soul? What, a body that no longer has a soul with a soul that never had a body?

The Projectile touched the bone and there was a fusion of fact and fiction.

It is here written.

This is the secret origin of the Projectile, after all, as seen in "The Projectile," issue no. 1.

Jesse said, "I think I'm going to go now."

A man and a woman were sitting next to an open window. The woman was rubbing the man's knee and smiling at him. A nice little

breeze was blowing through their hair.

They had said "I love you" to each other many times, but they had only been joking.

Suddenly, the woman glanced out the window.

"Quick," she said, "here she comes."

They both moved away from the window, watching the girl outside.

The woman called out to the man, "I said I love you."

He returned, "But that's not enough. You can't just say you love me."

"But, what then?"

"It's not enough to just say you love me. I have to know it."

"But how can you know I love you if I don't say it?"

"Love is not just saying it."

"But, if I said 'I love you,' what else could I mean but 'I love you' and what else could you know if I said it or if I did not?"

"If you didn't love me, you might say you did. But if you did love me you wouldn't just say it."

"But what if I loved you and I didn't say it? How would you know?"

"I'd know you loved me if I knew you weren't just saying you did."

"But if I did love you, I would say just that."

"Then I would only have to take your word for it."

"What else can I say?"

"Don't just say 'I love you.'"

"All right, I won't say it. But I do."

"Oh, I know. I love you, too."

They embrace with loud sighs.

Jesse rides off on her bicycle.

*   *   *