Fantastic Metropolis

The leaves are always bright in Purgatory. At mid-day, the sun is always shining, the breeze blowing, the water running. The traffic is light in Purgatory. I live on a main street and by nine at night you could walk out in the middle of the road and sit down to a snack without fear. We have a deli on the corner across the street and they make a decent cheese steak, but the owners have no warts or glass eyes, no nutty stories from Coney Island as they had back before all this.

Everybody knows that if you walk through the woods in the park, you will come to the edge, where the earth breaks off and there is nothing but vast floating blackness with distant stars. The woman who walks dogs, Helen, walked right off the rim a while back and swam into the void. We all gathered to watch her go. Not much was said. She just took a step and started doing the breast stroke.

My other neighbor, Bill, sometimes takes his pistol to the edge and fires it out into space. His theory is that the bullet will eventually have to hit something. When I asked him why that was important, he just shrugged and asked me if I wanted a beer. Yesterday he shaved his head. His roommate, Mac, keeps sending a lot of money to these sweepstakes games that show up in the mail. So far he hasn’t won anything, and he gets really angry if you mention it.

I’ve got to go over to the park this evening because my six year old has baseball practice. I take the baby along and while the practice is going on we play “Baby Squirrel and The Man.” I forget sometimes that his actions are always trying to tell me something, but I never forget to carry him on my shoulders when we walk. It’s beautiful there under the giant trees with the sun setting. Ducks circle in the pond. The little bridge gets more splintered, more decrepit each year, but it never gives way. When it’s over, we each get a water ice and sit on the bench under the willow and talk about comic books or TV.

There’s a lot of TV. in purgatory, and I think it’s how they watch us. They look in while you think you are looking out. There is a man with a tiny note book, no bigger than four postage stamps, and he is watching you and transferring your actions, your comments into mathematics and jotting it down with a straight pin dipped in ink. They show a lot of good looking women, a lot of stuff where everybody is shooting a gun into the void. Once in a while, late at night, you get a sex show and that heats the blood a little, but basically it’s all as empty as the head of Colonel Rasuka.

I don’t know exactly what his head is made of, but it’s some strange substance between a plastic and a vegetable. It sits in a field by the river that is the other boundary of town—big as a house, rooted at the neck, pointed mustache, thin lidded eyes, nostrils that swell and flatten like a pair of bellows. In recent weeks the Colonel has been losing his hair and looking a little tired, but he’s always ready with the gossip.

I was down there walking the dog the other night, so I stopped over to chew the fat. “Colonel,” I said. “What army was it that awarded you your rank?” My question woke him, but he never answered it. Instead he told me about a visitor who was coming across time and space to Purgatory. “He’ll be very quiet,” said the Colonel. “Exceedingly quiet. You’ll hardly know he is here.”

“What’s his thing?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted,” I can’t quite make that out.”

“I am here already,” a low voice said from down by the river. My dog growled.

“What are you doing?” asked Rasuka.

“Sitting by the river and waiting,” said the quiet one.

“Who are you?” I called.

Yesterday, I caught him picking up pennies off the sidewalk outside the convenience store in the center of town. He is middle aged, thin, kind of stooped over, with sparse white hair and his hands in his pockets most of the time. I still don’t know what to make of him. My wife’s comment when I mentioned him to her was, “Who gives a damn?”

So I’ll make some turkey meatballs, which we’ll eat when we get home from the park. The kids will run back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the living room. We’ll read a few stories, sing a few songs, put them to bed. My wife will fall asleep on the couch, watching television. I’ll take the dog for a walk through the woods in the park and sit on the edge with my legs dangling into outer space. On the way back, I’ll light up a spittle stick and smoke it slowly, staring at the big trees blowing in the dark.

In my room, I’ll day dream this other place I have been thinking about where Colonel Rasuka has a body. He goes to an ancient city inhabited by a coven of flying female heads called the Polychize. He comes to it in the dead of night. It sits on the shore of an inland sea and its buildings are like sand castles washed once by the ocean and then shellacked for eternity. Its streets are no more than alleyways paved with broken rock, its windows and doorways, the empty portals of an insect mound. Something is going to happen tonight in that city, something spectacular—or I can only hope.

Eventually, I’m just going to get too tired to keep my eyes open and I’ll have to go down stairs and fetch my wife to bed. Maybe it’ll rain tomorrow. The Colonel has called a meeting for tomorrow night, so that should be a few laughs. He claims that he is going to raise a sunken ship in the river by singing. We’ll believe it when we see it, but that’s not the point. I’ll make turkey meatballs and then we’ll watch a little television.

---

I work at a school, where I have discovered that I am a teacher of Philosophy. I don’t know if they think I know that the students are plastic manikins, but it is so obvious it is embarrassing. There is no speech, no movement, not the slightest breath. The only fluttering paper is that which I accidentally drop. I am required to lecture vigorously to these figures. When the thought of what I am doing reaches back to my life and depresses me, I stop talking. For this I am gently reprimanded by The Committee.

In all, the time at work moved swiftly today. I drew images of the Polychize on the chalk board while I spoke loud, vociferous incoherencies. There were deer in the parking lot when I came out of work. They saw me and ran. It was hot and beautiful. I came home and smoked a stick and sat in my room with three different radios playing three different songs. I found the sweet spot in my rolling chair, just left of the center of the room, where all the notes and all the voices blend into a hybrid with a will to survive.

Tonight, before dinner, we went down to the river and joined the crowd encircling the Colonel. As usual, everybody was subtly ridiculing him. He takes it well. “If only I had arms and hands to hold you. Oh, how I’d hold you,” he always says. Things got a little out of hand at the last meeting, though. The Colonel had promised a fireworks display, which never materialized, and a man in the crowd threw a dog turd, hitting Rasuka in the left cheek. It was horrible because his eyes kept looking down, trying to see where it had landed.

Today, though, the colonel was in high spirits, singing his head off. His expressions had the crowd in stitches, his voice had them begging for mercy. Occasionally, he would stop his song to tell everyone, “Keep your eyes on the river.” Beneath the laughter and comments, I heard a very low voice whisper, “Look now.” I turned to the river and saw an oak branch floating along with a river rat clinging to it. Just then, Rasuka called it quits, and I turned to see that of everyone there, I was probably the only one to have seen the rat and the branch.

As I gathered my wife and my sons together from the crowd, I kept an eye out for the quiet one. I thought I saw him as I lifted my younger son, but when I looked back he was gone. We started home, the kids running ahead. I told my wife about what I had seen on the river.

“I saw it too,” she said. “When you turned to look, so did I.”

“What did you think of it?” I asked her.

“What did you think of it?” she asked. We laughed for a while about that, and then we spoke about planting the garden.

After the sailor boy puppet with the captain’s hat and the red skirt told a segment of the continuing story of Marlu the Manipulator, and the children had dozed off to my singing, my wife and I sat on the couch in the dark.

“Have I always loved you?” she asked.

“It feels that way, doesn’t it,” I said.

“I remember a bigger house and just the shadow of a another man,” she admitted.

“I remember playing in the snow in another place than this,” I said.

“I guess it’s either this or the void,” she said.

I scratched her back till she fell asleep.

The dog and I went to the river and, on the way, we met Bill. He told me he was due to get his first disability check.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I can’t quite remember,” he said. “I got hurt on the job, something fell on me. I’m set for the rest of my life.”

He asked about the wife and kids and then told me that tomorrow they were burying that guy who had beaned Rasuka with the dog turd. “Mac saw what they did to him,” he told me. “There were about a hundred little holes.”

He bummed a stick off me and we smoked, staring up into the night sky. “Does the Little Dipper ring a bell?” he asked.

I avoided Rasuka and went down in the vale. It always frightens me a little to walk there at night beneath those gnarled branches. What frightened me most tonight was the thought of running into the quiet one there. I let the dog off the leash and moved slowly down. He wasn’t there, neither was anyone else. I stood at the very bottom, the wind sending leaves whizzing like thin dark birds. The dog chased something down the path where it turns into brambles and impassable wood.

Back at home, the television tried to sell me collars for my kids. You just hit a button and it shocks them into being good. “Who comes up with this crap?” I asked my wife even though she was asleep. The sex show tonight was a lot of women getting it on in prison. You know, there was a tall blonde warden with a riding crop. I switched back and forth between that and “The Banal of the Paranormal,” on which they were interviewing a woman who could predict, with a hundred percent accuracy, the moments of the day when she was going to evacuate.

Every day she gets up early and, even before she has a cup of coffee, writes two predictions (hours, minutes, seconds) on a scrap of paper. I couldn’t believe they showed her on the bowl.

I am going to call my wife to bed in a minute. It was a full day in Purgatory. I forgot about Rasuka and the Polychize, because last night was a disappointment. The boys are breathing so loud I can hear them. The dog is taking his position on the couch as my wife gets up. I hear her ankles quietly crack as the boards creak on the stairs. She is standing behind me now, rubbing my shoulders.

---

The guy who sells me my spittle sticks at the convenience store told me his theory about Purgatory this morning. “It’s a ham sandwich without the ham,” he said. “You got to bring your own ham.” I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. “You know that young girl who walks up and down main street—long red hair, tight ass?” I knew who he meant. “Yeah,” he said, “well check her out. She’s got enough ham to cater a wedding.”

“I always wonder about the cheese,” I told him.

“You can’t forget the fuckin cheese,” he said, taking a long toke on the piece of stiff brown rope that was his cigar.

I had to sit before The Committee at work. The old hags groused about my teaching methods, so I told them to go and ask my students what they thought of me.

“Mr. Forte,” they said in unison, “you don’t ask enough questions.” On a television screen behind them they ran a tape of me sitting at my desk, picking my nose and staring off into oblivion. The camera adjusted for a close-up and held me for five long minutes. Every once in a while I would tell the room full of manikins to calm down. I remembered the day that tape was made, I was lecturing on Plato’s Cave.

Nothing ever comes of my meetings with The Committee. I never do anything they say. I told them that I had seen roaches in the hallways of the school, and that ended the meeting. They lightly touched their beard hair and motioned my dismissal. Back in the classroom, my students had patiently awaited my return. I thanked them and began blabbing about the problems I had with my kitchen sink. Then I took the pointer off the board and whacked a couple of them in the head. The hollow thunkings resounded in the closed room and dust flew off their clothes. “Did you catch that?” I said to the hidden video camera.

This afternoon, when I got home from work, I put the little one in the carriage and went for a walk. We journeyed down by the creek. The sky was overcast and it was unseasonably cool for Purgatory. “Don’t tell me it’s actually going to rain,” I said to my son. On our way we saw a mother duck with her new babies. “So fuzzy,” he said. We saw rabbits chasing each other in a circle on someone’s front lawn. We saw red wing black birds and blue heron, jays and pigeons, swallows, purple finch. It did rain. The first time since I could remember.

We hurried over the creek bridge and ducked inside the stone shelter that some people use for parties. It is built of modest boulders and is octagonal in design. There are wide open windows, stone benches lining the walls and a huge primitive fireplace, blackened and slick with grease splatter from the annual Squirrel Meat Festival. My son wanted to get out and run around through the shadows. I just watched the miraculous rain come down and wondered whether Colonel Rasuka was going to take credit for it.

I almost forgot to tell you that this morning, when I got up and went down into the kitchen in my underwear to start the coffee, I looked out the window and saw Helen standing in my backyard, staring in at me. I opened the window and said, “How was your trip?”

She didn’t look well at all. “They told me that any day my check was coming from the estate,” she said.

“Who told you,” I asked.

“You know, the one made out of wood with that long nozzle of a nose for sucking you up.”

“I don’t know that one,” I told her.

She dropped to her hands and knees, craned her neck back and said, “Walk me!”

I shut the window and went upstairs to take a shower.

A little spice goes a long way when you are talking turkey meatballs. My wife has been dabbling with the recipe. My eyes sweated, my tongue burned, but I ate them all. At dinner we talked about the rain. The baby told about the ducks and I informed my wife as to Helen’s visit. She went on about her job at the hospital, where the entire nursing staff, twenty in all, care for a single dead body. “We keep waiting for old Melow to decompose, but he never does,” she said.

“What is he, a mummy?” I asked.

She took a sip of coffee and shook her head. “One of the doctors described Melow to me as a ‘degenerate slough wader who has not been beckoned’. I think he’s made out of that shit the Colonel is made of.”

After dinner I wrestled with the boys and read to them from The Purgatory Anthology of Light Verse. Their favorite is “The Man From Coolcannan”:

There once was a man from Coolcannan

Who wasn’t sure how to put his brain in

He went to the store

He bought two more

Now his wife is always complainin’

I always love to see them sleeping. Their blonde crew cuts and serious expressions, their twitches and the lidded movement of their eyes as they follow some dream. I stayed with them after singing the songs and just watched them drift off to sleep in the dim glow of the night light. Outside, the wind blew. The sound of the television from downstairs mixed its murmur with the whisper of their breathing.

I had been sitting there a long time when the dog finally came in and tugged at my shirt sleeve. Wood and I walked through the park, through the thicket of birches, to the edge. On the way back, we passed the house of The Committee. The windows were wide open and the sound of opera, played on a wind-up phonograph, drifted across the park. I saw them in there, sitting in straight back chairs, all together, listening and smoking pipes. They are definitely in with whoever or whatever is behind Purgatory. They have to be. I’ve never seen women that ugly.

Tomorrow is another day. I am so weary tonight, but I will end with one more thing I came across this afternoon. There was a leaf suspended in mid-air over the sidewalk on the way to the park. I pointed it out to my son, and we both just stared at it a long time. As we got closer, though, I saw that it was held in place by the merest strands of spider web. My son motioned to me to free it and let it fall, but I left it as it was and moved on. Now, the tired silence has brought the wind chime on the porch to life. I hope we do it tonight, so I can sleep without dreaming of the way it had been.

---

The Polychize flew, screeching through my thoughts this morning on the way to work. Colonel Rasuka in his bodily form was firing his pistol into the air as the threatening heads, jagged toothed and hungry for blood, whizzed by at an arms length. The Colonel’s personal body guard, the foliate, Moissac, a vegetal creature in human form, raised his long bow and fired, obliterating an eye. Things were heating up in the dripping ancient city. They were so close to the treasure. Rasuka could smell the riches above the scent of slaughter.

It was all so real until my own eye happened to catch sight of the girl with the red hair. I perused her ham from my passing car and speculated as to where she was always so purposefully off to. The next thing I knew, I was in front of my class, carrying on with little conviction about the sublime and the beautiful and the intersection of future present and perfect past. My gracious students understood the absurdity of it, but they held their tongues. Eventually my words petered out and I sat at my desk, putting my head down on my folded arms.

Then, I wasn’t sure if I daydreamed it or I actually heard it, but my name came slithering through the room on a whisper. I looked up but could not see him back there in the last row, his face blocked by the plastic heads in the front of the room, but I did see his foot in the aisle, tapping slowly. “Forte,” he said, “do you remember?”

I nodded and that was enough of an answer for him. “Do you know why you are here?” he asked like a shower of chalk dust.

“I work here,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of some sin, I suppose.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he said, his voice melting into a bronchial laughter that mimicked the breathing of my sons. “What does the universe care about sin?”

“Then why?” I asked.

His foot stopped tapping in the aisle.

“Forte,” he said after a long silence.

“I’m still here,” I said.

“Would you like to go back? Would you like not to feel that certain, shall I say, undertow?”

“I don’t know which is worse,” I said, “the forgetting or the remembering.”

“I can make you forget the forgetting,” he said.

“I can take you back to where you had been. This will all be just a moment’s lapse of clarity in a bright day.”

“Who are you?” I asked and got up and walked down the aisle. The manikin was back in place where he had been sitting. Then I heard the classroom door close.

This afternoon my older son brought home from school a photograph of himself holding his student of the month certificate. His round face was rounder with a closed mouth smile that held back pride. He had the certificate across his chest and his legs were spread in a perfect V. “Do you love this?” he asked.

I told him three times how much I did.

“Then, it’s yours,” he said and handed it to me.

“We’ll have to get a frame,” I said.

“We’ve been in school a hundred and sixty-five days,” he told me, “and my snowflake hasn’t fallen once.”

I gave Wood a bath out in the backyard with the hose while the kids messed around in their plastic wading pool. Bill came to the back fence and asked me if I would hold the extension ladder for him so he could pull some bird’s nests down from the eaves of his house. I held it and he hobbled up thirty feet and started dislodging handfuls of hay and twigs, shredded spittle stick filters and bits of string. It rained down dreamlike. But right in the middle of the slow falling—plop, plop, plop, three sightless baby birds hit the ground like ripe fruit.

I took the kids inside before Bill dug a hole with the shovel. I watched from the fence as he scooted them, writhing and chirping, into their grave.

“This is really fucked,” he said, shaking his head, and then he put the dirt in. We heard them from underground and so did their mother, who now had landed in the lilac and was frantically calling for them. “I oughta kill her too,” he said, stepping down on the spot, “but then where would it end?”

My wife came home from work as I was serving dinner. She had just heard on the car radio that Rasuka had vanished. We ate quickly, and then got the kids ready. We went down to the river like everyone else and just stood there staring at the spot where the head of the Colonel had sat forever. I didn’t see anyone in shock. We all just started talking about the Colonel, telling Colonel stories. Right in the middle of it, I had a fleeting ancient memory of cooking marshmallows at a barbecue. It was late when we left and the kids chased fireflies on the way home.

After the boys were asleep, my wife and I sat outside in the lawn chairs, staring at the sky. She had a glass of wine and I had a beer. I was smoking a spittle stick, blowing rings.

“Colonel Rasuka,” I said.

“He was a turkey meatball,” she said and we both broke up. But later, when I was watching the distant stars change color, I knew that the Colonel and Moissac had reached the treasure vault in the City of the Polychize. Through catacombs of the moaning half-dead, dripping with saliva, they ran. Down wrought iron staircases, deeper and deeper into the concrete earth.

I think I will barely be able to make it to the bed. The sounds of that crying mother bird have just come to me from out of the night and they are interrupting my thoughts of the quiet one. Since we never made it for a walk, Wood will look at me with disappointment as I pass him in the hall. I’ll stare at the ripped Japanese curtains and listen to the train moving rapidly to nowhere. I’ll wait for the breeze. Somewhere in the middle of the night I’ll hear a gun shot and that bird will stop crying.

---

This was the day, the needle’s eye, so to speak. I woke to an empty house. On the kitchen table there was a note from my wife that she had decided to call in sick at work and spend the day with the kids. She had already called the baby-sitter and gave her the day off. They had taken the carriage and gone for a walk along the river and then were going to get lunch in town. I made coffee and ate some cantaloupe and looked out the back window to see if Helen was around. As I stared out into the empty yard, I thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to stiff work too.”

I called in and got one of The Committee. I think it was the one who wears these shiny polyester jackets and skirts, the one I call Jawbone of an Ass, but their voices are so similar, every word a creak and two groans, I could never be sure. “I’m sick,” I told her.

“Sick?” she said.

I thought quick. “A twenty four hour virus,” I said.

“How can you be sure?” she asked.

“I’ve been sick for twelve hours,” I told her, “and I feel like I’m going to be sick for another twelve.”

“I’ll make a note of it in your file,” she said and hung up.

“Screw her,” I said to Wood who was sitting in the kitchen staring at me.

I walked along the river, looking for them. Then I went up into town and checked the pizza place and the diner. I stopped a few people and asked if they had seen them. The red haired girl told me she had seen them walking off toward the park a half hour earlier. I thanked her and watched her walk away. Over at the park, it was beautiful. The air was cool and I sat for a while in front of the pond, watching the ducks and smoking a spittle stick. I thought if I stayed put, they might find me. After a long time I got up and headed home.

The minute I opened the door of the house, I knew it was empty, and that’s when I first felt something was up. I stood in the living room and listened to the dripping of the faucet in the upstairs bathroom. Then the phone rang. I answered it and the minute I heard the breathing, I knew it was the quiet one. I stayed on the line, waiting for him to speak. It took a few minutes to realize that what I mistook for a light hum in the receiver was actually him speaking. He seemed so far away and his words were pin prick whispers.

“I can’t hear a damn thing your saying,” I told him. He went on and on his voice rising and falling. Finally I hung up.

I went back to Bill’s house and told him what I thought was going on and asked to borrow his gun. He wouldn’t lend me the gun but he said he would come with me and bring it along. We drove around town in his beat up old convertible, looking everywhere for them. “I’ll do what needs to be done,” Bill told me, “but don’t ask me to think about this.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

After checking all the stores and asking questions, we drove back along the river and spotted a woman walking, pushing a baby carriage like ours. From behind, the woman looked so much like my wife and the boy walking next to her looked like my older son. When Bill stopped the car, and I got out, though, I saw them up close from the front, and they weren’t my family.

We went back to my place eventually and sat around drinking beer, waiting for them to either come home or to get some kind of message from the quiet one. I smoked a spittle stick and the beer and the smoke put me in a kind of daze which eased my nerves somewhat. I sat back on the couch and listened to the music Bill had put on the stereo. As I sat there I began to think of the dreams I had been having of before Purgatory. Some of them played themselves out again and others wove together and then shredded to reveal another mixed with another and coming apart at the seams. It all appeared to be leading to some ultimate answer.

When I came to, it was dark outside and Bill had gone. The house was utterly silent again and I focused on the dripping faucet. I got up, leashed the dog and went out. I knew I was headed for the vale and that the quiet one would be there waiting to make me forget the forgetting. I walked quickly, and even Wood did not stop to pee on every telephone pole but also seemed to walk with purpose.

Down along the river, the wind was blowing, and as I passed, I thought about the Colonel. Just then, he and Moissac were lifting handfuls of jewels and letting them run through their fingers. All around them in the treasure vault lay the lifeless bodies of the enormous painted clay figures they had hacked and skewered and chopped their way through to get to the end of the story. The colonel stopped in the middle of his revelry, looked directly out at me and said, “Here it is needful to use a little skill in keeping close, now hither, now thither, to the side which is going away.”

In the vale, I found them all—my wife, the kids, Bill, the red haired girl, Helen, the Committee, the guy at the spittle stick store with the ham theory. They formed a single line at the head of which stood the quiet one. A path had opened up in the woods where previously it had been impassable. As I arrived, the quiet one was mumbling something in the ear of the red haired girl. She listened intently, and then strode off at her usual pace down the path. Half way to the point where it turned out of sight, there was a bright flash of light and she disappeared. I ran over to my wife and put my arms around her, but she was rigid and she felt nothing, saw nothing but the quiet one. I hugged the boys and tried to get them to notice me, but they couldn’t.

“Mr. Forte,” the quiet one said to me. “Please take your place in line.” Wood growled and the hair went up on his back. “You will not be taking the dog, let him go.” I let Wood off the leash and he ran out of sight into the thickets. As the Committee, one by one stepped up and were whispered to by the quiet one, I stood in line, my mind racing. Flash, flash, flash, the old crones were fed to oblivion and the spittle stick salesman stepped forward. After him it would be Bill and then my wife and sons. The tension I felt made me begin to twist the dog leash in my hands, and when I noticed this, I knew I was going to strangle the quiet one with it.

Helen went with more of a fizz than a bang, and the spittle stick salesman followed her lead. Then Bill took his place. As the quiet one leaned over to whisper in Bill’s ear, I made my move. I broke from the line and ran at him, the leash twisted around my hands and held up in front of me. He saw me coming and he smiled. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground. An explosion had gone off in my mind. In the flash and the bang, less than a second, I glimpsed the entirety of my life before Purgatory. The experience had stunned me and I knew it had come from the quiet one. “I’ll have to take you the hard way,” he said. He smiled and another jolt passed through my thoughts, making my eyes bulge and my tongue loll.

In between the jolts, I would come to consciousness and see him begin to grin again. In one of these strobe flashes, I saw Bill holding his gun to the head of the quiet one, and then deep in the afternoon of my previous existence, my other wife was serving tea in glass cups in our living room. “I got a call from Berrin today,” she said. Her hair was brown and hung down in ringlets that covered her ears and forehead. I looked out the window and saw a plane pass high above the roof tops of the development. “What’s with Berrin,” I asked, playing along. “Berrin says…” Just then a beautiful round faced child came to the entrance to the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if it was a boy or a girl, but its hair was silky bangs and its eyes were a startling green. “Mr. Farley is shooting his dog,” it said.

Then I heard the gun shot. Its noise echoed out and ate its way through everything like acid. When the smoke cleared, I was here, sitting writing to you. My wife is asleep, downstairs, laying in front of the television. The boys are breathing steadily. Wood is lying on the floor behind my chair. I know if I go downstairs there will be Turkey meatball left overs waiting for me. Tomorrow, I’ll take these last few days entries and rip them out of my diary and stuff them in an empty beer bottle. Then when I walk with Wood tomorrow night, through the park to the edge, I will toss them out into the void where they belong. Some time years from now, I will remember this, but the memory will be tattered, partially eaten and half forgotten. For now, I will have a spittle stick, listen to the breathing and study the quiet.