“Don’t look!”
And again it is when he looks below him that he fails. Wanting only to see whence he’d risen. The merest second — less — it takes for it all to come down. It starts at the apsis. East rushes west and the west’s facade can’t take it, crumbling. The walls seem to shrug as they come down on themselves. The black point on the red spike cracks open. Esther spins wriggling between its jagged halves, falling toward the rose window even as the window tilts. It’s all photo-clear. Yang says Whoa. The buttress bows outward and shears. Her fall takes time. Her body rotates slowly through the air, trails a gauze comet. The rose rushes up at her. A mile-high man could catch and cup her among the falling stars; the gauze would follow. It is Day’s failed breath that turns him blue. The blood-colored pane holds the mother inside, awaiting the child to set her free.
There is the sound of impact at a great glass height: terrible, multihued.
ROTATE
The sky is an eye.
The dusk and the dawn are the blood that feeds the eye.
The night is the eye’s drawn lid.
Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant.
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (VI)
RECONSTRUCTED TRANSCRIPT OF
MR. WALTER D. (“WALT”) DELASANDRO JR.’S
PARENTS’ MARRIAGE’S END, MAY 1956
“Don’t love you no more.”
“Right back at you.”
“Divorce your ass.”
“Suits me.”
“Except now what about the doublewide.”
“I get the truck is all I know.”
“You’re saying I get the doublewide you get the truck.”
“All I’m saying is that truck out there’s mine.”
“Then what about the boy.”
“For the truck you mean?”
“You mean you’d want him?”
“You mean otherwise?”
“I’m asking are you saying you’d want him.”
“You’re saying you’d want him then.”
“Look I get the doublewide you get the truck we flip for the boy.”
“That’s what you’re saying?”
“Right here and now we flip for him.”
“Let’s see it.”
“For Christ’s sake it’s just a quarter.”
“Just let’s see it.”
“Jesus here then.”
“All right then.”
“I flip you call?”
“Hows about you flip I call?”
“Quit screwing around.”
BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
B.I. #59 04-98
HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE
EASTCHESTER NY
‘As a child, I watched a great deal of American television. No matter of where my father was being posted, it seemed always that American television was available, with its glorious and powerful women performers. Perhaps this was one more advantage of the importance of my father’s work to the defenses of the state, for we had privileges and lived comfortably. The television program I most preferred then was to watch Bewitched, featuring the American performer Elizabeth Montgomery. It was as a child, while watching this television program, that I experienced my first erotic sensations. It was not for several years, until late in my adolescence, that I was able, however, to trace my sensations and fantasies backward to these episodes of Bewitched and my experiences as the viewer when the protagonist, Elizabeth Montgomery, would perform a circular motion with her hand, accompanied by the sound of a zither or harp, and produce a supernatural effect in which all motion ceased and all the television program’s other characters suddenly were frozen in mid-gesture and were oblivious and rigid, lacking all animation. In these instances time itself appeared to cease, leaving Elizabeth Montgomery free alone to maneuver at her will. Elizabeth Montgomery employed this circular gesture within the program only as a desperate resort to help save her industrialist husband, Darion, from the political disasters which would come if she were exposed as a sorcerer, a frequent threat in the episodes. The program of Bewitched was poorly dubbed, and many details of the narratives I, at my age, did not understand. Yet my fascinations were attached to this great power to freeze the time of the program in its tracks, and to render all the other witnesses frozen and oblivious while she went about her rescue tactics among living statues whom she could again reanimate with the circular gesture when the circumstances called for this. Years later, I began, like many adolescent boys, to masturbate, creating erotic fantasies of my own construction in my imagination as I did so. I was a weak, unathletic, and somewhat sickly adolescent, a scholarly and dreamy youth more like my father, of nervous constitution and little confidence or social outgoingness in those years. It is little wonder that I sought compensation for these weaknesses in erotic fantasies in which I possessed supernatural powers over the women of my choosing in these fantasies. Linked heavily to this childhood program of Bewitched, these masturbation fantasies’ connection to this television program were unknown to me. I had forgotten this. Yet, I learned too well the insupportable responsibilities which come along with power, responsibilities whose awesomeness I have since learned to decline in my adult life since arriving here, which is a story for another time. These masturbation fantasies took their setting from the settings of our actual existences during these times, which were located at the many different military posts to which my father, a great mathematician, brought us, his family, along. My brother and I, separated in age by less than one year, were nevertheless dissimilar in most things. Often, my masturbation fantasies took their settings from the State Exercise Facilities which my mother, a former competitive athlete in youth, religiously attended, exercising enthusiastically each afternoon no matter of where my father’s duties brought us to live for that time. Willingly accompanying her to these facilities on most afternoons of our lives was my brother, an athletic and vigorous person, and often myself as well, at first with reluctance and direct force, and then, as my erotic reveries set there evolved and became more complex and powerful, with a willingness born of reasons of my own. By custom, I was permitted to bring my science books, and sat reading quietly upon a padded bench in a corner of the State Exercise Facility while my brother and mother performed their exercises. For purposes of envisioning, you may imagine these State Exercise Facilities as your nation’s health spa of today, although the equipment used there was less varied and maintained, and an air of heightened security and seriousness was due to the military posts to which the facilities were attached for the uses of personnel. And the athletic clothing of women at the State Exercise Facilities was very different from today, constituting full suits of canvas with belts and straps of leather not unlike this, which was far less revealing than today’s exercise clothing and leaving more to the mind’s eye. Now I will describe the fantasy which evolved at these facilities as a youth and became my masturbation fantasy of those years. You are not offended by this word, masturbate?
Q.
‘And this is an adequate pronunciation of it?’
Q.
‘In the fantasy which I am describing, I would envision myself on such an afternoon at the State Exercise Facilities, and, as I masturbated, I envision myself gazing out across the floor of vigorous exercises to let my gaze fall upon an attractive, sensual, but vigorous and athletic and so highly concentrated on her exercises as to appear unfriendly woman, often resembling many of the attractive, vigorous, humorless young women of the military or civilian atomic engineering services who possessed access to these facilities and exercised with the same forbidding seriousness and intensity as my mother and my brother, who spent long periods of their time often hurling a heavy leather medicine ball between them with extreme force. But in my masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power of my gaze would rattle the chosen woman’s attention, and she would look up from her piece of exercise equipment, gazing around the facility for the source of the irresistible erotic power which had penetrated her consciousness, finally her gaze locating me in my corner across the activity-filled room, such that the object of my gaze and I locked both eyes in a gaze of strong erotic attraction to which the remainder of the vigorously exercising personnel in the room were oblivious. For you see, in the masturbation fantasy I possess a supernatural power, a power of the mind, of which the origin and mechanics are never elaborated, remaining mysterious even to I who possess this secret power and can employ it at my will, a power through which a certain expressive, highly concentrated gaze on my part, directed at the woman who was the object of it, renders her irresistibly attracted toward me. The sexual component of the fantasy, as I masturbate, proceeds to depict this chosen woman and myself copulating in variations of sexual frenzy upon an exercise mat in the room’s center. There is little more to these components of this fantasy, which are sexual and adolescent and, in retrospect, somewhat average, I now realize. I have not yet explained the origins of the American program of Bewitched of my early youth for these fantasies of seduction. Nor of the great secondary power which I also possess in the masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power to halt time and magically to freeze all other of the room’s exercisers in their tracks with a covert circular motion of my hand, to cause all motion and activity in the State Exercise Facility to cease. You must envision these: heavily muscled missile officers held motionless beneath the barbell of a lift, wrestling navigators frozen complexly together, computer technicians’ whirling jump ropes frozen into parabolas of all angle, and the medicine ball hanging frozen between the outstretched arms of my brother and my mother. They and all other witnesses in the exercise room are rendered with but one gesture of my will petrified and insensate, such that the attractive, bewitched, overpowered woman of my choice and myself only remain animated and aware in this dim wooden room with its odors of liniment and unwashed sweating in which now all time has ceased — the seduction occurs outside of the time and movement of the most very basic physics — and as I beckon her to me with a powerful gaze and perhaps as well a slight circular motion of just one finger, and she, overpowered with erotic attraction, comes toward me, I also in turn arise from my bench in the corner and come also toward her as well, until, as in a formal minuet, the woman of the fantasy and I both meet together upon the exercise mat at the room’s exact center, she removing the straps of her heavy clothing with a frenzy of sexual mania while my schoolboy’s uniform is removed with a more controlled and amused deliberation, forcing her to wait in an agony of erotic need. To compress the matters, then there is copulation in varied indistinct positions and ways among the many other petrified, unseeing figures for whom I have stopped time with my hand’s great power. Of course, it is here you may observe this linkage with the program of Bewitched of my childhood sensations. For this additional power, within the fantasy, to freeze living bodies and halt time in the State Exercise Facility, which began merely as a logistical contrivance, became swiftly I think the primary fuel source of the entire masturbation fantasy, a masturbation fantasy which was, as any onlooker can easily be able to tell, a fantasy much more of power than merely of copulation. By this I am saying that envisioning my own great powers — over citizens’ wills and motion, over the flowing of time, the frozen obliviousness of witnesses, over whether my brother and my mother even may move the robust bodies of which they were so justly proud and vain — soon these formed the true nucleus of the fantasy’s power, and it was, unknown to me, to fantasies of this power that I was more truly masturbating. I understand this now. In my youth I did not. I knew, as an adolescent, only that the sustaining of this fantasy of overpowering seduction and copulation required some strict logical plausibility. I am saying in order to masturbate successfully, the scene required a rational logic by which copulation with this exercising woman is plausible in the public of the State Exercise Facility. I was responsible to this logic.’