He paused. “You’ve come here to kill me too, I suppose.”
“What?”
“But you don’t have the guts for it — anymore than he.”
“What?”
“See? I’m not even carrying my gun.”
He pushed his chair back from the table and held out his arms.
The room empties. They have gone to make the call. I walk back and forth shaking a fist in the air. The fuckers! By my wits I have done this thing and the stupid sons of bitches have gone for it. But why not? They will hear him laugh, they’ll hear him say, Yes, let him go. My heart fills with a passionate conviction. He and I are complicitors. We’re both against them. As if, having made this up, I cannot make it work unless I believe it myself.
And I am released. And I strut out of that room bone-cracked, skin-stitched and betrayed and I glare at them all as I lead her by the arm out the door. I take my time. I think the illusion will endure only if I do not break and run. I sleep in Sandy James’ parlor. I sleep eighteen hours. I take her money, buy a truck. I hire two men to load it. In the rear-view mirror I see only a black industrial cloud where Jacktown was. I press the accelerator. Cars turn on their lights, the red lights of moving cars ahead of me. The furniture shifts and bangs against the tailgate. The heavy furniture rises in the air on the bumps. I am in transit on the road, the child bride beside me, bracing herself with her knee against the dashboard and holding her baby tightly. I open the window for the cold air. I want the wind to blow these feelings out of my eyes, blow them away, leave me without memory or love, leave me to myself.
“If you thought I would want to kill you,” I said, “why did you tell them to let me go?”
“What?”
“When the police called from Jacksontown,” I said to him. “With that message.” I was smiling like a fatuous idiot.
“What message? I don’t know what you’re talking about. From whom?”
I choked on the answer. Bennett got up and stood at the parapet. He stood looking over the lake with his hands in his pockets.
That night we steal upon a station of the Tokaido and purchase disguises. We are a country lord and his serving boy. She wears bloused trousers. We travel in this humble manner because my mission is clandestine. Soldiers of the daimyo eye us warily. We book rooms in a modest inn where, to avoid suspicion, I call for a woman. She is a tired fat artiste who responds to the humor of the situation. The two of us climb all over her, I with ordinary lasciviousness, my young ward with the affection of a child for her mother. Of course the old whore is terribly moved. She reaches into the child’s pantaloons, and my hand, like a band of steel, clamps around her wrist. If she discovers my serving boy is a girl, all is lost. Even so the situation is difficult. I use all the sexual arts of which I am capable to divert the old bag. But in the midst of passion I intuit that the more undone she becomes, the more shrewd. It is actually interesting. At the moment of her release she is totally withdrawn and quietly aware that we are not what we appear to be. But her tongue is extended. I grab the tongue and impale it to the polished floor with an awl. I shout and stamp about and raise an uproar. The innkeeper comes to the door. Other travelers come running. I berate the innkeeper for the poor quality of his house. He is abject. The woman moans, rump up, head on the floor, eyes glazed like a pig to be served. I put my foot on her back and behead her. The innkeeper begs my pardon.
At dawn we continue our journey. The sky is pink. We climb the trail alongside an amazing stream, so rock-strewn that the water, broken into millions of drops, falls like the sound of hail and bounces like steel pellets. I scrape the bark from a small pine tree tortured by the wind to grow like sunrays toward the earth. This lime-green powdery moss I allow to dry for four minutes in the palm of my hand. I then lick this powder from my palm and immediately my young love becomes a giantess looking down at me with amazement. I trip her and she falls backward, quaking the earth, I run into her vulva and by that means continue my lifelong search for the godhead. It is some sort of gland somewhere. The way becomes slippery. In this viscous darkness I use my knees and my hands like a water spider. The way becomes narrower. Soon I am flattened, drawn like a mote toward some powerful brilliantly lit eye. I feel myself enlarging. The light is blinding. I become my own size and break her open like an egg.
You are thinking it is a dream. It is no dream. It is the account in helpless linear translation of the unending love of our simultaneous but disynchrous lives.
Data linkage escape this is not emergency
Come with me compute with me
Coupling with me she becomes a couplet
Lovers leap in the sea
A drop of sunlit pee between two lips
Substitute a priapic navigator
I see inappropriate behavior
I recall Father Damien seeing his own pale blue eyes
Regarding him from a face resembling his own enlarged redblue heart
It is a woman, a leperess, expressing his sentiments.
I refer to the paired animals going up the ramp of the ark
Leopard leopard aardvark aardvark porpoise porpoise inchworm inchworm
The story of Noah is the religious vision of cloning.
Scientists tweeze pollen eyedrop spermatozoa
Dispatch flights of sexy sterile white moths to eliminate specie
They notice human lovers commonly resemble each other
Test it at home looking at their wives friends friends wives
Or if not each other then each other’s brother or sister
But in any event that love conducts a shock of recognition
Question haven’t I seen you somewhere before answer yes in the mirror