I’m burning with desire for your touch. Aware of lying flat in a cushion of sleep, nothing but birds pecking at specks on either side of my enclosure, aware of there being no sound, I turned and reached for the nearest lung to suck from. Inject me… mmmmm, water tastes good… My teeth vibrate as I grit them hard against the blackening broth of sky above, evidence that my throat was making noise even though I couldn’t hear it. The trees rain phlegm on me in an abysmal storm that is taking place at the threshold between two dark worlds: the living and the dead. My eyes snapped open and I heard drunks yelling down at the creek. Walking through town I noticed tiny numbers encoded on every surface. Strange dates on bridges and tiny plaques like metal scabs all up and down telephone poles. Cryptic codes I would never know encircling hieroglyphs made for some race of secret vagabond police. As night descended I squinted into the horizon and thought I saw the world as it was 300 years ago.
Surfaced in a strange man’s bed. Always draped with some damp sheets, or maybe a sleeping bag unzipped lengthwise. I buried myself deeper. Light seemed to vanish completely amid the heavy, dark cloud of his strange funk, that man-cloth smell like wet bear fur. I had walked so far that I felt like I would never be able to leave, no matter how long I slept. I had a feeling we would be here forever, chained to the furniture of our den with felt wallpapered walls heavy and moist. I dragged myself out from under the rail car and went out walking after midnight, looking for you. What total hell to be a real teen. The realization made me think that perhaps I have never really been one. But it didn’t matter, I was going out to Walgreens to bring as many of them as I could find back to the camp. It had been raining for a week and all the dead, mangled cat-rats I found on the side of the road had filled with water, like mottled fur bladders plugging up cracks in the shiny gravel. I knelt down by one who I originally thought was still alive and stuffed it into a bag for rehabilitation. I soon realized that it was a stupid idea and regretted it immensely, but kept walking. I walked for an hour and a half before I saw another person. A motherfucking cop jerk and I ran into the woods when I saw him. I found a small cardboard box on a fence post and transferred the cat-rat body into it so I could use my bag for sticks. I’ve been walking for so long I felt like my spine was gonna break, so I crashed out under a big tree. But it got worse and I had the paranoid fantasy that there was something out in the woods watching me, getting closer, but always hiding behind trees or along where some cars were parked. For a while I stayed with another guy I knew who lived just outside of town with fibers and streaks like great big branches of veins threading up each arm. He lived in a great big house full of ex-cons, all choking down meds that didn’t belong to them. Escaped, elevated by lightening bolts flying through the air a weird whoosh over and around the trash cans, rattling them like empty mussel shells. He’d been away for a while and his battered relations to other humans carried over to the painful way he hugged me. We trapped ourselves in his room and tore away at each other, an echo of an echo, laughter and screams filtered through droplets inching down his back; we were the sound of aliens, all wound up, unreal. He slumped over the velvet heart in his lap, one or more addicted, jobless vagrants scratching at his door. Later in the day we found them sitting in a line along the living room wall like deflated canteens in the mid-day dead hour. Sleeping potion bottles strapped to their bodies, vaporizer bags punching in and out, up and running sugar swirl gas clamped between yellow teeth. Burning halfway down their windpipes. Nudged an arm and whispers like fucked dirt, shallow breaths all in sync. As I fell asleep outdoors I told myself that nothing would ever actually get me so long as I was out cold — in a dream I told myself that our kind doesn’t die. The carbon monoxide from heavy traffic cutting through the neighborhood to avoid rush hour gave my thoughts a new urgency and I fell into a contagious bout of self-pity. The pieces rattled around in my apron pocket as I neared the site. They were activated. I knew I was close. The pieces threw themselves against the confines of their enclosure, inside the patch pocket taped to my chest, appearing from the outside like a large pulsing cartoon heart, thumping away irregularly.
I happened upon a handful of stately Victorian houses standing hugely vacant on a dark, sandy street. No one was around and it didn’t feel as if anybody had lived here for many years. Certainly not since I’ve been around. The earth fell silent and I darted in and through them, contemplating my next move. The houses emanated their own strange otherworldly heat, unlike that of animals or people. A kind of body heat by stasis and I can’t really describe it any better. A proto-electricity. At any rate they were more or less alive and I jumped in and around and hid in odd corners where they creaked and strained to enclose me.
Outside I noticed an absence of footprints almost immediately and sensed that I was in the presence of a force more ruthless than I could have imagined. A flock of green ex-pet parrots flew overhead without a sound. Wind swirled around so carefully, its heat barely touching my lungs. I breathed pure thoughts and prayed the rain would take me away from this place soon. I ran to the backyard of one of the oppressive structures. I could hardly imagine what I saw in among the torn remnants of a berry bush, feeling my knees pressing into the dusty bramble, lying flat, thrown open like a cask. I opened a jar and flies flew out and got lost in a mess of my hair. I felt them beat their wings around the back of my neck. I was at the center of the world, at one of the special places…
A rail car stood open in a frozen yard, steam of smoky ice resting in billowing rock formations on the tracks. Sunrise, red-woods surrounding us all. I crept in, feeling with my hands in front of me along the damp planks until my hands fell onto the heaving bones of a ribcage rising rapidly in the dark. It spoke of riches unknown to any other traveler. Of course it spoke softly of you, little pet. I wrapped myself up in the remnants of a linen dropcloth and the car sprang forward, climbing to twenty mph as we slept at opposite ends of the cell. I woke up to that same loud pinging noise coming from town and made my way to the Walgreens just before morning. I looked around in some mags and slipped into the backroom, snacking, making a nest for myself high up in the rafters. No one noticed me up there and when I opened that box the next time the cat-rat was just bones. As I walked they rattled around in my apron pocket. The closer I got to the dense wet crush of ferns and other soft greens at the foot of a redwood tree the more the leaves seemed to be making a hissing sound, vibrating oddly in a dustless quiver so quiet I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t listening to the rush of psychic blood at my temples instead. Walking with my head getting heavier and heavier, the exposed trail broke down underfoot, big cracks forming as I made my way deeper into the heart of the forest. I carried broken ferns to a place in the ground and I laid them down as a place for you.