Some glances.

You drive for ten hours. You drive for twenty. Driving for days makes you not want to stop driving. To drive to the end and drive right back. Never fleeing. Moving. Looking. Driving for days makes you want to stop. To walk. To touch. To put a branch into your hands. Feel its snow. Hear your feet under it. Driving for days makes you lock your eyes to your feet. It makes you push. It makes you write yourself in the second person only.

Each day dresses itself in a week. A month ago the sun broke its sunrise over your trunk and you passed through the Appalachians. Then Kentucky. Hills mined beyond recognition. Chewed by tractors. Nibbled through to their ribs. If there are trees they are infants. Mechanical claws, wheels drills rotors land themselves like insects over the slopes.

The trans-Siberian railway continues. You keep going. You drive through the smells of diesel and cost-effectiveness. Your eyes red themselves with exhaust. You try to look. To tell what you see. The perverted anonymity of motel rooms. Gas stations where chewing tobacco receives a separate isle. I-Hop diners where miners row themselves in front of Football telecasts with the attentive concern of UN delegates. Where Evangelical crosses stick lit and gleaming out of the night forest. Where the earth tilts and the hills slide off.

Where you see with your own eyes what silence looks like. Where “nothing” turns into a qualitative object. Where the earth is flat. Where next weeks’ weather hangs at the far end of the chessboard. Where people use words like “ours” and “here.”

You keep on going. You go past “just over there.” You go where ghost cities of highrises form themselves like playing blocks over the snow carpet. Where you move like a fly towards them. Where even these glass sentries seem to lean on each other under the winds that keep on and on on on on on from nowhere on to nowhere.

But sooner or later everybody sleeps. For the first time in years you slide into the backseat. You are little again. Everything is simple. You close your eyes.

And resting your nose on the metallic cold of the glass you again open them. You are on a local road, the sun is heavy over the side of your neck. In the front seats parents are hoping for gas. A forgotten stable passes you on the other side of the window. Then a bit of snow. Then your eyes snap open. You slide up in the seat look back over the trunk reach for balance, reach over the seats and suddenly and unexpectedly –

“Stop!”

The trouble with being in a car with a critic and a drag queen is that they never agree on anything. The radio becomes a fumble of half-songs. Decades come back in a very big way. Joni Mitchell. Michael Jackson. Smiths. Stripes. Deborah Harry. David Byrne. Bowie. A lot of Bowie. Each trend is defined. Argued. Defended. Cigarettes stay lit for miles. Simona becomes a caravan of a smoking section.

Cassie turns out to be quite a character. One hour out of the city and we can suddenly no longer go west. A phone call from her father changes everything. She begins to claw at her mouth, her teeth grip every nail, she hugs the seatbelt, she pounces at the window.

“We can’t,” she says, “we can’t cant can’t can’t can’t.”

“Can’t what?” I ask. For some reason I’m driving. Earl never made it.

“We’re gonna be right in the storm, we can’t,” she says. Rainman-like she begins to sway in her seat. “Can’t do it,” she repeats.

I try to keep my eyes on the road. I had never seen anything like it. With the intensity of a woman in labor, Georgette gives out a moan from the backseat. This is the city talking, I realize. The withdrawal kicking in, the cockpit shaking itself open at takeoff.

“What do you want to do?” I ask in my most therapeutic, grandparent-sedating voice.

“We have to go South,” she states.

“South?” I ask and find myself instantly wishing for my table and my space and nothing else.

“South,” she states. She holds her cell phone to her mouth. She holds it between her palms, they are drawn together.

“How can we go South?” I ask.

“We have to,” Cassie says with the determination of a hijacker. “We will go down just a bit then go West. We’ll pass the storm.”

I look at her. She nods to herself.

“Darling, let us just do it,” Georgette chimes in.

I look in the rearview, I look all around. There’s no help. We take an exit. We go south. Just a bit turns into three states.

We go way South.


Somewhere in the Appalachians we stop. The clouds float algae-like near the hills, the sun sinks in them slowly. It’s one hell of a sun. Cassie is ecstatic. We’re on a two-lane country road looking for the waffle house.

“Waffle house! Waffle house!” Cassie yells over a Save Ferris track. Yes, dear readers, I have gotten a doctorate in the 80’s. Just in case you’ve missed it the first time.

“It’s right by here,” Cassie keeps on, “I know it.”

The Men in Black anthem comes over a vintage radio station. This tips everything over. In her knitted hat, Cassie dances in her seat, she bangs on the glove compartment.

“Waffle house!”

She can’t contain herself. I can feel Georgette exhale slightly in the backseat. I snap my head back just for a moment. He has his fingers under the tip of his ear, his knees draw together towards the door. His eyes pass over a barn, a field.

We never find waffles. We find a rest stop and park. Cassie is a different person. She floats out of the car ethereal, with the passivity of a spirit. She is heartbroken, I know that. Georgette knows it too. Despite his seeming annoyance with her, he walks along, he slips his arm under hers. Together they walk under the oversized Chilli’s sign. I lock the car and walk to the edge of the parking lot. I could never like rest stops, these roadhouses of deja-vu, of ray ban stands and unused payphones and stationary eighteen-wheelers, of groundhog days and mornings and minutes just waiting for you to step into them and buy something.

I stand by where the concrete ends and the grass starts, ahead of me is a field big enough to land a plane on, if only it wasn’t part swamp. A flock of about thirty birds grows miniature over the green and yellow crust of the algae. Across the field I spot a small house. It looks real, it looks warm. I exhale.

I find the bathroom without trouble and do what I have to do. I take an extra long time to do it. I wash my hands in the sink, I make the water as hot as it can get, I wash my face, my hair, the back of my neck. A few stalls into the bathroom a father commands his son on how to urinate. I dip my fingers into the already wet center of the paper-towel roll, I spin myself what I need and a little bit more. I bring the dry and patternless paper to my face, I sink my lids into it. I try to tell myself who I am. Who I’m not. Or at least, I try to make sure I can remember.

There are so many things you remember when looking out the window. He asks me if I'm all right and I say that I am. We shake hands. He gives me a four-piece pseudonym. Because he's not wearing his makeup I dub him a he. He slips something pink with his glass of red. Thinking of Shelby I dub him Georgette.

Above the corner of the living room the BQE maternally rubs the ceiling to sleep with its rumble. A florescent cow hangs from the ceiling. The walls are turquoise. Or pink. I was never too good with colors. The cow has tits that expand and contract. They change colors too.

Georgette fumbles through a youtube selection. A break in the music and depeche mode fills the room.

"No more eighties," Cassie yelps from the couch, her chin a paperweight over the tops of her blouse. Cassie is a literary critic, the true and clear mind of this apartment, the master of rubricked creativity. "Earl!" she yells.

Earl is in the bedroom. In Georgette's room, to be precise. There is a bed and a moat of socks and scraps about six inches wide around it. There isn't much else. Earl is on the bed in an evening gown putting on lipstick.

He snaps something back with a voice of a mechanic. A few fucking minutes. OK?

OK.

We wait.

Georgette snugs next to me on the couch. I readjust myself slightly. Valium is really best for shopping, he tells me. But you have to know what you want. Every time I go, I feel like a conductor, he tells me. He swings his arms masterfully.

"And then cheese, then bread, then that awful dip," he explains. Somewhere in the background Psycho Killer comes on. Heads talk. He bobs his head. He has a ring of keys around his neck. They swing left. They swing right.

"But if you don't make a list, you will just swipe everything," he tells me. "And then you'll just be like - god, what are these things doing here?"

He continues talking. His British accent is beautiful. He tells me of the local bands in Brighton. I don't listen.

Outside of the window the grey popped like popcorn. Since sundown it held together. Then it snapped. Flakes fall. Suddenly there is no end to them. They put me in a reflective mood. My mind thinks of everything.

Earl paces out. He has thin legs and the heels work. The dress doesn't. Everybody stays quiet. Slowly, bodies begin to lift themselves up. We shuffle down the stairs soldier-like. No words are wasted. Earl opens the door. We step back into the factory of cold. Steel beams. Warehouses. Not a tree in sight. Earl balances himself down the stoop stairs.

Simona waits for us at the curb. Simona is a Ford Focus whose doors look like they've been kissed by a rhino. Earl opens the driver door, slides in and reaches around the cabin to unlock the other ones. Cassie and Georgette stand near their respective places.

"Well?" Cassie looks at me.

"You really should come," Georgette adds politely. He is standing by the passenger door, leaning his torso out, hugging the sides of his face with his red curls. He really does pull it off better than the other two, even without the makeup.

I stand and I look at them. It's cold, unbearably cold. Flakes have turned hard and they slap the back of my neck. In an hour we will pick up Cassie's girlfriend. Her voice will be deeper than mine, I remember that. We will go to a warm nook in Brooklyn where we will watch boys dance the dance of not being boys. Then back to Simona. Then to the Pacific. Twenty minutes ago they figured it all out.

I stand and I look at them. What does one do? Conscious attempts to not_run from yourself only seem to make your feet move faster. What does one pack? What does one pack when making a miniature mess of life? A toothbrush? Dreams that you can always see when you close your eyes? Things that you stubbornly continue to believe in?

My feet don't move. Behind Simona the BQE sloshes passively. Three men appear from around the corner. Their eyes focus on us with the intensity of forest animals. They quickly disappear into a cellar.

"Well?!" Cassie nods and shakes her head. She twitches at her nose ring.

I stand. For once, despite anything, perhaps because of everything, this is suddenly one city I do not want to flee from.

I close my eyes. I feel the flakes ring over my lids. Swaying, I keep them closed.

If only for a little bit.

It has been difficult to write lately. December has been thick, so abundantly thick with its air, it often seems like a Herculean task merely to lift the pen out of the pocket, to prop the eyelids open with it, to look, to scribble, to look. Everybody seems to be just trying_to_make_it. The weekend, the vacation, the pillow. Some place where you can exhale, feel yourself, breathe. Heads move quietly and obediently in and out of the train. Ties gargle cigarette smoke by the canisters. Electricity replaces sunlight. And one can’t help but ask – where’s the story in that? Where is the story?

So you begin to look. Not at just how the womans’ cheekbones tell you “I’ve seen some shit in my time,” not just at how the street musician wraps the saxophone around his neck like a dance partner, but more. More. Where’s the story? What is it? How is it? Where does it all come from?

Walking home I see always an old man with the flattest stare god has ever slapped across a human face. It’s simply a disk, an empty plate, asking for nothing, saying nothing. He is in a wheelchair by the entrance. The twilight thins over the retirement home, no one pulls him in, no one pulls him out. He sits. His face sits. The chair stands. I wonder time and time again - what is he thinking about?

Here, of course, he is mine, and I can stuff him with anything. The fact is, (I can say) his face is paralyzed. He had fallen asleep with the window open several years ago and had woken up immobile. A freak accident. It happens. He sits now and wonders about the new pool they are installing in the retirement home. He cannot, for the life of him, understand why someone would install a swimming pool in a residence where nobody can even walk. His mind crawls over itself. It is all he thinks about. When his daughter phones him he walks her through each possible conspiracy.

(Here, he is able to talk. We dutifully suspend our disbelief).

The conspiracies drive his daughter mad. She becomes haunted with dreams of management buyouts, retirement homes turned luxury apartment complexes, nurse bribes, retiree diasporas, her fathers’ possible schizophrenia (she had never seen the swimming pool), and so on. She becomes irritable, paranoid, and upset. She begins to frequent the gym with the passion of an antichrist. She begins to squirm from her husband who is a former top-line project manager but now teaches typing classes in Albany. His self-esteem sinks even lower. He begins to call Svetlana, his former lover in Tashkent. Svetlana, a mid-aged sales clerk with a warm face and subtle, charming wrinkles begins to dream of an exit visa. She begins to reminisce more and more of the old theater where they had met. He was in charge of the stage, the lights, it was Leningrad in the 80’s and anything, for that brief and inescapable moment, was possible. These thoughts chain her into a state of constant anxiety. Svetlana begins to neglect customers and more and more frequent the local theater. She begins to re-read her copies of Shakespeare and Pasternak. She begins to fumble with plates, hum in the shower. Three times a month she goes to the store to buy eggs and two times a month coming back she drops them. In the autumn of 2007 the streets of Tashkent become glazed with the clear and yellow jelly of broken white shells. People slip.

And so on.

But - these stories, even if I can muse on them, are not mine. I have come to realize that. My stories are much closer, they are right. here. Still, as so often it happens, I cannot reach them. It’s the things that are closest to us, after all, that are hardest to grasp, the hardest to understand. Can it be, after all this scribbling, that our own stories are the hardest of them to tell? Haven’t we been taught that it is all the other way around?

So, I stop. I look at my ashtray. I look to the side of the table where the wall is an endless white. This has been my space, my endless space between the table and the wall into which I look, into which I scribble. Sometimes. Most of the time I plainly smoke, bend my head down into my open hand, the lit cigarette like a dandelion sticking its way into my hair, I try to close my eyes, to think what I want to say, all the bla’s and none of the bleh’s but then suddenly open my eyes, remembering that they must be open, that I must simply point them into that space and that everything will be all right. But, as they say, it ain’t easy. The space has not always been there. It is not always there now. Hell, I had no idea what it was until I read about it.

Still, it is that space that I come back to and it is in that space that I sometimes begin to see. Small things. A branch, perhaps. My branch. The way it bends like a racing track over the fog. A memory of a basketball game played suddenly comes out of nowhere. Small details here also. A backboard over my head, the pointed shoes of the coach, the feeling of a marionette. Different lifetimes and everything so clear. I stop by one and peak in. I lean my eye closer to the door. And I think, always cannot help but think – what makes it mine? What makes it truly, indescribably mine?


So, here is an old thought: if I am taking a visitor to a place I have been, to a feeling I have felt, should they not see what I see? Feel what I feel? Shouldn’t my consciousness sit on their shoulders like a child leading the way, should it not be the helmet that guides them? But then, what exactly is my consciousness? What is this nasty residue clinging to the sides of my brain, this stained glass mucus of the heart? Where does it come from, and more importantly, what drives it?

I know I am a sucker for images, sounds. A single track in my earphones can dump me straight into my Kharkov apartment and the next sling me out into the narrow Seville streets. Over the years I have grown into a walking switchboard of triggers and somehow I get the feeling I am not the only one with this disease. So, has something changed? Have words, once the precious cargo of horse messengers and heralds, lost their touch? Is the continual abolition of physical distance, the evolution of printing presses from the first moving type to the one I am banging away at this very minute – has this all made words dull, secondhand? Is this changing what we read? How we read? Is the oral tradition coming back in a very big way? Have written words, once the exalted mercenaries of expression, become a form of media? Have they always been? And if so, can they not be combined with other forms, in a one, whole, cohesive dance?

What I have in mind is not quite the picture book, not quite the raw and segregated labels of Warhol and not quite the slaps of chaos of Pollock, but perhaps something inbetween. Something fluid, something that grows, in a sense - a moving type that truly does move. After all, we have a printing press here that is very much recent and very much unused. Isn’t it about time?

Of course, this is all nothing new. Nothing really is. The earth is a grandmother of inspiration. We wrap ourselves warm in its quilt and keep our eyes open. Looking. Saying everything, telling nothing. Coming to the microphone without pride, without ideas, tapping it only so slightly, and, having given our eyes a pass around the room, asking in a soft and leading voice:

Where is the story?

A Bit of Non-Fiction

Sunday. December. The day in a constant evening.

December asks you to clean the apartment. To keep all the lights on. To keep cleaning and cleaning.

December makes you not like the things you say. To dislike even more the things you write.

Understand even less the things you feel.

And then start over.

December makes you snap at the people closest to your heart. And then snap the heart itself.

To keep cleaning and cleaning.

To stop blaming December.

Sitting in bed, the sheets only half way up. For a change not smoking.

Listening to music never heard. Re-reading things never read.

For a change from cover to cover.


Worth a peak:

A very good essay:
What is an author?

Some valid but sad points about identity:
The Saturated Self

What wind moved these flurries? Everything was silent behind the window. They meshed under the streetlight, they clanked against the pole, melted together under the bulb, got ripped apart over the darkness. The whole week the city cracked over its own edge. It had snowed once on Sunday, an unexpected and sweeping whiteness that had debranded the cars, deleafed the trees, leveled the autumn and disappeared. It had melted as soon as it came and now the city was nervous. The holidays stood like a doorman over the streets. Barrel-chested. Heavy. The air thinned. Heads fugued at the store windows, postal workers hackled in the side alleys, everything rattled like a cockpit.

And then it came again. A slow, ethereal march of the flakes, a Tchaikovsky dance of the lilliput swans over the twilight. Like a dream, the snow came only at night. It came at night and changed everything. This was not the post-thanksgiving cold that had prematurely gripped the air, gripping until a thin frost climaxed over the pavements. This was a graceful and pale hand of the unseen, the good and beautiful unseen that was beginning to stick to the windowsills and antennas. Where had it come from?

So often then it seemed as if the world was under occupation. The unseens were everywhere. Car engines scratched satan-like beneath the window one moment and clothes danced lightheartedly over a string the next. The room crashed into your stomach during the night only for the air to be suddenly plentiful in the morning. The world somehow had taken to passing itself in freight trains through the ribs and nobody seemed to know why.

It was only an hour past sunrise and I stood at the street, keeping my eyes on the coats and scarfs and backpacks carefully making their way to the train. There was a thoughtfulness that a newly fallen snow gave to a morning. Feet moved slowly, words slid around the collars without a sound. I stood in a driveway, my head bent, feeling the warm and irreplaceable silence of sunlight over my neck and my nose. There was really nothing like it. Everything was at a sudden yet worried peace. I stayed where I was, feeling the street wake up around me. Doors began to open, exhaust pipes rattled to a start, shoes stepped out over the stoops, they lay their faces slowly to the newly fallen snow. They rubbed their cheeks into it like a pillow. With each step they crunched the powder, they chewed it without a hurry.

Hryuuush.

Hryuuush.

I opened my eyes slightly to the sounds and instantly began taking small notes in my head. I wanted to write something about this, to capture it all somehow. Yet, nothing came. I thought about Hopper, Wyeth, Seurat. The previous night I had went again to the museum, never going up but instead lingering outside by the lobby. Back to back cigarettes and indecision ultimately led me to the store and there I had spent most of the night. Looking around, reading. In truth, there was a Hopper anthology I had always went there to see, and finding an odd copy of it stranded near a guide to Lisa Minelli, I had fled with it to an abandoned corner. For an hour I must have stood there, beats and cellos within my ears, my fingers tracing their way across each print, focusing at a point within the painting where it all seemed to merge. There was something there, there was something undeniably there. But what was it? Was it silence he painted? Was it the frozen movement of the moment? After songs upon songs of tracing, it hit me - the bastard! He was painting the unseen. The unseen stuck between the spaces, locked in bars and bedrooms and gas stations, everyday eating us and massaging us… I lifted my eyes over the book and glanced around. Were the students, the clerks, the shelves, vases books lights – were these all the result of the unseen? Was the unseen all that there really was? Was it the charged ether that seemed to flood the cities? Did the atmosphere merely blanket over its round body, keeping it all from spilling?

I stood at the street thinking of this, watching a car pass here and a parent scold a child there, gathering the seens in an effort to describe the unseen. The sunlight. The people. Small exhales of vapor. Two-legged locomotives choo-choo-ing their way onward. I had always preferred to write in the mornings. The world becomes clear. Simple. Even the unseens slumber calmly and lethargically. Yet nothing would come. I watched the flakes, the few of them still left in the air, slightly pick up, carry over a car and a porch, nestle under a canopy. I thought of ways to describe them. I took in the details. A light wind came again and a nearby rooftop popped soundlessly like a blender, the flakes dancing eagerly upward then downward, dropping into the driveway and coming back up. There was really no way to describe them. No metaphors to build, no mediums to combine. They were flurries, only small little flurries, warm flurries, cold flurries, hard edged and soft flurries dancing in a horrific, beautiful slavery to the wind. I stood in the driveway and watched them, closing my eyes and opening them again, letting my feet grow slightly cold and my nose grow warm.

Careful, we’re in a memory now.

If you feel the need to walk - don’t. Think first of where you want to go.
Places are like taxicabs around here. You just get into one.

So, lets take a look.
Remember, stand still. Distances are nothing.

On our right is a piano. It’s old and the story goes that it was smuggled from Germany during the war. It’s an interesting story, but I will tell it later.

The piano is filled with glass jars filled with water. When you play, if you can play well, the sound floods, it spills and crashes over the apartment. It’s beautiful. Every time I come back I hear its nocturnes. There is never anybody here. You can stay for days.

Listen.

It’s the one in G-Minor. The page that someone ripped at the top. But I put the book back. The piano doesn’t need it.

I have been walking around these walls. Coming back to them. For how long? It’s not always the same. Scholars of travel and of space will argue: time is motion. Motion is time. If you return to the center of your space, to the center of your time, you will find neither.

But I will have to disagree. Kindly.

At this moment the sky is grey outside. Turn a bit more to the right. That door with the glass in it that is hard to see through. That is my room. Peak in.

The windows are closed. Daylight leans over the bookshelf, slightly falls over the new years tree. The tree is in the corner. It’s dry. It must be March then. This year we had left it in for too long. We forgot all about it.

There is a pipe near the window. It sucks up the echoes from the yard. Water drops down like pebbles. It’s March and everything above is melting.

Let us go somewhere else.

Quick.
Through the corridor. The door, the living room (our feet still by the piano).
OK.
We’re here.

It’s warm. Even in the evenings it seems as if the sun never leaves. The grey television screen in the corner holds on to its dust. The vase on a small table near the armchair cradles its mint drops. There’s about four of them there.

And the table! The table where the sun rests in a fixed parallelogram of yellow. The red and white checkered tablecloth.
Everything is good now.

I sit down.

Below me, a bowl. Beans and lettuce and sour cream in a soup that is green and white with everything. To the left, a white little plate, a piece of bread, black, the butter - light yellow. Cut into small little pieces. Small little soldiers. To my right, my mother.

I do not see her. I see an old sweatshirt. Flannel.

My mother tells me then of the lost gnome. There were a thousand stories about him. The gnome once found a machine. Wandering through where the forest became thin he found it by accident. The gnome was tiny and the machine was tiny also.

I see it. Small and rectangular like a digital silver watch. Big as a red-checkered square. I pick it up and put it under the shadow of my plate.

My mother continues. He didn’t know what it was, the gnome. But he couldn’t help but tinker with it. He had to figure it all out.

It took him ages.

That was the hardest part, after all. Years passed. Each day the gnome would run from the village into the forest. He would inspect every lever, every switch.

Then it came to life. Suddenly.

The gnome did not know much. What it was about, where it came from in the first place.
He pulled down the cover.
He pressed a button.

He went.

The watch, this streamlined spec of silver, it could take him anywhere. Any place. Any time. Any person. The gnome met kings. He danced with princesses. Ate grapes with Scheherazade. He listened to her stories.

Porters. Mules. Ali Baba. I listen to them and suddenly time begins to coil. Stories within a story, memories within a memory. The room is funny that way. But it is only from this room, from this apartment that I can travel. This is the terminal, it seems. But why?

I become nervous. For a second I step back.

And there is nobody. Everything clicks downward. The rooms are empty.

Still, the sun is where it was. There are small breadcrumbs over the tablecloth. Muted through the door come the rings of the piano.

Suddenly I see everything better.

Everything begins to fill. There are shoes now by the door, near the shelf in the corridor. I am still in the room, but can see them from here. On top of the shelf there are glass bottles. We use them to fill up with water for the piano. I fill them up in the kitchen. I see everything. The cottage cheese drips bored from a sack near the window. A small wooden table, the wood painted white, brown and soaked in the parts chipped away. My feet are still by the piano, do you see? This is simple.

Watch.

The balcony. We’re on it. We’ve gone through the room where the piano stands, where our feet still are. The piano is playing a mazurka now. A song or two had passed.

I look around. Below the balcony is the yard. Ahead, garages. On the left a new building is being pieced together. They have been building it as long as I can remember, and thus, here, now, they are building it always. A piece goes up. The crane lifts it. It will be somebody’s window. Somebody’s kitchen. At ground level, black tiles paste themselves over the fresh cement. The rest of the floors paint themselves beige. Beige upon beige.

And now suddenly we see it from below. The sun breaks over the straight edge of the roof under the sky. We’ve dropped straight into the yard. It wasn’t hard. Memory is soft, after all. It is the soft pillow of possibility. Anything could happen here. We land without a sound.

The new building stretches up and up to our left. We are by a tree. There is a rock, an enormous, primeval rock that stands under it. There are a few tree stumps near it. In the autumn we all use the stumps to climb up onto the rock. We make a mountain of leaves below it. We jump. Then we climb back up again.

I am showing you this because you need to know me. If we’re going to walk here, to go around this yard, to see the alleys that flow out of it, we need to know each other. This place is treacherous. It has a peace like no other but it is worse than any summit tightrope. I have seen people ski off rooftops. Fly off swings. Plainly disappear into the garages.

Look, a small road to the garbage pile and we are near them. Stay close. Some of them are open. Mouths of uncertainty. Black, there is a constant smell of cement dust and oil. There was a man in one of them who lived under a car. I only saw his feet until he was no longer there. Everybody said he was sick and that he ended his life with a screwdriver.

I do not go near them. I walk to the garbage pile quickly, I carry a plastic bucket by my side, there are cucumber peels, apricot seeds, a glass bottle, I woosh the bucket up and everything comes out.

In the winter though, this turns into my favorite place in the yard. No one knows about it and yet it is the most beautiful. The owners close their garages and there is no one here. The yard is empty anyway, always, yet it is then that it truly seems at ease. The poplars crunch their twigs softly under the crisp winter air. Snow spreads like sour cream over the burnt back of the yard.

I come to the garbage pile. In the winter it is covered with flakes and has no smell. There is a small mattress near the garages. I am not afraid to go near them because the owners closed them up until the spring. You put the mattress against the garage, you put the tip of your shoe into the wooden frame, and you ascend. You climb.

On the garage roofs, there is snow. Snow up to your knees. No one touches it. You can plop. Make human toilet seats. Human shadows. Arms out, legs out. Human touches. Visualized.

But it is not winter yet. I stand now (feet still by the piano) within the empty yard. Everything is so big. Sounds come like air balloons at me through the summer warmth. It is summer here, now, it is March back in my room and perhaps September around the checkered table in the living room. That is the kind of time we have here. If a stranger would pass through the yard (as often they do on the way to the university or the park), and would ask me: dear boy, what time is it right now, I would tell him:

It is a different sort of time here, sir. It is not the time that circles around the yard in clouds and stars and airplanes. It is only the kind of time that me and you bring into this yard ourselves, dear sir. It is the sort of time that sits in our bone marrow. It is the beautiful disease that we carry. By stepping back here we infect the air with it.

But it’s all right. Do not worry, sir, do not stir for your briefcase or umbrella. We are inside the spindle now. It spins faster than anything. If someone was to try and find us, the spindle would appear to them as standing still, (as spindles do when they are spun). But we know better.

Sir, the time is: a crumpled time, a fragmented time - time of quarks and pigments and memories. Its outside flow breaks here.

I can tell you that it is morning because near us I see two or three apples in the dirt that no one has yet picked up. I can tell you it is midday because the poplars lull as I remember them when coming back home with a chessboard. We piece together the time around us like a quilt. A quilt of understandings, dreams, who knows what else. We stretch it farther and farther until we can make a tent out of it. Our own little planetarium. Fine sir, sit on the ground with me. Do not worry about your appointments.

Look up.

The time is: poplar trees stretching, the crane crowing over, the swings moving only slightly… who touches them? Who rocks them so softly yet precisely?

We are small now, so small sitting on the ground. I see details, small details of the quilt – the way the playground sand sticks to the wooden planks that guard it, the way a stone edges its way out of the ground like a loose tooth, the small apple forgotten, the poplars so high over everything, the road bending beneath them and their leaves hanging out near the curb. I see the sky, the day, time sweeping the clouds along like a brush – the external time, the outside time, the outer edges of the spindle spinning and spinning…

and you fine sir..

What do you see?