Close to the Knives (7 page)

Periodically a car would come. It would start as a bright spark in the distance, a glint of hot metal joining the earth and sky, and soon the unraveling shape of clouds of dust would rise beneath rear wheels, and after a long and soundless moment of this speck vibrating against the horizon, its shape would slowly become discernible and fluctuate into largeness and take on the shape of a tourist's camper or a small sedan and it would eventually gain color and the dark windshield would materialize around a face or two that were first just blank smudges and then would gain features as hot air and sound drifted by. In the moment of their approach, we would stop, rearrange our anatomies, zip up our pants and assume the body language and gaze of tourists losing themselves in the sky for an afternoon. Our hands always the hands of fear and apprehension—mixed with pleasure and frustration—until the car revealed its occupants and intentions. The momentary disengagement from the accelerations where the mind travels in sex, the multiple hands floating back and forth on the textures of trousers waiting for the vehicle to disappear so they can resume their rituals and rhythms of unfastening buckles and zippers, and our faces turn away from the hot shield of sky and burrow into the folds of each other's clothes and bodies.

A solitary tiny bird drops out of the air onto an oval-shaped blue stone and pees noiselessly onto its hot surface. The hallucinatory sensation I recall from the depths of fever is the idea that this guy and I are part of the same vascular system; he and I are two eyeballs sitting in the dark recesses of a metallic skull viewing the world through the windshield the way one's eyes would if they could proportion and transmit information independent of each other as well as recall separate private histories. The automobile is a vehicle of motion just like the human body, its motor, the brain, claiming or recalling distance and motion and passage.

My eyes are microscopes. My eyes are magnifying lenses. My face is plowing through the heat and sensations of this guy's flesh, through the waves of sweat, and in my head is the buzzing sensation of either insect or atmosphere. I see the hallucinogenic way his pores are magnified and each hair is discernible from the other and the uncircumcised dick is bouncing up against my lips as it's released from the trousers. The sensation of its thickness pulls against the surface of my tongue and rubs the walls of my throat, burying itself past the gag-reflex and then the slow slide of its withdrawal as a disembodied hand descends against the back of my neck, just barely grazing the hairline of the scalp and in the periphery of vision there's the steel-blue glaze of the steering wheel and the threads weaving themselves into the fabric of his trousers and the sound of his body bending and the cool sensation of my shirt being pulled up over my back and the shock of his tongue trailing saliva up my backbone and under my shoulder blades and I am losing the ability to breathe and feeling a dizziness descend, feeling the drift and breeze created by the whirling dervish, using the centrifugal motion of spinning and spinning and spinning to achieve that weightlessness where polar gravity no longer exists. The sounds of his breath and the echo of body movements I am no longer able to separate. The pressure of the anxiety slips closer in the shape of another vehicle or of the cops arriving, nearing the moment where the soul and the weight of flesh disappears in the fracture of orgasm: the sensation of the soul as a stone skipping across the surface of an abandoned lake, hitting blank spots of consciousness, all the whirl of daily life and civilization spiraling like a noisy funnel into my left ear, everything disintegrating, a hyperventilating break through the barriers of time and space and identity. And all of it mixing with the stream of semen drifting over the line of my jaw and collecting in a pool in a pocket created by the back of my neck where it meets his upper thigh and abdomen. I'm tipping over the edge in slow motion. In the moment of my orgasm, as I'm losing myself, I become vaguely aware of his hands cradling my skull and his face appearing out of the hot sky leaning in, or else he's pulling my face up close to his and I'm breaking the mental and physical barrier, I'm listening to my soul speak in sign language or barely perceptible whisperings and I'm lost in the idea that at the exact moment of the kill, the owl's eyes are always closed, and I feel his tongue burning down my throat and the car is in a seizure and he's smacking me in the face to rouse me from this sleep, leaning in close again like something on the screen of a drive-in movie, his lips forming the whispered sounds, “Where were you?” and had a cop car pulled up in that moment and had I possession of a gun, I'd have not thought twice about opening fire.

These are strange and dangerous times. Some of us are born with the cross hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs or skulls. Sometimes it's a matter of thought, sometimes activity, and most times it's color. I don't receive the proper kind of paycheck to take out a seventy-year lease on my life. If I submit my gray cells to certain men and women in this country for a total overhaul and redesign I might have something called peace in my life. But what one sees if they look closely into the pupils of my eyes are a series of activities that are merely things that have occurred to me in the years of my childhood and teens. Others may be genetic, others a conditioning and response, but overall I trust myself in a way no other could. If those cops showed up in that moment I described above, I thoroughly believe that they have no right and that their laws don't reflect me. It is easy for some in this country to be vicious and murderous when they have the support of rich white men and women in power. Those people consistently abstract human life and treat minorities as nothing more than clay pigeons at a skeet-shooting range. They toss up a fake moral screen, nail it to the wall of a tv and newscaster's set and unfurl it like a movie screen. These fake moral backdrops are conceived at will and displayed like artifacts of the human sensibility as built by a caring god through millions of years.

But the very same man who orders the death of journalists off the coast of costa rica as they are uncovering a story dealing with our government's importation of cocaine and our government's use of drug profits to fund the contras is the very same man who will stand on a studio set, airfield, white house garden or convention podium and talk in the fake moral code about the humane and glorious designs he has planned for the social fabric of america if elected president. And the same man who stands before you at the altar of the church with seven television cameras pointed at his face and talks about the sanctity of the fetus is the same man who kisses the hands of dictators in central america—dictators responsible for the pillaging of an entire country dissolving in poverty, as well as the murder of hundreds of thousands of people he
perceives
as disagreeing with his power structure. The rich have interchangeable heads and their interpretations of law and religion are just as manufactured, false, interchangeable and disposable as the fake moral screen. They have an entire media system to dispense their manipulations of those scrambling for food shelter and some illusion of security. Our borders are opening and closing to refugees of the countries our government pillages, based solely on whether or not those governments toe our party line. The u.s. uses its economic blockades to starve entire populations and accelerate peoples' deaths from malnutrition or collapsed medical care systems. The bureaucratic distancing technique in washington d.c. creates poverty and mass death in another region of the hemisphere and allows officials here to proclaim that the attacked country's political system is what has made it fail. Because I am born into a created system of corruption does not mean I have to turn the other way when the fake moral screens are unfurled. I am just as capable of creating my own moral contexts. In fact, using our government's techniques, I can reinvent and redefine a screen for my own needs. Since my existence is essentially outlawed before I even come into knowledge of what my desires are or what my sensibility is, then I can only step back from the arms of government and organized religion and use similar techniques to walk from
here
to
there
. If the cops roll up in their vehicle with their shotguns cradled and bolted between the front seats, and the design of their genes and gray cells makes it possible for them to put the guns on our bodies, then I can in that moment unfurl a screen that creates a horizon and landscape that is uninfected by the letters and words of “law” and pull out my weapon and defend myself from intrusive and disruptive actions. Of course, those in power count on the fact that we are stuck inside these gravity vehicles called bodies. The pressure that gravity sustains on our bodies keeps us crawling around in this preinvented existence with the neighbors split-rail fencing preventing us from crawling out. The pressure for escape has led us from our tadpole ancestors through time till now to develop an appetite for speed. Speed of consumption, speed of physical movement, speed of transmitting and receiving information. Since speed is a luxury for those who have power and money, many of us have traded physical speed for fantasy like this mental projection: surround ourselves with enough material goods and maybe we won't see the stinking mess outside the windows, if we are lucky enough to have windows. It is no accident that every guidebook in every conceivable language contains the translated phrase:
DO YOU HAVE A ROOM WITH A BETTER VIEW
?

This morning I woke up in another part of my brain. Take the idea, for a moment, that one usually wakes up in a similar area of the brain every day of one's life. When I opened my eyes, I woke with a feeling of confusion and a sense that something indiscernible had shifted during the sleeping hours and now I was somewhere else, not in another place physically, but something similar. The “I” of
my self
had crawled through the thickness of memory and consciousness to some other place in the structure of the brain and emerged within a new gray coil. When my eyes opened, I felt I was viewing the once familiar room through a four-foot-thick piece of slightly yellowed glass. It was like being under the surface of a pond and opening one's eyes and straining to see a measure of distance to the kicking legs of one's swimming partner, only there was no one else with which to measure the dislocation. I fought the urge to lay down and return to sleep in order to regain my proper place, to shift back into a developing place where for thirty-odd years I'd been waking up. I've been moving around through the day trying to readjust within a mild sense of panic. I kept getting lost in the notion that the drift of my past and the sway of familiarity might be just a centimeter away. But in the brain, a mere centimeter can mean hundreds of miles of cranial distance. It can mean years and years, or even a whole lifetime of familiarity being dismantled by a shift within a limited physical space.

Two fragments of dreaming I can recall from this sleep: I was suffocating, walking through doorways or in the street just having exited from a building. There were people walking around and I felt the presence of someone I knew just over my shoulder. I felt a panic from being unable to breathe, but I couldn't speak to anyone. Finally I managed to holler and it caused my breathing to resume and the dream shifted.… I was in a bathroom standing in front of a mirror hanging over a sink. I saw my eyes in close-up magnification. I saw dull brownish yellow marks on the whites of my eyes like they were bruised or rotting from the inside out.

I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach. The hand holding the burning cigarette travels sideways like a storm cloud drifting over the open desert. How far can I reach? I'm in a car traveling the folds of the southwest region of the country and the road is steadying out and becoming flat and giving off an energy like a vortex leading into the horizon line. I'm getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom. It's the preferable sensation of arriving at a movie fifteen minutes late and departing twenty minutes later and retrieving an echo of
real life
as opposed to a tar pit sensation. Destination is an entry point for the practitioners of the fake moral screens.

Forty miles outside of town, drifting through a section of countryside controlled by the marine corps air station, I'm beginning to experience the slow withdrawal from population. My body is going through slender jitters inside all the space outside the enclosed windows of the car and I feel something concrete slipping off a ledge back there behind my eyes. I was up until this moment a member of the industrialized tribe—the illusory tribe that catapults this nation, this society, into something thick and hallucinogenic. The hand with the cigarette is slowly making its way back across the hip of the horizon. Its slow-motion drift creates a dark spot below it like a cloud shadow on the landscape that travels at the same speed. The hand with the cigarette is drifting for hours back to my waiting lips. What is it in these wrists that grab the steering wheel? What blood flows through these arms and hands? What color and sensibility in that blood? What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world toward my eyes? What do these eyes have. to do with surveillance cameras? What do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring? I'm the robotic kid with caucasian kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks. I'm the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the preinvented world. I'm the robotic kid gone haywire in the sudden mounds and coils of krazy-kat landscapes. I'm the robotic kid lost for a fraction of evolutionary time in the outskirts of tribal boundaries; I've slipped through the keyhole of an enormous psychic erector set of a child civilization. I'm the robotic kid lost from the blind eye of government and wandering the edges of a computerized landscape; all civilization is turning like one huge gear in my forehead. I'm seeing my hands and feet grow thousands of miles long and millions of years old and I'm experiencing the exertion it takes to move these programmed limbs. I'm the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me I wonder: What can these feet level? What can these feet pound and flatten? What can these hands raise?