Excerpt from "26",a novel I'm working on.
by Kathleen Yearwood

At the strip club the men, who are wearing ball caps, are tossing coins at the naked woman on the stage. The coins are supposed to stick, sometimes on the breast, sometimes on the crotch, the woman with the shaved crotch opens her legs to the men in the front row. Put a coin in, win a poster of the very woman you invested with your coin. She gives it freely, and she turns round and presents her anus. The man in front laughs because he wants to throw a coin and get it in. She is unnaturally clean, although she has been sweating, working one end of the stage to the other, walking this way and that, like a tiger in a cage. The gaze of the men is dispassionate. They're sated, but unable to leave. The waitresses further exploit them, dressed like schoolgirls, but with white shirts open to reveal black bras, and tied up to show their navels. The men can't leave. There are the waitresses, the beer and the music is so loud, so loud and popular, everyone's heard it before but not with the naked woman walking this way and that, in a hurry, unable to leave the stage. She hits the edge, which is ringed with lights, and turns and scurries the other way. She is wearing shoes with heels, so she can walk this way and that way on her toes, but always coming up against the edge of the stage and swivelling, turned back towards the center again. There is the beer, in bottles and the waitresses coming over and the loud music and the announcer crying: "Oh, wasn't that something fellas?... Ladies and gentlemen", and the clean, sweating naked woman is sweeping up the coins from the stage with a magnet on a stick, she sweeps down on her hands and her toes, her feet in the red shoes with stiletto heels. In the back alley behind the club, which is painted midnight blue on the outside and has no windows, there are houses, and in the basement stairwell, in the back alley, one man shoots another in the back of the head. Then he runs away. There is a faint pulse of music from the club, so softly, like a heartbeat and the blood is already getting thick on the concrete around the shot mans head. In front of the house, on the street, the police are there. There are two cars. But they are talking to some young men in a car they have pulled over. The trunk is open and four young men dressed in black are standing with their hands on the car. One cop has a thermos in his hand. "What's this?", he says to a man with long hair and a leather jacket. "Iced tea", says the man. "LSD?", says the cop with a smile "Iced tea", says the man "LSD?" says the cop louder, like he can't hear. He opens the lid and sniffs it, then pours it onto the ground. Then another cop says "What's this?" and takes a baseball bat from the trunk. "It's a bat", says one of the men. Another cop takes a look at the arms of one of the men up against the car. There are cigarette burns and old, thick scars, with some fresh wounds all the way up to each elbow. "What's this?" , says the cop, nodding at the arms of the man. "I don't ask you about your sex life, don't ask me about mine", says the man. Eventually the quietest and smallest of the men is taken away in handcuffs for some unpaid fines. No one hears a shot. In the remand, the small man meets a few people. A native guy who seems ready to burst into tears. A guy who says he stabbed his father last night. Next door to the remand there's a rooming -house. Windows of the house are visible across an alley from the remand cells. The Native guy says he can see through the widows and into an abandoned room where there is a woman lying. He thinks she is dead, but he sees such strange things going on in that window. Reflected in the widow he sees the sun, and the moon, and sometimes both at once, nothing takes the usual time, he says, the sun and moon go by so fast and sometimes even backwards they go, meaning time must be going backwards too. Everyone there is wearing orange overalls with the sleeves shortened so they can't hide things. Everyone looks a little silly in their orange overalls and nobody listens to the native guy. "Women are walking to and fro, he says, but faster, and we are wearing orange overalls, he says, but we are just repeating a pattern, or we are a repeating pattern, you can't tell who we are in here, if we follow the time as it passes in that window. The woman in the room, he says, just lies there, because she might be dead. He's never killed someone, but lots in here have, he says. And then he's quiet. He oftentimes spends the day alone in his cell. Looking at the snot-flecked filthy cinder block wall beside the metal shelf he sleeps on, he notices a pale green stripe that wanders around the wall and meets itself. "Put a twist in that and call it infinite," he thinks, and closes his eyes again. Outside, in front of the building, it is still snowing. But the reflection in the window of the rooming house on the other side is changing days and seasons very quickly now, he says, the leaves appear and then fall off in a few minutes- that's how fast it goes, he says. Then it's bare trees then the small green shoots, then the sun and moon chasing each other, the moon waxing and waning so fast it looks like a door to heaven opening and closing. But outside the door onto the paved street on the opposite side of the remand it snows and snows without end. The men in the jail walk their paths in their orange jumpsuits, and slowly he shuts up about it altogether. Where are the women who kill? On the news in the remand, on the TV bolted to the ceiling, (black and white because one of the ministers in the government said they didn't deserve colour TVs in prison, so they took all the colour TVs out and replaced them with black and white), but they can still watch the news, and there's this woman sobbing in a snow- filled front yard, and she gets taken away for murder, her jacket pulled up over her head. But where did she go? The men in the remand hear that the women are in the building somewhere, but no one has ever seen one. The Native guy absently watches the sun and moon circle in the roominghouse window. The dead woman only visible in between, when neither sun nor moon are reflected, he can see her body on the floor. The big shot man still lies at the bottom of the basement staircase. His door is closed, his blood is filling up the little lading under his head. He was known as a terror. Now he is as limp as an empty sack. Some of his victims feel this transition, they are suddenly a bit lighter, but the running away man feels sick He can't remember why he shot the big man, because it was so hard to do. It was supposed to be easy, but it was hard, and now the big man is haunting him. He takes off his jacket, and his shirt while he runs, he is sweating. He can't take the bus or see anyone, he walks the last couple of miles to his house, an old roominghouse behind the remand. In his room, he takes off his pants and shoes, he rips the pants into tiny shreds and flushes the shreds down the toilet. He finds an old paper bag from the grocery store and puts his shoes into it. He wraps the bag around the shoes then he goes poking around the building to find a vacant room. He will hide them behind a wall in an empty room. The native guy at the remand sees a light come on briefly in the dead womans' room behind the image of a blazing sun in the window. He is overjoyed that someone has found her. Even thought they didn't stay long. Several nights later he sees that she has left her place on the floor, but she is not gone, she is standing in the room fixing her hair. He jumps up in a panic, but afraid to tell anyone what he has seen, he goes into the common room and notices that the second hand on the big wall clock is creeping backwards, as it has done before. The woman has been resurrected. He sits at another window and looks out into midnight blue darkness. We are not eternal. Life is not eternal. This is just misreading the signs, what this resurrection proves is that the moment is eternal, and she is living a moment back when most clocks agreed that she lived. Time runs in all directions here. "I'm supposed to be doing time," he thinks, feeling his face flush and go hot, ""what the hell, what?, I know where I am , but I don't know when." Downstairs there is a cop called Kazan. He looks past the man he is supposed to be talking to and gazes at the video monitors of the prison area upstairs. He notices that some of the videos are more like still pictures, like they are stalled on one image. Others pump along as usual, door, wall, window, guy walks past, door wall, window. He squints a little. His eyes aren't perfect anymore, but then, he is 47 and he fakes the eye-test now, because cops aren't allowed to wear glasses. Which is unfortunate, being as it weeds out any bookworms from the force. Kazan reads criminal code. And self- help books now and again. He is stocky , with acne scars on both cheeks. He is unremarkable in most aspects, but for one: time has a problem with him, or he with it, he hasn't figured it out yet. He knows though, that as soon as he goes upstairs, his nametag will change. He makes a guess based on the season, time of night and where he is going that when he gets upstairs his name will be Kataz, but he's not sure. He heads upstairs to check those cameras. He sees the Native guy looking out the window as he lets himself into the room through a steel door. He assumes there is a woman down below on the pavement waving up. There are taxicabs lined up on both sides of the street waiting while women in tight jeans and jackets with false fur collars wave up at the remand windows, while the men crush their noses up against the glass, or vogue, so the women know who it is. But there is only this lone man now, gazing down into the street, which is covered in snow. Katza walks over to the man and says"What's up?", the native man, who's name is Ivan, looks at the cop. He reads the badge and looks past the cops face to the wall clock, which has just now completely stopped. Murray lies on the couch in his mothers' apartment. The couch is beige and the wall behind it is beige and made of cinder block. The entire project his mother lives in is made of cinder block. Murray lifts a bottle of Gato Negro to his mouth and takes a long, thirsty drink. He can hear kids playing in the hallways and outside over the blare of the TV set. "Teenaged Sluts and Their Married Lovers" is the name of the program. Murray is tall, muscular, olive skinned and drunk. He is wearing boots and braces- the skinhead uniform. He runs his hand over his head, through the thick black hair there. "Shit", he says, and getting up with some difficulty, goes to the tiny bathroom to shave his head. When he is done, he drains the bottle and goes out onto the balcony overlooking a cinder block courtyard. Smokestacks billow just across the road, and in the middle of the stacks a huge gas flare burns, day and night. The kids' voices bubble up from below. "Shut up Pakis!", he screams and hurls the bottle into the courtyard. The bottle hits a little patch of dirt and doesn't break. When Murray turns around he hears someone at the door. He opens the door into the hallway and two cops are standing there. One of them is Kataz. "Good afternoon, sir", says Kataz "We're investigating an incident in your building, sir, may we ask you a few questions?" "No", says Murray, and smiles. There is a pause where the other cop shifts from one foot to the other. "Can I ask you what it is you do for a living?", this cop says. He looks at Murrays' bare arms, covered in cigarette burns and slash wounds. "I'm a welder, but I'm doing roofing right now", says Murray. "Not involved in the drug trade?", says the cop. "I was just sleeping here", says Murray, "and I'm gonna get back to that, if that's all right with you?" Kataz looks at the other cop and they both shrug a little. Upstairs, the cops enter the apartment directly above Murrays mothers' place. There is a body lying face down on the floor but nothing seems to be broken or missing. In fact, both cops have already made extensive notes in little pads about the state of the room, which strikes them both as immaculate. They proceed to "stand by", meaning to wait uselessly, trying not to disturb anything in the room until the medical examiner gets there to tell them what they already suspect: that this body is dead. They sit gingerly on the edge of the couch for about 20 minutes until one of them says "I need a smoke." There is an ashtray full of butts in the room, so they know they could smoke if they wanted. A short search turns up a clean ashtray, stashed under an open TV guide. A remote turns up and the TV gets flipped on. A check of the guide reveals there is a movie about to start, a German film about a castle. They light their cigarette and watch the entire film, the body quietly sprawled in front of them on the carpet. There is another factor in "standing by" that Kataz especially appreciates, and that is that he has never noticed his name tag change during these times, even though he has scientifically checked at 5 minute durations. His reg # never changes, which comforts him somewhat, there is a sort of stability in math, and his co- workers have never mentioned his name tag, preferring to believe they have misread it several times a day, rather than bring it up. Sometimes Kataz has kept a log of the name changes- he knows for sure it changes depending on where he is and what time of day it is, and he knows there are subtil changes that coincide with the seasons, such as the morphing of the K into a C, and the modulations of Z and S. Some of the names seem almost funny, like Carcrash and Catarrh, and he has looked up some of the names to see if there is any significance there. The strange thing is that he never noticed anything until he joined the police and got a name tag. So he knows it may have been a lifelong affliction. This city is among the ugliest in the world. Other cities are celebrated for their architecture, their waterways, their flowers, streets, or their views. And certainly there are ugly parts to every town, but this city could swallow up a gothic cathedral and make it look like a vinyl- sided storage shed. Beige, grey concrete, fleshy pink, pink like an amputated Caucasian toe. Row houses. Huge two- story row houses, side by side, with just a dark corridor between them, no more than three feet wide, where the sun cannot reach. Soon to be rimed in mold and sprouting noxious mushrooms for the children to die of. You never see children here. Never see anyone at all in among these big tombs. The tall, featureless slabs, with metal clad windows and no overhangs, the starkly flattened faces of the houses painted beige or amputation pink, look like naked, square people. The people are all at work or school, struggling with the heat and smog to get through another day to pay for the monstrosity that has gobbled up life for miles around. It has fed on the cows and horses who used to stand in this field, it has fed upon the field itself, the grass is all gone, the little creek has been razed along with the willow trees, to make this flat expanse with houses plopped down. A couple of gophers run and wrestle with each other in the dust by the highway, as if to remind the commuters that life exists somewhere small and underground. Much of the project is underground, with the gophers. The wires and cables and sewers were laid first, buries in the clay, then the shitboard houses erected. 30 thousand dollars to start, for a row house by the highway. A good investment. There's a new cop shop not 200 meters away. A fortress of a cop shop, massive and painted midnight blue and gold, open 6AM -til-10 PM every day. For complaints. It is early morning and the sky has gone that shade of midnight blue. One of the cinder block projects, like a fetid mushroom behind the row houses, lies in the shadows, broken glass on the chipped concrete steps from parties long over, and the sun, still under the earth somewhere is bleeding grey up into the navy sky. Death rides a pale horse, a beige-ish horse with blue veins showing through the pale skin of its neck. The pale horse was a sunrise, or a cinder block building full of sleeping people. Or both. A beige building at the very edge of the city (Babylon) beside the streaming smokestacks and the eternally burning fire of the flames of sour gas, at sunrise. A pale sky, blanches at seeing all this again. The sun longing for the destruction it knows it can bring. If the sun can see the earth from so far away. Longing to rise and see just a field and some birds. But this remains. Murray just getting home from work. He rides in on a pale sunrise. Or a bike. He dismounts and carries the bike up the three concrete steps. The same steps his father tried to bash his brains out on long ago. He warms up some food in the microwave. He thinks softly to himself. Before bed he listens to music. Sometimes jazz, sometimes classical, sometimes Metal. Only those three. Any other music drives him crazy. His mom can spend days on the couch with a headache, more likely a hangover, listening to Burt Bacharach and power rock and Murray has to leave. But it's best that Murray stay at home, go to work and ride his bike very carefully. If his mom knew she mightn't kick him out for days at a time. Because Murray is the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, as described in Revelations, which in itself, may or may not be true. But when Murray dies, the world will end. There is a crow who has discovered a baggie full of slices of watermelon, ripped open with the pink chunks of fruit spilling out over the asphalt road. He picks at the watermelon with obvious enjoyment. He never thinks about how he will never find this wondrous food again, he just eats as much as he can then hops off to the cover of a bush where he wipes his beak on his leg. A car comes by and squashes what is left of the fruit and the baggie into a flat pulp. It's a police car because there's a man smashing the windows in of the bus shelter just down the road from the feasting crow. Katzan gets out and realizes at once the bus shelter smasher is drunk. He asks him to stop smashing and the man just looks at him. He isn't wearing shoes. Katzan asks the man to get into the cruiser and he just looks at him. So Katzan goes over to the man and leads him gently to the car. He settles him into the back seat and puts plastic handcuffs on the man with his hands in front. He closes the cruiser door and goes around to the drivers side, shaking his head ever so slightly. Another cop car drives up over the watermelon and out jump two cops who both take a look at the suspect. The window is open a bit and one cop takes a look inside with a flashlight that is 2 feet long and weighs 5 pounds. He suddenly drops the flashlight onto the suspects genitals. The drunken man yells at the cop in pain. Katzan says, "Leave him alone, he's alright, he's calm." And the other cop says, "You're not gonna church out on me are ya?" and walks over to the sewer drain with the suspects' running shoes and drops them down the hole. He looks at Katzan. The other cop comes over to the sewer with the suspects' keys and and dangles them over the hole. Katzan grabs the keys and there is a minor struggle. Finally Katzan says "Give me the fuckin' keys", which the other cop does. Now Katzan knows the suspect will charge the police with assault. This pisses him off so much that his name changes. The running shoes fall down into some water in the sewer. A wet snow is falling by now. The water from the streets flow into the drains and wash the shoes from smaller pipes into bigger pipes, now ten stories underground and heading for the river. In the beginning, apparently, was the word. I'm sure this is a problem in translation but it suits my purposes well. In the beginning was the word, and the word being go, anything I say creates a universe around itself. Of course, what I choose to write is not necessarily what you will read, or choose to understand. The surface world of the city is shot through with holes that connect underground, that sink and sink to the lowest point which is always a valley through which runs a river, or at least a creek. Things, and sometimes people, fall into these holes and turn up in the river. From the surface on the street it is impossible to imagine what goes on down there, during the rain or melting snow the tubes underground are gushing with water. The city is merely a crust over theses tunnels, which were built first, and long before, most of the things on top. In the beginning, therefore, were the sewers. The running shoes are washed to the river on a tidal wave of melted snow and foam. You can walk into the sewers from the outlets at the river. They are 6 feet tall, because by the time all the water reaches the river it is a torrent that fills the space. Before a city can be built, the sewers are laid, and anything underground must be excavated before the buildings are built. So the jails and the tunnel from the remand to the courthouse basement must have bee built before the courthouse. So can we say then, that the jail cells were always assumed as a necessary foundation for the court? Of course we could. What use is a law without a means of enforcement? In the same way a city built without sewers would wash away in the first few rainstorms. The shoes wash out on a torrent of melting snow and foam and land in the river on a plume of yellow water right beside a floating human body. This body is being looked for now, but has not yet been found. Katzaz drives across the bridge the body fell from, upriver, but he does not see it floating in a small eddy right beside the sinking running shoes. He traces a complicated web of movements across the surface of the city, at least as complicated as what the sewers do underground. But there is no connection. He flies across the bridge several stories above the river, does not see the shoes, nor the body, but he does notice his name tag change as soon as he gains the far side of the river. The body in the river and the shoes bob gently at the outflow pipe, they do not flow down the river, they ride up and down on little swirls in the water. Night has fallen so the water is orange in the bright places and ochre in the dark under the street lights on the bridge. A person remembers places from the light. Colours make you feel one way or another. Some cities experiment with orange lights rather than white. They make an endless sunset at that corner on the highway where you turn off. Driving down into the city you are overlooking a smouldering fire. Or along the river, the smokestacks spew warm orangey smoke, and the water reflects warm orange ripples, while the river keeps the body and the shoes close to the downspout, but secretly wanders off downstream to the edge of the city and the trailerpark. Inside a beige trailer, 60 feet long, like a bloated snake that has just eaten the family, a four year old girl wrapped in a dirty towel throws her skinny body against the bathroom door, which is locked. Her sister Mary is inside, taking a bath in water absolutely opaque with the dirt of her older brother and sister. Mary is third on the bath list and her little sister, locked outside, is last. The water is not much warmer than body temperature. Mary is just sitting motionless in the water listening to her sister as she tries to break the door down. The little girl is holding the towel with one small hand and kicking the door and shrieking as loud as she can, "FUCK YOU, MARY, FUCK YOU, OPEN THE DOOOOOOOOOOOR" Such fury from a tiny, breaking angelic voice. Such impotent hurling of a feathery body at the hollow wooden door of the bathroom. Both girls can hear their father raging in and out of the kitchen , onto the porch of the trailer. But they ignore his ranting as best they can. It happens every night, he works himself into a rage and yells and paces around. They only take notice when he goes silent and slips out of the kitchen door, leaving it open. They know from lifetimes of practice that there is more danger in a silent, unslammed door than in all the screaming and ranting in the world. There is a steady drip drip drip from the bath tub tap. There is the little girl sobbing collapsed on the floor at the locked door, and the receding footsteps of the father down the sand lane that leads to the highway. He has both hands over a wound in his chest which is rhythmically dripping blood onto the sand making a winding trail of magenta splotches the one closest to him seeming to jump up from the dust. Kata drives past a man standing by the road with his hands on his chest. He thinks it is a strange attitude, but the man doesn't looked distressed. Besides, there is an eerie calm everywhere at this hour- just before sunrise. He needs to get his sleeping prisoner to the remand anyway, so he cruises past the smokestacks and the housing projects, past a man on a bike, just as the sky lightens to a sickish green, like the veins on the back of his hands. It looks like snow again, flat grey clouds lower in from the east before the sun, even though it's April. Tufts of yellow grass still protect pools of snow in the ditch and there's not a sign of a leaf or bud anywhere. Not even a pussy willow. Yet it never gets colder or warmer. The season seems stalled. In these northern places, when summer comes, it comes with a greedy rush towards growth. Nothing waits, not the leaves sucking up the sap in the trees, not the green plants after the first rain. The first rain which seems to carry within it whole frogs and snails, fully formed and dropped into sloughs with the rain. Which is possible. Mushrooms sprout overnight, you could watch them grow- giant Amanita Muscaria with orange heads with white raised spots glowing slightly against the dun ground. In the blue hour, which in summer lasts all through the night, in June, the sun still blues the northern horizon and the mushrooms glow in the aurora while the leaves hiss and above the spiral of mosquitoes gloriously hum, punctuated by the croaking and beeping of frogs, miraculously dropped in rain as tadpoles, the shape of raindrops, and tiny snails like reanimated fossils. Last night I dreamt we were on a boat and I looked up to see showers of falling stars, falling in curtains from right to left across the black sky. Early people in North America knew that meteors were actually rock, long before the Europeans did. There were meteors on the prairies that people called "fast flying rock", and they left tobacco at them. One of those rocks found its way to a museum somewhere, but the people want it back. Seasons can come without language, rocks can fall burning from the air, people, I think, learned language from birds and coyotes, listening, thinking, "what a good idea". And the birds and coyotes feel sorry for us because we weren't born with a song, we had to make one up. That's where they are better suited to this world than we. Take written language. Animals have always had ways of recognizing by patterns where they are and where they are going. A map, of sorts, but more like a map with a story. History is apparent in animal tracks. The moose starts here and goes there at this or that speed. He stops here, turns here, crosses the road. He slips in the snow when he sees the men in the truck. He changes direction and gallops into the ditch. The tracks of a bear are like the tracks of a small human child. The tracks of my relative tell me a story. A line of characters that could easily be copied onto the ground or scratched onto a rock. This could be the genesis of writing. And when the printing press is invented, so too we have tires with treads. Making the characters uniform, running in straight lines, no longer the mammalian meandering of hieroglyph. On the gravel road: someone in a car stopped, there is a puddle where they took a leak. Some garbage, a beer can. Here is where a porcupine crossed the road, dragging its swaying tail, here a pigeon-toed skunk, fresh tracks, all last night. When the road is paved, no one will know what happened. When the world is paved, history will end. When nothing soft remains to leave your imprint on, the word will stop. In the English dictionary, the word is separated from the world by work. The work of writing it down. When we are interred in rows, under the waters that flood in the absence of trees, our fossils will tell our history, about how language was stopped for lack of any tender place for it to take hold. Death enters on a pale horse. But the lost horse is midnight black, but midnight in the winter. This horse has escaped from a field, to look for food. And weirdly enough, everywhere she goes, spring bursts forth, and grass grows. Wherever she goes, bees are happy. They love the feeling of the soft flower petals on their bellies. They spend a long time scrambling over the purple velvety flowers that grow in the horses wake, because it feels good, and smell of clover makes them giddy. The horse covers a lot of ground. She used to run up and down, stopping short at a barbed- wire fence, until she jumped over. Now she travels in one direction, through an eternal spring, wherever she puts her foot the ice melts and she drinks. There is nothing more satisfying than watching a horse drink. She sucks up entire bucketfulls with black lips quivering just under the surface of the cold water. There is an audible sucking as the water creeps down the pail and up into the horse. She raises her head with her lips dripping, and water running from the corners of her mouth, and swallows the great draught. The black horse is near the trailer park now. Looking at a man standing by the highway with his hands on his chest. Katas arrives at the remand with his sleepy bus shelter smasher and hands him over in an underground reception room. It's morning now. An uninspired washed- out affair, and Katas needs some coffee. Upstairs in the cells, Ivan wakes from a dream about meteorites showering down over a river. He decides that the last weeks have been a hallucination and he thinks he may see the prison psychiatrist, as someone once suggested. "Life exists to tell time" -me Ivan sits in a stuffy beige room at the remand. The room does not have a stripe wandering around it. It has another plastic chair, besides the one Ivan balances in, and a metal desk, and a filing cabinet. The door is locked from the outside. There is a camera on the ceiling as well. Ivan seems to wait a long time, although he knows better than to trust his sense of time. He wonders if there is anyway he can mark time. He hums a song, and thinks this might help, because surely the song takes a certain amount of time to sing, it moves through time, so he knows if he begins to sing backwards, or can't get past one note, then time will be doing the same. He smiles to himself for the first time in a long while. The doctor finally appears at the open door, shuts it and sits down by the desk. A guard stands outside the door. Because there is so little furniture in the room, and the ceiling is so high, there is a great deal of echo, which wasn't noticeable while he was humming, but now makes every noise confusing. "What is the problem then?' asks the doctor in a pin-prick voice that is heavily accented, "I understand you have been seeing things, yes?" Ivan looks at the corner of the ceiling above her head, which is where the voice seems to come from. He doesn't even feel like talking in this room, but he gets a yes out at more or less the right spot. Maybe a little late, but at the right spot, more or less. The doctor makes a note on a small pad. "All right then!, exclaims the doctor loudly, with an echo, "We are going to CURE you. Do you believe me? We are going to make you for-GIT your past." Ivan says nothing, but he understands that without knowing anything about his past she disagrees with it. He wonders what sort of past she would allow, and whether he will have to trade his past for hers, or just discard his. But, he thinks, who am I without my past? It's all I really own, for example, what will I dream about with no past? My past is not all good memories, he thinks, I had no parents, really, and everyone I knew died, pretty much, or drank, or went crazy, but it is my past, I earned it and paid for it- then he looked at the doctor and realized she did not approve of his past and would, if she could, annihilate it. He decides to play along, as one does with very dangerous individuals. He nods his head to the last question, tears in his eyes now. He wonders how much longer he will have to spend in the presence of this madwoman. He hopes she isn't violent because he is paralyzed by her lizardlike demeanor as she licks her lips. Something about the acoustics in here is having an hypnotizing affect as well. Finally he mumbles "I don't want drugs." And these are the last words she permits. "You must NIVER think of these as drugs," she cries, the echo making Ivans' eyes vibrate. "This medicine will make you hungry, do you understand? But you must not eat bread and cake..." He looks at her. Where would he find cake to eat in jail? He barely stays alive on the garbage they feed him. She is still talking, "Do you have trouble sleeping? Yes? This is a WONderful drug," she writes on her prescription pad now, (didn't she just say drug?), "You take this just before bedtime." Ivan recognizes the name of a powerful narcotic that many people would pay good money for in here. She writes a 30 beside the drug, more than enough, he thinks, if he saved them up, to kill himself with. She glances at him to see if he's getting the message. He hasn't said 5 words to her and she's giving him the means with which to leave this vale of tears. Or for Ivan, of tears in time, pronounced "tares". Ivan notices with an internal start that his tears are not flowing, but are stalled on his cheeks. He knows he must not show his fear while this woman looks at him. He looks to see if she's wearing a watch. Her cell phone rings. "Ah, excuse me a moment", she says, looking at it. "Yes? Oh, hello, my love, yes, darling, thet's right, no. I'll be home at 6, yes, very well, yes I love you too my cabbage." She smiles at Ivan. "Thet was my husband," she says to the man with no family. She talks then about her large and happy family, and Ivan realizes they must be extremely rich. Ivan grew up in several foster homes, and after that in a cold house with 26 people stuffed into it. Kids as well, and everyone absolutely starving. That's how he got into crime. Ivan figures she did want to replace his past with hers, or someone he doesn't know, and the resulting confusion might have been distracting enough to maybe jolt time free, making things run in one direction again, erase hallucinations and creepy cops. But he knows better than to bring any of this up with her, all he wants now is to get out of this booming room more or less intact. He hears her talking again, like a bellowing cow through pea soup fog: "You can pick these tablets up three times a day, there are three different drugs and you must take them all for thirty days." Ivan realizes with a shiver that she has just given him the answer he came for. He can save the drugs up and count them, thereby showing how many days have gone by with multi-coloured capsules. He lets out a sigh and feels the tears drop onto his lap. She has given him breadcrumbs with which to find his way back. He wonders, as an aside, if she is suggesting he kill himself. He will not take that bait. Even if that is the plan, to murder all of the useless eaters in here, then he will not submit. As crazy as he might feel, he knows he will never be as mad as she. The door opens and he wanders out into the puce corridor. One of the doctors longtime patients is sitting on a bench, lumped against the wall. He is bloated, his hair a dry mess of straw, his skin blotchy, green bags under both eyes. When he catches sight of the doctor his tail begins to wag. Her work has a permanent impact, thinks Ivan, and he books it. Back in the common room, a guard tells him his lawyer has shown up. This is the lawyer Ivan called two weeks ago to come and take pictures of the injuries he got when the cops beat him up at the bus stop. The bruises had all faded by now, the cuts and scrapes healed over. He goes down to visiting anyway and sure enough, there's the lawyer with a Polaroid camera in his fleshy hand. He is so corpulent, he looks like an overinflated beach ball wearing pants. Ivan wonders where he's been, seeing as his office is across the street from the remand. "Where have you been?" Says Ivan into the telephone. The lawyer, perched sideways on the edge of the metal swivel chair on the other side of the greasy glass says, "I took a little vacation, which I in no way regret, and then my daughter was called to the bar,(he beams), she has joined my firm, there has been a period of readjustment, naturally." It was true this was indeed a rare interview, in the flesh, as the lawyer usually sent an underling to do these things. Ivan said, "It's too late. There's no point anymore and I can't charge the pigs without photographs so you may as well go." The lawyer whipped out the pen he had many times told Ivan all about. It was a gold pen his father had given him when he passed the bar, a whole family of muti-generational lawyers had used this pen, and he was exceedingly proud of it, so much so that if he loaned it to a client for signing, he immediately demanded it back with the insinuation the signer was planning on stealing it. Ivan despised the pen, and the man holding it. "I drive a nice car", said the lawyer into the phone, "and I live in a nice house, and I want to keep it that way." He paused for effect. "Understand that if there is to be no lawsuit, then there is to be no profit, and I am unable to undertake this valuable work." "On the one side there is the law, you understand, and on the other there is Justice, and you must not mix them up". He was almost instantaneously gone. Ivan sat a minute in the orange jumpsuit with the shortened arms thinking about the pen and the nice car and nice house. He wondered if he ever might find that house in the future. With the car parked outside. Planning revenge gives form to formless time. Close to the offense the revenge feels prickly, like it can hardly wait. But everyone knows, true, beautiful revenge must be put aside for a long, long time. The longer the better, so it can be done after the anger has burned out, for real revenge you need a clear head. The emotion is deposited and saved up towards the day when your enemy,(who has long forgotten you and has new enemies to think about), presents his soft underbelly, without fear. Waiting for revenge to flower is a way to count the time. In a pleasant way, without regrets, for the only past worth regretting is the one without justice. After revenge takes place there is the sweetness of remembering, which also makes the past less burdensome. I recommend justice above painkillers and narcotics for lessening the pain of regret. Ivan swallowed the little pill of the lawyers words and they were sweet in his mouth but very bitter in his stomach. He went back to his cell and tried to think, with the television blaring from the common room, "Teenaged Sluts and Their Married Lovers", he tried to think about time in a new way that would fit his recent experience while he drifted into a sweet sleep. There are cities in our dreams that we have never really visited. Combination places where we can walk down a viaduct and emerge on the waterfront of a city so iridescent we think we must have been there once, on such a shimmering day, but when? These dream cities have multiply connected surfaces: go down a set of stairs and there's a wrongly remembered version of the same street- with trolley cars sliding, boats out in the water, but trembling with the bittersweet impermanence of nostalgia. We are struck by this nostalgia, sickening sweet, and a longing so intense it seems to emanate from the other side of life. Ivan was having this dream. In the dream he realized a longing this powerful could only come from loss, and because the dream was about life, he must be dreaming about life the way a ghost would. These glistening streets were a product of dropped synapses, combined with the ones that had fused over the years of thinking the same things. Every place seemed interchangeable with every place, because to a ghost, there are no distinctions between places on earth, it is enough that they are on earth. In the same way that a dog in a dream becomes a mixture of all our dogs, living and dead, that a friend may look like himself but be someone else, that we can go to parties in dreams where we know no- one, this is because the dreams of the dead do not differentiate. When you are hungry enough, any food will do. All of this alarmed Ivan. He understood why nostalgia increases with age- to prepare the body for the waves of regret a ghost feels when remembering life. Ghost stories are the tales told by ghosts about how thrilling their lives were. The same life they trudged through, grumbling, hardly noticing that they were alive. Ivan woke up. It was night already. He thought about the dead woman for a little while in the gloom. He could hear the psychiatrists voice in his head like a phrase of music. He decided he would flush his three pills after counting them and this might help the hallucination of her voice to cease. When the pills reached the river, they joined the body and the shoes in the eddy by the outlet. The body was being lifted from the water. The shoes were carefully salvaged as well. The pills dissolved, unable to change the mood of the river one way or another. Further away, even further out of town than Murrays house or the trailer park, lies the prison. This is the big prison that holds about 400 men. More if there's double- bunking. The lifers have their own tier. On the tier air comes into each cell through circular vents high up in the walls. They blow continuously. Some prisoners have adopted the hobby of making paper sculptures with moving parts to hang in front of the vents. There are ducks with wings that turn, seagulls likewise, men with running legs. But the most celebrated in the whole prison is the old guy who, among other wonderful things, has made a whole 5 piece band of musicians. The drummers' paper hands jump up and down holding little match-sticks (smuggled in), the guitar player strums his guitar, a bass player is bent around his bass like a snail trying to crawl into its shell- his head bobs from one side to the other. There's a horn player too, and though they make no sound at all, anyone can imagine the music they play. Next to the band is a little zoo of animals, or a barnyard. There's a cat whose tail switches, and a black horse, eternally galloping. The cat is well understood among these prisoners, but when he's asked where the horse came from he just looks down and says "dunno". The cat is well understood because there used to be cats in this prison. All the old timers can tell about it. There were two cats, at first. Wild ones in the yard. When there were 30 cats, the prisoners had tamed them. It went on like that for years, each cat had her favorite cell and the cats feasted on mice all day until lock-up, then the cats would hear the keys rattling and run to their cells just in time to be locked in for the night. Then there was more feasting on whatever the prisoner sharing the cell had gotten for her that day. One curious thing about these cats was they all taught each other to drink with their paws. They would dip their paws into a dish of milk or water, then turn the paw upwards, with the droplets caught between the pads, in the fur, and lick them off. The cats seemed to prefer this thoughtful way of drinking to the regular way a cat will drink always from the far side of the bowl. This is how a cat drinks: a pink tongue appears just above the surface of the water, then flickers out and in, disturbing the surface of the liquid no more than a knife entering it would. The cat gazes upward with obvious pleasure, slightly cross-eyed. This expression in a cat you are familiar with is quite friendly and desirable, and on a strange cat it's a bit threatening. No one knows if the prison was a less violent place overall during the reign of the cats, but some of the old timers think so. They are prisoners though, so they are never asked their opinion by researchers on the outside. But every night a prisoner would come home to his cell and watch his cat sprawl on the concrete floor and groom every inch of his fur with his raspy tongue. Licking between his pads, slowly, washing his ears with his front paws, with the sound of spitting onto his paw, purring when he got bored or looking up suddenly to listen for mice, seeming to forget what he was doing, and by this ritual, stopping time. Nothing bad nor good, or perceived of as bad by one but good by another, could happen during these nights, and nothing ever did. The black paper horse in front of the prison vent runs, and the real, escaped black horse runs, beside the highway, past a man holding his chest. Later on the cops can read the drops of blood in the skiff of snow leading from the trailer to the highway. There are the mans' tracks, and the tracks of a horse going by. A shoeless horse heading towards the city. And two strange things: the mud in the horse tracks and the fact that the man is gone. He may have been picked up, or he may have crossed the highway, or walked down it, but because the highway is paved, his trail goes silent. Snow swirls on the smooth surface with every passing car, like grey snakes. Kazan notices his name hasn't changed for awhile, and he knows he should feel happy, but he also knows the weather hasn't changed either. And he knows it is May and there is still ice on the river, which is not breaking up, and snow is falling. He's been dreaming too. Kazans' dreams are enough to keep him awake. These ones were sexual, and disturbing. In his dreams he has affairs with people he knows. Women he's never considered before have sex with him and it becomes clear in the dream this has been going on for years. He has to shake his head when he wakes up, because the dream seems real. Even worse are the dreams about lost lovers. They call him up and he starts reconsidering, he can't remember why they are even apart. He starts to muse how it would feel to touch them again. They always go straight to intercourse, then he sees her with her new lover and realizes it was all a joke. She just looks away and walks off with some guy he doesn't even know. Bitterness floods in and he wakes up really depressed. "Why can't sex stay locked up in the body?", he thinks, "Like I need more unhappy memories." Loss is always painful. No one warns you: To Live Is To Lose. If you knew this going in, would you go in? What you get from life is supposed to be quantitatively more than what you lose each day. You can so easily identify the ones who lose more than they get. Easy to identify and easy to ignore. Their loss proves there is an imbalance somewhere, and those who have more than enough cannot suffer the presence of the sad. It is too much like being asked to redress the balance. Advice developed to deal with normal amounts of grief can be useful to those with normal amounts of grief. But for a person who has lost everything before they turned five; trust in the world, their parents, their virginity, sanity, their hope... no advice will stick to a personality worn so desperately thin by grief. A few resilient souls ignore the fact they have nothing to live for and steam ahead into life nonetheless. The rest do the natural thing and wallow in the muck and ruin the first few years provided them, lie down exhausted and die unto life. Even normal people eventually go mad. Practicing some bullshit story every day without variation, lying to themselves about nightmares and memories, hatreds and petty revenges, they produce madness by carving pathways through their brains, fusing neuro-transmitters, into a madness that everyone ignores and expects. It's called "getting old". What if the story you've rehearsed to yourself ten-thousand times never happened that way? It never happened that way. You have to consider that there was an alternate universe going on at that time you had no access to. And if you don't at some point consider that, then you will go mad. The people who have lost too much are the proof that a world exists you have no access to. And you wouldn't want to, even if you could. When they go mad, they go mad all over. It can be freeing, having nothing else to lose. What is missing is a way to connect. What is missing is a place to connect. Can it be sex? Can it be violence? There's a choice to be made when you are cornered and time is ticking ahead with you left behind with no cat to watch, no water to drip, no music to count the minutes and of course, you can feel yourself slipping away because you have lost so much and no one will admit that to you, you have nothing to live for. But, of course, you think there must be something, and then things just happen. Sometimes sober, but more often drunk and stoned, people get hurt in a connection gone wrong, someone dies and there you have what you were looking for. A connection for the rest of your life. With the weeping family, with revenge that never burns out, with the prison, the trails, the lies, a whole life gets created out of nothing. None of it at your command, none of it in your control. And so intricate, you think, "Why didn't I think of it before?"