“Nature remains,” Walt Whitman once wrote. Looking in her eyes, I knew he was right.
She had me pinned against the pillar, her breath hot, her eyes gasping. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and hundreds watched as she grabbed my ears with both hands, locked my eyes. Pure heat. Howling. Blue eyes on the rocks. Her knees were against me, her lips a cigarette away. An elderly man nodded to me.
Here we stood, in the middle of a Bernie Sanders rally. Iowa. With hundreds watching.
Her words dripped out like she was bleeding a kill.
“You’re gonna start a riot,” she said.
…
8 hours before
Found in the dank caves and undergrowth of South America, the Zodariidae spider is the best kind of killer. It has a taste for one thing, the ant, and it goes to extreme lengths to disguise itself as one of its prey…Yeah, like us…That’s right, this beast looks and acts almost identical to the ant, walking and eating and talking and making love just like one, right up to the moment of murder.
And every once in awhile, as these spiders travel through the great swarm, they encounter one of their kind, a fellow Zodariidae. There’s a flash of recognition. An awakening. The spider-equivalent of a smile. They watch each other with a dozen eyes, both calling the other’s bullsh*t as a crowd of drone-ants rush by, set on their routine. It’s a wonder the spiders don’t burst out laughing.
It was the winter of 2016, and insomnia had me in a vicious grip.
Three days in, and I was seeing spots, hearing calls, finding bits of the future mixed with the past and the present.
Try to imagine waking up in the middle of the night, walking out to your yard and digging six feet into the hard earth. You find a time capsule, dust it off, open it, and discover pictures of yourself from the future. How do you recover from a thing like that? It’s an injustice to reason, and it’s how you feel when you’re in the jaws of insomnia.
It’s when you hit 36 hours of no sleep that you lose your sense of humor. The vibes get wicked, the days and nights become one solid sheet of grey, and you start ‘teleporting’ to random locations, broken points of time, neon gas stations and casinos, old side-streets and abandoned churches with red doors. You find yourself driving down the highways with a drunk dwarf in your passenger seat, and he’s screaming bad instructions. It’s entropy incarnate.
It was on the third day of this sleepless binge that The Revolution called. Bernie Sanders, the ugly liberal power-dog, was brawling with some political hack who worked for Walmart. The Democratic nomination was at stake, and he needed my help.
We met at a Denny’s on the fringe of Chicagoland, right as the sun hit my rearview. Thirty of us stood in the parking lot. Coffee, hangovers, a steaming plate of muffins, “yeah, she’ll be late, overslept.” Jumping up and down, huddling, grabbing each other penguin-style. I was in my car spilling a bottle of aspirin when Dan, the organizer, stuck his head through the window.
“You Troy?” he said.
I was, am. He looked around my car, raised his eyebrows, nodded to the radio.
“You like the blues, eh?”
I did, do. He bounced his head to the beat.
“This guy, he’s a g*ddamn revelation,” Dan said.
He is, always will be.
“Anyway,” he said. “We’ve got a carful, and they’re ready to go. You, ah, good to drive?”
I tripped the ignition and we were off, a caravan of hardcore, nudist-colony liberals rolling deep into the heartland. An undercover reporter in their midst.
There wasn’t much fanfare. A journalist from the Aurora Beacon was supposed to take pictures, but she never showed. Instead, a lone supporter with rosacea and a yard sign waved us off. As I pulled away from the lot, he jumped and hollered, flapped his Bernie sign in the wind. Flakes of skin broke from his face and tumbled down his front, collected in a pile at his sneakers.
“We lucked out; seems like the snowstorm missed us,” said a voice to my right. A Haitian with sad eyes and a packed lunch, Nadia’s words bounced like reggae. Outside, Illinois stretched for a thousand miles. Bleach-white and frozen.
Nadia’s family fled to America after a dead-eyed man rose to power in Haiti, put his cronies in charge and ensured his job security. In this case, that means he tore the nation’s smartest people from their beds, lined them up against a wall and emptied several AK-47s in their direction. He was a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy.
Since one of the American candidates reminds her of the dead-eyed dictator, Nadia chose Bernie Sanders as her champion and counterpoint. Now, she was rushing to Iowa, 90 miles-per-hour with a red-eyed journalist, to knock on doors, push literature, stab the earth with yard signs, etc.
“You just don’t see stories about immigrants like us,” she said. “It’s always about the criminals — What is that sound?”
The thing was buzzing again. Louder than ever. I dropped it in a puddle of beer the week before, and now it was breaking into these electronic fits, giving me away. I opened the hatch where it was hidden, and a dozen North Central College parking tickets spilled across my seat.
“G*ddamn mongrel campus safety b*stards!” I yelled, too loud for my compatriots.
I assumed the 10-and-2 and reached back into the hatch, finally found it. The audio recorder, purchased from Best Buy after several hours of haggling, was malfunctioning again. I fumbled with the controls. What a wreck. The thing was hopeless, and the pair of students in my back seats were whispering about my behavior, narrowing their eyes. The Haitian was ruined by terror.
I take the ethics of journalism very seriously. Things like hidden listening devices are, to the reporter, a mortal sin. Graver than bribery, coercion, libel, firing squads and settling down to do PR work. As a professional, I’m bound by these ethics. That’s why I took every precaution to hide the bug.
“You just don’t get honesty from people, not anymore,” Nadia said. “And the media, they’re not helping things.”
“No, never,” I said, ripping the batteries out of the recorder. It whined, and the light on front vanished. The road was quiet, the bug was dead, and I turned up the blues.
There’s something somber about meeting in a Denny’s parking lot and heading west. Something grey. You start to get it when you pass the last gas station for 75 miles and a sign reads “chiken eggs 4 sail.” The language degrades. The water hardens. The landscape stretches for a thousand miles around you, an open vision. And that’s when you see it. Nothing.
When you’re back in the city, pumped full of smog and a fat waitress is telling you to finish this sentence, grab your notes and clear out, you want to bury yourself deep beneath the concrete. Really get down to the bedrock and worms. Just to feel it again.
…
We were approaching the Bernie campaign outpost in Clinton, Iowa, off the muddy banks of the Mississippi. The river moved at a mean pace, carrying rafts of ice and trash downstream. The Haitian muttered something about how the rafts would fade quickly, but the trash would take longer. I told her to stay focused and stop trying to push poetry.
The Bernie outpost sat between a pawn shop and a cash loan center. Down the street from a hot-dog joint where the owner knew everyone in town and wasn’t a fan of all these visitors swinging by and didn’t know if he could serve this many people, especially since his assistant is a “certified, bone-dry idiot.” Small-town, cute Americana. Elvis and cherry pie.
We got inside the campaign outpost, and the walls were thick with maps, pictures of Bernie and reminders to buy more coffee. “The Revolution is Here!” read every sign.
Every five seconds, someone would rush by and staple another stack of papers to the wall. They were shrinking the room, swallowing us one page at a time. Doomed by reminders.
A pile of cell phones buzzed in the corner.
Old men spilled coffee. Black.
Flies hovered over the refreshment table.
The air was burnt from all the body heat, and we spilled out the door. The walls bulged. Our voices thickened the air, and it all stuck to the windows and dripped. If you wiped it and licked your hand, it would taste just like humanity.
A man wearing a Bernie Revolution t-shirt emerged from the bathroom, left the sink untouched and produced a “pretty moist and, like, good” chocolate-chip muffin from somewhere. It looked deflated. He watched for a moment, smirked and gave a low, animal growl. He might have whispered something terrible. Then, he feasted.
A golden retriever, this tired beast named Rory, lumbered through the crowd, licking children and staring dumb. People giggled and pet her. There was a big, painful tumor at the top of Rory’s head, a punctuation on her existence. Pink veins scattered around it. Yellow puss seeped out. Yes, whatever lived there would quiet her within a year. We pretended not to see it. And of course, nobody touched it.
Someone squealed from the corner. The muffin man had lost control of his hunger, and things didn’t look good. His unwashed hands kept stuffing more muffin in his mouth, more than it could take. His cheeks bulged. Lips pursed. With a groan, it burst.
Chocolate caked his lips, mixed with the saliva on his chin. The dark waterfall spewed across his shirt.
He put his hands on his knees. Sputtered. “Hoooooo, man, those are good-good-good.” He looked up at me with this savage grin, like he was about to reveal a secret of the universe.
The teeth oozed black, and every word fell heavy.
“There are more in the back, if you’re interested,” he said.
Rory whimpered and pressed her tumor into my stomach. It poked my liver.
A man stood on a chair, far above the crowd. “Alright, folks, quiet down. Here’s what we’ll be doing today…”
…
Canvassing: the systematic initiation of direct contact with individuals commonly used during political campaigns. Campaigners will knock on doors or make telephone calls to engage in a personalized contact with an individual.
The Haitian, she had lost a lot. Maybe everything. You could hear it when she walked, the way she dragged that club foot, dead & aching across the sidewalk. It was like every one of her tragedies was chained to her ankle, scraping against the pavement and leaving a trail of red. A screaming weird-corpse of pain, it poisoned the air with every step.
The sound of her dragging foot was distracting to the working journalist, and it made my job nearly impossible. I dug around my pocket, found my headphones and stuffed them in each ear. Let Johannes Brahms block the noise.
Brahms, the good composer, sat at the dusty grand, teased his fingers over the black & white, then played his melody.
The neighborhood was a grid of American rot. Rows of abandoned houses bisected by more of the same. Someone had fled in a hurry, left it all to the animals. A few mansions littered the edge of the suburb; but, like most things, they were either dead or bought by the government.
Lichen grew from every porch, and eyes peered through the black. Every house was littered with holes where air conditioners had been plundered and windows shattered, replaced by the cool dark…a host of veins, sick-green and twisted. The wind tore through the cracks, rustled the weeds, whispered to me and the Haitian, mixed with 21 Hungarian Dances (a theme composed by old Brahms in 1869).
Play it, Brahms!
We worked street-by-street, dropping flyers and talking with a man whose “daughter is into Bernie and [he doesn’t]know why but she’s a kid after all.” Doors turned on broken hinges. Bernie flyers swung loose from the handles. The Haitian asked if I felt safe.
We rounded a corner, the wind whispering its soft promise. Everything was still and silent, and Brahms was on the decrescendo. That’s when I heard the curdling scream of a Haitian in danger.
A mutt had jumped a broken fence, and the beast was charging us. Its eyes were red with blood-lust, tongue licking our scent from the air. This one had tasted human before. It hacked and howled, phlegm spilling from its jowls, which bounced to the tune of a Brahms concerto in allegro.
The Haitian was a goner. Although I was no longer in racing shape, I could still cover a mile in about five minutes, and she was a cripple. Yes, halfway down the block I looked back, expecting to see the dog feasting on the poor woman, maybe working on her liver first. What a bad scene; and how would I explain it to the campaign staff? Sure, some blood was expected on these trips, but you had to keep it within reason. I turned to face the mess.
To my surprise, the creature was stopped a few feet before her, wheezing and pushing its neck into the rusted chain that held it. The Haitian was smiling and waving to me, still panting from the chase.
Clearly, she didn’t understand what nearly came of her liver.
…
We hit the streets up & down, dropping flyers at each house. About half were abandoned, and the rest should’ve been. The afternoon dragged on, like it was disinterested in us.
…
A woman stood frozen in the doorway. Her body was a silhouette, framed by the glowing deluxe wide-screen behind her. She wore socks that were rotting and a t-shirt that read “INDIANA” in block letters.
“Excuse me, miss. Have you seen this man?” I held a picture of Bernie Sanders, covering his name with my thumb. She shook her head ‘no’. Family Feud blared behind her.
“Well,” I said, “Keep an eye out for him, will ya? He’s been missing for two days.”
Her jaw hung low, her eyes blank. I kept going.
“It’s the dementia,” I said. “Poor guy woke up in his front lawn awhile back. Sprinklers were soaking him and the man didn’t even notice. Lucky for him, it was summer. Could’ve froze, otherwise. Anyway, his family’s hoping he turns up real soon. They’re optimists, you know.”
“Troy?” the Haitian called from behind.
The woman in the rotten socks backed off, started to close the door. I pressed my hand against it and she stopped. I leaned close and whispered, “Honestly, at this point, we’re just looking for a body.”
…
It was quiet on the block. I stopped and the Haitian stopped behind me. She’d been in a pout since I’d started telling residents that Bernie was a lost man with dementia. I ignored her and looked to the sky.
Somewhere up there, a star called VY Canis Majoris kept watch. If this star is a mountain, the earth is a speck of dust. You’d need a high-powered microscope just to see the Atlantic Ocean. And there are tiny cruise ships somewhere out there, holding a million rotten smiles.
I took a step and the gravel cackled beneath my feet. Some grand joke. Yeah, keep laughing.
I told the Haitian all of this and she told me to “act professional,” this wry twist to her lip. Then she went on this diatribe about hope and perspective, but I won’t bore you with it.
We reached a house with chipped paint, like something had gnawed on it, left it for dead. I walked up the ramp and rang the doorbell, but the doorbell was torn out of the wall, so I knocked.
Brahms stepped away from the piano, took a bow.
A large man answered. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or much of anything. 300 pounds, maybe more, and he’d just had a stroke a few months before. His flesh hung like a discount butcher shop and his mouth was caked in red. Might’ve been blood, but it seemed rude to ask.
I watched his eyes. He watched mine. Satin lips. I remembered the words of the muffin man back at the campaign office. “There’s more in the back, if you’re hungry.”
The man scratched his naked chest and looked at my Bernie brochures.
“Ah, the revolution’s here!” He said. Blood flew from his mouth and stuck to his chest hair. Behind me, the sky was dirt.
I turned to the Haitian and said “hope” with a sneer. But I didn’t say it to her; I said it to someone in the background.
She looked back, confused. “Who are you talking to?”
To tell you the truth, reader, I was talking to you.
…
We reached the outskirts, and the neighborhood thinned. Houses were sparse, residents were nearly extinct, and the only sound came from waves eating the Mississippi shore.
I’d quite knocking on doors and was just leaving flyers, scattering them to the wind. The Haitian was tired, lagging behind, just as I thought she would. I looked back at her and she smiled, but it was forced. Like she’d signed a contract and that was in the fine print.
We reached a yard—at least, I think it was a yard. The thing was covered in a thicket of political signs so dense, the sun couldn’t even touch the snow. I waded through them, knocking over smiling politicians from elections as far back as 2005.
I reached the door and it swung open. A man with busted glasses stood there, unshaven, chewing something ugly, wearing pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Clearly insane.
“Ah, hello! Up five points from a week ago, aren’t we?” he said.
I looked back at the Haitian and she was fixated on the sky, searching for VY Canis Majoris.
“…Now, the smart money’s still on Hillary, but…” the man went on.
His eyes bugged out, covered in veins. They looked like Rory’s tumor. I’d seen those eyes before.
It was 2013, and some girl had dragged me to volunteer at this political campaign. I think it was Republican…maybe Democrat. The headquarters were stuffed in the back of some forgotten office park, and it was humming with college students and a man wearing a dark suit—rushing around the office and pulling out his hair.
He sat us down at a table, put a phone in our hands. We knew what to do.
Call. Follow the script. Hang up and repeat. My partner had a simple mind, so she enjoyed this sort of thing.
That’s when I saw it: the ‘Politiwacky.’
The creature was holding a phone against each ear, foaming at the mouth as he shouted “HI THERE, MS. STONE. I SEE YOU’RE A REGISTERED VOTER” into one of the receivers. Pizza grease and news print had stained his hands past recognition.
This one hadn’t slept in weeks. His desk was wallpapered with spreadsheets. A poll-smoking junkie. A freak that haunted every rally, every caucus…he crept at the back, neither malignant nor benign.
He had no loyalty to any party, any politician, any moral. He didn’t care what happened in the election. He just wanted to track it, to participate, to be there and snort it all up his cocaine nose. He was a Politiwacky.
The Politiwacky shouted his ‘call total’ to the man in the dark suit, who smiled. The freak had already made several thousand, and the day was young.
Now, I’d found another Politiwacky, and he was hopping up and down, spitting out poll numbers and projections.
“…He’s strong for an outsider, but still an outsider,” the Politiwacky said. “Plus, he just doesn’t have the cash to-“
“That’s actually why I’m here,” I said.
The Haitian whimpered.
“We’re collecting donations for the Bernie Sanders campaign. And if you want to keep this race going, you’re gonna have to fork over-”
“No!” The Haitian yelled. “No, we’re not!”
The Politiwacky backed into its living room, eyes narrowed. We’d frightened it. You see, Politiwacky’s are skittish. They aren’t hardy folk. They struggle in most climates, especially the North, and their skin turns paper-white in the winter. They break out in fevers daily and rarely see the sun.
“I think you should go away,” he said, closing the door.
I shrugged, turned to leave and was suddenly face-to-face with a Vietnam vet. You know, a real “smell of Napalm in the morning” type. His mouth was curled in a bitter twist, and the skin from his cheeks was being pulled away from his face, like the earth wanted it back.
The old man had seen us walking door-to-door, and decided to investigate.
He seemed friendly, so I handed him a Bernie Sanders flyer.
“Bunch of bullsh*t,” he snarled, tearing it up. The crumpled remains of Bernie’s face landed at his feet. I smiled.
The Politiwacky slammed his door and scurried inside.
The vet’s hands were shaky, and a constellation of scars wrapped around his right palm. Those hands had once gripped the blade of a knife that was headed for his throat. They had killed, too.
I gave him another flyer, and as he shredded it, the vet told me he’d been betrayed by America. He told a story of injustice, old wounds and a government that never “gave him a g*ddamn reparation for his loss.” Each time he paused, I handed him another flyer. The Haitian stood behind us, breaking into a nervous sweat.
That’s when he started laughing. A hopeless laugh. Even cruel. It tasted bitter, and he laughed so hard, tears began streaming down those cheeks and landing in the shreds of paper beneath his feet, making a sick pulp of Bernie’s face. I was mortified, but only for a moment, and then I joined in the laughter until I was out of flyers.
That’s when he reached for my notebook, the one with all the poetry. I pulled back and assumed an Israeli fighting stance.
“You son-of-a-b*tch,” I said.
The joke was over.
…
After Much Walking
The afternoon had turned strange, bloody, and our good graces with the neighborhood were dead. It was only a matter of time before the people of Iowa got together, dipped us in boiling tar and doused our bodies in Canadian goose feathers.
The Haitian kept shooting me hateful looks. Time to head back to the campaign office, collect our reward, bask in the glory and all that.
That’s when I saw it.
The red door. It belonged to a house on the corner of 3rd and 6th, and it was the only door on the street that wasn’t in shambles. In fact, it was pristine. Newly painted. Ornate. Didn’t belong in the neighborhood, just like the woman who opened it.
Jeans wrapped around her waist, just below her breasts, and her blouse sprouted from it all brilliantly. Satin, silk and woman. Hair brown like the earth and eyes dark like a funeral. I suddenly felt very poetic.
She plucked a cigarette from her lips. The sky started to break overhead and we stood in the smelted heat. The porch rose above me; and from my angle, she looked eight-feet tall and lovely as cream on a Sunday. She had satin lips.
I smiled at her and she smiled back, like we were laughing at the same joke.
The Haitian stood behind us, fumbling a stack of Bernie flyers. At that moment, she might as well have caught fire and turned to ash.
I said “hello” or “hey.”
The woman leaning against the red door, who will later reveal herself as “Dia,” squinted at me, like she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
I asked Dia if she participated in the caucus because it’s very important that you participate in the caucus because you can make your voice heard and make sure a leader is elected who matches your values and can make real-world change and-
“You’re a smart insurance man, aren’t you, Mr. Neff?” she said.
Hold.
Dia didn’t even need to raise her voice above a whisper, and the world heard. The vines stopped rustling and a great calm washed over all. The street was empty to either side. If there were wolves in the hills beyond, they dropped their kills, sat down and watched.
If you don’t know what’s going on, just wait. You’ll catch up in less than a minute.
I cleared my throat.
“I’ve had eleven years of it,” I said.
“Doing pretty well?”
“It’s a living.”
Dia took a drag and gave the Haitian a wicked smile, who was backing away from us.
“Do you understand what we’re doing?” She called to the Haitian (and maybe you). “Have you brushed-up on your film noir? Have you seen ‘Double Indemnity’?”
See, I told you she’d explain it.
The Haitian wasn’t having any of this, kept stomping her feet, asking me to leave. I told her to act like a professional and turned back to the woman with the red door.
“I wish you’d, ah, tell me what’s on — er, engraved — on that anklet of yours,” I said.
She laughed and told me her name’s Diana, or ‘Dia’ for short. She asked if I like it, and I told her I’d have to drive it around the block a few times.
I looked down at my notebook, which I’d covered in a scrawl of madness and poetry.
Yeah, um, I’m here and I
Blaze the octane….
I, ah, well, Emperor
Of these hollow drives
These casket forests all boxed
Together in red train cars
Headed to the Gulag
If the state can afford it.
When I got home, I’d tear out a few lines, tape them to my bedroom wall, and throw the rest away. Some nights, I streamlined things and wrote on the wall itself. It’s ugly poetry, but it gets me through the night.
I looked up, and the red door was open.
“Come in for some wine,” said a voice within.
I looked back at the Haitian, and she was shaking her head “no.” But, hell, what did she know?
Dia appeared on the porch again, this time with a glass of wine. Red. She beckoned, and I walked up the stairs, as men do. I couldn’t see anything past the doorway. Dia walked ahead of me and disappeared inside. There was a buzzing from the depths, and—what’s this?—a whisper…“Carcosa.” The darkness clung to us like a thousand flies.
…
She had a record player. Vintage. Her dress matched her lips.
Dia asked what I do when I’m not here, when I’m not now. I told her the truth. I drain bottles, drive around the empty streets at midnight, hit the notebook, splash ink across it like a killing, write some poetry, then trash my room. It’s a savage existence, and a lonely one. But I tell her I’d have it no other way. I don’t know if I lied, but the wine was sweet down my tongue.
Dia sighed deep and her chest swelled. Outside, the earth peered through the window, hoping to get a look at the action. The needle bounced when she breathed like that.
There’s not enough punctuation, I tell her, and we’re missing a great many words in the English language (but I can’t even name one). And if I had more, I’d use them on her.
She scratched the record and told me she’s haunted. Haunted by her ex-husband, who ran off to “find himself.” Some slack-jawed skeleton without a bone of bravery amid the style. I started sketching a picture of her in my notebook. It’s awful, grotesque, and it’s nailed to my wall.
With introductions concluded, Dia passed the cigarette and took another pill. She does this thing when she looks back on her suffering…her lips purse, her eyes go soft as static, and her whole being goes two-dimensional. After you’re done reading her, you could fold her up, put her in an envelop and mail her to that ex in Jacksonville.
I took a drag, told her I sympathize, but then she went on too long and I got lost in the music.
“Hey dude, I really should get back to my partner,” I said.
Dia smiled and pursed her lips.
“I didn’t see any partner,” she said, leaning against me. “And don’t call me ‘dude’.”
Her eyes were straight vodka. The woman leaned over and put down another vinyl. The Stones. Right when the needle hit, she struck a light. Flames licked the end of her cigarette, and she passed it all to me.
She’s my little rock ‘n’ roll, the record spun round. My t*ts and *ss with soul, baby.
The heater was throwing a fit in the corner, and it reminded me of a child I’d seen the day before. The little thing was having an asthma attack in the middle of McDonald’s, screaming and spilling its chicken nuggets all over the floor. It gasped like a fish, tears streaming down its chin. It kept looking between me and the mother and the EMT, asking us to help in a babble. Begging for mercy, the salvation of a breath. And I just stood there with a wad of paper towels, looking half-dead and stoned. Welcome to it, kid.
“Have you heard — oh, well thank you — have you heard of Cotard’s Delusion?” I asked Dia.
She hadn’t. The light was dim. The record spun. Her nails dangled over it all.
“It’s a condition,” my words melted, synched with God. “Where people think they’re dead. They’re fine, really, but they’re convinced they’re dead. They stop washing, stop moving. They just sit there and, I don’t know, think they’re dead.”
Well, the sense is sensing that the juice keeps pumping and I know why, the record spun. She touched it with her fingers now and then, spun it forward and back, and I didn’t seem to notice.
We were in her basement, on an old sofa. Dream catchers. Animal statues. Sweetness of wine. A stack of cheap novels by her desk. She was a writer. She was divorced. She was alone. She owned a cat, too.
It purred and rubbed against me.
“How old are you?” the divorcee said.
I shrugged. “Ah, man. Nobody knows for sure. They found me in a wicker basket, washed up on the banks of the Ohio River. A nice family raised me.”
She laughed and emptied another bottle. Her laugh was cruel, like she was watching a lover drown. I couldn’t get enough.
Her fingers reached the record and pressed the needle, scratching it and sending an electro frenzy through my head.
Dia sighed, and you could see a few years escape. She’d been holding them in, all this time. Kept them to herself, sealed behind those lips. She was the swallower of worlds.
“You’re a strange beauty, I think,” she said, finished her glass and poured some more. Took a drag and chased it with another pill, as people do. “You’ve got poor complexion. You’re small and you kind of hunch weirdly when you walk. And your face is different. Kind of simian. The things you say aren’t the things people say.”
She paused and watched the ceiling. “But I like the way you say them.”
I downed my glass and admired how the carpet twisted into a vortex and swallowed her words.
Come si chiama, what’s your game? spun the record. I’m just a poor man, fzzzzzzzzzzzztttt-fzzzzzt-fzzt…I’m just a poor man…what’s your name?
Her eyes covered me like a cancer. “I think I’d like kissing you,” she said.
Suddenly, VY Canis Majoris didn’t seem so great.
And Brahms, are you seeing this?
The ceiling distended and nearly touched my nose. We laid down on the sofa and Dia was abundant & warm. A cloud of smoke held us together. We were ****ed and things started coming together.
Dia studied me through the haze. “You shouldn’t be doing that, you know.”
“What?”
“Something young and healthy like you shouldn’t smoke. Don’t you know? It’s poison.”
She hung on that last word.
“Poison? No,” I said. The room turned to a hot fog as the ceiling and floor made love. “It’s toasted.”
Dia smiled, plucked the cigarette from my mouth. Took a long draw, deep & red. Held it in. When she finally released, the vapor was pink.
The woman leaned close. When you looked in her eyes, you got the feeling you’d been missing out on something your whole life. Like you were the punchline.
She pressed the cigarette against my mouth and spoke in a cherry femme whisper.
“I think you’re cool.”
…
Some Time Later
I lost the Haitian.
Hours had passed without warning, and just as I closed the red door, I realized she was gone. Vanished into the winter. I called her name and the wind cried back.
The sun was blood-red and pissed. I was seeing in Technicolor. Deep in the vice of Insomnia. At this point, it didn’t matter much what was real and what wasn’t. I just needed to survive, get back to the campaign office and maybe, with God’s grace, find the Haitian.
I stumbled down the block, head hung low like a soldier who had lived too long. The great stick-around, that’s what got ‘em, the warriors among us.
The longer we’re here, the more we get it. The big joke. The ‘infinite jest’, as D.F. Wallace called it. We start to look at the sun for a moment too long, realize it isn’t just smiling. It’s laughing. Just like Wallace did before he tied the noose.
I reached the Bernie Sanders campaign office, right as the sun started to die. The Haitian…by God, I was gonna find her.
…
“Why do you keep calling her the Haitian?” the receptionist said. She chewed her gum and eyed me suspiciously.
“Ah, I don’t know,” I said. “I think she goes by Rosaline.”
She thumbed through a stack of documents.
“No, I’m not seeing any Rosaline, and nothing close to it…Wait a second, I remember you! No, you definitely left here alone.”
“I left at seven in the g*ddamn morning from a Denny’s in Aurora, drove up here with a full car and a broken recording device, went door-to-door through your psychotic town, where I was nearly eaten by a dog and beaten by an elderly man…among other things…and every—okay, nearly every second of it happened with a Haitian at my side. She’s real. God, she’s real if I know she is.”
The receptionist was backed against the wall, and I was a maniac for the moment.
“But I-I-I remember you being alone,” she said.
I gave her a hard stare. Her lips quivered.
“You could always check the rally,” she said.
“The rally?”
“Yeah, you were supposed to report there hours ago. All the volunteers are there. Half the town, too.”
…
I waded through the crowd, and the politician’s voice rattled around my insides. His words were thick and irregular. They clung to everything they touched, left bits behind. They were matted buffalo fur with wads of chewing gum stuck to it.
To keep below the crowd’s line of sight, reporters crawled across the ground like babes in a chapel. I stepped on their cameras and hands as I searched for her.
The Haitian. She had to be real, she was real, and I still don’t know why.
“We have the right to love the people we want to love,” said a voice from the stage.
It was Bernie. He stood behind a podium and pounded it with his fist, promising a revolution. VY Canis Majoris loomed from somewhere above.
I checked every aisle, every seat. I even walked the edge of a restricted area and had to deal with an angry policeman. The Haitian was nowhere to be found.
That’s when the beast got me again, the insomnia, and it set me against a pillar, melted the room in front of me. Pain took my brain and stretched it out like taffy. I stood in the middle of the crowd, clutching my temples and trying to push the wicked hurt back to the cave from where it came. That’s when I saw her: The Angel.
I’ve always wondered how Mary must have felt. God, imagine stumbling around the desert on a cold Bethlehem evening, just hoping to make tomorrow, and then an arch angel appears from the fabric of time. “His wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame.”
As I watched The Angel approach, I finally got it.
Her eyes were ice, her body hot, and it burned as she pressed my back against the pillar. My face was scorched. Her look was cutting deep. Where does this sort of thing come from? How does a professional react?
The Angel glanced down at my notebook, a splatter of poetry and obscene scribbles, side-effects of a twisted mind. She threw her head back and laughed, then looked in my eyes. I saw the Zodariidae.
“You’re gonna start a riot,” she said.
I babbled and sputtered. Were there words within me? What’s the protocol for this situation? What does the AP Style book suggest?
“You’re gonna start a riot,” she said, sticking to that last word for longer than I could handle. “If you don’t move out of the way.”
Wait. I looked behind me, and a crowd of angry liberals waved their arms and screamed for me to sit the hell down.
“I really thought I was gonna get a kiss,” I managed to say, and The Angel laughed as her boyfriend pushed her away, glaring at me with violence. Oh, well.
I looked up and Bernie was watching me.
His tone dropped. The crowd parted before me, Red Sea-style. It was silent, not a drop of Brahms, and I stood there with my notebook, my wrinkled clothes, my bloodshot gaze. Bernie looked deep, right in my eyes. Right in yours.
Something formed on his lips. What was it? Ah, the corner of his mouth started to lift. Yes, it was a smile. And as he smiled at me, I smiled back.
…
I stumbled into the Iowa freeze, and the horizon stretched before me. A field of infinity reached for its bounds, and together they gasped.
None of it was real. Or maybe it was. I couldn’t tell. Still can’t. That’s how these insomnia benders work…at a certain point, you take the truth and the colors at face value. And a few hours later, that’s just the way they are.
Not that it really matters; we all wake up to find ourselves in a dreamscape now and then. All that matters is making it to the end. That’s always the game.
I sat in the snow. Laid back and let it swallow me. It was cool, real. I didn’t know a thing, but I knew the sky above.
Ants swarmed beneath my feet, a spider in their midst. She looked full and wore a smile…she really got it.
The sun watched with great interest. Across the field, the old vet limped and shrunk, like he was headed to the end of something. The fox feasted on a nest of sparrows. Far below, the worms writhed in the dirt, and nothing waited. I sighed, and the air made it stone.
I’ll be damned. Whitman was right.
Fin.
