Empath

"Empath"

by

Timothy Stillman

"Fly me to the North/to where the gentle lilacs never bloom/to where their fragrances never once again will enter my room/to where the whiteness is the only thing I can see/I just can't stand to have your sadness all around me."

Rod McKuen

It was his fear, his broken heart that gave him the violence of gentleness. And that is what frightened me the most.

You don't need to pull back the yellow speckled oilcloth curtains in the dingy dirty cluttered kitchen of this dingy dirty apartment in order to feel the imprint. At least I don't.

It's happened time and time again. The way the cold gets in when there is winter and this is Seattle. For this must be Seattle and it must be winter, for if it isn't, then my life is over even before it is.

I sit at the rude wood table, small, in one of those yard chairs of cloth and aluminum with a bent left leg that half tips me over from time to time, and causes me to always steady myself with my hands on the little table. And my hands were born in 1981 and that is the truth. As someone from some long ago TV comedy said so, sputtering at the end of the word "truth."

I am a baby chick and he has been imprinted as my mother and Seattle has been the same way stamped on me, marked on me because any other retinue that comes forth, that says I don't have to be here or even be me will destroy me more than he has already.

He knows things about me without my telling him and he thinks I am this boy he was in college with, and I am not I am not. There is no human thing about him. Or there are nothing but human things about him. There is always that pained hollow in the center of him that I am always in danger of falling into. In this cold little flat in the center of the city and these endless days he proved me so. Proved I am the golden boy he remembers.

That morning, early, dark and the bedroom where we sleep and where we find our things mixed up and confused--His hair, perhaps, on my brush--my toothpaste different from his on his side of the bathroom sink--(how generous he is to me, but that is His toothpaste on my side, not mine) that morning he had the proof laying on the breakfast table as he called me, sleepy soaked so I couldn't think, to breakfast.

He is tall and slippery and he smells bad. He had fixed some cocoa and had poured instant oatmeal and warm water into a chipped bowl with a clown of a little bear drawn three times round its circumference. And in front of me between the cocoa and the bowl was the morning newspaper, creased and turned to the obit page, folded and the obit he wanted me to see circled with a grease pen, for he works at a laundry and has to get to work early each morning. He will not let me work. That would be wrong. He says so. It is so.

As I folded down my compact body into the chair and put hands to my mouth to keep from yawning, and letting him thus fawn, because he says I am enormously cute when I yawn and I hate that kind of thing. I hate it especially since lately, and how long as he held me captive here?, I have come to slightly, slightly mind you, enjoy it. Feeling a little surge of happiness as apparently the Stockholm Syndrome is setting in.

The light in the ceiling over me is dim and yellow and sickly. It makes my captor's sickly skin even more so as he sits on the opposite side of me. His glasses spark and his eyes hold to my face as I brush the long wheat colored hair out of my eyes, for he wants me to have long hair. The wheat color was added by my own genetics, so far at least, independent of this man.

The news print is a shadow of vague marks with dark little eyelids covering up each word. There is a photo of grainy man face beside the article, and I feel the graininess of this man, in a yard chair like mine, sitting across the table from me. This man with the sad skin and the sadder eyes and the mouth that maybe has never smiled since Golden Boy left and persuaded me to take His place. It is all reverential.

The man, he does have a name, I know he does, speaks of Joel as Him. All the time. There is no getting around the inflection and the preacherly tone of smote and fire dragons entering the papery walls of this place and saving Him from the dragons that took him away from this man, that smote his true love forever more. His glass lenses are not thick but are like little streams of water beaded together to form the lenses. His eyes are always shifting, if that is you can see them at all, for no one tries, though I have lately, because there is no point to it. He is unremarkable and uneventful any way you look at it.

The cocoa is almost cold when I put it to my lips for he hates hot food and hot drink because He hated such and therefore i (i am lower case right now for him, his inflection lets me know--until I become Him--for I am the chrysalis, the fetus not even begun to grow yet, from which Joel will one day be culled and birthed and made certain and for always, this time of all the lights in Seattle which are rainy against the window this wintry wind blown night and that morning of the newspaper obituary.

I tried to focus on the words for the man's entire body was an exclamation mark pointing right at them, signs on him flashing in bright hurt eye red and yellow neon--READ READ READ. For this man who must have a name other than the humble follower of, the most humble keeper of the flame of Him, forever be the day and the crevices in each minute of it that he fills with Joel, and this little me who he says is Him almost sure. Like a baby duck imprinted with the first thing he sees in the summer barnyard and takes to be his mother forever and a day. I am no child. I have been on my own for a long time.

And the long time I have been on has always been Seattle. Otherwise, once the windshield wipers cleared the sleep and wet out of my green--sorry, sir, I mean blue eyes, for He had such blue eyes you could stare at them all day and never feel the facets of them were to ever be explored for all eternity--this from him about Him and the little me him, sort of--eyes and I saw the face and the words "Perry Como, Popular American Crooner for 50 Years, Dies One Day Shy of His 89th Birthday." The man across from me read me like a filled in acrostic. Like a New York Times Sunday word puzzle that he blocked the right words in such a short time, and sure of himself, as he had never ever been sure of himself, this nervous twitch itch of a man of middle age, so he filled it all in perfectly with his Blue Bell Laundry grease pen.

And he looked at me as I read the article. Suppressing a yawn and his smiling was like a snick on me, like he had taken part of me, such as my DNA and was now analyzing it in the laboratory of himself, all the green walls and the sterilized test tubes and the glass beakers and the jars and the centrifuges and the wall charts of chemistry and anatomy schematics and the denizens of the light that was pure reflective glow that would find my DNA stolen from me as though he had taken my fingerprints and my fingers. And the things he had stolen from me all these weeks (?) before had been as nothing.

As it seemed I was now truly trapped. Now there were suddenly runnels seeming under my forearms laying on the table and my hands holding the square of his miracle in their long fingers, as lead handcuffs covered them and chained me and braces came across my forearms and I was lost to him forever. The sacrifice of Joel to find the Joel in the cross who had, sorry, Who had died for the sins of little men in shabby apartments in cold cities where the street lights and distant office building lights were the laughter signs of everything over, dead ending, park benches for him soon and then much worse.

This was his proof. This was His proof. All the winters had gone to me because he had not revealed this last key to me. Because I knew he was somewhat agitated but I didn't know by what, and yet when I read that Mr. Como, whose face I recognized, How?, had had a hit single after a long television variety show career, when he made himself famous world wide for his slow almost comatose tempo rendition of songs as he wore his trademark cardigan sweaters, had after this sung a hit song that was the theme of the 1968 television series, "Here Come the Brides."

And it fell, the paper square, to the table, from my hands which were not handcuffed after all, as I looked out the oil curtains in the tiny square window at the city stretched out before me. Which was Seattle. Which was where the now totally cool and cold bowl of oatmeal took me because the gruel taste of the stuff sliding down my throat like a greasy spelunker made me here, was that final coffin nail that did not suggest, as the man lit his own coffin nail and blew smoke at me without saying a word, without giving a hint why this obituary was so important that I read it--

As my lips of their own volition, had my eyes turned truly blue?, as though this were the final eugenics experiment that Mengele had tried on who knew how many who had come before me?, and this time the magic worked without having to resort to crude debasing pain and horrorshow, began singing the opening lyrics to the theme song Como made famous and which was played on radio all the time, "Seattle." Because it had to be. Otherwise I was too young to have seen the series. Otherwise I had seen it on rerun. And heard the song played on one of those golden moldy oldy radio stations.

But-I-Had-Not.

But I had to have had. And I put my arms around my chest, around the thick gray and white plaid over shirt--the kind He had worn, (my jeans were also like His, Wrangler's). We seldom bathed, the man or me, because there was no heat in the apartment, save the kitchen stove; thus, the kitchen was our nexus. Anyway the rusty cold water from the clattering pipes, in spits and starts, did not appeal to either of us. So we smelled and felt pretty rank most of the time. I had no clothes to change; he had few changes. I only had to put on my socks and boots (yes, like Joel wore) in the morning, to be dressed for the day.

I suspect Joel made much fun of this man who never knew, rather like Margaret Mead had believed all the ridiculous stories about mating rituals the Somoans had made up all those years ago right into her grandmotherly eyes and ears which surely were never shocked by anything, and surely believed anything anyone said, being a dedicated anthropologist looking for the edge of forever in her study subjects. Joel who loved grass and whiskey and a good joke. The man was his most opportune joke. I tried it on the man myself when I got braver. It worked. It made him feel closer to me. And that did not work.

Like I was a study subject for this man. Like he was pulling my cells out of my body right this minute and like I was dizzy with the contempt he felt for me that I had been denying all the time I was Him, and not a little egg implant prototype of Him, calling him around, making him lose count before he decided on me, making me make fun of him because he had let me and a fellow has to do something to get away when he can not physically get away.

All of this, the obit and the read and the revelation took a few minutes. And I knew that "Here Come the Brides", whatever that was, was a series that he and He loved. Their signature series. Their ritual nightly program which pressed deeply into both of their hearts. As they had adopted the theme song about Seattle and the bluest skies--see?, I know the words, how?--as THEIR SONG. Forever and a day. And I looked at him as I had not looked at him before and his little pointed chin quivered a bit and I looked him straight square in the face and then I shamed myself and looked at the table. The little newspaper like a square and now twisted croissant of paper and type face laying before me.

This was Joel's biggest joke on him. He could tell the man anything, for He was loved so. Did He even know that? Did it mean nothing? Why am I asking this? I can't abide him. And was all the legacy they had had together. That Joel had picked a puerile TV series, and surely a puerile song and made the man believed it was THEIRS, thus to torment the man when Joel and his shadow went away for good and how much I wish I could go away for good too, though I knew at that moment I could not. That bathos and stupid and laughs behind hands held inside while the man was around and let out in spluttering glorious hysterics when the man left and He went to call his friends to tell him about the latest gag that the fool believed totally.

Surely, Joel would have been--into--heavy metal, Black Sabbath or even "The Who's Tommy" or surely the rock opera of "Hair." Maybe the song about wearing flowers in your hair when you go to San--and then it hit me, present and past, and place and time, and identity and lack of it, all of this--how do I know this stuff? Sixties music? And the more I thought of it, the more I knew about it. The more details, and coming on strong was more than I cared to think about--a dorm room and a study table and a concrete floor and the sound of the shower coming from the bathroom door between our two beds. But had that been him and Joel? Or him and somebody else? And if Joel could move, transmogrify from body to body, or of a body could do that same thing with a spirit or soul or something....then who was anyone? Who was this man if not the knight he wanted to be?

And I held onto the table edge with my hands. Hard. The grainy wood, with the edges of splinters biting into my left palm, as I felt the world--tilt. As though there should be a graciousness to falling down that fabled rabbit hole. As though there should be a kind of rabbity time clock ticking the minutes away now, because I didn't remember these things as from having seen a TV program about them, or heard these songs on golden moldy radio. It was--I felt them. I felt them, the songs, the times, this city where I went to university--and that was not true--I did not go to university here. I did not go to university anywhere. I couldn't afford it. I barely made it through high school, though you can tell I read a lot I guess, but it all just bored me and seemed pointless.

But that time long before me--this was more than a recitation of facts. This was a feeling in the marrow, as though the imprint had turned so deep, so powerful that it was a gale pulling me into itself, and making me not me anymore. Remembering the feel of the afternoon naps I took in the room before chemistry class each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Remembering how he and I took turns reading "Desire Under the Elms", which was required for play writing class, and we used the accents in our rendition, the ah mebes and the ayeahs, and laughed ourselves silly as we sat by the wall heater on the concrete floor and had our arms around each other and laughing and feeling close and feeling that lovely little winter spark that makes warm and good friends. That makes the songs sweeter and the day and night more important. Spangly. As though I was wearing glitter and had flowers in my hair.

It was not guessing at all of this, because I had maybe seen "Animal House." It was feeling that kinetic surge of power when I had read back then, with him, "Future Shock" and "The Medium is the Massage." It was that love of "Rolling Stone" and their daring articles and exposes and professed love for what we loved or perhaps it was only "the news that fit", and they changed for each generation. It was the corridors I ran down and the stairs I ran up at the end of every class day to his arms. Or that he ran up and into my arms when his classes lasted longer.

It was holding and denim jeans and hands that pulled at tugged at each other's hair and I saw him as he was then--rangy and smart and hollow eyed and high cheekboned and face texture of lovely oatmeal in a winter sun when Christmas rolls around in the kitchen windows of the house that I knew we would someday have and be together forever. The knuckling of our hands and the secret ties. The secret indentations that were made by nature and fate and by us. That constant rush in the chest. That heat. And longing.

That I have never felt before. I have been a hustler for six years now. I have never felt--this. Instead of being caged, I am free. Instead of remembering vaguely a place I lived in and left, far from here and went to a place also far from here, like L.A. or Frans Sanfisco perhaps. By the bay. Joel wasn't making fun of him and I was glad for him and I put my head so suddenly heavy down on my arms. And the man put his hands on mine and I remembered him as a boy and me as a boy, grown full now, grown from that chrysalis, the fetus ready for birth full form. His hands smelled of cigarettes and I wished he were young again and I wished--

"Remember," he said, his voice fog bound, uncharacteristically hushed and husked, "when `Portnoy's Complaint' came out in paper back and I got it before you did because it was supposed to be so sexy and we thought it would be so great, all the critics said so--"

As I pulled my head up and smiled at the dark interstices of outside the window, and continued for him--"and you got back to the room, god it was hot as hell that day, and I was already on my bed reading it--I was going to surprise you--"

"And it was the biggest load of crap we ever read in our whole lives."

And we laughed. Back there we laughed. And I was nothing. I was a bigger nothing than this man because I had been once someone of import and power and legion, and then I doubled into myself and folded like a paper flower and took myself away from being Joel and the ability to house him again as a harbinger to haunt this man down through all these sad desperate dangerous days of his. And I was angry once more, because this was wrong. He had chosen the wrong image and the wrong fun house mirror and the wrong customer and he could keep me here locked in this place until he rotted and fell dead of old age which might be a minute or two from this very moment.

And I said:

"I hated Norman Mailer. And I don't give a damn what His father thought about `Of a Fire on the Moon', all that intelligencia garbage and Norman being the star of his book, referring to himself by his first name and in the third person, and dad and you and my mom and some other teachers sat round the house that day being piss arrogant beyond words about all of that. And Norman was wrong. The consciousness, the philosophy of the world did not change and expand and become far more intelligent, that we did not, as Norman believed, waft off to join the cosmos and leave our little problems behind and become the Star Child or something. Norman's prediction was wrong, the whole lot of it."

You had always hated the intellectual things. Though You faked it because of your father, the English teacher. You had found that teachers, not even professors, in that little community college, were dallying away the hours in their ivory towers, even before the song came along. And you are here with me now and I don't want to be you, not the small case you or the larger reverential case You or YOU for that matter. I am not you. You are not me.

This man has brainwashed me for weeks or months and I have had to adapt like a snake has to adapt when taken from one climate to another and I am not a snake. You are and he is. Because you played him and he has been playing himself ever since. I know the you inside You. I see the little man behind the curtain and I am not going to listen to you telling him as well as me to pay no attention to that, but to look at the great god and powerful Ruler of Oz there in green reflection and pasted projection and blue smoke blown so carefully with that craftily drafted compelling breaking in small parts voice of Yours. You used him and you used me and I figure if he was dumb enough, the hell with him. But you can not use me. I refuse to be your conduit to Mars where this space goofball lives.

And all this time, the man across the table from me. Lost in his reverie, remembering things, letting jagged words come out of his mouth, words like slivers of hard winter ice, and I saw him insane. I saw him slipped out of whatever small sluice was holding him in all this time, and he had taken off his glasses and he was rubbing his face madly, rubbing it hard with the palms of his hands and knuckling his eyes hard and making his face blush with red that even I could see in this badly darkly lit apartment kitchen without the sun even close to being up yet.

As though he was trying to wipe the years off him. Trying to prove he waited as long as he could and it was not his fault that he got old in the waiting. Trying to prove he held onto his youth because I and all the various incantations before me--and I was determined, after me--were all You, the moth of ingenious design. The tiger moth flown from the moon. The lunar moth big as the moon and drifting in the midnight cold Seattle--where I have never lived, where we are not now, but it all shifts, you believe it's this city and it is. You believe someone is someone else far distant because they look alike or you want them to look alike.

You tire of living just in your mind. You remember too well and not well enough at the same time. Ghosts of haunted eyes for far different reasons pick at you and clutch at you like mad winter witch claws of winds and you have to pick at them, pick them up, and make them something because obviously street trash, they are nothing at all. And they do it, because, like me, they needed food, they needed shelter, they needed closeness that they could pretend--that THEY could pretend, see it cuts both ways--someone cared for them. But this man like all the others did not care. Did not know I was there.

And had stolen my identity, probably not much of one, but it had been mine once, I think. Like someone steals your identity on the computer and takes over being you. And makes you remember "Seattle" sung by a Mr. Perry Como, this theme song from "Here Come the Brides" with Robert Brown, David Sherman (big heart throb back then) and David Soul. With Henry Beckman as Clancy and somebody or other as Birdie.

And there it is. If I had lived in Seattle even for a few years, I could have seen it on rerun, if it was, even though it was quite old. Cities do that with series set in their area, even if the show was about a time over a hundred years ago. It didn't matter how long ago the series had been on the air originally, because they are perfect for the Chamber of Commerce to use as local pride and tourist fodder. But if I lived in another part of the country, odds would diminish greatly that I had seen the show that old on rerun. Maybe Nick at Nite perhaps, but when you work at legit jobs and then you hustle on the side or full time you don't have much room for TV.

This part of a newspaper with the obit was the first paper I have seen since I got to this place that first night. There are no books, there is no TV or radio in this apartment. For he wanted it to be pure. Wanted me to come to the realization in my own time. We talked seldom. We talked about Joel to an extent but brief, just enough to plant the idea, for I had much time to think during the day when he locked me in as he went to work. Mostly he used me at night and that was the extent of it save for these little chemical word spills so they were like Hansel and Grettle bread crumbs that I followed, however unwillingly--at first--because I was intrigued in spite of myself, and because my restless brain had to make a puzzle and then solve it.

He let me drink all the booze he could afford. Smoke all the weed. That got me through the day. And scrounging my skin from him at night gave me a puzzle all its own to figure out--with the clues thrown in, gradually, subtly,

. So I wouldn't be contaminated in the experiment. So I could prove him right.

Even when drunk and stoned and satiated from sex, he kept his tongue. He said very little even then. Control he had. Control he does not have now. The lab in him, the great experiment performed finally, has been shut down. The lab has melted to a pulp and the man in whom it was became melted before my eyes. His glasses removed and pushed from the table. His head in his hands. His hands trembling.

His body shaking more and more as though he had come down with some palsy. His almost bald head shook and his words became more daggers than ice shards and he sang in a defeated voice bits and pieces of songs from his and Joel's days, I find it impossible to make fun of Joel and of joining Joel's ghost who is now me in laughing about this man.

And the man is cracking up and he draws fingernails down his face, and blood issues in the cracks of his cheeks. He has me. He has Joel back. Why is he doing this?

Am I not good enough? All this time, he has been laughing at me as I fell into his trap more and more, a little more evidence, tantalizing bread crumbs as time went on, and he laughing at me with the ghost of Joel beside him. And me not Joel at all? But I HAVE TO BE. I HAVE TO BE. And I pushed back the lawn chair and I walked over to the lit oven with the enamel scratched door open because it was the only heat we have for winter--but is it really summer and the girlies in their pretty summer dresses? somewhere out there, out of time, out of luck, out of mind. And out of me.

]

I stood and looked at this babbling, broken, very ill man who had such pain sticks going up him and into his fingernails and into his ears and eyes and I imagined him a witch at Salem being tortured by Cotten Mather and the ilk with branding irons and fire lit sticks from the bon fires and his screaming and calling me down through the hundreds of years of history. And I will not grow mad with him. I will not be knocked asunder anymore. Displaced by someone who maybe wasn't real to begin with. A one page joke turned into an interminable novel. And I ran the hell out of there. I ran to the tiny living room and out the tiny hall door and ran down the corridor of filthy moth eaten carpeting and dingy punched in kicked in scuff marked doors, past the path sound of life in poverty that becomes the sleeve that I knew so well, the sleeve that requires constant sewing up so the poverty lives with you every day. Because you would miss it were it gone from you or you from it.

It's the only thing one knows after a time. It is a friend of inestimable want and need. We all have to have something to believe in and that will believe in us. I ran out of the apartment house, into the cleansing snow that was made red by the neon red sign at the top of the tall spindly place where tiny rooms were the world away from everything of value that tricked you, me, into not believing so. The world seemed so huge out there, so unbelievably panoramic, it fairly took my breath away. More even than the cold clutch that hit me center chest. I didn't know which way to go. I felt guilty. Then I took one arbitrary step. Then another. And I fled.

I came to a diner. My legs had gone rubbery, and I sat over coffee for a time, thinking it out, skirting round it, wanting to forget. All of it. I might escape it this way. Putting it behind me, but I can't. How could I ever do something like that? I was free now and I felt in prison. I had run for blocks and blocks in the snow, coming heavy down, like a curtain, and me with no place to go, no place to be, only away from him, and just shivering in the firm wall of the push back Arctic blast. My blood huffing. My nostrils grasping huge sacks of air and tossing them down. My neck and spine in hives and boils of fear as I thought I heard the shadow of the man pounding behind me.

I didn't walk into the diner as much as I collapsed against the glass door, and into the hot room. So wonderfully hot it took the breath out of me some more and was like a bright warm glove was suddenly around me. Holding me. Protecting me. Creasing the dirty streaks on me. Making me safe. It was an almost sexual release.

Bright white glare of light inside. I held onto the side of a booth back that was next to me. Then floored it as best I could to a counter stool, across the linoleum which seemed a lot like the kind in that apartment, where I just about did collapse. Till I got my breath back and the world was less dizzy round me. The waitress was like from a fifties film noir-- in color that was black and white still and all--henna haired scrawny bodied woman, beaten down shoulders, pink dress, white apron, name tag, and her just shoot me expression, defeated even more than me. I managed to ask for a cup of coffee. I could have sprouted three heads and she wouldn't have cared. Just leaning on the counter watching me. Hi ho. Cup of coffee. Robbery rape or murder.

What's your pleasure, young man? Forget your troubles. Come on. Get out of here so I can go home, her one remaining hope that she still might have put some faith in.

I could have asked her if this was Seattle and what year by the way was this and when was I born and do you remember seeing me before and if you used to know me did I once have a name, for I've just remembered that I used to have one, but I can't seem to get a handle on that either. And maybe I could find a mirror somewhere, the wash room or something, and look at my face. For I've forgotten what that looks like too. I try, but can't. I remember Joel's face, but how? I've never seen a photo of him in that apartment. Maybe its hoo doo and voodoo and hypnosis when I slept that he filled my brain with this stuff. Possible. Who knows.

But I don't want to know where I am. I don't want to know my name or what I look like. I don't remember how I looked like before the kidnapping--for that was what it was, hustlers have their rights too--what if I look like I used to and don't recognize me? What if I look like Joel whom I've never seen and recognize him immediately? There is a newspaper on the counter. I will not go look at it.

The obit of Mr. Como had been at the top of the page but the top had been turned down to hide the name of the paper. Eventually I will have to find out and how much can I find out about who I am or was or was not or am now and where I live or do not and just how old I really am, young or old?, or why I should miss this man who raped me of my identity and never knew the real person was there in front of him already. The real Joel? And he went mad just when he had won.

I drank my coffee. It was hot and acrid and scalded my tongue. I drank it fast. It hurt and burned my mouth and all the way down my throat, to my stomach. All those weeks, months, of cold or lukewarm cocoa and cold or lukewarm oatmeal, made this great too soon gone coffee a magnificent treat.

I paid with some money--he always let me keep a dollar or two in my jeans pockets--taunting me without saying it that when I realized who I really was I could, as Whit Bissell told the Teenage Frankenstein, in answer to the monster's constant muffled (because of the appliances and monster make up) question--when can I go out among people?--in time my boy, in time. Another movie I've never seen, but know intimately because of that very fact.

I left the diner, though I didn't, god, I didn't want to. I would have stayed in there forever but there was no time and I hit the cold mountain and the snow thick and white and everything pushing against me again. I walked fast and, hopefully, alone in the dark morning before sunrise and I figured out why the man had gone mad. Not because I was so small and insignificant to his memories, i.e., fantasies and dreams about Joel, but because I was that once golden boy, or even surpassed him, and I was odds and ends to the man at that point.

I guess you take the dreams and the pain and the wildness and wanting to go back to something and someone in whom you once believed with all your heart and it breaks apart on you. And the dream even in the guise of whatever reality you happen to believe in, the dream haunts you and shafts you and makes impossible with mere human bones and body and flesh and heart and soul, makes all of it unobtainable. Taking all the emptiness of all these years for him, and living with them, bringing out little perfect cameos of Joel and holding them for a moment then releasing them back to the ozone again.

And the emptiness feels good after a time. Feels as though penance for one fine day Joel will return to you just as he left you. The man had taken the fear and the loneliness and the desert of his every moment and had thrown them into the future, for a time that future was me and, like I've read in a book of literary criticisms, if all that nothing you've been plowing through can be tossed to the future, you expect it to make a wonderland, a nirvana, like Joyce Carol Oates wrote, (I read all the time--it's just I can't remember what most of the books are I remember these things from. Or the covers or where I read them.

There is nothing mystical or supernatural about that. Books do not imprint on me from others' minds. That would be dumb for me or anyone to believe.) Though, this brings me to another ledge of the nightmare I hadn't considered before. The fear--was this the first time this happened to me with a trick? This disappearing act I did into myself. If I'm not me, I'm anyone. Don't think that.

Just this thought from what I read--I!--this man had needed to take the so called reality of now, the so called orderliness and destroy it like a madman, toss it and hurt it and tear it and everyone in it up, this nihilistic place where he lived and always will live, that he wanted to use to create Joel, to create love that had been or might have been or impossible to have been, thus to make that golden bridge one day one day come true up there. But when you get there, all the stuff of the world and himself thrown away hoping some greater god will rearrange it, reorder it so it is heart's desire. But it's still the same old torn life and torn hopes and lying torn memories. And you don't even get to die for a long time of that. You have to live with it.

I walked faster. Ran. I've been running all my life.

Me. I have legs. I have arms and a torso and the sun is beginning to make the sky in front of me a little less dark, a little glow of red. I start running. I will run to what I am. What I have been since the first day of my birth. I will not become that sad old man. I will not let the past strangle me almost to death but not allow me to check out altogether, still hoping hopeless hopes, each minute of each day a deep laceration. I run faster and faster until there is a stitch in my side. My body is frozen in the snow cold and the rush of Northern wind blowing right at me. But it feels though painful, good. It feels free. And I am free to run to me, run into me again.

I hope he remembers me when I find him. I hope he doesn't run away from me. Or that I chase him for so many years I grow old and have to pick up tricks that I can pretend are me, were me, then and not now, and that I am Joel and not Joel at the same time, and that I am of the sixties hippie generation and the me decade at the same time, and that I am not complex and I do not need to analyze every feeling and thought. Let this man leave me alone. Let him not haunt me.

Let me not pick up an older man and pretend he is my captor. Let me not go back to that apartment and that obsessive idol worship, long may He be praised. There should have been a Laura painting of Joel above a mantle place and roses on either side. Save there is there no mantle piece.

Run into the sun and let me not melt away and let me live to find out who that actress was who played Biddy (not Birdy, dummy me, but Biddy) on "Here Come the Brides." If I can find that out and remember more clearly what she looked like then, as I can remember all the other actors so well, then I think I'll be okay. I think I'll have turned the corner and will be safe. As safe as hustlers these days ever are or ever were.

You meet screwy people in this racket. The trick is, as Jim Thompson (I've read a lot of his books, too, yes) was told once, observe them, but don't be like them. But it's difficult with this particular Passing Parade. Now, why does the phrase, Passing Parade, seem so familiar to me, on the tip of my memory? Am I to be implanted with someone else's lost love? God, no no no.

And I run. Fast as hell I run. And I don't look behind because there is no doubt in my mind someone or something's gaining on me. Wherever the hell you are, Joel, in me or out there, god, would I love to make you pay.

And what the hell kind of name was Biddy anyway?

As in the back of my mind, as I run through the shadows of barely awake morning with sun dim red smudge making. As I run through the shadows, fearful, more and more so every moment fearful, that one shadow in particular, or worse, two or more, will separate from the sides of buildings or the sidewalk I run down. Shadow (s) that will become fluid and slide and slip and cocoon slither out and breathe inside me and will have red eyes to stare into me as though I am nothing. Clinging, desperate shadows. That will part from their brethren and climb down the side of the sky or the walls I run past. That they, rustling, will climb down without limits or form, and void, as though they are Nosferatu, upside down, skulking down the side of his dark midnight horror movie castle. Shadows. That will have lives, so to speak, of their own.

And I will run into them. Not into me. And they will remember me. And I will too. No matter how I fight it, I will. And I will be i again. I want to stop. To stop and scream. But I can't. I can't stop to fill my lungs for a scream. I've no time for that. No time at all. I have to run down the concrete strands of this spider web till my heart bursts. Black furred spiders, huge, following me. Waiting up ahead for me. Ready to pounce on me at any second.

I have to lengthen and lengthen my own shadow. Far in front of me. Giving egress. Till I fall into the rising sun. Help me! Somebody! No. Please. Don't help me. Not anyone.

That would mean more memories. Haven't I lived enough lives for you people already? Maybe, though, I'm addicted to it. This scares me most of all. I could be a million people all at the same time. An entire city of facets of all those memories. And then I wouldn't be lonely anymore. It might be worth it, if I look at it from that angle. If such a thing does extend my powers into infinity and beyond. And that would bring up some whole new questions if I could go on doing it indefinitely.

I could be, well, God even. Then--payback time. But for whom? Can someone who doesn't exist go insane?

Timothy Stillman (comewinter@earthlink.net)