THANKS JoHN

Hard Etruscan Bone

You understand, don’t you, I’m not like you, she said. Yes, we share things, but only those that are common, nothing more. We both shit and eat, sleep and wake, fuck and eat and shit and sleep and stay awake long into the night trembling with cold and bitter memories. That’s all; that’s all we share; all we have in common, nothing else. Beyond those basic shared human functions, animal functions, actions, we share nothing, nothing more. We are different, distinct, but indifferent in only those things, those vatic human needs, those things and actions and functions that we all share and have, together, as one human system, a functionality, nothing more. Beyond that we are not the same, but different, distinct and without measure, two separate things, entities that exist as nothing more than the difference between the two: you and I, it and that, him and her. I clacked my tongue against her cheek, below the bone, and ran it into the seam of her mouth, warm, pulpy, wet, glossed with her own tongue, washed into the spaces between her teeth, diamonds, ivory, hard Etruscan bone. When we fuck, I said, there is no difference, no distinction, we are of the same measure, a cloth cut from the same bolt; and that, yes, that is the difference between you and I, I need the difference, you see the difference, but never need it. We fucked, hard, until the skin leavened from out backs, her stomach pressed into the couch of my ribs, Adam and Eve, fruitless and at ease, fucking like two animals, the difference immeasurable, but there just the same, constant and holding, inseparable. The beast with two backs, blushed, reddened with sameness, indifference and functionality. Our bodies’ pulp cut close to the stone, deep through to the centre where there is no difference, only soft, succulent wet fruit.

If I were to tell you, tell you how it is, you wouldn’t believe me. I am not what I appear be, what I seem to be, but the difference between the two, what is seen and what is appearance. The two, the seen and the appearance, are often the same, yet different, indifferent to being seen as the same. What is seen is often not what appears, or what it appears to be, seen. Being seen, and being the appearance of what is seen, the seen, depends on the other for the appearance of being and being seen. The two, in this manner, are interdependent yet dependent of one another; they are seen as being seen as the appearance of what is seen, or appears to be seen as seen. If I were to tell you (which I won’t) you would only see what you want to see, the appearance of what is seen as seen, nothing more. I am the appearance that is never seen but appears to be seen, the difference between the two. I am the tissue connecting the two, the seen and the appearance of the seen, or what appears to be seen, yet never is. When you see me, the appearance of me, the seen of me, what you are seeing is not me, but the appearance of what is seen as seen; the difference between the two, what lies in between the seen and the appearance of what is seen as seen. As I said, I am not what I appear to be, the appearance of what is seen as seen, yet never seen at all, but the seen as seen as the appearance of being seen as seen, the appearance of seen, the illusion of appearance and being seen. I told you, you wouldn’t believe me, see me for what I am, what is seen and appears to be seen, the seen of appearance, the illusion of the seen and the appearance of what is seen as seen. The rectory parasite saw me for what I was; a frightened, confused boy, the appearance of someone, a being that was never there to begin with, but was seen just the same. It is the illusion of being seen, of being an appearance of the seen, that, and that alone, is what appearance and being seen are, nothing more. Sometimes, so I have learned, it is better to be seen as an appearance of being seen, a not seen, than being seen at all. Perceptions are like that, appearances seen as memories one has remembered to forget. What is seen is seen backwards, from the illusion and appearance of the present seen in the past. What is seen is never seen, but remembered, the appearance of what was seen but never was. Now you see what I have seen yet never seen: the illusion of being seen, but never being seen at all. It is the appearance of being seen that is seen, nothing more.

This is the other part of the story, the other story. Her lips are blue dulse blue, cool to the touch yet cragged with shell grit and sluice. She skips needles, sharpened to Braille, on the striker of a match pack. Reusable, she says. I found her in the bathroom, a caulk of blood clouted on the curve of her elbow, towels and face clothes stopping up the toilet, a toilet that ran for days on end, a Fountain Blue hammered from porcine teeth. Gouts if it, as I remember, the blood and soft tissue scrapped clean from the juke of her arm. And the scrimshaw and thistle scratches hard as railheads. Skin folded round the crook of her arm, arms weald with calluses, blue-yellow like hard candies or dying leaves. The surgical tubing, nicotine brown, clutched in the child’s grasp of her fingers. All moons, so I have come to learn, are jaundice, whored with STD’s and incurables. Stars like dead men, night’s gallows assayed with corpses pretending to be stars and moons and gods’ constellations, night putting an end to the pain and hammering and indecision. Hoarfrosted skeletal trees: tonsured bare mullets. They ask for nothing, trees, but a pissing of water and a sun shiny day. The air, so I remember it, was thick as thieves, fecal thickness, not for the asthmatic or endemic or faint of heart. And I kiss her softly on the top of the head, no hibiscus root or wildflowers, just dull, brittle husks, crenellates. And the midsummer night air abuzz with flies and dragon’s wings, and eyes closed tight, yet seeing behind lids heavy with fear and last resorts never resorted to. Another bloodied mouthful of Chinese cooking wine lying the insides out of a palate fed on spider grass and five and a quarter, a hunger for biscuits and blood putting the fear of gods into an otherwise godless heart. This is the story, the other story I have been meaning to tell, to let you in on. It’s no secret, but simply a retelling of an old story told by a fool, not one of Dostoevski’s idiots, but a fool, a simple fool. There are other characters yet to make their appearance, but they will, soon enough. You must be patient, as I am, or like to believe I am. Whether I am, patient, is another story, one best left for later, time permitting, which, as you know, it seldom does. Apaleena, that is her name. She I will tell you about soon, when the time is right, sooner than you bargained for, as you will see. She is the way in, and the way out, the panacea for this troubled world. She I will tell you about if you are patient and unwary of the time. She is all people and no people, the simulacra, if you may, of people’s. She represents nothing more than what I allow her to represent, all things and no things, the thingness of things. She is mine, not yours, nor will she ever be. She is what I have made her, what I have put her in and through, nothing more. Apaleena is mine, a thing, a simulacrum that I have made to fix this troubled world. I will leave it at that, as there is nothing more to say until later, until her departure from the world of my thoughts. She must find her own way out; then she will be more than simple thoughts thought by a simple fool.

I pay the price for having memories. For being there and not doing anything, not putting an end to it. I didn’t even try, and for that I will pay the price of remembering. Dante showed us the way out, on the back of a poet no less. All forests cast shadows, some with neither entrances nor ways out. Kafka’s burrows, no way in or out, just deeper until the darkness becomes light. All of us, to a one, bullied from between scabbard red thighs, shaking, skulked with anger and first memory. There is more, there is always more to say. I have no more time to waste on rectory parasites or first principles, or second scoutmasters and people who bother me for a cigarette, which I will surly never give them. I have wasted far too much time and energy on such things, things that amount to nothing more than memories to be forgotten and done away with for good. A pocketful of stones weighs down a body soon to be a corpse, bloodless and sour with gas. Memories are like stones, pocketed for safekeeping, or until the last rail of air is exhumed from weakened lungs. Her name is Apaleena, and in her name is the naming of all things and no things, the first word uttered from trembling lips, the last breath taken before the stones weigh. You will remember what I have, the stones that fill my pockets to the fop. Then you will forget what I have remembered and get on with the remainder of your life, for better or worse, the choice is yours. Leave it at that, and be done with it.

Stanley polyp Mulligan stood pigeon-footed at the window ledge peering into the shaving mirror. –No never mine-said he. -The eyes, whose eyes, the nose and upper lip. Who is this man, such a fine and handsome specimen of a man?- With a touch of amused bewilderment he saw before him what he saw yet had never seen before, a man shaving with sharp razor stropped and honed. The sun moved out from behind a gray sheep of clouds and fell, terminal, on the bridge bone of his nose, a fine gentlemanly specimen of a nose so noses go. A great and mottled nose, so it was. Outside the windowsill ledge a wing-wearied seagull sculled nits of heavy morning air stained tobacco chuff brown. Mulligan griped the palm of his hand across the pink scold of his face, a fine specimen of a face, and placed the stropped sharp razor on the sill of the windowsill ledge. He, Mulligan, looked out the window, as he oft had occasion to do after shaved shaving, and ran his fingers through the briar and nettled mess of his hair. After which he paced, feet crossing over one and each other, to the water facet and poured himself he a glass of tap-water tepid from the tap facet. The cup, resin brown and spidery with cracks, the handle all but missing but for a hook and crock, slid from the gripe of his fingers and fell shattering to the mackintosh floorboards at his he feet. Mulligan, he, looks up then down and rumbles-What, for the love of gods almighty is this all about, this shattering and chuff and mottle?- He turned, Mulligan, towards facing the boot room door and sighed. Nothing further was said or implied about the subject or happenstance. As it was, nothing more. –The dogs got worms-said Murphy from beneath warm bed linens and tacking, his child’s head, warm from sleep, pushing from under the covers. –Seems, so it does, he’s always got them, worms-said Mulligan shaved. Mulligan shifted his weight carefully, as he was prone to hallucinations which set him off kilter and to one side, always one side, and added-We should put it out of its misery we should-. -You mean kill it- said Murphy. -Cut it up into little pieces and feed it to the fish- Mulligan said. -What fish-Murphy said. -We have no fish to speak of, none that I know of-. -We can’t, surly we can’t kill it you mean- -Why not-said Mulligan-damn things always getting in the way and the gods almighty stench, enough to turn one off one’s supper- Murphy, struggling to free himself from the bed-linen said-Leave it alone, he’s no one’s bother. No bother for you or I or no one- (This is the other story, the one I have been meaning to tell you but never got around to telling).