Que por no ocuparse en nada

In the hotel room I cut at the hair on my head with a pair of nail scissors and watched it fall like leaves into the white basin. When my hair head was shaved I lathered my tufted skull and scraped the rest away with a razor. Gleaming lanes of scalp appeared, the skull's ridges and grooves as familiar as the lines of my palm. This is you. This is who you are.

(Just 1.5 kilograms of tissue inside your head contains you. Essentially human and individually unique, your brain thinks, feels, remembers. It learns from its mistakes and it invents new strategies for your survival. As the supreme coordinator of your body's complex machine it knows things you don't realize you know. It runs your life, and if it dies, you die.)

I scream and the sound frightens me. The world forces its way through my senses, paralyzing me in place with fear and shock. As I desperately try to react, to understand what is happening, my mind is filled with a jumble of incomprehensible sensations. Visuals.

(The common form of post-traumatic memory loss is antegrade amnesia. With this condition, a patient's memory of events before the accident are clear, but they find it difficult to hold short-term memories following the accident.)

I begin to regain my grip of reality. My reality at least. It doesn't feel real, but it is better than the jumble. From somewhere the concept pops up: amnesia. Maybe it relates to me?

(She used a Smith and Wesson .38.

I had a license for the gun of course, and she must have pulled it from my shoulder holster.

I might have pulled the trigger.

She wore a white dress, and the front of it was lined with tiny pearl buttons that were covered in her blood. Just staring at my face with her eyes wide and the small curving corner of her mouth was slack.)

Awake in a narrow windowless room; head throbbing. Looking up at the ceiling. On a bed stripped of the worn duvet and the stained linens that smelled like stale sex.

This is you. This is who you are.

Feb 14 1929: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The shooting of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al "Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.

Feb 14 1979: Walter Carlos, the musician who created "Switched on Bach" and the score of "A Clockwork Orange", reveals to the world that he has had a sex change operation and is henceforth to be referred to as Wendy.

Feb 14: A girl pawned her engagement ring. Gold ring with red and white stones, a generic distinction for the love that expired. Still sitting stale on the shelf. It wasn't a gold ring with one ruby and two diamonds. Because that would remind her of that good year when all she wanted was a silver ring because rubies and diamonds were just glorified chips of stone and he told her that she was worth more. But she thought:

Worth, how much am I worth?

How much more than the one-hundred-and-fifty dollar ring bought on sale at Fortunoff?

Am I worth more than the forty dollars in my pocket now? Well. Forty dollars would buy lunch and burgundy nail polish and a hardcover from Barnes and Nobles and that was enough to make up for it.

They had stopped on old Highway 17 and left the car to creep between stands of new-growth pine trees that would be hacked down for lumber before they had time to develop a memory of these two, staring through the hazy air of sticky resin and summer sweat to watch the riding lawn mower.

"That's breaking at least one law," she murmured, "gravity." She paused, breathing out her disbelief while she tugged on his belt, "How do you think they manage that?"

"Carefully." He answered her and swatted her hands away, tugging on the thin cotton of her shirt when it clung to the back of her neck.

He speaks of outdated ideals and antiquated love affairs, and the rain beads up on his wrinkled forehead and trails down his neck. The chalky cotton shirt looks as waterlogged as the man himself. Soaked through to the skin and shivering. He starts to walk again and turns to me and says, "Every now and then, one must be nostalgic about the days when a stamp cost twenty-two cents."

*

"How is it that you can tell me you'll catch me when I fall," and she kissed him on the mouth. Bitten with resentment and cinnamon gum. She was gone before he could react, and he watched her shadow lengthen across the sidewalk. "When you expect me to give you the net?"

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the swoods;
For nothing now can come to any good.

--W.H. Auden

She began to cry then. An ugly sound, her body jerking and
her hands covering over her face. She didn't see them walk away,
watching the woman, who looked too frail and breakable with wet
eyes and the scent of lavender powder. The newly cut grass was
ground down to rust-red dirt and the plastic stubble of artifical
turf that covered the heaped earth, and wreaths of carnations and
lillies.

One spelled out start of the word "DAUGHT--" in pink and white.
She couldn't think of the rest of the word without having
the images spring to mind.

"What does it feel like?"

"It feels like falling."

"Of course I don't really know? Because guess what?"

"What?"

"I'm not dead."

When it started raining, she didn't notice the umbrella being pulled
open above her head, an arm guiding her back toward the car idling
on the hill to take them home.

The price of comfort is that life passes rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off.

The bar was rank with the smell of old beer and old tobacco and a faint overlay of old urine. There was a television up near one end of the bar, and in the back there were many broken-down booths and tables, some with people sleeping at them.

Martin snarled at him an wordlessly smacked a double shot glass down on the ar in front of him. He was a great burly Welshman, with a cauliflower ear and a head full of silver hair. One could guess him to be around seventy, at least. Martin splashed bourbon into his glass and went to draw him a beer from the tap. Keller never had to order a drink in this place, it just arrived. When he came back with the beer he mumbled something and Keller mumbled. Neither one of them ever understood a word the other said.

He drank his shot, had a sip of beer.

Finished the beer.

He pushed his two glasses toward the bar and Martin came by and refilled them, paying himself from the small pile of singles that Keller had put up on the bar. He walked away without saying anything. There was a muscle-bound white truck-driver type with a Rockies cap on sitting at the bar to his right and staring rather unpleasantly in Keller's direction. He hissed something that was unintelligble, and Keller turned the other way on his stool and and drank his second shot. The man moved, shifting from the right to the left. When he passed he smelled like something that had been dead for days. Keller swiveled back to center and studied his own image in the mirror behind the bar, the reflection of his head balanced on the necks of bottles displayed on the shelf.

Finished his second beer.

He clinked his glasses together and got another drink, ignoring the man.

When Keller was drunk enough to be confident, but not enough to be stupid, he hit the streets. Feeling good, feeling fine, feeling no pain whatsoever. Crossing the street and heading down the block, turning left on another corner with a flickering sulfur-yellow streetlight. A shadow fell in hard behind him, and Keller snapped his head up in recognition of the scent. It had followed him from the bar. He had just enough time to exhale when the arm clamped around his neck, twisting a knife just under the point of his chin, pushing his head up and back. The blade pierced the surface of his skin a little--

--there was a dull roaring sound in his ears. The last thing he could hear was himself, trying to scream around a mouth full of dirt.

The first thing you ought to do when you find yourself in a hole is start digging.

Pulling the leaves from her hair, he said: "What are we but the dust and wishes of a million dandelions?"

with wind-swift fingers he finishes off the song, thrumming strings that ripple notes like rainfall, face tranquil.

in between sets he lays the twelve-string across his lap. sometimes he glances back over his shoulder to look for something that ain't there. proof that old habits don't ever die. sometimes he rests the guitar against his leg and smokes a cigarette, irreverent of the laws. bars were meant to be filled with the eye-stinging grey haze of smoke. same way that drinks were meant to be drank. same way that stories were meant to be told and shared like bees in the hive.

"Blood from a stone."

"Bullshit."

"Yah heard that, huh?" rye-whiskey hoarse laughter, playing along. "Heard that he walked out of the mouth of Hell after playin' for Split-toe hisself."

same way that the bartender leans forward on his elbows with a beer-soaked rag in hand to listen or offer a piece of gritty spoken advice, "It's true. Don't go telling that to his face." and the bees buzz, and he smokes, and he plays his guitar to people that always stop to listen and the place goes as still and quiet as the bottom of the well.

they call him Johnny, or Jim, or Olly, or O. they don't ever ask his real name.