START LOOKING INSIDE

After dinner Mani finds me again. The dog has a strange look on its face which I don't like.

First of all, I don't like that a dog can have a strange look on its face, second, the look seems to be like that of someone who knows a secret, who knows that you don't know, and who knows that you know that he knows and that you do not. She looks smug for a dog. Her yellow eyes are anticipating my chagrin at something. I say, taking me to the river at night, Puedes? He shakes his head as if it’s a waste of time to answer me.

You see. This river is special, he says.

It better be, I say.

Or what? he asks. I am surprised to be confronted by someone so small, but then remember he speaks for the dog as well.

I say, you'll see. I don't feel particularly threatening though, and he doesn't look particularly concerned. The dog still smiles queerly.

Follow me, he says.

I figured as much, I say. I follow him and the dog out the door. We walk back the way I had come from when I first entered the village. I say, how far is it? I already came from this direction and didn't see a river.

He shushes me. Now I can say I've been shushed by an eight-year-old and his murder dog. I shush, but mostly because as a conversation partner, these two are not very engaging. We walk for about a mile or so. The terrain is easy and my leg has healed quite well. I still carry my crutch, but it has become more of a cane or staff. A primary means of defense against whatever is out here in the dark, though it appears to just be me, the boy and psycho-mutt.

He stops at the end of a row of trees. I hadn't seen the end of a row before, and it is notable for one to suddenly appear. With his back towards me he says, Abuela says you're sick. She says you are possessed by an evil spirit, and that we shouldn't trust you.

What do you think? I ask.

I think you're a retard, retard, he says.

Excuse me?

That seems to be the most appropriate term I have found in your vocabulary. You think you have been ahead this whole time, but actually, you've been very far behind.

I feel like he's toying with me now, and I start looking around for the hidden hand, coming to humiliate me with a strike from behind or above. But I also stop walking, and I listen. The sound is like a chorus of paper shredders waltzing uphill. It's a river and it's not small either. Apparently, I missed it somehow in my fugue state upon first arriving.

He's standing on the bank above a rushing black line. The moonlight fractures into quanta and is delivered as if on conveyor, downstream. This moment is being washed and washed away in time. His back to me, smug and proud. Reading my mind, hmm? I doubt it.

I walk silently up next to him and push him in. The dog leaps at me. I spin and uppercut it in the tits while simultaneously tossing it overhand into the current. They both disappear silently beneath the ink black depths and surly white cap turbulence. I stand with my back to the grove and contemplate the motion below me. The river makes a peculiar type of silence by drowning out everything around it in white noise. I feel peace, like I've finally found some place safe. I hear Mani and the dog walk up behind me. That was quick, I say.

Yeah, we didn't really go anywhere, you know.

I turn around and look. They are not even wet. Is that really water?

Is anything really anything?

I suppose you've got a point, I said. What happens if I go in it?

That's what you're here to find out, he says, and runs at me with his palms out.

I find that I don't want to get out of his way. It is clear to me now; this whole thing is beyond my control. The dog howls in tune with the white noise of the river, somehow making the rushing sound of the water grow as Mani closes the gap between us like a bolt of light. I do the only thing I can. I drop to my knees and spread my arms wide.

Our chests thump together and I realize that he had dropped his hands and encircled my rib cage. I wrap my arms around him and stand up. The damned dog is at my side. It licks my pant-leg. I lean back, carried by the impact of his tiny body, into an arc, falling end over end, down into the darkness and the cool loneliness of that river. I wonder where I will wake up, and when.

We disintegrate in that flow. I become time itself and look upon twelve generations of my grandchildren. How they veer and vault along their lifelines, each one moving closer to or further from my path. Some are criminals, street drunks, others teach kindergarten, make sandwiches for the homeless, travel the earth far and deep. There is a psychologist to whom I appear as a spirit.

There is a woman whose life consists of cutting flowers and masturbating in the tub while listening to jazz. She has a greater connection with the silence and solitude than anybody I have ever encountered. I see a little girl, age ten, wearing a pageant outfit covered from head to toe in vomit. Her mother stands by, looking like she could burst into tears or laughter. The girl also on that ambiguous perch.

That moment of recognition of the bodily nervousness of being, combined with the divine comedy of life, supported and nurtured by a warm and loving family, branching out, her life takes a turn away from seeking validation from external approval. She becomes a much more inwardly driven being, an artist. She will never be satisfied by earning credits, whether they are dollar signs or the lustful stares of men. Those things will just be color in her world. What moves her from then on is explosive emittance, spontaneous dance, paints on a canvas, music in her ear, the magic of edible spell-crafting, and the warmth of true friendship through adult-to-adult conversation and energy transfer.

There is another little girl whose mother, barely a child herself, would drag her around town like a sidekick, into all the bars and the backyard parties. The girl feels like an adult. Watching her mother charm herself and the men around her. Even standing guard outside the door when mom wants to get with one of her boyfriends. At twelve, she learns that adults do whatever they are compelled to do to feel okay, even though it means that her father, working eighty hours a week, comes home to an empty house, makes himself a TV dinner. Watches TV alone. Tries not to think about where his wife and daughter are. Jerks off silently to barely legal web-porn. And then stays awake until early hours waiting for them to come home, for his wife to get in bed with him, her comfortable mountain shape smelling of parties and sex, when he will finally hold her and be able to sleep, requiring little of her, but her presence for a few scant hours of rest before they all get up and do it again. That girl's sisters all have different looks to them. Her father's genes are strong, but not always present.

A boy, whose father left his life at one year, now three, talks to himself in the dirt driveway of his home. He swishes a crowbar back and forth in the dirt. Bare feet sensing the magnet beneath him, the tickling of life between his toes. He's making up stories about someone he can't consciously remember. They are stories he doesn't really understand, but they drive him to rage. His forearms at three are like the arms of his father, supple, but hard as tree trunks. The crowbar rises and falls in great arcs, over and again, in a murder of a pristine lawnmower borrowed by the mother from the boy's adult sister from another mother. Nobody for miles is present to hear his pain. The mother is passed out on the couch. The neighbor is a deaf couple. The trees surrounding the home are indifferent to such momentary bursts of animal emotion. They have, after all, bears using them for scratching posts.

Another man, secretly gay, goes into a tobacco store. He's got a boyfriend at home, though he has another secret, a crush on the young man who works at the store. He brings in a book to give to him. It's about the blues, as a musical genre, as a psychological phenomenon, as a depth to which some aspire, and a hole from which others cannot escape. He looks the younger man in the eyes, he doesn't stray, down his long arms, to his washboard stomach exposed by a ripped half shirt, to his butt in those torn punk rock jeans that haven't been washed or changed in six months. He just keeps eye contact, quietly smelling the man's body odor, which to so many people is offensive and brutish, but is nothing short of aphrodisiac to the keeper of secrets. He gives the younger man some authentic engaged conversation about music, about life, then he goes home and shoots himself in the head, quite efficiently. When the boyfriend calls, estranged after several weeks of non-stop arguing, the phone just rings and rings.

I see a man in a studio space filled with paintings. He is obsessed with pulleys and rigging and has set everything up in the place to ride on track and be pulled aside, along, or aloft effortlessly with a carefully balanced set of counterweights, wheels, bearings, and strings or cables. It is a bit like a mechanical spiderweb, but instead of everything sticking to it, everything just slides around on it. When he gets going, running around the space like the spider, he can flip with the tip of his index finger large sheets of plywood that come up and cover the windows for a projected transformation of the space, overlaying the darkness with a two dimensional picture that cuts across the aerial network of tram cables to splash upon a white screen, two dimensions becoming three, and three, two. He continues on his marathon around the space turning cabinets upside down with a glance to reveal hidden stashes of archived artwork, a pot of beans that appears through a hole in the wall. A magic floor that opens up revealing a clockwork center.

There is a man so alone and broken that his weight is like an unbreakable stone. He carries it around and uses it to justify his wickedness. It is so small that he can hide it inside his heart and it will never show outside, never come up in a cardiogram. He's perfectly healthy, they always say. At first, as a boy, he thinks other people might care. He brings it to his father and mother. They say, don't worry son, you just get used to it. In time you won't even notice. And at first, he doesn't. Then he has a son who only ever wants his approval and can't get out from under the weight of his father's stone.

I recognize myself, though not at first. At first, I just feel sad for the man. When I recognize my own face, it is in this mirror that I see myself for the first time, my complete lack of awareness of my connections to the world around me, spreading out and backwards and forwards in time. I see the actions of a helpless automaton, but I see something else too. There is self-awareness, there is a spark, it is small and dim and neglected. But it is there, and that means that I had always had a choice. And that I let fear choose.

If I had had a body at that point I would have felt anguish. I would have clenched my fists and held them to the sky while crumbling at the knees. But it was just another moment in the universe. I was awash in the cosmic rays of the twelve-dimensional lattice of hyper-time-space. I stayed there for an eternity.

When the river spits me out, I am once again sitting with Abuela. This time she is young again. We are under the tree where we had met. We are alone, the stars are out. She takes my hand. I look down and see that my hand is smooth and light brown. I lean into her ear. I kiss her just below it on her neck and she giggles but doesn't pull away. She places my hand on her breast, and I feel the excited points beneath her shirt. Just cotton fabric between my hand and the ecstasy of her vibrant body. I become more aggressive and she lets me.

Her name is Katrina. Her hands are curious extensions of her mind. They pull at my clothes. They push at my body. My body is hard and twenty. I am not an expert; I just have guts. She pulls my shirt off and her hand traces sigils on my bare hairless chest. I wonder if it's something she sees, or something she's drawing out of me. I taste her neck with my teeth, and she folds in my arms and moans. Heat shoots out of her body. I gently pull her shirt over her head, exposing twin beauties the size of lemons, with nipples the same shape and size as the tip of the fruit. They are olive white, the lines of her tan ending with the rippling foothills of her rib cage, the horizon of her collarbones. She pushes me hard onto my back and sits on top of me. I place my hands on her small hips. My hands seem large and hard, she is small, soft and delicate. Her spell casting returns to the subconscious drawing of charts and symbols on my chest. With every feathered stroke I become harder beneath her until I am sure I can't be held back. She draws a line finally down down down to my belt. Her hand undoes the buckle with considerable effort. I try to help but she shushes me and puts my hands back upon her bare sides.

My pants are off and she's on me. She is preparing me with her tongue. Her mouth is hot, insistent. She has one hand around the base of my cock.

I reach down to find her hand that holds her up. I touch her fingers. My fingers coax her attention to bring her lips to mine and she does. With her laying atop me like a mountain silhouette, I slip her pants and panties off. The musk of new dew fills my head and there is no way I could possibly be harder, but I am. I am frenzied for her magic.

She spreads her legs over me and leans in hard with her pelvis, pressing down on my cock with her swollen vulva. She takes me. I stroke her body atop mine until she finds her chi. In that moment she thrusts down upon me with vigor that rises up like the kundalini snake. Her moans and whimpers are calls to the unseen. I feel her body inside changing around me. She's coaxing me now. Her moment's come and she's looking for the finale.

I sit up, still inside her. She moans as I pull her, slide her up and down. We roll together. I'm on top of her now. She's bleeding a little bit. Her fingers use the fresh blood to paint my face and hers. I become animal. Biting and licking and groaning, growling. I fuck right through her and into the center of the earth. I feel my belly heating up and becoming soft with a charge building to blow. Her moans and shrieks coordinate in my mind's eye with the visualization I have of myself as being summoned, a long slumbering monolithic totem. I will cleanse the earth with my ejaculate.

When I come, I come so hard that I plow my forehead into the dirt repeatedly next to her face. I split my eyebrow on a rock. more blood gushes warm down my face. She licks it off my lips and bites them. There is a reddish black spot in the dirt from my bleeding skull. Her eyes are liquid, shining in the silver light from the moon and the cool breath of the stars. Her smile tells me that the spell was cast properly.

I look again at my hands on her body and we are old again. I am white and pale and my flesh smells like I've evolved to sweat old spice. She is perhaps the oldest woman I've ever seen naked. Her olive skin, smooth in spots, shivers into wrinkles at the extremities. I think, it's true, women only age from the neck up, the wrists and ankles down. She gets into child's pose and starts humming to herself. Her shape is that of a sketch made with a paintbrush. The round strokes of her ass, painted in umber, her shoulders with the knots of decades of casting and weaving, cleaning and nurturing, look like the shoulders of a DaVinci sketch, all cords and machinery buried deep under a sweet smelling cloth, soft to the touch above, impenetrable complexity below, an example of how everything connects and each tiny movement can be felt across the whole as a tremor, or a passing shadow.

I find myself reaching for her naked back. I lightly touch her with my fingertips, then press my palm more firmly onto her. She turns her face to me, and I see it is filled with stars. Her mouth is a parenthetical smile, with her ear pressed to the ground. Her nostrils continue to constrict and dilate in a pattern of processing the steam coming off of her shoulders. Her eyes meet mine, the corners of them play little games with my attention. She is thoroughly entrancing. My hand moves across her soft shoulders and down the back of her ribcage, over her sacral spine, and back again, as I begin to explore, just the terrain that she presents in that position, ass up tits down. I press my fingertips and knuckles into the various places I feel calling for attention. Hear her moans and sighs in response as she melts more under my touch.

She turns her forehead to the ground and takes a large in-breath. I watch her stomach inflate. Her wrinkles smooth as the flesh beneath them grows more hydrated and supple, expanding while the skin shrinks off its age. Her belly grows into a roundness as she sits up. Her breasts, which were deflated and hanging without much sense, begin to swell and perk with the weight of milk. She stretches up with a tall spine onto her knees and heels. Her buttocks looking firm and fresh, her swollen stomach continuing to grow to term, belly button poking out like the nipple of a lemon.

I pick one from above our heads and show it to her. She laughs. She takes it and bites into it. I see her body shiver from the taste. I lean in to kiss her, and she spits it playfully into my mouth. My body shakes from the act, both intimate and transgressive. I put my hand on her stomach. She laughs again, this time at my doctor joke. I feel a series of swift kicks coming from within. This baby must have six feet or the reflexes of a mantis shrimp; you know, those shrimp that can punch things to death.

I look again down at my own body. I have not gotten younger, or older. I'm just me, what I expect to be these days when I get up and look in the mirror every morning, checking the reflection for signs of death. Liver spots, crepe papering, bed sores, ulcers, streaks of poo from nocturnal incontinence. But I'm clean, if not restored to glory. My dick is swinging, deflated and a little tender still from Katrina using it as a magic wand. Why is everything so symbolic, so easy to ignore until it isn't? I sit close to her, my ass in the grass, blades mingling with hairs and tickling my nethers, wrap my arms and legs around her and hold her. She vibrates with affection and pours herself into me, leaning with a smooth face into my burnished chest. I feel something in my heart.

It's a defect. It's a weakness. It shoots right up into my eyes and they begin to water. My face makes a grimace like a wounded clown. I bare my teeth silently to the sky while she nuzzles further into my core. I make no sound as I feel this weight placed outside me by invisible hands, and I watch it blown away by the slightest breeze. How long has that been there? It felt so substantial, but really it was nothing.

The petals begin to fall like snow. Fruit forms, grows swollen and drops as well. By the time it hits the ground, it has become dirt again, and is quickly swallowed up by the claymation grasses that swirl and sway but never outgrow their place. I feel them brushing our thighs like the lapping of waves in wading depth.

I remember a day at the beach. I was forty. We were building sandcastles. I had cool sunglasses, they were gargoyles, you know, cop glasses, tactical stuff that was big in the nineties. Darby was sunning herself. She liked to do that, just put on some oil and lay back in a lounge chair. She looked good back then, twenty-seven years old. Two pregnancies behind her and fit as a model, not skinny like that, strong, and beautiful. I wanted to hold her forever. By that point things were already rough though, and the signs were there.

I helped Chet build sandcastles, showed him how to plan for the incoming tide, build a moat, a flood wall. We used buckets and cups to form parapet walls, central towers zooming three feet into the air on a base of hard packed sand. We dug out tunnel entrances, courtyards, window openings. I found some scraps lying around on the beach and we made a drawbridge, and some peasant market looking area. On the top of the highest tower, we put some effigies to our patriarchal line. There was me and him.

I felt like I was lying to him, or leaving something out, but I didn't know what, and he didn't seem to care at the time. He just kept talking out this fantasy world that he'd built up instantly in his head about this sandcastle we were building. It seemed like he thought it would last forever.

Darby lay silent as the crypt, her skin glistening as it darkened in the afternoon sun. The beach bag by her chair filled with paperback novels, sun lotion, a sleeve of crackers, baby wipes, and a little weed dugout. I looked at her through my sunglasses. She was wearing her blackout Liz shades, and I could not see if her eyes were open or not. I ran my eyes up and down her body, hoping for some sign in her face, some little smirk or smile that would show she noticed my interest. I didn't know what to say, so I just looked silently until I heard Chet saying, dad, dad, dad. She moved then. Lifted her glasses and looked at me. She didn't smile. She scoffed a little. Her eyes seemed to say, go on dad.

The tide was coming in. She sat up and said, what do you think guys? Time to go.

I said, yeah, I guess so.

Chet said, no, please mom, just ten more minutes.

That's an impressive bit of work there, honey. The tides gonna come and wash that sandcastle away though, you don't wanna be here to see that do you?

No mom, we built it so it wouldn't. The waves can't touch it, he said.

I felt like I had somehow misled him into thinking that anything would last.

She said, alright babycakes, ten minutes more.

Mom, he said, I'm not a baby.

The first wave that got close ran away with the beach bag, which I chased down into the surf.

My bare feet in the cold water felt silent, enshrouded. The sand beneath my barely calloused soles was a cat's tongue. Small shells and rocks prickling and poking at my toes. I caught the bag. One of the paperbacks was wet, but that's pretty much why people bring them to the beach. They are hard to destroy, not very intricate text. You can pretty much lose a hundred pages, and the thing is still just as readable. And if the ending is lost it was usually so predictable anyway that the average reader knows from the jacket what the outcome will be.

When I came back with the bag, dripping saline solution like an IV punctured in multiple spots, Darby was standing. She had dragged her chair up the beach and was watching me and Chet. He was standing inside the floodwall, knee deep in water, face red and tears streaming down his hot little cheeks. Dad, he screamed, I thought we built it good enough!

When I look at Katrina, she is crying. She has poured out a hot wet ocean onto the silvery hairs of my chest. I look into her bright eyes and I laugh. She breaks into laughter as well. I kiss her forehead and she begins to age again. I look around for the child she must have birthed, I see a coyote pup, wet with afterbirth, standing with shaking legs trembling, with the fear and astonishment of everything that enters this world. Her small golden eyes searching for the warmth she'd just left behind.

As the wrinkles return to Abuela’s forehead I watch her fade. The dog grows fast. She is strong and we play tousling games in the grass beneath the tree. I stay by Katrina's bedside until she passes. Her body glows and then turns dark. Leaves creeping up through her navel, between her arm and through her armpits. Eventually a tree grows out of her mouth where the sunlight creeps between the barely parted teeth of her savasana. It grows and replaces the tree we have spent our lives under. And it flowers in the spring, bunches of sweet white flowers that smell so intoxicating I know I would never leave. I cry at the base of her tree for a lifetime, while the dog runs around it in circles and howls on moonlit nights, calling mother, come back.

I look at my own mother, back in her faded photo sundress, standing in front of the house with that smile on. The one she always put on for the camera, which wasn't really much of a memory of her at all, which is really how it was. If I try to think about who she was, I can remember a woman who told me what the rules were, who corrected my behavior, fed me meals and answered my questions with an encyclopedic level of precision. She never showed the slightest bit of emotion. Not even when dad died. She just kinda kept on with lunch and tea and bowling on TV the way she had for the twenty years prior. Grandchildren were nice to look at. They were okay when they were running over your lap, but they didn't really do much for her. Katrina's tree weeps big transparent drops of nectar down from the flowers, covering me in a sugary dew.

My own hands grow roots as I sit back in the grass one day. The dog climbs up into my lap and licks the sap off my face. She looks into my eyes very close. Hers are yellow, mine are brown, still full of shit. We laugh. A yote boar comes around and they make puppies right there in my lap. The pups are all born blind and squirming little helpless crying dreamers. The parents stand guard over the fumbling movement. The yote goes out and hunts rabbits to feed the pups. He comes back with seven in one trip, collated on one giant canine. The parents grind them up and swallow the rabbits, then lean over the nest, which is beneath my branches and regurgitate rabbit stew into the tender mouths of the infants.

I am laying in some dirt, under a lemon tree, looking up through the branches at the smoke-filled forest fire sky of southern California. I have just about every external reason to live, to thrive. Why am I out here punishing myself and hoping to die? I guess I know. I know why I have done this to myself. I just don't want to admit it. It's all so obvious now. There is too much junk. I have to clean it out. I have to make myself into a functioning paper mill. I don't know any other way. I think if I just arrange things on the outside that they will all come together on the inside.

I think that about Darby, about Chet. I think that about Lisa and the girls, but really why does my relationship with them work if not because they stay out of my way? If I can just arrange the space, put things where they belong, I will be able to think clearly.

I walked out here from the highway. I left my car, my phone, my jacket, everything but my watch. I was looking for some peace. Some order. Some bitter reflection. I got lost. I've never been lost before. I've always known exactly where I was. Maybe there's something wrong. Maybe it's dementia, but I'm only sixty. Said every early onset Alzheimer's patient ever.

I was drawn by the spell of a young witch, but I wasn't even me. I was Waldo. I'm not even sure that I am me. The branches are laden with ripe lemons. No one is buying anything but toilet paper and art. It's not a good sign. The restaurants are filled with caution tape.

Booze and tobacco are up. Underground unsanctioned gathering spaces are at a premium. But I hate gatherings anyway. I should be in heaven with this social distancing. I should be writing a new business plan, or learning Chinese again, or working out twenty-four hours a day. I just can't sit and watch TV. And there is only so much space to organize. There is only so much stuff to throw out, externally. And then I have to start looking inside.