Night II

I have left the dining room table, where he entertains family and friends, and find myself in bed, or on a cot set up outside the salespeople’s offices. As he walks in from the next room, through the swinging doors, and asks where to find my riches, and I insist he dig further, I glance down the bed and remark that I rest on a cot set up outside the offices of salespeople who work in a dealership, one that most likely sells farm equipment. A cot, black, and webbed between its pipes with heavy straps, in a style almost military. Notices of special offers, accompanied by a cartoon figure, have been soaped onto the front windows, from inside, in reverse. No activity, as the shop has closed, though the daylight makes me wonder. After he has fetched what he needed from the kitchen and gone back to his guests, I rise and approach the swinging doors, peering through one of their small, square panes. I see no one. The table resets itself instantaneously, as if aware of my regard. Silverware, rolled into napkins, positioned atop each stack of wooden dishes, ready for the next set of diners. No sign of him or anyone else, as if aware of my looking for them. I wake, determining to remember what I have seen and heard, for, in spite of the meal, which, with all the evidence, has not been eaten, cooking smells have not lingered, so nothing to remember having smelled. Asleep again, I have returned here. A woman I do not recognize approaches across the dining room, where I have stepped inside. The guest of honor at the dinner party to follow. She acts concerned no one else has greeted her, hands me a book, whose recent appearance occasions the gathering she has arrived early for, and goes. As usual when leafing through a publication I have not read, I begin at the back, where I examine her line drawings. Not much more than stick figures with overlarge heads, in the popular style of graphic arts from the ’80s. Exactly how I imagine myself describing it, if he asked. The rest of the book comprises a series of photographs, all nearly identical, of the sunlit corner of a room in a house, her house, sunlit despite a tall hedge outside the multipane window, sunlit across light walls, almost yellow, and simple wicker furniture and other belongings, a few arranged on shelves above the chair where she sits to read, I gather, from the comfortable arrangement. As I flip through the plates, I notice only slight variations, a repositioning of the camera or an article here and there in the corner. Someone lives in this room, and her having snapped it this way has been enough to make it look lived-in rather than left. Her house. Then I close the cover and read the title, LaPaz Vez, holding the book high enough to block my view of the dealership, where someone lurks at a podium desk, thrown into shadow by the lightskirt of the lamp on the table beside the cot, where I find myself lying, not in her house, where, if I could, I would stand at the window, looking out. During other periods of my life, when I have been at a loss, I have thought to myself, There will come a time, in the distant future, when I will be standing at a window somewhere, looking out at the sky, and remembering some experience as a remote event that no longer has a hold. I lay down the book that encloses all the words I have spoken, the one that ceases to be read the moment I fall silent, the one that she will find on the table, beside the chair where she reads, and shelve or store, knowing that her own book, and her book alone, has been left for me to begin, at the beginning, to pause only long enough to notice the dedication.

Night I

You walk into the club and realize you can’t separate the band members from the audience members, or even from the band members’ friends.

No problem. Get your hand stamped. Stand at the bar and order a drink. Relax. Mingle. Snag someone’s eye. Chances are it’s a person you’ll sort of recognize, though you won’t necessarily be able to place them. Someone you’ll know by the end of the night, even if you never see them again. Most likely, as they just flew into town that afternoon, to take in the show and catch a red eye back to Santa Monica. Or they live somewhere in your city. Blink and you’ll miss them. But who cares? Another new best friend, too cool to act too cool, will step in to take their place in your line of sight.

Once you release your nervous energy, you know that differences don’t matter, because you’re about to be immersed in a synthetic, syncretic experience, where varied styles of music, fashion, and attitude will be mixed, scratched, and recombined in ways you’ll find surprisingly unfamiliar. You don’t even need to know what big words mean. You write them on the back of your hand, and you’ll cock your head to read them, smeared as they are by Finnish vodka, obscured by the stamp, the next morning, and believe you made them up yourself.

You know you’ve been here before, with some of the same people, maybe even wearing the same clothes you wore in a dream from the previous night, which you only half-remember. A dream that follows you all day and stands or sits with you when the lights go down. One thing’s for sure: You remember flying.

And so it begins. Or maybe you’re not sure, as if you’re attending a concert where the band stops in the middle of a piece, to tune up again. No mistake. Not because they’ve played so hard as to push their intonation up or down half a step, and the dissonance confuses all but the musos in the front row. No, because their tuning up, in and of itself, sounded so beautiful. The noise of all those instruments, trying to hit A above middle C, together. One of those pieces where the musicians rest their fiddles and sackbuts, to whistle, clap, or shout slogans. All in good fun. No crude political agenda.

And so it happens. Fast-forward to the end, only to find that you’re still in the middle, and if that’s where you began, anyway, good for you. Start at the beginning and lose your place. Happily. Asking for more. Return the way you came, and lose yourself.