Ak'bal

Ak’ bal

...like that day

When all darkness (ak’ bal) struck out of Chaos

Fled unto the center.

www.bjonsonwerke.volpone1i@gutenberg.com

　

　

There is an intruder in my blog. Someone has misappropriated my words and traduced my meanings. At this time, the invader’s presence is evident only in remote and well-nigh inaccessible posts, old writings that are half-forgotten to me and, therefore, unfamiliar -- texts tucked away in places far from my current writing. But I am concerned that this word-burglar, having inserted himself into outposts on the frontiers of my blog, may be emboldened to approach more closely, may seize more and more terrain, and, indeed, become so pervasive in his/her aggression that my readers will be uncertain whether I am the author of any text posted to my blog or whether those words represent the scurrilous and questionable opinions of this invading enemy. And so, it is incumbent upon me to take action. I will have to track the villain to his lair, expose his misdeeds, and expel the alien from my blog.

The name of my blog is The Ottoman Empire, a domain that my readers may access at www.ottomanempirejsb.com . I have embedded my initials into the web-address to differentiate my blog, devoted to speculative writing, film reviews, and assorted autobiographical musings, from scholarly sites devoted to the history of the Turks or the Balkan States. (Indeed, I sometimes get web-tourists from Ankara or Istanbul or, for that matter, Gobetekli, highly contentious correspondents who denounce my blog for willfully inducing confusion between the Middle-Eastern Sultanate involved in the siege of Vienna and the battle of Gallipoli and this correspondent, a narcissistic essayist and memoir-writer with an interest in foreign films, archaeology, anecdotes about ghosts and cryptozoology, and melancholy recollections brooding over long-ago love affairs. The Turks write elegant, if non-idiomatic, English, denounce me in civil terms, leaving messages here and there among my posts like stray turds, and, ordinarily, are content to merely advise that they will not be visiting my web-site at any time in the near future, thank you very much, nor will their friends and associates (who are legion) be paying me the courtesy of their calls and that my blog should be avoided by all and left to fester in cyber-isolation. Needless to say, I don’t suspect a Turkish invasion of my blog – their inclination is to leave alone what they abhor.)

My family operates several furniture stores in southeastern Minnesota. My father, and his father before him, were morticians. There is an overlap in the skills required to build and polish and sell a nice corpse-coddling casket, exquisite cabinet work with a plush interior, and the production of dining room tables and armoires, and, after all, a well-made coffin is a kind of furniture, albeit for an underground realm, and so my family gradually made the transition from corpse-washing to the retail of Easy-Boy chairs, sofas, and sundry items. My son, who now operates a real estate business, instituted the blog and gave it a whimsical name, The Ottoman Empire, so-called after an item of furniture sometimes sold in our stores. Customers interested in the purchase of davenports or coffee tables tend not to be detained by humorous observations about the vagaries of the furniture industry or the history of styles in recliner chairs and, so, when my son left my employ to start his real estate agency, I took over his blog, an enterprise languishing in any event, and, without erasing his entries, merely adapted the cyper-space to my own ends. Once I took over, I furnished the web-site with essays and film reviews. So you will see that evolution is a law of life – just as my family progressed from embalming bodies and peddling caskets to selling hutches and divans, so did The Ottoman Empire advance from reviews of leather-clad love-seats and cherry-wood bookcases to critiques of indie films and speculation about Oaxacan ruins and the notorious, elusive Chupacabra.

I discovered the first clues that my blog was infected with an alien presence by accident. A couple years ago, I had occasion to write a film review denouncing a locally produced documentary about juvenile delinquency among African-Americans. I used some intemperate language and someone left a message in the dialogue box after the review accusing me of racism. Of course, like all writers I am anxious to be praised for my work, but dislike any form of criticism. The message was obnoxious to me. The writer footnoted my film review with these words: The documentary is about the sacrifice of those who work with disenfranchised youth. The reviewer is just another angry middle-aged white man, upset because someone is challenging his sense of entitlement. Grow up and learn something about sacrifice! Needless to say the critic of my criticism did not sign this comment.

These unkind remarks were like a sliver in my flesh and, from time to time, I reverted to them. With each reading, I felt a fresh sense of outrage and indignation. Something about the message conveyed to me the appearance of the writer: a slender Caucasian woman in her forties, probably a schoolteacher, with fragile bones and a plain androgynous face, an ex-dancer with arthritis in several crucial joints, humorless with a voice like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. I tried to imagine her vices but nothing came to mind. When I studied her words, a delicious, if reprehensible, sense of self-contempt suffused me and I imagined her, like an angel, standing on the frontiers of my work, a flaming sword in hand, casting me out of the garden that I had made. I perused a few postings made around the time to see if she had registered any criticisms about my essay on the death of my dog or a long treatise of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or a short story that I had written about a mysterious swamp monster. I found no trace of her, but, skimming a movie review on Kiss me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s 1956 film noir, I encountered these words:


Meeker’s performance as Mike Hammer is without subtlety or inflection; it seems prehistoric, like writing "heygh" for "high" or certain pre-classic Mayan characters written with affixation.
Although the allusions were pretentious and seemed in character with the rest of my review, I was puzzled by the word "affixation." This was a term that I didn’t know. How could I have written a sentence including a technical term relating to abstruse aspects of Mayan orthography completely unknown to me. Either I had written these words in some kind of trance, or someone had hacked into my computer, introducing material foreign to me.

A nervous sense of violation and fear gripped me. I clicked my way into other texts, some that I recalled well, others that I seem to have forgotten. My blog is vast and contains hundreds of postings and, of course, it is impossible for me to keep them all in mind. Yet, nonetheless, I began to encounter words and phrases that I couldn’t possibly have written.

In an appreciation of Albrecht Duerer’s engravings, I found this expression "similar to the xylography known for hundreds of years in China." "Xylography?" Orson Welles Touch of Evil was said to be "wholly edulcorated of the sentimental influences of his Mercury Theater period." A horse cantering across the desert in an old Western was said to show "sprezzatura." In a jocular aside to my readers, I said: "But we will leave that to my epicedium". In quick succession, I encountered a half-dozen words that I didn’t know and that I had never known: "ailurophobic, hemoclysm, exequys, transhumance, naff, variolation, ergativity, degringolade." In an autobiographical I said that I had "betaken myself to the cadastral registries." What did this mean? Who could have inserted these phrases into my postings?

I leaned toward my computer screen as if to insert my head into the echoing hollow of the monitor. Entries that I had posted stood upright, against a horizon of brown desert and monotonous, withered hills. On the treeless steppe, I saw presences that, at first, looked like the pinnacles of termite mounds, bony grey fingers thrust up from the sand. As I approached those forms, I saw that they were eroded statues, seated figures with features blasted away by the wind pregnant with biting, particulate sand. A beam of light moved through the empty space and, when it lit upon the figures, each of them representing one of my old postings, the statue seemed to ring, first with a bell-like tone, and, then, a babble of voices – it was like the rays of the sun stroking the enthroned stone Memnon to life on the muddy banks of the Nile. Some of the figures I recognized well enough and could, even, see my own profile, my nose and chin and hair, carved into the graywracke, much eroded but still partially visible. But other stelae I couldn’t decipher. These seemed to me to be completely illegible, torrents of nonsense syllables, or messages written in a foreign language.

The deeper that I went, the more dense the encrustations of unfamiliar postings. Someone had blogged about the history of Estonia and about the disastrous launch of New Coke and, in a comment below, a chemist had posted the recipe (allegedly) for New Coke, naming it the Theobroma. A correspondent commented on a translation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone into Mayan. The aspect of the blog was no longer an Egyptian plain overlooked by scattered, and ruinous, monuments. Rather, I was wandering a Jewish cemetery, very like the graveyard on France Avenue that I knew from youth, a small tract of land cumbrous with innumerable headstones, all locked together in a thicket of incised granite. Names glowered at me but I couldn’t identify their meaning. The pathways between postings narrowed and what had earlier been a grid of aisles and corridors became a winding way, constrained between the stones, a mere capillary path leading to the center of the great cemetery where it ended at the base of a high wall. On the wall, I could see letters faintly glowing in the darkness. I couldn’t read those letters until I touched them with my fingertips but, then, they became animate, intense with meaning. It was the text of an essay I had written several years before about a freeway near my boyhood home and the businesses and restaurants that had once lined that wide and roaring highway, the way from the country to the airport. Among phrases characteristic of my style, I found more linguistic oddities, strange words studding the text like malevolent gemstones: "cloche" and "secateurs" and "insufflication." A voice somewhere nearby spoke to me. At first, I couldn’t make out the words, whispered as they were in a sort of gravelly undertone, phlegm-soaked and exhausted and dark as the night enveloping this part of my blog. "Knock out the lights and call the law," someone repeated. I looked around for the source of this command but saw no one. The forests of stone rose impenetrably around me on all sides. Again, I heard a voice speak: "Knock out the lights and call the law."

Caressing the words cut into the cold granite wall with my fingertips, I brought them to life: "While the ceremony was underway in the meeting room, regulars of the Legion Post occupied their customary stools in the barroom entirely indifferent to the honors being bestowed in the adjacent room. Sometimes, a muttered oath or obscenity reached into the place where the assembly was underway, but the officers of the club and those gathered for the meeting pretended not to hear the revelry in the barroom. The Good Citizens were tediously profuse in their acknowledgments and thanks. Speeches droned on. One after another the recipients of the Good Citizen Prize rose to be acknowledged. The carpet, the color and texture of the trunk of an old tree, smelled of spilled beer. In the toilet, ice cubes were melting in the urinals. I looked up and saw something scribbled in pencil on the tile wall: M + M and, then, an arrow pointing back to the door through which I had passed to come into the restroom. I turned on my heel, exited the toilet and went into the taproom. The people lined-up along the bar were nudging one another, jesting, shoving drinks back and forth across a surface puddled with spills and more melting ice dampening the peanut shells. Overhead in a globular diorama, large horses with bearded fetlocks were hauling beer in great wagons shaped like palisaded forts. A TV set showed baseball game underway. I sat at the bar for a moment. The bartender, a fat woman with a flat face and tiny eyes, looked at me curiously. I ordered a whiskey and water. The woman set the drink on a napkin. Someone had written M + M on the napkin with a pen. Next to the letters, I saw an arrow. I picked up the napkin and, then, experienced a momentary panic – the arrow ordered me to go in a certain direction, but, if I replaced the napkin in the wrong orientation, or turned it sideways or upside down, the arrow would not guide, but, rather, would mislead me. For a long time, I scrutinized the napkin, trying to visualize how it had originally been set before me by the fat barmaid. At last, I reached a conclusion, albeit tentatively – the arrow was directing me to the door of the bar and, outside, into the night."

"I went outside. It was humid and heat lightning in sheets fitfully illumined the grisly-looking, dark clouds overhead. I walked for a dozen blocks down the sidewalk, past shuttered businesses, and other bars leaking gusts of sullen or hilarious laughter onto the pavement. Kids cruising Excelsior Avenue passed me, shouting from open windows. The spire of the old movie theater rose overhead and I was certain that I had gone the wrong direction until I saw that the marquee of the moviehouse was marked ‘M + M’ with an arrow unmistakably pointing down an alleyway beside the theater. All of this was familiar to me, part of an alternative life that I had dreamed into existence."

"Dogs barked at me, tethered behind ramshackle fences between the old garages in the alley. Woodpiles stacked against metal siding hummed with decay, hot cores of organic rot reducing the logs to moist dust inflamed with writhing insect life. Lights flickered and men in their undershirts who had come from inside their kitchens to smoke in their backyards coughed. I saw their red eyes in the dark. Someone had smeared graffiti on the side of shed – a round, pebble-like figure that I recognized as the Mayan glyph Ak’bal, wholly redundant because night was everywhere pressing close around me, and the darkness did not need to be named. Next to that cipher, there was a gang sign, and two ‘M’s’ beside an arrow. I changed course, walked down a sidewalk, and came to a bridge crossing over a greasy river flowing through a concrete trough. Beyond the bridge, a tavern awaited, a capital-letter "M" grimacing as electricity surged and, then, waned through a neon tube."

"The inside of the bar was cloudy with smoke and the air smelled of fish and there was a little blue, black and white flag that I didn’t recognize hanging over the cash register. A heavy-set woman with her glasses on a chain around her throat sat in a cage selling pull-tabs. Discarded pull-tabs, furry with hanging chads, had fallen in white drifts between the pool tables and the booths. I went to the bar and ordered a drink, whiskey with water. The ice cubes in the drink were perforated and, as I sipped my whiskey, the cubes melted to become pale, transparent rings, bands of ice that might fit around my little finger. People were playing pool and I could hear an accordion wheezing in another room and, at tables, covered with white paper, couples were eating batter-fried fish and french fries and drinking mugs of beer. Is it catfish, I wondered? Catfish pulled from the "Big Muddy"? An older man occupied the bar stool next to me, dapper in his suit and mismatched tie, and the bar-top turned at his elbow so that the woman with whom he was sitting was at right angles to him and to me as well. The woman was in her early sixties, wearing a red kimono-like dress, an outfit that seemed to me incongruously bright, tight-fitting, even seductive. Her fingers were studded with rings that winked at me. Her companion stared into space, gazing toward the mirror behind the bar, panels of reflective glass mostly hidden behind ranks of bottles. The glass of the mirror seemed smoked and I could see myself dimly, hunched over the bar, the old man at my side as a hulking shadow, and, then, a flare of red like a battered rose where the woman was seated, slopes and curves that I could inspect, it seemed, to my heart’s content so long as I kept my eyes fixed on the mirror, the dusty bottles on the dusty shelves showing me their front and back sides in the dismal, dark glass."

"The woman spoke to me – ‘Do you come to the Mud often?’ ‘I know I’ve been here before,’ I told her. Her voice was insinuating, rough with abrasions made by the gin that she was drinking. ‘How do you know that you’ve been here before?’ she asked me. ‘Cause I can tell you where the toilets are located’ I said. And, indeed, I had an intuitive sense for where the restrooms might be found so that it was unclear to me whether I had been here before, or just in some place that was very similar. ‘Good man,’ the woman said. ‘It’s important to know where those places are located.’ The woman paused and lit a cigarette. I saw that the ashtray in front of her was clogged with cigarettes that she had signed with her lipstick. ‘Most of the people in here are retired,’ she said. I heard the word ‘retired’ as ‘retarded’ and so I looked around and shrugged. ‘I guess so,’ I said. She said that she wasn’t ‘retired’. ‘I’m still very much involved in my business." ‘What is your business?’ I asked. ‘Carpets,’ she said. ‘I sell carpets and have worked as a carpet consultant.’ ‘What is a carpet consultant?’ I asked. ‘If a carpet is installed wrong it’s a trip hazard,’ she said. ‘Sometimes lawyers hire me as an expert witness to tell how a carpet should be properly tacked-down.’ ‘I see," I said. ‘Carpets have a long history,’ she said. ‘Women have been smuggled to their lovers rolled up in length of carpet.’ ‘So I’ve heard,’ I said. ‘If carpeting isn’t applied right, it can be terribly dangerous,’ she said."

"The old woman had long false eyelashes. She fluttered them. Opening her purse, she searched for business card. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You should call me if you need anything.’ I looked at her card. Her first name was Vicki. There was a drawing of a race horse on the card and the words ‘A True Thoroughbred’."



"The bartender announced that the grill would be closing in a couple of minutes. He said that he would take ‘last call’ orders for fried catfish. At the other end of the bar, I saw a steamy little window, yellow as honey, and could hear oil sizzling in the kitchen where a chef wearing a white smock and white toque paced back and forth."

"Vicki smiled at me. ‘They have good catfish here,’ she said. ‘Fresh caught.’ ‘Smells good,’ I re plied. ‘On rare occasions,’ she said, ‘they fry up snapping turtles caught out there in the Big Muddy.’ ‘You don’t say,’ I said. ‘You see my husband here,’ Vicki gestured to the man between us. He stared fixedly into the mirror, gazing at the joint where the room and its reflection met. ‘He’s totally blind,’ Vicki said. ‘I can’t believe that,’ I said.

Vicki’s husband wore a tie with a tartan plaid pattern. The tie was sloppily knotted and clashed with his pin-stripe suit. He turned his head and looked at me curiously.

"You see, he’s blind," Vicki said. She took her cigarette lighter from her purse and flicked it a few inches before his eyes so that the yellow flame blazed up close to his face. The man flinched and pulled his head back away from the torch. Then, he winked at me. "Can’t see a thing," she said. "She’s right," the man said. "I’m totally blind."

Vicki told me that it was a terrible burden living with a blind man. "I have to guide him everywhere he goes," she said. The man hung his head in shame.

Another man came up to Vicki and put his chin against her shoulder, nuzzling her. Vicki brushed him away. The man tried to whisper in her ear. She put her tongue between her red lips and made a nonsensical babbling sound "La, la, la, la," she said. "I can’t hear you at all." The man nuzzled her shoulder again and, then, stumbled off. Vicki’s husband got up and walked to the bathroom, sometimes groping with his hands ahead of him, but generally navigating around tables and chairs with little difficulty. Perhaps, his hands were extended before him to break his fall if he lost his balance. He seemed to be drunk and tottered on his feet.

"His name is Frank," Vicki said. "He’s diabetic and he lost his vision. For the last five years."

"That’s terrible," I said.

"He can’t see a thing that I do," Vicki told me. "He’s completely in the dark."

Frank came back from the toilet and sat on the stool at the bar. Vicki took out a compact and adjusted her make-up.

Vicki asked me if I was interested in carpet. She said that she had an astounding collection of carpet samples.

"You should visit sometime and look at Vicki’s samples," Frank said. "I can’t see a thing she does." He looked up to the television above the bartender. A boxing match was underway. The two boxers were twins and they were punching at one another in a yellowish ring that trembled under their feet. The ring looked like the carapace of a turtle making its way up the Big Muddy. One of the twins slipped and fell down. Blood ran from eyebrow and an abrasion on his cheek. The ring was surrounded by smoke, a torrent of darkness in which I could see the heads of spectators bobbing like flotsam.

I went to the toilet myself. Above the urinal, someone had inscribed several glyphs and the characters "M + M", an arrow pointing in the direction that I should take. The marks led me westward, always westward, beyond the sunset, and the sunset of the sunset, into the deeper darkness. When I emerged from the rest room, Vicki and Frank had risen and stood teetering over their stools; some currency of a kind that I didn’t recognize was strewn on the bar. The music had become louder and the colors were more bright – Vicki’s kimono was scarlet, a pool of blood in the gloom.

"We paid for your drinks," Frank said. "We’re leaving now," Vicki told me. "Would you like to come with us?" I followed them out onto the pavement in front of the bar. We walked along the sidewalk to their car and I saw that the back seat was filled with rolled carpet samples – there was no place for me to sit behind them in the vehicle and, so, I bowed slightly and shook Frank’s hand. Vicki pressed up against me and whispered something in my ear. Her voice smelled of gin and cigarettes. I walked down the sidewalk. Frank opened the door for Vicki on the passenger side of the car and, then, got into the vehicle behind the wheel. I heard the car start and saw it pass by me, also west-bound, driven erratically, swerving back and forth across the center-line as if the driver were drunk or blind.

I didn’t recognize this part of the city. Streets intersected with the boulevard at haphazard angles, either acute or obtuse, but never making a right angle. Old mansions with stone towers and monstrous tile roofs stood alongside naked-looking empty lots. An overgrown cemetery occupied the opposite side of the street and I saw will-o-wisps moving among the graves. A sign at a corner named the avenue: Narva Maantee – but I had no idea what the words meant. Chinese and Mexican take-out places lit up some of the intersections, but most of the businesses along the street were dark and shuttered with iron. Scribbled on the wall of a Dunkin Donuts, I found another mark – M + M and, then, an arrow directing me to continue along the boulevard. I passed a place where there had been a great and destructive fire – the building tilted over the sidewalk was shaggy with soot and ash and broken glass sparkled in the gutter. The smell of burning, the product of a complicated conflagration of urine-soaked mattresses and rotting food and various rubber and plastics object all entrapped in a dense, fatty BBQ smell, made me dizzy. I saw marks chalked on the sidewalk, but they were crosses.

A block beyond the burnt tenement, a big "M" neon-lit quivered in a fog of flying insects. The "M" marked another bar. The rest of the sign was cold and dead next to the wreath of whirling winged creatures. There was no doorman at the bar, no bouncer to check I.D. The place was crowded with paneled walls and shadowy corners and an old tile floor that was checked black and white and slippery with spilled booze. Dark faces turned to look at me, scrutinized my face and figure for an instant, and, then, turned away. The bartender was a large woman wearing a black beret.

"Honey," she said. "Are you at the wrong address?"

"I don’t know," I said.

"Trust me," she replied. "You is at the wrong address."

"Okay," I said and turned to leave.

"You got to buy a drink at least," she said. "You come in here and so you got to buy a drink."

"I will buy a drink," I told her.

I asked her for a whiskey and water. "What kind of whiskey?" she asked. "I don’t know," I said.

"Bar-pour," she said. "Bar-pour, it shall be," I said. She nodded her head quizzically and put a napkin under my hand. The napkin was lettered in black: "MR. MAHOGANY."

"Mahogany" I said. "Mr. Mahogany’s club," she replied. Music welled-up out of a juke-box. Some of the patrons stood up and danced in place, swaying back and forth like tendrils of sea weed in an intermittent current. The bar was long and narrow with walls as bare as the inside of freight car.

The bartender put the drink on the napkin. It tasted like lukewarm tap water with only the merest trace of whiskey. I sat on the edge of a bar stool and sipped the drink, not too quickly, but swiftly enough to show that I was serious about finishing my water with whiskey and departing from the place. When I handed the woman a ten dollar bill, she sniffed at it suspiciously, then, flexed the greenback between her brown fingers, snapping it out straight and taut, and, shrugging, said: "We don’t get many like that in here." She opened the cash register where I saw the same peculiar currency that I had glimpsed earlier, little white chips like irregular fragments of dice and strips of folding money, brownish and bit stiff like inscribed beef jerky. "Here," she said, handing me three of the ivory chips and a piece of the jerky-money.

I thanked her, left the jerky on the bar, and turned to leave. But a hand restrained me, a tight vise-like grip crushing my elbow.

I turned in the direction of the hand holding me in place. A small man with a grey face like a withered leaf said: "What’s the rush?" "No rush," I said. "I want to tell you something," the man said. His teeth were dandelion yellow and his eyes seemed awash with some kind of sticky cream-colored fluid.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Did you see the men on the boulevard? ... --

– Now this part is problematic: here the writer presents this character’s words in an almost unreadable dialect, a sort of black-face minstrel-English, all corked-up with "dis’es" an’ "dat’s", a questionable exercise whether intended as satire or, perhaps, as a homage to other writers, since the dialect deployed in the narrative seems redolent of Mark Twain’s lamentable Huckleberry Finn as processed through the obscenity-laden prose of Robert Gover’s long-forgotten "Kitten" trilogy, novels once highly praised by the likes of Gore Vidal, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer, The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, Here Goes Kitten, and J.C. Saves, that is an impenetrable paragraph in faux Ebonics making an el malpais of more than three or four pages, bad lands for the reader to cross as one might say in French – the French being great admirers of Robert Gover to this very day – except that the phrase el malpais is, in fact, Spanish... the whole thing a (possibly racist) misfire to be sure that I don’t intend to attempt to reproduce in these pages: I do not now, nor have I ever, written anything in black-face, the prose that I compose is strictly-speaking White, that is, Caucasian, unavoidably as white as white can be and so this text- block of Mr. Bones and Tambo festering in the depths of my blog shall not be quoted here, but, instead, I will simply remark upon its content, particularly as it has bearing upon my effort to identify whom it was that had seized possession of the borderlands, the frontiers hidden in my computer: Gover, perhaps, on the evidence of this text and the fact that the author died in January 2015, old and full of years and honors, at Rehobath Beach in California, a firm believer in metempsychosis, that is, the transmigration of souls, so that he might well have found himself inhabiting one of the grottoes of my blog in his after-life and, thereby, inserting his foul-mouthed African American prostitute into the writing confined there –- although, I suppose, it’s equally possible that I may have written ala Gover in some dream state, in a fugue-like condition as it were, having stolen glances in my childhood more than once at The Hundred-dollar Misunderstanding as it lurked on the shelf of my father’s bookcase, a testimony to his beatnik anti-authoritian days, the novel’s cover, as I recall, displaying a comely Black girl in the throes of passion —

So (the man with the grey face and exudate in his eyes said) there were two men, tall and regal, of dignified bearing, and they proceeded down the boulevard (Narva Maantee) in a part of town where personages of their type were not often to be seen. The two men walked side by side, or, sometimes, the first two steps in front of the other following him, or vice-versa, changing position from leader to follower and follower to leader according to some principle that was unknown to those observing them, not that it made much difference because the two men were, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from one another... Now, the aspect of this promenade that most drew my attention, and the attention of the others in the neighborhood, was that the men often reached forward with their hands, letting the tips of their fingers just gently touch, elbows crooked to both sides, as if the personage making this gesture was carrying in his outstretched arms some kind of commodious basket, albeit one that was wholly invisible. Now, you must perceive, that this gesture of the outstretched hands and arms seeming to make a circuit of the empty air, was performed at chest-level, or, even, eye-level and so, apparently, demonstrative although it was not at all evident what was being demonstrated. So the men progressed along the street, a spectacle moving at a steady pace westward, the couple periodically reaching forward to make that lavish and Baroque and voluminous gesture, pale hands fluttering forward and the elbows crooked so that the arms might inscribe a circle in the air, and the tips of the fingers, the very uttermost tips just fluttering against one another. This was the exact gesture seen in the opera seria of Handel if performed according ancient practices, a period reconstruction of that lavish and beautiful presentation that one might expect from one of the castrati deputized to sing the part of Xerxes or Hercules or Giulio Caesar for that matter, arms opening outward over the chest as if cradling a vast bouquet of flowers in that place and, then, feet pointed, as if to inscribe ballet-like dance on the sidewalk, and the men in tandem proceeding forward, through our humble neighborhood for a distance of many city blocks.

Did the men sing? Did they deliver from themselves arias and recitative in a piercing counter-tenor register? Were they to sing, then, of course, I would recognize them as revolutionaries, freedom fighters making their way the Song Festival Grounds for the mid-summer Laulupidu, singers marching to where they would find a chorus 100,000 strong waiting for them, the girls waving black and blue and white flags, the young men pumping their fists in the air, all voices unified in the Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, defying Moscow, defying the tanks... a nation in the throes of being born. So let me ask you again: Did the men sing?

They did not. But the procession of the two men, now in tandem, now one following after the other, attracted the attention of onlookers and, since the dignity of the personages making this parade was beyond question, no one addressed any remarks to them, but, instead, we spoke among ourselves wondering what this display meant, or, indeed, even if it had any meaning at all. One man who glimpsed the two marching through our streets thought that they were marking us out either for some signal honor or for some destructive incursion – the rounded gesture of their arms signifying either a crown about to bestowed upon us or, in the alternative, a crater that might be made by the shells and rockets soon to land among our shops, our crack-houses, our bars and grills, our take-out places, even, our humble homes. Another man thought that the incursion was a kind of provocation and that it should be met with the uttermost force. A third fellow said that the rounded, barrel or hoop-shaped gesture was intended to frame certain aspects of our landscape that had hitherto escaped our glance, juxtapositions of advertisement and architecture, odd formations of infrastructure, curious webs of cable and electrical wire, even, places of historical significance, the locations of assaults and batteries and homicides as well as conspicuous acts of kindness and generosity. Someone announced, as if it were a fait accompli that the two men were a duet and that, shortly they would reveal themselves in patriotic song and that, then, they were going to join in the fighting around the TV station tower, but another said that no one had heard them singing and that if they were not singing they were not a part of the singing revolution. And, then, a woman said that the two making their transit through our neighborhood intended that we follow them, that they were Pied Pipers sent to draw the rats from their holes and to lead them, and the rest of us, as well, to wherever it was that they were going – this last comment leading to a host of speculations as to whence the men had come and to what location they were progressing: either the future or the past, either heaven or hell, utopia or dystopia, or nowhere at all in particular, ambulation for the sheer purpose of ambulation...

And, then, my interlocutor said to me: "Does you wan’ to know wha’ I recken?" – That is, "Do you want to know what I think?"

"I do," I said.

"Those men (he said) were not so much walking as paddling."

"What – ‘paddling’ – how do you see that?’

"The way that they moved (he told me) was slow, graceful, elegant – an upstream sort of gait against considerable current. ‘Paddling,’ I would say, more than walking. And the open arm, the gesture suggesting something carried, this is indicative that the two men were, indeed, carrying a very great weight."

"What weight?"

"They carry the weight of the sun as it is conveyed across the waters to the western islands where the sun will be concealed as a thing of very great value, the treasure of both the eye and the mind, kept in a cave until it is time to be brought forth as the dawn."

"But why are there two men?"

"Because I have just told you: there are two suns -- the sun of the eye and the sun of the mind. Both suns must be brought forth at dawn and carried across the land to shine into all things and, then, these solar orbs must be taken westward, ever westward, to Ak’bal – that is, to be stored in the darkness of well (cenote) or a cave or under the earth or waters, and there preserved until it is

time to bring these treasures forth again for the new and coming day. But there were others who had different ideas and, indeed, everyone who saw the men making their promenade along the boulevard had their own notion of what it meant and, one of them, said that he saw the arms raised forward and, then, lifted to make a graceful arch and that this arch framed a scrawl on the wall, the letters M + M next to an arrow and that this signified that the two visitors to our neighborhood were, in fact, guides of some kind, angels, perhaps, sent to lead us to another place..."

So westward, westward ever, the course of empire

There was a field where a field was not supposed to be, a vacancy slipped between houses extending a quarter mile straight toward the round steel vats and the fenced and aerated lagoons of the Waste Water Treatment plant and, if you set forth across that field, you might encounter pads of asphalt and concrete in the clover, the footprints of structures that no longer existed, slightly indented depressions that, perhaps, represented the basements of phantom houses, a fragment of sidewalk starting at a midden heap and running for a half-dozen yards amidst the weeds until it simply ended. At the end of a rutted track, a big semi-tractor is parked, a high, hooded vehicle midnight black with a streamlined hatchback, the kind of truck cab in which the trucker can sleep in a loft behind the place where he sits to drive the vehicle – it’s best to give that semi-tractor cab a wide berth, best to detour around the meadow where it is parked. If you find something out of place, located where it is not expected to be located, then, you are apt to regard that thing with a sort of superstitious awe, as an omen or a sign, something that I (or whoever is writing these words) discovered once while hiking in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, west of the pass, on the bare slopes near Sheep Mountain... there was a waterfall in a canyon transecting the high country and a trail to an overlook from which the fall could be seen, albeit at a great distance, and a thousand feet below in a gorge full of ashen pinnacles like the steeples of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, crossed alpine meadows glistening with wild flowers, an interminable mild path running sometimes through the cool pinon pine, past outcroppings of rock shattered into slivers by nine-months of ice and snow at this elevation, up and down knolls, but nothing steep or disorderly, just the grass nodding in the cool breeze at 11,000 feet, the distant peaks softened and blurred by the snowfields lingering on them, a mule-deer now and then standing stock-still to watch me pass, an endless trail almost without features wandering here and there in the mountain meadows and, at last, after walking four miles, perhaps, I saw a trailer with a rounded top, sitting in the shade of some aspen trees, no road anywhere nearby – I had left my car at the trailhead at the end of an eleven-mile upward pitch on battered gravel – no buildings for thirty miles or more in all directions, no shacks, no sheds, no domestic animals anywhere to be seen, only, sometimes, little windrows of horse-shit decomposing to straw and dust in the bright sunlight in the middle of the foot-path on which I was walking, a trail that also served as a path for pack animals...the trail led up a slight incline, through the flowering columbine, to the trailer and I could see that there was an aluminum folding chair set next to this little, streamlined capsule, the remains of a fire enclosed in some loaf-sized rocks that had been kicked into a circle, a fishing rod and reel leaning up against the sappy trunk of a tree, bumble-bees humming in the clover... Now, you know, the mind on a long walk is apt to venture into transgressive territory, the monkey-mind only to ready to contemplate all sorts of atrocities, forbidden desires, awful urges, and, now, as if in retribution, this trailer had appeared in front of me, athwart my passage over the mountain, blocking my way so that I would have approach this tiny settlement closely and, of course, I was afraid, suspicious of the inhabitant of that trailer, most likely a Basque shepherd, I told myself, yes, most likely just a Basque shepherd and probably anxious for company alone up here, tending to his flocks, but, then, where were his flocks and where the hound and where the grazing pasture where the sheep were reposing? And what about this silence? What about this terrible, oppressive silence? If this was an object that my imagination had produced, it was not to be trusted – the trailer might suddenly transform into something terrible and lethal and, so, almost on tip-toe, I approached step-by-step, trying not to breathe too loudly, holding my canteen close to my belly to keep it from rattling, and, then, I had come past the horrible trailer, hurried down a rocky slope to yet another ridge running barren across the high country, seen no sign of a shepherd or, for that matter, a fisherman or outdoorsman, come to the brink of a canyon where I heard a rushing sound far way and far below and, there, saw the waterfall: a tiny churning engine in the gorge full of oddly sculpted minarets and pinnacles. (It must be me writing these words because of the showy simile invoking Gaudi, that architect’s work a subject in which I have an interest). I must have taken a different way back because I didn’t encounter the trailer returning to my car, something that also frightened me because it meant that I had gone the wrong way and was, perhaps, lost in the Big Horn Mountains, but, at last, I climbed a hill and saw, across a valley green with pinon, the hot sun expressing the strong-smelling sap through the bark of the trees...saw my car parked where I had left it at the trail head and, then, the skies darkened and it rained a little, just sufficient to settle the dust on the gravel road, and, all that day, I think I had seen no other human being on those mountain heights and this is what I (or someone else) remembered when I saw the semi-cab parked incongrously in the long field naked to the sky filled now with strange stars and constellations... was there someone awake in the truck cab? Someone, perhaps, watching TV on a laptop computer? Then, I heard voices and saw a couple of old men sitting a picnic table by an windowless building, a three-story shed with a lean-to porch on which someone had placed an urn full of strong-smelling flowers.

The old men were conversing in the opening sentences of short stories that someone had written and, then, deposited in a remote location, at high elevation among crags and cascades in my blog.

"On the occasion of each of my divorces, someone always gave me a micro-wave, used but still serviceable and, so...."

To which the other man replied: "It is not a bad thing to sit alone in a car, rain on the windshield, waiting for the encounter that will change your life..."

"No one knows the trouble I’ve seen..." countered his interlocutor.

"On Christmas Eve, Roger discovered to his dismay that even the porno places were closed..."

"Don was so rich that, when he got drunk and parked his car so that it could not be found the morning after his binge, he simply took a taxi to the car dealership to buy another vehicle, usually a new Ford Taurus..."

"Among the many indignities that I have borne, the desecration of my web-site by postings of an unknown author, whose skill as a writer, perhaps, surpassed mine, is the most intolerable..."

"Intolerable? I thought you would be pleased at the interloper’s proficiency. Would you prefer that this writer who has appropriated a few bytes of your data was a worse writer, less competent than you, and, therefore, likely to expose you to shame because, after all, it is not evident to an outsider which writing is the product of which author (sic)..."

"He thought that great art required sacrifice and lived by this doctrine but when the time came to make that sacrifice, he considered the austerities that would be required of him and..."

"Knock out the lights and call the law."

"On the road to the contagious hospital..."

"Beyond the wastewater treatment plant, a cursor encounters escarpments of signs, advertisements, passwords both hacked and unhacked, hash tags, encryption engines spewing out code, raw linguistic material extruded from the bowels of the internet, a steep upward ascent among talus fields of fragmentary words and phrases, the whole landscape seemingly dynamic, the product of landslides, erosion, tempestuous winds, yet, also curiously still and inert. A hiker stubs his toe on phrases in foreign language dropped like Baroque terracotta ornaments (putti and buscrania) from the facades of cliffs: nefas,"Halbstarker,"hash tag beastsrule#, percentage of suds, No Parking Zone, Dangerous Curves ahead and LOOSE GRAVEL..."

"On the dark plateau, more wilderness – the area seems to be under development: there are old Victorian houses mounted on steel frames, jacked up a dozen or more feet above grade, their ancient cellars like the craters of lanced boils, abscesses in the earth, and long parallel and muddy ridges scraped into place by bulldozers and everywhere imprinted with the ladder-like mark of ‘dozer tracks, a forest of cranes on the horizon each of them hoisting a gas-powered generator sixty or seventy feet into the air to protect against theft, strange flags flying atop the construction cranes, vast excavations impounding slumped, sullen-looking floodwaters, half-finished walls and skids of poured concrete like tiny landing pads among the heaps of gravel, and the roadside devoid of sidewalks, although it doesn’t matter because no traffic is coming or going and you can walk in the center of the highway if you wish and smell the fresh lime scent of the newly made road that runs like a white arrow across the dark plain. After some time, you come to round-abouts, traffic circles, like astronomical markers in the featureless darkness (Stonehenges without the megaliths) and as you traverse those lanes arc-ed around equally featureless mounds, there is the distinct danger that you will lose your way, take an exit off the traffic circle that is too early or too late and so find yourself moving at right angles to the command of the M + M marks, scratched in chalk on the roadway – this could lead to complete confusion because the roadways radiating from the traffic circles are all identical in form and configuration, the same straight way leading to the next traffic circle between wide gutters equipped with storm drains, and, if by chance, you miss the proper egress from the round-about, and, then, have to hike 360 degrees, full-circle along its full circumference, you will be irretrievable lost since there is nothing to distinguish one highway from another. So with an increasing sense of anxiety, I am marching forward from traffic circle to circle, each round-about a quarter mile from the last but in every cardinal direction so I can not establish, with any certainty, that I am on the right path.

At the same time, puns proliferate and various examples of amphiboly – "the exploits of Pendario, also known as Lord Nelson or the victor at Waterloo, were, in fact, performed by Toole Theef – "and I hope that the plot involves larceny?" – "To be sure it does." Or, we read that Thomas Mann’s daughter, Ericka is related as grandmother to O’Toole Mann, a famously endowed porno-star." The poet Charles Simic is quoted in the New York Review of Books on July 9, 2015 as saying: "I’m also a child of History. I’ve seen tanks, piles of corpses, and people strung from lampposts with my own eyes," prompting the query: "How did you use your eyes to string up people on lampposts? Your eyes must have been exceedingly robust and sinewy." And then: Would you like to enter my corn maize? The labyrinth is designed with corridors cut into the crop to simulate Durer’s "Four Horsemen of the Pooky-lips." Probably, an excursion best to avoid, but...

You will find your way out as the road progresses by focusing your eyes on the TV tower, its great concentric rings of concrete marked with red blinking lights to repel airplanes and its enormous steel spike, painted in alternate bands of white and red, rising more than a 1000 feet above the forests and the lakes and the Song Festival grounds – it is said that there are a thousand steps, at least, coiling around the spine of that vast TV tower and that, when the Russians parked their armored personnel carriers at its base, and launched their assault during the Singing Revolution, they sprinted upward, running at full speed for the first 100 steps and, then, slowing because their packs and gear and the weight of their weapons tired them, and so, they reached the top of the second hundred steps, where I have it on good authority, that their officers ordered them to make a halt so that they could catch their breath and, of course, Tallinn is humid in the summer and can be warm and so the Russians were sweating so heavily that the moisture leaking from their bodies splashed on the iron rungs of the steps and made them very slippery so that during the ascent of the third hundred steps a number of men fell and became casualties. The revolutionaries at the highest point in the tower had come to that summit by elevators that were, then, disabled in the simplest way possibly – simply jammed with a box of matchsticks so that the cars couldn’t be called to the ground to raise the attacking Russians. And the revolutionaries knew that the tower was equipped with an oxygen removing device, a great vacuum that was designed to be deployed in case of fire, something that the Russian shock-troops should have known as well since the 1200 foot edifice had been both designed and built by Soviet engineers, a monument to their empire and a device from which Estonian broadcasts could be made to interfere with the transmissions of the Finns in Helsinki or the Danes in Copenhagen or the Swedes in Stockholm – it is a known fact that if your broadcast has more power, more wattage than another broadcast on the same frequency, the more powerful transmission will prevail, blotting out the less powerful broadcast...this is a principle of a form of hacking, phone phreaking, about which more later...but, in any event, the defenders of the tower knew that the Russian troops could be suffocated by evacuating all of the oxygen from the huge metal syringe pointing upward in the sky, and their fingers hovered over the button (or was it a lever?) poised to activate the device. "Upward!" the Russian officers cried and the men climbed another 50 steps but, then, had to rest again and more men slipped on the sweat-greased iron stairway or lost their hold on the iron hand-rails and there were increasing numbers of casualties. The attackers climbed another 25 steps and, then, one of the officers had a heart attack and he fell and his AK-47 dropped into the abyss and sailed down to burst on the concrete 375 steps below. "Upward!" another officer cried and they climbed 12 steps but, then, had to pause because a stretcher crew was coming upward, shoving through the men arrayed on the steps, pushing them aside to retrieve the fallen leader. "Upward", someone said. But, this time, they climbed only six steps before logistical problems delayed their ascent. "Upward!" the lieutenant said but they went only another three steps before pausing because radio transmissions had been received saying that fighting had broken out in the Song Festival grounds and that snipers occupied the fire observation tower to the side of the huge conch-shaped bandshell, rings of prestressed, reinforced concrete that looked something like a Spondylus shell from the Caribbean, a mollusk involved in auto-sacrifice rituals involving the shedding of blood in propitiation of the young Maize god – they are fighting by the Song Festival grounds and we should go there, so said a Lieutenant and he looked upward into the narrowing concrete vault of the TV tower and saw only Ak’bal there, that is, an ascent into darkness and, then, he thought that he had misheard the radio transmission: perhaps, the excited voice had said that there were singers in the fire observation tower adjacent the stage under its conch-shell-shaped dome, singers not snipers, but it was too late – the men had reversed their march and retreated, clattering down the steps, having never reached even the half-way mark in their climb and, at the point of the tower, where its metal spike lacerated the constellations, the freedom fighters relaxed and let their hands and fingers fall away from the lever (or was it a button?) that operated the air evacuation device...

So, you see, if you keep your eyes fixed on that TV transmission tower, you will navigate in the right direction through this darkness...

Thence, into a zone of strip malls, fast food places with easy-in and easy-out, freeway overpasses, an airport somewhere nearby because the sky is crowded with the heraldic underbellies of planes landing and taking-off, red wing-lights flashing, convenience stores lining the boulevard, the great desolation of commerce: insurance companies and group health administration facilities and orthopedic clinics in glass towers, lit after midnight on floors where the janitorial crews are vacuuming, emptying waste-baskets, cleaning toilets, plotting rapes and murders, "M" house-high emblazoned in neon on a night club raised above the adjacent parking lots on a temple platform, the night club signifying its intrinsic allegiance to the dark with the neon figure for Ak’ bal or here the glyph Ak ab that means the same thing – a compound of the watery element, particularly as it is found in underground caves and grottoes with the mark denoting the scaly surface of a serpent. Here is the last of the three creations, the midnight café of the third "M", after Mud and after Mahogany – the high domain of Mr. Maze who has died and been cast into the waters as an infant and who skin must split and be cast aside, like the skin of a snake, in order to be reborn, gardens flowering with night-blossoms and lazy iguanas, mariachi music trembling in the breeze, What, was this place once a Mexican restaurant? Murals on the walls that depict skeletons dining on fruit and tamales with their living relatives on the Dia de los Muertos, the decor famously vulgar and done up in a Neo-Mayan, or, should I say?, neo-Nahuatl style. There is Mr. M – at the door, in full regalia, inviting patrons to the navel of the universe, the axis mundi, jade amulets strung around his neck representing the Young God in the jaws of a panther. Mr. M–‘s eyes glitter like obsidian and he wears turquoise rings.

There is no one blind in this saloon and the only currency accepted is ivory chips and folding money imprinted on a kind of vellum that looks like beef jerky and, if you fumble in your pocket for some bread or dough or the do-re-mi, whatever you call it, you’ll find that you don’t have the wherewithal for so much as a single drink, not even the cash for a beer and, so, you will have to rely upon the generosity of strangers. Someone approaches with a face ambiguously familiar, probably a long-dead friend or relative, and offers to buy you a drink if you will read your famous blog entry on mica and eyes of mica, except that you can’t recall having written any such thing, so you say: I don’t recall...but, I think, it goes like this– there is a library and I go there every day because there is a girl that I love and I want her to know that this is where I can always be found because the idea haunts me that she will come one day, cool and inviting and with a bottle of wine hidden in her purse, and want me to go with her to drink the wine, but I will not be in place where I am supposed to be waiting for her, I will be on the other side of the library, or among the stacks or outside somewhere and she will look for me in vain. And so I am motivated to be dependable – if I can’t be attractive or handsome or exciting, at least, I can be dependable: I can always sit at the same table in this same library and, in that way, when the girl comes – if she comes – she will see me where I am supposed to be and gracefully repose in the chair beside the place where I am studying and, then, open her purse just wide enough to show me the dewy bottle lurking in her bag and, then, we will go outside onto the mall and sit under the old trees and pass the bottle back and forth, drinking from it until the wine is all consumed – this is what I hope will happen, except that it doesn’t occur except, perhaps, once a year, but, nonetheless, in the anticipation of that event, I always take the same place in the library, always undertaking my studies in exactly the same place so that I can be found if ever someone comes looking for me.

And so, it was that I became acquainted with the other regular patrons in the library as, no doubt, they became acquainted with me. A couple of homeless men frequented the place, shabby fellows who could be seen every morning bathing in the sinks in the toilets like sparrows and there were a few Asian students, melancholy men with thick glasses and complicated Texas Instrument calculators – this was during the early nineteen-seventies – always alone, bent over their recondite computations. The head librarian was a wiry homosexual with grey hair whose lips were always pursed as if to whistle a merry tune forbidden by the decrees of silence that he was required to administer. In the stacks, pale scholars had been assigned certain iron study carrels to which they were chained like galley slaves, haggard and desperate, and, then, there was the Peeper, although one could not call his monstrous activity anything like mere peeping.

The Peeper was a middle-aged man dressed in shabby nondescript work clothes. He appeared in the library only after midday and I suspected that he worked a shift in some industry that released him from his labors about 2:30 or 3:00 p.m. Apparently, the work was not physically arduous because the man was round, with broad hips and sloping shoulders, his paunch pressing against his belt-buckle. He walked with a shuffle, dragging his feet in their greyish work boots across the floor. The man’s face lacked any characterizing features: he had pasty skin and a black eyes under black eyebrows and the set of his mouth and jaw and nose were blurred, curiously vague as if unfinished in some respect. The forces that mold a man’s face hadn’t been applied to this doughy, indistinct man and, for all practical purposes, he was invisible.

Under the cloak of this invisibility, the Peeper entered the library and scanned the room with a mild, indifferent gaze, standing still at the threshold by the circulation desk where the homosexual librarian was soundlessly whistling and chirping. After looking about for a minute or so, the Peeper would slip sideways between the tables and, silently, descend into a chair adjacent to a young woman. His criteria for selecting any specific girl never became clear to me – generally, it seemed that he was drawn to women wearing white or pale clothing, possibly a sleeveless blouse, although there were exceptions to this principle as well. In any event, the women that he chose for his attentions also were clearly defined to me, highly visible, as it were, with sharp contours and profile, women wearing translucent and sheer blouses with their brassiere-straps apparent between their white shoulders, face turned away from the Peeper so that only ear and cheek was presented to him, scrupulously inattentive to the man who had taken a seat neighboring them. At first, the Peeper would unfold a newspaper and shuffle it ostentatiously and, then, he would glance to his right and left, the woman always on his right side peering down at her notes and textbook. After a couple of minutes, the Peeper would cease his fruitless sidelong looks to the left and would slowly rotate his body until, more or less, facing the woman. Then, his face would change, a metamorphosis of a particularly hideous and unsettling variety would occur – the Peeper’s eyes would become darker and more engorged with blood and they would expand, overflowing his eye sockets to lap up against his hair combed sideways over his moist brow and his cheekbones. The Peeper’s neck would crane forward, telescoping to support the enormous weight of his eyes now glaring into the side of the woman’s face and body. The intensity of his gaze would increase exponentially until it seemed to irradiate his victim, causing her to glow with a curious creamy and yellowish light. As I watched, the Peeper’s eyes seemed to extrude from his face, caressing the woman’s lips and armpit and shoulder with a wet, groping, tentacular touch. The Peeper’s face was no longer human but, rather, the conduit for some kind of impersonal, awful power – his desire to see the woman beside him made his black eyes shine like mica, like some kind of crystal: he was like a huge mantis despoiling a flower, poised to pounce, a look like a vector of sexual energy raping everything in its path. Ultimately, the woman would tremble in the force of his gaze, she would quiver like a leaf, and, if she turned to confront him face to face, of course, she would vanish entirely into his look, swallowed whole the way a python eats the corpse of a mouse, but, most of the women would sense that the man’s eyes had become lethal, that they were a great outpouring of some kind of arachnid or insect energy, and, gasping, the woman would rise, snatch up her belongings and flee the terrible look that was now imprisoning her – she would depart the library and, then, the man’s face would suddenly deflate, collapsing into a wet, flaccid chaos of features, noseless and lipless and without cheek or jaw bone, until gradually reconstituted from the smear and blur sufficiently to support the Peeper’s neck rotating and his head shaking back and forth like a dog emerging from a deep water, and, then, silently, he would stand and flex his shoulders a little in triumph as if wings were laboring to sprout there, and, silently, unnoticed by the rest of the library, he would shuffle away...

Slouching away from the library, the Peeper’s eyes were wet, exhausted, no longer the pointed and lethal instruments that they had been at the climax of his looking. The light had gone out of his eyes, but when his gaze was at its uttermost, his eye sockets seemed to me to be full of mica, stony and impenetrable – they glistened like mineral. He had become an auto-sacrifice, an offering to some strange scoptophiliac god. In Paracas, and Chimu, archaeologists have discovered mummified children, wrapped in gorgeous textiles, their eyes gouged-out and replaced with shards of mica, their hearts extracted and replaced with garnet and rose-quartz, gourds substituted for their stomachs, heroic bodies contrived to exist forever peering into the future with mica eyes, imperishable mica hyperlinking to a shady street in New Jersey, near the seashore and, so, also, near the boardwalk smelling of suntan lotion and dead fish and saltwater taffy, a still, silent shady street with the great sun above trees buzzing with cicadas and a sidewalk dappled in light and dancing shadow as the sea-breeze stirred the branches overhead and, then, a wall and a doorway in the wall and a secret garden. What is this place? A kindly old lady with grey hair emerges from the house next to the garden and offers my brother and I (or is it "me"?) wet cups of lemonade and my mother is standing somewhere in the fog of green leaf. – This is a rock garden, the woman says and she leads on a tour: the placid walkways and stepping stone lined with ferns and flowering shrubbery sheltering, outcrops of exotic minerals transported to this place and displayed among the blossoms and the caress of the emerald green moss. The old lady walks ahead of us along the path and there is a birdbath brimming with water and, perhaps, sparrows grooming themselves in the silver spray of water drizzling down into the terra-cotta scallop of the bath and she says that here you will see tourmaline and, there, garnet, and here rose-crystal and spiky amethyst and a petrified log polished to show its agate cross-section and a haggard-looking meteorite, charred black and pitted with craters, and, then, a great bank of mica, crystalline in the sun, sheets of friable mica heaped-up under a tree that releases light through the sieve of its leaves down into the mineral and makes the sheets of crystal glitter and sparkle with a shocking brilliance... These are the souvenirs of trips to the Southwest, visits to the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert, excursions underground into caverns, stalactites stabbed into flowerbeds and yellowish stalagmites lurking like toads under hedges. Things grow in a garden and so this begs the question: are the gem specimens seeds of some sort and, if so, what is the foliage that they will engender? What the tree? What the blossom? Of course, gems are born in the womb of the earth and they grow in the darkness, their crystal lives icy and abstract, whole colonies of ornate minerals semi-sentient in the soil or the matrix of living rock. The kindly older woman, perhaps, perceived my discomfiture – what, after all, is grown in a rock garden? Are the stones the fruit produced or are those gems the seed? I was confused and the bright sun shining on the crystals dazzled my eyes. She stooped in the shadow of the bushes, her fingers grazing in the book-like stacks of mica, and, then, she turned to me and placed in my hands a dozen sheets of the brittle mineral. "Here, you may have this," the woman said to me and my mother beckoned: "say ‘thank you’," she said. And I thanked the lady and we went back to our little house and I sat in my bedroom and stroked the mica sample that had been given to me as if it were the most precious treasure of my childhood, which, in many ways, it was. For this specific sample of mica, flaking at the edges, as flimsy as cardboard remained with me a long time. For years, I would forget the mineral, but, then, might find it tucked away in a box with other souvenirs of my childhood. It was a talisman for me and symbol of something luminous and brittle, sheets of crystal like pages of paper, stratified one sheet atop the other, so that you were always tempted to pull off the crystal panes and hold them to your eyes to look through them – semi-transparent windows onto the world that blurred and distorted faces and landscapes and that polarized the light into strange flares and eclipses. I think I only lost the last fragment of my horde of mica in a divorce, when I was 33 years old – the mineral was left in a house that I abandoned to my wife and children and, since that time, the crystals have been hidden only in certain remote parts of my dreams and in citations in the gloomy suburbs of my web-site, in blog entries misappropriated by invading sensibilities – See, nothing is lost: everything goes into a repository of memory, an archive to be extracted at some later date, and when the memories are extracted, they are used and, then, thrown away like tissue paper, discarded. The maize seed is drilled into the earth and perishes there, it’s skin flayed and rotten, but, then, the young god emerges green, feathery, like an emblem on a hunter’s cap, a feather over the brim of his hat. Throw away the mica, make a sacrifice of its memory, hurl it into the Cenote, the deep well of sacrifice with its crumbling limestone walls layered like the pages of chalky encyclopedia and bookmarked with cascades of green, falling vine and the dark surface of the water deep in the pit covered with a lid of blooming algae, sheets of green through which frogs paddle under the watchful and bulbous eyes of dragonflies. Pitch in your books, your diplomas, your tender and pink infants, your credit cards and cash; make a sacrifice of your scepter carved like the young god’s head and floral headdress, the sculpted knob on that hardwood staff foaming with copal smoke burning within a hidden reservoir so that the young corn-god’s nostrils seem to exhale sweet-smelling incense and his brow leaks thoughts like the haze on the summits of the mountains. Sacrifice your solar disks and gorgets of jade and your labrums and shields embroidered with quetzal fieathers and your car keys and GPS systems, your curved spoons to induce vomiting at the great banquets, your bottles of Courvoisier and Hennesey, your champagne flutes and mugs for cacao laced with hallucinogens, your amulets and figurines, your carved canoes both miniature and life-size, throw it all away into the well of sacrifice because you must now understand that to live is to be obliged to sacrifice, that sacrifice is the law of life, I’m afraid. although this is difficult for modern people to grasp – so go to the brink and throw down into the green darkness your cell-phone, your I-Pad, your talisman of mica, and, perhaps, you will stumble, trip over the surplus of knick-knacks and gew-gaws scheduled for immersion in the Cenote’s dark waters, and, nudged from behind, you find yourself falling forward, tumbling head over heels, diving Alice-in-Wonderland-style downward to splash through the viscous algae film on the pond and, then, sinking down, into the deep, past the sediment of skeletons plumed in headdresses and crowned in fatal gems, through the hidden crevasses and fissures to the deepest vantage point where there is a perpetual roaring and, there, at the axis mundi, the local tribe has generously erected a viewing station that extends like the gondola of a zeppelin beneath the world: if you look in your pockets, you will find strips of leathery currency, mummy-skin flayed from cadavers, and incisors, molars, canine teeth, ivory-white coins with which to pay for admission to the attraction: an "u"-shaped walkway made from plexi-glass that extends out over the brink, all enclosed by hip-high plexi-glass walls as well to keep you safe during your promenade. The small walnut-colored man at the ticket station takes your money and issues you a ticket and, then, gestures to lockers where you must place your shoes, your boots, your high-heels, even your Air Jordans since the plexi-glass surface of the walkway might be readily marred by your shod heel and must be kept free of scuffs and other marks that could obscure the view downward, between the chamois booties that you pull over your feet. It’s windy on the sky-walk and your feet slip and slide beneath you on the transparent plexiglass surface of the balcony hanging out over the end of the world and you are dizzy with vertigo looking out over the vast void. The horizon is all carapace, patterned turtle shell rising up into the dark heavens from which a tragic, unceasing wind pours. Below, the turtle’s mighty, clawed feet churn to foam the sea of cocoa, dark and bitter, Theobroma, the elixir of the gods – it’s all visible below you at an immense distance, like a waterfall running in perpetual motion in the inaccessible depths of a gorge, the turtle’s feet paddling the cocoa and the dark tide whipped to white froth and the earth towering overhead, balanced precariously on its dome of shell – so this is what underlies everything, this is the final spectacle, and, when you have reached the uttermost projecting point in the plexiglass cantilever, you pause for a moment and feel the tremor of turtle’s laborious swimming, the crash of its great feet paddling through the black and syrupy sea and the wind that comes from nowhere musses your hair and makes your eyes sting and there is the curious scent of dark, bitter chocolate all mixed-up with an odor like fish and earthworms and humid soil where ferns flourish –

But there is a hyperlink in this text, irresistible to your point-and-click finger, and, then, you’re borne away to someone’s thesis on comparative mythology and book reviews of books you’ve never seen, let alone read, and the story of grief and mourning over a loss you’ve never experienced, then, an economic treatise explaining in exact terms how it was that human flesh with precision comminuted bone and teeth became currency and could be exchanged for goods and services, dollar bills minted from living flesh with the eyeballs of those sacrificial victims imprinted on the money and still animate, blinking at you from the mummy-jerky dollars and, even, glancing left and right from where the corneal tissue is impressed atop those pyramids of the Novus Ordo Seclorum – to be sure, it was a slow and laborious transition from conventional greenbacks and silver and copper coins to using human skin and integument (with bone and tooth) for money, but Marx predicted that this development would occur and, now, of course, in the capitols of world finance, it has come to pass that the only currency that anyone will accept today is printed on flesh and bone: these are the debts that must be paid, the sacrifice that keeps the earth aloft on the shell of the turtle and that stirs the young maize god to submit to death once more so that human beings will have food to eat.

But my friends, this is extremely excessive and we must withdraw a little from the brink and take sober stock of our surroundings. We are in a remote and hushed place in the internet, far from the hurly-burly of Amazon or the other marketplaces. And you must sense that there is an order here, a logic to all appearances and declarations. Another narrative comes at you like a truck on the freeway or like a train roaring over steel tracks in advance of a thunderstorm.

"I had gone to the jail to see my friend who has been locked-up for committing a fifth-degree assault, wife-beating, as it happens, an appalling offense for which there is no justification – this crime combined with driving while intoxicated, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct (that is, urination in the open), and similar misdemeanors, all the result in overindulgence, as you can imagine... or was he arrested for window-peeping or some other form of scoptophilia? I didn’t know... But my informant met me at the airport, bid me park my car in one of the vast ramps overlooking the terminals with their concourses thrust out upon the concrete plain like the wide-spread fingers of a hand lying palm down on the runways and, so, I left the car, a Taurus, as I recall, in the dank ramp facing inward toward acres of similar cars aligned in rows between squat cement columns, and, together, we took the elevator down deep underground to the tunnel and the train in the tunnel that ran to the stadium downtown and the courthouse and the jails."

"My informant said that he come from the sector of hate speech and, then, walked through the pornography zoo where the creatures were kept in iron-barred kiosks and he told me that after we finished our visit to the jail, we should see the attractions."

"What are the attractions?" I asked.

The subway car jolted over the tracks in the dark tunnel.

"You know," he said. "The Art Museums, at least a couple of them, and the exhibition of exile art, then, the surgery display at the College of Surgeons, Effigy Park, the Bridge of Sighs, the Meteorite Museum and the Carousel Collection and, then, of course, Dinosaur Hall."

"That’s a lot to see," I said.

"To be sure," he told me. "But, first, we have to explore the ruins."

"Where are the ruins?"

"Here," he said.

So we exited the subway that had now become an elevated railroad, a station like a balcony suspended over the ruins on criss-crossing cast-iron girders. I recognized the terrain: it was the industrial zone between the old slaughterhouse to the north and the train yards to the south. Every visit to the city had to begin in this place, among these battered warehouses and ghostly sheds.

We walked down to the sidewalk and hurried along broken walls where old concrete loading docks jutted out like fangs from the crumbling buildings.

"You’ll have to remember where you parked that car," he said. "The number of the level, and the side – you know, the red side or the blue or the green. Can you recall?"

"I don’t recall..."

"Didn’t you write it down somewhere?" he asked. "I told you to write it down."

"I made an entry in my blog," I said. "But someone has intruded on my blog and hijacked most of my entries, at least, those more remote, those distant from the access portals."

"I don’t think that’ll help us to find the tortoise," he said.

"Tortoise?"

"Taurus, your rental car."

"Maybe not," I replied.

"We’ll have to deal with that later. I knew a guy once who was so rich that, when he went on a bender, parked his car illegally somewhere and lost the vehicle, he wouldn’t even bother looking for it – he would just buy another car, brand new..."

"You don’t say."

"It’s true," he said.

The streets were lonely but not entirely cheerless. Here and there squatters had set small fires and were warming themselves by the flames. Bohemian coffee-houses occupied some of the street corners and, through the windows, I could see people sitting amidst ferns and potted plants and girls serving cacao in cups shaped like osteology specimens and I could see that there was froth on the surface of the cacao, latte, I thought, and people writing notes in I-Pads and earnestly squinting at the screens of their laptops.

A number of the abandoned factories had been renovated into performance spaces and we went through a cavernous building like a hangar for airplanes, but empty except for the mess made on the floor by bats roosting overhead and, then, came upon an interior courtyard open to the elements where some folding chairs had been set around a small stage under flood-lights with several microphones poised and waiting and, I thought, that it would be bad to be unable to find the rental car where I had left it at the airport and so I took from my pocket the car-keys and read something on them, some characters that I couldn’t decipher, the mark for Ak’bal, and, then, a license plate number MM something, the numbers were faded so that I couldn’t exactly decipher them although, perhaps, it was a deficiency in my eyes or a defect in the light available in the courtyard set up for the performance --

"It was a blue Taurus," I ask my guide. "Wasn’t it a blue Taurus?"

"How can I recall?" he said. "Tortoise?"

"No, Taurus, the bull," I replied.

"I thought you meant a turtle," the guide said again. He didn’t seem to be listening to me.

Music was playing somewhere and I could here the drums sounding, rimshots echoing off the broken pavement, and we bought tamales from a street vendor. She grinned at us standing over buckets hanging from her bicycle that leaked steam into the air. People came out and danced for a while as we watched and, then, someone pointed to way to the jail and I left my friend and went in the direction indicated to me toward a bridge suspended over swampy water.

So, I came across the causeway, entered the lock box where I established my credentials, then, was escorted through a corridor used for general storage, it seemed, so that the passage was clogged with cardboard crates, many of them obviously water-damaged, tubes of failed florescent lights, old signs used as advertising for silent auctions and charity balls serving as fundraisers for the Sheriff and Police Officers’ Widows and Orphans Association, mops and buckets and carts stacked with toilet paper in unopened packages with cleaning materials in plastic jugs marked by skull-and-crossbones insignia, corroded filing cabinets, law books that had been drowned by floods, computer keyboards and monitors, broken fax machines and teleprinters, discarded office furniture: steel desks from another era and big, funereal chairs, upholstered in Naugahyde, that were broken so that if you sat in one of them the chair would recoil against your buttocks and pitch you face forward to the floor...and, at the end of this corridor, an elevator with its walls padded with grey, quilted fabric, stained all over by fluids squirted out of suspects beaten in the brief transit from this underground sallyport to the booking room a couple floors overhead, the elevator bypassing the Justice level where there were courts and judges and court reporters and lawyers scurrying between hearings – this was a special elevator with only an up and down control and a red panic button to stop the padded chamber between floors so that beatings could be properly administered in the privacy of the enclosed metal cell brought to a stop in its shaft. This elevator will lift you from the jail’s entry at the end of the underground corridor used for storage to the jail itself with no official stops in between, although, as I have told you, unofficial and retributive stops were not only condoned, but encouraged, between floors.

Upstairs: windowless offices, buzz of ventilation systems haphazardly breathing for the place, niches for interviews and visitation, then iron bars and metal cages, all of this bathed in a hard, clear light that has no apparent source. My friend is lying on the concrete floor next to a drain in the Drunk Tank – a white porcelain toilet squats in one corner and there is a metal shelf eighteen inches above the concrete apparently intended as a kind of bunk. It looks like the kind of place that is cleaned with a high-pressure hose.

My friend is without belt, trousers half-way fallen to his ankles, shoeless, face covered with a mask to conceal his identity, although, when I first encounter him, he has turned his back to the corridor and lies on his side, facing the concrete block wall across the star-shaped drain and, so, I see only the back of his head, his scalp battered with sores oozing blood. A powerful odor of vodka boils off his body as if he were very hot, sweating the booze through his pores. I call his name. He stirs a little, trembling at first, then, shaking with his whole body on the concrete floor, and, then, gradually his scattered parts come together and he stiffens, sits up, and turns in my direction. He is wearing a rubber mask: Max Headroom’s grotesquely telegenic features sculpted in painted rubber with a crisp blonde crewcut, but the handsome face sags on the skull of my poor friend and the mask’s eye-sockets are filled with impenetrable darkness – they don’t seem to fit over my friend’s eyes in any exact way and so I have the sense that he is either blind, or seeing me only out of the corners of his vision. The mask shakes a little on his skull.

"This is a pervy part of your blog," the Max Headroom mask says, latex lips immobile of course.

"Can you take off that mask?"

"You don’t want to see they’ve done to me," the Max Headroom mask says.

I notice that his knuckles are covered with black scabs.

"Very pervy part of the internet in general," he says.

"Why are they holding you?"

"Why do you think?

"I don’t know. Can you make bail?"

"You have to pay with your flesh, with your skin and your teeth and parts of bone. I don’t have that currency"

"So how long are they going to hold you?"

"How should I know," the Max Headroom mask says, chin and rubber jaw shaking like jowls. "Obviously, I hacked your blog. I confess. Dude, your password was a joke. Do you know how many poor bastards use that pathetic birthday code, just shuffle the numbers with a one day deviation – it’s just about universal. And the misspelling: SHIBOLETH for SHIBBOLETH – there’s probably a half-million people who mistakenly think themselves ingenious using that word and, then, that specific misspelling, that exact misspelling, in the theory that they’re confounding people like me. But, as you can see, I’m not readily confounded and it didn’t take me more than a half-hour to overcome your encryption and hack through the fire-walls and – I guess I will have to use the word – and...steal your identity."

"Identity-theft?"

"So how does it feel to be me," Max Headroom asks. "You and me – together – this close!"

He holds up two battered fingers pressed together in a sign like a benediction.

"Did they arrest you for hacking my blog?"

"No way," the figure says.

"So what happened?"

"Suspicion of piracy. Big time piracy. This stuff with your blog is nothing, small-time, no one cares – what do you get? 15 hits a day. I don’t mean to be harsh but you’re small potatoes – I mean I’ve hacked the Pentagon and Miley Cyrus and Jeff Goldblum for Christ’s sake. Big stuff. No, they’re accusing me of the Chicago signal interruption. I’m under arrest for that event. And, you know, I’m not even the engineer on that hack – of course, I know about it, and could name names, if’n I wanted, but really – that’s ancient history, now, old timey stuff, more of a phone phreak than a hack anyhow. And no subtlety – just done with brute power..."

I would come closer to the bars, but the space between them is wide enough that, perhaps, he could slide his hands through to seize hold of me. Considering the dimensions -- the width between the bars, his slender wrists, the length of his arms – I back a few steps away. The figure is standing now, tottering uncertainly, much taller erect than he seemed lying on his side on floor.

"I was the guy who moved the corrugated metal behind him – we were simulating that moire effect, those wiggly lines in the background when Max Headroom would make his appearance on his TV show or pitching New Coke in ads. The hack? –it was all distinctly low-tech. I stood off-camera and moved the metal piece back and forth – it was pretty heavy and sharp, we’d cut it with shears, and I was wearing gloves to keep from slicing up my hands. I won’t name names, but the kid in the mask jumped up and down, denouncing this and that, you know, making weird noises – screaming and crying and farting. We really weren’t prepared for the hack to work and so the script wasn’t exactly ready and the kid didn’t know what to say, maybe, didn’t have anything to say even had we thought of it (which we didn’t). We had the voice distorted and, of course, for the first transmission, the sound didn’t work anyway – it was just the kid in the mask dancing around in front of the corrugated metal sheet that I was waving back and forth. But on the second hack, the one on Doctor Who, we got the sound up and running, although the distortion made it hard for people to understand what he was saying... there was lots of speculation, of course, and I will tell you that some of the transcriptions of his words were downright poetic, apocalyptic, like verses from the Book of Revelations, although I know he didn’t say any of that stuff: it was just humming and obscenities and some puns, we liked puns, word play, but nothing too witty and, then, the moaning and the screaming and the farting sounds."

He paused and I thought an expression crept across the rubber face, an amused smirk verging on glee, but that was impossible because his face was a mask and the expression on that face couldn’t change – no that was an impossibility, but it gave me the creeps nevertheless.

"See the older brother had something wrong with him. He wasn’t quite right in the head and didn’t speak English exactly right – he had come from the old country when he was a toddler. Kids picked on him and he was teased and bullied. But he had certain talents – he could figure out how things like phones worked. He used to take phones apart, disassemble them, and, then, rebuild them – these were the old rotary dial phones, remember them? The hack was 28 years ago, now – that’s a whole life time. The older kid’s uncle was from the old country, Estonia, and he was really close to that uncle who didn’t even speak any language that I could understand – they communicated by working on electronics, stuff from radio-shack, building remote-controlled race-cars and helicopters and, then, they got into wire-tapping, they would cut into people’s phone conversations and scream at them, and, finally, the older brother figured out how to phone-phreak, how to make long distance calls that didn’t cost anything at all. There was a phone down in the subway out there on the second-to-last stop before the airport, way out in the suburbs, and the older brother adjusted the mechanism so you could call to Estonia free-of-charge and so the immigrants would be standing down there near the gates to the platforms, waiting in line to talk to people back home, and the uncle controlled the phone, and I guess he leased it or something and paid off the older brother who wasn’t quite right in the head with cans of pop and potato chips – those were exciting days in the Old Country, people waving blue and black and white flags and singing patriotic hymns at the Song Festival Grounds, the singing revolution, as they named it, and so people wanted to call overseas, to Tallinn City and Estonia in general, and so the line to use the free, or almost free, phone would stretch from inside the subway up the steps to the concourse and, sometimes, out of doors to the "Kiss ‘n Ride" parking lot. So, you see, it was phone-phreaking that led to the plan to highjack the WGN broadcast, the re-broadcast of the Bears game... The signal was coming from a transmitter somewhere in Hyde Park and beamed off the Sears Tower to the whole upper Midwest: WGN for "World’s Greatest Newspaper" – and all you had to do was intercept the signal with your own transmission at the same frequency but with more power. That’s what I mean when I say the whole thing was without any elegance at all – it was just an exercise in brute power. We amped up our signal so it was stronger, had more wattage, and, then, simply over-wrote the Bears transmission on the same frequency. It was simple enough, but we had forgotten to turn on the microphones, didn’t have the mics engaged and so our audio didn’t come through – we kept broadcasting for 15 seconds, I don’t know, maybe, 20 seconds and, then, cut the power. Then, we came out of the basement and checked our directional antenna and covered it with a tarp, the sort of thing that keeps a backyard grill from getting wet – we figured that someone would identify the vector of the transmission and localize it and we kept expecting to hear sirens, but, then, the younger brother, the kid who had pranced around in the mask, he said: ‘I bet they’ll come for us silently, without any sirens at all, just a black car or a couple of black cars or a black helicopter even.’ And he looked up at the night and it was cold there in the suburbs of Chicago, the stars were shining and you could see the planes landing, one after another, at O’Hare. But no one came, and so, ninety minutes later we broadcast again, this time highjacking the PBS signal also projected from the Sears Tower downtown. Second time, we had audio and we inserted our charade into Dr. Who, an episode called "The Horror of Fang Rock" – the little brother hopped up and down and burped and farted and called people names and, then, he dropped his trousers and we whipped his ass with a flyswatter, not too hard, the older brother done-up in a French maid’s outfit, everything carefully framed so as to keep faces from appearing on the screen, and I was there, managing the corrugated steel panel to make those freaky lines quivering in the background. This time we broadcast ninety seconds or more – it seemed an eternity – and every instant we were expecting a knock on the door or the SWAT team to surround the house or, perhaps, the engineers downtown to overpower our signal with something of their own, some counter-signal if only a Test Pattern. But nothing happened – I suppose we could have broadcast for a half hour if we wanted but we didn’t have the material – that’s the tragedy: we pirated the air-waves and owned ninety seconds and, I suppose, we should have used that transmission for the edification of mankind, for communicating noble and artistic truths, like your blog for Christ’s sake, but the technology was what interested us, not the message – the media was the message, I suppose, and so we had a bully pulpit, reached into 200,000 homes or more, but only to make farting noises and mutter various forms of nonsense. We were just kids, of course – the older brother was an adult, maybe, although it didn’t matter, because he never really grew up. Later, there was a fight over the phone-link to Estonia, someone had used a girl to trick the older brother into setting up another phreaked phone, this time to another city in Estonia – I didn’t know the place even had more than one city – and it turned into a turf war so that, finally, the uncle who was running that scam got himself beat up, and, then, thrown onto the tracks in the subway, and he wasn’t run over, no, nothing dramatic like that – wasn’t even burned by the third-rail, but it was scary enough that he left town and went to Estonia and never came back and, then, the kid who had worked with him on the phreaking, the older brother who hadn’t been quite right in the head – he went to Estonia too and he also never came back, although people in the neighborhood said that he had become wealthy advising criminals in the old country about how to set up ways to pirate DVDS and steal cable transmissions. The younger brother, my contemporary, was a city boy and never really learned to drive very well, but one day, when he was visiting relatives downstate, in Normal, I think, went out to a bar with some cousins and they all got drunk and made my friend the designated driver. Well, of course, he couldn’t drive at all, but he was ashamed to admit this and tried to get the kids who had been partying home and there was an accident, a bad crash, and my buddy was killed – that was that. And so, you see, I’m the only one left standing – the only survivor of the great Max Headroom signal interruption episode, renowned throughout the world, with web-sites devoted to that hack, a Wikipedia entry, and still unsolved, perpetrators unknown to this very day..."

The dark shadows in the mask’s eye-holes glistened as if wet, like Cenote’s bored down into the secret waters under scrub and stone.

"See," he said, "that hack is pretty much the paradigm for all this stuff –"

"All this stuff?"

"Your blog. My intervention in your blog. And so on."

"Explain that to me."

The mask wobbled on his shoulders: "Everyone wants to communicate but nobody’s got anything to say. You want to seize the means of transmission, but once you succeed, once you have that forum, you find out that you’ve got nothing to say. Or worse, you discover that the only thing you have to communicate is your current whereabouts, your GPS location, the name of the bar where you’re drinking Mojitos or tequila shots – you might want to post a selfie showing the lavish dessert that you have just been served or depicting your cocktails or shrimp salad. You discover that the only thing that you can say is that your mood is giddy or sad or glad or dysfunctional. And you find out quickly enough that you aren’t Proust, you aren’t Hemingway or, even, Rachel Maddow or Alex Breitbart or Matt Drudge – you aren’t anyone at all, just one of the mob, an anonymous member of the crowd. But, of course, you’re afflicted by this awful desire to expose yourself, to reveal yourself to the rest of the world."

He was pointing at me with an accusatory figure when I thought that he should be pointing back at himself.

"The ‘I’ that I write about isn’t really me," I said.

The mask made his face seem huge, monumental, an Easter Island effigy.

"That’s all the worse," he said. "Bad faith and inauthenticity. You don’t even know who you are and, yet, you’re imposing yourself on the web, broadcasting over the Internet, vomiting out all these opinions and reflections, your musings, for god’s sake. But its feckless, inadequate – self-revelation without having the guts to do what we did –"

"What you did?" I said. "Prance around giggling and making weird noises with your face covered all the while so no one can know your identity. Exposing your bare ass to the camera. That took guts?"

"We expected to go to prison. We really did," Max Headroom said.

"But the mask –"

"The mask?" he said. "Maybe, it wasn’t a mask at all. That’s the uncanny thing about masks. Perhaps, my skin is fused to this thing covering my skull right now. Maybe, this has become my face. A mask isn’t just a tee-shirt or tennis shoes, something that you put on and take off as you will. No, a mask is decisive. When you wear the mask, you see the world through it. The mask becomes who you are. I can’t take this mask off because there’s nothing under it. This is my face, my real face –"

"You’re kidding me," I said.

"People like you are a dime a dozen," he told me. "The most obvious sort of person there is. You want to show off and be admired, but you don’t want the responsibility. You aren’t willing to make the sacrifice, to accept the blame with the praise. You want to make your revelations in a genteel sort of way – on the internet to an audience of carefully selected sycophants who will reliably admire your work. You won’t submit your work for real publication because you fear the Editor, you fear a confrontation with the Editor who will expose your bullshit. You aren’t willing to dive deep down and reveal anything significant about yourself. You don’t want to stand in the Truth, up on the high scaffold – no, you want to stand near the Truth, in the audience for the Truth and, then, you want to mutter a few adjectives and adverbs about the Truth and be applauded for your probity. But those who have mattered make the whole sacrifice – they pay off with their body and blood; they drop into dark waters and, sometimes, resurface or in other instances, are never seen again. They accept the scars made by the Editor’s obsidian knife. You have to listen to me. I took over your blog to show you the way. Don’t you understand that. You have to become like me, you have to be like me..."

And he began to strip and throw his clothing aside. "Look at this!" he cried. And, he began to tear off the rags of his underwear. It looked to me like he might try to tear off his skin as well.

"With every keystroke on your computer, you’re erasing yourself," he cried. "You’re typing yourself into oblivion. Your brain cells are dying with each keystroke, my friend, and, before you know it, you’ll be into the lies and the fraud and the bad faith so deep that you won’t be able to find your way out. You’ll be lost in the maze and there won’t be any way out and, then, you’ll say ‘I want to make the sacrifice, I’ll go to the altar and make the sacrifice’ but it’ll be too late. The doors will be closed and the roadblocks will bar the way and there will be no path home.

So he was naked, except for the mask and his pale white skin, all marred with bruises, was exposed to me and he stood beyond the bars screaming for the jailer to come and escort me away from his presence...

After the jailor shook my hand, and after I had walked several blocks in the shadows, it occurred to me that I had probably placed the car keys to my rental vehicle in a locker at the jail and that, now, I was without a way to start my car, even if I could recall where I had left it. I turned around and ascended some steps onto the scaffold overhead, thinking, perhaps, to obtain a vantage or perspective on the neighborhoods through which I had walked, but the short, rickety stairs that I climbed were misleading, because, in fact, they led to cantilevered catwalk something like a crows nest at the crest of a tall construction crane, a steel platform bearing a small zinc-roofed hut, all of this, at least, 800 feet above the river valley.

I looked over the edge and saw, far below, the river, dark with sludge and beaten down by industry, crawling in a particularly abject way through the mills and sluiceways and I thought that it was surely severe negligence, indifference to the rights and safety of others, to build such a platform without installing a guard rail around its edges, but, no, this promontory was as open as a diving board, a ladder lying on its side over an 800 foot drop where there was a chain dangling down and a gas-fired generator hanging like an amulet, and, then, I heard a moaning sound, a low sputtering groan. A figure was with me on the other side of the zinc-roofed hut and he was swathed in filthy bandages and staring with dark, hooded eyes out over the river valley. I thought that he had surely climbed to this height to throw himself down and so I said to him: Friend, friend, don’t despair. And he turned his face, mostly obscured with bandages toward me, and I could see that fluids had leaked out of his mouth and stained the wraps binding shut his jaws and he eyes were dark and lightless. – Don’t despair, my friend, don’t jump, I said. I could see that he was unable to speak and he lifted a hand that was featureless, a paw wrapped in stained, disfigured gauze, and he pointed into the valley at the river far below, spanned here and there with bridges, and I said: Behold, all the nations on the earth! And I said: I will give you those nations and you shall have dominion over them, but, as I spoke, I knew that I was lying because I had no authority to grant anything to him, and since I knew him to be Lazarus and not Christ or some other figure from the New Testament – this was surely Lazarus! And so I didn’t quite understand what had impelled me to talk in that way.

Of course, I expected him to jump but he didn’t and, when it was clear to me that Lazarus was safe, and back on terra firma, I went to the bus stop and waited there, thinking that I should return to the airport and locate my Taurus and, then, be on my way. This part of my blog was unknown territory and crazy with chutes and ladders, hyperlinks like trapdoors leading into terrain that I couldn’t recognize and, by this time, my only desire was to return to my home page and rest there awhile. Even if I found the Tortoise, I remembered, that I had left the keys to the car behind. Huffing and puffing the bus approaching, stopping at intervals on Narva Maantee

The bus was crowded with people and there were no seats so I stood clinging to a stainless steel pole as we lurched from stop to stop. The avenue was interminable, like a sentence expanding over several pages, a vast construction of clauses dependant on other clauses with its animating center buried somewhere in the procession of words and phrases. At an intersection between two propositions, we stopped for lunch. The cafeteria was said to be on a second- or third-floor level above the street in a hulking building assembled from huge rusticated ashlars quarried from rhyolite or graywrack deposits in the forests to the north. Although we searched for a door to the building, none was visible and, so, the only way into the structure was to climb its exterior – this proved to be feasible and, in fact, surprisingly feasible because previous climbers had pounded pitons into the ashlars to make a ladder ascending the building’s facade. The other people riding the bus climbed fluently, navigating the sheer surface of the building with aplomb. I followed reluctantly, taking hold of the grips nailed into the raw stone, and pulling myself upward. It was hard work and I began to breathe heavily and my hands were sweating so that I was afraid that I would lose my grip and slip from the protruding spikes and hand-hold bolts. The city street echoed underneath me and some emergency vehicles with sirens howling zoomed past.

The climbers ahead of me slid into a crevasse in the wall, a hollow fissure that wormed upward. The crack in the building was very narrow and I could hear people above me grunting and complaining as they twisted their way through the tight passage. On one side of the crack in the building, pinkish insulation was visible, only slightly covering fuse boxes with protruding insulators and switches.

The person immediately above me had to remove his rubber mask to squeeze through the tight spot, an irregular manhole at the end of the vertical chimney. Clearly, the bulk of the mask was not his problem, but rather the impairment to his vision caused by the rubber or latex sagging over his brow. The bottleneck squeezed his shoulder and he had to maneuver his hand up over his sternum to pluck the mask off from above. Then, he turned his head, measured the distance with his eyes, and bracing his foot atop the fuse box in the plump, ruffled and pink insulation, forced himself upward. When he had cleared the bottleneck, I could see up to the vault of the ceiling high above. The ceiling was coffered and lit obliquely. The wood coffering seemed to be covered with gold leaf and I could see a frieze portraying mythical animals in bas relief running along the tops of the white stucco walls. It was the most wonderful ceiling I had ever seen and its beauty was a moral judgment on the rest of the world.

"Come up," the people above me cried.

I wriggled into the bottleneck gasping for air. It was as if I were climbing a very high peak, tilted upward on a slope of ice ascending to a perfect isosceles summit.

"It is not so easy to be born," someone said.

"No," I replied, "it is not so easy ."