TWENTY FOURTH ENTRY

I could not pause to ponder on my meeting.

By the time I navigated my stunned way out of the sculpture gardens, made my way to a thoroughfare and hailed a cab, I was already ten minutes late for my appointment with the bookseller. I handed the driver the address. It was no time for further cultural disparities.

Another ten minutes and we were there.

An older section of the city, adjacent to the downtown, but thanks to a (labyrinth) of miniscule sidestreets and dead ends, nowhere discernably near it. A neighborhood the closest I've seen to "Dickensian," with its cobblestone roads centuries older than myself or anyone I knew, the woodslat walkups with ancient and rain-stained eaves, windows of thick, distorting, hand-blown glass.

Like the cab had driven through a wardrobe to another realm.

1234 Kolstaag Av was my destination. A nook in a cranny, a door hidden down an alleyway with only its numbers etched in the frosted glass. A rusted set of bells coughed at my entrance. The musty smell of knowledge breached my senses.

No system I could immediately recognize. Stacks of books, not shelves, some man-high and teetering impossibly but beneath a collection of cobwebs and silt that said they'd been precariously-so for some time. Uneven, stone floor, like a basement. But of the titles I saw, this was the place: third edition DaVinci notebooks; a suede-bound lost folio of Shakespeare's tragedies; the Confessions of St. Augustine in a hand-stitched, calfskin-bound journal whose pages I knew from the curl of their edges were burdened with handwritten ink.

The kind of shithole worth a hundred million dollars.

I was amazed this place and its proprietor were not on my list. Mentally, I added them.

Eventually in my wanderings I came across a podium on which I expected to find Webster's own notes, for all I knew, but which was surprisingly bare save for a handbell resting on its lower lip. I rang it. The sounds of a clattering wheels and a soft thud returned. A curse in a foreign tongue. My introduction to the bookseller.

He came from a corner I hadn't noticed, or maybe a corner that hadn't been there the instant before, who knows? Slowly and silently like an apparition. Brown trouser cuffs rolled up past his ankles but still slipping between the floor and the thin soles of his black shoes. A white button-down tucked in but escaping at his left hip. A belt of braided, rainbow-colored leather strips. Shock of white hair like water shooting out of a partially-obscured geyser. And a lower lip that sagged dramatically at the left corner, telltale sign of a stroke.

He spoke to me in words inconceivable.

Uh, hi, I think was my repsonse.

He switched gears without a jerk.

Mr. Norton, I presume, he said.

Mr. Logktadt, I butchered. He laughed.

You Americans, he said, shaking his head.

Before I could retort he had assumed his place at the podium, his living skeleton fingers clutching its sides.

You are here about The Book, he said.

The? I asked.                                                 (one must be careful, and certain.)

If you were here for a book, he said, Why, then, you wouldn't be here at all.

Well then, I said.

You understand The Book is not here.

Yes.

But I know where it can be found.

Yes.

And you have brought, ah, appropriate payment, yes? His eyebrows like albino ferrets in heat lurched upwards and wiggled before settling with what I swore was a ripple from their outside edges in.

If I smoked, here is where I would have lit a cigarette, stalling for suspense.

I have, I said, If the information is perfect.

He laughed.

Do you all want to be the Dirty Harry, or just those of you who travel abroad?

Just those of us who can back it up, I said. His chuckles faded to a smirk.

I unbuckled the clasps of my bag. Retrieved the velvet-wrapped contents of its inside. set it on the podium. Unwrapped it.

Ptolemy's Cosmographia, the first printed atlas in history. From Bologna, 1477. Beautiful chocolate leather gilded at the corners and center, closer resembling some ancient puzzle moreso than a book. One of two in private hands. Now in his. The bookseller licked his lips.

You understand, I said as dictated by M. ___________, That if the information you're about to provide leads to anything less than a complete acquistion of The Book in question, this deal, and in fact your life, is forfeit.

He scanned me as a matador does his bull.

Yes, he said. I understand the terms. Do you?

What?

The Book is in Trondheim. In the public library.

Pardon me?

Have you not heard of Occam's Razor, my friend? he asked smiling. The simplest explanation is often correct. Where else would a book be?

(res-)
        (-o-)
               (-nation)

Where in the library?

I do not know.

In the stacks, hidden in an air duct? There must be something more.

On the shelves.

What section?

I do not know.

What does it look like?

I do not know.

But you know it's there?

I do.

Sure enough to wager your life? Your books?

The old man smiled wickedly. Me you might harm. But you would never do a thing to my collection, except perhaps take it for your own. I watched you walking in here, your eyes on my spines. I know you, Mr. Norton, you are spoken of in circles. I know you well.

On your life? I repeated.

His smile stretched. On my, life, as you call it.

I hated to, but I had to betray my ignorance.

And Trondheim is? I asked.

Seven hours to the north, he said, By train, and checking a brass pocketwatch he added, Which leaves on the hour.

With a hesitance I overcame only because it wasn't mine I left him with Cosmographia.

Come again, the bookseller smirked.

If you're real lucky, I replied, bells clanging again at my exit, You'll never see me again.

2:49 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

TWENTY THIRD ENTRY

Some people cause themselves to disappear.

(Possible)

Not necessarily intentionally, or even consciously, but some people conduct themselves in such a manner as to earn their erasure.

People of a certain disposition might want to label this as "karma,"  but I am not one of them. Karma is retributio,n and I am not speaking of retribution, mere cause and effect; I am speaking of predestination, of the stones directing the path of the road.

Consider Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.

Hakim was the six Egyptian Caliph in the Fatimid Dynasty. He ruled around the turning of the first millennium, AD.

A young man when he assumed his title, ten or eleven, I think, the reign of Hakim produced nothing too remarkable, perhaps the Dar-al-Ilm, "House of Knowledg,e" which included an immense public library and course offerings in philosophy, astronomy, and Islamic studies.

No Ptolemy 2, but no Hitler, either.

The remarkable aspect of Hakim's reign was Hakim himself, and the increasingly-erratic behavior he displayed as he grew older.

It started simply, if not strangly specific, with prohibitions against grape-eating, chess a,nd catching, selling or eating scaleless fish.

Like

I don't know. I thought they all had scales.

(perhaps that's the point)

In his twentieth year he ordered every single dog in Egypt slaughtered and thrown into the desert.

He forced the citizens of Cairo to work at night and sleep during the day.

At one point he outright forbade women to leave their homes. To hammer the point, he ordered the cobblers to stop making women's shoes.
 
And Hakim, closer here to Hitler than s,ay, Hammurabi, would not abide his edicts being broken.

He routinely cut off the hands of his female palace slaves for various, piddling offences such as tardiness, appearance, and fellatio-related issues.

He owned another slave, a brute named Masoud, whose sole purpose was to sodomize dishonest merchants. As the brute saw fit.

And of course, there were killings.

viziers         judges     poets       physicians    cooks          cousins
bathhouse keepers     soldiers    Jews           Christians     intelligence gatherers
merchants    slaves     palace guards    whores    and even
              his own tutor.

High-ranking or lowly, closely acquainted or complete strangers, all fell as indiscriminatly as rain falls on the oak's myriad leaves.

Earning it.

One day Hakim took a rare, unescorted donkey ride. He never returned.

Three possibilities: least probable to most, in my opinion

1- He was hidden away by God - as devotees proclaimed - and will return as the Mahdi come Judgement Day.

II- He was killed by assassins hired by his sister, who, having confronted her brother about his bizarre ways and the possible effects on the future of their dynasty, was as a result about to be officially charged with adultery, a captial crime. This story is supported by reports of a bloody, riderless donkey found by a well along the Caliph's route. Official reports, so thus unsubstantiated.

                                             (sleeping)
Three- Dromomania, or the walking fugue, or a slipstream, a portal, a gateway, or just the desert, the sand, the sun, the night - Hakim simply disappeared, propelled by the same absurd compulsions that characterized his reign. It happens every day. Some of us just walk away, wander off, or slip inside something we'd always known was there, but could never see. Until we could.

Life lines up one event after another all leading to one moment, not the last, necessarily, but one moment where everything suddenly makes sense, the loose ends dangling behind us all our lives are at last tied together and seen as a whole the path becomes obviou,s the destination a destiny well-devised.

Hakim's moment came on a donkey ride, his thirty-sixth year.

Call it a Tuesday.

And I wonder, when that first new sun found Hakim w,hen the desert hills swelled with clarity and the sand nipping at his skin was stolen from shadows and given a billion beige and tanned and umber faces, did he recognize the world around him, or was it unfamiliar? and did either result grant him a heretofor unknown comfort, or instead resurrect an instinctual buried terror?

Is it easier to pass a Caliph through the needle's eye of what we deem "(( )Impossible( ))" than it is to rule in Egypt?

I am not a betting man, but I have a wager.

1:28 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

TWENTY SECOND ENTRY

Whatever comfort this insane crawlspace had tricked me into recreating, it stole with the attack at its exterior walls. The lack of ceiling is like being dangled headfirst over a bottomless abyss. The wind has assumed a hostile nip. The throbbing light from the computer screen I think is giving me a brain tumor. The hopelessness has resumed.

The helplessness.

The pointlessness.

Ignorant of whatever parameters, religious or otherwise, define the term, this is Hell.

A Hell.

Why shouldn't there be millons?
                                                (hundreds of?)

There are three quotes that spring to mind - even their quippers, lo and behold. The first is perhaps the best known, by Jean Paul Sartre, as found in No Exit: "Hell is other people."

Sartre obviously was never imprisoned by himself in a dark labyrinth.

Even a cockroach here scuttling at my side would be a drastic improvement in conditions. To know life - to see it and touch it and even end it should I choose - would be evidence against my worst fears and as such a bolster to my resilience.

Which leads me to the second quote, from old Eliot "The, Hollow Men," I believe: "Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections."

My own inclinations reside closer to this.

The mind, for its many blessings, is ultimately a prison. It holds everything about you, biologically, emotionally, intellectually. If you leave it, you die. Have no doubts, the mind is the ultimate of prisons, one we are born into and from which there is no (merciful) pardon. And the warden is a scoundrel with a long memory. Every mistake, every stumble, every regret, every shame: these are things that never leave you. They may be pushed from the mind's forefront or even down into the subconscious, but they are never erased. The mind sits on them, waiting to release them like so many noxious clouds when you least expect it. When darkness descends behind the eyes, when the mind lulls itself into what would dubiously seem its most placid.

                             (all the better to see you with, my dear)

                                                                           When we sleep. When we sleep we think we have calmed our mind to a state where we can let go and drift away. This is not true. In sleep, we relinquish our will, our control over our thoughts. We let go. The mind goes on. The mind does not sleep. In fact, it comes alive when we are our weakest; it thrives on its own control. In the darkness it drags up all those forgotten negatives, stirs them up with our anxieties and fears both general and eerily specific ( heights and snakes and drowning, the silhouettes of branches outside a childhood bedroom window) and foists them into our dreams. In the darkness and the relinquishing of will there is Death. In Death, there is darkness. The same can be said for Hope and light. Such is why we have distinctions between the mind's wanderings: daydreams, and nightmares. The two cannot co-exist; there are no daymares.

This is also why, contrary to what fiction would tell us, it is not your achievements that flash before your eyes in the moment of death, it is your failures, the things left unfinished, unsaid. Unsettled sediment now rising to the surface. How do I know?

How do you think?

Such images are all I see when I close my eyes.

Furthermore, there's an appropriate Gide quote about Hell and unfinished business, but my Gide's not so good.

Which in turn then brings me to the quote I can remember the, third and last in this series, which I believe assumes the metaphysical heart of Sartre's, in that Hell is other people, but their absence rather than presence, and simultaneously conveys the despair of Eliot's enforced solitude; it is by Tryon Edwards, the theologian:

"Hell is truth seen too late - duty neglected in its season."

"Truth seen too late" sounds the very definition of regret that, most piddling and powerful of human emotions in my opinion, and an eternity of such without an opportunity for reparations or amends is truly Hell.

Even worse, however, is truth never seen.

Worse than Death.

For Death is absolute;
                                  the absence of truth          is everything but.
                                                                (light)
                                                            (direction)

One last quote just sprang to mind, Lewis Carroll.

                ("You must be mad, or else you wouldn't have come here.")

7:35 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

TWENTY FIRST ENTRY

My journey b(tween)e the walls continues.

Little has changed.

Architecture          Temperature        Light Level        The Scent of
              Topography          Wind Speed        Acoustics             Nothing.

All these remain as first described. If anything has changed, it is the level of my munitions. Perhaps rashly, I did not scout for additional bread and water before entering the walls, so have only a limited store. I am forced to be stringent. Who knows, after all, how long before I come across more, if at all? Who knows how long before I find my way back?

(if at all?)

Despite these developments, or rather their, lack however, my spirits are, if not high, at least aboveground. The limits here make for a more comfortable space, both physically and psychologically; imagine waiting out a terrible storm alone in a darkened, empty warehouse versus a secluded hallway. Though apparently just as confounding and boundless as the outer labyrinth, the reduction of room to move here helps perpetuate the lie of finity.

The wind with its muffled cooing keeps the air fresh and alive and has become almost a friend to me, certainly a companion.

I have not conversed with it.

Though the urge, I must, admit has occurred to me. How many poets, after all, how many novelists, songwriters and those in the visual arts, how many have anthropomorphized the wind's presence? To talk with it is not so far fetched, to discern diction within its gusts is not so odd, or so I rationalize, and furthermore, a little conversation, even one-sided, might keep up my sanity.

Fortunately, I realize the irony in this line of thought:

If you can convince yourself it's okay to be crazy, then you're not crazy (but really you're crazy. really.).

I talk instead to you.

("a rose by any other name...")

I seek to establish a routine, as that, for sure, will instill upon my mind some sense of order. It will be composed of thus:

                               * 4 hours' navigation
                               *              1 hour's respite
                               * 4 more hours' navigation
                               *              1 additional hour's respite
                               * 2 final hours' navigation
                               * 12 hour's cessation for typing and sleep

In addition to order of mind, I am hoping this routine will establish an order of body: it will learn when to surge and when to sleep, when to be hungry, when to regulate itself. "Survival is perseverance," I once read
                                                                                             (who knows?)
Death will always find you; it's only a question of how far you're going to make the motherfucker run.

My instincts are reviving.

It is only a puzzle. It is only a puzzle. It is only a puzzle.

One, that like every, other has a solution.

One that, in fact,

Wait.

There, again.

A

scritch.

Soft, but near, somewhere

There, louder.

A

definite scritch.

Like              claws.
      (fucking)

Somewhere,

There, my feet. My left foot. Pressed against the opposite wall.

Opposite the opposite wall. Opposite side. Outside.

The scritching comes from outside.

Louder.

I can feel each staccato click in its raking.

Along my arms, at the back of my neck, the pit of my stomach, the core of my teeth.

Wait.

A second scritch.

Starting just an instant behind the first, each rolling into the other. This second scritch higher upon the same wall. Too high

to be

the same
              (beast?).

(Impossible)
                    (or just very
Unfortunate.)

I draw my feet toward my haunches, away from the wall.

The scritching grows louder, like it's making its way through the (stone)
                                                                                                (plastic)
                                                                                                (metal)
                                                                                                   (?) closer to my den.

Then (Impossible), a third scritch, midpoint b(tween)e the other two. Either there is more than one source or it is a single source of exceptional balance.

They come one after another: scritch
                                                   scritch
                                                         scritch
                                       scritch
                                             scritch
                                                   scritch
                                scritch
                                      scritch
                                            scritch

Pound!
            the bottom paw.
Pound! Pound!
                        the uppermost then middle.

The wall can't be but I swear I see it bulging. I should run but I can't. I should scream but I can't. I should at least (                 ) but goddamn me to Hell I cannot.

Whayhgh



A new scritch, treble to the bass of triple pounding, this one right
                                                                                  behind
                                                                               my
                                                                         head.

Instantly a second, a third.

A fourth on the opposite wall as the first on mine begins to Pound.

A fifth and a second.

A sixth and a third.

Increasing every second, louder faster harder angrier, a threnody of chaos  in two horrific notes:

      scritch     scritch
Pound!  Pound!  Pound!
      scritch
Pound!
                     scritch
             Pound!  Pound!
      scritch     scritch
                          Pound!

Every treacherous thought, every cruel second, hard won breath and suicidal drop of sweat plummeting from my brow - is my last. If the beasts (?) do not break through the walls then surely the symphony of their attempts will shatter my frail psyche and kill me from the mind down.

Had this computer a cord with which to hang myself.

Had I



Silence.

Too abrupt, too absolute, too poised.
                                                    (( )( ))
More frightening than the cacophony it escaped.
                                                        ( I )

too   afraid

(Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.)

1:03 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

TWENTIETH ENTRY

Tyler Hammond was my first friend. We each arrived on the first day of kindergarden wearing capes. Cement. We dug up my front yard looking for Leprechans, jumped our bikes into various lakes, streams and puddles, took up smoking, and shared four girls. I was the best man in his wedding on my twenty-first birthday. We haven't spoken since.

Jim McKeon was a high school cohort, one of the gang. Summer after senior year the two of us performed the cliched ritual of climbing the local watertower and getting drunk at the top. Attempting to hurl the empty bottle an impossible distance - clear over Firehouse Drive and into Clendon Lake - Jim extered such force that he slung himself over the rail. I caught him by the belt loops of his Levis. That summer we were inseparable.We went our separate ways in the fall, saw each other Christmases the next few years, but that stopped soon enough.

Hunter Johnson was my first college roommate. The night we met he introduced me to mushrooms and older women. And that was just the start of it. He opened more doors to me, made me feel more alive, than anyone I'd known before or since. He taught me a freedom I'd only read about, he injected action into my inherent passivity. And all in four months. In the spring he pledged Kappa Something and just faded away.

Les Barber was the replacement. A mousy thing, lean and pale and babyfaced behind acne. The Renfield to my debaucherous Count Dracula, more of a lackey than a friend, a yes-man, a powerless sidekick, but in my most inebriated moments I divulged to him every single one of my secrets. He was a listener, Les, it was all he was built for. Perhaps that's why, when the semester turned, I moved out of the dorms. Les simply knew too much.

Durelle Mack was a co-worker at the Skylight Exchange, the cafe/nite spot/used paperback depository I worked in throughout college. We were the swing shifters, mid-afternoon to mid-evening, between the rushes and more of caretakers than full staff. He had the kitchen, I the floor. We'd play Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain as loud as the stereo allowed and smoke joints in the back alley when the customers were thin, which typically they were. We'd knock off to the bar across the street for a couple drinks once the night crew relieved us. He tried to kiss me once, but I didn't hold it against him. He graduated the semester before I did and moved to the capital to work as a fundraiser. I did not.

Professor Hilary was visiting from Cambridge, giving a series of lectures on monastic Enlightened Manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries. I didn't understand 80 to 85% of the words coming from his mouth, but I knew I wanted to, I had to, so I clung to him like a remora. He rewarded my eagerness with his full attention, determined that if I was going to seize this mantle, I might as well wear it correctly. He was a savior and a cancer. He treated me as an intellectual equal to the point he treated me as a dullard. He taught me everything he knew, and furthermore, he taught me how to learn everything I have acquired since. He was not a father to me, he was a grandfather, one whose paternal influence is not sullied or dulled by the social, historical and emotional complexities the former relationship implies, and therefore one who can ascend, in impressionable eyes such as mine at the time, to godhood. Professor Hilary was a god of secret knowledge, secret history. How else could I see it? He returned to Cambridge and we continued my tutelage, albeit on a much less frequent and intense level. Eight months later his wife passed. I never found the words.

Brenden Bumgarner was, for lack of a more contemporary term, a ne'er-do-well. He was a drinker and a taker of every substance I'd ever seen him offered, a carouser and wooer of fawn-like girls with pestilent hearts, a prodder and a pressurer, a handsome devil on your shoulder whispering alluring nightmares. A particularly memorable weekend of Absinthe imported from the Netherlands, an eight ball, a marathon Twister tournament with a trio of girls from down the hall, and a Twin-Peaks-induced exploration of our darkest fears. I fucked his girlfriend in a closet at a party. To my credit, at the time he was in the back yard at the same party feeling up a high school girl. It didn't matter.

Nicky Meech lived in the other half of the duplex I rented my first year in New Orleans. He did something with computers, had them all over his apartment, all operational and always on, very Orwellian. He had a tremendous black lab named Jericho whose paw print I still have stained on an Ornette Coleman t-shirt. We only saw each other in the evenings when both our days were done and we'd retire to the front porch to smoke joints and cigarettes, swill sweaty bottles of Dixie and watch the sky turn all sorts of colors before calling it quits and going black. The workers stumbling home. The night crews slumping out. The rats crossing the telephone wires to avoid the strays prowling below. We didn't talk much, but it didn't seem to bother either of us. He might have had a girlfriend. Or an ex-girlfriend. Or one of those confusing in-between breeds. Lease came up, I moved out. That was that.

Gizelle Kaufmann was my first real boss. Kaufmann Rare Books and Literary Antiquities on St. Anne's. Journals, correspondances, sketches and fragments, that sort of thing. She was a crotchety bitch, and a chainsmoker of these horribly-smelling Moroccan cigarettes, like sun-dried dung and the straw it sat on. She primed me and fed me her contacts and resources with such a fervor it was as though she knew she was dying. And she bequeathed me an illuminated Songs of Innocence, not a first edition but a second from 1792, three years after the first and two years before Songs of Experience was added. It is phenomenal. There is no one I've known and doubtful any I will ever meet who could understand me better than she did, and who offered so much faith in me from the start. Phenomenal in and of itself. 

Bradley Gamble was the finest man I have ever known. He taught me, by example, to believe in karma. He taught me to believe in change. He taught me to believe in redemption. And I did not attempt to teach him the slightest goddamn thing.

Jonathan Wille was my partner when I first settled in Los Angeles. Norton & Wille. Scrooge & Marley, more like it. I was obsessed with success, with garnering respect as a young firm in a field dominated by those as ancient as the texts they pursue. Jonathan was a purist, only interested in the "proper pursuit," and not interested at all in becoming a "literary mercenary" like most in the game. He wanted our clients to represent works whose discovery would contribute to literature and history as a whole, and before us. I agreed with him, but not at the expense of my livelihood. I understood, to put it in Hollywood terms, that you have to do the stuido pic to finance the little gem. Jonathan did not. He left the business after less than a year. Our letterhead, cards, and even the sign were all changed within the week.

Drew Nystrop dealt in the occult. On several occasions he proved frighteningly capable, so I kept him on regular rotation for a while. He had a shop downtown crammed between a Subway and a nail salon. Claimed he got the space just to mess with the walk-by's. He wore glasses thicker than molasses. He was at least a few years younger than I. Our business transacted, we would lean on his counter and talk of cinema, of all things, our shared penchants for the work of Dario Argento and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, George Romero, John Carpenter and Alejandro Amenabar. We always made plans to socialize outside of work. They never materialized. My work blossomed outside of his field.

George Franco, my bartender when I lived in West Hollywood. One of those places that doesn't need a name, just a neighborhood spot. George poured the stiffest vodka tonics in town and had a medical marijuana card for his migranes. Some nights I'd hang around after closing, watching Sportscenter for the third time and waiting while George counted out the till and the barback wiped the counter tops, rinsed the ashtrays, and then the three of us would go up to the roof and smoke a joint overlooking the clouds of haze tinted auburn hanging over the city. He was a thoughtful guy, George. Young but wise, reserved but personable. A good guy. I moved down Wilshire.

This is not to mention Miles Bischoff, Andy McGinn, Mike Fehr, Jimmy Freeman, Anoop Habeeb, Pearl Lindsay, Ryan Jacques, Charlie Badger, Fred Cox, Brent Hattman, Catherine Thibideaux, Mickey Leliever, Rodney Bulizzi, Chris Stevens, Chris Lathren, Forest Philpott, Erik Gaertner, Annie Haig, David Dollar, Colin Oldham, assorted cronies, cavorters, colleagues and other memories who dribbled away through unreturned phonecalls and emails like water through a crack in the dam.

Then frozen and held up to see, a mirror that reflects me as a blueing apparition.

Which perhaps I am.

11:44 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

NINETEENTH ENTRY

A dream, I believe:

I was at a party, a gala, some formal social gathering to which I knew I had been invited, more than that, I had been ordered to attend, yes, forced; the anxiety I felt in my dream in the midst of these people was not of the sort that stems from general discomfort, this was that plus an additional slathering of doctrine on top, someone else's yet something I was held to live by. The faces I did not recognize and they did not seem to recognize me, though there was a lingering familiarity about them, there was however nothing mental I could attach it to, no feature that triggered a memory that brought it all together. It was as though I had no past, but everyone's present; it was like I was born and suddenly knew everything, except what to make of it. I stammered through the room, a ballroom I, believe, with great towering tapestries draped against the walls, depicting what/
                                                            which/
                                                                          where/
                                                                why/
                                                       or/
                                                                         whom I cannot tell you, though I am left with undeveloped images that instinctively cause me to shiver. There was music, I remember that, though I do not remember a band, but I remember looking for it, so I know that in my dream as now in "reality" I am certain it was the sort of music only a live act can produce. A string quartet, perhaps, a brass section or a drum circle, I do not know, I do not remember, but I remember people were, dancing they were locked in each others' arms, some kind of ordained wrestle, and they were twirling and dipping and flinging and shrieking, I cannot (could not) tell if they were enjoying themselves or not. The room was lit by an enormous collection of candelabras suspended above the dancefloor as a grand chandelier adorned with long, thin stalactites of wax dripping from brass and silver, creeping closer to the dancers and spilling the occasion hot drop among them. I too was among the dancers, though I was not dancing. I was twirling and dipping and flinging, not yet shrieking, but I was not dancing. I was looking, I was twirling and dipping among the dancers to see beyond them. I was looking for something.

For the band, as mentioned, but I think that tangent had been given up.

For a partner, perhaps, but I don't think so.

For an, exit perhaps. More likely, but again, I don't think so.

It doesn't seem that central, looking back on it, but I remember feeling - really feeling, not just dream feeling - such an immense anxiety at the "time," in that moment, such terror and hopelessness, as though every chance, mine, yours, everything's, rested on my finding that nameless object/
                                                                                       person/
                                                                               destination/
                                                                                             idea.

But the moment morphed away, and the music started getting louder, less distinct, like a player piano falling down a deep well where you wait at the bottom, and the dancers started loosening their movements, once formal and by the note, now lost in the cacophony of notelessness and thus haywire themselves, lacking all fluidity and grace, resembling now the walking dead, Frankenstein monsters, scarecrows in windstorms, bodies buring at the stake. I remember crouching, clasping my hands over my ears, but somehow that made it louder. I remember screaming but I don't remember hearing a word I said.

Then a snap like the earth hatching some slick and poisonous beast and my eyes fled to the ceiling, to the massive chandelier of one thousand candles above its, chain now slack and broken at one end. The surging music, the dancers twirling faster, the chandelier crashing down on us all. Wood, bone, life, light, all reduced to powder, music, shrieks and the racing of hearts to echoes no one heard.

All was darkness.

Have you ever dreamed of darkness and silence?

I am not speaking of dark and silent moments in your dream cycle; I am talking about subconscious awareness that you are inhabiting, in whatever sense, somewhere utterly dark and utterly silent. For a perceived, and thus valid, lengthy period of time.

It is the cruelest trick in your mind's repertoire, and one of the more selfde-structive.

In my dream I remember I kept closing my eyes. Whether to shield out the horrors inhabiting the outer dark, to attempt and wake myself or make some shift in the dream still, after all, of my own devising, or to summon my own death/salvation I cannot tell you. My dreams don't work like that. Often I just get sensations, not specifics. In my dream I remember I kept closing my eyes, and I remember how that felt.

Then I remember opening them, and there was a light.

A single candle, the broken tip of a single candle, I remember, burning not a yard from my face. I took it and stood, attempted to use its feeble light to show me my environs, but it was not enough.

There had to be other candles, I figured other, candles who though broken and snuffed from the fall could be rekindled to show me the way. And so with my single one I swept the floor around me. One, two more, I found, lit them. I started walking, stepping over rubble and sweeping my path with the light. One, two more. I lit them, added them to the bouquet. Somehow I was holding them all and somehow the wax that had to be streaming down them was not reaching my hand, or if it was, it was not burning it, or if it was, I was not feeling it, either in my dream, or reality. I stepped over rubble and kept searching.

Of course, it wasn't rubble.

You should know that by now. I should've known it by this point in my dream. But it was a dream, I was lured in by what was happening, not what would, what should.

Perhaps you, as well.

Of course the rubble was the assorted dancers, all dead now, some in pieces and some still together although rearranged at ungodly angles.

I remember this did not frighten me. The only death that has ever frightened me is the concept of my own. Even in dreams I stay true to this. Curiosity, more than any other, was the feeling I had in the moment. I swept my light over the corpses, studying their suits, their gowns, revisiting the familiarity I found in the faces but hadn't been able to place.

Of course I could place them now. I knew them all. One way or another, from some time or another, I knew them all. Had been on good terms with them all. What some, most, I assume (Ibid.), would call "friends."

Contrary to what might be expected, I was not saddened, all these dead acquaintences.

No.

I was curious, confounded, actually, as to how they got here, and how they had been all around me and I hadn't been able to place them, and they hadn't seemed to place me, and why I was here in the first place, I didn't know, I don't know, I didn't want to be, I never wanted to be, I remember knowing that much, but someone was making me, someone was ordering me, or threatening me, someone was playing my hand as their own, I didn't know who, I don't know who, and the faces, the past, kept coming with each sweep of the light, I remember that, as long as the candles burned the faces kept coming, each sweep another new one, until somehow at some point, I don't remember, it's like I'm told it happened, the light just vanished, disappeared, and though now, supposedly conscious I, cannot remember any further details about the dream other than these vague ones provided, I can remember the faces, and their owners, and it is now, knowing that they are mostly alive and well, existing out there at this very moment, it is now that despair overtakes me.

(I don't remember waking.)

3:27 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

EIGHTEENTH ENTRY

I arrived at the designated time at the entrance to the designated place. At first, glance I could sum them up perfectly: they were magnificent. The gentle, barren hills the garden is built upon were covered with untainted snow smooth as pearls. No hedges or shrubbery spoiled their emptiness, purposeful as it was to drawing attention toward the true jewels of the landscape, the human contributions, the statues themselves.

Inhabitants of a fairground of the classically flawless, a most glorious congregation draped in cool, slick, captiviating, dark stone like frozen shadows.

Their poses were regal and relaxed, instructive and laboring, content, empowered, sorrowful. They were the people they signified, more than, they were the people the people could never have been, because people change, they pass through life while the sculptures here would never pass through anything. They would remain. They would outlast this field, this city, this species, even, time should the effort be required. The sculptures were mementoes of life at its zenith, the subjects' best qualities lured to the surface and carved there forever. The sculptures were (are) perfection. Or the closest I've come.

I wandered the paths, or what I perceived to be the paths, for the snow covered them as well, blindly, feeling as still as the statues, transfixed by their stasis and longing to lull myself into a similar state.

Until one of them moved.

Difficult to perceive at first. His descent was direct over the crest of a hill and straight towards me. The only detectable motion was found in his shoulders, which bobbed as he trudged through the snow.

Marring perfection.

His head was lost to the blanche of the overcast sky, as was the smoke from the cigar whose tip could be seen blazing even at such a distance. But I could smell it (the smoke) on the wind.

Brandy-soaked cherries.

He wore the same overcoat as the afternoon before and the same nonchalant expression upon his face. His hands were hidden from view. His pockets, I supposed, but it was difficult to tell. He could've been wearing a cloak, not a coat. In his approach there was a preternatural essense, an effortlessness compelled by the stillness of his limbs and the inattention to path clouding his, eyes dark as the skin of the statues.

I groped myself as discreetly as I could for any sort of weapon.

I came up with a Milanese fountain pen, silver tip encased in brushed chrome, given to me by a seminary student I aided some years ago, and without which I never leave home.

I unscrewed the top and let it fall silently into the soft recesses of my coat pocket. The blood beneath the skin of my thumb was pushed away by the determination of the digit pressed against the pen's shaft.

Bookselling doesn't always deserve the demure reputation it gets. Value is the thing. A hundred thousand dollars, five hundred thousand, a million - it's all the same, whether it's in books or cocaine. Money is money, pride is pride, and both are always worth killing for. Torturing for, at least.

"Ease yourself, Mr. Norton," he said to me, a thick, indiscernable accent sounding like a marriage of Eastern European and Carribean. Smooth and deep, commanding and objective. Humorless. His smile was no smile at all, but the clenching of teeth required to hold his cigar in place. I did not ease myself.

"Who are you?" I asked. "Who do you represent?"

He laughed a low rumble of maliciously melliflous notes accompanied by globes of smoke that unravelled between us like spun cotton.

"Like you Mr. Norton, I represent an interested party."

I studied his face. There was nothing distinctive about it, which was its distinction. He could have been anyone, everyone, no one at all. He looked like every grifter and broker and butler cum assassin I could think of who would be interested in what I was after, which was all of them. He could have been all of them.

"And if I ask what that party is interested in," I said, "I suppose I'm going to get another Bond-villain chuckle, right?"

In times of stress I resort to humor.

Difficulty is, I am not funny.

He laughed anyway.

"I don't know what you mean but I like that you're scared," he said.

"What makes you think I'm scared?" I reacted.

"You're being sarcastic, I can tell by your tone. You're tying to assert yourself, show me you are to be reckoned with. In the American way, of course, all words and witticisms. You can stop, Mr. Norton. I know enough about you to know exactly how much of a threat you are."

There's really no way to respond to this in the moment. Later, now, certainly, a million retorts fly to the, mind but in that moment, as it was coming out of his mouth and into my ears, traveling to my brain and being instantly deciphered into understandable thoughts, there really was no way to respond. Which he liked. He chuckled again.

"Now then," he began, "As mentioned, I represent an interested party. Our interest however, is that you go home. "

"Seems simple enough," I said.

"Indeed."

"Why me, though? That won't accomplish anything. If I return empty-handed there are ten guys, twenty, in line right behind me. I'm just the messenger. You don't solve anything by stopping the messenger."

"You do when the messenger is one Bartleby Norton," he said.

"Oh, well, now you're just flattering me..."

"I assure you, Mr. Norton, your involvement here is requested to cease not because of your skill at your profession, though I will allow that your list of accomplishments does read like a much older broker's, not because of your skill at your profession, but rather a more, let's say, personal connection."

My blood went as cold as the snow, the sky, the statues.

"Who do you work for," I demanded.

"Go home, Mr. Norton," he said, turning. "Allow your fate to come to you," and he retreated silently in the same footprints he created on arriving.

I was sweating. I pulled my hand from my pocket to wipe my brow and found it covered in black ink. I went back to the pocket pulled, out my Milanese ink pen, snapped in half

(Impossible).

7:24 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

SEVENTEENTH ENTRY

Developments.

Of the sort some men, lesser of course, might resort to labelling, if only as an antonymic to "arresting," "liberating."

I prefer "propelling."
                                                             (Ibid.)
To use such a word as the former in a predicament such as this would be a gross and perhaps even negligent overstatement.

Figuring death, however dealt, as a more pleasing alternative to this current state, which struggles to be called "living," I set out again, my computer open and facing before me with its dim cycloptic anti-shadow, to see whether or not we had anywhere left to go.

(Perhaps) We do.

                                                 Around a corner that mirrored
                                              the corner before it and
                               the corner  before it and even
                                                                          the unsettlingly familiar
                    corner before that,
there came a variation that made me nauseous for its stark novelty. The light, worthless as it is, caught it first, a silver reflective ring etched into the wall far opposite. Perhaps it glowed of its own accord, I don't know. Three notches bowed open on the ring's inside. My hand thought faster than my head, reaching into my satchel before my thoughts could piece together the scene and its consequences.

I caught up and found the key already in my grasp.

I approached the illuminated ring.

I set the computer on the ground.

I let the key my ambassador lead the way.

No surprise when its teeth and the cavities of the notches interlocked.

No surprise further when a clockwise turn was permitted.

No surprise even when the seemingly seamless wall immediately to the ring's left, my right, popped open, revealing the outline of a spatial propensity most  would designate "a door." I don't know.

I pulled it open.

With my good (only) hand.

Darkness further, though somehow more shallow.

I stood upon the precipice, extended my arm, and stepped forward.

My fingers instantly found themselves, again, not surprisingly, grazing an opposite wall.

I stepped inside.

A corridor within the corridors, a path among myriad paths.

It appeared I had entered the (hollow?) space between walls. From within the walls were of the same slick and frozen unknown substance as on their exterior side, a stone that yields, a synthetic that will not behave. The floor as well. The ceiling, as before, was out of sight. There was (is?), I would estimate, four feet of open space between the interior walls, so although technically a tighter prison, it felt more protected, it was brighter than (( ) outside ( )) for the lack of berth in which the light might dissipate, and it was new. That alone was enough, but when teamed with the rest of the above factors and my decidedly anti-claustrophobic proclivities, I could not help but convince myself to leave what some men, again, lesser, might qualify as "the open" for the confines within these (infernal) confines.
                                                                (imagined)
                                                                        (fated)

Inside and setting my bearings, I at last noticed it:

a wind.

Soft, undetectable to normal senses, but to those deprived as mine it was like an assault.

It flows in a cool steady stream over my skin like the breath of the dead but it is not as hopeless a thing.

If wind, then a source.

My insides at this revelation created something they shot circulating through my bloodstream that felt as foreign in the moment as would have the sun's warm kiss or the touch of a living other, a feeling inconceivible yet frightening in its familiarity.

If wind, then a source.
             Like a mantra repeated:
If wind, then a source.

I started toward it so abruptly I had to return several seconds later for the computer.

For hours since I have walked. And despite my experiences in terms of exterior topography, the walls do not stop, they do not turn abruptly - though there are soft, constant curves that seem to switch direction without my noticing - and they do not recede into the ground.

My literary mind - something about a House, somewhere in Virginia, I want to say.

Each mythology has its own version.

Or literature is conspiring against me.

Who else do I have?


I have stopped for the night/day (?). There is enough room here to prop my back against one wall if I keep my legs ever so slightly tucked.

I take comfort in confined places such as this. As a child when worried or afraid, I would hide under tables or curl up behind couches. In such spaces everything is certain: what is present, what is absent, which is the way out, the way in, the path to peril, the path to escape. And of course, there are the gestational comparisons.

I feel above my prison for being within it, unable to allow myself (foolishly) to conceive of said developments as another cog in my captor's' Goldberg plans.

Tonight, I believe, I might actually sleep.

Tonight I might even be blessed not to dream.

6:34 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

SIXTEENTH ENTRY

There are three outcomes I can imagine, given my current situation
                                                                                                       (I
                                                                                                             b
                                                                                                          i
                                                                                                           d).

I have been navigating these corridors and turns and only three conclusions come to mind:

One: There is an exit. This labyrinth has been constructed according to the rules of fair play, and there is an exit. This is only my prison so long as I allow it to conquer me. The answer (the exit) is out there, and obtainable. And all I need to achieve it is my wits. Wits, and perseverence.

Both, dwindling.

Second: There is no exit. I am reminded here of Samuel Beckett's, The Lost Ones, in which certain unfortunate folk find themselves citizens of a discorporate geometric structure, rubberized, it would seem, and despite the nooks and crannies tunneled into the sloping walls, the cohesion of teamwork and even the presence of extension ladders, no escape can made, quite simply because the exit does not exist.

("Does not exist, take an exit/I hear voices insinuating/
                Feeds my lyrics to this song that I am saying/
Sunlight 7:20p.m. early September/Standing looking at a photograph/
                             That you do not remember being taken/
     You look out of breath, and me like I am faking/
             As a matter of fact I don't recall this photo being taken/
You don't even actually exist so I just started shaking/
                            Does not exist, take an
                                                               exit." - lyrics started spooling through my memory. I don't know who they belong to.)

The Lost Ones like a tuning fork always found its note in me. Do I believe in predestination? I don't believe I do. However I read it before, however, I could not read it again, can never read it again, as now I have cruelly discovered the deeper turmoil Mr. Beckett was attemtping to portray.

I wonder how long they kept him.

III: There is an exit, of sorts. Picture the interior of a cattle processing plant. Itself a labyrinth of stainless steel siding and dirt-caked tile. The cattle is forced inside - much as I have been forced inside, though they're offered the honor of entering on their feet - where they begin to navigate the corrdiors before them. There is only one path, however, and each turn and each straightaway takes them closer and closer to that final turn, and that final doorway granting them passage to the killing floor.

This place like that, in which life grows (mercifully? treacherously?) shorter with every step.

This is all I have been able to come up with:

Life, eternal dying, or just plain Death.

It could be that I am the last man in civilization's chain, spirited here by some askew Rapture that sought, for reasons inconceivable, to sequester my soul here in defiance of  memento mori until God Himself, the ultimate warden, selects the time of my release.

It could be that I am in Hell, that fire and brimstone have been traded for darkness and cold, that this is my eternal penance for unmentionable crimes committed while corporeal. No demons are worse than demons, for at least with the latter, one knows where one stands.

Or, Occam's Razor again in usage, it could be that I am quite and completely mad, swatting at the bedsheets in my hotel room or some Norweigian insane asylum, if I'm lucky, American, if I'm not (the differences would turn your white), hallucinating this entire ordeal. Conjuring my worst nightmares and injecting them into my realities. Victimizing myself. What sort of man is driven to that?

a little one, I would think, a very, very little one.

hardly a man at all.

All options lead to Rome,                      here, "Rome" being an impermeable
                                                                      cloud of doubt and terror.
                                  (to bend the phrase)

What option then?

2:14 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

FIFTEENTH ENTRY

The discoloration of my hand has spread to my wrist like a violet crushed velvet ruffled cuff.

This is not good.

I now feel nothing in the limb, even on the instances I brush or bump it against the walls or floor.

This too is not good.

Inevitably, I will lose my hand.

The only question that remains is, will I lose my life with it?

Another question, however, suddenly springs to mind:

Who fucking cares?

What life is this to lose? How could relinquishing this terror ever be viewed as wasteful? Nothing that defines living - no fresh sensory input, no interaction with others of the species, no replenishing of expended nutrients, no regular cycle of sleep - exists in this foul prison. At best it is squalor.

My own odor has become overpowering. It is cold here, true, but when I do find sleep, I sweat rivers. Reason would say it's the fever that comes with an infection like the one I'm bound to have in my hand, now my wrist, but I know better. It's not from infection, not that kind of infection, at least; it's the dreams I can't remember, the things so horrible that my mind, that (this) complex, exquisite machine, blocks them from my conscious memory for the horrors they hold (though it is this same machine that forged them(?)).

This is not the point.

The point is were there any substance left in my stomach, no doubt now like a sun dried tomato, I would retch at the stench I am brewing.

And these are the least of my worries:

When I awoke.

On my cheek.

Were etched four bloody lines.

Roughly an inch, inch-and-a-half apiece in length.

Less than a centimeter wide.

The two center slightly longer than the two ooutside.

Like clawmarks

(Impossible).

It would seem my cat is creeping closer.

Furthermore, aside from the injury to my hand, which I, arguably, inflicted myself, this is the first instance I have evidence of this place actually harming me. Until now my peril has been (again, arguably) entirely mental. Within my mind. Now it would seem to be without.

External.

Physical.

real.

It would seem to want to hurt me. And it would seem to be able.

I felt nothing in my slumber, was not caused to wake by any sting or sear of pain, no noise shook me. I was attacked unknowingly, and scarred without realizing it.

I simply woke in time of my own slothful volition and found the wound in place.

Like a birthmark.

Revealed in the face of death.

This bothers me more than the loss of my hand.

So much more.

To Lose.

If they (he/it) can get this close, they (Ibid) can get even closer. They can get inside; my thoughts and fears and guts their's to ransack.

And their claws, it would seem, are honed.

Death has always been here.

Today its agent was born.

Please, Lord,

let not this entry be my last,
don't let this labyrinth become my tomb,
i beseech (Thee).

not until the blood on my hand(s) springs from another('s) pumping fountain.

1:27 AM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment