Scartography
by Alan Clinton
Because I was one of those horrible white spaces with no one to explore me, or perhaps walking along the stalagmite bridge I could hear through my hood voices talk about instant passages to rotating Belize, I thought now was the time to attempt mapping my day as I walked it. After all, I had already come a long way from the terrarium where I slept beside disconnected doors as alley cats ran across the rubble of my body. I had fallen through one of the doors one night and woken up with my head shaved, a collared shirt, and you, whose autobiography I was helping to write even though I had never written one myself.
I think I neglected the map for so long because I realized just how immense the task was going to be, including everything as both object and symbol in one image, the stone picnic table where I had two reflections, tumbleweeds, caged constructions and their arson, a map that would constantly change with my thoughts in streetwise readiness. Except streetwise is hardly the term for everything--emotions that grow on glass like morning glories. Even though my family had only ever owned a twenty-five year old rust pod designed to transport me to birthday parties at four story houses, I found my old nose using a computer to design a car my freshman year at college. The preliminaries, which I never got past, involved screens filled with errant line attempts, undernourished waifs of trigonometry. Then I would have to walk home in the cold with no woman to take driving in my mangled car. I also had an analytical chemistry lab whose ceiling looked like the underside of Marilyn Monroe's skirts run by two graduate students who had to make happy hour one minute after the laboratory period ended, which is sort of how I felt when John Kennedy Jr.'s plane crashed off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. You once mentioned to your birth mother that you thought JFK Jr. was cute, so she responded that she had taught him in lst grade. She said this because the Catholic Church tricked her into giving up her child for adoption and her only retaliation was telling the adoptive parents she had smallpox. Yet she still garnered, twenty years later, a chance to see the child they ripped off. How sad it was when you received a letter stating that you could have gone on a date with JFK Jr. if only you hadn't been such an ungrateful little rich girl. But now it's too late, and I just received a call telling us that we're both virgins. Now I'm tracing shareware histories trying to see when the records were erased. I want to be sensitive to your water soluble state, but I also can't help but revel at the dadaist destruction of someone so beautiful and the thought of his pilot license bones being picked in whispers. It might be an unreadable format. A sea waif lives from surge to surge and can no longer chart current or reef. He failed the bar three times and ran the magazine into bankruptcy. The crash occurred after a meeting designed to find more money for the rag.
Still, each day I come to my mailbox at work and find a note from one Ann Martin, who now knows where I work and where my parents live. Her job is to call these places as often as they will let her in order to convince me I owe money to a place or paradigm she can't even pronounce. Apparently the crumbling hovel I used to live in was not receptive to the multimedia algorithms used to find my way in the rivers of swinging cigarettes. Anyway, today I found an iron paper weight on my desk with the word "Tansey" written on it. It was covering a scrap of manila with the word "chess" written on it. I know that somehow this was Ann's doing, who has the same name as the first woman I ever loved. I've got to stop all this uncredited work, self destructive versions de perruque, all these journal etchings no one has seen but a lawyer named Doug who has absolutely no jurisdiction in these matters. The airplane escape diagrams my friend Jason gave me are silent as well. By the way, if the relatively new millionaire girlfriend (that's you) finds out about this debt, the one who convinced me to leave the suicide algorithms in the first place, she will leave me for the lawyer. Oh God, I forgot to wake you up this morning so you could answer phones all day long about insurance.
Jason is especially good at differentiating between disorder and chaos on the one hand and mere randomness and arbitrary acts on the other, in fact he's made a career of it. But what can anyone say about the numbness that haunts the right side of your face and the out-of-network bills that accompany what makes it impossible you should know of my debts. Your doctor keeps saying you're in network while your insurance, after long hours on long distance hold, keeps telling you you're out of a network and out of luck. You're parents are millionaires, but you've considered prostitution to deal with the numbness. You've considered prostitution because everyone's supposed to make their own money no matter how much money anyone else has or how they stole it.
It had never felt so good to be invisible, but then Ariel found me. The mud is there to hold sticks in the air, the line to keep different fabrics on display, and the table for bottles to rest on, while I'm out in front of the weeping wall (in my underwear) because a Fu dog is screaming in the power lines.
The moment you thought that someone else was on the line you began to talk about past loves and how much more aggressive they were, and just when we knew everyone could hear, we got really angry. I had a dream the next night that was all about escaping this--when you climb the Himalayas now you encounter the latest rage, microhouses perched in the crags. It's amazing how small they become when you remove all unnecessary objects. I can't tell whether I treat you like a resume or you treat me like an audition, but the result is excruciating flashpaper. My nose grew out of the cliff into all this debt. If it hadn't grown, perhaps I wouldn't have felt so lonely when I was supposed to be out making money in the engineered hills of Tennessee. It's a long climb up to the microhouses--that's the parallelism of my rock face. Who were the two men who wanted you to shave your pussy down, and were they the same ones who gave you 45 seconds of bliss--did one of those give you genital warts? I know I said I didn't want you to be a virgin, but now?
The pastor came over to the bipolar house, took the guns away, and said the cheap millionaire should go find an apartment if he's serious about divorce, and give his wife as nice a truck as he drives. The whole thing is a big monster growling out of my warzone, and the wires growing out of its head. When others got their tongues pierced they were machines becoming hellsound, disillusioned with phone books. But this one vibrating piece of plastic, with or without a g-spot enhancer, can send horrible shockwaves across the entire lake you had tried to fill with pebbles. It's much as you stated through the keyhole in the mountain, "I haven't the slightest understanding of sex as you know it." My heels set sail for the flimsy sickness mine, a social puzzle whose last solution is to be found in the eye of a llama who can't handle the number of books processed in any given storm. When an ocean camera stops floating, the pose is genuine, the port still has trade options, and there is a woman taking pictures of a garbage can to find out what is portable, what is disposable. The death she never faced made her see even more faces there. Do you remember our rock in San Francisco?
The two important women in my life right now, excluding Ann Martin from the Collection Agency, are going in opposite directions of the hurricane, resulting"in the dislocation of my shoulder while holding the door open for a robin. The door was glass, perhaps prefiguring the shattered windows in your house. You have gone into the hurricane to put all of your parents' commodities into the garage so that they don't levitate into psychic film. My mother is escorting a manic depressive away (I remember driving to Jacksonville to see some computer generated images off to the west coast, and somehow brought the collection agency back with me like the virus of tomorrow and even and especially Margaux/Margot Hemingway, lover of tiny safaris and occult lifelines, committed suicide after a dispute with her landlord and why, after watching them bathe in the objectless mountains remembering the first time our genitals touched violently, is the thought of an empty apartment filling with furniture so comforting) from the storm, and they both want to stay in my bed tonight before the bridges lose their. supports in the mist. I keep wanting to discuss this with my mom, but she hasn't been home for a month, and I wasn't allowed to call the manic depressive's house because of the husband who locked himself in the bedroom. Anyway, they're headed up here in a van that is too big to carry on my shoulders like the 150 lb masks I'm used to. On the shortwave, they listen to my brother reading passages from bis girlfriend's diary. Apparently, she was responsible for a number of suicides, and this caused him to lose a lot of magic in her eyes. They found out my address, probably from someone at work finally. Do they know my number? Will I have to write all my books now?
It is not clear how the man got inside all those rooms, or why he fled after waking you on the leg, but I'm sure if you entered his apartment you'd find shredded portraits and concrete poured down the toilets--a real avant-gardist. After taking my pills for the first day, I still can't have sex, but I can run from my past and back to it. My parents are still in the mountains somewhere. Someone you once kissed, whose photos are in my hell, died today of brain cancer. He took slow shutter photos of construction sites at night, running all over them with a flashlight like a madman in a graveyard. Labyrinths of light. Standing in one tower and looking at the inescapable one I'm not sure if I left, the last two months are unbelievable. If only I could be lost in the joy of building the labyrinth from which you proceed to escape, but instead I've suffered a complete disorientation during this now Babelonian attempt at cartography, and after almost four months of blank nervous wandering, I've returned to this same tree in Central Park only to find it photoshopped into a neuron. There were hours when I couldn't think spent waiting for representatives on the phone or moving among De Chirico shadows looking for loans and citizenship, loans and citizenship.
In the rush to escape, the bipolar I Ching was left behind, ensuring that instead of yielding the initiative to words, there were merely the flea bites to be picked inexorably to hallucinated meningitis, and following the meteor showers of blood poisoning I'm back here with permanent scars you welcome to fight me from the wake of your flawed emeralds. Everything is formally gravitational now, so that the first weekend the brain hemorrhage moved inside of me I found myself at the Volvo dealership with you, waiting for paradigms that looked like football sized bacteria, and after that I couldn't vacuum a single carpet or string a phone bill together. Now, able to sleep up to twenty hours a day, I'm much more calm but still have no way of making a million dollars, I'm still waking up for one hour of horrible heartbeats before I call my parents to ask for three thousand dollars that don't exist.
After cracking one rearview mirror and dislodging another, I've realized that picking scabs to disease is really some unfortunately housed vestige of tribal mutilation, transformed to sabotage the birth control pills my fate keeps taking. Every time a scab breaks, I'm ice fishing the divination, the I Ching streaming lightning through a turtle's plastron. Behind the mirrors--melted plastic and faked orgasms. Someone help me burn the Christmas green without anxiety, that's all I ask. The ragpicker can track all the drunken orphans he starts to believe after a time, and we must agree that appearances are everything, that good pairs of glasses are the most important things in all the dreamy world of finding time to work things out.