Spin Glass

Later that night I retract into the same garden. On the same bench. Alone.

Now my hat functions as a shield for the gentle wind. Thank God for tights, too, and fur. Fur is the best protection. It's dark out and a cast-iron lamp post illuminates the path, but only in splotches across the path back to His house. Little fairies in the shadows of the trees. Moonlight streaks through the leaves and breaks them away.

I am staring up at the half-cloudy sky and watching the world stir from the wind. I am a little high but not enough to forget that time is passing. It must be late now.

Very late.

And there's a certain peace beyond imagining before and after the waves crash against the beach; and wherein the moon is visible through missing spots of canopy and I don't feel the urge to move. Stars are above me and nothing can touch them. I rest my hand on my face and lift it up and stare at the creases of my skin and fur, and how the light flits between my fingers, and the mind, the ego, is seeping out of the back of my head into the grass. Fertilizer. When forests burn down they leave some of the most marvelous soil that can be imagined. They keep digging up phosphors in Norway. They keep cutting down forests to build more Rooms. The earth here is dark and black in spots, and there are dead roots and dead weeds, and all manners of histories are told in the ground. Four billion years ago the world started dissolving itself and we lost the history of the stones. Are you there or are you resting? Are you hiding from somebody in the halls? Where did these trees come from? Where did this bench come from? Where is its home?

I don't know. The wood is not sourced locally but then where is it from? Where in the world was the metal unearthed and then where was it melted down and then where was it formed into the shape it has now? Cast iron looped into planks and then the wood was varnished with a whole new substance from someplace else. Even the resin is homeless. I don't know if He brought this bench here or if it was always here or if it has no origin but I have not known any part of His house to have no origin. Right? It all comes from someplace. All someplace forgotten. Maybe if I had a lot of energy these days I could beg Him for information and ask Him where all the benches and path-stones come from. Where does the cedar and oak and pine in your house come from? Which trees died for you? What about the wiring, the lights, the pipes? In what part of our planet was it forged? Who put their soul into it? Where is all this blood going?

I dream of the pipes in cities flowing red every night. The violence is invisible. Koyaanisqatsi.

Okay. Again again. Hands and arms and legs and feet and make sure you're all here. Grounding rhythm. I had to make this up lately to stop freaking out on my own; I touch my chest and make sure my heart is beating, I touch my head again, and my horns, and my belly, and my legs, and I curl up and stretch out and yawn and, yes, I'm here. I am necessary. I am alive. I don't need to paint myself to know. I don't need hands around me. Do you understand?

Remember this: you don't need hands around you.

Deep breath.

This is the plan. I am going to use the Internet. I am going to get on a computer for longer than five minutes and use the Internet to contact His old friends so that I will stop being so alone. I will also keep my messaging vague enough that nobody unrelated will feel interest. And it has to be thorny enough or worrisome enough that His old friends will not feel persuaded to try to find this place. Please, no more stolen cars. You're projecting. You are a special kind of shitty to have done that. Most people wouldn't. Most people didn't. Are you about to steal any more cars? You're not going to steal any more cars. But the damage is done. Move on. Don't incite terrible things.

Imagine a house with all His friends in it.

He would call it a congregation back in the day.

Don't let that happen.

Then also think about it this way: if you are hurt and you were hurt when you left, then the same could easily be applied to those that left Him voluntarily. He is certain that He harmed them in the soul. And while perhaps He had not yet begun building the forest above His house, I think that it was that in all but name. Now He does not require me to think about Him because He has that forest, but what of the others before? What would He ask of them in place of what He did to me? Would He tell them to think about Him? He might say, think about me or I feel miserable. Please. And so on.

I wonder if it was like that. And if it was, I would like to help these people.

Do old wounds need to be opened up? I would be wrong to presume I know better. But in all there is damage done and I would not be completely in the wrong if I tried to mend some of it. My brain has gotten all gummed up and turned into mush by Him and I can only imagine the sorts of terrible thought patterns that got burned into others; but I can also ask, and I can share, and we can get someplace.

We do not have to be alone.

I don't know you yet but I know how your blood flows.

Then again maybe I should start with Euclid.

Obviously I know how he thinks but obviously I don't. What is going on in that head of his? When he isn't making me angry he is keeping his distance, he is living his life on his own. I want him to be happy as a fact because it fits a clean narrative but he has faded orange leaves and he's just hanging on, hanging on, staring at me from across the room and we maintain eye contact but we continue not to talk because what would we say? I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. What the fuck does that word mean to anyone? In reality I'm not sorry because I feel self-righteous. I might as well be whatever I want to Euclid. I've already screwed up. Can't start making it better now. I am the one with life experience. I am the one who is bitter. I am not as hurt as I look.

Look, see. Look. How rarely do I cry now? So many hours just spent walking outside and being healthy, I have to be better off. Simultaneously better off and worse off. Just enough to always be the better one.

Are you alright, Euclid?

Really. Deep down. What is going on with you? Are you holding on or are you slipping away? Do you want a moment away from Him? Do you want to talk about it? Explain yourself. Lay your thoughts on canvas. I will teach you how to paint if you'd stop knocking over the cups of water. You're clumsy with your inner ear refitted. You had your Deafness stolen from you but you aren't any less of yourself. I want you to be doing okay. Please. I know it hardly feels that way but I want you to be doing okay. I'm not what I am. Please learn how to tell this to him before it's too late.

Again again.

Hands and arms. Chest. Heartbeat.

And a paintbrush against the back of my neck.



One twenty or one thirty, is that the pace of the blood in your body now? Sitting up now on instinct and staring ahead at where the trail dips into night, and I see His eyes in the space where the lamps do not reach. I see His eyes. Tapetum lucidum—His eyes are glowing like searchlights and they have caught me. And in a vague shadow I see the rest of His shape. Frozen in air. It's unfamiliar to me these days. I always forget it's about to happen.

It's about to happen now.

The wind rolls over some leaves and my neck throbs, and my heart is screaming.

How long do I have?

My hands move for me, I am crying, I am sobbing now. Where did the tears come from? I want to live I want to live I want to live, I can fix this, I can fix this. What if I went back in time to Max's apartment and fixed all of this? I'd visit the lake on weekends and get a better job than Seven Eleven and I—I would say I'm sorry to Euclid, I would tell him I'll do better. I'll hold us up. It's not over. I can salvage this. Please. I would do it all better. "Please," I sign, "not now. Not tonight. Please, just not tonight."

Please.

please.

please

























Devotion is two headlights in the dark.

Devotion is fear of God.

Devotion is fear of death.

Devotion is the foundation of a Room.

Devotion is stumbling without reason.

Devotion is hands against hands.

Devotion is rebirth as a corpse.

Devotion is a rubbing sensation.

Devotion is a falling sensation.

Devotion is a star.

Devotion is flashing red and white and red and white and

Devotion is a killed animal in a cistern.

Devotion is being loved wholly.

Devotion is being strangled terribly.

Devotion is years of investment.

Devotion is life with the eyes removed.

Devotion is nine tenths nothing by volume.

Devotion is a chemical reaction that wells up in the guts.

Devotion is a chain reaction that destroys all it touches.

Devotion is staring across the room.

Devotion is wordless and meaningless.

Devotion is meaning itself.

Devotion is anything that insists upon itself.

Devotion is a reason to exist.

Devotion is a star.

Devotion is tall.

Devotion is speaking.

Devotion is signing.

Devotion is silent.

Devotion is anger.

Devotion is infighting.

Devotion is breathing.

Devotion is nameless.

Devotion is a star.





























































But I am not taken away.

Instead when I wake up out of my panic I am half of myself off of the bench—or no, I am completely myself, all of my body parts, but my organs have exploded out of my mouth from terror—no, no, I am intact. I can't stop coughing and heaving and where is the air I used to have? I look up and the night is persistent and the trees still breathe but I have not made sure that this is still Michigan and in fact I think I have been gone for a very long time.

- - -

I am crawling to bed... one of the bedrooms, it doesn't quite matter, and my legs are unsteady so I am constantly stumbling forward through the dim hallways. I pass many other rooms and my eyes ache and I still keep thinking, am I dead? No, no, something worse. No, no, something better. I promise. Euclid, are you there? I don't see him in the halls or in the foyer. I travel north then west further into the bowels of the house and reach that bedroom, whichever is open. They're all open all of the time. You have enough beds for all these people, you should take care of them. When you close your eyes you shall wake up in the entrance. My hands are trembling like they are not attached to me. I keep thinking I'm gone. Am I here? Euclid, are you here? Here or there? Are you there or just resting? And the door caves in on itself and allows me inside where I flick the light on and shut the door and land on the bed limply and sleep for eleven hours.

Amidst this I dream. I have not ever dreamt in His house so I will recount the things that I dreamt about even though I think, in all ways, the physical space I inhabit with His presence is more dreamlike than what my mind can conjure. But regardless,

it begins where else but a Room? Maybe this is my own. Actually I am certain that it is a Room below my own apartment in Austin. The Room below my apartment is where all the things fell that I forgot. Most of all, planted sideways on a battered pillowcase I brought from my old bedroom, I see an orange pill bottle which says Lexapro. And I feel a little anguish for whoever has lost this because the existence of something in a Room necessarily implies that either it is unnecessary or necessary but forgotten. Or is there a difference between those two things? One time I spent two weeks having forgotten to take my medicine. I was delirious and shaky and my head wouldn't stay on straight. Vertigo is the sensory word for it. This bottle of Lexapro is on the pillowcase in the Room below the apartment below a falling sky, it is raining outside, it is April again, and the bottle is of course every ounce of vertigo in my guts. I rush to the bathroom. It's the previous December again. It is that day much later when I found the dead thing in the cistern and I was trying to throw up all day, all day, can you imagine how often I have thrown up in my life? I have been reaching into my body and taking things out. It is raining outside and inside is a little hole in the floor, pinhole, and you fall through it and here you are in a Room where forgotten things go.

In dreams there is no uncertainty as to where things come from. Nothing is homeless. Similarly in the Room below His house I have always been struck with the sensation that, in spite of having been abandoned, each object knows its origin. And so does He. And He would often tell me as if it were as apparent as anything. Well why did Lone Star Lanes fall through the world? Why it and not something else?

Then He would give a look—is this look real, is this memory real?—and tell me, well why are you you and not somebody else? I tell Him I was born with a hearing defect, and then later, very much later, I am staring at the ceiling and telling Euclid, no, it was no defect. Nobody made you. You have no origin. You have no home. Then His hands appear in darkness and God's finger asks to take mine—this is the dream again. In the dream the darkness is pervasive and I am squealing in agony, where did my Lexapro go? Did I forget it? And I have no origin and no home, do I? And He tells me, you are you and not somebody else. Nobody made you. You have no origin. You have no home. Then His hands appear in darkness and I take His lead all the way back home. Walk with me. Walk with me. Vertigo. Did you forget something? Yes, darling, you did. You forgot Him a lot of times a lot of times. You keep running from this fact. This is still the dream. I am sane I am sober I am safe. I don't feel safe right now but I can't leave the dream because it's real. I wake up for four minutes and go back to bed because He is in my thoughts, sprinting, or is he floating? I am back in it and have a second dream much shorter than the first. In about fifteen minutes Max will be over to pick me up from Seven Eleven after my shift ends. I don't need that. I had a car when I worked at Seven Eleven—I had a Honda Civic at the time, ha ha, so why is Max picking me up? Max is picking me up to take me to His house in the woods. He's looking at me through the windshield a mile away with city blocks peeling apart to the left and right. I once told Max that I considered him my best friend and then paused and said (out loud) well I don't mean to be too easily attached to somebody. I know I'm just your roommate. He isn't here right now. I never apologized and never will. But worst of all I made you trust me a little bit and harmed you for it. Why? And he answers but I can't hear him. I wake up again and fall back asleep. One last dream which lasts only a few minutes at most, I'm hardly sure how. I am holding His arms and stopping Him from falling backwards through the skylight. Inside His house are a great number of people who He loves. Don't go in there. I know you will hurt them. He appears short of stature, shorter than me, and behind His back is a dagger. Hello? I bury my snout in Him. We are not on the skylight anymore. We are in a great and unending cloud. You know that if you are alone you are not alone. You know that if you are hopeless you are not hopeless. At the end of every hallway I will be there. Now imagine that you die. I would take you even then, darling. Hello again, and it will be like old times. Do you remember? No, because it did not happen to you, but it did happen to me. I spent many years of my life feeling Self-Absorbed, and Self-Important. As with all things I am trying to interrogate this by reading it. The words are so unkempt darling. Actually can you retrieve the microfiche? No, I can't retrieve the microfiche, it is the size of a Room. Size rarely matters. Place rarely matters. Will you go back there in those woods? The pine tree is oozing sap and the road is melting asphalt. I keep feeling like I'm sinking into the road back to your home, Tabi. I keep trying to figure out what's memory and what's imagination. Is this a dream? Darling what matters is that I will be here. I have never told you this part. And perhaps never will. But listen close: "I love you." And that love has begun eating at me, darling, it is a ravenous thing. It has teeth and claws serrated, and where it bites I feel myself rotting away. When I look at Him I do not get such an impression. Would you like to be held? Oh, He always phrases it like this! Be held. Behold. Parallels, darling. It's all flashing red and white. Blood and wool again. Again again. Please, Euclid, take stock of your body. Euclid isn't my name right now. Still, take stock. Take stock of your legs and arms and have I ever told you this part? Maybe I will one day. I will give you something that you can't hold. I will tell you, "I will not hurt you anymore." How long is this going to last? Hold on. I will tell you in song. I'm Deaf. Right. I keep forgetting. My hands are fickle memory. I feel as if your whole self is fickle memory. Ha. That too. The shape of the dagger in the light again. Parallels, darling. Take stock. I did. I am all here. I am all myself. I am myself and only myself. The dream ends.