A single heartbeat can defeat even the staunchest of holdouts. Femur and Septum ate the clouds of their dismissal like candy scorched in the sacred scapula of a lost and burning proclamation.
Ways of bending that are meaningful include the creation of symbols that whisper meaning into the shifting castles of windy words that the world whispers as you fall past it toward another moment in the day.
Mystic burgers were the heartbeat of the gathering of spirits that Femur felt might save her. Femur was twelve. She shed her umbilical and stood poised.
Yes, we were lovely, and we ate the burgers we had barbecued in the twilight under the tree in the yard by the small space between the fingers of our lives where the skin webbed delicately on the waning moment of the organization of our boney white assholes.
I can see Jill laughing, babbling, what’s the word I want here? She is like a little brook, a little stream of water traveling in a single direction. She’s single-minded. But she’s not single-minded. She’s everywhere at once and nowhere I can capture. She never smiles, but she always smiles. She always has a smile hidden away inside her and you know it’s there, you can see it, even if you can’t see it, you can see it bubbling near the surface, bubbling out of the middle of Jill, as though Jill could smile from her navel. Jill Underhill is not a river, but she is a river. She is the inordinate not-minding of curves; the messy, unpredictable course of river over rocks, and river through mud, till river meets sea.
Sea is death. Death is river crossing over and losing itself, losing its character as river, entering the big black lack of light that is a giant body of water: the sea.
I picture Jill with her face pushed out and her straight stringy blonde hair falling past her shoulders, telling Middleton to fuck off. I can see her laughing and babbling, like a little brook, a little stream of water traveling in one direction, never minding the curves and messy, unpredictable courses it has to take over the rocks and through the mud until it gets to the sea. The sea is death. Death is the place where the river loses its character as a river and enters the big lack of character that is a giant body of water like the sea. The sea is green, and sometimes blue, and dark, and deep, and full of creatures, like manatees, etc.
Ricky Jervais is a name. But that’s not how you spell it. It’s only a name. It isn’t spelled at all. It’s a pod of letters standing in front of a man, or a boy, or even a girl maybe. Some girls are named Ricky, is that not true?
A pod of love fell upon us with a whumpf of warm loving air hovering over us, warm loving air that spread like the lower part of a nuclear holocaust, the part we never pay attention to, the part of the nuclear cloud that spreads out around the base of the mushroom cloud and crushes everything sideways, like cars and people and buildings and pets and potted plants.
When you start to fall asleep the right things always start to happen. Like when you’re sitting on the subway, riding a long distance on the subway, and you start to fall asleep, all the right things start to happen, and then your head snaps up and all in a single instant the wrong things start to happen and you fear that you have missed your stop. What have people seen in your face as you were falling asleep? It is the fallen face that shows most obviously who you are and makes you vulnerable to theft, murder and all the bad things that happen at the bottom end of a movie, or a book, the place where we run out of imagination, so that all we can do now is create another explosion of death among our characters. Our characters are our friends, our only friends, yet we kill them so carelessly. How could anyone care any less?
Do you ever wonder what’s the last thing you’ll ever do? There are so many people looking in mirrors down here, Septum. Asking mirror questions of all the many mirror people. Wondering where they’ve got themselves into today and what they’ve got left of themselves, and just when will they be rendezvousing again with that old self they once knew so well but lost somewhere along the way. And Femur knew well that this was what people were looking for, and this she went looking for in Septum, in the city of Septum, on the lost weekend of ’82.
The tunnel of air you exist in shreds momentarily leaving you exposed. You smell the breath of truth as it comes raining down, as it turns the world blurry and runs down the edges of the world, collecting in pools at the base of your bum, where you sit naked in the puddles in front of your townhouse.
People who think you are less than what you are might not make it to the end of the street if they go for a walk after dinner this evening. It’s been pretty hot in the middle of the day these days, but it seems to cool off sufficiently at night to take a little walk. The dog might run ahead, frolic in the stream that runs through the ravine at the far end of the neighbourhood. You might never go back home. It seems so far away, now, too far to travel and still get home before it gets dark.
By discovery, I mean precisely that area in the midst of a series of fresh water lakes where the animals have to swim, or else resign themselves to remaining stationary for the rest of their lives.
Femur came, and then Septum came. How could this be a failure? How, in any sense of the word, could this turn out to be a failure? But the failure is always in the words, the way the words wedge themselves between us and become inconsolably remiss, devoid, under-populated, impossible to pull away from, like some oversized wood splinters wedged deep into the flesh of our fallen memories.
There are ample armpits in this world and Femur has licked her share. She likes the taste of armpit. And she will lick a fair number more of armpits before her time runs out. The armpit, Femur feels, leads onto the runway of the human soul, and from there you can take off in any direction and never return to the same place twice, arriving today in a deep thicket of grass, tomorrow on the tip of a small rise above a river lain crosswise in a deep and treacherous canyon of rock and love and wasps and wisps of Spanish moss twisted atop the molten shreds of what remains of our misty and drenched state of dreamland.
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