Eyeheart Everything (12 page)

energy energy energy energy ENERGY more more more more MORE! Now I’m snorting crystal methedrine — up my NOSE! My NOSE! More pain ... yes! pain is good ... more pain ... ow! ... okay, that’s enough pain. Now I’m drinking lots of COFFEE, to take the edge off the speed. Now I’m eating lots of SANDWICHES to take the edge off the coffee. I’m feeling the effect, the effect is happening to me now. My mind is accelerating ... but I’m not getting any smarter! I’m thinking the same thoughts over and over like before, only FASTER! Now I’m taking a DRAG off a REEFER CIGARETTE! Wow man, far out! More sandwiches! Now I’m DROPPING ACID! I’m taking a postage stamp that someone sold me for twenty bucks and I’m licking all the paste off of it and sticking it on my forehead! I’m waiting for the effect ... I anticipate WONDERFUL NEW THINGS ... I wonder what plaid will smell like? But I have no patience — I am a man of ACTION! While I wait for the acid to kick in I run outside and start asking people where I can get some heroin! I ask them all! I must know! The police come and I am ARRESTED! Soon I will write my lengthy prison opus! I am so EXCITED!

Now I’m learning what it means to kill! To pluck the mortality from an earthly carriage! To hear the HSSSSSSSS sound as the soul escapes the body. I have killed all of the bugs in my house, and I’m trying to decide what to kill next. I want to kill something more dangerous, like a plague-bearing rat, or maybe a black widow spider. And I want to kill larger things, like antelopes and houses and continents. I want to find the most dangerous planet in the solar system and KILL IT in the name of ADVENTURE! What planet should I kill? Which one is most savage? Now I’m hard at work in my laboratory ... I am designing the PLANETARY PERSONALITY PROFILE. Were you lonely and unloved during gaseous collapse? Is your surface covered with a thick layer of boiling phosphoric acid and toxic fumes, anathema to all life as we know it? If a moon left your orbit, what steps would you take to bring it back? No ... this takes too long. I am a man of ACTION! I live an active LIFESTYLE! I will kill VENUS, because it’s closest. Now I am at the survival store. Maybe I should kill someone here. But no, that won’t work, we’re all SURVIVORS here. We can only kill things that don’t shop here. I am at the survival store, shopping, surviving. I am shopping for a telescope and the largest crossbow I can buy. Bah! This crossbow is PUNY! I will buy an assault rifle instead. Now all I need is a HUGE LADDER ...

I must be more REAL. I must exist HARDER! My writing must be a testament to TRUTH, to a life that WAS and still IS. When I die I want people to be able to read what I wrote and say: until he died he was ALIVE. And now that he’s dead, he’s just not the same. Everyone dies, but some of us put it off until the last minute. I must have a good life, and after that a good death. I have to die ... ENERGETICALLY! I must leap into the clutches of death like a trapeze artist leaps bravely into the outstretched arms of his partner, unflinching, unafraid even knowing that if I miscalculate even slightly I might fall to the ground and be KILLED! I want to die like Hemmingway was planning to die before he accidentally tripped on his bearskin rug while yawning and tumbled forward onto that shotgun he was in the process of cleaning. Such tragedy won’t be my fate! I want to look death in the eyes, and say: here death, here deathie deathie death, come to Papa. I want death to come when I call, and sit in my lap and eat out of my hand ... no! Too effeminate! I want death to come when I call, obey my commands, fear my wrath ... and then gnash me to pieces in its mighty jaws! Slowly! PAINFULLY! And with PANACHE!

But not yet! Not today! Because I’m a young writer with ENERGY, and I’ve got a lot of young energetic writing left in me. I’ve got BURNING REAMS of BRILLIANT FIRE to put out! Lyric blood to spurt from my HEART! Babies of genius to birth! Gallstones of insight yet to pass! Organs of theory still to DONATE! Limbs of autobiography yet to ensnare in the offset press of destiny! If I seem to boast, it’s because my view of the truth is unclouded by petty facts and knowledge. I may appear scatterbrained, but in truth I’m OMNITHOUGHTFUL! I seem lethargic, but really I’m just COILED! And when I finally burst onto the front pages of the literary supplement of history, my bio will be big and fat and fast and pulsing with life. It will read: He is so bright and strong and powerful a writer, you could run ten blenders off the manic twitching of his brow as he writes! You could fry eggs on the red-hot surface of his typewriter! You could use his stiff cock to roll pasta! But you wouldn’t because he never sits still — he’s just got too much god damn ENERGY!!!

We went to that restaurant you told us about, the one where all the dead people are hanging from the ceiling, their heads lodged in the plaster so that they seem like the underside of a people-garden, or like accreted fleshy stalactites. Yes, pretty weird ... but the food is incredible! You were right, they really know veal. It’s funny, when we got there we sort of wondered whether, I mean, we wanted to know how they got that effect, you know ... it’s just really well-done. They look real. They look like real live dead people lodged in the actual ceiling. But of course you’d smell them if they were real ... Did you notice that some of them twitch from time to time? It’s like they must have robotic parts or something.

But yeah, we had the Veal Scallopini and it was just perfect, plus we had the white bean and spinach bruschettas, excellent, with a little bit of cumin. And our waiter was so funny! You know they’re all actors. He did this thing, where he acted very friendly but kind of nervous ... it was like he was pretending, basically, that there were real dead people hanging from the ceiling, and that he himself was a prisoner in the place and extremely scared but trying to hide his nervousness behind a professional demeanor. It was a riot! We played along, of course, and told him we would send for help when we left, after he slipped us this hilarious note, “Help Help Get Me Out Of Here You Are My Only Hope,” et cetera, and we left him a big tip. I hope the place catches on because the concept is just brilliant.

And the desserts! Excellent! And we had this bottle of wine from Spain, not one I’d heard of but it packed a wallop, for sure. That kind of intense almost fizzy bite at the bottom of it, but very very subtle. The tiniest taste of the strongest flavor, you know. Those tables there are made from real bones, too! Did you know that? Dave was with us, who’s in med school, he seemed entranced by the furniture in particular. We thought they were probably all cow and pig bones, but he assured us they were mostly human bones. Dave says that human skeletons are pretty easy to get, and they did look like they had all been sanitized pretty well. Bleached, one assumes.

It’s true the whole place is kind of macabre. But at the same time they’ve got real flair. They’ve got lovely dried flowers arranged everywhere, and the tables are always set with starched white cloth, and even though we were the only ones there that evening (I do hope more people find out about the place!) it had this spirited, public feeling. Like the headless bodies hanging from the ceiling are a metaphor for the experiences of society. You know, they’re the anonymous mass, the people you don’t know or notice but who are just there.

I’m excited, really, to see more restaurants taking risks like this. The avant-garde dining scene in this city is so moribund! If you read this note any time soon, let’s go there again and bring Andy and Claire, okay? And where have you been, anyway? I’ve been trying to reach you by phone for days. Call me, okay?

I open my eyes and all I see is the deepest blue, too pure and deep to be the sky, too wide and complete to be anything but the sky. Wind blows past my ears, but the silence is that much more complete because of it. A blob, an orb covered with rags and windows and water and skin and dirty hairs and dust and drugs wanders into my field of view far above, it’s like a giant hot air balloon, slowly cruising over me some fifteen thousand feet away, hovering there. I wonder if it will land.

“Oh shit!” it says, and I remember again how to say Oh Shit is to say nothing at all, except that you’ve realized something you can’t express yet. But I am at peace here, hypnotized by peace. I have no past or future, I do not exist. I wonder for a moment what my name might be, but trying to use that part of my head is painful, like trying to scratch with a broken finger. I back off, and return to peace.

Ah. Peace.

Footsteps. Somewhere to my left or right. I have some awareness that I am probably lying on the ground and not floating, as my body feels it’s floating, magically three feet above it, though I am confident that if I need to levitate at any moment, I’ll just levitate, no problem, there won’t be any hassle or performance anxiety or uncertainty. It will be fine. Everything will be fine, and the only reason I’m not levitating right now is that I don’t feel like it, because nothing could be nicer, nothing could improve upon how and where I am, right now.

But somehow I know that this peace can’t last, as I hear more footsteps now, and see another hot air balloon, this one close-cropped and red and covered with wrap-around sunglasses and face-paint. What does this second airship have to add? “Oh fucking shit!” You are always amazed at the ineloquence of people at moments of bliss. But let them be. They are good and happy, and even as more footsteps approach and I realize a crowd of balloons is forming, and that they are come to wake me from my beautiful dream, I decide, okay, now that I understand the meaning of everything and how to levitate and live forever and achieve total peace, I know I can come back here at any time, so I let go, pay my respects to the blue sky and turn my head to the right.

There is a ring of people looking down at me, and they are all the funniest looking people you could imagine, half of them are naked and not just naked but erotically disenclothed by hunks of steel stuck through them, by tight butt-cheek-shaping straps, by paintings on their bodies. They are all looking at me. It’s nice when sexy naked people look at you. I am definitely on to something here. Many of them have sunglasses and many have open speechless mouths surrounded by chapped, spotted lips, and I think, they look hungry, maybe they will eat me. I consider that, and I decide yes, it’s okay, they can eat me. I like to cook for strangers. And it’s not the sexy women who I notice the most, although there is this one, goddamnit, I was just on an astral plane and now I’m thinking the most explicit thoughts about this woman, who’s got olive cream skin and big lips and sunglasses and black hair done up in a crow’s nest, and who has painted a sunrise on her navel, and there’s a silvery round C with little silver balls on its serifs, piercing her navel, such that it appears symbolically that she has pierced the sun, and I wonder if that symbolism is intentional and what it means, and I want to ask her about it, only the thing I notice even more than her is that the guy next to her — next to her except for this skinny old guy who’s also got no clothes on, but who has a cowboy hat and reflective sunglasses and a bandanna (red), holds a bottle of water and had more hair on him than most people wear clothing, but really next to him is this six-foot tall man, at least, unless the rest of them are dwarves, a man who is muscular and shaved and tan and has his head shaved and wears speedo-style swim goggles, and his dick is fully erect, and he’s got some pieces of metal through his scrotum, which I wouldn’t be able to see if he wasn’t holding his dick in his hand, not really rubbing it up and down like maybe I would do if I were him and watching some really sexy event involving me, and not feeling the least bit ashamed about masturbating in public, but he’s not masturbating, he’s just holding it in his one hand, and he’s biting the thumb knuckle of his other hand and his elbows are tucked near his sides even though it’s not cold, not that I can tell, and I realize he looks really afraid. All of these people are looking very scared right now, and they’re all looking either at me or at something near me. Am I scaring them? Am I scary? Who am I anyway?

So I start to reconstruct some of my history, and this time it’s okay, really, it’s not painful at all. I know my name, my name is Charlie and I’m from San Rafael, and I went to a private high school and got a good job in San Francisco — I’m a Windows NT Administrator! I live in San Francisco and it’s really expensive but fun, and my friends and I went to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert this year, it’s my first year, and it’s incredible, indescribable, and I was just out wandering on the playa with some people, and we were looking at this amazing thing, this gigantic fast-moving thing, on the horizon. How to describe a bizarre thing in a bizarre setting? I was talking to Tony, I’m sure he’s around here someplace, about how my mind had shut down involuntarily and I was feeling hypnotized by everything that wandered across my field of vision, this huge party, this spectacle, and here came this gigantic, this gigantic, thing, thing, I can’t explain what it was but it was tall and had streaming flags streaming off of it, and it spat fire and waved its enormous tentacles and billowed its huge sail, and a guy with a bullhorn stood up on top of the shaking mast of it, clinging heroically to several lines of rigging, yelling unintelligibly as it came closer, moving very fast, people I saw a few jump off of it as it picked up speed, the galloping thing, and the man on top, tugging at the ropes that were pulling him off his perch, as the thing rocked and scrambled closer. He was naked too, with sunglasses, and a bandanna, and in the distance I could make out the barest metallic glint on the tip of his penis, and I thought, gee, why do people do that?, but he held a megaphone and squawked into it, I couldn’t make it out, just static squawking as it came closer and I was struggling to hear what the hell he had to say, this master of the indescribably bearing-down-upon-Tony-and-me-thing, as people I noticed began running around, is this part of the thing’s thing? These gaily painted people yelling and leaping and falling off of and running in front of me and towards and away from me, as the indescribable thing, which now emitted loud disco music and had eye-stalks and signs painted on its sails reading “BEHOLD THE INDESCRIBABLE THING!” came speeding towards me, and the man in the megaphone shouted “Move! Move!” and everybody moved, and he moved, but I liked it right where I was, and as the indescribable thing came closer I knew it was coming to meet me, and I would get to know it better.