Bluffing

by J. Blanco

1:24 a.m. at Ground Zero, NYC and I am thinking of your love, cold and accusatory. I can just see the remnants of your spirit now, standing hands on hips before me, them smoky brown (accusatory) eyes asking me, “how can any love be cold?” To which I reply telepathically, “I’m sorry, but it was never warm or inviting.”

A wind rattles the gates and lifts up dust and discarded detritus; rats scuttle and a barnyard howl escapes my mind. I sway back and forth, lying in shadow, flaccid back and butt against stiff and scabrous concrete.

On this bluff I stand in my mind, letting go. My days of wondering if I am depressed or if this null-and-void level is simply my status quo – “home” – are over. Long ago, I was a proponent of happiness, then thought, at what cost? You’ve got to sleep to dream and I always wanted to be awake. Now I’ve got more to forget than most have to learn. Now, it seems easier to somehow learn how not to breathe than it does to learn how to grin or talk or love again – I’ll have gone to Kingdom Come and been made king by then.

One of these days I’ll have to learn to fly like you did – eighty-eight stories down. Eighty-eight. Stories down. Must’ve been a rush.

But flying requires too much movement, too much will and cardiovascular activity and so my middle and last names are Is and Fucked.

Nights pass and here I lie, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. For change. For the return of all that was lost. For death – life too much of a distraction from my slow and calculated suicide. Drowning my secret sorrow with a love older than yours, a love that’s been as much the cause of my discoloration as the remembrance of you – your smells, body language, the flavour of your skin. Spending what passes for my existence with as little human interaction as is possible in this gelatinous city, making as few gestures and saying as few words as practicable – this debilitating addiction to memory lends itself to inarticulation.

The man behind the bar knows what I come for and supplies me with what I need, without my uttering its name. And the women know not to get too close, dancing to the edge of my precipice and gyrating just out of reach. Their shimmying falls on blind eyes anyway, as my peter hasn’t budged since the last time you paid it attention; this, they seem to intuit, and mercifully let me be.

And I’ve not seen a sunset in at least half a year – time no longer exists in my life, outside of making sure I go back under before the sky lightens. I do, however, notice changes in climate and population – the swine disappear in the cold and on mean nights, I’ve hoped to wake from my stupor to find they’ve all eaten each other away.

As if on cue, a cow and a pig waddle on by and I overhear and translate a snatch of their incessant twaddle, sounding like so many pounds of bacon frying in a pan.

“D’you think he’ll find us?” she squeals.
“Of course,” he moos.
“What’ll happen?” is the last I can make out.

The latter question finds its way to my soul and I can’t get rid of it, so I try to change the subject.

2 a.m. at Ground Zero and I think of my own love, massive and unwieldy. I could not ground it. I could not ground it.

What’ll happen?

One day, I think, I’ll wake up without breath and they’ll bury my shell in some unmarked grave, far from your own.

Of course. Of course. Of course he’ll find us. But what’ll happen is nothing. No judgment, no redemption, no big bang, nada.

Cuz Jesus loves me but my dreams are wicked and full of blood, like, everywhere and those three towers – THERE WERE THREE! – are white, gleaming from within, and the blood is black and splattered all over them and the ground shakes as I slide the key into the hole of the foyer door to our apartment building a quarter mile away and Jesus loves me, I know, but how does that pay these debts? Cuz every dream I have is of a world gone mad and when I wake up, it has.

And yet still I feel this need to express myself in words – filthy, jagged handwritten words written on disowned office memos and soiled napkins and paper plates. This compulsion God’s punishment for surviving, for being alive and not caring. For this I’ll live forever, praying for stray bullets, speeding cars, and worst of all, hope. Torturous, agonizing hope.

2:43 a.m. at Ground Zero, NYC and here I sit, ensconced in dirt and fumes, catching fugitive glimpses of my humanity.

And secretly clinging to them.