I imagine they are about twenty-four years old, these soft balloons that are floating beside me this very second, these Easter candies swaddled in official laundry. Twenty-four years of journey, almost a quarter of a century, but still youth for breasts. They have come a long way to graze shyly at my shoulder as I gaily wield my ruler to serve someone’s definition of sanity. They are still young, they are barely young, but they hiss fiercely, and they dispense a heady perfume of alcohol and sandalwood. Her face gives nothing away, it is a scrubbed nurse’s face, family lines mercifully washed away, a face prepared to be a screen for our blue home movies as we sink in disease. A compassionate sphinx’s face to drip our riddles on, and, like paws buried in the sand, her round breasts claw and scratch against the uniform. Familiar? Yes, it is a face such as Edith often wore, our perfect nurse.
– Those are very nice lines you’ve drawn.
– I’m quite fond of them.
Hiss, hiss, run for your lives, the bombs are dying.
– Would you like some colored pencils?
– As long as they don’t marry our erasers.
Wit, invention, shhh, shhh, now do you see why we’ve soundproofed the forest, carved benches round the wild arena? To hear the hissing, to hear wrinkles squeezing out the bounce, to attend the death of our worlds. Memorize this and forget it. It deserves a circuit, but a very tiny circuit, in the brain. I might as well tell you that I exempt myself, as of now, from all these categories.
Play with me, old friend.
Take my spirit hand. You have been dipped in the air of our planet, you have been baptized with fire, shit, history, love, and loss. Memorize this. It explains the Golden Rule.
See me at this moment of my curious little history, nurse leaning over my work, my prick rotten and black, you saw my worldly prick decayed, but now see my visionary prick, cover your head and see my visionary prick which I do not own and never owned, which owned me, which was me, which bore me as a broom bears a witch, bore me from world to world, from sky to sky. Forget this.
Like many teachers, a lot of the stuff I gave away was simply a burden I couldn’t carry any longer. I feel my store of garbage giving out. Soon I’ll have nothing left to leave around but stories. Maybe I’ll attain the plane of spreading gossip, and thus finish my prayers to the world.
Edith was a promoter of sex orgies and a purveyor of narcotics. Once she had lice. Twice she had crabs. I’ve written crabs very small because there is a time and a place for everything, and a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity. I appear to be engrossed in my therapeutic exercises, she in the duties of supervision, but shhh, hiss, the noise of steam spreads through O.T., it mixes with the sunlight, it bestows a rainbow halo on each bowed head of sufferer, doctor, nurse, volunteer. You ought to look up this nurse sometime. She will be twenty-nine when my lawyers locate you and complete my material bequest.
Down some green corridor, in a large closet among pails, squeegees, antiseptic mops, Mary Voolnd from Nova Scotia will peel down her dusty white stockings and present an old man with the freedom of her knees, and we will leave nothing behind us but our false ears with which to pick up the steps of the approaching orderly.
Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine. But some do not hear it this way, some flying successful moon-shot eyes do not see it this way. They do not hear the individual noises shhh, hiss, they hear the sound of the sounds together, they behold the interstices flashing up and down the cone of the flowering whirlwind.
Do I listen to the Rolling Stones? Ceaselessly.
Am I hurt enough?
The old hat evades me. I don’t know if I can wait. The river that I’ll walk beside – I seem to miss it by a coin toss every year. Did I have to buy that factory? Was I obliged to run for Parliament? Was Edith such a good lay? My café table, my small room, my drugged true friends from whom I don’t expect too much – I seem to abandon them almost by mistake, for promises, phone calls casually made. The old hat, the rosy ugly old face that won’t waste time in mirrors, the uncombed face that will laugh amazed at the manifold traffic. Where is my old hat? I tell myself I can wait. I argue that my path was correct. Is it only the argument that is incorrect? Is it Pride that tempts me with intimations of a new style? Is it Cowardice that keeps me from an old ordeal? I tell myself: wait. I listen to the rain, to the scientific noises of the hospital. I get happy because of many small things. I go to sleep with the earplug of the transistor stuck in. Even my Parliamentary disgrace begins to evade me. My name appears more and more frequently among the nationalist heroes. Even my hospitalization has been described as an English trick to muzzle me. I fear I will lead a government yet, rotten prick and all. I lead men too easily: my fatal facility.
My dear friend, go beyond my style.
Something in your eyes, old lover, described me as the man
