his face.
The smile disappears without recoil and maybe I imagined it.
I feel warm, though.
John Ransom Miller is staring at me, or through me. His eyes are unfocused and this is but the etiquette of trains. I tell myself to let my own eyes glaze over, to look at the flashing windows. I tell myself to close my eyes but I’m stubborn. I can’t help but stare at him. I am thinking of killing this man, unlikely as it sounds. His name is John Ransom Miller and he is the force behind a lot of evil doings in the velvet. I tell myself that if I kill him, none of what follows will come to pass.
I want to remember his face and at first glance, he is near perfect. He looks like a movie star. Upon close inspection though, he is not so perfect. He leans hard on the umbrella. His black, square-toed boots are fairly ruined. The leather is gouged in places and streaked with brown and yellow grime. He recently stomped through some nasty shit. His pale charcoal suit is a fine Italian wool and silk blend and probably cost five thousand dollars. But the jacket is soiled and wrinkled, as if he slept in it. The trousers are flecked with curious stains and his gray shirt is missing a button. He licks his lips once, then stops himself. His lips are red and cracked, as if he’s dehydrated. His left eye is bloodshot beneath the drooping eyelid, which makes the right eye appear very white in contrast. There is black stubble along his chin and upper lip.
John Ransom Miller played rough last night, obviously.
He slept on someone’s floor and went to work without changing clothes. He slept in the trunk of someone’s car. He’s having a nervous breakdown, or his marriage is fucked up. Or none of the above. He continues to stare through me and one thing is clear. He doesn’t look vulnerable.
Ten minutes pass, pushing twenty. I relax. And then two white guys come hopping down the rabbit trail and my heart begins to wiggle around like a spider caught in its own web because the headache ratchets up a notch and I have a vision of what’s going to happen, real or false. I know what’s going to happen.
Dirty clothes and expensive tennis shoes and fierce rabbit faces. They have the look of those Nazi rabbits in Watership Down, the ones that shredded the ears of their enemies. Those rabbits were tough motherfuckers but they were still rabbits, and they ran like rabbits when that big black dog showed up to eat them in the end. They died like rabbits and now I watch these two human rabbits approach us from the rear of the car and I am not surprised when Miller moves his hips to force a little unnecessary physical contact with them.
John Ransom Miller is a black dog at heart.
The first rabbit is muscular and rubbery, with red hair that falls in greasy shanks. He stumbles into his friend, a bald skeletal kid with metal studs through his eyebrows and blackened lips. The two of them turn to stare at Miller with the splintered flashes of hate and love that usually mean violence is on the wing. The adrenaline kicks in and I feel the muscles tremble in my arms.
This is a scene from the dark side of my skull. This is a product of one of my seizures but it can’t be. This is random. This isn’t my drama and I tell myself to back off, to relax and let it happen. As if I’m watching television.
Miller smiles. How clumsy of me, he says.
His voice is a soft, metallic monotone. His voice is computer-generated and I believe these rabbits are fucked. The bald one wobbles a step back and glances fearfully at me. He knows it too, perhaps. I look at him without emotion. I don’t know him and I don’t care if he lives or dies. I truly don’t give a shit. The rubbery rabbit-boy sneers and tosses his red hair out of his eyes.
Every motherfucking day, he says. Every day I pass your narrow ass on this train and every day you bump me.
I know, says Miller. It’s weird, don’t you think?
You a faggot, says the rubbery guy. Or what.
He wants to be mean and dangerous, a human razor. He looks the part but his lips tremble slightly as he says these words. His little bald pal shifts from one foot to the next and the tension is like jelly. I’m thinking I might as well stick out my finger and taste this jelly as the rubbery redhead smiles and leans forward and Miller steps into him, bringing his forearm around like the butt of a shotgun. A great purple scarf of blood billows from the redhead’s nose and hangs in the air like comic book art. He buries his face in his hands as the train rattles to a stop.
Miller shrugs. Excuse me, he says. But this is my stop.
The redhead is bent over, bleeding onto his own shoes. His little bald friend has already bolted from the train. The redhead tries to speak but his voice is far away, underwater. He is gurgling and I wonder if he is swallowing his own blood.
Miller nods. His throat is full of blood, he says.
I stare at him, unblinking. That doesn’t seem good. Does it?
It probably won’t kill him.
The redhead chokes and spits blood. I shoot a glance at the doors and they remain open, for now. The air shimmers between train and platform. The redhead will soon be blowing bubbles with blood and I wonder if I should just get off. John Ransom Miller is looking more and more like a psycho and maybe I don’t want him to think I’m following him but the doors will surely close soon and I can see myself standing on the wrong side of them if I get off too quickly and Miller decides to hang around and torture the rabbit some more. I shove my hands into my pockets, gaze up at a snarl of graffiti where someone has written you are beautiful in black ink. Beneath it, someone else has written or else you’re dead.
I scratch my head.
The doors have been open forever. John Ransom Miller crouches down to face the bleeding redhead, who is still hunched over with his face in his hands. Miller smiles warmly, tenderly.
My skin crawls.
Miller reaches into his breast pocket and the redhead flinches. Miller laughs and hands him a gray silk handkerchief. The redhead stares at it as if he’s never seen a handkerchief before, as if this might be some kind of trick. Miller shoves it into the rabbit’s hand and says softly that no one ever died from a nosebleed. The redhead gurgles back at him and John Ransom Miller shrugs.
He nods at me. Are you coming?
nine.
I’M GETTING COZY WITH THE IDEA THAT TIME IS CIRCULAR, that lost time will come back.
Behold.
I find myself outside in the final minutes before dark falls over California and I am confronted by an apocalyptic sunset. The odds of this happening today and not tomorrow seem astronomical or anyway too staggering for my small brain to contemplate right now. The hills before me are splattered with some kind of freak sunlight that appears to exist on a physical plane but is forever shifting from one form to another and is therefore impossible to contain. If only I had an instant camera, then I would never need step outside again. I despise cameras, though. They butcher your memories and anyway when you’re an old man drooling yellow shit down the front of your pajamas and your eyes are long gone, what good is a boxful of shitty snapshots that have turned green with age.
Nothing is real to me anymore. The world around me has been systematically reconceived through digital imaging and computer animation until every flower and raindrop is pure and flawless as the flowers and raindrops of the book of Genesis. The new world is brought to life in high-density pixels and is then transferred to human memory. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
Beautiful or not, it disappears. The sky goes dark and what are you left with.
The image stored in my head suffers rapid decay and within hours I will be unable to describe the sunset that I have just witnessed without accessing the false but technically perfect sunsets that I’ve seen on a thousand television and computer screens. I have no personal memories that are untainted by media and marketing and I
