I don't want to open my eyes. There's a soft cinema playing on the
screen of my own darkness. Tall men, short women. I can smell them as
they dance past, just enough movement and motion to ruffle hair and let
skin taste presence. Always just enough, an adequacy of absence.
“I'm full.”
“You mean you've had an elegant sufficiency.”
“No. I'm full.”
Can't remember the last time I felt full, burgeoning with pregnant
desire, distended by gluttony, rammed, shafted, stuffed.
Ridges of fingers corrugate my eyelids. Pressing, pressing. A slight
sickness. The pulpy interior. Skull fucking. A third eye somewhere. The
one-eyed torpedo. One-eyed Enos. Eros.
“With a pistol crossbow. Jamie Tucker was the hardest boy in school.
Under eighteens South-West boxing champion.”
“What weight?”
“I dunno.”
“Did they catch the lads who did it?”
“No. Straight between the eyes. He got up and walked a mile and a half
to the hospital with the bolt sticking out of his forehead like a
fucking lollipop stick.”
Thanateros, “Shhh.”
And when you lose everything, EVERTHING, that's when you've got the most
to gain. I once said to you that “A man with nothing to lose is a
dangerous man,” and you said, you said something else that I can't
remember, but it was the reverse of what my father had told me to think.
There is no path from mercy to understanding, not directly, not across
the abyss. Oh yes, you can travel the well worn routes to wisdom,
severity, beauty and victory, those satellite states, but understanding,
that most fragile of conditions, for that ...
... An endless drop.
“Everything has been created.”
“What about a vacuum?”
“I beg your pardon?” stupid little girl.
“How did God create a nothing?”
Falling, until I pass out, until my ribs are nearly crushed, until I'm
too exhausted to scream. And then, when I think I've landed, I realise
it's just another dream. Intention, inattention, invention is
everything. “Everything?”
“Everything.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I didn't shut my eyes.”
