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  Chapter One

 This is how I used to imagine it happening. On Monday, January 4, 2010, at approximately 10:00 p.m., Lora pulled onto the shoulder of Interstate 44, rolled down her window and asked a hitchhiker if she could give him a ride. He is an older guy, someone she would have called “Sir,” the kind of older man that walks with that defeated kind of stoop in his stature. Of course Lora knew better than to pick up strangers. She wasn’t stupid or careless. But she had been coming home from a meeting at church and it was dangerously cold. I’m sure she would have contemplated her decision. She would have had some inner dialogue about how risky it is to pick up strangers. She might have even thought about my disapproval. She knew if I had been in the car I would have insisted she keep driving. But Lora was alone. I’m sure that this man, this hitchhiker, wasn’t wearing a suitable coat. He probably wore just a jacket, maybe even less. She would have thought about driving anyway, once he turned and she saw his face, but then she would have thought about the word cruelty and unlocked her doors anyway.

Once inside her Toyota Sienna, this older gentleman, not so old now that he was close up and out of the cold, would have said something reassuring to her. Lora would have smiled at him; maybe even gave him a polite laugh. But then, after she had turned up the heat a little, but before she could put the car in drive, he stabs her six times in her neck, chest and stomach. He pulls her body to the back of the van and takes the driver’s seat for the next 200 miles. He is a serial killer, probably, and Lora just another unsuspecting victim. This is what I used to imagine.

This is what I know. Her killer left her in the back of our van, parked at a Love’s Truck Stop, where they found her body two days after she had left our house for a meeting at church. The police couldn’t return her wedding ring to me, or her wallet. The killer took her license plates, her cash, even the little diamond earrings she always wore, which he would have had to take the time to remove, unscrewing the backs with his thick fingers. Her killer took everything.

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The early morning air is still cool. Traces of the night are more absent than present. Suddenly, as though out of nowhere, the Indian returns from the ruins; he starts giving water to the animals and appears to be the same as when I left him. All the equipment is packed and the Indian loads it onto the mules. I feel the temperature rising. Soon it’s scorching. When we arrive back at the base camp it’s like reaching home.

Mr. W_____ hands me something that looks like bread, a dark substance, made from the supply of flour that remains. Before night falls we examine the negatives of the ruins. I can see he’s pleased. I point to the place on the negative where the two rope lines show black against the cliff wall and explain that we used them to climb to the upper ruins. I remind him that the ropes will show white when they are printed. The dwellings will also show white. It was a settlement, I say. The cliff wall rises another 1000 feet above the niche that holds the dwellings. Ladders used to be let down to the base of the cliff so that those who lived there could climb up. It’s eight or nine hundred years since they’ve been abandoned. It’s something to think about, Mr. W_____ says. And then he moves the subject of the conversation to the composition of the rock face and the geometric planes; to measurements of distances and altitudes, and to the camera’s inability to measure. I talk about compensating efforts and point to a negative showing the Indian guide looking like an insect on the face of the rock. And here in this one the same view without a human figure. I mention the ability of photography to deliver different states of time. He finds the idea worthy, but not of primary interest. He picks up the plate and examines it. It looks docile enough now, he says. I’m not certain it’s docile, I reply—oh, it’s true the Indians in the region have become quiet because we have treated it as war. In any case it’s a kind of ghost delivered on the photograph.

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It was almost time to go. His mother would see him out the door but not to the train station. She would not watch him leave on the train, his face framed in the window, his garrison cap covering his newly shorn head. She would see him to the door, where he could go to work, to school, to the store, and in the corresponding memory of her mind, he would return.

She opened the lock of the jewelry box on the kitchen table with a butter knife, the key orphaned in Reszel, Poland. He wondered whether she would produce a pocket watch, a folding knife, his father’s or his uncle’s, that he could fondle while trying to sleep on the hard earth, dirt full of blood and insides, exposed black tree roots cradling his head like witch fingers.

He opened his hand, waiting. She pulled out an envelope, old and brown, and the dark, furry object he regarded. A rat carcass. A hard moldy bread.

“Saxifrage.” She put the crumbly mound in his palm. “Most powerful herb. I save it until now.”

He glanced at the leaves and roots spread over his palm, dried like a fossilized bird. His lips tightened. His whole life to that point a stew of herbs–chalky and bitter and syrupy in his teas, his soups, rubbed onto his knees and elbows after school. He put it back in the envelope, more fragile than the herb.

“You take this.” She grabbed his palm, her knuckles blue and bulbous. “Eternal life. You take it if you are about to die. You will live. This is the only one. You understand?”

He nodded, pushing it into the pocket of his duffel bag. Herbs had not saved his father, his sister. Not spared his mother’s hands, curled and broken, her lungs, factory black. He hugged her. She smelled like garlic and dust. Then he, Stanley Polensky, walked to the Baltimore station, got on the train, and went to war.

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They brought Lenin to what looked like a hospital room and a female doctor in her mid thirties did a physical. A crowd of people looked on. Lenin didn’t resist. Deeply inside, he was curious. What would they find inside him? Would they explain the miracle of his aliveness? A scientific explanation would be ideal.

“Strange,” the doctor said. She was the only woman in the group. She would have looked like a distinguished physician from an advertising poster of a medical school, complete with a pristine white coat and gold-rimmed glasses, if her coat hadn’t been so short and her eyeliner so thick. One of the men, a uniformed cop with a major’s stars on his shoulder boards, had already touched her a few times, but she hadn’t complained.

“Strange,” she repeated, looking at the ultrasound results. “Most of the major internal organs such as liver and lungs are shrunk, but they are still present and functional.”

“So what?” a very large man in suit and tie said.  He introduced himself as the Politician-in-Charge. His bushy eyebrows and the prematurely wizened, square face made him look like Brezhnev, the Soviet leader of the eighties, and because of that his career probably hadn’t developed as well as he had hoped it would. “The organs shrink with time. Isn’t it so, Dr. Litvinova?”

“My balls don’t shrink with time,” the major said. “And my penis even grows with time. Wanna look, doctor?” Continue Reading →

AIM FOR THE MOON

Mrs. French, the head children’s ward nurse, slides the catheter inside your fifteen-year-old dick.

“Easy,” she says.

In the hallway, on the other side of the nurse’s station door, Moose and Royce laugh. It’s your first and only bladder infection at Mid-State Psychiatric. The ceiling light burns your eyes. Moose, who’s been catheterized the most, said to stare into the bulb until Mrs. French finished. “Aim for the moon,” he said. The bulb’s the moon, and if you shoot it with your piss, you’ll be discharged. The game’s rules are simple: do x, attain freedom.

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ISO

The skies are raining blackbirds.

Thousands of red-winged blackbirds (Angelaius phoeniceus)

fall from the sky round midnight in Mississippi state as we frenzy into year 2012.

Maya prophecies say this is the end-year; they do not mention Mississippi.

He’s an old guy. Call him Qa. He’s waiting it out alone.

He blows blues on his trombone.

Lies on the couch, dozes, dreams.

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