BEFORE

He was the greatest person in real life.

Some people are only great in your imagination.

They only exist in a rosy-positive light when they're gone.

(Like me.) He was different.

Very different.

In 1972, he took acid for the first time, and saw God.

But God wanted something for the trouble of visiting Andrew.

God entreated his servant with a task. He said: Andrew, take care of Mathew. Then, you can be a lawyer.

"Not just any lawyer; and not a vigilante. Definately not a judge."

Andrew explained to me a few hours past the peak.

"But first, I have to be a good friend. To Mathew. A saint."

"Like Francis?"

He didn't know what I was talking about.

"Francis. You know-Saint Francis Assisi."

"Who?"

"Brother, your Sunday school teacher should KO'd ya, if ee couldn't keep you after class to learn that!"

It wasn't what I'd meant to say, but it sounded pretty good anyway.

(Acid has a way of doing that.)

Andrew was slackjawed,

"Say that again, will you?"

"Sure . . ."

an I said something totally different.

"Wow. Heavy."

"Yea. I thought of it all by myself."

"Congratulations. It's the maddest mad movie material."

and he forgot all about being a lawyer.

I wish I could remember now, what he said.

We were pretty wild as youngins. I remember us goin-to a party where a joker spun 'is car off the road, and turned it sideways in a ditch. He passed out (or got knocked out) and farted burritos as he snored off too much something. We laughed, but needed his car three hours later. Seeing how he didn't say NO, an . . . hell; we asked, but he was still unconscious. "Just drag 'im out." Andrew said. So the seven of us, toasted like overdone bagels, hoisted boy wonder out, and dragged his car back on the road. We left him there in the mud, without the Mustang. He's prob'ly still wondering what happened!

Andrew was a serious trouble maker. He usedta walk late nights, smashing windows on cars with a baseball bat, or a two-by-four (hands mebe all bandaged from some other stuff he'd been upto). Those'r the days car alarms worked, cuz people paid attention to them. Some joker'd come running out of his house (even if it wasn't their car!) take one good look at Andrew before stopping like a fucking cartoon, an' backin up to his house real slow-ass first-right inta that front door he just ran out of. Andrew; the motherfucker. He said he didn't care. An-we believed him.

He used to say:

"You know what really pissed me off today?"

He talked with a funny list, like his mouth was always off-balance.

"What?'

Matt was allowed to ask what. Usually, he was too young to have an opinion.

"I'll tell you . . ."

and he'd launch into the hugest story you'd ever heard.

That was protocol. Matt would debate anything with everyone, 'cept Andrew. Andrew, he listened to. Reverently. Andrew was God to Math-yew, but Matt rarely let it on in words.

I guess we were all pretty close, even then.

We fratrnized on weekends nights, when Andrew wasn't working at the garage.

We'd stay out late drinking pint vodka-n talkin about everything. We were like Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy, high on every thought we had, and everyone's different ways of looking at things. We'd smoke so much grass, we'd fall over backwurds sitting Injun-style, round in a circle with our legs all crossed, an' that was before we'd go out-n walk 'round. It was fun; that was for sure. Before Matt died, we used to have some fun.

We sure did.

I was sixteen an three quarters, in love like crazy. I guess people used to know it, b'cause they'd sing nasally Sound a Music tunes. "You had sixteen, gooin' on seventeen . . ." but, with dirtier words than that. No, the woman didn't know it. I called her 'woman', 'cause it filled me with respect for her. I was as smitten fer her, as Andrew was for our company, and Matt was for his master's cold, adoring stare. But it was different. Everything she did was holy-it shined with a supernatural flash of white teeth. I was garbage next to her.

I was afraid to even cough when she went by.

Andrew said I had to get some guts, and ask her out. Sheet! I cringed at that thought.

I'd sooner jump offa big cliff with a blown-out umbrella, or sandpaper a bobcat's ass in a phone booth. I look back now and laugh. She probably felt the same way. Kids are so stupid like that, aren't they? Anyway, 'bout then, I finally had to talk about her.

"I wanna tell you something, Math-yew."

"What, Marvin?

I used to be Marv, before it was shortened to Ma. Matt always had to address us with respect. The members of our gang, that is. I used to call Matt Math yew, in an aff-ected sort of way. He didn't like it, but he was a junior initiate of our group, so he had to make us feel good by letting us be bastards.

"I love that girl."

Matt sometimes understood things, ways older people couldn't.

When I told him, he nodded, and got real quiet.

"I'm proud of you, Marvin."

he decided to say. It was odd for a junior member to be that parochial.

They usually tried to talk shit like we did, even when it wasn't called for.

When'ya doin' her?! An that kinda stuff.

I let it sink in.

"Yea?"

"I can tell you do. I think it's really great."

He must have seen my surprise.

"I think you're in-fatuated, because you're not talking shit about her."

Matt's esteem for me is elevated, because of a pansy-assed reticence to even say her name aloud? That's a good one. Matt must have thought my love was what he had for Andrew, so he identified with me. I thanked him, an forgot all about it till next week, when I squirted beer foam between my front teeth for a fag joke. We were laughing hard, just about pissing ourself as a whole, when I noticed Matt got up and walked off.

"What's his problem?!"

"Ah shit. You didn't know?"

"I don't know nothin!"

We lunged on that one.

"Yea! Markie ain't know ta-nuthin!"

Andrew quieted us down.

"Yea, yea. All that shit. His brother took a bullet, 'cause some royal Nazi-shitheads thought he was givin' some other guy an ugly look."

"So? What's he did."

"That's do, dickbrain. Dude thought his brother was queer."

"That's why they shot him!"

That was incomprehensible; mostly cuz we were stoned. "Because they thought he was queer? You mean, he wasn't, and they didn't even know, but they did him anyway-just for looking wrong?!"

"Man; I don't make the rules." Andrew said.

We felt real bad after that, until Matt came back, acting like nothing happened. Made us wonder what was really going on. Matt could a been some prick daddy's sugar-cushion when mom wasn't lookin. His old man could-a-been gettin' both brothers on the rod. Made us a little guilty, always wonderin' what thoughts were cooped-up in a limpid little brain of his.

"What about the girl?"

"Oh yea, the girl. Well nothing of course. I never even talked to her."

"Why?"

"Same old shit. Afraid of being rejected, or having ma-angelic vision spurred.

She could have been doing half the high school, and then how would I have felt?

I'm worshipping a whore? Damn. I wish I'd found out now. But not then! No sir!"

Ma shakes his head, with kind of a grin.

"What was her name?"

"You know, I can't even remember!"

He has a good laugh.

"Yessir! Can't even remember the ruddy little tart's name! There's my testimony for love!"

"Hmm. What about . . ."

He's lost in thought.

"Jillian!" he yells excitely. "That was it. Jillian . . . Swelt."

I forfeit the question, and prepare for a story.

"They used to call her all sorts of things. Jelter Skelter, J-Svelt, Jilt Swell, Jiz Slide, Jis-Smelt, Jizz Swelter. . .there were hundreds. Thousands maybe. I remember, she wore these skintight hot pants to school (on dress-up day), and us guys couldn't help noticing her nicely-cleaved muff. Roadworthy, they called her, 'bout that time.

I wanted to kill them."

"Bet you didn't look."

"Well, of course I looked! Even thought I'd like to wrap a hand or two right-round the fur hill. Got me all fired up about ten different ways. I didn't want to think those thoughts, but I did. I couldn't help it; I had to imagine her naked, but guilty thoughts poured in on top o'the nice pictures. It just about drove me crayzee. I couldn't say anything, 'cause my 'infactuation' was a secret. Had to just nod my head and agree with the shitty talk. Anyway, you were saying?"

"Was I?"

"Yes, you were."

"Ahh . . . I don't know. . . . Oh - about Matt. How did Matt die?"

"'That ain't the proper tone to use when Mathew's brought up!"

"Pardon me."

"You show some fucking respect! You hear!?"

"Hey-no problem. You were taking it so easy, I thought it wasn't any big deal."

"I'm allowed to. You're not."

"Sorry. I didn't know."

He squeezes his eyes between his thumb and forefinger

"Okay."

I say I'm sorry, to cover his immediate grief.

He couldn't even talk for awhile.

"…Just don't let it happen again."

I finish school. Don't ask me why. I guess I was pretty good in English and PE, so they cut me some slack. I like wringing funny words out of big dictionaries, an' throwing 'em around like I knew ex-act-ly what they meant. I mean, I did know some things, but I guess I felt dumb, after all. I didn't like school like the other kids, an' thought they passed me b'cause I fooled them pretty good. Now it's lots different. I've met plenty of Dumb Motherfuckers, and I mean Reeal-Dummb. I'm a goddamned rocket scientist next to them.

I was silent. I thought Id let him talk, so I wouldn't blunder on tender ground again.

"You wanna hear about Mathew, or what?"

That surprised me.

The anatomy of the mind is its emotions about things. Have you ever noticed how stupid you can be, and still congratulate yourself? It's a crying shame. When I was a high tension wire service truck diffident, and I say that because I didn't give a flying fuck for the job, but it paid pretty good, and there was nobody there to watch you slack off; I had to work wit the fucking dregs of the County Seven district. They were the noisiest bunch of worthless scumbags that ever kept the lights on. They ate hash cake and climbed these godfersaken poles in the dead winter night, in the middle of a huge storm, wit lighting flashing on the horizon. They'd drink and carry on all dyin-day long, then get off after twenty-two hours straight an head fer the bars and the pussy-shops. They were a timorous breed, but all timid and whipped inside by the mindless daily grind of the place.

This isn't working. I've got to back up again.

Hold this, will you?

When you're way up there, the everything feels fragile. Your weight makes the metal flimsy. It gets too hard to believe they hold up those sacred million pound cables that keep everybody's TVs on and the metal-smelter's ovens alight. They buzz so hard, it makes your skin prickle, and your hair stand sideways. If it's raining, it's ten times worse. You just wonder how you'll make it through one more climb. Half the time, you can't even get there to fix anything. I've had to walk three miles with coils of stuff so heavy, it bends 'em, just to lift-em off the back of the truck. I had to make three trips, walking in those leather two-ton boots through a swamp. Damned if the truck didn't get stuck on the way back out, too.

That should do it. Push the one with the blue handle. Over there!

(I hit the hydraulic lever, and watch the crane back arc right back down.)

It wasn't a bad job, still isn't in fact. I just needed a break. I quit for three an....let's see. Three and a half years, to trace Matt's route. I don't mean where he went, I mean how. Where he washed up in the beach of his own head. You won't believe the shit I want to forget, trying to get there. First off, I had to go to India to try to find Andrew 'an ask him how it all went down.

I don't know why Synergy came with me. He didn't even know Matt.

The blasting music pinned our sorry asses to the chairs, while we ripped psychedelic holes in our brains. It was the outright worst case of chemical overdose we'd ever collectively done, thanks to a lousy, freak wolf-face acid guru from the Haight, who sold us blue sunshine winsome smiley blotter with four way perforations on it. "Tim Leary's favorite." he told us. Fuck. What did we know? I took six. Marvin, the throbbing sunshine love follicle took six of the motherfuckers? Matt took three, and Archie tabbed three or four. Andrew wasn't with us. He worked, while we partied, road tripping his Falcon all night to the dreaded hippie zone. Some chick saw we were too high to be walking around, and let us stay in her apartment. We were too high to stay in the pad too, but too high to leave. It was a very bad state of affairs.

"We're gonna die."

Markie said, a very vexed expression dripping sideways across his chin.

"We're gonna die in a nine-minute clock movement. And that means we'aren't gonna die, because the time's so slow, we're never going toe-either get there, or stay there quickly."

"What? What-what. Qs and Ps."

The room was throbbing rather badly. I could hardly stay in my seat.

"MuyGawd, we have to get out ahere!"

"Calm down. Be cool-d."

Archie spoke. He didn't believe it, but he spoke."

All of us were all the other people talking. It was terrible.

I'd say their thoughts about me, and they'd start arguing with themselves through me.

I was dying. I was eating my fucking heart out backwards through, by, and around my brain. I prayed to God I would survive those nibbles and slushy crunches of cortex being dissolved.

Matt. Mathew never said anything, or he didn't need to. I said it for myself and him.

I saw great big bubbles floundering out of our chests, full of gook and black bilious boils. They lofted down our fronts, spreading lugie slug slime across the floor, and coating our clothing with rainbow sheen mucous. The unctuous slippery glop popped after lolling at our feet, splattering the ceiling with bloody rancid memories. I could see each one clearly, dripping it's festering repression down in long spittle blood straings.

Yuck!

I cringe-out just thinking about it.

It was too many things happiness couldn't cope with. It was our collection of bad trips all rolled into one. Matt started howling real low, then inchin' up louder and . . . and louder.....Man! The thing was coupling with him, and making this balloon come out of his head, all full of boiling white light and black marbles shooting around, deforming the envelopes' coming out of the rest of us, and pushing them all out of the way-and them half-men-half goats were lunging for the balloons, trying to pop them with sharp little eider horns while the moaning, or the screeching, was getting louder longer and more terrifying, even though I was him now, and the balloon was full of the things we didn't want to Tell the outside world about, never ever, and I was back looking at the bulbous thing watch us, growing bigger and more treasonous, towering above our prune heads like a magistic thunderclout Zeus threw bolts from.

Then, it was gone.

The walls were clean, and the buzzer was ringing.

We listened to it for the longest time, and imagined all sorts of things.

Eventually, the girl climbed up the fire security ladder catwalk-thing, like it was perfectly natural to walk straight through air. Her face was all red and angry, then she looked at us where we were zebras, and hyenas cracking buffalo bones, displaced from out through in of our last native land.

"You were tooo hiiigh."

She explained later.

Oh. Is that what happened?

I still had the taste of marrow between my teeth, three days later.

When we didn't get Andrew's car back on Mad Monday, he flipped.

He took it out on Matt's passivity. The rest of us were generally too glad to be alive still (sane)

to pay him a whole lotta listening. Matt, on the other hand, heaved out his worst resignations. . . he told us all the shame he had, listening to himself spill that eerie screech (which started innocently enough). Come thinking about it now, I'm not sure you could even hear him if you weren't stoned. Matt . . . he was appalled afterwards that we all knew his terrible secrets, which nobody had even yet begun to process, for being too overloaded with self-observation at twenty-five acid volume, to even hear a stack of plates smashing upstairs. And I mean, up-stairs.

At first, I didn't even know what he was talking about.

"What stuff Matt? You're being crazy."

"Yea. We were lucky to live through that shit."

Then later, I began to remember.

I remembered listening to the radio, and hearing the old love songs.

I remembered thinking about what I'd do if one of my friends died. I was sitting on a fallen log in a deep-dark, surreal-n-sensuous forest, breathing in sound of nothing happening. I was there with Matt, who was telling me things about himself. In this hallucinatory dream, we both wanted to know the tinniest details about each other. We were in one of the slimy bubbles, which asked us if we know each other from another time. Through the filmy exterior of our little world (whose wall seemed thousands of miles away, but so close we could look right through it), we could see our stoned bodies sitting there inside out, trying to get away from the horror of their selves. They seemed like kinda inert lumps of lettuce, trying to crane a few of their leaves to a strange, feeble sun. Inside our bubble world (it was kind of like a universe) it was so warm and friendly-we were both with the direct earth descendants, who shared a piece of prophesy in us. We thought out all the times between us, and saw our mirror-selves watching us, listening and remembering this time away, form time.

It was one of the most terrible, impossible and brilliant things that's ever happened to me.

I think we made some kind of strong attachment neither Matt, or I had the courage to talk about;

or . . . I guess he may have, at the end. All I can say, is . . . Mathew felt like my own flesh and blood. Towards his very end, I gave him the attention I would to a little brother.

"I'm going to die soon." Matt said

"I understand."

In the dream, my heart was torn by shrapnel. I came out when the bubbles popped, and I'm sure my face was drenched with tears. I tried to turn and look at Matt, but my head was a was held in a vice. I don't know why we never mentioned it. Somebody might say we never saw each other there; that we were in different places. I don't believe it.

He was there.

Anyway, we had to fustle and fuck around doing something, and

the whole incident got back-burnered. I think it was too much to even talk about.

Andrew was real moody, and Matt was more quiet than ever before. I had a job I hated, but had to do, Markie was about to get shut-out of hours at his work, and Archie's old man was hitting the bottle hard, so he had to spend time at minding his kid sister and mother,

who wasn't doing so well. Synergy was Sharon's cousin, who was vile and really a pot smoking trouble maker, according to her. She said he was visiting soon, and we should meet him.

I looked forward to some novel people coming to cheer us up.

As it turned out, he didn't come for nine more months.

My, how nine months can be nothing.

Synergy's real name was Maros.

Maros hated to be called by anything other than Synergy, or Syn, for short.

"Sounds too much like morose." he told me one day.

"Synergy is better. It's my little nomenclature for sex, sun, sin and energy, all rolled into one word." I don't really think it was a nomenclature, but he liked the word nomenclature so much, I was afraid to tell him. It was just like him to want to go with me, looking for Andrew. He's never even met the guy, and he's so fascinated he's ready to take his dead uncle's inheritance and follow me the whole way around the moon. When Matt died, Andrew just left.

He never even told us where he was going.

"Andrew, we're all hurting."

He looked at the ground.

"You hurt; but it was my fault."

He was seriously depressed.

"What do you mean?! It wasn't any more your fault, than one of ours.

Don't nail yourself to the cross. Lousy shit happens."

"You don't understand."

"Feeling guilty isn't going to bring him back."

Andrew was silent. I sat there, watching big splats of tears fall on the hot concrete in front of us.

I think he wanted to say something; but neither of us could utter a word.

In those sixteen years of knowing Andrew, I'd never seen a mind so paralyzed with fear.

This was beyond everything we'd ever felt. My whole world began to shatter.

I used to dream of Mathew at night. He'd come and talk to me, saying he's almost past the last place that will let him visit. I'm suppose to remember him the way he was.

"Like I am right now."

he said. Mathew came to me last night. I told Andrew, about a week after it happened.

"Don't ever tell me that again."

he deliberately said slowly.

I only saw Andrew six or seven more times.

What's that?

A water filter.

Do you really need one?

I don't know.

Haven't you ever traveled before? I mean, out of the country?

Canada.

Canada doesn't count.

Why not? It's 'out'.

It's just like America.

I suppose you have?

I've been to Mexico.

That shouldn't count either.

What-ya mean?! It's more different than Canada.

Shared borders don't count, if you don't give any Canadan credit.

We were just kidding around. Actually, we got along really well. As the time to leave approached, I had a very bad feeling. I wish I'd said something to him. . . Then.

Do you tell anyone anything before it happens?

Damn. He had to see for himself

You don't know where you're going?! That's crazy, man! Get a grip on yourself. Death is tough on friends. How can we help? What can we do? Don't sell everything, what do you mean your car is going?! His 55 Chevy's on the auction blocks. 'Sucker was lovingly rebuilt from the frame up over a ten month period. It was the machine Andrew said he wanted to be buried in.

That's when we realized how serious it was.

There was no turning back, and no going forward.

I waited a year for his postcard, then quit my job.

"When'r-you coming back?'

my employer asked. He didn't understand.

"Maybe never."

You're moving to live somewhere else?

I know he's thinking it. This is your home town, I've known you since you were such a wee baby, your momma's lap looked like a huge playing field when you were in it.. Where else could you possibly belong? He didn't understand. I wanted to leave everything. As far as I was concerned, I was leaving completely. I was going on a trip to find something that used to be somebody who'd left me. If Andrew was dead, I didn't know what I'd do. I was going to use him to play a chess game with dead heroes-like that joker played with black death on the late night movie. I took a living person, to make me feel the things I needed to.

So I'd look for Andrew. I took Syn as a life ring, just in case.

It wasn't fair to him.

I probably should have told him that.

Shit! I should have toal a lot of people a lot of things.

I remember when we left L.A.

It was one of those rock-bottom flights, where there were tons of stopovers at crummy times, before you got to leave your own country. We were suppose to fly out of San Francisco, but we had to go through El Paso, then Los Angeles. I was pretty tired, we both were; but Syn had done crank after the four hour bus ride, so hecould wait at the airport for three, an-he was hyped, (it being our third flight already). We were fried on travel before we even went anywhere. Finally, after a buncha delays, the plane jumped off into a real clear night, and my nose got smashed against the Plexiglas window. Looking down at the huge grid of millions of people's lights, I had an uncanny feeling; I was a scientist, either laughing at the absurdity of all these constellations inhabiting in endless expanse of space; or some kind of microbiologist. No, Id say a physicist, examining some clusters of particles with an absurdly powered microscope. It also seemed like the moving lights were life forms, maybe a rudimentary cluster of groupings of primal viruses, or something less known, to be sure. It was an extra-ordinary feeling. I didn't know if they were galaxies, swarms of super-malls of universes, or electron-scanned things at the very bottom of what we know.

It seemed as if. . . they were all three. That's what really got me.

I told Synergy,

"I look at that, and feel like I'm looking through the biggest thing we can imagine, and coming out through the smallest."

"Man, you're trippin'."

"You would be too, if you had a window seat."

"Nah. I'd pull down the shade. I'm stressed enough the way it iz, without thinking things like that." His legs were shaking up and down at high-speed, like one of those vibro-waist fat reducers in old gymnasiums.

We talked over the lap of an Italian girl, who'd grabbed my hand at takeoff. I didn't think anything of it. She was about twenty and scared; probably ridden on a plane three times in her fucking life. "Where you from?" "The Holy Name Academy. In Oakland." Like a school defined who you were. She apparently had no faith in air travel, 'cause I saw her nod stiffly to Synergy's I'd pull down the window shade comment.

"Planes. Don't like."

"Me either."

Loverboy confided.

"Where-you from in Italy?"

Isn't he the suave one? He'll probably nod his head to anything she sez, like he's been there of something.

"Yea?"

(He's never heard of it.)

"I think I've been there."

He's wondering if he can get away with claiming his distant Italian ancestry.

Not that he has any.

Synergy didn't last very long. He only grooved with rough, dirty-living conditions until he got sick. He's a momma's boy at heart. Three days of puking his guts out, and hallucinations of eyeglasses coming to get him, and he was finished. I left him, waiting for a bus from Deli to Kathmandu. We parted on good terms. What's the point of washing both hands of someone in Asia, when one's been used to wipe yourself? No toilet paper really got him down.

Shit. I could have been there for hours waiting. Days even. In retrospect, I don't think I wanted to see his transportation I'd have to take (sooner or later), up close.

Our first two weeks were a blur. I'd stagger outside, and want to vomit the sleeping dead, lining the sidewalks. I'd find some weak tea, and sit there in the dense charcoal haze, watching humanity stream every direction. Syn stayed in his room most of the time, smiling at the ceiling; sending out the little boys for more charas and warm beer. His idea of a cultural search, meant firing off as many exotic bowls of the black resinous hash as he could in a twenty-hour period. It was an amusing way to experience the craziest, most entropy-mad country in the world-locked in a cockroach-infested room, with dirty sheets for walls. I can't imagine anything less than 100 percent vouchsafe craziness, when I think of that India. I don't know it now-it could be different, but then-it was the most eye-opening thinking and seeing I'd ever done. Probably ever will. I tore down the walls of St. Francis' Jerricho-tore down my whole life let go there, not just one little part of it, like Syn. Is this making any sense?

Let me read you a journal entry. I'd started one to keep myself half-sane. I think. I'd never kept one before, except when I had to at school. Sometimes, I'd fuck off all semester long, than-beg for a makeup credit, handing in the journal I was supposedly writing all that time. I'd write in a day or two, something I shouda written for weeks, or more. I'd drink a lot of coffee'n stay up all night, so I could pass some vexed-out teacher's class in the morning. Anyway, I did it without credit this time. Maybe it will give you some feeling for what I was experiencing there, before I found Andrew.

March 22.

Don't know what I'm doing here.

The process of writing this, is a strange one.

As I sat drinking beer with and for an actress, I watched her eyes closely. For this, I earn her heartfelt respect., until she looked past the wall of friendliness long enough to see

I'd discovered her. "Why did you go into acting?"

"The process fascinated me."

"What about it?"

I could tell it wasn't soul introspection. It didn't have anything to do with probing her mind.

She wanted relief from that. She wanted to flee all her thoughts hiding there.

Characters, were out-of-her-body excused absences.

The wall shed light through its hairline cracks.

She became uncomfortable.

I thought of Syn, ad his return.

"All its intricacies."

She drank more, and began to pay attention to the television.

"Liar."

What did I have to lose?

My destiny?

She bristled.

"What do you think it is?"

"It's not up to me to answer things like that."

That's when I noticed things were changing. I wasn't my normal self; I would never have ruined nine chances out of ten to bed the girl savagely. I woulda played her steel-bow game, for as long as it made a wake. She would have thought I was duped, having so completely duped herself. . . she'd projected illusion all over the people she mentally jerked around. Not this time, bay-bee.

"You're a cheeky one!"

"Just a very vexed ion, spinning some unknown orbital."

What got you there?

Spinning?

The other way from normal.

Nothin.

Now it's your turn to be called liar.

If there was music, I'd turn it up now.

My vexation spun like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon, but my leash was tied to a post of our interaction.

I had this friend. . .

and he . . .?

I felt like we carried on-devoid of the information each one of us sought. That night, I was so riled up with weird thoughts, I had to write them down. There's nobody I know to talk to. Yesterday, I decided there was nobody I know well enough to try to let these thoughts out on.

I was wrong. I see now. I , and the person I left behind, are the ones who need to listen. Nobody else even matters. I tell other people so I'll hear it myself. Yesterday, I'd decided to try the girl. I acted as she acted, faking openness, and our willingness to explore aome sensitive issues. But it's madness. I'm wandering through hotel lobbies, wanting to go home, afraid of the changes I'll take there with me.

Whoo!

What do you think? Reading back over this makes me remember things; it was hard. I wanted to fuckin-flee, like Synergy did, but I was firm-and-fast in a mettle to find Mr. Andrew. It took me a long time to get over my fear of heading into the countryside to look for him, where there weren't any things people or words I would recognize. Days, I walked riots of streets, and ducking into places, would have a cool drink, watching the world of pain and scramblings outside.

They never questioned me being there. I was white, so I must have money-

and not making a scene meant I could stay as long as I liked to.

He was out there.

I knew it.

What was I going to do about it!?

When I finally found Andrew, he was a changed man.

Syn left me with his backpack, a hundred dollars (he didn't think he'd need), and a telephone number in Kathmandu. Where he tracked that thing down, it's hard to say. He had a ton of kooky friends who's always call him, and stop by, claiming to know people in out of the way places. That was at home. Here, nothing was kooky. It was all kooky. I imagined there was nobody on the end of his phone number, but I didn't want to get this spirits down, considering he was already too depressed to enjoy himself. I wished him many merry-hash smiles in Kathmandu. He wasn't happy about going there, but the way we bought our tickets, we had to leave from the place. That was the big hitch on the cheap-assed tickets we got. Planes flew back 'practically empty...', the lady said, once they'd dropped off their treking tourists (who paid full fare, and then some, too) '...because airlines have to fly back with a few straggling passengers, they make it cheap to go home.' That's what we were told, and I for one, believed it. Who besides dummies like us, would ever buy a sight-unseen one way ticket from Himalayaland? Shit. The lady hadn't even been there.

Once we got there, I wished we waited.

There was this place where heroin addicts either used the floor of other people's bathrooms (if they happened to leave thier doors open), or the stall of a nasty toilet downstairs, in a really grungy coffee house, to shoot up and pass out. One day there were two bodies slumped the most uncomfortable way you could imagine in the place (that perpetually smelled like urine) and one of them, I swear, had shit himself.

"Under that decrepit clothing, bad smell, and self-deprecation, a human being is ensconced, waiting to get out."

Mr. German table philosopher spouted.

"Bullshit." I told Mimi.

Mimi was the girl I'd been hanging out with there.

"You're only sayin' that, because you didn't have to kidnap a toilet seat from one of them."

"Still . . ."

"Still nothing! I had to kick one out of the way, so I could push the door, and find a shitter without his head in the pot. Do you know what that place smells like?!"

"Probably a lot like the women's."

"Yea. I'll say."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm talking about the women's room."

"What were you doing in there?"

"The men's door is locked."

And, it was most-likely for a damned good reason.

Somebody probably died in there, and the attendant didn't want to deal with the mess.

Mimi seemed to understand the general hopelessness, and let the topic drop.

"Let's go, before I have to take a piss."

"You're smack in the philosophical groove now."

"Very funny."

"But seriously-that's the wisest thing you've said all day."

"You gonna give me some kind of 'ward?"

I didn't know if she was jinxing me, or what.

"Like psych ward?"

Everything was so crazy all the time, it was always messin' with your mind.

"Maybe. Come on, let's go."

Mimi was my new friend. She's been in India three years, bumming around, and killing the time her trust fund dictated, till daddy loosed the strings on all the accounts. She'd learned how to live for next to nothing, in a place already dirt-chalk cheap. She said she thinks she's seen Andrew around, so now we're looking. It's possible. White people stand out, 'specially people like him.

I'd pay her travel costs, and she'd get the food lined up. If we found him, she'd get the hundred bucks Syn left me. She was happy enough, her only reservation being my stateside-fresh, green-assed ways made the locals want to charge us more. I tried to be hipper, and imitated her sure dealings with everybody's need to be totally obnoxious. A hundred bucks was a lot of money, to cash-starved expatrts. That's what people call 'em, with a lot of acid thrown in.

She wound me along the trail of lost-tourist places.

"People come for a month, and stay two years."

She instructed me on the nefarious furloughs tooled into boring college curriculums. Everywhere you looked, it was three weeks in India that ever ended tour.

"And why not?" she said. "This place has everything everywhere else has and then some, all rolled in one big burrito." (She used food metaphors a lot.)

I was surprised she didn't say chapatti.

It took us three weeks to get down south. I showed the pictures of him thousands of times, to every nationality of tourist on the face of the earth. Then I got the bright idea of asking shop owners. I went to places he might have frequented, and described Andrew's extraordinarily bad temper when something got him pissed. Mimi, meanwhile, was perfectly happy to go on searching forever. She had to live anyway, so why not travel for free doing it?

Not that two people's cattle-truck bus tickets, or overpacked train roof rides were particularly charitable. They were so fucking cheap, they were almost free. We used to hitchhike too. Once, we were picked up by a really rich Indian man in an old Raj-style Packard touring sedan. Seeing him pull over was like seeing a moon rocket landing in Topeka Kansas. He wanted me to sell him my girl to him for a month.

"How much?" I said.

I was only kidding! I told her later.

"If he's told you a million, I would have done it."

"A million rupees ain't a million bucks."

"So? He looked clean."

"I would have bargained, if I knew you were game. 'Course. . .they'd never deal without an agent, and when agent's doing the work, he needs a healthy commission."

"You want a Fiver, or one percent?"

"I was thinking more like, fifty-fifty."

"Bastard! I'll call you Blood-hungry Pimp from now on!"

She liked me, but it was over her line.

Much later, I discovered it was worth a lot more for a moan on the spread-legged bed, if Indian John negotiated with a man first. He wanted to think the white woman was so "speaklessly sleshal", and I think if he spoke english better, it would have been speechlessly special, his prospective dick had to coerce her away from a lover, or preferably, a husband, with lots of hard-earned cash. Strangely enough, Andrew taught me this.

She liked me, but not enough to fuck me. I learned that from the very beginning of our chumminess. She was weird. She was possessive, but all she'd do is whack me off, maybe, like we had a lot of hash or something, and she was laying on me part-way, and I'd get a wild hare in my pants that wanted to get out-n run around. She was no foul looking thing, I can assure you that. I'd see her lounging around without much on, and be hard as a rock imagining better things to be doing than lounging around. Anyway, I'm sure she gave the hand-jobs 'cause she was high; but it was more calculating than that. She did it so impassionately, it was like a public service-

or I should say, pubic service. She did it to keep things cooled-down.

"How come we never git it on?"

"You're not my type."

Thart was all I ever got out of her.

She was nice, but something makes me think she was a real bitch underneath.

Maybe she didn't fuck me for my own protection.

Yea--christ! I never thought about that before. She could have had anything.

Some million-rupee cowboy might get more than he bargained for.

So; shit. That explains it.

Where were we?

Oh yea. Goin' south.

We pulled into Bombay.

Yours-truly followed her sultry no-cunt trail round the bottom

an' over a way, to that festering part of a trade port perpetually decaying into the past.

I was sick here, and I mean sick. Her constitution was ten times mine, 'cause she didn't feel a thing, and I was ungratefully retching blood and bile-like stuff. All the pre-death indicators.

"You'll be right in a few days."

She was callous as hell-and them nasty hallucinations warped her face to Satan's mistress, and the memories well up of Syn; and "Do you think that is exactly what he thought?" thoughts swindle my few precious moments of not feeling like I have to puke in ten seconds for twenty more minutes, then recovering from puking for twenty minutes, trembling in bed.

Poor Syn. He was a better trooper than I thought.

You don't have any idea what sickness is, until you get waylaid there.

It makes the flu look like a pizza party. Anyway, that's were I got Andrew's first confirmation.

"Sit Andew-yes, I have seen."

"No, not me, this picture."

"Oh yes, have seen too . . ."

I immediately discount his statement, writing off the Asian propensity for No is a very bad response, always say Yes, to this too-good-to-be-true lead. "No kidding?"

". . .Big man. Very angry come problems. He come here, something wrong; get opium. My opium best here around. He know." which preceded a great betel-stained toothless gum smile. "Yes. Andew friend. Big friend, now . . . I help you too?"

I bought some to celebrate. It was helplessly debilitational.

"I told you." she said.

"You. Did?"

It had been several hours, and I could still hardly talk.

"Everyone who knows, goes to him."

I couldn't even say thanks.

I was bumming about this time. You're sick as a dog, all your friends are a million miles away-and I mean literally, from a whole lot of ways. They didn't get what I was doing.

"Geo-bullshit. That's what I think. What do you think Andrew's gonna be able to tell you?" Markie swore. "Andrew's probably off doing some Pakistani girl who's all full for white guys, wearin' them hoops and rings and bells all over the place. He's havin' a fine-ole time."

When he knows he's probably not. I felt sorry for Markie, showing me that part of him. He was afraid Andrew was all fucked up, but he was too aggressive an' afraid at the same time to admit it. All my friends thought I was nuts going there. "Man. You're leaving that good job and all? What's going down? Quit falling back on-th past. Move forward."

but they weren't going anywhere.

I was torn up inside. Weren't they?

I think I was getting lost. I know I was, in dead-end Bombay.

Who the hell was I gonna call? The goddamned American embassy?

Talk to the mutherfuckers behind the phone that never works behind their walls of bullet-proof glass? I'm not feeling so well, in fact, I'm shitting-puking a stream of bloody stuff I'm sure I'll be pissing any day now. Ah, yes sir, I've been the whole way around the block with the other people dying in line waiting for the hospital, and they said go away, you're not sick enough to be seen. Where the hell were my "lifelong" friends, now that I needed them?!

Why weren't they curious enough to wonder what happened the night he died?

They're too busy takin' it to their own sorry graves, wonderinn, and doing jackshit about it.

I was feeling a heap of sorry for myself. It seemed to Ma, all of a sudden, that he had no friends at all. Especially in that dive of a place where we spent our nights.

Hey Ma, what the fuck are you doing?! You're running away man."

Bullshit guys. I ran to something. (That's what I thought, once I was there.) Am I?

"Maybe you're right."

I was so messed up, I didn't know if things fell up, and or flew down. When it was time to go, I almost didn't, listening to their stay-home shit play in my head. 'They're a test meter. They're setting me full o'doubts to see if I'll go through with it.' I tried to think. Shit. I can't imagine having stayed there, wondering about it the rest of my life, like they must be. It would'a been like sleeping. I didn't know what it was I had to run to . . .

(he smiled; "to"-more like "into". I reasured myself, running into a brick wall.)

but I was doing it, somehow; this unknown thing I needed to be flundering around in, trying ot figure out. It's kind'a hard, changing so radically, when you have to do it all by yourself; but

you always have to do your big changes by yourself. That'something I learned out there.

I was thinking a lot about the person I'd left at home, when I finally met Andrew.

"You will wait. Mr. Andew comes to day, I think."

Not a weep of a whisper. Did that make sense? Weep . . .of a. . . fuck. Who cares.

Yu've gotta try some words out sometimes, like putting mango in your vanilla lassie (that's a milkshake, in India). You didn't. Yes I did, and it was so good, I always had them that way.

Did you get better? Slowly.

Verry slowly.

Markie and Archie had two-ton shoulder chips about their manliness. I think the i-e on the end of a name doesn't help too much. I-e names always sound like little kids bickerin, with a mom fed up and jus-about to slap them upside their empty little rhe-torical heads. Markie and Archie were tough, and wouldn't be pushed around very much. Sometimes, it used to be a problem with "Mr. Andew", 'cause Andrew ruled our gang. He was all fulla positions, and I mean the kind you'd think, as well as the kind you fight for. In his case, they were hardly distinguishable from each other. I remember once, they had this big bullsit history argument about something dumb-I can't even remember what it was-and Markie took a swing at Andrew. Not a serious swing, just sorta like this; (he shows me) almost friendly-like, yousee? Well; Andrew found a left hook sooner than Markie's punch that said something more than a bit of nothing (but 'more' ain't a lot in this case), even finished it's little follow-through. It sup-pined Markie with a floor to sprawl on, and a black side of his mug to examine in the mirror, every morning for two weeks. I dunno. I thought it was a little of the same treatment, with a nuclear bomb thrown in for good measure; and I said Do you know what the fuck you're doing!!?

Jesus Christ Andrew, getta hold on that anger!

and that's what he needed to turn it on me. Guy could be a real bastard sometimes.

Anyway, some part of Markie (at least) probably didn't mind Andrew going.

I was different in that regard.

I'd known him longer.

Post-Asia Marv and his hard-mannered, take-no-prisoners attitude is starting to crumble.

That's what I'd say about you at this point.

"Would you really now? I thought I wasabitova pussy cat."

"In what sense?"

"All of 'em."

"Not with mistress Mimi, unless you're holding out on the dirt."

"She was a different story."

She was real attached to me, ('specially 'cause I was footing her bills and all) an' didn't wanna take up with Andrew real-tight at first. I gave her the ultimatum of take the hundred and scram for a while, or forfeit it and hang out. Just when I thought she didn't give a damn for anything alongside the trust-fund roadway, she did an about-face. "For your trouble." she said, holding out the cash. What trouble? I don't know what your nice little curry-stained mouth is talkin-bout. She continued: "For the trouble [she meant herself], and how you were such a gentleman about it." Under Miss hardassed exterior, was that funny little elf girl, peeking out smiling. "I had fun. Maybe..." we can have some more? That's what you're thinking? Damn. The girl surmised me with one small look. She caught yours-truly with his pants down around his ankles, drooling his hundred dollar surprise. You sure you don't want it? You urned it fair and square, and . . . she waved her head negative, and pushed my hand back.

"Take it. I'm happy."

"You said she hung with Andrew? That must mean you found him."

"Found him?! Sure. He found us."

"How so?"

"Some rice-vine had been warning him two people were searchin fer his ass."

"What that? The hashish hotline?"

"Fuckif I know."

Well-well, if it isn't . . .

Son of a bitch. I had to go half way round the world chasin' your ass!

How'd you finger me?

Left a trail like King Kong running through the trees.

No!

"I was still pretty weak when he turned up. We talked a while, then I had to go lay down. He said he's confused why I came, I said so was I and let's take some time to talk, he said cool, and he's considering going up to Calcutta would I like to come? Yeasure, I'm gotta to take a little nap now (either that or throw up, fall down, get the shits, or all of the former at once), but talk to Mimi and hang out. If you want. Sure Ma. Seeya soon."

"And?"

"I saw him two sacred get-well days later. I'd been havin all these crazy hallucinations with Christ in them, so I refer to them as sacred, in regards to those lower muscles that get all fucked up when you lay in bed too long after dry-heaving your bloody-guts out. Ah. I digress. Mimi'd been gone the whole time, far as I could tell."

Feelin' Ma-bettr? He always made jokes with my name. You look like hell, so I hope you feel better than the shit smeared on that unshaved-mug I'm talkin' to. Better; yea, it's relative. Happens. Indya's hell on germ killers. I lay like you did for a week, pissed and shit the bed. . . you name it. Sucked. You look thinner. You too. Happens, huh? Yea. Guess I'll he a jockey soon. Give it time. Indya don't like big-muscle men for long. How so? Looks bad. You've gotta look sickly, like the rest of em. Why? You're different no matter how you look, big white man. Natural order of things. Mass mind. You know-can't hardly resist it. He's high. Syre I'z high. Why not?!We can . . . Not me. Chicken shit. I'm fuckin' dying here on this lousy bed in the hottest fuckin' place on the planet and you wanna shoot me up? Suppose to be.

Indya's like that.

"So we shot up."

"You're joking!"

"Nope. He brought it to help me. Serious."

"Did it?"

"Yea."

Not much, you know your weakened condition all over this room-yuck. I mean, what's so ggawdamned therapeutic about the shit? Makes you relax. Stop thinking so hard about it; and besides, it dries you out. Mutherfucker! Not so tight! Weenie! Stop lookin so hard at the needle. Can't help it. That clean? You first. I never thought I'd .... Didn't you? I'm s-prised. Where's Mimi? (like, she doin' this too?) Comin. Soon? You just relax, big boy; taker easy. (You did.) Time. You on? Mimi was running her hands through my hearing. Thank you, she was whispering. It felt pretty good-I puked a lot, but it didn't hurt. It all flowed out so nice and suffer-free.

"Was-as good as they say it is?"

"Better."

"And?"

"There ain't no 'and's."

"What happened next?"

"When you're on, there ain't no nexts."

Whoa.

I felt like a bird who's flying in his dreams, but awake too, all cuddled into his wing on one foot having a nap. It was something else. What about you? "I've dont it before." she said. Was this good stuff, or not? "Better than I've ever tried."

"How'd you feel afterwards?"

'Pretty good, considering."

"Considering what?"

"My friend's hooked, Mime looks like she'd like to be, it's one thankless-day after another when you're down, I'm still weak, not finding any answers, about to go to another dirty city etc-etc. Finding Andrew didn't give me the satisfaction I thought it would. I had forty thousand burnin' questions, and his direction,was the only one I knew how to run towards."

"What'd you do?"

I walked outdoors, and got lost. There were the usual skinny, dying waifs branded with illnesses, sleeping on the slanting foot-worn stairs, but everythin' was different-more trippy, and sinister that afternoon. I rounded the usual corner that smelled of morbid garbage, and insidious, rotting-flesh chaos, took twenty stops to look at things, opened the rusty pre-colonial gate, and bumped a man squatting over his unfinished ablutions, steaming fecal splorches an' hideous belches towards already-unholy ground. My tea vendor, who'd been looking worse and worse (as days rolled inevitable to weeks, and weeks, to months), was no longer in his place, and as I noted this, the whole fabric of space seemed to shirk-cower and apologize-for it's oversight, stating at defiantly this same instant, its relief the man believed in his illness, and his reincarnation, so the universal mind doubted his sincerity enough (because he believed with such fervor) it thought it'd test this teaman's belying-writs of existence, and the hereafter. His street shifted to some now frequency of events, closer to its own valedictorian illusion over the things the man who's now disappeared, feverently hoped to see. Everybody felt a little disoriented, and haplessly struggled for slippery rocks of permanence to hold, wave-tossed, in Cacutta's stormy-slimy sea.

After I left their company, there wasn't much to do. I'd sit and smile watching the impossible river of street movement belch a toxic blue funk of noise, motion, and acidic exhaust, drinking BangLasses, and smoking the occasion of holy water chillum, out'a of my pig bladder boda. It was a purgatory. I had to stay there until I knew why I'd bother to do the next thing.

The street was an animal. It was a frantic consciousness, honking, screaming and smoking its way to some horribly-distant conclusion. Yawning, I thought of the smack they'd left me.

"In case you get sick again?" she asked me.

No. In case I need to get sick again.

She didn't get it.

It was a little much, to be walking around, I mean. It was as if . . . I was moving at a thousand miles an hour, and everything in my peripheral vision was blurred with the speed, though I'm sure I wasn't walking more than a few miles an hour (if that). in maybe fifteen or twenty feet, I lost all my bearings, and swallows flew around me, as I wake up and feeling things but staying asleep, walked all around the simperings of people laid out on the sidewalk, waiting their turns to die and be rebuked. Shivering, it was too hot; the body's all confused, I kick-a beggar, no arms or legs, scabbed and festering, leering on the dirty cover of what-onto-what enlightenment. . . I donknow. Staggering; feeling heavy and light, flying and sailing underwater, stop and hands in head chai, people flaying clothing angrly in dirty fountain water sudsing animal hide soap, humming little songs of rejoice for a sok in the jaw of life . . .I can't understand the happiness in this laughingstock of a day-to-day scrabble 'gainst disease, death, moral-emotionalcolic starvation-I am too heavy with it, and then, I am light again. Ocean waves nausea; I am its boat; it throws me to my feet to walk; answers stare the inertia-questions inside me... I fanned them laughing, "I tell your sate yourself. You say no. WHY!?" asking their well-meaning questions as eyes tear and run, remembering Math-yew, and his I give up attitudes. I am alone, and I am full of people asking for my attentions. I am the whip flaying the idolatrous stink of already-welted flesh, festering slowing death in some penitent's self-imposed prison cell. I am the God I seek.

I am the death.

In other wards, I was having a hard time of it.

Andrew was rucked up with a couple oaf-friends who'd burnt their passports (or sold them black market, with some bona-fide signatures on official forms for extra rupees, no doubt) and they were about as fucked up, as fucked-up comes. I mean, for white people who used to live clean and sanitary lives. They were living like high class beggars, in a shambles of a squat no self-unrespecting hobo would stay in for long. "I'm not here much.' he apologized. "It's like a cover-up." Foe or friend would be equally repulsed. "What'ch-doin you need such a smoke screen, man?" "Snow blow smack you know? Whatcha need, I got it, how much you say? We can do it." You seem to be in love with your work. Bettr watch out sonny boy, it's going to kill you.

"You and Mimi tight?" as if I needed to ask.

I guess I was jealous, and lonely.

"Tell me why you came." We'll talk, when you tell me why you ran.

He didn't know.

When a deer gets hit, it runs. It runs till it falls, and gasps its last bloodless breath.

"I cana-t talk about it."

"Better. You bettr."

Too high again, too many times here. Talk mutherfucker! Talk? You. No!! Don't tell me that.

"She'll help you?"

"You. Mimi."

"Can't help . . .she's. . ."

"Yea."

Can't bother. Woe. Words and pain such an on and off thing-such and effort to maintain.

". . .say let's . . ."

and I forgot what it was.

He wouldn't talk about it, but when I was around this scarred version of the old Andrew, it was impossible to think about him (Matt) for too long. It seemed like Matt'd taken Andrew in his death, writhing the pain of their bond, in his last few excruciating instants. Matt's gone, but Andrew's still stuck there (in his death), trying to kill his pain with morphines

that would never let him go.

Our last night, we peeled his cover, and looked at his chaos underneath. He had his own private "Indya" inside. I understood everything now. He'd caned himself, stroke by laceratin' stroke, to this place you could be a walking wretch, a hollow ghost, and still fit in jist fine. India was the land embodiment of his self, so the roiling stopped, and turned in its harness to trample Andrew slowly, in its hot, self-destructive sizzle. He was balancing on a think-act tightrope over a philosophical abyss. I guess he always had been-Matt's death peeled back the pain-reactive scenery-that made Andrew think the high-wire act was a self-inflicted joke. Bottom was a thousand feet down. Before [Matt died], he thought the drop he projected, was his net.

No nets now. Nothing.

He was falling, still under the ultimatum

not to fall. He was trying to perform; but his audience was all gone.

Then; I left too.

"He was in the elevator shaft, struggling with the cable. I was yelling at him . . .'Take the fucking thing off! Take it off! Stop trying tangle yourself, Matt! Talk to me! Take if OFF! Rip it; any-t-h-i-n-g . . . just . . .' and that's when the motor started up." Then Andrew burst into fearful tears, shaking and sobbing. "B-God! It was so fuckin-HORRIBLE!"

I was calm. I don't know why. I felt like a TV interviewer, trying to get the bottom of a questin the person I was asking kept trying to slide around.

"Ahh, Andrew? Why was Matt on top of an elevator?"

". . .An-the voice didn't even scream to cover the grinding crunches; an-the cable came up bloody at first, then smeared with flesh; groans and laments of human meat, reflecting its fresh wetness in the dark elevator shaft of the soul. He was doing something for me. I aasked him to."

"What?" (If you don't mind me askin.)

"We were stealing something."

"Ohms law. Where they build and buy-someone must steal, so they can buy again."

"What's ohm's law have to do with it?"

Archie was beside himself with anger, fear, and sadness.

"Nothin. I just said something stupid, 'case I didn't know what else to say."

We were blown out. Totally gone. Two bottles of Jack Daniels were being drained, but I didn't even feel drunk. Inside, I was hollow. I was a shell of a man.

I thought about Matt's brother, who got shot just-this senselessly.

I thought about Matt, and what would happen to him.

That's when I lost it.

"I went on a ramble, breaking this and that, whatever-just like Andrew used to. (Wanted to feel what he felt. I wanted to be him. . . to see what it's like to feel that pain.) It didn't work. I had a slide guitar-I tried to play a song for (and from) Matt on it. Under that craziness, I was sure he'd come back to help me with it, like someone's funeral dirge, written by a soul already dead, through my fingers. When it didn't work, I smashed it. I didn't leave the house for two days. I'm not sure how it happened, or why it stopped. I was only a bottle of something, minus its contents."

"How did you connect leaving, with solving this?"

"It didn't have anything to do with solving anything. I was in pain, and I didn't know how to express it. I was in a state of rebellion for the things that got him killed, of which, I was a part. He was helping this guy [Andrew] he happened to think was the best sort of person in the world, to do something wrong; something that wouldn't (probably) do him any good in the end, and I'll bet he knew all this; but he did it anyway. It was weird. You kin ask for synonyms of 'friendship'?

Me too. I tell you: my answers weren't here. I had to league with destiny, and look elsewhere."

"And Andrew was your only link to that?"

"He left, to draw me out. That's the only sense I can make of it."

"Then you had to leave him, when he offered you nothing."

"He had jackshit to offer, by way of answers. He told me shaky facts, and the limited ways he was about, in facing the manic depression that followed. He was intersections without their traffic lights. His cars of thinking piled into each other, and broken glass littered his roads you wanted to walk on, with your tender bare feet. Shit. He tolerated my presence long enough to dump a buttload of dirty consciousness, grab Mimi, and leave. Seeing me was way too much for him. He had to fall back on his lover-Miss Heroin, to say things for my benefit. Don't get no misconceptions though-he was happy to see me, and wanted my familiar self to say all the right old things, hang out, and get perpetually high selling smack, crystal meth, you know-but I was a new person. I wasn't interested in the same things I was, before it happened. Before it happened with Matt, I mean."

I got high every day, and wondered what it meant. Why do I need to do this? Why's-it escape? How can it be an escape; it's a trap, and things like that. It wasn't drugs I was talkin' about-I was interested in the whole thing. You know what I mean? The whole thing of Matt dying and me being there and Mimi shacking up with Andrew and my fried chicken habit and Archie being all weird . . .you know what I mean. It was everything all at once. It was like a tidal wave breaking every ten minutes, and I understood it was happening, was going to happen, and had already happened-all at once. I had nightmares of Matt's corpse turning into sausages and becoming a worn rope that ran the elevator. I'd see his eyes on one, and a finger in another-little grizzly bits of flesh mixed in with memories of us being together. The more I got high (seeing too much; but trying to see more), the worse it got, until finally, I was too tired to sleep, and too afraid to even try. It had to stop somewhere; but where?

It stopped when I saw myself leaving the room when I was still in it. I just got up and left my body laying there, staring at the holy sephulter, covered with moss and cobwebs or something, at this wreck of the chapel. I was laying there, and I wasn't. I was the thing looking at the thing that's me, feeling a whole new pace, looking backwards and forwards at once. I think I was so tired, I fell sleeping while I was still awake and thought I could just rise and walk away. Do you think that's possible? I mean, you think you're sworn into one place, when you're really in (on?) an amplified adrenaline in another. Result is: you split up. You're in two places at once, taking part of the person under the person you used to be-(the one laying on the ground) to look back at that self with. What'd you reckon? I couldn't make a bit o sense of it. I thought so hard about the thing, it nearly drives me nutso to remember, because when I remember that time, I go right back there. Memories'r crazy, like that.

"What did you do, when you stood there looking at yourself?"

"I asked myself questions, but I couldn't hear them, and I didn't even care if I answered. You're goingto love this part. I didn't care, 'cause it didn't matter. I knew the answers before I asked-the part of me that didn't care, was laying on the ground, but it didn't care by not listening. The parent-part that was wailing these questions (a funeral chant?)-he didn't care if there were any answers, even though he had them all-ready. He was asking because the part laying dawn talked him into it. . . so know why? Do you believe in craziness? I don't know; but I think I was right there. The part on the ground wanted the questions asked so he could ignore them. If they weren't properly asked, he couldn't not pardon their absence."

He stopped to think in the logos of that convoluted statement.

"Do you get, what they're getting at?"

"Sure. They were both me, and they were the parts that make me go to seek answers fer things like Matt's death, and Andrew's whereabouts, and everyone's weird-fucking problems and hangups. I was ordering-priooritizing-my caring about they're outcomes."

"Who's 'they'?"

"Everytoon in cartoon land. When I came back, it seemed like I was like a cartoon moving through a two-sided world (compared to the place walked in that other part of myself). Everything became Bugs-Bunny drama, and I couldn't take enough precautions to not start laughing whenever 'terrible' things happened. Road Runner just outsmarted the W.B.Coyote when I washed my mango in a fountain next to a no-arms no-legs worm-cripple, begging. He was falling off a cliff, waving Bye-Bye, real pathetically, as he realized he was running in thin air."

Matt? Where are you/how are you, I . . . want ing, but I'm tongue tied. Why did you do it? I wanted to ask you so many things, now . . . It can't matter. I wanted to be your friend forever, I know I . . . didn't trust you. I should have been more open about it. Andrew was wrong. I want to tell you this, don't feel like . . . ah hell. You're already past this, aren't you? Are you a h . . . I mean, a ghost, or what? This is too weird, talking to you like this. Usually I see you in the elevator shaft, all torn up and bleeding. It is good to know you're in some other place, still all whole and... (I'm dreaming?) I'm dreaming. You're part of my dream (?), and . . .I woke up, slowing down, one floor after another, no buttons, up and down again-in that elevator? Why do I have to be here?! Let me OUT! I woke up into my dingy room, and I swear he was standing there, looking at me. I thought it wasn't him, at first. I didn't know where the hell i was. I think I was so confused by waking up three different times, I was braced for it being another level of dream. You know how you wake up, and you don't know where you are-like, you could be anywhere in the world, and there isn't even a ten-watt bulb over you, lighting some answers?

That was me. I say I saw him, and I'm sure it was him, but some part of me doubts the whole-damned thing. Anyway, I shot up the tin-film pouch, and took the rest of the day off. It was during them high times, when I got the crazy direction of lookin' for ghosts. Whoo, I was out there. I'd ask Matt what happened, cause Andrew's answers were too philosophically stark.

"Did it work?"

"Patience."

In those two weeks that followed, I started heading for Kathmandu a half-dozen times, while my body lay around soakin' up the craziness (or blowing it off?) in Calcutta. I never can say, anyhow. Don't ask. I don't know. In Asia, having a ghost talk to you is normal. People talk to their dead relations all the time. Andrew? Shett-I doped my last with his stuff. He and Mimi were chemically co-dependant. She worshipped him-God only knows why answers himself when nobody's looking. Get it? She's nuts, but nice. She wrote me a post-care package with some Hash in it-a head-trippybit-o shit, in little black marbles; no return address, of course. I suppose he's doin pretty good (if he's still alive, that is). . . if ghost Matt isn't bothering his soul, maybe (if he's still with her). She could'a been lying, naturally, but it's gettin-about trust-fund time. Maybe she's gointa ditch him before the payout.

She wasn't dumb, after all.

Markie never believed him. When he said he was an only child, Markie said Bullshit, something's going on here. I don't know what, but there's something. How do you know? I asked him, thinking it's as full of shit as anything he said. Because I come from a big family, and we don't answer like that. What's that suppose to mean? We answer right away. Therein't any pause, or shifting yur eyes around. Six brothers and five sisters. Why would Harry have to count them up, when he's known them all his life? (Harry?) My little brother. Oh. He just says it straight on; no dillydallying around. Matt's too long on his answer of Ain't got any.

Maybe he wanted some siblings all his life? What the hell did I know? "Narkie" was always looking for conspiracy to shout at. Ma, you don't know anything, he always said.

Don't I? Matt's smashed to bleeding bits talking to his brother, who's trying to scrape the slime off the elevator cable and pack it valiantly back in his ruined body cavity. In the grossest scene I've ever personally witnessed (or remembered); he bled chunks of brains blown out of the back'o his head all over his little friend (suffered [probably], in his meeting with the fag-haters), and had to cup them in from pouring over the blanched face of Matt, putting them back in that hollow, shattered head, as if he were saving himself for a few more minutes, to heat the cadaver of his brother with some futile action, otherwise known as love. It was horrible. I couldn't even go back to sleep, I was so afraid of it happening again. I got some other dream later. The worst part is the moment you wake up. I'd yank my hands up, expectin' to see them covered with human remains.

"Yuck."

That's the time I started dreamin' bout my father. Ole-dad was a friendly ogre, who kept asking my brother (who'd turn out to be Matt) what he was going to do with my life. I would interrupt him and say, "You mean, your life, don't you?" to which he would ignore me completely, start the question all over again, and make me respond the same way, 'cept with more impatience. In the end I wouldn't even recognize him as father. He took on this ancient crippled Andrew-like character, who I'd then he forced to remind, had vested interest in being nice to me, because someday he'd be suckin' his last gasp, and he'd want me there comforting him. . . "So you'll feel like you left somethin useful behind." I tried to tell him.

Fuck. I was all fucked up. I had to stay heightened with charis, so I could be deadened out with success. Having found Andrew and crossed him off the list of questions, answered my motives' need to get somewhere, without answerin' this new need to arrive as soon as possible somewhere else. Andrew was a dead end, because he was the starting mark. There wasn't anywhere to go with the things he said, because everything he said was so hopelessly shallow. Too much pain. Too much censored thought-and nightmares too, no doubt. He was my marker in a deep sand pit, his example juttin' out like a flag to warn unwary travelers: Don't fall in! He was an ant longing for his surface, sliding down the face of that ant-lion's lair, scree falling all around his busy legs, scurrying an' climbing nowhere. He was going down; he pulled Mimi with him-everyone has a secret with the devil (hiding sins inside), bugging them night and day to end it all for them. Earth life is to much to take. Let me go slowly, painlessly. . . so there's Heroin. Heroine. Funny, that. The sand funnel of someone slinkin' around silently-their door ajar-self destruction, is almost irresistible. It's the end o-the world. No more worries or cares. You're going to die, so mind their Ps and Qs goes out the window. You're dying-who cares?-it lays down and breathes the last gasp the same way; yurbodymybody. We're all equal in the shadow for death. We're at the starting mark-the end and the middle of the road-all at one time. It's the shit religions carry on about, and under all that, I was too close to falling in for good, dropping out'a my air of dream-search for Matt, right before my answers thinking their own questions, fessed up.

"I'm rambling. Sorry. I get that way, sometimes."

"Please. Continue."

"You're not bored?'

"It's better than Hit Radio. Don't we get any other channels?"

"Power lines kill anything but the strongest ones."

You know when you got that feeling in the bottom of your stomach? Like, you're really scared about something, and your whole body gets that rush? You're sure? Let's say a big scare-not a little tingle; a massive, meager-scrape your life back from otherwise sure death, or general major head-limb mutilation. We were in this old taxi, a poor excuse for an automotive contraption at best, even by Indian standards, and a bullock-cart pulled out of a dirt alley right in front of us. The driver screamed and put his hand over his face, (even though we weren't even that violently close), alerting me and this mash-potato faced Englishman sharing the cab, that there were no brakes whatsoever, a fact a minute before would have authenticated, had the driver's emphatic (no synchromesh) downshifting been questioned. Nothing like that ever seems out of place in a place wholly out of place. Did making great geargrinding crunches make the insane more insane? So, time slowing down let me think plenty o-thoughts. There was the slow moving cart pulled by the animals we were plummeting into. There were other cars we might hit instead. The driver was testing the non-existent emergency brake-a wooden bedpost arrangement with three bolts anchoring it to a hinge on the floor. It had a hole drilled in the bottom with a rusty cable pulled through, knotted rather carelessly on its far side. He recollected himself, placed both feet to the dash, seeming to forget his first, callous, We're gonna die by Vishnu's will. reaction, and pulled back hard, one knee balancing the old cab's out-of-balance tires' shake coming through the bent steering wheel. I could see the people's eyes starting to get very wide, and their wooden cart loomed in our cracked, yellowed windshield. "We're gonna hit them, and kill something." That's what I calmly thought. We're fulla bad luck. This really sucks. We're getting closer and slowly (ever so) not getting quite so close. That hundred feet took forever. It was enough time to write an entire book about the changing expression on the face of the driver, grimacing his frenzied relation with the bowing bedpost handle, objectifyin' the film of airborne phlegm from coughing outrageous hacks of cheap-tobacco lungs, fed up with it all. His oily reflection, was a caricature in its own right, shining dully back from the front seat first-hit noise directly before it happened. I remember this cracking, next thing. I think I was looking out the window, like- "fuck it" If I die, (oranyone dies), that's the cards' call. I had so lost the me kinda fear, I thought. . . I'm lucky to have a few seconds of time to a look around. Bye Earth, I was thinking. It was sure fun, mostly. Then I got wrenched forward, as we plowed under the carriage of a rough wooden cart. Some-dammedthing flew past my head and smashed the windshield from the inside out, a bunch of people screamed, the car came to a stop and my face felt all wet. That's what I remember. The door fell off when I tried to open it, the guy next to me wasn't breathing'n, I staggered out and looked back at the wretched state of things. That's you in there, I thought. You're dead.

Miraculously, nothing happened to the people in the cart. They were thrown straight in the air when we submarined thier world, tumbling around the ire of wood-and-metal meeting, with nothing more than scratches, scraped bruises, and wide-open eyes. I sat wondering what happened for a few miniature eternities. Someone was talking to me from a million miles away- in Hindi? The joke is lost on yours-truly. All I remember is four teenaged girls that sat at a table, bragging their latest conquests. Like it's a good feel you've been split open, or your hips are all bruised. That's love, and you should be heaving that chest in and out, being crushed by a slack-jawed fisherman who plied you with underaged drinks, copped a feel and offered you a hundred bucks. "It'sll feel good. Too good. You'll see." Bruised hips. Beard-scraped face. No condom. What's he got to worry about? She makes up a different scenario, morphing intimate to sordid, and back, all over again. One wants to go to Harvard, one to Yale. "You all right there?" Huuh? "I said, you all right?" Yea. Aall right, sure. Dead, but all right. He spoke perfect English, and let me balance my precarious thoughts, either there, or in butchered high school Spanish. He laughed later. "I knew you weren't a speaker." How come? "I didn't sound right. I don't know a word of it, but what you said was . . ." Garbage. I'm surprised I found any of it, laying around up there. Must have been the impact. Rattled it loose from the place everything goes you forget. Sonuvabitch. I hardly even went to the class, let alone stayed awake for it. Guy was from Deli. Real polished. He said the Englishman's pockets were stripped before the ambulance took him away. I still wasn't sure if I was dead or not. Probably not, 'cause if I was dead, I wouldn't be breathing, or bleeding. Damned v-cut over that eyebrow. See it? I'll be damned if the hospital didn't stitch it up with a needle and thread for fifty cents. No shit. A needle and fuc-ckin' sewing thread! You sterilize this? I should'a asked her. She's probably a seamstress; doesn't know a thing about proper medicine. Anyway . . .yea. I was picked up by this guy-he read a lot. He had a room full of books and kooky shit piled on the window sills. I stayed with him six days- musta had a concussion, something . . .hell. I had a headache to beat the band. I'd lay there and look at his cracked ceiling and he'd talk about how Westerners didn't understand India at all. Din't even see it, he reckoned. He talked for five days straight, them left for Deli. Left me in the lurch with all those books and no money. Bastard kyped my wallet, left a note saying he'd be back with it, "Sorry, but desperate dimes demanded destiture measures." Whatever the hell that meant. (He spoke better than he wrote.) There was a lot of rice, and a wad of tea, so I didn't go hungry.

"What's the matter?"

"I was trying to remember the name of the book I read three times."

"Didn't have much else to do, I suppose."

"My head hurt when I stood up for more than two hours. He had a nice mound of pillows and a sort of a couch, folded in the corner of the room. I made myself completely comfortable, settled down for a stay, and read everything I could find in English."

"G- er, how long were you there?"

"Donno. Two weeks? Maybe even more."

"Did you think he ditched you?"

"Nah. He was a wealthy man in India, to have all those books and things. He would have kicked my all-white ass out, or drugged me, and trundled out the baggage. No- he was coming back. It was only a matter of when."

"You still had your passport?"

"In my bag. I reckon he wanted me to stay."

I read all tha-crazy Indian fairy-tale shit, fulla gods banging each other, some other stories, a buncha philosophy, and a book of aurvedic medicine. I thought it was a load of nonsense,

at first.

They were pretty bad translations, but something about them got to me. I kept reading ('cause there was nothing better to do) and started to get this funny feeling. It was like. . . I was hearing my own culture's stories with different names and costumes. I was in a kind of loop, where all stories equaled one story, and all photographs were trying to get the same essential thing on film. Aeurveic medicine addressin' the things beneath the treatments and causes of their explanations-that was a trip, like, there's a lot of ways to fiddle with big pictures' resolutions, and Aurvada or Western were slingin' into the same home base, raising a sudden duststorm we thought was the very thing itself. Do you get what I'm gettin' at? Maybe I'm not saying it very well. The stories we picture thought (think) are the real thing, aren't. We are the pictures the photographers in a hundred thousand different cultures are trying to capture, to represent the unrepresentable with. Yea. I'm one version of a person, when I could have been a thousand different people; underneath, I'm all that same person. You get that? It was the first time a story spoke its truth, by saying it wasn't the truth. It said the picture I'd bled for (so calmly) was a thousand-in-one choice to explain something bigger. Something I didn't get.

Fuck. Let me start all over again.

My head was pounding, and full of crazy ideas. I read the Vedas for English dumbshits, and started to think I had to pound my head on a wall to understand them, but I's knocked my head an' didn't understand them. That's the thing. I thought I didn't understand, so I seemed to be above them, looking down. Everything began to make sense, in making no sense whatsoever. Whatever I read sounded like every interesting thing I've ever read. Like I was galaxy-looking a long way away at things we use everyday, and never think twice about. . .you know water and how we're 96% of the stuff? How often do you really think about that? You're full of questions, like pictures wanting titles and names under them, so we know water from dry land when we're looking on it's canvas, and I mean the sail of a boat. I read and read, and at one point, it seemed kinda lucid, like . . . it had to make sense. When Rakeesh, came back, I tried to tell him about it.

"Is this what you mean, when you say westerners never see India?"

"No. But you are closer to a seeing you than most tourists are, I think."

"Closer to seeing what? Myself?"

"How else, one to understand God?"

"I thought God couldn't be understood?"

"Yes."

He wasn't much help.

He had my cashed checks, my passport, and some strange stiff bark he spent the whole next day grinding to dust, Omming and chanting a holy story till I was half-nuts, he watered my deceased-headache thirst with Tso-someoneorother's medicinal liquor. Shit had roots, and bugs, flora and faunas galore init. I closed my eyes and drank. Wasn't half-bad. "What's it for?" I asked him later. "It gets you ready for this." he said, pointing at the ochre-colored dirt he'd hammered the bulky strips into. Yea? What's that for? "You'll see" It was in that sing-song, head-rocking self-satisfied Indian kinda voice. 'You'll see', indeed. I left the next day, before the bastard toked the stuff up. He was a danger to my condition, not to mention a thief. Probably wanted to drug me up, so he could steal my shit again. Thanks for nothing. I told him. "It is a profound gift, as you say." was his only response. He pushed a pile of the hammer-slammed bark into my bandaged hand, smiled, and took a step back. He bowed, like a monk dons a hundred times at a temple. The bark was wrapped in a shred of white-raggedy silk.

"What do I do with this?!"

He shrugged.

I had a big scar over my eye, still red and angry with the alien germs and fouled smells floating around India's atmosphere. Those three hours stuffed a lot of sweaty people in the railroad car, while the pathetic train system tried to find its way out of the station. Yonder, was the border. It tossed and turned in a pounding-head sea of heat, beady eyes, soaked clothing, and disease. The short, old man crushed next to me had one mangled arm hanging limply at his side, his other sleeve folded back with a piece of rusty wire (where its swarthy compliment should have been). The wire kept carrying off the loose strings of my T-shirt, scratching my sun-blasted shin as he knelt to cough unspeakable red globs of God doesn't even want to know what on the already-unspeakable floor. I was trapped in the cattle cart hell. All these people were the same that wide-eyed us before we plowed into their livelihood. What happened to the to the driver? To the Pommie who wasn't breathing? Maybe I'm hurt worse than I thought. Everything swindles me in this fuckin'place. Death teased, friends steal my money, girls die a slow-motion Matt ennui, ghosts speak, then disappear . . . and what I look for is nonexistent, but I have to look for it anyway. Thank God I'm taller than these ants, and can breathe. Who didn't want that? Why am I chaos? Archie, Ma-Marv-Marvin, Syn. . .Synergy . . . all names, the stories behind them. . . what's it all mean? We're cul-desacs, thinking we're bigger than we are. We think there's some energy that makes Earth inmates, immortal free-nationalist whirled-universal canisters of answers, and holier-than-thou questions. We're all, every one of us, just as unfortunate as Matt-Mathew-

Math-yu . . . just as stupid, and crammed-in as the Indians, just as lost as the souls who think they'll come back Burghers and Brahmen. I'm here with all the unfortunates, sweating, and slavishly waiting for the God to move this fucking train engine forward, and they think I'm luckier than them. I am. Why am I? Because I can leave this mayhem? But what I leave, is what I enjoy; it is what I run to. Mimi ransoms her here for now's later reward, biding time in beady-eyed stares of diseased, destitute masses, who are lucky, for being able to revere ideas before the western idea of luxury, of riding a train, instead of not going anywhere, instead of waking up to find their lives at end, the legs that used to carry them rotting off, the child they lavished love on dying, getting skinnier, and blacker before their eyes. They are lucky, because they ride the hell to the hell that won't pack them in. I am just as lucky. It's true. And, why isn't it true? Because I'm here (there and wherever) with the same unanswered questions as everybody else. Could it be man is nothing but a longing to see who and what he really is? Christ! I was off my rocker. I guess I had a fever, standing there like a moron for hours on end, waning into that craziness (that was normal-ness for India). When I woke up, they'd stolen half the stuff in my bag.

It got to the point . . . whoa! I remember saying my own name and listening carefully, and it didn't mean anything to me. Just a buncha letters and sounds. That's me? Irrelevant. Who cares? Who gives a good-gawdamn? Could never mean anything less than numbers, or sticks and stones lined up? That's me. (Points at a telephone pole.) See? Indeciperable. Indians; never mind. North Americans; they prob'ly understood this. It matters, and it matters not a kilobyte, trilobite, or unessential itty-bit. You sure? You're asking me with that I'm not asking look. Sure I'm sure. I'm as assured as you can be, when you don't know a goddarn thingabout anything anymore. See how it gets? I was way out to sea, paddling a life raft with no campaign to wage, no compass, no food, and a dying need to get somewhere important. Anywhere; but it had to be somewhere in particular. Ah-was flailin' water with the wrong end o-the paddle, hopin' to get somewhere by the heady grave of pure brute force. Grave. Yaah. That's a good word to describe it. Fuckin' hell-that was a rough time. I was trying to get a border, to have a bread break, some kind'a philosophical rest and repast with people who knew what I was haulin' around with me. You know, relax. I needed some apostles to kick with, eat drink and be merry, think about things, basically-I had to GET THE FUCKOUT-A DODGE.

We rodeo-rode atop the madness on diesel-fired steam-engine cars, and they shuttled us from place to place under one know-nothing pretext or another. I don't even know where we ended up. Somewhere out of Benares, where we jammed on a bus that broke down sixty kilometers later. Finally, I had to hitchhike.

What a wild place that is. Benares. Didn't I say that already? Monked-up and stinkin' of burnin' bodies. Bright colors-funeral dirges trompin' night and day through busy crazed angst of be holy Now! by payin' your money for homely chants at your onward-journey funeral finale-and by the way, better leave some extra, because people steal the expensive firewood, and they'll throw your part-burnt corpse into Holy Ganges water, where Cholera victims to Earth float, awaiting crocodile jaws. You wouldn't want that, would you? Sheesh. Ganesh and Shiva! Calling all holy homages! as you pass the dying men begging for some pieces of sandalwood, barely moving from their homemade cots. They lay their theoretical last daydreams for everyone to see, having weathered the passage to the only place worthy to die in. In Benares, dying is big business. The last great tromp; the last prostratin' crawl; your last holy hours, decaying from loaves of rock-hard bread, open festering sores, and the fear there's no softhearted men left to thirst for someone's else's soul. Just a few strands of cilia (chunks of wood) to let me wade to eternity. Give me the means to die. What are they saying? Why do they look at me, that eaten way? I've never seen anything like it. In the morning, the haze of dead lingers off the surface of the river tens of thousands descend on, for bath, drink and rejuvenation. Why don't they sicken, draining its air, and water of ash-dumped dying? Because (I'll tell you:) they believe Ganges is the holiest of holies. Their belief stops the river's ills, all except death, which they desire above their lives. Their incantation to Earth, is living to die, to be reborn, to live to die, and be redeemed-be justified for all that suffering, by having a new yearning-a new type of escape, by never having to house yourself in an Earthly body again, and feeling its manifest suffering, to wish for the thing the disembodied don't want.

Suddenly, I wasn't so eager to go. Why? Read my lips: Everything was unpacked, and packed up tight. What was I saying? Benares, the holy city. It was a totally delightful crock of shit. Don't get me wrong-thought it was great. It was just how I was feeling. It was the living answer to the I never had question. Everyone came there to be holy; it was a Mecca (though I haven't been there, I expect it's the same as Jerusalem; though maybe not) but how can anyone be holy, trying so hard? Westerners go there to study things they could study at home, taking their holy flute, sitar, and secret oral Hindi lessons (didn't you know the Sitar takes seven continuous lives to master?) while smoking hash with the hashhead Sadus, self-cangradulatory, thinking they're getting somewhere. Somewhere like Nowhere isn't the same thing. It's the biggest circus of all to see what a circus really is. You're smack (and literally, if you want) in the middle of the comic cosmic jolly-joke in Benares. I walked around there tragically-laughing, crying inside, thinking about thinking all the time. It was right in the pocket of the pants everyone's wearing. It was quite unlike any thigh, boob, dick or wanting look, but it was that thing (or series of things) too. We wanted to be enlightened. We wanted it, like they wanted sex, or some car-like the beautiful Packard of the nutcase who wanted Mimi. Fuck. I should'a sold her there and an-then. All in the mind. All a crock of shit. Whoopie! I was a backwards shirt at a suit and tie function. I watched the Sadus smoke that harsh hemp, rough hand-roll in thick belching smokestacks. All day long. Every day. Did they know? They didn't take it very seriously. They make a joke, sniggering silently, at the dread-head hipster-westerners seeking enlightenment being voodoo cool, snatching pictures of each other, laid-out prone in learningnothing, meditation lesson collecting Don't you wish! you'd been there stores of tales for home. I felt sorry for Syn, thinking of him here. I felt sorry for myself. Infusions of God bring the hardest souls down. I, soul; I am because I am; what are the rest of you doing here?!

What a man-made sacredness it all was. I loved it, and I hated it too.

"What did you get from the place?"

"'What did I get from the place?'"

"Yea. To love and hate must give insight."

"I'd say so. It gives you . . . Mmm. Not sure how I'll say it."

It's all steamed into one, the love and hate. We hate so we can love; we love so we can know the sacredness of hating-because that points the way back to hate, from which, there can be redemption. We create beliefs we'll later prove wrong, just to create again, trying to find the correct solution, of which there's none. I think there's no solution except the act of creation. We pray to deities of it, ask their forgiveness when we transept their sacred "unknowable" places, eat within the column of their blessings, stare straight out the portal to the images we've created, too naming them the unnamables to notice. Haahaa! All those sorry humans bathing in the holy stinking Ganges, thinking that's God . . . it's pathetic. It is god, and it is pathetic. How can slices of a dead science, finger absolutes in-between? I'll tell you: For an opportunity to become the new dominant religion. You get that? It carves out its own version of what's good, and "Gadzooks!" what we thought was good is bad. In every instance, there is god, and there is delving deeper. Straight to unending endingness. Darkness sin blasphemy evildoing flip-siding good, and proper delicious lascivious discoveries' (that first will save the world, destroying it later) sensual pleasure and abased neoisadism . . . you seenow? How vanished, and how plastic it is? It's right here with us, looking the question : Where is it? right in the kisser, ready to pop a good self-serving fist right where it counts. We're the question! We fall down, holding a cracked and aching jaw, wondering what happened. Mostly, we'll call it a vanguard-a ruffian, a Mafia thug, reckless nitwit, thick-headed numskull, a troublemaker-you know-the worst, in the worst of life's luck. How funny, to see it's good side lolling over puking our blatant misinterpretation.

"Madness. I've never heard anything like it."

"I know you're kidding. It's all too obvious, when you've cracked your head in an accident, traveled in an oven, been ripped off while you're sleeping, hung out breathing dead-body fumes too long, listened to Sadus suck bubbling herb till it sounds like music of the old-time spheres, and had one bang-lasse too many. Syn told me about that. I half-expected to see him at any moment, poking around. He's probably vexed he left. Damned fine herb in that place."

"Did you ever see him again?"

"Nope. Saw his friend though."

"The one you thought was nonexistent?"

"Uh-huh. In Nepal."

I got tired of the India, after a couple of weeks. It was like a dead-serious Disneyland people still partied in. Something about starving people waiting to die in the holy of honey-n-milk places got me way down. I managed to talk to a few of them-mostly old British Raj subjects, no doubt, and asked why they dragged their tired bones all this way. "You mean this question?" one asked me. "There is no other honorable place to die. Is best to be consumed by-and-by the river." but didn't you weaken yourself to the point to no recovery, by living the vow to come here? (I thought he might have recovered from god-knows whatever was killing him now, if he hadn't bumped along in an animal cart two thousand kilometers.) "Ah! But in the vow is the recovery!" (?) I looked in his darkening eyes, lined by deep circles of fervor, impending death, and the hope of resurrection. "Why not live now?" I asked him.

"I am." he fell back, exhausted, my question stunned-his answer preceding a vile fit of raspy-sputum coughs.

"God be yours." I said, for no reason alltogether.

And I drenched myself in the holy Ganges, thinking about this man, the philosophy he followed, the books I'd read, and the blackening powder I carried in the little white shred of silk. I wonder why the thieves didn't steal that! (Frankly, that bark scared the shit out of me. I don't know why I couldn't throw it away.)

"How'd you get there?"

"A ghost pushed me."

"Matt?"

"Hell-if I know."

"When was that?"

The next day, I woke up with a raw-beer hangover. Don't ask me what happened. I think I speaketh the truth, but that could be totally wrong. I met this untouchable dude, you know-one of the lowest low castes (Government claims don't exist anymore) when I went see if Raj man was cold, laying out there dying, and all. A scroungy rag-tag was praying for him, I was guessin' in turn for some of his clothing when the time came. It was a an odd, eerie scene, compounded by flickering light of distant bonfires consuming human flesh, my barely-mended head, and a lot of alcohol. I thought they, the untouchables, I mean-weren't fit to pray for a holy man? Another mythos was smashed. I walked up and swore, though I didn't mean to, because the old man looked to me, and (didn't it?) his whole face had gone black. Even a moron could see he wasn't much more for the world. The untouchable rained chants in Hindu mumble; I stood there swaying, with a creepy feeling rising in my spine, started to back up slowly, tripped a little, turned around . . . The untouchable walked behind me, issued me to the right, the left, straight ahead . . . I was thoroughly lost. We waded through the flotsam of humans' existence to a stinking mud hut-a hole in an overpopulated maze of waddle-slopped sides, complete a sewing relic of irrevocably-dirtied flower print for a footwipe, some sheet plastic, suncracked and useless, for his roof . . . we drank-no words exchanged . . .very strong, unctuous-thick liquor . . . who asked what it was? We drank in the shadow of death, like it was normal. I think I came more lucid, pulled out the powder, held it out to him. He bows down. His hands shade the silk, like it's too bright to see from his dirty, dreary life. He takes a little pinch, throws it at the light, and it poofs into a bilious, acrid smoke. Wow! Sounds good when I tell it, huh? I should'a been a story teller.

"You've got a hell of a vocabulary."

"Think so?"

"Especially when you forget you're talking."

"That's good. Forget the thing you're right in the middle of doing."

So anyway, the stuff hurt my nose. . . Like I'd sucked a hooterfull ov ammonia at extra-close range. I coughed, felt dizzy, and staggered out-retched my guts out-whoo! Don't know what did it, the booze, the beer, dude's death, or the smell of the guy's pad. All of it, probably. Shit. Woke up feeling like hell, went out for my tea, and bumped into the same guy. He hid his face, turned and slunk off. Not kosher to fraternize with whites during the day, I thought. Ten steps later, there he was again, in a totally different direction. I doubletaked big time, looked back to where he was, looked forward again, and there nobody was there. I'm bad off, I thought. Gandhi hexed me. Do you know what he didn't do next? Show up again. I donned my tea, shook my head out, turned around, and goddamn if someone didn't shove me!"

"Who?"

"Nobody did, that's the thing. There wasn't anyone near me."

I packed my meager bag that morning.

"You take the bus?"

"Too right. Six bucks for a deluxe roof-rack seat."

You can't even stand up in those fuk-kin' Indian busses, gotta wade through chickens pigs bags of rice and kids clamorin'' all over you, stooped over like an eighty year old, no seats, nothing. Twenty hours standing up-three bucks. It's no bargain, believe me.

"So you went to Kathmandu?"

"Where else?"

"Were you planning on flying home?"

"I wanted something different."

"What does that mean?"

"Hellif I know."

They wanted a bribe at the border. "For what?!" No reason. They have less money than I do. For them, it's the only reason. One guard went through my tatty stuff while the other wanted to know what's in my pockets. Nothin. 'Cept . . . that damned powder! He took one look at it and handed the stuff back, real slowly. I was freaked, then I looked at his eyes. . . I could tell he wanted me to take it . . . there was his outstretched hand shaking a little, those knurled Indian fingernails pointing straight up at the sky, invoking some protective Juju power. "What is this stuff?" I ask the extortion camaraderie. They wave me through. Eyebrows say a lot oftern-than-not, what's going on. Anyway, the stuff saved me a sizeable payoff, so I'd keep it. Nepal's border was a joke. People steamed through with all the stuff they could carry. They took one look at my visa and shook their riot clubs. Politely. This way please. At Kathmandu's city circle, I was dropped off. More like thrown off, really. They kept waving and shooing me down, till I climbed off my sunburnt, oilcanning platform of soybean fry-jugs, and vamosed. I can't imagine where that bus was going, except into town, and figured a single white male is bad luck when crossing this ancient perimeter. Hell, for all I know, the shit in in the silk scared them too. So I hoofed a lot of mud, alot of funky cars banging and junking escape to the mountains (India?), got splashed, hitched a ride on a tractor, and finally, got totally fucking lost. I was in these thousand-year-old rice paddies getting real soggy feet, on narrow slick tails that barely qualified as walkways (falling in, from time to time), asking anyone I was in ear-reach of "Katmando? Kathmatdu?" as stupidly as I could, to which they nodded emphatically, pointing at the ground. Yea, great. Then say something not so intelligent by pantomime, like shoving hands in mouth and masticating-food, need food, fakiest chair and a table you ever didn't see, and an old man takes me home. Travels a mile out of his way to deliver me to his daughter? I don't know. She dished me out a soul-renting soup that gave me the certifiable-worst case of gastro-eclectic farts Guiness ever smelt. It was good though, and she was pretty cute. I was on the "Kathmandu!" program again. She shyly milled about getting bags and making me wait, sit down! with both hands, ushering me a straw chair for some man with a half-sized ass. So I waited. I waited an hour; at least. In the meantime, I'd become an item of historical significance in the family house. Villagers poked their heads in and giggled, trying to ask me questions, touching my cheezy windbreaker with their wide Asian eyes, and generally immured in kooky Western knockwurst-headed tourism come knocking. All I wanted, were anti-directions to the Tractor farmer's wacky shortcut.

She took me to a chair lift, and pointed, making a little finger-walking through the Yellow Pages puppet show, like : Follow this. She bestowed this intelligence on my general loathe of good common sense, that I had to follow it, for better or worst. What that thing swayed and creaked obsoletely towards, I couldn't imagine. I never thought I'd see a chair lift stretch from horizon to horizon on flat, tropical ground. Oh, sure-eventually I hit a readable sign. Took me all goddamned day to get eight miles.

Crazy place, that.

"How come?"

"'How come', is the sort of question people who haven't been there ask."

"Can't you articulate it?"

"It's like asking villagers where the city in the city they live in, is."

"Tell me about it with patently metaphoric gesticulations, then."

Hell. The ski lift went some ridiculous distance, and used to function as a superhighway for goods, because there hasn't been a road to Kathmandu till just recently, as the history of human kind goes. They had to take absolutely everything apart, and carry it on Sherpa's backs, before that marvel of technology arrived. And we're talking everything. Cars and trucks, electric motors, steel I-beams . . .Even the chair lift itself. I mean, how did they turn the corners? Nepal's trails are windy and inherently treacherous. Christ! The place was Captain Nemo's bottom of the sea. You can look at shit there, even now, you'd never see anywhere else. Cows getting executed, heads cut off by one Gurka black-veiled sword drop, blood everywhere, pedal cabs leaden with flesh, flies buzzing around dirt-floor four foot ceiling butcheries-chick head offerings, weird noises, monks listening to ten foot brass horns, transported to ecstasy, incense posts clouding the air, live legends, and older-than-old religious stuff everywhere. At night, the city empties out, and ghosts roam the time of its heyday.

"Yea, that had some significance. I felt like someone was watching me there."

"Did you look up Synergy's friend?"

"Not right away."

I hadn't known anything till now. I know nothing at all now. That's suppose to mean something. I was a stupid-fuck living in the United States. Not even that! I was a mile deep, locked in the terra-firma of my miserable little part-time satiety, as dweller of a city, one minuscule block of it . . . in my wilder imagination, I was a citizen of a state. The whole country was too much to think about. People from New York were as alien as Mexicans, or Laotians. I was a regional characteristic, not deviation from the standard of what I'd been told to believe. That's accounting talk, but I don't even want to know what it means. It's a colossal crock of shit, and I was it's smell-right, deodorized lid. I wandered around like a roadweary pilgrim, having reached a destination. Now what? The mendicant tries not to wonder aloud.

"So what did you do?"

Smoked shifted space, ate apple pie, yak cheese pizza, and breads . . . too many good things to count. Met some folks, drank a lot of beer and homemade brandy, relaxed, relaxed some more, got a cycle to die on in the every dire accident that's just Karma, learned organics of road travel, and finally, tried Syn's hope-chest phone number. I guess it was a couple of weeks before I got around to it.

"Were you any closer to finding Matt?"

"Indoobitably. I was closer, for being farther from caring, or even expectin' to get any directions to git there, where there is his quart of water added to a great big ocean."

I was a linesman, a ballgame official, markin' a lottery o-white hash-marks on the Indian tourist trail, dumping refuse, and helpful hindsights overboard-pictures; hell. My brain was cluttered with them. I'd try to tell people things . . . It was Pshhh-Wop-wopwop! (he pretends he has a steering wheel.) Hopeless. Like driving cross-counrty with'a flat-tire I'd open my mouth, and more great super unspeaking things full of promise would fall over that rail, in the ocean of to much mayhem, too much making too-little sense. . .nooks and crannies of things, hiding, waiting, with gigantic guns to blast whatever can't make its conforming, conform to . . .whoa. It's mad. Everything's dusty. It's old there. I'd try to tell people where I'd been, and where I was going, so futily. Every thing and sight and smell was irreconcilable with the cozy nest words came form from. The nest is safe haven from the things we can't see-those things we came here to seem to seem to see, by not seeing anything at all. Kathmandu was all that's endpoint. You had top off the white chalk follow-me line mind, step into the guy with the Packard's car, take his money, and jump back out-fast, scoff at Mr. Andrew, his bunghole drugs, the hundred dollars buying off Syn's fear of staying, and Mimi's little mime play. . . watch Matt's dally with death. Here ist-iz. All if it.

What will I do about it?

Go home?

Hell with that.

I took up with a dude who wore dirty Nepalese clothing, with brilliant gold and silver. He had different kinds of semi-precious stones set in, dig this-animal bones. The bones represented attributes of the animals they'd once been (when they were walking around), and the stones had different healing properties, based on how they'd got sewn into his garb, worn on his fingers, through his hair-you name it. The guy was operating in a very different sphere of reality. He'd take their symbolic mumbles seriously, and count the number of steps it took to reach some particularly vitriolic (a word he liked to use) temple. 'Don't hapharzardly walk to important places; think about why you're doing it. Leenger on each street you pass; loook at the stuff in the kerb; smeel the flowers growing-and then you'll rally arrive.' Guy cracked my own too-serious state-up, big time. He was out to lunch, eternally and permanent-like. Walking around the city with him was a-kin to dropping ahit of acid every couple-a hours. You know how they say, it doesn't do anything after awhile? You keep taking mushrooms, or LSD, or whatever, even downers or alcohol, and you can't even feel their effects anymore? That's because you are the effect, after a fashion. When that's true, coming down's the scary high nobody wants too much of. Anyway, I'm notso sure why I got off on that, except to say this dude was high on the last breath he took after the next last breath, and so on. His blood was a ragin' river of natural pharmaceuticals. I never once saw him smoke, drop, shoot or drink anything. He was too fucked up on life, busy countin'out thirty three steps up some pagoda, talking about the holy "Spanyards" killin' the Cubans, ("A race among fabled races."), suckin' in the latest dung or flower smells, and praying to the God ov-whatever. He was one seriously tripped-out hombre. Snooped all over the city, found the greatest stuff-smart as hell too, no mealy-mouthed dumbshit. He spouted celestial seasonings for every mundane occurrence, full o'common sense-downright nascent, where other people liked to look the wrong way. He's the one who'd yell and shout to look at something closer, by just looking at it, as if it mattered, and not saying a single thing a-tall. The way he examined things, it was like he bottled it up to take it to a scientific exhibit, sawing laser beams of iris'-getting-smaller through the item of whaterver-it was that was takin' his face from somethin else. If he looked hard at a thing, you could be sure there was some other reason than why you'd look at it that made him look there. Anyway, you're shaking your head like-yea sure. . . Tell me, do you handle freaks with such admiring kid gloves often? And I say, no I don't.

There was something relatively special about him. Somethin' . . .

Yea. I'll tell you.

Th'dude was a regular marvel.

We eventually went on a trek. What else do you do? It wan't-exactly a problem to live there forever. I spent ten bucks in a week, forty seven in a month; get the idea? Black markets are great. So we went on a reekin' creaky bus for motion-sickness travelers. No kidding; those people had never been on busses before, I'm sure of it. Everyone had a green face, n'puke-splattered shoes. I did right-fine, not blowin' chunks till the end of the trip.

"You got sick again?"

"Too much."

The bus had about three glass windows in it, 'ncluding the windshield. People were hangin' on out the doors the sucker was so full. We picked up everyone who high-fived us, or could run fast enough to glob on, for eleven hours of bumping, grinding gear changes (on hairpin hairball one-lane roads). We must have doubled it's already-full occupancy. Up and down, brakes smelling bad-metal on metal for sure, painful first-gear long grades-even the old ladies had to run, and get yanked to the doorway bristling with people, trying to hang on. The engine was so anemic, they didn't dare stop on a mountain grade. Yea. It was all pretty cool-like, till it started to hail. We were packed in so tight, there was no moving; I had a window seat (I thought that was good, then I had a lap full of ice) and froze my fucking asshole out. My pack, that was well-equip with borrowed sweaters and the like, was lashed to the roof, under a ton and a half of Indian sack rice. This sucks, I told my friend. "Center on earth's innerital warmth." he told me.

I tried.

"What kind of sick?"

Where the road stopped, I knew I couldn't stay on that bus another instant. I climbed out the window frame, took twenty steps, bolted my pants down and shat a torrent. Two seconds later had to puke. I was shaking like an aspen in a tornado, trying to stand up, and a dirty

pug-nosed pig pushed me out of the way-knocked me right off-balance, so I fell with my pants around my ankles, eye-level with this brute who was slurpin' up my intestinal rejection. All the commotion got the dogs riled up. As I steadied myself on a dead, spindly tree, while the menagerie found by stomach contents, and happily lapped it up. That'll make-a person sicker than the first sick they had.

"Yuck."

"The punch-line was spitting. You know how you've gotta spit after a good puke? Well goddamn if roosters don't snatch green mouth oysters 'fore they even hit the ground. It'sa country-wide phenomenon. They'll saw their necks back and forth, trying to slide the nasty snot-monsters down. Whooah. Can hardly think about it."

"I feel sick myself."

"Told you."

"This guy you're with. . . what's his name?"

"Now, this may seem a little peculiar to you, but I never bothered asking."

"It's rather peculiar."

"We got along right from the start-like we knew each other. It took so long to come the name problem, I guess we just ignored it."

I felt like hell for a day, then got good enough to walk. Good enough to talk without my teeth shuttering in the air. It was a funny sight, where we were. They had a bridge just put in, meticulously constructed in some other country, all its parts numbered and shipped then retinker-toyed together here. . . a thousand feet down the ravine, rustin' under a kajillion pound rock some earthquake dislodged. But everyone carried on, carrying stuff, up, and down, a rough-hewn, near-vertical switchback connecting the severed thoroughfare. They were pick and shovelin' this boulder (which had the magnitude of a skyscraper) in a futile attempt to excavate their beautiful bridge before the next century. Bus to foot. Nobody even flinched. We walked out asses off, on the road through and from the nowhere of those mountains. I was in a daze; just one front of the other; walking. . . walking . . . and somebody grabbed my arm, pointing up a verdant valley. "Trekking." he said. "Need guide?"

No guide, thanks.

"Sounds like you did need one."

"Nah. Once you're on the trail, it's hard to go wrong. Besides, I had a map, a whole ten-cents worth, that was two shades better than hand-drawn, and based entirely on a geological survey in 1929. I didn't think the routes had changed much in the last two-thousand years."

"What struck you about the place most?"

"It was a first. I'd never walked through a marijuana forest before. Ahkid you not-they were trees of pot-They were so tall, I didn't know what was going on, except for that smell. They laughed, the porters carrying too many wheels of Yak cheese for a normal human being, when I lit a dried bud hanging there, and breathed in. Damned thing burned like a log of firewood! These fantasies were fifteen or twenty feet high! Not so good mind you, but plenty of it. Grubby urchins used it to rub between their blackened palms, trying to refine a sellable product. Only tourists, old people, and crazies smoked, we found out. That's why the porters smiled."

"We should go into the import-export business." my travel mate sighed. "All this lovely mother nature, dropping on the ground." I didn't know you partook, I commented. "I don't. Still....." No kidding. I know what you mean. We talked shit for an hour, then shut up for three. It was a pretty good arrangement. After three days of good hikin', we got up to some monastery flying heaps of tattered rags. It was a barren stop on the long, stone-strewn voyage to Tibet (and beyond, no doubt). It was hard t'believe people'd lived up there damn-near forever."

I don't know why I'm telling you this, except; up there was the first time I had a full-on dream with Matt talkin'to me. It must have taken altitude to wake me to his domain. From then on, I had a resource for understandin' the dead. We stayed up there, watching monks for a week. On the eleventh day, the waterwheel running the yak and yogurt works smashed to bits in a flash flood. The big-cheese Lama in residence, asked us to accompany him down.

I was ready. It was too fucking cold up there.

"You mind? I ought to get a bite of something to eat."

"You're buying"

"Burgers okay?"

"Longas they aren't yak."

The trip down the valley just about killed both of us. The old guy had a hundred and fifty pounds of broken machinery on his back, all heavy old gears and bronze bearings (which were probably high-tech, considering some of the other setups we saw), and he walked like he was possessed, never rested more than ten minutes, though his back was bent with age, and his eyes were weak. Everyone passing us Namasday'd, bowed, smiled, handed us things . . . that part was good. The rest of it was certified torture. Stupidly, and I mean real stupidly, we volunteered to carry some of his broken bits, stuff heavy enough not to shame us, walkin' next to this veritable mule of a holy man. Ten miles down the route, I conditioned pain-frazzled nerves to deaden long enough to make it ten more feet, get out a nubbin of pencil, and write my last earthly wishes (before it-was all over). I don't know how the hell I made it off that mountain range. The old guy kept asking if I needed some weight taken off, pointing to his load, from mine. I thought it was a joke at first. Maybe it was; I'll tellyou what wasn't. My legs, neck, and back were sore for a month.

"What about the dreams with Matt you mentioned?"

"Oh yes; the dreams. Did I passover them? Shoot. I guess that walk out is even more etched in my mind." Matt was goin' at me with a false face; I asked him to take it off, and he didn't want to. I'm your mirror. Your twin. What-you think of that, Ma? I'm your face. We're joined-you and me. He went on like that for half an hour; I woke up and thought: Oh gawd, I don't want to dream that again. 'And I want you too. I want only you. You're eyes. I want you tolerating me, I want you looking at me; I am you. I am your hour's last gasp . . . and shit like that. Next time I woke up, I tried to stay awake, but the whole room stayed cold with the dream. I hardly knew where I was; I was afraid of the little monk's cell we stayed in, afraid of the breathing, the biting air, and dank sooty smells.

I can't go back into that dream.

I can't.

"But you did. Right?"

"Sure didn't. I lay there looking at the dark ceiling, thinking about outboard motors."

"Huh?"

"You know, takin' them apart, piece by piece."

"Sounds like something a prisoner in solitary confinement needs to do, to keep from going crazy."

"Keep from craziness. Yea. Sleep can be crazy. Too right;"

On the second night, I was sitting in front of him agin, looking at a long umbilical cord between our navels, bulgin'-n pulsin' yellow bile, shit, blood and nasty blue stuff. He grabbed and squeezed it, (with an insider knowledge of what it was), and my brain exploded into images, and old childhood pains. I finished the night in a cold sweat, yelling gibberish. "I thought about that alot up there-the 'going crazy' stuff. Must'av been the altitude. I was always alittle dizzy."

"Sure sounds like it."

"Don't think I wasn't thinkin' that!"

Ya can't know what it's like, till you've been there.

Matt came to me a week later, all cut up and bleeding. Why didn't you stop me, Ma? I didn't know what would happen. Why didn't you tell me it would end like this? He turned around slow, hardly moving his legs. His back was all shredded red meat. Look Ma, look what happen'd! Look Ma! Why did it have to happen? He kept hobbling around, turning clockwise to face me-that weird mask was over his face, and . . .

"What?"

"Yea. Matt's front was all shredded too. He was takin' rheumy breaths, through a rip in his windpipe, all glistening scabs and pus. Shit. It was awful."

I wouldn't even call them nightmares. I thought it was some part of Matt still on the planet, trying to get fixed. I'd wake up shaking, wantin' to go back intathat dream, to talk to him; but I was too afraid to, all at once. I started to tell Mr. Lama about it, making sleepy hands-together pray-mimes, eyes closed, fingers butterfly-flapping up to dream world, eyes open knife-to-chest harikari blood tears other person . . . you can arrest me for being stupid, but I swear the shlepper understood me. I'm absoluutely sure of it.

"He put his face right up to mine, and blew."

"Blew what?"

'In my face."

"I don't geet-it."

"Blew air in my face."

"What's that suppose to mean?"

"Ah well, I thought about it for quite a while."

That's when I called Syn's number. It rang ten times, then somebody answered.

Real slow.

Loooo?

Yea . . . English?

Yes. Speak-English.

How do you do. I'm a good friend of Synergy, who is friends with somebody at this number.

Synn-ergy.

Yes. He's a man from the United States, who was here visiting, not very long ago.

We have met him.

No kidding?!

Synergy has left here.

(I figured.) Is his friend still around?

Matthew is gone.

I got a shiver from the end of my toes, to the top of my hair.

Mathew. . . .ah, yea. When do you expect him back?

(I was almost afraid to hear the answer.)

So I met Matthew. Matthew was a Nepali man who'd once been to the United States. He'd been baptized sometime in his childhood by a fanatic group of Save the Heathens busybodies, who callously traded medical assistance for religious conversions. He was baptized out of a given name, and into a Christian charity. He didn't seem to care. For him, all occurrences were made-apparent gifts of the almighty. The ones you couldn't see were the cursed items of the world.

I had a real good friend named Matt, I told him right off. "Yes, Matt is a common name where you come from?" We met in a coffee house near Freak Street. "I have been told his was a great place in the bible." I vaguely remembered a story, or two. What happened to Syn? "Mr. Synergy? He has felt better, and returned to your home. Have you known him long?" The conversation seemed twisted; sideways to itself-who were we really talking about? The low ceiling crushed us; it's smoke lingered between our words. . . How 'long' is long? I felt we were talking about whole lifetimes, accordioned together into an exhale of sentence. Not too long. "That is a-shame. He is an impotsible man." Syn? Surely he meant: interesting? Ahh. . . . "What finds you in Katmandu?" I was viand for his questions' needs. It all seemed terribly futile. I don't know. "Quite. It is this way with many people." On and on it went. The more I talked to him, the more pointless everything seemed. He made me depressed. He was nice enough, but . . . so I said it. Why do you ask questions like that? "Like what do you speak of?" I listen to you, and get sad. "It was also this way with Mr. Syn. I wish I could defend myself from these demons that cast the spell on you."

He claimed he was possessed. He said his brother had a bad time with a village medicine man, and his whole family got hit by spells. "Even in the US, there were private talks with this demon, and his demon friends. In my end, it was time for me to go, because this smile you see, was very close to breaking." He had a tattered Life magazine on the table I was sightlessly flipping through. At the very moment he said that, my eyes riveted to the page of three police officers crying over the grave of one of their murdered partners. In the indeterminable minutes that flood from time standing still like that. I noticed my whole face was wet, and someone was whispering in my ear. "Tell him stop believing in them." What?! I look up and swear; he's intently focused on a point slightly below my nose, trembling slightly.

"He said, stop thinking about it. Stop believing."

"Who said?"

"Dunno. Either the demon, my death-friend Matt, my mind, or all of it, traffic-jammed together."

"What did you tell him?"

"Just that."

He started sobbing. I had to calm him for about an hour, but my eyes were so full sometimes too, I couldn't see anything It said . . . "Tell me again!" This was the equivalent of God-speak. What was going on with us? He thought disbodied voices were help (like angels) from the world slightly beyond.. "I have been waiting for years! Have you come all this way to tell me?!" and don't you know, I felt like I had! It was the utterly-nuttiest sensation. I felt like a messenger from God! It made me ornery, and a little scared afterwards, when I thought about it. How could I have taken that suggestion so literally? How weak-willed was I?! Fuckin'-hell. I was all over myself for breaking down like that. Something in the picture just ripped me up, like I was lookin' at myself watchin' Matt's dead body, shedding all the tears and twisted faces I wouldn't let mess up my tough-man image. I wasn't even thinking-I was hardly connected to my body, an' poof! some voice tears through my iron curtain that's suddenly turned to silk. It made me scared to think how close that world was-whatever it was.