for Holly

May, 2006


There are too goddamned many of me in this room, grappling over this stale machine, jabbing our fingers into each other’s eyes, swapping-out skin-grafts, tapping me on the shoulder every nineteen seconds, using up all the good oxygen...

"TWENTY FOUR HOURS!"

I need to brew another pot, or at least wrest out these last two molars before they ratchet back up into my skull, because the house is filling with flies. They pour, screeching at me, out of the furnace, dumping down in crisp, black static-electric mats on our faces, and by the time I discover just which one of us is writing this, we’ll all have run out of air in here.

"SPLIT THREE WAYS!"

But whoever is writing this has left me a trail of typographical errors and idiosyncratic punctuation habits...

"SINCE YOU BOUGHT ONE THIRD!"

...from which I can surmise the following: he is leaving me this trail intentionally, to throw suspicion not on himself but upon the man whom he is so abysmally and humorlessly impersonating, but behind this intention is a deeper motive, a need to be discovered for the poor imposteur that he his, and this need is, in itself, a message, though not necessarily to me, but you, his gentle reader. As I comb through his scribble, erasing, cutting and pasting, marking his misspellings in red, I realize that I have taken him out of his own writing and gently, insidiously, interpolated myself like compacted sour lozenges between his words; in being almost laughably unsuccessful at impersonating me, his would-be-scapegoat, he has impersonated himself impeccably, thus, proving to us once again just how precisely unreal a man he is.

"YOU OWN EVERYTHING!"

There are too goddamned many of me in this room, grappling over this stale machine. Between the armless one with the blunt scissor-segment prosthesis, the one-legged, three-dog-headed man, barking, belching, shitting out the words, "That’s it, I’m done!" like a suspect being interrogated under purple high-beams, the blue corpses keep piling, their faces matted in dry, dead flies. There are less of us now. The air is sweet; it is not a good sweet. Bones of each other’s that we’d broken in these last skirmishes are now healing into bricks and pipes, limbs sawed off above the joint with bitten leather strips and 90-proof-backyard-still-applejack are now growing into floor lamps, table legs and window frames. A rattling sounds in the attic, the man in starched shirt and black suspenders is lumbering down the stairs. I hear him just outside our door, now, black phlegm rattling in his black lungs, wheezing, barking, shitting out the words, "I’ll take it with me to my grave!"

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