They live in a beautiful house. It floats above the parking
lot, autonomous and quiet, nothing above and nothing below. There
are those who think strings are holding it in place. There are
others, closer to the truth, who suppose the physics of pure air
have something to do with it: suppose it's embedded somehow, that
somehow around it air has become an almost solid thing.
Yes, they live in a beautiful house, an impossible house,
the inner structure of which is something like this: a little
after eight o' clock in the morning, he wakes up. What dreams he
leaves behind on the bed (there are small beads there of blood
from where a cat as friendly as vacant smoke scratched him) are
impossible to tell, as impossible as the house itself, floating
above the stink and menagerie of the parking lot. His body, which
has lain stretched all night across suns as hot and impudent as
precocious teenage girls, murmurs in its cells after the coffee
he twists out of bed to make; Swedish coffee, poured via a small
measuring cup into cone filters into a black Gevalia drip maker.
It's impossible to tell what he thinks as he stands before the
maker, just burping into life; we can only suppose that after a
while, too weary to watch the machine fulfill its task, he
stumbles off into the den, where he punches the button on a PC
tower, punches the button on a monitor, to get the day rolling
before him. With a series of barely perciptible crackles and
beeps it jerks to life.
She's his partner for the most part, and the girl she
hungers for isn't looking. They glide through the hallways of the
kitchen of the cafeteria; they have access that only a few others
have, but it's confused, and she feels she's not doing him
justice by describing him thus. He has long hazel hair, quite
thick, that he pushes an old man's hat over; He wears flannel and
old cordurouy. They are both full of drugs as they glide through
the kitchen, past the banquet girls who cater events for students
and faculty there; this is why they glide, though in truth he
lumbers, he is as big as the biggest men they've ever seen. They
eye him hungrily. She knows in some way she is a part of all
this, that she belongs here next to him scooping leftover banquet
food onto cafeteria plates while the banquet girls attempt self-
concious and deceptive talk with the both of them. The talk is
about getting wasted, about the vulnerability they could exhibit
with the right combinations of chemicals; they are talking the
holes they've made in themselves through which sometimes frat
boys, sometimes dirty long-haired boys like these get through.
They're all blond and bronze. She wears black to cover her
blindness.
Sometimes he's ashamed to go out. In the sunshine, where
everything is ripped open and frying in its exposure, he's afraid
others can see it on him, can smell it in the waft of his clothes
as he walks by. He doesn't look anyone in the face. It takes many
pills, many draws off his snake's head hashish pipe, to get him
to leave the door.
She's writing a poem for the girl she's just fallen in love
with. I'm afraid, she says into the sallow lamp light (the lamps
are all jutting from the floor like bad teeth; there are no
tables in the attic to put them on, barely a bed to sleep in, and
the machine she writes with is lying on the only available high
surface there is), and the sallow lamp light just answers with
more yellow, not quite piercing the darkness of the peaked attic
ceiling. She barely knows the girl, but would like to know, oh
yes, she would like to know more; she's a dark girl, hidden in
waves of shoe-polish hair; her white face, as round as a creeping
moon, peers out from it with the blankest of expressions, like a
doll with maddeningly-painted lips but smooth button eyes. She
knows that in some way she's pushing something onto the girl that
isn't really there, some hunger she has at night patrolling the
shallow room or slipping up and down the swollen streets,
inflamed with summer (blooms emit endless scents that trickle
through the cracks in her thoughts). She knows how the girl will
react. The girl has another, she knows, and the girl is happy
there. But if she could pry the girl away from him, direct that
flow of blank attention onto herself--
He climbs the stairs to the boy's apartment. There are at
least two doors on each floor, and each of those doors, if
knocked on, would give way to rooms full of young people
drinking, smoking dope, cutting lines of weak cocaine and
scooping them up in a snort. He hasn't heard from the boy in
three days, and he knows he's been shooting (he was in the
process of shooting the last time he talked to him; I'm just
doing the Lou Reed thing, he'd said, chuckling). He reaches the
door he wants. He knocks. He knocks. He knocks. The door across
the hall from his opens, and amid a sliver of light and warmth a
woman's head slides out. Are you looking for him? she asks. They
took him away about an hour ago. There was an accident.
His knees disappear.
Other people pierce it. She's worked so hard this morning to
knit it so snugly around herself--a dreaminess, a warmth, light
that clings to her skin like cola would if spilled--that she's
almost paranoid that someone will call or drop by and incision
her solitude. She knows it's wrong somehow, that living inside it
is not how normal people live. Normal people watch television.
They punch a button on a slender remote and sit and lie under a
glittering cascade of imagery, each picture a symbol to aspire
to. Everyone's new dress is a category accesible only through
money, and money she has none.
When he first meets her, it's because he's stumbled into the
wrong room. Poised at the keyboard, he's roamed through all the
poems and pictures and sounds he can, and, with night drawing
tighter around the littered little house (his room-mates have all
fallen asleep, and the ganja wears off), he craves something
immediate, something human. He types: I am looking for a woman
who moves like the ocean. He copies it, pastes it repeatedly into
the applet's form field. Most in the room ignore him; they're too
busy wringing trite pick-ups from their keys, but this one
responds. This one writes: I move like the ocean. Her name is
pink, and smells like the outermost haloes of brandy.
This girl follows her everywhere she goes. She has blue hair
this season, is young and slim and bright-eyed sober. LSD has
worn a familiar blurry path through her that she knows this girl,
who has bewitched all the young men she knows, won't be able to
follow. Still, she walks upright, despite the seesaw inside. This
girl, too, has a boyfriend, an asshole longhaired richboy she
can't stand, too vegetarian and trendy to be real. One day, the
girl announces that she's quit her boyfriend. That night, as the
acid boils down in her eyes, the girl knocks on her door,
bewilderment mixing with the longing on her lips.
But the seesaw is something he knows is neccessary, he knows
as himself, cascading back and forth within a sleeve of flesh
(today, for example: the southern heat that lies over everything
like an insistent mother, shielding everyone from breath, from
coolness, from relief; murmuring, You are mine, I will take you,
take care of you, dress you like the other girls so the crowds
are smooth, so nothing interrupts us as I suck) but never falling
over, never falling out. For the weekend, they travel. A suitcase
on wheels, hardly heavy, it's only a weekend: buildings and
monuments that stretch on and on. At night, they make love in the
hotel, and he climbs over her like an insistent mother, until the
crowds of bees humming in both of their bodies is smooth,
champagne-colored; so nothing interrupts us as I suck. By day,
they ride the metro, which shoots underground in crackles and
spits passengers out onto the minded gap of each stop. Ah,
London, he thinks, you're a lady; but this is the United States,
all the girls are perfected and tanned, the 1970s has been
resurrected for longer than a decade here; kitsch is king, and
irony, but what's so ironic about boys without hair? They look
like medicated monks lumbering over the sidewalks, and though he
knows each of them suffers somehow, each somewhere inward cries
out for that emptiness that keeps him from loving everything he
sees, he can't discern it in the way they navigate the rocks and
the dust and the glittering of metal juggernauts. They seem too
confident to be hurting.
We are Americans, they say. We need no other knowledge than
this. We are not shadows, not wraiths with books folded ingrown
in our hands (like you, big-eyed girl walking next to the loved
one you suck from); it is our right to walk unscathed. All other
knowledge is useless; the boy in the restaurant at the train
station says this, loudly; he has short hair, wants to run a dot-
com business and thinks that Dreamweaver and Flash are
sufficient; why should he learn code? Meanwhile, the loud boy's
money pushes subroutines through the translucent skin of her
mind. Sitting before her cold cold drink while frostily and tired
her girlfriend finds their luggage again, she reduces every
breath of hers into conditionals and nests them in functions.
Everything has become code in the last year; she has found the
impetus of every movement in algorithms, she inhales and exhales
a syntax readable not just by her or her girlfriend but also by
the machine. If hunger equals true, then eat. Else, sit in the
lounge, staring across a polished table; sit near enough the
mirror to watch your face age...
Earlier, he'd watched the driveway through the mesh of a
lawn chair. Back then, the lawn chairs were made of cheap nylon
strands woven across a metal frame. He watched the driveway,
watching through the mesh. It was something like a parking lot,
he was thinking to himself much later (sitting in a floating
room, sitting in the impossibility of a floating house, staring
blankly at the country before him, guarding the parking lot where
the ruins of ENIAC loped over the black top in a suit and tie,
looking for all the world like an insurance salesman, someone
here now to sell you a security you can never know), a place
somewhere where storage is the essence. He had just realized
himself as a database of memory and learning. He'd interfaced
with everything then.
