Loved by All Nature

From his vantage he could see
Ones go by quickly, kicking up rain
Twos more slowly, holding hands
Threes or more standing ground, leaning  in feigned ease

The wind hissed
and for a moment made the rain walk sideways
Pelting the faces of pedestrians, the ones, twos, and threes or more
Exhausting, satisfying, but to little effect
(No one died, not even a cold the next day)

The October wind sighed
If only they knew

how he hated them

The wet sidewalk shined on like cheap plastic,
fracturing light, making wavy imitations

The Sphinx

“It’s impossible to dress for this weather”
We stand, we two, on the crest of a hill
The daylight retreating over the far horizon to our backs
During the day, unbearable heat that examined and re-examined every portion of exposed flesh
Burning red in its penetrating gaze
Now gave way to night that assails our bones,
blowing up like a deep exhale from the unseen creatures in night’s valley below

“Are we ready?” a rhetorical question, goes unanswered

We are, point of fact, hopelessly unprepared.

But this is how it was: only the clothes on our backs, not even the benefit of a proper jacket, the day receding, the night barreling towards us like a pack of wild dogs

If we had spent a day longer
If we had met our contact
If we had run another inventory

The backs of my heels tingle with the desire to turn around and run after the dwindling light

You stood like a sphinx in silence, so long…
I could feel the hags running my thread through their boney fingers, measuring, measuring, measuring my life cord by cord to its ultimate end

You held a hand out to me
“There is only one way forward. We follow the light.” And set off down the valley.

“But it’s that way,” I gasp in desperation. “The light has fled.”

From a small distance ahead, “Then we follow this way until it comes back.”

This was how it would always be: the light at our back, deep darkness ahead, and all manner of unknown and menacing obstacles before us. Nothing to defend us but ourselves and each other. That was the truth of it, until the day the old ladies do cut my string.

So I followed.

Devil and the Moon Part II

By taking the moon, he had changed the night completely. Those near enough to home went there and locked their doors, but those left outside had become victims and wolves.

He wasn’t a particularly handsome man, and it was hard to guess his age. When he smiled, or leered, he seemed young, but when he was thinking to himself, as he seemed to be while they walked through the back alleys to the main street of town, he seemed altogether too old for his body. his gait betrayed a furtive restlessness of someone used to being chased, which was supported by the poor state of his shoes.

THe night had become altogether dark and cold. She thanked heaven she wore her sweater that evening and tried to ignore how far away the idea of heaven seemed, like her mind reached out to it but had to give up like a bad cell connection failing to make a call.

She was with him for now, and as long as he held the glowing disc in his pocket, she needed to stay. “Stay and see this through,” she thought. It didn’t matter that the idea was insane. That he couldn’t possibly be carrying what he was supposedly carrying, she was dealing with a situation, a crisis. She did that well, by going on automatic and dealing with details as they come. That’s what she needed to do now, and she could sort out whether she had really watched someon walk across the sky, darting from start to star like a burglar, later.

“Here,” he said, sounding unpleasantly pleased with himself.

She wanted to say, “Where are we,” but the reality dawned on her before she could. This was the same street she looked at every day, a dozen times a day, while going to work, while buying groceries, or meeting friends, the main street that ran through the heart of town. But something had changed. It had gotten dark; real dark like the ancestors of man must have known before the advent of electric light. Back when legends and fairytales about devils and demons could be whispered back and forth and believed with total sincerity. The world had been a scarier place. On this dark, cold street it was again.

“Notice anything different?” he said. Everything seemed to be in place. The street lamps still shown, but their light couldn’t reach beyond the canopy of their covers, so the light itself seemed assaulted on all sides by the consuming darkness. She looked to the sky and her eyes welled up with tears in a way that wasn’t entirely attributable to the bitter wind. It was altogether empty. If there was stars still there, they couldn’t penetrate, and, of course, the moon was conspicuously absent.

“I don’t see such a difference,” she said, trying to feign bravado.

“Really? That’s because you lack my long-term perspective. You think of these people as you see them today. I still remember little monkeys hiding from the darkness, worshipping their one great protector from the unknown.” He patted his pocket.

“Have you grown so much you don’t need your protectors? Let’s hope.”

He took her hand (not that she wished him to, but she seemed unable to say no) and lead the way up the street. It must have been around midnight but the streets were unusually empty. That is, those who did appear in the dark seemed to make every effort to vanish or remain invisible, so faces flashed pale before her and were gone as though the living had become ghosts and only she and Him remained real and alive on that street. And those she did see were huddled as though in fear of freezing to death. She could hear the wind howl but she couldn’t really feel it, no more than to numbly register that it was there. Not enough to taste it’s effect. She felt strangely set above…privileged. She, her strange companion, and their own private moon.

She heard a shattering of glass and saw a figure though a pane glass window duck out of site. It was a pretty young waitress, who seemed to have made a a mess of the plates from a big order in a fancy restaurant. The customers seemed uneasy and testy. The manager appeared over the waitress as she feebly tried to scoop of the shards of her misdeed. It was impossible to hear the words, but even through the glass she could feel her shame and humiliation.

The Man laughed, sharp and unpleasant. “She’ll be fired tonight,” he said. “She’s new to the job, and the manager knows the restaurant is in poor straits, he’s anxious to please these well paying customers. She just lost her other job. This will mean she loses her apartment. She’ll no longer be able to stand on her own emotionally or financially. Who knows what becomes of an independant young lady then.”

She looked at Him intently “Don’t blame me,” he protested. “I didn’t make her drop the plates. Maybe she’s nervous. Maybe she should be…she’s sleeping with another woman’s fiancee. Really, am I so impressive you credit me with every slight misfortune?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just…I think I know that waitress.”

“Come on,” he said. “We need to keep moving. The night is wasting away, and we have a whole town to see.”

If you think this is about you, it probably is

You don’t know how many times I’ve caught your hand before it could fall away from your hair
Put my hand on your chin to keep you from moving the angle of your cheek
Which catches the amber light in a way I have never seen
Like the sun is somehow new and its effects foreign to me
(And of course, I’m a gentleman, so all this in my mind)

How many times I’ve lost what you were saying
Based on the depthless reaches of your eyes
Small but piercing like a door, barely ajar, leading to an open place
I’ve never been and I’m dying to write about

It would embarrass me for you to know how often the sound of your voice strikes me like a melody I can’t remember,
that half sticks in my head, and echoes,
so the only tenable solution is to hear it again and again from the source
as near to constantly as I can
(Because a half finished tune is unacceptable and sad, even in one’s own mind)

You don’t know and I can’t tell you
Because words invariably bump into other things and change moments
So the part that I can’t reproduce, even in memory, would be lost
I’ve never been so greedy to know a person

You poor girl, the moment this passed from a detached fascination
To an enlightened choice (if ever there was a choice to be had)
I’m a fire on dry grass now, driving hard to your doorstep, growing stronger on the way

You can’t know but I can show you
Please allow me to demonstrate

The Devil and the Moon (pt 1)

The Devil and the Moon (Part 1)

She asked him to do something amazing, merely because he said he could, with casual disregard somewhere between irritating and glamorous
So he plucked the moon from the sky

The fact is, he changes by night and by season
On cold nights he has wings on his dog eared Airwalk sneakers
And while the angels looked the other way, shielding their pink round cheeks from the assailing wind
He casually walked up the sky, in front of her, skirting the light from star to star, like a drunk wending his way through an alley

And when he reached it, he plucked as casually like a bum picking up a dollar
and hid it in the hip pocket of his raggedy tweed jacket

He high stepped back, more quickly vacating the scene of his purloining
He returned to her side grinning. The poor thing seemed very small now in jutting from his coat, casting unpleasant shadows on his face, making his pallor sickly turning blue white and green in turns

She noticed the sky had gone very, very dark

“And what shall we do now?” he said, his voice a quiet drum. “What parlor trick are you to put me to next?”

“Put it back,” she almost whispered pleading, still somewhat disbelieving.

But he remarked that if she wished it back in the sky she could take it from him and walk up there to replace it herself. She knew she couldn’t.

“Then walk with me,” he said.

She had no desire to be there with him. Now colder and darker than she could ever remember a January night being, she wanted to be home under a blanket watching something cheerful on TV with a warm drink in her hand. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave him, not as long as he had that poor thing held captive in his jacket. After all, if she didn’t make him put it back, who would, or could?

By taking the moon, he had changed the night completely. Those near enough to home went there and locked their doors, but those left outside had become victims and wolves.

With the Demon Alone

I had a demon and I named him “Alone” and his baleful empty eye frightened me and his long grasping fingers terrified me. He lived in a closet where I could hear him stomping about restlessly, sulkily, whenever I was by myself in my room. So, I made sure that I almost never was.

Being left only made Alone worse, and he’d begin to act out even when I had a friend with me. Even if she slept with me in my bed, I couldn’t pull her close enough or whisper in her ear with enough fervor to drown out Alone scratching pitiably, insistently, inevitably at the door.

“You’re not coming into this bed,” I said out loud one night, just a few days after she’d left me. No one else was around, just him and me. “You’re not sleeping here. You stay in your closet.”

He stopped his scratching and howled like an animal. I couldn’t move for revulsion. But the cries didn’t stop. I picked up the clock on my bed stand and hurled it at the door, not at him but at the door, and his howls only grew louder, galvanized by my response.

I resolved to finally be rid of him, this sore on my happiness, this blight on creation, abomination of my bedroom closet. I picked up the heavy brass lamp by the side of my bed and brandished it. I crept to the cracked door, peering in. His brand of darkness was always darker, Alone’s, so it shown black against the charcoal gray of my room, unlit and empty.

His howl had died to a snuffling, a rasping. It occurred to me it had been ages since I’d gotten this close. I hooked one finger on the edge of the door and pulled. It slide uncomfortably, grinding on the carpet, as though the wood refused to turn or had forgotten how with disuse.

And in the darker darkness of the closet there stood the Demon, cowering. He hunched, he scraped long arms on the wood of the closet, deep gouges worn into the wood on the door jam. His baleful eyes, stared, glowing liquescent and lit the room in a dull sickly pallor. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he was born, when he was small enough to wrap in a sheet and tuck away in my closet. By God he was mammoth now, like a bear tortured to stand on its hind legs by unscrupulous trainers.

“You’ve been here all along,” I said. “Only you.” And his long simian mouth raised its corners into a parody of a simian smirk. Again, I hated the thing. So I raised the end of the bronze lamp. I thought, “If I don’t kill it now, no one will.”

Clumsily, in the half light he caught the lamp at its shaft and we turned, me unable to bring the instrument down on its desired target, hopelessly outmatched in strength with the demon. But I kept pressing down, my bare feet leaving the carpet of my room, standing on my toes trying to muscle the metal to the top of its oblong head. And we danced. Around and around in circles, him resisting, just enough, me pressing on the massive thing, sweat beading on my brow. When my chest was fit to burst, when my hands stung from digging into the finials at the top of the lamp, I collapsed onto my bed. If it would take me, it would do it now, and hopefully quickly. I couldn’t live with Alone any longer in the recesses of my room, forever waiting.

As I lay there panting in the darkness, awaiting the metal tang of the lamp, awaiting the girth of the heavy creature to fall on me, enveloping me, ending me, I felt a pressure at the end of my bed. Its eyes were closed and the gray of my room had surrendered to inky black, so I didn’t see but felt the massive creature gingerly lift itself to the bed. One massive paw, then another, curling like a dog at the end of my bed.

The bed creaked, the bowl created in my mattress by its pressure was well defined, but not as I had expected, as though the thing had someone shed some of its form for the occasion. Here it was, coming to bed. It breathed a human breath, heavy with exertion but not dissatisfied. It sounded like it slept, or meant to. It sounded like it had found its place.

My head circled and I found my pillow with my forearm and rested against it. “It isn’t real,” I thought. It wasn’t real this thing. But it was here and it was mine. Whatever it was I had made it. And fear of him had made me.

That night the scratching ended, replaced by breath like a rolling tide.

Varya in the Corner

The second princess in a house of princes
Where being a boy is a birthright and a girl a burden
No long-limbed elegant lady you
Turned out calves and a solid broad hips
Made for carrying burdens and babies
From a girl
Bound for labor not adoration (you knew)
Wide set eyes inspiring affection
But not the luminous adoration of finer gentlemen

What did it mean in your heart?
Pinching and pining like a wild animal in your bosom
As you raised your young brother favored child,

Was there a moment of resolution
Watching the promenade
Beautiful faces at masquerade
Begrudging an overflow of dance card appointees
You’d determine to call the tune?

Hobo

The sharp pain in my chest reminds me of days marked in surface blood and cigarettes knuckles dragging on an endless string of blacktop
Piecing the horizon like a surgeons needle
Hunched with Neanderthal self possession on the hood of my automobile
Three-day stubble and raggedy hair
Sucking the ragged ends of my cracked perfunctory digits

The suit wasn’t badly cut
Gray slick and pin striped in thick resilient fabric like well hung drapes
I had purchased off the rack once upon a day
From some discount store that looked like a renovated basement
The cast offs of some lesser line of what might have been a designer for men

But 6 weeks and 11 hours in the capsule of a metal prison will do that to person
There are wrinkles where there shouldn’t be
The fit is fading fast and it pinches at the shoulders and pulls up on my cuffs

I’m somewhere between a travelling businessman and a hobo
I check the reactions of the registry clerk at the local cut-rate hotel to mark the passage of my own time
How much longer before I can no longer expect polite reactions from strangers to my unbidden presence?
One room, business rate, one bed, real cheap, smoking please (lots), and no sleeping, a wake up call at 7 and 8 and 8:30. Yes. Please.

And when you wake at 1AM tonight I’ll be at the Ramada in a room that hasn’t been updated since 1985. I would try to tell you I’m thinking of you, my blue eyed boy, my sparkling sun, but all I can see is the withered latex paint in egg shell white and floral patterns so mundane the brain rejects them completely pasted to the slanting walls of my rent-for-the-night man cave.

In a better day I dream of you. I listen to you dream, as I have for all the years of your life. Some day I will tell you about all this. And hope you understand. But for now, the sun rises on a day that never really set for me. And I’ll try to do better again. Though I’m not entirely sure what that means right now.

Hope and love for the future. Dad.

Time x Distance

Time and Distance met from time to time in one of the many out of the way nooks that existed between both, where the world looked sepia from a constantly setting sun (or was it rising?) the place was shady which agreed with Time, no longer a young man, and was cramped in narrow alleys like the backsides of unused buildings filled with the items people had either willingly or carelessly cast off. That agreed with Distance, who had grown perverse with Time (another story entirely) and had a fetish for tight spaces.

Leave it to say, Time and Distance could meet in the narrow shady recesses beneath the amber sun, low in the sky, and pick among the flotsam and jetsam for anything they needed, a low stool, a leather backed chair, brushing errant tube socks aside which were always inexplicably abundant in this In Between spaces. Space had brought her own bottle of top-shelf Tequila; time found a dusty room temperature case of RC Cola and seemed altogether too pleased. They sat for a while guessing what the other might be thinking.

It was Distance, always an expansive conversationalist, who broke the silence first.

“We are kin as you know, Mr. Time.” She thought of him as a kindly uncle despite how he eyed her lean waste as she perched lightly on her stool. “And the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say.”

Time raised an eyebrow. Who’s “they” he was wondering. Time and ambiguity were a deadly combination.

“And you came before me in this,” she gestured widely as she could in the alley. “Well this whole thing. So you’ve clearly had a head start. But I believe my sphere has expanded quite beyond yours. I believe I cause more suffering for these sons of Adam than you ever could.”

Time still didn’t speak. This irked Distance. He was poor company. Tended to keep his own counsel. She wondered why she bothered but she had a point to make. “Well,” she began again, “these people have made a mockery of Time. They’ve invented every contrivance to defeat you. Once upon a Time a person had to content herself with one task at a Time. Then they got the nerve to ride a horse. Yes, I swear that’s where it began. And it became a matter of space, not Time. Distance.”

Time raised one eyebrow like a necromancer raising the long dead—slowly and to some great effect. He had a way of making her nervous.

“And from horses, carts,” Distance was up and pacing now, she preferred to be in motion. She was taking small sips directly from her bottle. She hadn’t stopped long enough to grab a glass and hadn’t taken the Time to poke through the rubble to find one.

“Carts naturally begat cars, from cars to planes. And then phones! You cannot deny the detrimental effect of the phone! Now they can spend their Time doing one thing while they discuss another. Making descriptions, decisions, turning corners, in short making their way through your precious maze in half the Time. You, my old friend have been marginalized.”

Time seemed somewhat crestfallen. He was playing with the gold pocket watch he kept in the pocket of his old tweed vest which never seemed to work worth a damn.

Distance was galvanized by her friend’s unexpected reaction. She wasn’t used to winning in these friendly contests. She was pacing faster, striding nearly around the corner out of his site, to the overturned purple couch at the end of the bottling building, and back in great loping strides. She wasn’t sure what was working but felt now was the Time to explore her new advantage.

“And now that they can do two things at once, it became important to do three. So they invented new items. Smaller phones that didn’t need to be attached to the wall. Computers that could talk to each other. Then computers inside of phones, so now they can talk to their dear old aunt, nearly dying, while checking their work memorandums and waiting for a taxi while talking to a friend. They have nearly no fear of you at all; they live four times at once, much more than you ever meant to provision for their sorry states.”

She stopped her rapid pace and put one lanky leg on to her stool, standing before Time in triumph, grinning a wide smile like an expanse of brilliant cobble stones. The soles of her trainers were predictably worn, though the top leather shown as white as ever.

“So what do you have to say to that, older brother? Take your Time,” she gibed.

Time turned a little in his swiveling leather-backed chair, the kind owners of small businesses placed behind their desks in 1986 as a sign of their rank. He craned his neck with some apparent strain, shifted uncomfortably (he suffered from sciatica since the 1500s) and licked his salty lips. The effect was not altogether pleasant.

“In the Time it has taken for you to tell me your little tale—full of flaws, half truths, and incorrect timeline as it was—the two mortals to whom you are closer than anyone else in this century have fallen in love, though they won’t know it for another three months and when they learn, it will be too late.

Her mother, who is busy planting her garden in anticipation of spring, has developed a tiny fissure in the capillary in her frontal lobe. Within two weeks she will develop a sudden headache. She will call the doctor to ask permission to take an aspirin – she has an antiquated relationship to medicine. She will lay down but when they find her she will already be in a coma. She will wake twice in the hospital, not know her own children and die within a month from an aneurism.

Her husband will leave his cell phone in the car, as he always does, and will linger as he gets his hair cut, taking a full 45 minutes. He will miss the call from their children and won’t catch up with his wife until she is already in the hospital. Already in a sleep from which she will not awaken, senses intact. He will never have Time to say goodbye.

His son-in-law has a phone, a computer, a headset, a pager, and a personal assistant to maximize his effective use of Time. He takes coffee to work longer hours, and sometimes cocaine. He finds he can’t concentrate on any one thing for more than a few fleeting moments. Yes, don’t look surprised—I have my petty revenges.

His wife, your friend, will be so distraught by her mother’s sudden illness that she will quite forget about the man she fell in love with, who is not her husband. He will be hurt and never understand. By end of year he has quit the city altogether to start a new life with a broken heart.

Her husband of course, is sharing sex and cocaine with his assistant. He will have neither the focus, nor the inclination, nor the Time to be there when she needs him most.”

Distance was agog. “But that’s cruel…”

“No,” said Time, “This is you and I working together. Time and Distance – the abuse of Time and the abuse of Distance in one’s own heart. My work doesn’t come until the end. As she sits alone next to her mother’s deathbed, unsure where her husband is— don’t look shocked, you keep him away just as I do—the hours will drag on interminably. That will be my gift. No TV, no radio, no contrivance of any sort, just your friend and her heart alone ticking away her mother’s final moments in silence. I would not deny her full experience of that Time together.”

Time fumbled with a dusty long-neck bottle of RC Cola. Is he really going to drink that? How long has it been sitting back here in the twilight sun? How long would those things remain potable? His old hands fumbled with loose skin trying to twist the cap. She suddenly had the urge to kick the old man in the face. Break his nose and leave him laying in the dirt. Maybe he would be too feeble to find his way out. Maybe she could spare her friends, and all the other humans for whom she suddenly felt a swell of sympathy, the pains of this bitter twisted old man.

A strange rasping sound echoed from the back wall of the bottling company and resounded through the alley, slow, unpleasant, and no guttural. The old man was laughing. He had cut the sagging yellow flesh of his palm and was sucking on the wound like a child in a playground.

Distance’s mood changed despite herself.

“I wonder when we’ll have the opportunity to meet like this again,” she mused merely to break the silence. Time opened his mouth to speak but she silenced him with a finger. “Strike that. Let it be a surprise.”

Time smirked, lips pulled tight over yellowed teeth. “I was merely going to say, that depends on you as much as I. You supply the Where, I’ll bring the When.”

She took another sip from her bottle waiting for the sun to set – or rise – though she knew it never would in this place.

BACK DATE

At 8:30 in the morning, every other morning, I report for a standing meeting with the department. The fact that it is a meeting, in which we stand, around a little white board, is a matter of some amusement to me alone. We stand around a little white board and explain the timing of our projects. We back date the projects – 2 days till creative, 4 days for printing, 1 day for fulfillment, two weeks for mailing. We assign resources based on those dates. It is important to have foresight in this line of work. It is essential and expected of us, to take the time to talk about time so the timing on our projects coalesce and whir like the separate gears of a giant clock.

I remember in the shadow of your room there were no clocks. There was one on the VCR in the living room, and although it was an hour slow it was the only connection I had with knowing when my classes would begin, whether or not I deemed to attend them.

I remember your room had a door one-third too small for the opening, so we were in danger of passer bys peering through and seeing us even in the compromises of some spontaneous passion. I remember it had no ceiling. You had a parachute tacked up above to keep visitors from the rafters descending on us unwanted as we slept on transparent grappling lines like unwanted dreams. The parachute caught them.

Your bed was on the floor. It was a 6 inch piece of industrial foam cut roughly the width of your own body, so lying next to you, as I did for two years, meant sleeping half on your person and half on the straw mat next to your bed. I became surprisingly used to this inconvenience, this lack of comfort. If the accommodations were not plush, you were. In the brashness of my youth I took to holding your breast in one hand. The prod of your nipple in my palm the smell of your neck and the brush of your hair were all that I needed in the way of worldly comfort. There were no reliable clocks. I had fallen into a fairy ring and could sleep all day next to you and immune to the world outside your small cranking window.

I primarily check my phone now for time. I have never cared for watches—I can’t stand the binding around my wrist. After losing many serviceable options of varying attractiveness based on my tendency to cast them off and throw them on any clean surface I gave up the wearing of a watch as a bad job. Now I have my phone, and if the battery is dead my computer, and if that’s closed, the department clock, or if I have no inclination to stand up and look at it, I fancy I can measure times passage by the regular clicking of keys, lifting and falling of telephone receivers from the workers on all sides of my cube. Like insects in a hive we sit unnaturally close but do not as a rule talk to each other. There are deadlines to meet, and we are all deadly serious.

I remember snaking my arm around your waist and holding fast to your bosom, as I did, somewhat crudely for over two years lying on the rough straw mat next to you. It became so you couldn’t sleep without my groping you. It was a strange pact between us. I knew you were unfaithful to me at every possible opportunity, but in your dreams you were mine. I held you, and you wanted to be held, in that space where there is no motion of planets, no regular secession of moments. It was one interminable moment when you were mine, looking into your soul while sleeping, knowing that this time would pass too.

By 11AM I’ve enjoyed four meetings this past Monday. I sit dully taking in what I can. The important part is that I spring on the correct information, grab with deftly by the nape of the neck, and go for the kill. All else falls beneath my notice. I am still as an insolent jungle predator, for hours in the midday heat, motionless waiting for the right moment to exert my power. I do what they cannot. I can create. I can make decisions, distinctions, life, project, time out of time. They know this. But for all that my esteemed peers would as a whole rather see me gone. It’s 11AM and it’s time for me to discuss again with my manager my time management skills, or rather lack thereof.

You were an unreal creature to me. You were only 17 when I met you (I was only 19 but still my parents tried to frighten me with the possibility of a statutory rape case should your family ever become aware.) Your skin was impossibly supple, every angle turned up to catch the light most favorably. There was a dweomer about you of a changeling princess—a girl touched by sadness so young, that in your defense you learned to change from day to day, moment to moment. As a child you could become invisible; as a young lady you could become the incarnation of the desires of men, dark lips, dark eyes, dark hair, and a smile that killed willing prey. I felt sure I would die to touch you, and that I would die if I ever did.

I couldn’t stand the changes, so I kept hold of you firmly. All day and all night, if I stayed with you, with one hand around your waist and one around your breast, I could keep you in human form. Not a series of moments but one elongated moment. I remember you woke up early and tried to sneak out of the room before dawn, leave me slumbering in your house with your family who hated me, so you could run to the city to meet your estranged lady friend. You had so many “friends.” It was never a question of “if,” it was a question of the circumstances arising with the same certain answer. Every new situation called for a new lover, or a series of new lovers. My teachers, my bosses, my friends, my counselors, my enemies, all rivals for your desire, and I accepted it. I had a single spell at my disposal, one to hold you still in thrall for the run of the night. You would come back to me after being with them and cry and I would hate you but you were mine and I would hold you, hold you still long enough to sleep.

I don’t remember when the spell was broken. We had travelled a hundred thousand miles; changed addresses six times, made our home everywhere, and sometimes had no home except my car. Time passed, I was a stranger to everyone that used to know me, but I had not changed since the day I met you. Not grown up, though grown older. I was in the woods of Western Pennsylvania, having gained enough lucidity to quit my night job and try to finish school. You had moved out, fallen in love with some lawyer from D.C. twice our age. Predictably, you were back, looking for the spell again, the soporific mixture I could give you to help you sleep. You didn’t want me during the day, but you needed me at night, and you couldn’t stay away long.

You found me on campus, took me back to your new place where you were living with some woman (were you sleeping with her? It didn’t matter at that point.) We cried. We talked. We had sex, and I selfishly turned on the chameleon in you, made you the fulfillment of my desire. And I turned to go.

“You win,” you said. “You’re cooler than me now.” I knew it was meant to sting but it didn’t matter. I had no more mixture for you; I couldn’t accept your pain any longer. I walked away, long shadows trailing from house to campus, and your adventure had to continue without me as your apothecary and mendicant.

There was a new intern today. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark lips, skin impossibly supple. I met you as I have in one hundred other people, doppelgangers haunting me with shadows. This you called me “sir”. I am no longer the brooding Heathcliffe. No longer the Faustian hero, lean and dark. My time has past. I smile at you and you have no idea why.

It’s nearly the end of the day. I’m well past deadline. I need to back date my projects, keep them on schedule, make every step click into the next in a continuous motion that takes me from here to there. My room has clocks now, many of them. But in the shadow there is a room with no clocks, and no time means no definitive beginning or end. Perhaps I am still sleeping next to you. Perhaps I always will be.