The Internment Hour

First light break; rise, unsheath; remove, replace. He (Brian) walks over to the mantle. There is a picture, older man and woman, in costume, seen from slightly below and glaring down. From next to the mantle he tears a piece of paper from a notepad and a number 2 pencil from beside it. He takes the picture down and lays it on its back. He places the paper over the picture, puts the pencil in his balled fist. Moves his fist back and forth, forward and back, in the air over the picture-paper, moving, gradating, his fist-pencil closer and closer and closer. Contact is made, a force leveed upon the surface-paper removing trace amounts of graphite from tip of pencil, settling in grooves and pockets on paper, back and forth, back and forth, lines tracing over lines over lines and lines forming shapes forming a mass on paper over picture. When the tip of the pencil is down to the nub he lifts it in the air above his head. He removes the paper, places it atop the pile with the others after comparing it with the last, and does not look again at the picture. Through the stained-yellow curtains behind him the last rays of sun flood in over his back.

There is no light, but the mind awakens. He (name unknown) squirms up one shoulder, then the other, arches his back, wiggles his toes. He looks to the left and sees the hook there, and follows the rope down around the back of his neck, and follows it around and around and around his torso, stomach, hips, and legs. He looks to the right and sees the other hook and the rest of the rope back around the other side of him. He looks down and sees his swaying shadow, and he knows it’s morning. He twists his back in a C in one direction, then the other, gives with his shoulders in the opposite direction. Hips the same direction as shoulders, feet the other way. His neck cranes around in a circle, sending his eyes to all corners of the ceiling. He begins to spin around in the air. First few spins take the bonds about his calves, then thighs and hips. While facing the back wall, quickly spinning himself away, his stomach and chest are opened to the air and exposed, and finally his shoulders. He lands on the floor, giving at the ankles and knees, and he arises to find that his body is alive but his mind is less kind, and it reminds him that the day is over and his bonds are recommenced.

A ray warning over the windowsill. She (Ella) shields her eyes with her hand, then covers her head in her blanket. Upon forfeiting–again–she sits up in her bed and moves her hands over her face, then her fingers through her hair. She arises, decamps, disrobes, submerses, subsumes, dehydrates, rerobes, and exits. Through her living room and hallway, hand upon lock, hand upon chain, upon doorknob and turn. Light outside on step brick haloes scalds and blinds. Rise one foot off floor and onto threshold, rise other foot off floor onto threshold, and disappear. Over squat concrete structures across, a darkness crawls edfa in on claws overhead.

At daybreak, he (Aaron) is standing on the roof. He was waiting, for this. The light rains down on his face, through his skin, onto his throat, lungs, muscle and bone. Axis of the sun, Aaron waits for it to climb to directly above him. In fear, abject and entire, he turns his body, runs to the ladder, and climbs inside.

As this body stands itself in the open like this, arms stretched out, palms to the horizon like so, like greeting, it is siezed in its motion. This is called inertia, and once I thought that I had discovered it myself, when no, I didn’t. As it moves itself, twists about, upwards and stalks and branches, and is swept into it all, as it then only realizes first those powers, but no, again no. Our view from here, ourselves, we accord it less importance than it does for itself, but then it flexes from the ground and sways about in the world, this first, out here, alone, well.

First it heaves out, up, wills itself, gathers its power, its strength, from under its feet, do you see? The pulses coursing through there, right there, do you see? It looks so much like nothing, doesn’t it?, but that’s where it all begins, that right there, like last time, do you remember? When we were there, just like now, but it never saw us, but we saw it all, didn’t we? I know we did.

The rhythms as it moves itself, those two, do you hear them?, the swell and expell, and that constant one there, ba-dum-bum-ba-dum-. You feel that there, don’t you? You would, wouldn’t you, you’re closer. I can see. Keep your hands on the ground there, inhale those rhythms, make them yours. Go on.

It’s telling you everything. Watch. The thump and its yawn, circling each other everywhere, every one rending itself, tearing itself. Soon we’ll see. We’ll wait.

There! Look. Its shell there, do you see? The shell peels from its host there, and it pours from itself in that rhythm there, do you see? No, not it’s face, don’t look there, that means nothing, not anything. It’s all happening right here, right closer to us, do you see that piece there, gliding so gently off and onto the chilled ground, and giving voice to what’s inside? It’s new again. The rhythm will cease soon, but only enough, just enough time and it will come again. It happens and it happens, and it’s so much more beautiful now than it will be. Do you see? It will begin again, and again, and soon there, on that one, there will be a new place there, with new grass and stones and trees, and a home like ours, and what’s flowing through it now will bring it all there, and bring it all again, and if we stay, we’ll see.

The sun has come. You can look at its face now. Go on. It will open its eyes for us. Do you see? It’s looking at us. It sees us. Isn’t it beautiful?

He called out, and heard no return, and called out again, and nothing. So in lieu of another, he began a letter:

… Frankly, I can’t see you. I find you negligent. Yes, negligent, and this negligence, like the weight you hold in your many mighty hands above your many monstrous heads, will destroy us at your faintest whim. This is excruciating. I find you exruciating….

He wrote of his delirium, “our delirium,” his collective delirium, and his portents, and how his body was lacking, feeble and old and lacking. When his hand grew tired of his pen, he put it down and began to gesture wildly in the air, slashing around, pinwheeling, kicking at the dirt. When he grew tired of his gestures, he fell back onto his ass onto the ground, and a small, sharp stone slid under his thigh as he fell, and he accepted it, and didn’t dare move, for this mild little pain brought him pause. He thought to himself, No, this is too much, too much for one god, however many bodies he may have.

He examines the rod. He can’t tell anymore if he’s pushing it down or if somehow now his home is vomiting it up from beneath him. He’s got the handle in his fist and is jamming it downward with all manageable force, shoving the thing down from his back and up his shoulders and down into the bowels of his home. He can feel a rictus stretched across his face, but he knows it’s the only way, and now his teeth are grinding and gnashing against the nerves in his jaw, and raining fire through his temples, so he stops. He returns to his first thought, that what’s down there, that there must be some other, some better; he’s heard tell from the neighbors, from their help, that there’s some liquid that you can pour into it, but didn’t have any. He takes a few deep breaths, he feels the blood flow back into his body, he grasps the handle again. The brown eyes gazing up at him are saying something about two men on the lawn, about how they’re dressed the same and looking in the window. His head is resting on the counter, sweat running heedlessly into the sink, and he’s telling the brown eyes to keep watch on those men, and to tell him if they start looking in the window.

Another one, he’s sitting on an ace-nine and staring at a raise, and something in the pool, and he’s lost his thought again. His cards are in front of him, but he sees nothing beyond that. He tilts upward and feels each pivot pinching, grating, screeching against the one before, and he sees his fellows, and they’re sitting, looking silently into their hands. He feels one drop of sweat fall down the crook of his nose, and now everyone is looking straight at him, and they each of them thing, we can’t hear his hand, so what is that banging outside?

“Have we got anyone there?”
“No, why would we?”
“How do we get someone?”

She returns home, long past dark, and wonders if he’ll be there when she comes in, and if she’ll notice.

She wants so desperately to stop, and she can’t, and the longer he’s, the worse it. A man spends all day doing something with his hands, and a crank or a lever, and all day, he feels eyes on his neck, just hot enough for sense.

“We call it… which, what name?”

He has his radio on, and he is told in a foreign language, in a tone of certainty, that he lives in a disgraceful and pitiable place. His ears are against the speaker. He hears those words and moves his face to the window, and he sees no one, so he turns it off.

Two people stand outside their open doors. One goes in, then the other. Once inside, for the sake of, one looks into the window of the other, and sees no one.

A man cracks an egg in a skillet, but he looks at it and sees no egg, and no skillet. His face in his hands runs streams through his fingers, down his arms, and he makes no sound.

“Who is?”
“Yeah, who are we… who?”

A man is given a length of speech, and he reads it, one tone one syllable after the other, and he wonders to himself. A woman sits outside her door in the dead of night, the dark folded over her like a blanket, with a book. A man and woman sit at a table, their fingers braided together, staring just past each others’ faces. Her lips part and churn, her chin lowers on its hinges, but she makes no sound. Outside they hear footsteps, heavy, heavy, echoing in the room. She is a flutter of sudden movement, hoisting her head, raising one shoulder, then the other, jogging her leg against her other knee, and he simply sits, keeps staring at the wall behind her and its picture of her and her mother and father at a wedding when she was young and wouldn’t have understood.

Once, David Hahn looked up at the ceiling, and the blinking eye told him everything he needed. It pulsed rhythmically, in flashes so regular that the message between them was simple enough to worm around, tendrils between his ears. He got up on a chair with a wrench and took the eye down, brought it to him, to his face, where it belonged, but off the ceiling its conduit to life was severed and it wouldn’t speak. That didn’t matter, it said everything several times already, had told him what to do and how to do it. The wrench slid easily along the back, prying the skin off in an easy, bloodless piece, the innards exposed to his eyes, now blinking with the same regularity, a community passing through the tissue on his fingers and through him. He removed the battery, a foreign body and useless, and it made sense. He couldn’t see it in there, but it was waiting for him, glowing heat up his arm. He was touching nothing, both hands levitating the eye compartment between them, his eyes closed swallowing the stunned, invisible flame, all of it into him, gently unfolding a shell of its warmth around him. It was giving him thoughts. Images behind his headlamps, fevers, answers.

He took it out into the blue dusk, out back to the shed where only the tools could watch this. He splayed open the insides of this creature and spread it all out before him, and dead center, where his valley of nose met the cliff-face brow, was the light, and he placed his two hands, one on the other, over it, to gather it all in.

He could not. It was still there. He considered a picture, and it disgusted him. He would tell his group, but only abstractions. They would have to understand when he came forth with the eye’s intention for him, the invention it gave to him for safe-keeping, inevitable creation.

Item one: one plush bear doll, approximately 1′ wide by 2′ tall; tawny brown polyester fur, black plastic eyes, and an American flag bandanna around its neck; fur is matted and dirty; left on a step outside the New York Public Library branch on W. 40th St. Found by: one African American woman, between 30 and 40 years old, 5′4″ to 5′6″, approximately 150 to 170 pounds, short black hair cropped tightly to the scalp, one dangling pearl or faux-pearl earring in left ear, long blue sundress with yellow and orange floral pattern; and one African American child, 2 to 4 years old, black hair spreading outward from the scalp, large brown eyes, blue t-shirt and jeans. Bear picked up by child, who promptly begins chewing its ear. Woman (the child’s mother?) removes the bear from the child’s mouth, replaces it on the step on which it was found, and scolds the child for picking up “random stuff” and putting it in his mouth.

Item two: one coupon for half-off a chicken meal at any participating Popeye’s prepared-food franchise; left pinned to a corkboard at the YMCA on Bowery. Found by: one Caucasian male, between 35 and 50 years old, 5′8″ tall with pronounced hunch and long, unwashed beard; a pair of overalls covered in paint and other stains over a black-and-white striped shirt. Coupon unpinned and taken with no undue fanfare or regard for the presence of other people.

Item three: one cartridge of Galaxian for the Atari 2600 home video gaming console; operability unknown; left atop a telephone pole in Bloomfield, NJ. Found by: two teenaged Caucasian or Latino boys, both approximately 5′10″, wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with the logos for the rock-and-roll bands Clutch and Entombed (respectively) and black jeans and sneakers (white soles). Cartridge spotted by the teenager wearing the Entombed shirt, who begins to climb the pole on the metal rungs drilled into its sides. His friend follows him with the obvious aim of overtaking him and getting to the cartridge first. The friend (Clutch shirt) grabs him by the ankles and throws him to the ground below. The cartridge is never obtained by either friend.

Item four: one yellowed edition of the June 18, 1972 Washington Post, with the headline “5 Held In Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here;” left atop a ashtray outside 350 Park Ave.  Found by: unknown. During observation, the front door opened and 13 men emerged, 12 in black suits with white shirts and sunglasses. The 13th man stood in the middle amongst the covering of black-suited men, walked with his chin down, eyes darting left and right. One Heinz (”Henry”) Kissinger was leaving his office, presumably for lunch or possibly some sort of meeting, surrounded by a retinue of what appeared to be either personal security or perhaps an appointed Secret Service detail (unknown), and approaching a waiting Town Car with great haste. As they crossed the sidewalk, his eyes met with mine, observing from across Park Avenue in scurrying mid-day traffic. He stopped his retinue and stared at me; every guard standing around him eyed me (I believe) behind their sunglasses. I froze and thereby returned their stares. They could do nothing to me, not here, not for anything I was doing, I was doing nothing, wasn’t I? The security detail passed me over, a harmless activist perhaps, or a student with a grudge, and they continued hustling Dr. Kissinger into the waiting car. Two guards entered with him, the rest returned to their posts presumably somewhere in the office. When they were out of sight, I searched in vain for the newspaper. It was gone without a trace.

Ok. He looks at the paper again. It’s even. He measures the spaces between the lines in either direction. Good. Equal. Pre-cise. Now then. First: wake up, look out the window to your right. Sunny? Good. If not, skip ahead. Next: Arise yourself out of the window. Use only your arms, no kicking at the wall or the sill. -

Oh, we’ll have to make one for the night. Leave the window open. Yes.

- When at the sill, crane your neck up, bring your eyes to the sky and shout. Key: make no words. Make sounds. Next: climb down from the window and back into the room. Locate the bathroom. Next: Enter the bathroom, then the shower. Turn the shower faucet on, medium-hot, then bathe. Next. Towel. Next. Clothes. Next. Window. Climb out. Next. Fever. Sweat. Next. Reveal in a flash the total extent of it. Tell everyone. -

Oh, I know.

- Climb back to the windowsill. Crouch, crane neck as before. Scream of your fever until you stop.

Milder. Less.