Against the Cycle of the Virus

After I had explained to the friend that had emerged from my friend group that the proudest moment in a parent's life is to watch a child fail at a task, and had settled the ensuing argument when I saw the police tighten their semicircle on the suspected rapist's house.

"That," I said my friend group friend, "is a relief."

Of course, Christmas Eve in the jazzy district of the Circle can carry with it a bustling guilt. Why you're not home with your family getting the duck ready and such. It shot through us, front to end, in a ripple. Faster walking ensued. We passed tight-assed little bars squeezed with sexy red light bulbs, yellow, blue, one after the next, but got no further from the police action fisting about the nutmeg colored house in which the worst imaginable person existed entirely without regard for the daily motions that got bread made, schools funded, shoes bought.

So we gave up, headed for the house.

I Have Seen the Jubilees But No Animals

What I couldn't explain to the friend group that had now grown to nearly a hundred in number was that I had finally located the Jubilees. I thought it would be animals, maybe they'd be positioned one suspiciously random day on a meadow under a Steely Curtain of Rain. But then I looked around: police with hands poised over hips. Friend group amassing furtively. Suspected rapist still in house. And now it was time to go! I thought easily about going on, this was the only place going on could be thought about easily, in the friend group.

No, not at all. The numbering of holy days wouldn't happen with animals sketched into verse description, or come as I thought printed on rough-woven paper and inked. I wanted the resistance of the shorthaired animal under Our fingernails scratching against its growth pattern, wanted to clean animal dandruff from under the fingernails. Instead I received this clanky gloss by invitation in the mail.

The invitation came simply after I'd read enough good books to be given a hundred years to live.

And it came more precisely after giving up reading. Not so much giving up because I don't give up things I like, and I like reading because it's good for you. No, it came after I simply could not read any more. I can't even be around books, the smell of glue, of ink, the warming of air molecules when turning the page that hits the nose to penetrate the septum, making right for the brain before the decision to set the shelf on fire to be rid forever of the deaths in the books (I am all about life.) I just can't do reading anymore. My brain is a big pink erasor that pushes that rubbed-pencil scent out through my attractive mouth. I talk to others and they become nostalgic, and I too little at ease again. I probably smell like a mummy.

The invitation arrived by dream, which make no mistake is a viable form of communication. Not the boring sleep kind nobody wants to hear you narrate because you aren't at work yet; these dreams come through the slot somebody cut in the front door for just such purposes as getting mail. These dreams are in fact part of the original cutting of the slot in the door, screwing a metal hinge on it and so on, the fact that somebody knew what they were doing when they cut it out with a jigsaw or pushed the button so the machine stamped out the slot--however it happened, the mechanics don't matter. What matters is they thought of somebody somewhere getting mail through this door.

Well, OK, the mechanics do matter in a similar way that the mechanics matter when your friend group continues to grow in number as you cut around the corner away from something rough like a flourescence-soaked T-shirt and gift shop and move toward something smooth like an amber cove, a brick tavern, a deli with a peanut machine. But the mechanics don't guarantee anything and as soon as the mechanics are understood the mechanics fail.

Our friend group enters a Jubilee Center, and I have my invitation still in its oversized manilla envelope. I wonder if there will be enough seating for us all, and if the Correlator will speak English, because I only have a hundred years to live and I didn't want to spend any of those years learning another language. I understood that I would be punished for learning another language, because that's how it works On Vacation.

Friends 09/05/2007

Nothing’s been the same since sleep kicked in again. I’d like to dwell on the “purulent detail” of the group I’d met with my three friends, but apparently all the Girls from mixed companies have gone into a clanky set of dreams. Plus I wasn't the one who was talking to the Girls in the first place.

The honest truth is, as We set out around to avoid one corner where a suspected rapist was being stood off by police, We came up on a row of steel doors in miniplexes not unlike the openings to laundry chutes, but sized for people. I opened one of the doors which swung out far too easily. Inside I noticed all the women dimmed into showcases with earsets were just pretty, and all the men wearing the same, not unhandsome but not handsome. Below the low, amber track lights thin threads of blue glowed in small arcs over every other ear. I walked in, gave somebody a high-five and they looked puzzled but gave me one right back. He then stood up and walked out, joining our friend group. As we were leaving a Japanese man shot out through a door with an infant in his arm. Swinging closed, We caught sight of an exit corridor and knew that was the one We were supposed to go in. The man had a puckered face that said he'd gotten the wrong kind of attention from his work visit, and that he was annoyed at having to walk all the way around the little complex to leave. He didn't join our group of friends.

It was this that made Us head back toward the barricades. We were just getting coffee, waiting on out-of-town friends, not doing anything terrible. We’d picked up a couple of more friends along the way We’d met walking from District houses down to the recently opened Deli & Bar. It seemed so regularly paced I had to remind myself We were on vacation, this was Vacation Time.

Somebody at the back of our growing number of friends asked where the Girls were located; I informed him they’d gone into a clanky set of dreams. We walked on to the Deli & Bar to pay for food and water. I heard one friends (a girl) tell another friend (a boy) that she really just wanted a "free night" with him. Somebody else wanted to see some landscape paintings.

Why? Another friend asked.

Landscape painting is about the disappearing of landscapes, usually, the friend said.

That’s all? No more no less? But which friend said it I didn't catch.

Vacation Freedom Night with a sex friend and tour of a museum with paintings. I announced that neither was possible now, but I couldn't turn around to see who I'd said it to. By now our number of friends had reached close to 20, enough to not see everybody at once, at a single look. Some ate inside on the counters and others ate outside with the police across the street with black and brown guns they squeezed like shiny, terrified bugs. They pointed at the mud-gray windows, where behind the windows, the suspected rapist switched off the porch light curtly.