In the afternoon when Anse was asleep and with the last one still walking home from school, instead of going to gut and clean the fish I would walk down the road to the arboretum where I could sit quiet and hate them. It would be still at the pond, with the glass water and rabbit bones and everything slow and dead, smelling of mud and sap and the the black wet earth.

And so I took Whitfield. I was unvirgin before and unvirgin after he came down through the high brush and the cattails and said words that were nothing, empty air, loose as the water that has no shape, but he was not-Anse and so I took him. He said Love at the start and Adultery at the end, but they both meant the same thing or nothing, I did not know. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call it.

I would take him in the mud next to the water that lapped at our toes and find that I had forgotten my own name. And so the blood curdled and clotted, contained itself within myself and refused to flood again. I would think: I am full and empty, motionless, still as the rabbit lying there soft and quiet and beginning to liquefy underneath its fur. I was a cold jar, a hallowed tree, a body up-and-down and then flying flat sideways. I would think: I am already dead.

Then it was over. I said I won’t ever tell it. And he said I had every right to tell it, but I knew to him they were just words in the air that turned to nothing. They were wooden sounds. They were pale wisps of a thing already gone.

The man in the moon kept witness, after midnight, after the neighbors had gone to their quiet quilted beds: I stepped barefoot off the back porch and into our yard. I was half-naked, half-dreaming, intending to skinny-dip and hoping to slough off the dead cells of these dying days (have I told you? my father is dying)—but she was already waiting for me at the iron gate. A possum and her babies. Gilt by the sulfur light. She gave me a warning look. She said without making a sound, This is primordial choreography; This is all I know.

I’m slogging through the years, stealing paragraphs and abandoning others, and it’s fun and humbling and something I should have done a long time ago. More ancient updates coming soon!

He comes from the city of orphans and smog, built overnight and abandoned again, its empty factories standing now like the ransacked mausoleums of ancestral giants. There are no stars. There are no freight trains for a hundred miles and so he walks along the railroad tracks just before dawn, drunk and dreaming of the desperate laughter of whores; they smell of rosewater and burnt almonds and whisper things to him he cannot understand, but the sounds themselves go on reverberating in his skull for the rest of the night: sibilant, carnal, buoyed by the inherited sorcery of women—of sirens who wrecked ships and ruined heroes and made fools of men for thousands of years—

But the sun breaks over the tops of the trees and everything resumes its ordinary color. He stops and takes a leak at the edge of the woods, thinking of Marguerite with her black hair and bitten thumbs, and how the world has lost some elemental danger. There are no goddesses to take him captive. There are only girls and women.

I dream of the swamp and its lonely ghosts. They have moonblown faces and paraffin eyes, melting and hardening and melting again, like the candles that gutter inside the heads of rotting pumpkins. Have you see them? They are thirsty. They do not levitate the way I thought they would, but drag their feet across the mud and muck and rotten leaves. There are rumors of who they were and how they died: confederate soldiers who camped out here, in their pup-tents and mildewed clothes, nursing rotten limbs and eternal erections, dying from the heat, from boredom, from the absence of all tender life—but it doesn’t really matter. Understand that they’re dead. Understand that this place is haunted.

December ??, 1937
Oaxaca

———Day: and once again, the cruel splendor of a glowering star: hot and molten, blazing across the road and through the dusty curtain into the cloistered shadows of a room where, commingled with its plangent rays, sound all of the voices of the world: boys eating chocolate skulls, the horses in the road, the carts and marketplace and, maybe, possibly, somewhere across the stony paths, the sound of ¡Feliz Navidad! and your voice, if it’s your voice, carried on the back of a mother who walks with her wares, a glass bottle, a hollow chorus. And as if this were not enough, in the afternoon, in the bleeding golden light, the sounds of slaughtering in the kitchen reverberate like so many sharpened knives through the floorboards of my room. I should wait and let them splinter the wood, drive their serrated tips, like the silver narrowed teeth of feeding sharks, through my feet and fingers and throat. I should let them sever the nerves or cut out my liver; I am already a dead Prometheus, flayed and withered on the rocks. …The gods roar in the running water of the faucets, in the liquid that drowns my fever, all sounding like thunder when I submerge my head in the porcelain bath, wrathful, grieving and echoing: you stole the fire; we want it back. The green vulture comes daily through the open window to feast on my organs. He sits perched on the washbasin. He flies at me with his claws poised to tear open my flesh and then, quietly, terribly, his cold beak buries itself inside the putrid cavity of my soul.

Do you wonder how I am? This was our room, once, if you remember, in Oaxaca, with the slaughtering sounds then muted by the grace of your body and your eyes and Oh, Yvonne. I am utterly alone. I try to write, telegrams and letters, on sheets of paper that lay like crumpled ghosts in the wastebasket, under the bedsheets, on the stained floors of the cantinas that creak and rattle under the weight of the patrons who stumble across its length. I know this is hell. I know this is hell to see your figure in the glass and to realize it is only an illusion: my hand touches nothing but the cool air and the lacquer of this bar that stretches like a thirsty unspooled tongue from one end of the room to the other. In the shadows and noise, there is a woman that weeps. Have you wept for us? Have you wept for your fool of a husband who cannot find his way without you? Come back to me, Yvonne. Y. The first letter of your name and and and, repeating in my skull, the necessary fulcrum, the only conjunction: how can we live apart?

—The woman beside me weeps for her lost son, Cristobal, shot, one year ago, in this same cantina. Is Mexico dead? Is the world asleep? I stumble out into the darkness, the somber night, a somnambulator lost in a field of shuttered stars. How much time has passed? Has it been days or weeks? Not months, I know, it is still December. The roads here are steep and crowded with houses, perpetually leaning towards each other, dreaming of touching their leaky roofs and swollen gutters, if only for a moment…

And then today the beggars touched my coatsleeve on the road. I brushed them away and wandered into a garden that wasn’t mine and fell asleep among the weeds. Something had eaten the flower-heads. I dreamed that I was already dead: my face pressed against the soil: a swarm of insects suddenly teeming over my body and feasting upon my face. The locusts took my eyes—the fine pupil and crescent of lid and quivering optic nerve. And this is how I sometimes think of myself: a corpse in a stranger’s garden, faceless, a brood of insects fastidiously consuming the carcass, piece by piece, hair by hair, while scorpions dance in a venomous parade along my torso and a river of cockroaches descend, one by one, their antennae waving, into the spirals of my ear: a stranger, an exiled corpse, dissolving into the dirt. ——I cannot sleep without seeing the volcanoes. They are opened veins spewing forth the lava of their blown cores: invisibly, furtively, for anyone who gazes at their flat black crowns imagines they are dormant. It is not so. I am aware of some imminent explosion. I am roiling glowing mass, set ablaze and burning, for you…your face. If you ever loved me, come back. I am lying in a valley, under the volcano, about to be buried and waiting to be found.

I. Anticipatoria

Imagine an island made of ash—cooled lava that yawns like a black sea before you, cracked and crevassed, hardened now but not forever. You might walk a good distance, a mile or so, looking for some sign of life, and sometimes you will find it. I saw an ancient woman with her dog once—a hideous hairless dog with yellow teeth and bugged-out eyes nervously shaking in the woman’s hands—and I asked her something (I don’t remember what), and she turned her head to face me, so slowly, quietly, that I thought whole universes might have collapsed and been born again in the time it took for her to make that subtle gesture, but of course on other planets it might have only been a single second. That is the first thing you learn about this place—time is an untamed creature. There is no formal curvature of space, no patterned fabric or universal law, and so you forget how to tell a story. Time itself is flattened, bloated, twisted, bent, stretched and swallowed, doubling and redoubling back upon itself, until the beginning seems like a dream you imagined once and the end is an invisible ghost. But the woman—the one with the dog—she said, “I can’t believe it. I forgot to bring toothpaste. I forgot those little bottles of travel shampoo.”

“But you remembered your dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said and gripped him even tighter to his chest. The thing shivered. “But he’s leaving soon.”

In the distance you could see the blown top of the volcano, with its jagged edges like a broken tooth, beginning to belch fat clouds of steam that signaled its coming eruption. But how long did we have? I had not found my father yet. I had been told (in another life, in another galaxy it seemed to me then) he would be taken away by the molten river, dissolved, returned to the dust and the ash—and this was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. The sickening knowing dread.