Backwards, he kept saying

Backwards, he kept saying,backwards. I thought of the red-haired Australian woman who'd used that word. I thought about her Italian husband and a murder in the non-descript mountains and her newly published novel cover-- how they'd changed the title. You just have no say in a thing like that, she'd said. Its all backwards out there.

And here I am writing in a new pen. And here I am in my new handwriting, my old rooms. I'd been down in their basement, stacking t-shirts.

I'd been down to the river, where was I? I looked up at the city of Richmond. This was all Bob's idea, of course. He didn't trust the water there.

I was driving to Boston and off the highway a tractor trailer caught on fire like a raw animal. The treetops singed and curled under around it. The highway went silent. The fire hoses spritzed and dribbled at the thing, which passed me by clear as a photograph-- real as it could manage.

There was a change, then, and we all had to crawl along on our stomachs for hours. Philadelphia came on full of Christmas tree lights. It looked like a dream. Only later did we see it was a factory. A man was saying "engine" like "injun". All I heard was injun, injun. Nobody saw her coming.

The cats are panting cadillacs. It drives a U-haul around town, pays 50 cents for red feathers and sticks them in its hair. I'm not good at these things, said Bob. And Bob, we can stay in our rooms, I said, we can read all these books! Oh, spine and brain, old whether or not...

This is how it felt underwater: like a tunnel. like its green.

Now keep moving. Take a left, sure but keep driving. The brickman lays his bricks down and you expect arrangements to be made for your shoes, don't you? What makes it so hard to say things straight is the peculiar shape of your pockets? To Ramona, you say, as if this means anything.

Ramona would not notice you on fire in her kitchen, dear. What does anyone mean by sickly, to Ramona? A man waters his plants and dries his kitchen counters with a dish towel. If the sheets had been there when we'd said they were, we'd have remembered. We are forever picking up these glass jars, saying heavy.

day 9

one of these days & these boots, i think, when i remember matthew aizenstadt in the highschool cafeteria after a thre year dissapearance. typewriter tip tip tip tip tip tip tip tip tippta aye tip ta tip ta tip ta aye, could be my morning excersize, yoga, a walk to the curb (no mail) and backwards. calm down oldbaoy, i'd like to think but he doesn't need it. he's happy. they're all happy and they're all hapy without me and maybe they might want to get coffee or they would get coffee if i wanted them to, too, but some of them wouldn't ask unless i asked first and they don't need me. they're happy and they don't owe me. that'sa good thing. its a good thing being happy like a cool pillow. i have the cats and they owe me a lot. i have all the receipts and the film negatives which nothing ever happens to. they just either get lost or they don't and they just stay there. a lot like matt aizenstadt, i think. matt aizenstadt and his fishbowl metaphor and his girlfriend lindsay and not speaking anymore and the higschool assembly third row and the sunroom couch once and in the car once driving with the heat on and the windows rolled down, the insistence that it was always this way and it had to be this way. the thinking of it as a new thing & curious.