Life’s not short at all. Oh, those liars. Be ye drunken, said Baudelaire, on wine or poetry or love so the ticking clock doesn’t smash in your brain. That was in 1890, or 1860, and the ticking is still ticking. Not in Baudelaire’s head, but in everybody else’s, and drunkenness would be a decent approach but that the more you need it the less it works. When you’re a kid and your brain just burns a little bit it’s easy to smother that little agonizing drone, but when it’s a helicopter clipping against your ears with those long deafening blades there’s not enough grease to lube those engines into silence. You read books, but you can’t hear the words on the page when the chopper is slicing through the sides of your head. And it’s hard to stay drunken on women or men when you’re pacing and running up and down the side of the room to keep the beat of your own heart from running up your spine and out through the top of your head. So the old standby, wine, gets used the most because it’s more readily attainable than understanding or human kindness, but in spite of any drunkenness or the loose swimming in your head, you are still so aware that you are no less scared and no more relieved than you were, just scared and drunk, panicked and smashed, too drunk to run up and down is all but your head screaming cartwheels. As the great O’Neill said in the mouth of his Tyrone, “Drunk enough to sink a ship but I’m still goddamned afloat.” The thing is that you don’t want the clock to stop ticking; you just don’t want to have to realize it every bit of the way there. You don’t want to have to watch the scan of the little thinnest hand across the flat enamel disk all through the duration of that second, feeling the scratch of your blood moving up your arm through the length of it; you can feel the exact progress from the cells to the red platelets squeezing their way through the small round capillaries, out of the caverns of the cells of your flesh into the veins that lead tortuously back past the white tissues, out of the reach of each muscle fiber and reaching over the ligaments, easing up in its thin vein over the wall of tendon and cartilage that presents itself; joining, always joining with the next and the next in that well planned and executed reaching web until the path of the vessels gradually ease out of that muscle, out of the rounded forearm knot finally conspiring together into the larger course it joins up over the joint, then gathering some slight speed and perspective it travels along the slick greasy bone ever inward, ever gathering all of itself cell by cell and platelet by platelet into the thickening stream of it as it slips millimeter by millimeter through the extent of arm, elbow bicep and shoulder, thorax, breast, chest, chest wall, heart. Every second it repeats. That is a quarter of a second worth of information, maybe an eighth of a second’s information thrust through consciousness about yourself. The other three quarters or seven eights you are well aware too of the course that blood is making through the ventricles, smothered with oxygen, slamming a nano-milimeter at a time towards the artery opening its big sucking mouth, and so down along its course this time among ribs or through scalp or God forbid the sole of your damn foot. How are you going to get away from your own body? It doesn’t go anywhere without you. Books have the power to rob it at times and send you elsewhere. Let the heart froth away at its labors and heave and suck all it wants if your mind is presented astonished with a reality, with the truth of the way light slants electric and yellow and clear in August around yellow small leaved trees in Jefferson touching leaves bark and dust before it reaches the sweat beaded strands of the dark gnarled hair at the neck of some Lena Grove or some Joe Christmas or Compson or Snopes or Hoggabeck on his quest for a wife. Take that bastard body, my own body, bastard brain is whatever it is that dictates the necessity of knowing, of supra awareness. Do you grasp where we are here? To have to know and visualize in detail every atomic part of every second? That’s what supra awareness is, and it’s real. Your brain holds you pinned as it presents to you everything, all of the time. Your body, rather. I rather think it’s the body that holds you pinned in tyranny of being.

This kind of life is unbearable. It is untenable. It’s life, yes, maybe more of real life than ever because of the supra awareness. You are so aware, so alive and aware of your life that it can’t be lived. The more each part of each second is yours the less you can do anything like living in it. That is a goddamned mystery. It is goddamned mysterious, but ugly mysterious, not a beautiful mysterious, quandary. It’s the bareness of your life without anything else, and it cannot be borne. It can’t be lived. You have got to escape it, or rather, it will cast you out on its own volition. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t take any action.  There is no slashing or poisoning or tying or knotting or squeezing. It simply snuffs. It squeezes you out, poof, you are gone. That is the saddest thing. The seconds are hard, they hurt and terrify but if you are gone, never again will you look up and see blue. Nothing can be sadder than that. You don’t want to lose the sky. As bad as the rest of it is, it would be worth it to stay around just for the moments when you see the blue sky. You’re pinned back so hard into the soft high back of the couch that you are only a corner of it, a striking blue corner in the left top part of the window across. There it is so beautiful, so much what you are and you want. You feel the pain of that loss more acutely than when your parents died. Than when anybody died. You had that sky before you even know your parents, before you know what people are. Before you could recognize your mom and dad were people and yourself also, and that you were separate but alike with hands and flesh and faces, you had always looked up and had that sky. You’d fall on your back and there it was for you and apart from you. You knew it was not you, it was the there of other, and lovely and beautiful and full of grace.  Goddamn it. You don’t want to lose that. You love that.  That is the only thing you can love, ultimately. When the mind breaks that is the thing. You know you’re going to lose the blue beauty of its otherness and the way you love it. That is the only perfect love. You turn your eyes up and it’s there and it is all in you warm and lit and suffused with gold somehow and also white, and still only pure unfathomed blue. That is love. You truly want nothing from it, you only love it. That is the great loss. That is the real loss. Then you come to the point where really this has gone on too long, you have got to come to a character or a movement or at least a goddamn movement on the wall. You have got to get up and see your reflection or something—see your own face still human with eyes and nose, or if all else has failed entirely have the doorbell ring and go to it and find someone on the other side, because there has at some point to be a conversation. It can be with your own self, it can be with the neighbor or policeman or black squirrel on the sidewalk but something has to occur. Interaction has to take place.

But there is no one to talk to when your own head is under a pillow. There’s no interaction when time is lashed against your face.

More Fiction