The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
Then a band of demons joined in and it sounded something like this.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charlie Daniels
My friend described it as thinking through quicksand. The anise, the ice, the apparatus. It seemed more like thinking without the body. As if my eyes were placed just a foot forward and above my head in a tiny, insubstantial pool. Viewing the conversation with yourself in the periphery. To go any further felt unnatural. Not that I owe nature reverence. I don’t choose to walk into the ocean for the same reason.
It was a lonely magic. It was a trick no one would pay to see. I wanted to say, “This is my limit? Who the fuck are you to keep me in that thing? Down in that filthy, achy, impotent, tired wreck.” There was consolation in hearing my body, yammering and ignorant, behind me. “At least he’ll never know,” I thought.
The son of a bitch! He’d finally done it. The physical pressure. The months of disentanglement.
“Immense,” he shouted! “That is the best part of it. I am actively tormenting myself with the most agonizing, skin crawling embarrassment daily. I just get high and start typing absolute bullshit. Sometimes I just string twenty cliches together and call it a night. The real beauty is in the struggle to publish it somewhere. I told fucking everyone about it. So I know if I publish it, anyone I give a fuck about will see it and I’ll be revealed. Irreversibly revealed.” He took a drag, pulled that cocksucker grin and pointed at his friend while looking at his drink.
“So there is this gnawing, nausea and pushing and muscle tightening as you say, ‘it’s terrible and I’m keeping it’ and then ‘no you will not!’” “People cleanse their colons and I am going to cleanse my shame.” The entire tired scheme told again. Half borrowed thoughts and crudely constructed epiphanies. The gracious nodding and second counting I’d seen on the faces of so many of these friends.
I don’t know why I forget each time. For some reason the memory of escape is left in him when I go. It’s the first thing I recall when I go back. Before I’m back at all.
I felt a flash of generative heat move across my face. We were leaning against each other trying to remember where we came from. The commonality I sought was found, to my surprise, on the precipice of a dark evening. This dark evening. With the tempest roar of possibility slavering, fang and breath, inches from our faces. It was so hard to think.
We focused. Hope wouldn’t break our concentration. We were the iris piercing through depth of field. The tunnel through to reality we remember reading about. The place where our selves didn’t matter. Where the brilliant light washes out the shades and lines we create to make it all matter. The data store. The purest. The experience itself, at last, no mere memory.
You succeeded. I failed. I begged to be photographed. To be the illuminated pixel or silver halide. To be kept in marigold fields or charcoal night. Vital. With only one thing to feel. The scope of existence narrowed to perfection. No before or after. Immutable. I could not remember.
He had one paper bag containing a bottle of Wild Irish Rose, a string of firecrackers (150 count) and an expired bus ticket out of town. He wondered why his friend would cast him as such a cliché anti-hero.
On the seventh day the chicken became juicy, flavorful. The sinewy lines we traced in each other the night before, we processed together the following afternoon.
