Trouble in Paradox: A Creative Memoir

By A.P. Eberhart

Trouble in Paradox is the shocking and poetic confession of a young man tiptoeing along the elastic borders of sanity, the shadow of suicide chasing his every thought. Fed up with the tragic chaos of the civilized world, I packed my dog, the necessary survival supplies, a small arsenal of guns, and enough booze to stay drunk for a month, and escaped to the wild and beautiful Paradox Valley in western Colorado.

The book that has emerged from this sojourn is a gritty and irreverent comedy with tragic undertones, full of paradoxes and philosophical horseplay, a healthy dose of humor and polemic, history, politics and social critique, all wrapped up in a pretty package of high-octane wilderness adventure. After six weeks alone in the desert, heartsick and angry but still laughing, I fled that lunatic wilderness homeward to begin writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456734992

A.P. Eberhart

My name is Aaron and I’m an alcoholic—by choice. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with my memories. I have been walking the wrong way down a one way street for most of my life; living out on the fringes and testing the edges to see what I can see—and writing about it. I spend most of my time buried in books, wandering the wild outdoors, scribbling in my journals, or drunk on a barstool. I am 32 years old, work a futile and tedious part-time job, and sporadically take classes at the University of Colorado, purely for the sake of interest (almost ten years in college and no degree on the horizon—but I try to remain modest.) I have been called many things: a redneck intellectual, a vulgar poet, a shrewd fool, a bigoted liberal, a closet moralist, a hopeless romantic, a cynical idealist, an honest liar, and (my favorite) the weeping comedian. Slightly neurotic with a painfully average libido, I am subject to a lust for dive bars, cheap cigars, classical music, desolate deserts, pretty girls, and long moonlit walks off short planks. Though I have been writing for years, Trouble in Paradox is my first coherent, book-length piece—first of many. My ambitions lean toward literary fiction, and my first novel is currently fermenting in my febrile head.

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Trouble in Paradox

A Creative Memoir

A. P. Eberhart

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AuthorHouse™

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© 2011 A. P. Eberhart. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/17/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3499-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3500-5 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3498-5 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902385

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Part One:

The Stranger

One

The Riddle of Identity

Two

A Man of Nowhere

Three

At the Great Divide

Four

The Drunken Redneck

Five

Love Dies Alone

Six

A Fugitive at the Gates

Part Two:

The Sojourner

Seven

The River of Sorrows

Eight

The Silence of the Grave

Nine

Only a Madman

Ten

Call it Destiny

Eleven

Of Beauty and Solitude

Twelve

Ever an Island

Thirteen

The Human Echo

Fourteen

The Color of Fear

Fifteen

The Native

Sixteen

One Last Illusion

A writer is neither a saint nor a sage, neither a prophet nor a doctor. His work is an architecture of interrogations. The questions raised are his own, but since each of us is at the same time everyone else, his questioning is also everyone else’s. The questions raised are the very problem of creation.

—Eugene Ionesco

Prologue

How do I introduce such a book? Does the world really need to hear another tale of wilderness adventure? I doubt it. Thus I must first warn the reader that this is not a book about wild adventure—though there is some adventure, and a good deal of wildness. Second, I must warn the reader that this prologue is little more than the author attempting to justify his actions. Let us abandon pretense and call a duck a duck. This is a disclaimer, where I abdicate all personal responsibility. There could be no reasonable justification for the story I have to tell. None whatever.

That said, ideal reader, I will take an oath that this book is a serious child of my mind and experience. It contains the narrative of a camping trip I took several years ago to the Paradox Valley. Romantic and strange, the Paradox Valley is a part of that colorful naked desert known as the Colorado Plateau, a seared and sinister sundown land of little rain and ample dust, of heartbreaking sunsets, agoraphobic distances, acrophobic heights and claustrophobic depths. A beautiful no man’s land; a glorious land of no return.

The bitter truth is that, having seen enough of the world to be vary definitely a coward, I didn’t want to go to that insipid valley—that moonscape of the mind, that cracked and broken landscape of the soul. No, I did not want to go. But of course too slow in realizing my mistake, and too proud anyhow to admit such failure, I went to Paradox, and now there comes the inevitable book. Welcome to my head. Good luck finding your way home.

Written words are dead things. We impute meaning to the events of our lives only after the fact, and whatever lessons that might be taken from this tale are the product of a postmortem consciousness, sculpted by the dead hand of reminiscence. For that reason, whatever this book might be, it is not a true story—though most of it did actually happen. Long on honesty but short on truth, I intend to dangle before your eyes a montage of half-truths that might, if I am successful, coalesce into some more substantial fraction of truth. But be warned, it is a sourmilk kind of truth, tainted with acknowledged ambiguity and obvious falsehood, and I cannot recommend swallowing it whole and unboiled.

Be that as it may, all of the people and places I have described in these pages are, or were, nominally real—excepting myself, of course—and all of the acts and events here recorded are fundamentally factual, rendered accurate in essence if not in detail.

If the author seems a bit confused at times, that is normal enough. I am confused—always have been. Thus any embarrassing revelations or confessions of a personal nature that might leak out of the narrative should be ignored, seen for what they are: filthy lies. Further, any opinions or ideas that might be expressed are no more than farts in the wind, wild echoes emanating from somewhere beyond the edge, and thus should be regarded with a sympathetic smirk or a hearty laugh, whichever comes first. To paraphrase Mark Twain: anyone who takes this story seriously will be ridiculed. Anyone who does not take it seriously will be shot. I promise. Laugh first, ask questions later.

Cheers folks.

A. P. Eberhart

Shit Creek, Colorado

September 2009

Part One:

The Stranger

One

The Riddle of Identity

Clearly it is time

To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own

soul’s desert

And look for God—having seen man.

—Robinson Jeffers

What would a man do if he knew the exact date and time of his own death?

I don’t know, I hear my voice, a plaintive, arrhythmic bleat. But I aim to find out…

There is a first question of all philosophy, one ultimate question by which a man can gain the power to guide his own fate, and it must be answered before anything else becomes relevant. The question is whether it is nobler to live against an impossible condition, or to die and thus regain a reasonable measure dignity and freedom… I have been sitting here all day, considering the implications of this impossible question, here on the porch of my bungalow on the old Westside, high above the city of Colorado Springs, my hometown. A Beethoven sonata on my stereo competes with the noise of the traffic on the street—an epic struggle. An alarm clock chirps unheeded from my neighbor’s half-open window. My body seems paralyzed, inert, as though frozen in time by some abstract design, like a statue of stone; my elbows rest on my knees and one hand clutches my chin. My porch, a four-foot-square pedestal of simple white concrete perched two feet above the ground with one sagging step, is cold and hard and crumbling to dust with age and neglect.

The faint, acid flavor of fear in my mouth mingles with the taste of stale coffee from my third pot of the day. Caffeine: the tenth muse, Goddess of Anxiety; and mere anxiety is the source of everything, as Heidegger said. The cigarette in my hand has burned down, searing the flesh of my fingers. With a grimace I drop the butt in the dirt, suck the pain out of my fingers and light another cigarette. Starring helplessly at the image of myself in the puddle of rainwater on the step between my feet, my face vacant and unmoved, a few puffball clouds in the sky pass through my transparent reflection… I cannot look myself in the eye, so I lift my gaze toward the street and try to count the passing cars. But the cars don’t matter; I lose count and my thoughts drift away. All is lost… The hours tick past rigid and infertile, unnoticed, unfocused. The liquid view before my eyes becomes a blur of intense yellow that slowly fades to a hazy tint of lemon. Then come the creeping shadows and the darkness closes in and settles on me like a wet blanket. Another night.

Somehow the moment seems false, staged, like a scene in a play, like what I call right-now is nothing more than an echo, a chemically generated montage of past experiences, a noxious cloud of memories that make up a reflection of who I am—or was. Here and now I sit in the dark smoking and watching and listening, but again it is last week, or last month, again it is the random evening of that cold thunderstorm, the humid air is alive with static, the old man is walking his little gray dog down the cracked sidewalk, the upstairs window of the house next door dances with the pale blue glow of a television. Last week. Last month. Last year.

Strange days, and stranger nights…

Stillness. A noisy stillness. A hollow breath and my eyes begin to focus on the twinkling crucifix of citylights below me. In the foreground is my truck in the driveway, and 21st street, the sporadic cars whipping past, their headlights like tracers, like anti-aircraft fire in the cavernous ambivalent night. And the backdrop a leviathan cityscape, a sprawling urban cancer, a lesion on the earth, a pathogen reaching for the horizon. This city that I have called home all my life, but cannot call home anymore, not anymore, lay bare below me in its gargantuan futility: the crooked twisting umbilicus of streets groping chronically in circles like tapeworms, going nowhere over the congenital landscape; the hissing spiral of powerlines crisscrossing the city like sutures, a pillar of emetic smoke issuing from the power plant to the south; the cardiac towers in the center of the city, throbbing with the angina of their endeavor; the huge apartment complexes like rectal polyps, churches like ticks in the foreskin, office parks and industrial parks and trailer parks like sarcomas, like gaping wounds in the land; row upon palliative row of prosthetic cookiecutter houses veneered with treetops, like triage units in a war zone. The shallow silvery ribbon of Fountain Creek cuts through the city like a colostomy, like a gastric lavage carrying the urban waste to the greater world’s backyard. Over the fitful sounds of the street come the sounds of the nighttime city: the metallic hiss and groan of the napalm electric light, the low murmur of a gaseous ozone, the grumbling power of the creeping neon opiate.

The sprawling modern city, killing fields of the human spirit. They say life is short, but it’s the longest thing that has ever happened to me. Maybe it’s too long, I don’t know yet… But the dreary and routine tedium of this life I lead, the futile redundancy, the slavish monotony, the undirected adrenaline, I cannot bear it anymore. Like a man on a treadmill, chasing the horizon, furious in pursuit of a phantom, I live like a hamster on a wheel, a rat in a boundless maze: work, school, sit in traffic, work, get drunk, sleep, walk the dog, work, sit in traffic, eat, fight, work, work, work, get drunk—and repeat steps 1 through 1001 till eternity comes. What good is this kind of life for a man—any kind of man? I know what John Lennon meant when he said that happiness is a warm gun.

Human beings weren’t meant to live like this, I murmur to myself, to no one, in the general direction of everyone. And I laughed when they told me she was dead. I laughed and my eyes saw her face and my head went numb and I walked away. Her mother was standing right there talking with tears in her old eyes and I just laughed and walked away… That was a week ago now, I guess. Seems like a year ago already.

My telephone sits silent beside me on the gritty concrete, minding its own business—for the time being. Very few friends call these days. Even fewer girls. (Well, none, truth be known.) Always plenty of debt-collectors and telemarketers calling though; never seem to be any shortage of those bastards. And my boss calls with perverse regularity, always insinuating that I’m not at work when I am supposed to be—which is true, though it’s none of his goddamn business.

Prrrrrrrrr-ing… Speak ill of the devil and he shall appear. The caller-ID says Lewis Blackwell. The boss. Clone of the Corporate Climb: a good man, but too fair-minded and kindhearted ever to move above his present rung. Prrrrrrrrring… Prrrrrrrrr-ing… Insistent little gadget, this telephone. I don’t want to answer, of course, but he will just call again. And again. And again… Besieged from every side, resigned to my fate, I push the button and speak:

Evenin’ bossman. How’s your wife? She still do that thing with her tongue?

Fuck you Aaron.

No thanks.

You comin’ to work tomorrow?

Nope. I’m havin’ the chip removed from my shoulder tomorrow.

Whaaa?

Yup. Major surgery Lew.

Quit screwin’ around.

But I like screwin’ around.

You comin’ in tomorrow or not? Cause if not…

I’ll see ya round Lew. I hang up the phone and drop it on the step. It bounces with a click-clack and the battery cover pops off. As if to mock me, the phone rings again. Against my better judgment an electric thrill of hope surges through me: Christina! Amy! Sara! Gena! Angel! Kim! I snatch the phone up and look at the caller-ID window. An 800-number—telemarketer or creditor, both evil, both serving the same false prophet. Well but let’s have some fun.

Yell-O.

Good evening Mister Eberhart. This is Andrew with Citibank Financial Services...

So you’re calling to service me financially?

Umm, no sir, affirms the imitation voice on the line. I’m calling to remind you that your account with us is past due by several months.

No comment.

Sir? We need three-hundred-sixty-six dollars and twelve cents to bring the account up to date.

Says who?

Excuse me sir?

You’re excused.

Sir, can you pay the specified amount at this time?

"Can I? Or will I?"

Sir? Can you?

Maybe. But I ain’t the man you’re lookin’ for, anyhow.

You are Mister Aaron P. Eberhart, are you not?

"I’ll ask the questions round here. Let me explain somethin’ to ya Andy. Let me ask you a question. You listenin’?"

Umm… Yes sir.

Alright. Now pay attention Andy. If you have a number of pebbles, and you add or subtract a pebble, would you have the same number of pebbles?

Pebbles?

Yeah pebbles. Would have the same number of pebbles?

Well, no, I guess not. But sir…

Very good answer Andy. Now, if you had a length of rope, and you cut a piece off that rope, would you have the same rope as before?

Well, no. But sir, I don’t see how any of this pertains to your account…

Hold onto your nuts Andy, I’m gettin’ there. You get paid by the hour, don’t ya?

I hear a sigh whistle through the troposphere. Yes sir. Poor guy has to be nice to me. It’s his job. And god knows he needs his job.

Okay. Now we know that the pebbles have changed by adding or subtracting a pebble, right? And we know that the rope has changed by cutting a piece off. It’s a whole different rope now. That number of pebbles no longer exists, it has changed forever. And that rope that existed before no longer exists. Right? Ya with me so far?

Sure.

"Great. Now, Mister Andy, this is known as the riddle of identity, one of the oldest and most perplexing philosophical problems in the world. What exists before cannot exist after. No matter how insignificant the change, what exists before cannot exist after. Everything changes from instant to instant. You can’t step in the same river twice, like Plato said. Get it? And this applies to people, too, Andy. You’re not the same person today that you were yesterday. And I’m not the same person today that I was yesterday, or the day before, or the month before. And therefore, see, I ain’t the same man that spent all that money. I’m no longer the guy that owes you money. He’s long gone. See what I mean Andy?"

That’s cute. But you still owe Citibank three-hundred-sixty-six dollars and twelve cents.

Oh no I don’t. I’m a changed man, Andy. I’ve gained a little weight, got me a new pair of shoes and a darker tan. Think about it, I lose and replace millions of skin cells everyday. I’m a completely different person every single day. That guy y’all loaned all that money to is gone forever. I can’t be held responsible for his actions; that wouldn’t be fair, would it? Now listen, this is the last time you’ll ever hear from me, Andy. I’m gone, finished, leaving, never to return. If you should need to contact me again for any reason, then I’d suggest you need to examine your priorities…

Okay Mister Eberhart. But if you don’t bring the account up to date within ten days, by May fourth, 2005, we will be forced to send the account to collections. A collections fee of forty percent will be assessed at that time. And…

Do me a favor, Andrew, go play in traffic. With a violent heave I throw the phone toward the street. It disappears in a high arc and I hear it crash onto the pavement and shatter. Good riddance, ye wicked device of torture and heartache!

A little wooden sign on my neighbor’s door says: Out of my mind. Back in five minutes. That sounds about right… My body feels heavy; I am so exhausted that I could almost believe myself a disembodied thought. All I need is sleep, but some pernicious power has taped my eyelids open. The headache and the sharp stiffness in my back don’t seem real. This broken down old body: 27 years old, going on sixty. Already too many years of hard work, hard play, hard drinking and hard fighting; already too many years of worry and bitterness and squandered potential and neglected affinities; already too many years of wooing a savage, pursuing the wind, striving to softening marble, chasing a dream. My feet and hands ache with the chill of night, but I do not shiver. My face is hot and I can feel the heartbeat in my forehead. Something is pulling my throat down into my chest and my bowels are trying to climb out my rectum. There is a turd under my hat. My mind—a mind, I admit, forever dancing in the sewers of existence—moves like a river, solemn and slow and with a fatal undertow of ambition. As I sit my mind and mouth carry on the usual monotone dialogue, making decisions for me. Nothing moves but the traffic on the street and my soundless lips.

This world. It is too much with me this time: too cruel and ugly and perverted, too trivial and unjust and fraudulent. What is left for the honest man? What remains for a man of sensitivity in this society of butchers? What can the authentic man do but say goodbye, escape to the empty spaces on the map, the wild mountains, the desolate desert, the woebegone isolation of a wilderness both physical and metaphysical, both internal and external? Withdraw and cultivate your own garden, as they say. Run for your life! as I say. What choice do I have?

But am I an honest man?

As for that, I am not the one to ask. I couldn’t answer a question like that without a sneer in my rueful eyes. What a piece of work is a man, bemoaned Prince Hamlet. And that is true. Too true.

Is there any possibility of an authentic and dignified life in this postmodern nightmare culture of twenty-first century America? I mutter almost inaudible, staring at the cigarette in my hand, my voice trailing off into the silent flow of traffic on the street. A light, toxic breeze has come up out of the south, carrying the smell of exhaust. Cigarette smoke drifts and dances through my fingers and burns my eyes.

More than a hundred-fifty years ago Walt Whitman said to his fellow Americans: You are in a fair way to create a whole nation of lunatics.

I wonder what he meant by that? I say hoarsely, with a crooked glance at the dark horizon. I wouldn’t answer that one either… But this modern culture of ours, this megalithic social disorder we call civilization, this shrink-wrapped vacuum we call an historic continuum, it has cut me too deeply this time, finally pushed me too far. It is a personal failing, sure enough, but one that I do not accept full responsibility for: that I can no longer tolerate the urbanity of this urban environment; that I can no longer reconcile the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the real and the ideal; that I feel this society has become too abusive, brutal, coercive and onerous, too corrupt and extortionate, too lewd and licentious and depraved, too plutocratic and democratic and bureaucratic and technocratic. The view of this vast social failure is too much; the filth and clamor and indignity of the civilized menagerie has again become too much for me. I will affirm it openly: I am a virtuoso of righteous fury. Once again I have lost the thread, and I cannot seem to put it back together this time… I admit these weaknesses, but I do not count myself debased for them. There is justice here, somewhere.

Normally, when it all gets to be too much for me, when the press of culture again becomes unbearable, I tend to pack my truck with miscellaneous survival gear and retreat for several days to the somewhat less cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Rocky Mountains: an elixir of sun and solitude, mental masturbation and wilderness pilgrimage (plus booze), as antidote for these somatic afflictions.

But that won’t do it this time. No way. A few days and nights on some lonely random ridge near timberline is not going to bring me back from the edge this time. This is not my chronic and ordinary case of P.E.N.—Postmodern Existential Nausea—not my standard misanthropic melodrama, not the routine bourgeois angst and boredom of mass-man caught in the trap. It runs deeper than all of that. It’s more this time. It’s much bigger this time…

As I remember, I have not slept for days, strung out on caffeine and nicotine and sugar and painkillers. I can’t eat—can’t even remember the last real meal I had. Every little thing sends my temper flying off into a hurricane of rage and random violence: I put my fist through three different walls in the last two days; the pickle jar wouldn’t open last night, so I calmly threw it through the kitchen window; and I put a steeltoe boot through my TV this morning, because our objective newsmedia was again blathering useless banalities and spreading more intolerable lies, because our advertisers were again insulting my intelligence… Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t breath, can’t fuck—can’t even get the old noodle up anymore. Those worthless magazines and movies are just too blatantly fake; they work only for an empty and obsessive sexuality, a blind and obtuse libido. They worked well enough, I suppose, before I noticed the eyes. (The eyes: either sacrificially ambitious or giving testimony of an emotional state so cracked and floundering.) The pornography worked until I recognized the humanity behind my own hedonism—that was a bad day—but it doesn’t work anymore. Nothing works anymore. I have seen too much.

Well sheee-it! my voice again, a highpitched squeal, loud now. I have even lost the desire to get stonedrunk and beat-up a yuppie or a gay-basher. All the fight is gone out of me. This one is bad, the worst yet. And I laughed when they told me Allison was dead. I just laughed and felt nothing—and that is the worst of it, that is the most gruesome of it, that is something I cannot afford to tolerate. I felt nothing at all. No one did. Her death was foreshadowed, the prognosis ordained. Everybody expected it. We all guessed her chemical fate.

It weren’t no big goddamn surprise, my voice shakes, cracks, a violent shudder courses through me like a wave from my toes to the top of my head. But I laughed… How could I laugh…? I swallow a cold breath and toss my cigarette into the weeds beside the porch.

My court-ordered therapist tells me that I tend to dwell on the negative, that I am too pessimistic, too preoccupied with the bad and ugly, that I fail to see the good and beautiful side of things. I am so far gone, I suppose, that I don’t even know what that means. But show me the positive side of all this and I would be happy to see it. Show me the good, the beautiful, the hopeful, and I will gladly sacrifice myself on the blind alter of optimism. Gladly… But no, I cannot pretend to see good where there is none; I cannot pretend hope where there is no reason for hope; I cannot make-believe that things are okay when they so obviously are not. For too long now I have had that sick feeling, that persistent instinct, that insistent intuition, that something has got to give, some relief has got to be found, or again I will have to face that final danger, that ultimate existential ending far worse than the solemn comfort of death—

And the goddamn pills again! I shout, rattling my throat, causing a violent fit of dry coughing and heaving and wheezing…

What am I to do about it? Action is salvation, so do something about it… Try to find another cheap and nameless lady for the night? No… No… Go take my usual seat at Paul’s Bar and fill my soul up with beer and listen to the boys telling the same jokes they told last night, and every night before that? Or… Or I could do what I should have done a long time ago—the final solution.

My eyelids snap shut, my teeth tear at my lip—No… ah shit, maybe…—the words purge audibly from my guts, like a spasm. Yes, I could make a run for it, do the right thing and flee into the open arms of my secular fate: bolt, slink off into the abyss, make a break for the fortified borders of my transitory consciousness. A madman in search of a place to hide; a beleaguered soul seeking the angle of repose. I could do that.

It’s time for me to be gone, I croak, fighting the heavy ache in my throat. Just gone forever man… The decision is made.

Let the wicked delight in their sparkling squalor—I’m gone. I will leave tomorrow, for better or worse. Finally, as so long promised and prophesied, I will make the leap, that big goodbye trip into the arms of eternal freedom. Finally. Many years ago, studying a topographic map—as any romantic is prone to do from time to time—I was tantalized by those tiny black letters slanting from northwest to southeast: Paradox Valley. The place, yet unseen, has lingered in my head like a magic incantation, the name has been ringing in my ears for as long as I can remember. That will be the place.

I picture it as the kind of romantic landscape you see in old western movies: an empty silhouette of a place, a vast unbounded spectrum of sprawling mesas jig-sawed with gushing crimson canyons and soft vermillion valleys, a landscape bedecked with vaulted violet domes, pastel buttes and rusty pinnacles of roseate sandstone; that kind of country always with frosted peaks floating like an armada on the faroff rim of the world, the scene always embellished with a dim reef of lilac clouds; a thin, painted and petrified landscape, dancing in the gentle glassy heat, its every feature bold and distinct under the violent golden lamp of an irreverent sun, a whole desert world abandoned and brooding, resting timeless under that monumental sapphire abyss.

Thus I picture the Paradox Valley and environs. That is my ideal… But, overfull as I am of that sickheaded wisdom and bland cynicism of my times, I of course know better than to trust in my ideals. Nevertheless, it is about time we got there; it is about time I went through with this insane plan. I have promised myself that Paradox would be the place. It is time to keep that promise, time I lived up to my romantic destiny. Now or never. There really is no alternative, to tell the truth. We all must one day go to the valley of paradox, to which all roads lead.

Might as well get it over with! What the hell, right? I shout at a dogwalker standing at the end of my driveway, his miniature dog pissing on my newly planted blue spruce. The man and his little toy animal ignore me and move on quickly up the street. Have a nice evening. Prick!

Slowly I get to my feet, grunting and moaning and cursing like an old curmudgeon, walk inside and collapse on the couch. My dog eyes me from his mat on the floor in the corner of the room, his dark liquid eyes sullen and serious with a vague question. The dog—Kiowa. He is an eight-year-old black Labrador retriever: one-hundred-pounds of fur and bone and muscle and character. Smart too, much brighter than his so-called owner. And he has the power of prophesy, it seems. He already knows I am running away from home. And his question?

I can’t take you with me, Kiowa, I say to him, and his tail wags, his eyes sparkle, because he knows he is coming with me.

No, I repeat myself, and proceed to reason with him. You’re a city-dog. Ain’t got sense enough to survive out there, and I can’t be lookin’ after you all the time. He gets up and comes to me and licks my face, his tail waging in circles. He is winning this argument by sheer brute force, and he knows it.

"No. Now no… Aww, No Kiowa! Look, buddyboy, you can stay at mom’s house. You’ll like it there. Big backyard. Plenty of squirrels to chase. You can lay in the sun all day, in the tall grass behind the shed, and watch the world go by. It’s cloud nine, man. Puppy paradise. It’s Canine Canaan, I tell you. Trust me little buddy, you’ll love it there, you’ll be happy there, I promise…"

Damn. There goes the superiority of human reason. He grins, wags his tail furiously. He dashes around the small room, buzzing the thin carpet with his rough paws, expertly avoiding obstacles.

Alright alright alright. Settle down boy. We’ll be on the road soon enough…

The argument is settled but he continues to prod me, stopping dead in the middle of the room, staring at me with an imploring look on his drooping black face.

Oh! You probably need a walk, huh Kiowa? Sorry bud. Guess I forgot. Taking the leash from the nail by the door, I turn and walk out, Kiowa following.

We walk and walk, block upon block, over the narrow strip of alabaster concrete under a silhouette arcade of oaks and elms and maples and sycamores, passing, in the mucus glow of the streetlight, homes set back from the street and buffered from its violence by neatly manicured lawns and hedgerows of lilac and hybrid juniper: symmetrical houses, mostly of humble vernacular Victorian and American eclectic heritage, embellished with understated spindlework porches and balconets and long bending balustrades and bay windows and bow windows and gables and cornices. Simple and beautiful. A few cars pass us on the residential street. The soft night air smells faintly of fossil-fuel.

We trod through a city park over spongy and sodden over-watered grass, under the giant pines and locusts and elms. This little neighborhood park is Kiowa’s favorite place to run; he believes himself sole owner of the territory. With the air of a lord he moves among the tennis courts, basketball courts, trash cans, restrooms, swingsets, volleyball nets, junglejims, sleeping bums, picnic tables, merrygorounds, sandboxes, baseball backstops… A shoddy mosaic of trash decorates the park. A used condom lay fulfilled in the damp grass under a ponderosa pine; Kleenex floats whimsically on the gentle breeze; candywrappers bounce over the solemn ground. The earth vibrates at some distant insistence and the muddy sky evolves as the moon rises.

As Kiowa wraps up his nasal surveillance of the park, I unzip and piss on a small bronze statue of a fallen soldier, a public monument. What are public monuments for if not to be pissed on? The soldier’s name is Steven Saunders, subservient victim of the first war in Iraq, and I am sure he was a good enough guy; probably loved his mother and stood up for his sister’s modesty and played third base or something for the varsity team in high school. A good man, I am sure. It is not the man I piss on—no, never!—it is the monument, the uniform, the mass hypnosis, the universal bloodyhands of bartering human lives for oil and hegemony, ennobled in bronze—that is what I piss on.

But my hands are cold and home is calling. It’s time to go. It’s time.

Say goodbye to this place Kiowa. Won’t be nothin’ but a memory come mornin’… Come on boy, let’s go home…

Two

A Man of Nowhere

Hurry, hurry, don’t be late for your death!

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Another sleepless night. No chance of sleep tonight, not enough liquor in the house. But I am used to that; I have always been the sleepless type. For my part, I like the sheen that darkness puts on the everstill world; I like the panoramic form and coarse texture of the nighttime; I like the unpeopled culture of the black hours, when all the good and normal citizens are asleep and the whole earth belongs only to me. It is a strange compound of wakeful unease