by Paul Hughes
West nodded, nodded and sobbed, stroking Maggie’s hair, wiping tears from her. He nodded. He’d seen the light. They’d both seen everything.
“James!” Her voice echoed down the corridor. Richter heard, but he kept running. “James, please!”
He came to the chamber door, slid to a stop across the slick, tilted floor. He could hear Benton running to catch up. He opened the door anyway.
Two people looked up. Gray eyes. Forty-eight corpses around them. The light at the room’s center throbbed.
Hope slammed into his back, grabbing his coat and pulling him into the corridor. She shoved him against the wall, stood between him and the thrumming, screaming ball of light.
He turned to her, his eyes distant, his mind lifetimes away. He saw Balfour coming down the corridor, the hallway of an alien vessel, forty-eight corpses, two survivors, the light.
“James—
A palpable thrust of brilliance tore from the light at the chamber’s center. West and Maggie clawed into each other, the song of the trillions broadcasting above them, the light reaching out, out, out
When Richter came around, one of the K group survivors was cradling his head. A girl. The other crouched beside Michael, whose head lolled toward him. Richter’s heart stopped an instant when he saw Michael’s cold gray eyes.
“Hope?” He coughed out, choking on something copper. “Hope?”
“She’s—” The girl’s cold hand was against his cheek.
“Hope?”
The man tending to Michael whispered something.
“What?” Richter tried to get up, found himself weak in the aftermath of the light, drained. Something was fundamentally different.
West turned around, a small motion of his head indicating the chamber.
Richter threw Maggie’s hands from him, crawled slowly, painfully into the orb room. Made it to the edge of the drop into the bowl. Saw what remained of Hope Benton curled peacefully against the corpses of Assault K.
Something broke.
There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.
David Smith Jennings died an old man in the far, far future.
Antonia Cervera was shot and killed by David Smith Jennings in Wind River, D.C..
Abrah Allen-Kennedy was killed in the Quebecois nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.
Buddy McClure broke his neck and drowned on the bottom of Lake Superior.
Hank the Cowboy was cancelled.
Honeybear Brown lives on, under the couch.
James Richter went into the future to find
AMONG THE LIVING
was never known to command respect from his peers
was known to steal his fourteen minutes in fragments
was known to sometimes allow ashes to burn on his forearms and face
while waiting patiently for them to gutter out
because at least it was something nearing proof
that he was there at all
was never known to entertain such revolutions
but the autopsy was inconclusive
as to when and why he chose to
enact such validity
[then strike in my name; these are mine to erase.]
on histories
[if the self is defined as
[/there is nothing left to enlighten
wished he’d sky-wide hands with which to grasp the world;
such moss, the old-growth, teardrops of ocean:
the cellular towers would embed themselves in his palm like fiberglass dust
as he squeezed a little too long, a little too hard,
neither burned nor blistered by the lukewarm blood.
considered himself an aggressive driver
considered himself a philosopher, a deep thinker, an author behind the wheel
considered his thoughts the best when thought while driving, while wrapped
within a ton or two of green Ford, tan interior
so aligned with the subtleties of his landship that once
just north of the Mexico exit
when the number two cylinder coil blew and his truck
resonated new harmonics across grinding metal,
he promptly took the exit,
checked the oil,
and turned around to home because his father had once fixed airplanes
in a life younger than his own.
defined himself in histories of who started hating him when.
[the places between stasis are horror.]
was known to accelerate into curves
accelerate into downslopes
into relationships
was known to fear braking.
learned eventually
learned early
learned a little too late
that locating his happiness within the
broken puzzle pieces gifted in
the hope of finding purchase in the segment
he’d long ago torn from his own viscera
only forced the disbelief of soulmates and wondered him
wandering in search of so much more than this.
he’d invented his own mathematics to explain absolutely nothing.
wished he’d a sky-wide heart with which to love the world:
[the world, to him, was always internal, never
and he’d hate cities for reasons.
sometimes pretended he could poetry,
sometimes neglected the laws that fed him,
always hated womyn,
always hated person’s who couldn’t tell the different between
websters plurals and possessives.
if it were possible, he’d use subjunctive.
if it were possible, he’d trade his ability to dream.
found inspiration at speeds above legal,
at acceleration,
at speeds in alternate states:
[New York drivers are so... aggressive.]
found something comforting in riding the edge,
the rumble strips calling out,
dead deer
at what point does animal
become meat
become carrion?
once took a mislabeled hamburger from the dining hall heatlamp
to find portobello: wondered then if that was the taste of
coffins, memorials, garroted friends.
he’d spit out the first bite,
but took so many more after the voices.
how much now is left of you?
the sickly fascination with unstrung vocal chords,
rotted through, never again to
sing.
was once so
twice so
always so enamored by speed and swerves that the
rearview mirror delighted hindsight with the dopplered impact
of an orange construction barrel.
water.
was known to pick targets
when boxed in by tractor trailers
when the median gave chance
for a head-on collision.
drove like he didn’t care to survive.
bumper stickers warned innocents.
an army seven-million strong by the time he was ready
would be nice if once
just once
or twice
we could stop hating each other so much
to honor that time
and maybe it’s not really hate
but a succession of days spent wondering
through desert life
at stars
at breath
my decision of each inhalation tempered now
with the surre
nders inherent to each departure:
i must hate you.
i must unlove you
unseat you from this tangent,
exponentially tangential,
scattershot into futures apart.
was unknown in brevity,
famous in obsession and little else.
multitasked his path to mediocrity:
books, pages, digitally-versatile
stubbornness borne on
[did you know he was actually allergic to donkeys?]
i don’t know who i am anymore.
never tried a drug he didn’t fear,
never didn’t fear You, that base addiction
concreted, secreted in a night that he put his
hand over your mouth so the neighbors wouldn’t bitch.
knew then that your flicking tongue tasted yourself on his palm
from cupped foreplay: [this isn’t cheating; this is friendship: beneficently extended.]
synesthetic in that he could hear your smile,
taste your release.
synesthetic in that he could live
the shadows of you and die each time he felt for your
heart-beats.
ate aspirin like breath mints.
hostaged himself to yesterdays.
to three-times-nine,
to fourteen-seven:
to morning, afternoon, evening and night smoke.
once considered working on a bison farm
because “artists” need real “jobs” to pay for cable.
[your dark exterior masks a caffeine-driven activism/]
[you’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it/]
thought that maybe if he smiled hard enough, long enough,
his face would stick that way
[such childhood threats only work for negatives]
[and no one would know].
realized long after they’d left that they were gone
long before they’d left.
stole poetry from his inbox:
Under the cheese, reconciles a breezy stain.
Dresses by drugs, transmutates the acorn to guy.
Ruined by chariots, wipes the light to guest.
Transmutating, saying, transmutating, writing, stepping.
Counter had a spill, which was not at all a gut.
Tells cowardly, wordlessly, like keys yelling, allegedly.
Seasons like rocks go slyly but angrily.
lonely man: suspensory particularist falconine boil lonely euangiotic
lonely man: wondered exactly when the future became a time
when scambots used “euangiotic” to market
cum-guzzling tranny vids and
bigger dick pills [ripper cun7 open 2nite] and
the. lowest. mortgage. rates. ever.
was never particularly falconine.
synesthetic in that
the point is, i forgive you.
synesthetic in that
he never wanted an acknowledgement,
just silences
the suicide watch was long over,
the july phone call of an angry father
and halfhearted attempts to convince him
he wouldn’t walk off the roof.
sometimes swerved into traffic.
sometimes ran into snowbanks on purpose.
sometimes pretended he wasn’t home.
the catalytic reaction of palm to palm,
palm to breast,
wondering which geography hearts learn first.
his madness taught him that tinnitus
ringing through from first memories sang
a perfect constant note, an S note,
inextricable from musics that dredged and
driver units, fifty millimeters spanning twenty-
five thousand hertz were the most convincing evidence
that he wasn’t in fact indistinguishable from god.
wrote such worlds into existence
with maths learned in base one
four seven fifty three forty seven fourteen
made no sense to anyone beyond the periphery of
his madness: for all we know,
benton really existed somewhere dying at
quantum light x and ghosts are nothing more than
unrealized lovers.
let’s disappear.
wondered if the three seconds of static from
two minutes, twenty-two seconds to
two minutes, twenty-five seconds was
intentional.
have you remembered me as
he
fucks
you?
long ago forgot the ingredients of love if ever
he’d purchased them in the first place.
substituted distance for proximity and
water for milk.
burned the mess.
learned the result of making love is often
a screaming, dying pile of flesh
more self-inscribed suffering than infant.
the morbid lock with which he fantasized
an elegant entrance to their funeral cars
and the questions whispered by strangers, of strangers:
was he?
the one?
who?
such daymares unseat the hesitant security of decades.
revised his histories to include suspicions.
revised his memories to include evidences.
revised his life to the end result of conscious constructions
of begged pities and reassurances:
we are here for you
[based on truths we can never believe].
wondered what you were doing these days
with your hairs or if maybe every reimagining of self was
nothing more than a surface attempt to become present while
underneath you knew the same battles
used the same metaphors for us
and plagiarized my hate.
surrendered more than once.
never had anyone travel so far away and come back to him.
[these things happen in threes.]
surrender
capitulation
without white flags.
put down payments on
too many others’ emotional dowries;
invested too much of himself
in the gentrification of exiled landscapes:
he was the art kid they took home before
they met the safe one.
argued the non-pre-raphaelitism
of a proud antique-shop purchase and probably ruined all
chances of getting in good with mom.
[sure, it’s impressionist. sure.]
waited for the other shoe to drop.
spent most days barefoot so he’d never break a heart.
was accused of ruining lives twice.
took heart in knowing that he’d not once made that accusation,
hated himself more for self-ascribing all responsibility
often broke plates and
stood on them by accident.
knew that once he began to associate music to specific humans,
they’d either die or cross the world to escape him.
never again wanted an our song,
but he did enjoy plural pronouns.
agreed with blair about ginsberg,
but still wrote this.
editor recommended the expurgation of
two shitty teenage poems from
his first book,
so he wrote a poem chapter in the third
of seven entries, all math internal.
[the lessons of the second are that i can survive,
and no matter how much you were to me,
i will use the us we were to pay the rent
if i can’t use you as a pillow.]
drove in circles.
light bulbs lasted for durations of residence
because he preferred his work in
the dark
and found that he couldn’t proofread
when the songs had words.
rusted through most recollections
and lived as dust, wiped away more than once
but always returning, an exquisite layer
only visible under heartbeat scrutinies,
mostly shed flesh.
reserved a large percentage
of his willpower for a time when
he’d not likely need it longer.
divided and hid his past
[the electron flicker, stippled]
into convenient sub-folders
that only turned bold when someone actually needed him.
he hated bold folders.
preferred acoustic versions.
counted three grammatical errors
in his deepest inspirations.
marked his days
in the number of times
he emptied the desktop ashtray;
most days, three.
what a war mask such ash could inscribe.
marked his months
in the number of cartons, the handful
dozen career aspirations
and the nights they went to tully’s;
had a specific memory of each booth.
marked his years
with ink lines on left forearm.
no. it doesn’t scan.
gave more of himself up than he kept.
[it was a flawed campaign for a recalled product.]
first woke up