Days That Are to Come

O’s Story, the End

BECOMING A RAT

I ran and I ran.

I was sinking down into earth. It was as if the earth around me was opening. Its top was excited—I could see this—excited so that its bottom could open up and the dirt part, dirt from dirt, earth under earth.

I was in the marshes.

There was a lot of dirt underneath. Rich, brown bricks that I thought might be gold but weren’t. I knew.

It was seared.

There were bricks of soil, which is shit, everywhere, scattered all over the fallen birds’ wings. At this edge of an abyss, lips of grass like tiny swords lay in the sun. Light winds everywhere.

Beyond the marshes, there was nothing but time, so that the earth could take a rest. Where there was time, trees began to appear. Violators stood in the tops of those trees.

The earth opened.

The marshes had begun again because I was standing in stillness. In one of those pools between the trees. Water was air: silver. And then, the water that I was in and seeing started to ripple, for there was trouble underneath it, logs, fish-ferment, which is a combination of fermenting fish and fish shit. It all smelled like rot because it was. It was hot ‘cause hot is orgasm. All was rolling and hurting and smelling and it was a strong, rich smell which was rolling over and rolling over and around again: a dog in mud.

The dog’s teeth champed on mud which is meat.

My teeth or the world’s champed on me or the world.

The trees were long because this whole world was logs. Logs were rolling over reality: turned each other over, turned over on and under each other. Each log-wave began time. And a new room would come into being. Each log-wave-time turned over, was gone.

And again.

My heart leaped up and began to thump, for I thought that I heard something. In this world where I was alone. Which seemed to be without humans. Something which sounded other than the winds creeping low through the reeds, birds’ wings on the march, or the rocks under the wrecked ship scraping the sky.

At first, I thought I heard rats.

I was standing at the edge of a small hill. It must have been a young one, for its hair had just started to grow. I thought it was quivering because I was touching it, but the sound, I saw, came from bits of gravel falling downward, through that stubble.

Something that looked human leapt behind a tall tree.

It might be a possum or a giant rat. I thought.

Smells sat everywhere. They weren’t as powerful as the ones that had been down in the marshes. Where trees had begun.

There are times when I get really scared, though I know that I’m brave.

Not knowing what I was seeing, whether dream or real, whether human or animal, brought my steps to a standstill.

In back of me, regarding time and space, was Silver, who wanted to murder me. In front of me, regarding the same, was I didn’t know what. In front of me, my inability to know.

I had thought I would never return to Silver and now I was going to. I preferred dangers I knew to those I didn’t. And I knew how to handle Silver’s sexuality and her viciousness.

Or so I believed.

I didn’t know anything about her sexuality and viciousness.

Turning on my heels and looking sharply behind me over my shoulder, I began to retrace my steps in the direction of the boat.

Instantly the strange figure reappeared and, making a wide circuit, commenced cutting me off. Both fear and exertion had tired me, but even if I had just awoke, it would have been useless for me to contend with such an adversary.

For it ran manlike on two legs, but was unlike any man I had ever seen.

Soon I would no longer be able to see. For the sun was ceasing and the stars beginning to gather. Each wept at the other.

I was scared.

I knew that I was scared because I had never cared whether I was alive or dead.

I said, “I who’ve been dead for so long: I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how to live and that’s who I am.”

It was a girl who was standing in front of me. She looked like a rat. For example, her hair was drooling over her face’s front.

She stepped back and forth, as if she had to go to the bathroom, and then she threw herself around my feet.

It was Ange. She was the filthiest thing I had ever seen, far more grungy than Silver, for a sail part had been wrapped between her legs, then around one thigh, like a Kotex that’s falling off. Otherwise, she had become a rat.

“What happened to you?”

“I got lonely.”

It was then that I knew that I was a rat, that we were both rats, just like all the pirate girls, and it had taken all we had been through to make us this.

Metal-changing.

So I held on to her and the world disappeared and there were no more rats.

“Ange,” I whispered, “Ange.”

There was no one there to answer me, so I said her name as much as I wanted.

Maybe, in the future, I would get used to being in this new world.

“Ange. Ange.”

Everything was rolling in this gentle motion so everything was alive and the air was warm. I and everything and the warm air turned over and over. Though I was no longer scared, I wondered if it was dangerous to be here ‘cause there was no need to end.

“Do you want to stop, Ange?”

“No.”

The world was where things grew, just at the top of a slope which was beginning to run downward.

For the two paths had separated.

Here was fur moss and animals.

“Hear come the nights,” I said to Ange. They were rushing in, rushing water; the knights held their spears extended. Water was all over the place, had already flooded the world, there was no more ground.

The oceans were everything. The waves on the tops of the waters made, were also, patterns; the patterns were made out of froth, rather than water; the froth made the water visible.

This was the realm of continual ecstasy.

Now everything was wet, dripping with it. Dank and rotten. This world was never going to stop. For those two paths that had opened when this world had begun were now touching each other. Two paths each split into two. Burning. Turning around each other. They were still very dirty and exceedingly smelly.

The odors that had made the colors darken caused the waters to surge.

I looked upon Ange. Her hair was sticking straight out of her head and over her face. It was rat’s hair all thick and brown and so stiff nothing would ever make it go down again and her green eyes were red. These red holes were opening and closing, all of her was opening now around my left leg, so the plains went on yellow and yellow, yellow but with bits of brown like grass, there.

As if all was a surface and the surface, a carpet, a line on or under the carpet, rose up like a snake.

Earth was lying under earth.

Under the membrane of the earth, the snake pulsated equaled beneath an orgasm, a river. Every time the snake touched this membrane with its nose, because it couldn’t break through because this was the top, it was all orgasms in the plains.

The sun burned down, so the tips of the grass were now red, touches of.

I told her that she was never going to go away from me by telling her that she was a rat.

“If we’re rats,” she murmured rather than murdered in memory of the pirate girls, “we should act like rats.”

“Then we have to eat everything we can scent.”

We decided that that would be good behavior.

Ange said that there might be something to scent at the shipwreck or the place of exile.

I didn’t know what this rat was talking about.

“The boat got wrecked and those girls made me go away from them, they put me into exile.”

“That’s because you’re a rat.”

Both of us agreed that we didn’t want to be here because we didn’t want to be anywhere, so we might as well crawl through this skanky-skunk-wood-tangled-garbage-whatever-it-was called nature ’cause there maybe we could find that which could help us, though all of this so-called nature looked more desolate to me than a city that had burnt down and was remnants of human civilization.

Ange ‘n me decided that rats live in cities ‘cause rats are highly intelligent.

The sun was getting up so he was mortal like us. It was then I knew that there were dead pirates all around us.

We walked on hands and knees through a bunch of nature that was rotten by nature ‘cause nature naturally rots. Like trees ‘n wildflowers ‘n weeds ‘n rocks ‘n dead lizards ‘n all the childhood neither me nor Ange ever had but we’re gonna have ‘cause that’s our goal in life ‘n worms half-squished by these really hideous crabs who were Martians in disguise or in real life. And found dead computer parts.

Slithered around ponds and even through some ‘cause Ange wanted to feel what it’s like to have piss all over you. I said no because I thought I’d be disgusted, but it smelled kind of good, like I was all safe again, like when you put mud all over you, so then I felt safe enough to remember that I had never felt, that is, been, safe.

We didn’t find anything, so this nature was a lot more useless than a decayed city to two girls who had been through everything on their hands and knees.

That’s how I felt then.

We came, as if we were coming to an object, to the sounds of birds screaming. And to bits of bird shit. Ange said she was hungry.

“You smell bad enough as it is,” I told her.

The harpies above us were still squawking, probably ‘cause they were waiting for us to die so they could eat too, when Ange’s hand sank into what was mushy.

She started to put this hand on my face, so I informed her that I’d vomit, only the smell of vomit made me more nauseous than the smell of her hand. “You have to suffer and endure terrible conditions if you want to find the source of dreams.” I told Ange. “I’m going to make you bathe.”

The first time we looked up from this cross between a pond and a puddle in which we were sitting, we saw that we were in a cemetery.

This couldn’t be a pirate graveyard ‘cause pirates get buried in the sea so they can dream. So this was a rat cemetery.

A different bird was sitting on each tombstone. Most of which were wood ‘cause they were sticks.

This death joint was more solemn than a chapel. Neither Ange nor I had ever been in a church. One of the gravestones must have just had some sexual pleasure, ‘cause the liquid in which we were cleaning ourselves was still issuing out of it.

We thought of all the dead rats. How humans feared them ‘cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. How humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts, whereas rats eat everything whether or not they’re hungry. Rats: pleasure rules their world.

This is why Ange ‘n me would rather be rats.

Ange was the one who said this.

I asked her whether pleasure was equivalent to a rat.

She said that she’d know this as soon as she totally became a rat.

It all had something to do with treasure.

The puddle-pond was located in the center of the cemetery. In this land of the dead, we had already met dead butterflies ‘n dogs’ teeth but I didn’t see how we could use any of this nature for our own purposes, ‘cause all of it was perishing, if not perished, so we decided to keep on crawling.

While we were still sitting there, right in the middle of nature, I told Ange ‘bout how there was this guy named Orpheus and he had a girlfriend and we don’t know whether or not she was a poet ‘cause she was a girl. “Everybody knows that Orpheus, or O, or Or, was the most famous poet who’s ever existed in all of human memory, or Greek memory, which soon might not be remembered anymore, and that includes Orpheus’s girlfriend even though we don’t know who she was.”

I said that we know that Orpheus followed her down into the ground, right to this burial ground.

“At that time, there was a cemetery king who was a rat.

“ ‘Yo, Orpheus,’ said Rat, ‘you can get your girlfriend back and own her and kiss her all up. All you gotta do is get out of this dead place.’

“ ‘I want to get out of this rotting cemetery,’ replied Orpheus.

“ ‘So go. And don’t ever look behind you.’

“ ‘What about Eurydice?’ Now I remembered. That was the name of Orpheus’s girlfriend.”

“I’ve got a girl,” mumbled Ange and wriggled over to me and climbed on me ‘n made me come a few times.

“The Rat King said, ‘She’s right behind you where you can’t see her.’”

Ange and I, again, started crawling.

“Orpheus, of course, looked behind him, as if he walked out of the land of the dead, as if he hadn’t been changed by going through the land of the dead, as if he could be the person he remembered he was. Disobeying Death, or Identity, he lost Eurydice.”

Ange turned around so she was facing me. “He lost Eurydice ‘cause he was ignorant: he never knew who she was, just like we don’t know who Eurydice was.”

When Ange turned back again, now in post-cemetery domain, she saw exactly what I was seeing.

Silver was standing by.

Night must have come and gone. It was the coldest morning that, still, I have ever known.

Trees were rising up like dogs who forgot they’ve just been punished. The cold was turning the low-lying sun into ice.

Where Silver was, fog was rising from the ground. Her legs were spread so far apart that she could have been pissing. There was this lizard sitting in her silver hair. Then, all I could see were my lips on those of that white animal . . .

“Aren’t you going to talk to me?” The filthy-haired girl’s lilac eyes were looking into mine. So were the yellow and red eyes and everything that was living in her hairs.

Ange was muttering that this brat whom we had befriended, or who had befriended us, was a common murderer and a pirate and at the same time should be hung and electrocuted, so I said out loud as loudly as I could, “I know that you and your girls never meant any good to us.”

“Well . . .”

“I know that you want to murder me.” I was looking deeper into those lilac and black realms.

“Here’s the thing,” replied Silver as if no emotion had ever shared her world.

And even now, I know the sun is a lizard.

“The thing is,” she picked her nose with her grubbiest finger, “we, the girls ‘n I, want that treasure and we’re going to get it. There’s nothing you can do about this so you might as well be dead, and you have to die to be dead. But before you die, you’re going to do one thing, ‘cause there’s one thing that we want.”

“What’s that?” asked Ange, all green-eyed and curious. Ange was much braver than me.

“You’re going to give up that chart! The original that has pirate blood smeared all over it!” Her legs spread themselves apart farther, and at the same time, the lizard, who had been almost hidden in all that hair, slithered out until it was balanced on two or three strands of thick girl stuff. Its tongue hung out of its mouth, so long that it could lick its own eyes.

“What I mean is,” cried the nasty pirate, “we want that map. I myself—understand this, O—would never do anything to hurt you, so I don’t give a tinker’s damn what happens to you. I don’t give a tinker’s curse whether or not you’re murdered in the process of us getting, and becoming, everything in the world we want.”

And this was how I remembered that I still had a treasure map.

“I think you should die,” Ange replied to Silver, “and all of your girls should be electrocuted because, according to my acupuncturist, that is the most painful way for humans to die. All of your flesh while you’re alive will become shredded living worms because our treasure map is ours.”

Silver turned away, she walked away from us just like Orpheus.

Just like the headless writer—though he wasn’t headless then—she looked back. Toward me. Eurydice. As if I were dead. As if I were dead to the world, and so the world, now dead, was commencing again in the form of a sun. In the form of all the treasure that’s hidden within the sun. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, O. Listen here.”

My ears were as red as a rose.

“You come over here and slip that chart up into where I keep my treasures and I’ll offer you a choice. As soon as all the treasure’s been shipped into the ship, you can come on board with us and become one of us, and for the rest of your life, and all your lives after that, your cunt, when you have one, will know what it is to be continually wet, dripping in the winds of the world. There’s no use stopping the winds, is there? Think of all the odors coming from the winds. You’ve never smelled them, have you? Never smelled yourself, have you, girl?”

Pause. “Or you can choose to die.”

Pause. “You’ll never get a handsomer offer.”

Pause. “Either way, that treasure’s ours.”

“Now you hear me, Silver. Fuck off. That’s what I’ve got to say. I don’t want your rotting old cunt anymore. I had forgotten about the treasure map until you threatened Ange ‘n me. Ange ‘n me, we’re going to find the treasure and it’ll be ours and that’s that.

“If anything, there’s murder between us.”

There were all sorts of animals in Silver’s hair. She pulled a screw out and the white lizard scampered away. Mumbled, “Them that’ll die’ll be the lucky ones.”

After she had stamped away, the green-eyed girl and I just looked at each other.

“We’re tougher than pirates,” announced Ange, quivering.

“I’m scared.”

PLAYING HOUSE

The actuality was that both of us were scared, so, remaining standing up, we looked for a house in which we could play house ‘cause we knew that it wasn’t going to be our real home.

Ange said we had to analyze our finances to see what we could afford. Mortgage rates were going up all over the place due to the disintegration of government. She wasn’t going to take chances like we had been taking them.

We looked but we couldn’t find anything. Just goes to show that nothing ever changes, and, if there’s a history of human progress, men have made it up.

But Ange insisted that unless we wanted to become pirates and murder nonpirates we had to live somewhere.

So we started crawling through nature again.

We were inching and grumbling through used beehives and rose petals. I sneezed ‘cause I’m allergic to anything natural like the world.

Soon we got all tangled up in these dead wasps and combs that looked like they came from leftover schoolgirls and these kind of crab claws—actually I couldn’t tell what they were ‘cause Mother Nature is always changing her form. All of them were down in the ground. Just like the teeth Jason had sown in what might now be a post-human world.

One of the teeth caught on some threads that were leaking out of what remained of a pocket in my blue-jean shorts. The map started falling out. That’s what made me remember I had a map. Maybe it wasn’t drawn by humans, I thought, ‘cause maybe criminals aren’t human. So I looked down into it to find out what this posthuman world looked like.

Section of the map I’m looking at:

James Baldwin’s Novel

Inside the book

“This is what it’s like to be a black man in our society,” says Ange.

We returned to the map’s insides:

Maybe ‘cause of what I’d just seen and maybe ‘cause I couldn’t describe what I’d just seen, I, with Ange, kept on crawling.

We thought we were back on the beach next to the sea in which lived those men who had also been in Ange’s dead mother’s cunt. Next to the gray surface of the water where the ship had been and, now, was dead. A dead bird like all who are sleeping and dreaming.

When we walked to the edge of that sand, we saw that there was more sand below us. We were on the top of a cliff. The sun had set; the sea breeze was rustling and tumbling through the woods in the distance. Light seemed to come from nowhere.

We kept on walking. Piles of shit were hidden in the sand. I stepped into one; brown stuck into the crevices of my hiking boots’ soles. I loathed this sight, so I told Ange I had to find a bathroom, sooner than possible.

While I was telling Ange I had to go to the bathroom, I was so freaked out about what was on me that I didn’t notice that she was already knocking on a door of a log cabin.

“Look, Ange,” I said, “a house.”

Just like the one Abe Lincoln was born in. Dead crabs were lying outside it.

There were no windows, only porthole-like openings, where its slats didn’t manage to meet.

Ange, inside, stared at the floor, parts of which lay above other parts, sometimes so far above that a part was almost touching the ceiling, just like we touch God, while I was washing my hands, then more thoroughly my feet, right in front of the metal stalls found in the bathrooms of schoolgirls.

Then I remembered that there was shit stuck inside the crevices of the soles of my hiking boots. I had to get that out, though I didn’t want to, ‘cause the shit would contaminate my clean hands, but I made myself do it so I could be like a child.

Meanwhile, according to the map, a ladder led from the center of the large room outside this bathroom to another room.

Ange tried to climb up this ladder and failed.

I wanted to try. So many had tried and failed, but I was determined to succeed.

I fell.

When I started climbing again, I knew that in order to reach the room that was on top I would have to bring something with me. To bring something with me would be to give something away, But, I told myself, I don’t have anything ‘cause I had nothing in childhood.

I started to go up.

I was halfway up the ladder when I saw that ahead of me there weren’t any more rungs.

I had nothing to stand on anymore.

I kept moving by pulling myself up by my hands.

When I was almost at that trap door, I saw myself halfway through the opening, which was too small for the rest of my body to pass through.

I could only be pulled through.

Pulled into a room larger than I had ever seen. Where Ange and I would be able to play with each other.

I heard a noise that, at first, sounded like winds.

Ange screaming.

I leaped out of the tangles of that ladder and, rubbing my eyes like a child, ran over, beside the green-eyed girl, to a hole that was lying like a dead rat in the wall and smelling like a girl.

THE TRUE COLORS OF PIRACY

I peered through the hole:

Sure enough, all the rotten girls were outside. I saw two of them. Silver and that dead girl, Virgin.

They were lounging around, nothing else. Maybe feeling themselves up.

It was quiet and early, so I could still see the chill: white and stiller than time. ‘Cause there are no clouds in time. Gold and that brat whose hair was all over the place as if it was the garbage can for the years were wading knee-deep in air so milky that it had to be poisonous.

“Don’t let her in. That means you,” Ange told me.

“I want a truce,” the silver-haired girl yelled.

“What do you want a truce for?” I asked. “Get along or we’ll shoot you.”

“Now, me hearties”—as usual Silver was doing all the talking—“girls should get along with each other and not have fights, ‘cause girls aren’t violent, and all my nice girls agree with me. And piracy’s survived for a long time in this world. So why do you keep prolonging this internecine turbulence?”

“I don’t know.” Then I caught myself. “Get out of here or Ange ‘n me’re gonna shoot you.”

“I’m gonna shoot you,” yelled Ange.

“Girls have to accept girls who aren’t like them,” the pirate brat pleaded with us. “For this reason, the girls and I have decided to join forces with you even though you’ve never been to jail or stolen. But dooty is dooty, ‘n girls’ dooty is to love other girls.”

“And all other living beings,” added the Virgin. She was masturbating, so my friend followed her example.

I kicked the green-eyed slut hard.

“O,” Silver continued, “you ‘n me used to be friends, and you know, if you ever saw something you shouldn’t have seen, well, you know I get a little drunk sometimes. All of my girls do. It’s from living in a society that disrespects its women and hates their bodies. Especially when they masturbate. This makes us turn to drink, though I know that’s not the way to deal with certain types of hegemony.”

Ange was coming, so I kicked her again.

“The bottom line”—the girl whose hair was silver, though it didn’t look so silver after all we had been through, was still talking to me—“is that girls got to survive. Since girls includes u s . . .”

“Not you,” the Virgin commented.

“. . .we need that treasure. That’s the bottom line, matey.”

The filthiest of all girls, blood hanging like dead rats around her thighs, filthier even than Silver, stepped forward. It was Pussycat.

“Since that treasure came from pirates, that treasure should go to pirates.”

She disappeared as fast as she had come.

“Yeah, that’s the bottom line.” It was Brat-face. “You’ve got the map. The real one, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Ange replied. I kicked her for real.

“That’s what we want. As for me, I have no desire to kill you, O. You or your little friend.”

For the first time, I was seeing the pirate girls in their true colors. Black and red. They wore their insides on their outsides, blood smeared all over the surfaces. When opened, the heart’s blood turns black.

Just like the room in Baldwin’s novel.

“So,” Silver finished me off, “you give me that map so I can get all the treasure, and then you drop dead. Or, if that normal way doesn’t please you, become one of us.”

“I have a desire to kill you,” was all I said because I wasn’t noticing her anymore but rather thinking about how the pirate map that had started all this had come out of Ange’s dead mother’s box. Just as Ange had come out.

With that, Silver disappeared, dragging Gold with her.

Whereas my mother had tried to off me and killed herself instead. I clung to Ange in that world that was now deserted. There was no one there but us, so the emptiness of our playhouse would never go away. Brother and sister, we clung to each other.

It was the new world.

Ange and I were waiting for something. ‘Cause we were no longer going to play house. We waited past our time. Time was past its birth-time and about to bust through its mucous linings, and this delayed birth, or commencement, of the world set our ears, eyes, and nostrils—especially our nostrils, for we had gotten good at smelling skunk, dead fish, and crab, the three animals this isle was full of—on the alert.

“There are pirates out there,” announced Ange.

I didn’t ask where.

The world hadn’t yet begun.

So Ange and I discussed whether or not it’s right to kill pirates, as if anything that we said or might say bore any relation to what was really happening and what was really going to happen.

Then, the world began.

The viciousness of girls cannot be imagined.

All the pirates appeared.

The fields were lilac, filled with tiny flowers. Then the animals, little bits of fur, specks of gray, the tops of heads. Each time a head stuck out, each head was an orgasm.

A rat was putting her head under her paws and snuffling around. “Sniff,” she snuffled, shuffling, “wuff, wuff.” The rat, at that moment, thought she was a dog ‘cause she was looking peering snuffling for a word or a possibility of speaking: “Down there, something’s happening! Down there to the side!”

In the side, wood was rolling slowly. A roll of wood. Rolling down into the depths of hell.

The wood descended to where there were dark lands, rivers, everywhere. While the pirate girls shot at us and made blood flow out of the body.

Everywhere rivulets divided the land.

It’s not that girls don’t kill. A pirate named Pussycat, who was truly the meanest of all the pirates, having run up to Ange, grabbed the gun the green-eyed girl had found, wrenched it from her hands, threw it toward the other pirates, where it landed in a pile of rat shit. The girl pirates didn’t care. They were used to bad smells. With one stunning blow, Ostracism’s lover laid Ange senseless on the earth.

“Will I see poetry again?” I looked at Ange. “Orpheus couldn’t see the violence of red. This is all an announcement of the future of death.” All the motorcycles were coming in death; the orgasms caused tears of joy to be on their faces.

King Pussy, who was a rat, stood in front of all of them, all those ratty, now bruised pirates. “I, King Pussy, who see by means of my dreams, have seen wars! Mutilations! Girls dying from brutal mistreatment! The hell with my dreams! Now I see everything differently!”

In the past, King Pussy explained in her declaration of war, girls who had never done anything to anyone were called names and beaten with sticks. “Now we’re declaring war! We shall beat up O and Ange, for all the treasure is ours! Ours, the girls’!”

Ange—even though she had passed out—and I were seeing our limbs cut, then spread, over all the dark, rainy Thursdays, Thursdays about to die. Thursdays are always autumns. Thursdays are the days of death because girls put on suits of earth, suits of shit, buried in the bones of corpses, they crunch on those bones, those bones of shit.

Beaten up always on a Thursday . . .

The pirates had won the war.

Afterwards, sleep elongated to a lake.

For the moment, the pirates were gone. I tried to drag Ange up the ladder, ‘cause I knew we’d be safe in that room up there, but the rungs kept falling off. So I took her behind the ladder, to a small space the ladder had obscured. And shut the door so that room could no longer be seen.

If we remained hidden, we might not die.

“Where are those yucky girls?” inquired Kiss-of-Rot, a mangy pirate. For her peck was known as kiss-of-rose.

“I, King Pussy, see through my dreams . . .”

King Pussy had to masturbate to see this one:

“I see two girls, can’t distinguish all limbs, about to lose energy, dissolving, as if into gasps, hardly see figures. One has hair, one squatting on floor, other kneels beside her.

“Floor?

“The walls are moving. I can no longer tell—for to tell is to remember—where. Like going through narrow halls, shift as turn, another set of halls, just see through a slit.”

“That’s all you can do is see through a slit?”

“How can I look through it?”

Pussy: “A narrow, vertical slit. Through which these two girls . . .”

“Seeing into what?”

“ . . . they’re in a room. One has hand on the other’s face, the face of the one who’s squatting, rubs that cheek, the other’s inner thighs are quivering ‘cause she’s coming, me too it feels so good, they lie on the floor, both on their backs—it’s a wood room—’cause they want to rub their asses on the floor.”

“One is on top of the other, legs spread, O my God.” One of the other pirates was now looking through this hole.

“Where are these two girls, pig-slut?” asked mangy cutoff ears.

“Oh, behind. Just go behind, left, right, it doesn’t matter, oh shit, I’m coming again, I’ll tell you where I’m coming, where’s there’s light. . . ah . . . black.”

“Oh, shut up, Pussy,” said a girl whose tongue had been bitten off. She usually didn’t say anything.

The red glare of a torch lighting up the interior of most of the cabin showed me that all of the pirate girls had come and were in full possession of my house. Silver and her bloody cohort, Virgin, stood in front of me.

Behind were the rest of the motley crew, in the infernal light, in the nighttime that belonged to them.

As soon as she had me back again, brat-girl yanked my head up by its tiny hairs and then stuck her hand up me.

THE VISION PASSES

When the pirate girls blindfolded me, I knew palpable fear. I was terrified of each girl, of what they were going to do to me, for I knew they were going to do something.

What they were going to do to me was my fear.

There were animals everywhere. Not only the wolfhounds, who were barking, and the birds.

Hands shoved me forward—we’d started walking—pulled me in certain directions.

A rose yes yes rose oh the relief. Rose out front, all the roses were alive.

“I don’t want to be blindfolded,” I protested. Rose thorns stuck into my skin, stumbling.

The dogs kept barking, the birds and the lizards.

“We could let you die.”

“Let’s just leave her and let the birds eat her cunt.”

“I’m hungry,” bespoke another pirate.

“Give her to your dogs, eh, MD?”

But there was every kind of animal everywhere. I could no longer tell where Ange was among all those animals.

The animals are just one animal today, I whispered to myself. One growly bear who clenches paws and takes all into that chest. “I want, I want,” says growly bear. And just does what he has to do ‘cause he’s a he-bear.

“Yump yump yump,” which means give me. The bear has a big tongue. This makes the outside come while he licks oh my god bees. I’m gonna die coming outside and, of course, inside is all fields ‘cause there’s constant churning there.

Bear has gone to the roses ‘cause both bear and roses can’t exist at the same time.

The pirate girls were taking me down a hill.

We were going downhill. I said to myself, Oh yes they can. The bear sits on roses with his big tush. When this fat butt goes down, the roses squish. But bear doesn’t care about squished roses: this is what an orgasm is. When the skin of inside the asshole comes out like a rose.

Oh no, I shouldn’t be doing this, coming out; asshole skin coming out; but it’s okay when it’s an orgasm.

Growly bear, I continued, for I had forgotten where I was, puts dildo in his cunt. Is anyone looking at me? he thinks. If so, does their gaze affect me? I’m not interested, thinks growly bear. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” growly bear is shouting, ‘cause now he doesn’t have to do anything. ‘Cause coming so deep in there.

But growly bear isn’t that deep yet. Is going to the center, but as yet isn’t in the center. Growly bear’s where all is turning, metamorphosing. The riches of nature and orgasms are so strong, they metamorphose into convulsions. Where the rain of rose petals reigns.

Again I could smell the sea where the fish are always more rotten than they have been.

Some pirate took off my blindfold. Somehow, seeing had changed. In light that was also dark and dark that was also light, pirates were poring over a map. I didn’t have to see to know what they were seeing.

There would be a sign: dreams end . . . Then there would be paths and they would get jumbled, and bones, and they all get jumbled, and all of them would combine and then there would be a tall tree that, according to the map, was red.

And off to the side, a boat next to a black stone and a white stone.

“That’s where we’re going.” MD, her two wolfhounds leaping around her, came over to me and pointed toward a plateau. Trees were growing from its top, especially one so tall it seemed to be reaching through the sky. Right before me I saw an anchorage and two stones, one black and one white. MD kissed the dog on the left.

The pirate girls were so eager to find the treasure that they no longer cared about Ange’s and my presence.

All of us ascended to the plateau, we dug down. The higher we went up, the more this earth opened.

Until there were only mountains and everything that was rich and brown. And the meeting place between the sky and what lay below it was red.

Now, as the hill began to grow steeper, all the colors changed, for color is the first appearance of the world. The sun was red and the birds’ wings, for green is the color of death. Yellow fields rose up as if they were about to break open. “Oh, thank you, little men,” cried the pirates. “Come out come out open up we’re looking for the treasure.” Red was down here, was the cherry. They would have to go down now, there, there where it was brown, go, go into space as space expanded and action burned.

It was all burning as they climbed to the top. There space expanded and, simultaneously, violently contracted.

Each star is a contraction, a burst, when you dive to get treasure.

All of us still had to find the forest, find the lilac water so that what was the most inside, the treasure, could turn out, roll over. So that consciousness or surface, for all is conscious, could faint. Become a feint.

Once the treasure was found, the insides would turn and turn and never stop that. On the other hand, each set of turnings would become more violent and calmer. The woods will be the name of all this.

All of us reached the forest. The pirate girls started leaping about and looking for booze and doing whatever pirate girls do regardless of what they’re supposed to be doing.

The youngest of them, Black Maria, who was never heard from, cried out in terror.

“Now I see the treasure,” shouts King Pussy, for she is the one who sees, and I wasn’t blindfolded anymore, and what Pussy had thought was treasure was a dead pirate.

Which goes to show that a dead pirate is better than nothing at all.

Pussy who lives by her dreams wouldn’t believe that this wasn’t treasure, so she lifted up an arm, then a femur, like there was going to be something besides bones, and MD’s dogs were doing the same thing. All the girls started sniffing each other. They threw the bones around and said, generally, that is, that there was no more need for pirates and suchlike history and that now the reigns of all reins could be over.

Antigone decided to celebrate this day in which there was no booze, unless you count fermented rat piss, by changing her name to Angelique, who used to be some whore, because, she told us, she was currently talking to an angel. The angels were larger than humans.

Ange ‘n me were still these girls’ prisoners and hadn’t been allowed to talk to each other. We wanted to get away and be together. “Look at that old skeleton,” Ange pointed toward a corner of the crisscrossed jumbled-path cemetery where the pirates were lying.

She said this to the pirates, ‘cause she didn’t want to act like she was talking to me, but they didn’t bother to notice her.

It was a bigger skeleton than all the others. His feet pointed in one direction; his cock, a bone, pointed in the other.

“Let me see the map,” added Ange.

Silver was fucking Virgin, so the green-eyed girl just took the map away from her.

“Look.” Ange. “Here’s a compass. The map says the labyrinth begins ESE by E. This must be those guys’ last joke. ESE by E is here. His fucking boner is showing us the treasure, O.”

I looked down at the map and gazed at that dead cock. Now I knew why I had been searching for men. And hadn’t stopped until I had found one. The pirate girls were so into their private world, they didn’t notice anything, notice that the world or the sky was shifting again.

Ange and I followed the cock.

We discussed how boners stay alive even after men die . . .

Cocks weren’t treasure but pointed to treasure. That’s what Ange said.

And so we left the pirate girls to do what pirate girls do.

While we were traveling in the direction the cock told us to, I announced to Ange that I was going to tell her a story about treasure:

“It’s a story told by a poet.

“In order to take revenge against a human named Prometheus, who had challenged his inhuman power, God the Father, whose name was Zeus, created the most beautiful woman in the world. He wanted to give her to Prometheus.

“Actually he sent this woman to Prometheus’s brother, but Prometheus had already warned his sibling not to accept gifts from the gods.

“Even more furious than before, Zeus chained Prometheus to a stone pillar. There, in the coldest regions of the mountains, a vulture tore into this naked man’s liver, and Prometheus said, for his liver became whole so the bird could repierce it, ‘There is no end to pain.’

“Prometheus’s brother became so terrified that he fucked the woman, Pandora, who, because she was beautiful, was stupid, dishonest, and a pain in the butt, as opposed to the gut.

“All these events occurred in the golden age of the world, in the beginning of the world. In that age, when and where there was no human suffering, the cause of human suffering lay in a cunt.

“When the man, because he couldn’t resist beauty, opened up Pandora’s cunt, her evil excretions, her excrescence, smelled up the world. So badly that all those who could smell those smells—that is, men—wanted to die, and would have if they couldn’t get rid of that which lies within women.

“That’s where treasure is,” I concluded.

“How can you be you and say this? I thought that you loved me.”

“This story isn’t saying what I say about cunts: this is what that old, dead poet said.”

The dead cock was no longer leading us, ‘cause we were back at the edge of the water. Were in the middle of a cove, where a gentle slope ran up from the beach to the entrance of a cave.

“Ange,” I said, and took her hand.

Together, we entered the opening.

There were no more pirate girls and I didn’t care anymore.

It was a large, airy place, with a little spring and a pool of clear water, overhung with ferns. The floor was sand. In a far corner, I saw a box out of which coins and yellow slabs flowed. This had cost such blood and sorrow: what good ships, scuttled in the deep, amassed in blood and guts, what brave humans walking the plank blindfold, shots of the cannon, shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive can tell.

Yet there were still those on the island who had indulged in blood.

“Come in,” I said to Silver.

“I’m doing my dooty,” said Silver. “That’s our treasure too.” She walked into the cave, and then, King Pussy.

We all looked at the money.

“I’d rather go a-pirating,” said Silver. “If me and my girls take all this treasure, the reign of girl piracy will stop, and I wouldn’t have that happen.”

King Pussy was staring out toward the ocean.

I understood, and watched in awe, while those girls walked out of the cave.

Ange and I grabbed all the money we could and got into the rowboat that was hidden by the two, the white and the black, stones.

A Prayer for All Sailors

Halcyons shall cease to prey on fish,

Poisonous leaves become our food,

Be you sailors without remorse

For your lips have been stained in blood.