August 10/3:15/lc

It's good he's here. Good he's come. After seven years living so far from voices you loved, reckless idiots you loved, he walks in the door with the souls of the dead and the resurrected: you break out the beer.  

J R: finally, a job, a pretty good one: "He comes by the house one day in a 99 Ford something and we go driving. Then he stops. We get out. He goes to the back, opens the trunk and says, 'This is it, T, this is the deal.' It was ALL his writing. He's got it IN the trunk, he DRIVES it around with him." SLAM

A year ago his mother died. This is a hard thing. "You see early pictures of my Mom, she was gorgeous.  Then a few years back, she got so big. Huge. She said:  'It's great, T. When you're this big, nobody bothers you anymore.' But right before she went, she lost it all, the cancer ate her, she went smaller and smaller..."

You put your arm out. You ask him does he know about the life of a star: "Just before a star dies,  it grows enormous and reddest red. It becomes a Red  Giant..."  

"K L's writing Ghazelles."  
"Riding Gazelles?"  
"Wri - TING!"
"Gazelles?"
"They're SLAM short bursts..."

You say my father died far away in a perpetual summer. You were here. You had no idea. You looked out the window. It  was February, snowing. Crows from Sweden picking over dead leaves in the park below.

He goes out for beers. You slam your hand against the wall. Over and over. These mosquitoes you kill: one up on us, or so Arthur Koestler maintained. In his book, The Ghost in The Machine, Koestler, an ardent anti-behaviorist,  argued  that the mosquito  'chose' to acquiesce to its physical reality. He thought them an excellent example of non-deviance.

Then this year her mother died. So they had to come back. To a village outside Budapest. Where as a favor to her family he begins to scrape a hundred years of paint off  the family home: "Get the baby out of here. I guarantee you this shit is lead-based."

"It has to do with what it makes of its life, with the heat and light inside it, growing all out of proportion..."

The mosquito's stomach runs right through its brain. Eons ago, it came up against a sobering crux: if it went for intellectual growth, it would slowly starve to death. If it ate well, eventually it wouldn't have a brain in its head.

You grab the old linguist's dictionary: "Arabic. Ghazal..."
"Which is?"
"Solomon's gazelle..."

"I've got the kid now," he says.  "Sometimes I think: I can't afford her; how am I going to keep on..."

But you knew. You looked out the window. The crow had a calling card in its beak like that magpie in Goya's portrait of Manuel Osorio. It said, 'Your father wears a red vest.' Suddenly the tether just snaps.  You've got about one second to decide whether or not to hold on.

"She can pull herself up now. She's nine months old. In Hungarian her name means Wisdom."

"I tried to get my father to come. We're from here. 'To Hungary?' he said. 'No. Nono,' he said. I heard this in his voice: a terrible hunger: he wanted to but he couldn't. "

"It begins to consume itself. It begins to eat its own light, use itself  up..."

The mosquito neatly solved this quandary of sustenance vs. intellectual development: enough to think of blood, go for blood.

"We took everything out of the bank to come here. We were painting the house.  We put the baby in a tree, she was safe there. One night she tells me her mother's sister was taken out - in '56 -  They just put a gun to her head and blew her brains out. What is this?  I finished painting. There was nothing to do but walk up this one street, sit in this one pub, and drink bottles of Slivovice with her brother. I looked around SLAM I said to her father,  'Have you noticed? Everything's falling down around us! We don't have a cent -  but we Hungarians SLAM keep the knives sharpened!?' I finally told her: 'I've gotta get out of here. I'm gonna' go to Prague and buy a typewriter.'"  

We, on the other hand, made deviant 'choices' [i.e. lower AND upper brain], that led to contradictions  with our physical reality. We, Koestler, claimed, are an aberration.

"I've done concrete. SLAM Walls. SLAM I've laid tiles. You can go out on a tile wall  plumb centered. You can do a 3-4-5. The Mexicans are brilliant at it. The deal is you can take one look at a wall and read if it was laid out right."

"Then there's : Ghazi: n. Mohammedan anti-infidel fanatic - "
"Jesus that's a tad dated..."
SLAM "From Arabic: Ghaza: to fight..."  
"Well, they do have a punch to them..."  

"What was I going to say? 'I am a magnificent ruin, I am falling down without falling.' I wasn't going to tell them that. I moved to a village east of Prague. Cirque Berousek lived there in off-season. There were camels. An elephant and a Grizzly. Hail all the time. Rabid foxes. Night after night I peeled off my face, my father's face was there. I come from a bunch of pagan gun-runners with Byzantine underpinnings. They weren't exactly run-of-the-mill. They ran speaks, or died young of shipyard asbestos. The women popping out kids in double-digits. They said the soul lives in the hair. They believed stones walk at midnight. They made sure the dead had a good pair of shoes...PAUSE ...none of this may seem very practical..."

You suppose Koestler simply meant we cannot always be counted on to keep our brains and our guts in such sublime order. When did he write Ghost in The Machine? While he was slamming around those women? After he raped his friend's wife?

"G's still singing his life up and down the streets. A fuckin' troubadour. One night he's over, we've just had the kid, the whole thing's starting to SLAM overwhelm me. He says to me: 'T, just remember to sit upright and erect.'"

"I was thinking it could have something to do with the SLAM Gaza Strip..."
"But which -?"
"What?"
"A place for beautiful deer or a killing floor?"

"It takes itself into itself. It swallows all the red. It grows smaller than we can ever imagine. And then smaller even than that...."

"...and just looked at this stupid Russian girl in the bar the other night, telling me, ' No, you are NOT Hungarian. Americans are just Americans.'  And thought, 'T, don't SLAM ask her what she thinks those old Russian ladies on 6th and Balboa think they're supposed to be. Don't ask her if she knows what it's like to grow up in post-war Detroit in a house speaking Hungarian, a house reeking of  SLAM booze and that hunger.'

He wants another beer. You give him the key. Make up the couch for him.

"One night I heard the well draw up - of its own. I got up and looked out the window. A huge shadow darker than dark was there. It dipped its head in the well and then turned and moved back across the field, up the ridge..."
"What was it?"
"It was the big SLAM menhir from the hilltop..."
You don't believe that."
"It may not make sense but out there, over time I realized, neither does killing yourself over death..."

His breath goes in and out like sheets on the line in a wind. On the floor one of your cats curls into the top of his typewriter case. 20 bucks at the Antikvariat. A Mercedes superba.

Wisdom overwhelms him.  

"...grows denser, more radiant. Then it implodes. Sometimes if it's close enough to another, it becomes the invisible companion."

It follows, logically, that the well-balanced mosquitoes flitting about the room  here survive by feeding on aberrations.