Isolation, Part 1

With help from quickened clouds, the light sweeps up shadows and strews them again in such fluid succession it’s as if my field of vision were a room, its brightness controlled by a giant dimmer on the arching sky, a dull disk rolled by a capricious wraith.

By the afternoon, the day has spent its fortune. What’s left; dust bowls hours. Anything can happen in life; nothing can happen in the afternoon. A sparring match right after a title fight. Carrying on until I faint from the fumes gathering about my head.

The wind blows a Twix wrapper over a brick sidewalk swarming with ants. Militant and strict little pinheads; from my hazy height they seem lost in a dimwitted riot. When clouds block the sun, I could almost say it’s nice out. But the question of the evening adds heft to the ponderous tilt of the hours. What to do. Every option on a spectral sheet, an infinite list of flat virtual could be’s that assume unsettling proportions when I pass them by.

Even on these quiet streets, in a neighborhood lined with three story houses, where wealthy couples anxiously raise their autistic children and nonbiodegradable old farts cling to musty midcentury couches, candy wrappers and pop cans blend with the fallen whirligigs in patches of dust and dirt. The golden skin of the Twix is as natural as the cuticle of a leaf in the arrogant glare of the sun. One will refuse to break down in a timely manner and go on to poison the land and accelerate the corruption of all things, but the earth is set to fall apart regardless. What’s annihilation a little ahead of schedule?

Nature is an obscene machine, blind to its own blueprints, spitting out plastic and asbestos and flesh-eating beasts and dung beetles and maggots with sublime indifference. Man is caught in a deadly chemical orgy, a slugfest in a puddle of lye. He speeds up destruction, but speeds it up relative to what? Why prefer a faster or slower finish to the cosmic carnage, the immense murder-suicide of all cleaved meat.

The opposite of fractal, the opposite of interconnection, mirrored patterns. Nothing nowhere in piecemeal time, in held breath and hiccups, a time for each fractured nothing, innumerable scattered single use ketchup packets squeezed and splattering against an endless black night.

The banal sideshows and tryhard devices of chaos theory and quantum physics, the fizzled-out interrelations among apparently discreet phenomena. Folds within folds within spirals and mobius bands and double helixes, creative evolution repeating forms with novel differences. Does me no good to know about it, read about it, watch another overgrown adolescent slobber all over his lecture notes and rehearse another microwaved disquisition on the mathematical magic of the universe. All poetic description and scientific explanation a handwaving trick, a slick con job, robbing me blind and yanking my pants down before I know what’s happened.

The patterns repeat at different scales, but that doesn’t mean they’re connected, that they signify anything, that there’s any ground to it all. I repeat my past, but my past is dead and has nothing to tell me. The man I was at 21 still works at a toasted sandwich shop, wears a t-shirt that smells of marinara and meatballs, smokes weed before a shift, during a shift, after a shift, and lugs heavy trashbags to the dumpster in the fading evening sun.

The 21-year-old man repeats in the 25-year-old who repeats in the 37-year-old, who already repeats his future 52-year-old self, whether alive or dead; all of whom know nothing about each other except for the odd glance at chiaroscuro album covers and the sleepy skimming of redacted letters.

Or the 26-year-old man working in the deli of a co-op grocery, living in the three-bedroom apartment with his two best friends, waking early and drinking french press coffee, drinking the whole glass canister down to its sludgy bottom, feeling energized beyond all reasonable exertion, in excess of the days labor, the days thoughts, a savagely wasteful expenditure of nerves and glands, a profane ritual carried out in a rusted red dawn. Cycling to the grocery and prepping macaroni salads and pressing sandwiches on the grill, fantasies less than dreams, interstitial glimpses of women, from students to middle aged mothers he’d never touch and never speak to beyond asking what they wanted to eat, wanting to ask if they’d join him out back on a pile of pallets.

He performs the same tasks as the first brainless servant made of mud and hardened by heat into the henchman of an evil sorcerer. What he was doomed to do, what he’s done, just like the summer after he graduated from high school and had already finished a semester at college, when he worked for a municipal agency that cleaned government assisted apartment complexes, and walked into the rooms where the broken and helpless sat on couches and drank liters of big red right out of the bottle. Fetid dens of withered flesh and bloated innards, midsections ballooned into whole sections with squirming nubby legs like feelers of sprawling sea anemones, bedrooms like ruined ships on the ocean floor.

On his knees scrubbing mold with colors outside the earthly human visible spectrum, scraping at moss colonies, miniature forests, toxic mushrooms the perverse and penile shaped link between life and death, the slow growing projectile of death becoming life, coursing with the secret knowledge of the underworld, passing along the gossip of tortured shades, from stalks to heads, grey matter without skulls, the same as a man if he were a single winding leg and then a wrinkled brain from the waist up.

Cryogenic stains in refrigerators that would withstand the blast of a nuclear bomb. All the spores and bacteria sleeping and then waking and flooding into his lungs, exploring his circulatory rivers in canoes, the metal splinters and fibers that would infiltrate his backchannels, disorganisms neither living nor dead, microscopic reverberations that confound biologists and cause subtle problems over the years, nearly imperceptible conditions, releasing caustic fluid that creeps over the brain so slowly the madness sets in without notice.

The nameless pain under each stubbed toe and elbow on a sharp corner and burst of anger, under every curse in gridlocked traffic and unread message and heartless parting word, the infantile dependency and love and resentment bound together directed at mom and all her lying down stand-ins and the dread of certain death at an uncertain time; it all repeats itself in me today, only without connection, subsistence or coherence, like a bubble with the exact molecular structure as each one before it, popping like all the others before it, recalling them without penetration or overlap.

Just the same with my grandfather repeating his grandfather, a saga of illegible scripts, of men sent to foreign beachheads and men warring within their own homes against their wives and children and themselves, against their neighbors and the men they labored with shoulder to shoulder, on factory floors and then in cornfields, wearing torn tunics on manors owned by godlike men with fevers and fatal bowel diseases, gouty lords giving commands, repeating the first man bellowing in the terror of original awakening, a lonely ape waiting for his dragging knuckles to catch up to him, or the first man of God, Adam with ribs like a prison, waiting for the first woman to free him from his isolation and then put him in a jail of her making.