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The smell of flowers was heavy in the air. The commandante sat at a long wooden trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began tran- scribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on. Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose. Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whis- pers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost. "I could bribe him, of course." The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums "Coming Through the Rye." Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash. Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.... The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out, dying inside, hopeless fear re- flecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting of his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point. "Chemical therapy?" The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T,B. sani- tariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men's Homes, great, dusty cus- tom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K. |
