I scamper out on the back deck, past John Major who has both his arms manacled behind his back like a Guard at the Tate modern whispering something into the lithe teacup handle of Liz Madigan's earlobe as the gradation of skyline solidly transitions from film negative fauna to an obsidian shade of dusk. Unlike the front of the vessel the back deck is packed. My loins still hurt from where Jim Baker felt compelled to frat-boy punt me in the manhood. No sniff of Harmony. The first person I espy on the back deck is Our Wendy. She is ravishing. She is dressed to kill. She is wearing an evening gown dress that is emerald. She looks like she is reading nominations for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. She has a diaphanous scarf looped through her elbows and lower back as if she is a marionette. Whatever Our Wendy did with her hair looks like it took three hours and clearly defied the 'No hair-curler' mandate we received from Parade before we left.
She looks numinous. She looks striking.
She looks like Our Wendy.
"Hello Our Wendy,"
Our Wendy acknowledges me hello David who-doesn't-look-like-Harry-Connick Jr. or Tony -from- Blossom - and -is-not-from-the-real-Peoria David.
I smile.
“Nice dress.” I tell Our Wendy, her cheekbones correlate with the scarlet color of her hair.
“It was suppose my prom dress. I saved up for it all summer and then my boyfriend broke my heart so I decided to show him. He’ll be really envious when I send him pictures of me wearing the dress on a dance cruise in London.”
I want to tell her that she looks ravishing. I want to inquire how she was able to so precisely pack such a delicacy of haute couture into the limited contours of her suitcase. Mark is still no where in sight. There was something about the way in which Harmony queried if she could dance with someone else which made her sound like she was asking my permission first. I continue to wade through the thicket of red-coated elbows and bodies on the vessel. It was heavily rumored that Pin girl Elias Das ran out of Amarillo TX pins after affixing a punitive pin to the lapel of US Ambassador Raymond Seitz yet she seems to be planting more pins on the Skipper and crew of the ship. The trajectory of our ship continues to bob and sway. Our route seems to rove a five mile radius so that it passes Tower Bridge skidding past Big Ben and Parliament before making a U-turn then doing the same route in reverse. I bump into Greta. She is wearing her bandanna and cool hippie bangles around her wrists. I ask her if she enjoyed the chicken tonight and she smiles back at me, a lavender aureole encircling her visage. I smile out her name and continue to walk. Harmony has completely dissolved. I wonder if she is holding the other lad as close as we held each other during the Shakespeare's Sister song. Kevin of the Big Ten sees me and informs me that downstairs where the masses ate there is seriously like all the Pepsi you can drink, dude. He slaps his chest as if getting ready to lead the pledge-of-allegiance at a Veterans' Day assembly before offering a burp. Most of the kids on the back deck are culled from the first and second buses. For a minute I think I see Rita and for a minute I’m not sure if it is her. When I turn around I see Meg Weaver. She is by several members of her group who know me almost solely as Harmony’s beau.
“Hey!!!!” Meg says with excitement in her eyes.
I tell her hello. As always my morning running partner is turning my chest into a water slide via her smile alone.
“Where’s Harmony?” Meg inquires.
“I think she went to dace with someone else.”
“What!!!” Meg says, shocked, pupil dilating into twin exclamatory marks in her eyes.
“No, It’s all good. I’m sure we’ll hang out soon.”
Meg smiles before inquiring if I am going running tomorrow morning with the group.
“If you are there how can I say no.”
I notice that Meg is grappling the railing. She is closing her eyes. Whatever light that is left in the skyline is hitting the side of her face in a sliver moonbeam of illuminated nickel. I can hear her audibly inhaling through her nose. In a way it looks like she is having an orgasm without sounding all pornographic and wailing.
"What are you doing?"
"What are you doing?"
“I’m trying to create a moment. This trip. I mean. It’s been raining on and off the entire trip and here we are cruising down the center of the Thames in London and it is just beautiful.” Meg says, sounding all Anne of Green Gableish.
“You're beautiful.” I say, unbidden, not meaning to sound romantic. Meg volleys back with an unexpected what. I begin to stutter.
“I mean, you’re a beautiful person. Everyone on this trip is a beautiful person and we only just met not even a complete week ago and we are somehow here and we are somehow a family.”
Meg is blushing. She says yeah. She again closes her eyelids into the sky. It is like she is waiting to for the stars to make out with her forehead. There is silence. From the periphery of my vision I see Dimas and Longhorn straggling on the east end of the yacht. Baker is congregating with several members of the Big Ten, informing them to go on ahead and take a sniff at Harry and I guarantee you'll sniff hooch. Tamera walks by with her hands in her trench coat pocket and doesn't acknowledge me as I again offer a wave.
Meg is still contemplative. I want to comfort her. I want to tell her that everything is going to be okay. Meg continues:
Meg is still contemplative. I want to comfort her. I want to tell her that everything is going to be okay. Meg continues:
“I mean all of this is almost over. We have tonight and we have tomorrow night and the night after that and after that we are leaving. After that we are going back to the places we came from. I mean, there are only two or three of us from any given state.”
I’m not sure where Meg is going with this but I nod in concurrence. For the first the entire trip my running partner appears pensive. I want to make Meg smile.
“Hey, I mean, we'll all be in touch, all of us will hang out, We'll get each others' addresses and write each other and call. I mean. It's not that bad. We won't lose touch. We'll make sure that somehow none of this will ever die."
We are passing underneath the cement viaducts of the bridge leading to Big Ben and Westminster. Meg smiles.
“Okay, enough existentialism. Let’s dance.”
“What?”
“Comeon. “ I am grabbing Meg Weaver by her triangular elbow.
There’s no slow dancing. Everyone is just jumping around. Everyone is sweating and laughing We are forming a unit, and algebraic emblem for eternity. We are dancing to the equation of time.
I tell her again comeon. I tell her that it will be fun.
***
"Yours is the last voice I wanted to hear. Yours is the last voice I needed to hear before I come back to this place. Yours is the only voice I needed to hear before I came back home."
***
***
Her handwriting looks like a carbonated fizz from a freshly opened Tab. She is writing me a letter. It is the beginning of the New year. She said that she waited til the stroke of midnight. Via her handwriting she makes a joke about it seems almost unfair since I called her at the stroke of midnight Central time, and now she's stuck with nothing short of stale Dick Clark re-runs. She is excited. She is creating inky meadows across the page. She is talking about life being brand new.
She is stating that she can't think of a better way to open the new year.
She calls me David.
She tells me this this is what she wants.
She tells me that she wants to spend the genesis of the new year in the cradle of my arms.
"I know what you mean, that night on the Thames totally rocked."
Mark-Andrew says to me via a letter I receive shortly after my 16th birthday, come three months of what is perceived as time.
***
***
"Yours is the last voice I wanted to hear. Yours is the last voice I needed to hear before I come back to this place. Yours is the only voice I needed to hear before I came back home."
***
It is after she has looked at me, my thoughts spilling into the décolletage shoreline just south of her chin. It is after I have stood on the deck with John Candy who is always smiling and laughing and as we re-enter, dancing in a troika though before caroling out Bono’s ballad into her earlobe, her wrist biting my wrist that she forms cuneiform, reeling me off the stuttering flamingo plink of the stage. We are one and then we are bifurcated and severed, and the I am falling through an emotional umbilicus worm-hole, I am skidding down the rope attires to the top of Christ Lutheran school’s gymnasium garnering blisters. I am hurting, she is telling me not to, she is toadying up to the journalist with the column she has orchestrated where young faces will be promulgated and given fresh voice.
She yanks me across the same skittles flavored dance floor where Nat and his date have been welded to each other the entire night.
She is telling me no. She is telling me sorry. She is holding me, squeezing the conch of my finger tips. She is telling me that she is going to miss me. Somehow she is preordained to the incumbent gravity of loss. Somehow she is already privy that the classified dossier of this trip is nothing more or less than a dream. Somehow she knows that none of this is real. That is all moving by too fast. That it is fleeting.
That this trip is transitory.
That it is nothing less than a dream.
***
Her handwriting looks like a carbonated fizz from a freshly opened Tab. She is writing me a letter. It is the beginning of the New year. She said that she waited til the stroke of midnight. Via her handwriting she makes a joke about it seems almost unfair since I called her at the stroke of midnight Central time, and now she's stuck with nothing short of stale Dick Clark re-runs. She is excited. She is creating inky meadows across the page. She is talking about life being brand new.
She is stating that she can't think of a better way to open the new year.
She calls me David.
She tells me this this is what she wants.
She tells me that she wants to spend the genesis of the new year in the cradle of my arms.
***
"I know what you mean, that night on the Thames totally rocked."
Mark-Andrew says to me via a letter I receive shortly after my 16th birthday, come three months of what is perceived as time.
***
In the middle of the floor couples are dancing. Nat has been dancing with the squeaky girl from Arkansas all night. It’s pretty clear by the method in which Nat and his girlfriend are dancing that they are endeavoring to conceive by trying a new position standing up. Nat’s counselor has at least once walked over to where Nat and his date are dancing and mentioned something about watching the PDA guys and not making any other member of the trip uncomfortable. The Big Ten’s idea of dancing is pogoing up and down like an agitated exclamatory mark during House of Pain’s JUMP AROUND and then racing each other to the side to the side of the vessel the moment the music transitions tempo into a slow song. Elbert, one of the few African-American boys on the trip is making Tin Man in need of Oil motions claiming that he is a robot. There is a boy named Jeremy who has grainy sideburns and seems to have some pituitary gland malfunction making him the tallest on the trip. He is dancing like he is playing diminutive maracas and then he steps back off the dance floor and everyone cheers. Jennifer Flood and her purported romantic interest who has short black hair and communicates in assorted array of grunts is there as well. Parade’s gift of all the Pepsi we can drink is rendering chemical powwow on the younger members of Dan’s group, many of whom are going out on the deck and begin to make keening sounds in the direction of the clipped fingernail moon.
I am still on the back deck next to Meg Weaver.
Meg is stating that she really doesn’t dance all that often.
I tell her neither do I.
There is no Harmony. I try not to think that she is next to the Jennifer Flood’s alluded stud.
Shadows spill across the floor. I can make out the shadowy static of the Big Ben.
Shadows spill across the floor. I can make out the shadowy static of the Big Ben.
"Comeon Meg,” I say reeling her on the dance floor in the middle of the much-anthologized Salt-n-Pepper’s Push It. Meg is laughing. She again states that she doesn’t dance. She says she is coy. Her feet gently shuffle. She does a dance that looks like she has agriculturally-induced wings. She pauses. She is lanky. She stops looks down and blushes. She begins to dance again. I turn around and see Rose dancing with members of Bus 3. I point at her and smile while pretends she doesn’t see me. Across the echo of the dance floor I can hear Vinny call for a closeup before talking about a lovely couple. Meg and I are dancing. The cardiovascular-barometer of our flesh chemically fizzles as when we were running earlier that morning through Hyde park. She is smiling. She is laughing. Her face looks down and blushes in a controlled demolition of exploded freckles.
We are losing ourselves with everyone else on this trip.
We are losing ourselves with everyone else on this trip.
We are losing ourselves in London.
Meg has her own rhythm. Her dress is reminiscent of Harmony's in that it has wild flowers growing out of the soil of her fabric. The DJ is playing mid-80's Madonna. The only way to dance is slow. Holding hands, forming a key socket-shaped buoy with your bodies enjoined as one.
Meg's smile is electric. She is reeling me in. She is dancing.
"I can't believe I'm dancing. I never dance."
I smile. I want to tell Meg that she is a natural. I want to tell my running partner that she is a better dancer than Harmony. I want to tell her that dancing is with her is like what I could imagine dancing with Rita would be like. That it seems somehow right. The moon looks less like a moon and more like a gibbous second hand golf ball culled from a junior high shoe box diorama of the solar system strung overhead. Meg and I are not so much dancing as we are swaying back and forth. I am not entirely sure what is happening. We are both clumsy and we are both toddling. Twice our knees have maladroitly headbutted. Twice it feels like we have fallen down. I am dancing with my running partner and she is blushing. She is smiling.
This is England. This is everything I have wanted for the last three years.
Before I know it there is a squeeze on the back of my neck. Before I know it twin arms have wielded around my back. Someone is bear-hugging me from behind. At first I think it is Jim Baker. Next thing I know my vision is shielded. I turn around. It is Harmony.
"You tryin' to steal my date?" Harmony asks Meg before enveloping her arms around me. She is squeezing me tight. It is like she is trying to enter my body via a bear hug.
She is squeezing my waist like she doesn't want to drown.
****
It is a dream world and we are fifteen and eternal. Our Young Columbus jackets have become spacesuits, fleshy vinyl shrouds of Turin, enervated epidermis, intestines of a grandfather clock guarding us against the scoff vicissitudes of hourly hurt, the welt-inducing minute hand of Big Ben's bad porn mustache, the abrasive current that is time. Meg has stepped back and is smiling even though the dance is far from over. Harmony has her arms lassoed around my waistline squeezing me like I have just returned home from active duty. She is trying to walk into my hips and kneecaps. She is embracing me like she has never hugged me before. It feels like she is giving me the Heimlich maneuver in reverse. Part of me wonders what happened with the boy she asked my permission to dance with. Part of me wonders if she feels emotionally chaffed which is why she seems happy to see me.
"Hi," I tell her, trying to sound suave and failing admirably. Harmony squeezes my body again. She is not talking. We begin to dance, swaying back and forth. Throughout the night official YC '93 jackets are doffed and piled in an androgynous heap on the far side of the dance floor near where we feasted an hour earlier.
I am dancing with Harmony.
I am lost in the hypnotic blink of her eyes.
It is a dream world and we are leaving.
It is a dream world and we are readily discerning that we are somehow a part of something that will never transpire again. I look around and there is no sight of Mark. I haven't seen Rita this entire cruise and almost feel compelled to walk up to one of her semi-nerdy cohorts and inquire if they have seen her, inquiring if she is okay. Harmony’s eyes are empirically shiny. There is something about the vessel which sounds like it is purring, juddering the way the plane juddered and huffed on the runway back in Peoria less than a week ago, fifteen minutes after I first met Nat Pflederer.
I am dancing with Harmony.
When I was dancing with my morning running partner we had a clumsy dance style where we couldn’t refrain from laughing as our bodies skidded beneath the florescent patterns of light. It is completely different from how I am dancing with Harmony--our arms resembling the uneven bars Kim Zmeskal oscillated around last summer in Barcelona when I fell in love and made an inward vow that I would run in the Olympics someday.
The boat continues to sputter and cough as it wades down the eddies of the Thames
I want to kiss Harmony.
I have not kissed anyone since Renae Holiday outside the lower level of Northwoods mall in the first scattered calendric days of the new year. I am trying to be romantic. When I ask Harmony if I can kiss her forehead she responds by stating slow and gentle at first et sic per gradus ad ima tenidur. When I fail to glean the analogy Harmony states what, before adding that she shares the same birthday as Guy Fawkes Day. John Major still has his hands behind his back in a condescending cuff. He shoots me a look indicative of, what? Not up to par on the country your visiting's history, now are we. Without thinking I start kissing the top of Harmony's head. It is like I am kissing a halo. It is like my lips are mining her forehead trying to vacuum forth her own personal thoughts, wanting to discern with de facto license if my admiration for her is valid. She doesn’t seem to mind. My glasses are in the side pocket of my Parade jacket. The vessel seems to jilt into an indented thud once again. It feels as if we just hit something in the middle of the Thames.
It is a dream world and we are readily discerning that we are somehow a part of something that will never transpire again. I look around and there is no sight of Mark. I haven't seen Rita this entire cruise and almost feel compelled to walk up to one of her semi-nerdy cohorts and inquire if they have seen her, inquiring if she is okay. Harmony’s eyes are empirically shiny. There is something about the vessel which sounds like it is purring, juddering the way the plane juddered and huffed on the runway back in Peoria less than a week ago, fifteen minutes after I first met Nat Pflederer.
I am dancing with Harmony.
When I was dancing with my morning running partner we had a clumsy dance style where we couldn’t refrain from laughing as our bodies skidded beneath the florescent patterns of light. It is completely different from how I am dancing with Harmony--our arms resembling the uneven bars Kim Zmeskal oscillated around last summer in Barcelona when I fell in love and made an inward vow that I would run in the Olympics someday.
The boat continues to sputter and cough as it wades down the eddies of the Thames
I want to kiss Harmony.
I have not kissed anyone since Renae Holiday outside the lower level of Northwoods mall in the first scattered calendric days of the new year. I am trying to be romantic. When I ask Harmony if I can kiss her forehead she responds by stating slow and gentle at first et sic per gradus ad ima tenidur. When I fail to glean the analogy Harmony states what, before adding that she shares the same birthday as Guy Fawkes Day. John Major still has his hands behind his back in a condescending cuff. He shoots me a look indicative of, what? Not up to par on the country your visiting's history, now are we. Without thinking I start kissing the top of Harmony's head. It is like I am kissing a halo. It is like my lips are mining her forehead trying to vacuum forth her own personal thoughts, wanting to discern with de facto license if my admiration for her is valid. She doesn’t seem to mind. My glasses are in the side pocket of my Parade jacket. The vessel seems to jilt into an indented thud once again. It feels as if we just hit something in the middle of the Thames.
I wonder why no one else is looking around.
.
Below our feet the dance floor is beginning to change. It has transmogrified into a myriad of television screens. The dance floor is a stuttering chess board one second and the periodical table of elements the next before transitioning into a cross-word puzzle. Harmony has her chin planted on my left shoulder blade. I am holding her. I am not letting her go. Because I
am a good 5 ½ inches taller than Harmony my burgeoning hardon seems to balance like a
fulcrum somewhere above her navel even though more blood is circulating to my chest than
any other part of my anatomy. The DJ
mumbles something about sending this song out to all the couples on the
dance floor out there before breaking into Crimson and Clover while the yacht continues to sound as if is it is nasally congested, rattling out a chorus of hacks. The yacht can’t stop shaking. I am waiting for someone to holler out earthquake
only the Big Ten are removing their standard YC jackets, twirling them in a blurred helicopter above their heads as if they are at a bachelorette party waiting for crinkled one dollar bills to be planted into the waistband of their respective pants. The obscenely warm-Pepsi caffeinated youth of groups one and two seem to be sprouting an exorbitant amount of facial hair as they continue to cackle in the direction of the lunar orb on the back of the boat. Having run plumb out of Amarillo Texas pins Elias Das is walking up pinning ribboned-helix's for AIDS awareness on the nearest lapel. The dance floor beneath our feet is emitting a staid blue of a giant Jeopardy! screen before transitioning into vacuous-dun frames of a New York Times Sudoku. The dance floor looks like a game of Tetris. It is a giant Rubbix cube whose colors keep altering in almost psychedelic inducing laser light show fashion. The floor is transitioning in a pinwheel of blinks. It is a game of scrabble. It is featuring fragments of the Hammurabi code. It is a very Coach Mann assenting Magna Carta. The Tyninghame print of the Declaration of Arbroath. The Nicene Creed. More random members of various groups are hurling their standard YC garb in the hull corner. They are chanting the geometry of Etruscan tongues. Something is about to transpire though Harmony is still looking at me as if an eye doctor told her not to
blink while reciting a blurred sentence of consonants and vowels. Liz Madigan is holding up Our Itinerary which now
looks more like something Audubon commissioned to denote the foreign arcana and intricate errata of the
Voynich manuscript. Tamera struts past quoting what sounds like π, she is stating that she
is fairly certain she discerned the punctuating integer and that she is fairly
certain that the punctuating integer of π is the most beautiful sound ever
produced by the lips of mankind. Vinny’s camcorder has been supplanted by dual
neon cones as if he is orchestrating the lumbering movements of a plane on a runway.
He is stating that all is clear.
The vessel reverberates with a seismic tilt.
The Thames is a river of sepia-stained musk transitioning into a runway akin to the one we arrived almost seven days earlier at Heathrow. I am holding Harmony closer but she doesn't seem to notice the psychedelic pond in which we appear to be swimming, clasping each other across vintage flashes of expired commerce Elias Das has quit passing out AIDS awareness ribbons
and is now wearing her hair in a bee-hive informing Lynne Minton and Frank
McNulty to have their seats in a forward and upright position. There is more
tittering as the vehicle begins to accelerate. We are moving. The chassis of the vessel seems to skid and blast off,
leaving the shingles of London beneath us. We are a celestial dirigible. From above the Thames represents a coiled
garter, a fruit badgering reptile. Below the lights of London are constellations
mirroring those above.
Becomes nothingness.
Whatever firmament below is part of a viable non-blinking orb.
The wraith of Mary Queen of Scots is lodged into the bilge of the boat snapping like a white flag as we continue to rocket into the lucid pupa past the strata of what is to come. The top of the dirigible has sprouted what looks like a cape with a menstruating Gothic plus sign in the center the color of our standard YC Journey attire. We are blasting off into a bulb of darkness. Even throughout the melee I can hear Vivian talking into the tip of her umbrella as if it were a microphone stating that it's best not to look directly at the sun from this angle for fear of indelible retina failure. The floor continues to showcase embryonic images mixed with vessels of antiquity. There is The Nina and The Pinta and The Santa Maria and the Mayflower. One second our vessel is the Titanic the next it is the Hindenburg the next we are in second grade and the lunch tables fold out of the gymnasium wall and we are witnessing firsthand the Challenger exploding into a web of millennial exhaustion, our 3rd grade teacher with a Lynn Minton perm telling us that a teacher on board had also died. Harmony is completely oblivious to all of this. Harmony's eyes look like she just got voluntarily hypnotized viewing Van Gogh's Starry Night at the Met. I am trying to get her to talk only she can't stop staring at me. I try to make a joke apposite to the current situation we find ourselves in by making an untoward comment looking out into enhanced sockets of elongated space, asking Harmony that if I were naked and my body had transformed into the Great Space Coaster would she still get on board. I am hoping to elicit a smile only she continues to look at me as if astonished and unaware that our vessel is blasting through our area code of the galaxy. We pass the rusty eye-drop of Mars. Somewhere I swear I can hear Meg's voice stating that she had to read the Martian Chronicles for AP sophomore English and for some reason she really related to the story near the end where a nearly vacated Mars inter-planetary phone system is all messed up and the two lonely inhabitants finally connect although once they meet the guy doesn't want to be with her let alone foster a new civilization because she is fat. The vessel marshals, emitting arcadesque bleeps as it evades several asteroids, some that look as if they could be the size of Cuba. The Big Ten are forming counter clockwise motions and spinning with dervish fervor. There are cackles. We pass another string of asteroids. Jupiter and Saturn are just plain fucking huge beyond comprehension. Tamera is scratching her head stating that one could easily place the earth in Jupiter’s unpierced whirling navel alone. Tamera makes a reference to some French dude named Gustave Coriolis. Somehow the planets are gaseous abacus beads. Somehow even though we are warping some serious mock decimals across the vacuum of space everything we have ever wanted in this lifetime is in this moment. We are headed out. Tamera is saying that most people don't realize this but there are more suns in the universe than McDonald's has sold hamburgers. She is stating that the incalculable billions upon billions of stars in our galaxy alone let alone the billions upon billions of stars in the universe we just traverse there are mirrored universes fractaled and pocketed into galaxies of consciousness, not mention dark matter which the most adroit astrophysicist's on whatever planet we now just left behind postulates pretty much makes up the bulk of everything known to man. The electroshock cerulean tint of planet Neptune is the same color of both Meg and Mark’s eyes even though both, at quick sweeping dance floor assessment are nowhere to be found. We are blasting through the chalk board of every equation known to mankind. Greta is clad in a cloak of purple emanating from the sail of her smile. She is pointing at the sprinkle of constellations, smiling. Tamera sounds like she is filling out an application for a Smithsonian scholarship as she swivels in my direction rhetorically asking me if I know that the word planet actually means moving body? The continental shards of the Kuiper belt looks like the back pieces of a wet jigsaw puzzle that has now dried. Josh is dancing with the girl who wears copious blush. The second we break through the cosmic membrane of the Milky Way Tamera sounds like she is reading something ominous from a rectangular fortune cookie slip when she states the old adage about how it’s been estimated that there’s been more stars in the Universe than grain of sand on the planet we currently inhabit yet there are more atoms in a solitary grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.
Vivian states that we have gone farther than we have perhaps fathomed so what lies ahead is a bit of a mystery, now isn’t it.
We continue to push into the empyreal of the beyond . We are leaving. We are here for only a short time. We are here for all eternity.
Outside the vessel continues to erupt in a frisson of nuclear flares. Apparently some nerdy kid from Group 2 was able to spot a Quasar and now wants it named after him. The further we thrust into chasms of unknown blankness the more our attributes begin to change. We are gestating all over again. In a way it feels like we are becoming something greater than ourselves. Tamera notes that appx. 69 % of Young Columbusians are now wearing togas. Dimas and Longhorn have somehow grown horns and a goatee. Their legs seem to have five x’s the normal amount of leg hair. Jim Baker has joined them and he is playing some sort of impish lute. Counselor Trevor is wearing a slope-tilted Viking hat, drinking mead out of what could pass for the Holy Grail filling out the paradigmatic genome of an inebriated frat boy. Sir Charles has both his palms pressed out looking at the bacchanalian fete, trying to keep everyone calm. Several female counselors whom Jim Baker has accused of going out and drinking with the male counselors after curfew have availed their tops as if they are preparing for a post-30's mammogram, as if they are expecting Elias Das to christen them with Mardi Gras beads. Almost simultaneously Trevor rushes up to their availed tops and begins tapping Harmony's counselor Ahlex's breasts for nourishment, toasting his chalice in the air stating that the milk of human kindness tastes like nothing short of glue and tar. Vivian is commenting into her umbrella like a microphone stating that if you look into the far left you can see EGS-zs8-1, which is at least 13 billion light years from earth. We are blasting further into the yawping void of distillate nothingness. Elias is walking over to the toga-clad Big Ten placing a wreath of laurel leaves on the top of their heads as if they have just competed in a fraternity-sponsored GREEK Olympics. For a second the Doric columns shoot through the dance floor in cement beams and for a second it feels like we are back at Bath, the televised dance floor forming the healing pond before reverting back to individualized squares.
The copy of OUR ITINERARY that Liz Madigan is holding up brushes out of her hands floating like a pair of kicked-offed panties. When Tamera says check out that Gamma Ray one of the counselors mistakes it for being a Fraternity and begins to chug. The further we blast through space the more clusters of galaxies resemble cosmic nipples. Outside of the deck Meg is pointing at the Pleiades constellation as if it is the holidays and grandma lives nearby. With the exception of Josh and myself nearly all of the Big Tenners are wearing togas and laurel leaves forming a conga line. Josh is holding on to the girl with copious blush cowering as if he is afraid of what is to come. Jim has ears that look like he is a elfin-extra in a botched Christmas special. He is skipping, performing a calisthenic fartlek. Occasionally he wields his fist into a gavel and performs another OPEN JEWELS. Heath is wearing late-70’s porn sunglasses that seem
to project out like psychedelic binoculars bearing a rather prominent duck l’orange tint. The sunglasses extend from his eyes sockets so that they look like twin Hubble telescopes,
only they keep going. When I ask Heath what he is doing all he can utter are
the words far out and groovy before stating that these lenses that have
sprouted past the angular tip of his nose like a parallax branch allows him to see
anything he’s ever wanted to witness in all of time and shit. Several older girls are being led by a ghastly-cheeked Simone into
the corner adjacent from the YC effigy coats ferrying oil lamps. Nat is still spellbound and anchored by Miss Arkansas, who has the first name of Sara and the last of a Bach concerto. Nat appears to be growing a somewhat Amish upside-down dunce cap cidery beard. Mark's friend Denis who just couldn't stop stealing worth shit at Shuttleworth's earlier in the day is on a phallic-looking pogo stick bleating up
and down, talking about Xanadu and Samuel Taylor Coolidge, who several members
of the Big Ten think used to be a president. Heath keeps inadvertently bopping into things with his optical apparatus. Tamera says looking at the earth from this vantage point with those things straddled around your nose is like looking at pond scum through a microscope only human beings are the bacteria. Alaskan Bryan is clad in a toga although I swear Coach Ricca is holding up a stop watch telling Bryan to go, the sound of an expired flint clapping above the fete. Bryan takes off running he estimated 224 loops around the perimeter of the yacht that would constitute a mile. Coach is timing him. He is yammering out splits. I wish to move and be directly next to Coach Ricca. I think about the moment after I won the Young Columbus contest and I loosened my tie and came down to Track practice and shook his hand. Counselor Dan is wearing his yarmulke and talking
seriously about the Zohar. Elbert is stating that just because he is African American
doesn’t mean he should put on horned-rimmed glasses and break out into the
we-didn’t-land-on-Plymouth-rock-Plymouth-rock-done-landed on-us bit. Somehow
Nat has harvested a waist long beard the color of sand in an egg-timer. He is pointing
into the direction of Spencer who is carrying what looks like tablets of gold
before referring to him as a polygamous charlatan. Our Wendy’s luminous evergreen evening dress buds into a
Christmas tree, quoting the old Lorax adage about when the ax entered the
forest the trees stated that the handle is one of us.
Though it is space and there is emptiness a zephyr seems to rip through the pall of the ship. The Voyinvh manuscript that is OUR ITINERARY takes flight as if with wings.
Sir Charles, the only Counselor who isn't participating in the fete has his arms spread out saying comeon guys, this is enough.
The Jeopardy! screen is now showing chromosomes accompanied by sea plankton and an armada of microscopic nuclear war coated Taradigrades that look like muffled manatees. Sam is on the edge of the vessel where the Big Tenner’s have recently been urinating. For some reason Sam is wearing a Mickey Mouse Club Beanie,sucking on a pacifier; his body clad in a wooden-whiskey barrel around his waist with suspenders and water wings. He is holding his
YC 93 coat in his left hand. Sam keeps looking over the edge, as if he is riddled with anxiety while standing on the high-dive during free swim at the Y. I want to go over and comfort Sam and tell him everything is going to be okay. The Big Ten are lined up and they are chanting. Tamera quits quoting the successive numerical arrangement of π and begins to talk about different epochs in the earth's existence, gesticulating in a funny way, talking about how one must view the welcome mat of planet earth in terms of Millions of years and that it would take the avg. human being counting one integer per second almost a month of counting 8 hours-a-day-seven-days-a week to hit a million yet it would only take them only a little under a half an hour to count two thousand years back to the era of a culturally venerating Christ. Vinny is riding a bicycle with wings and has a sort of extremely early 20th century camera affixed to one of the handle bars which he has to grind on the side to capture film. Harmony and I are swaying back and forth. There is a feeling that the history of the universe as a whole is one ocular blink in the eyelid of an indefinable anthropomorphic God.
We continue to blast into the inscrutable wonder of everything there ever was.
Whatever firmament below is part of a viable non-blinking orb.
The wraith of Mary Queen of Scots is lodged into the bilge of the boat snapping like a white flag as we continue to rocket into the lucid pupa past the strata of what is to come. The top of the dirigible has sprouted what looks like a cape with a menstruating Gothic plus sign in the center the color of our standard YC Journey attire. We are blasting off into a bulb of darkness. Even throughout the melee I can hear Vivian talking into the tip of her umbrella as if it were a microphone stating that it's best not to look directly at the sun from this angle for fear of indelible retina failure. The floor continues to showcase embryonic images mixed with vessels of antiquity. There is The Nina and The Pinta and The Santa Maria and the Mayflower. One second our vessel is the Titanic the next it is the Hindenburg the next we are in second grade and the lunch tables fold out of the gymnasium wall and we are witnessing firsthand the Challenger exploding into a web of millennial exhaustion, our 3rd grade teacher with a Lynn Minton perm telling us that a teacher on board had also died. Harmony is completely oblivious to all of this. Harmony's eyes look like she just got voluntarily hypnotized viewing Van Gogh's Starry Night at the Met. I am trying to get her to talk only she can't stop staring at me. I try to make a joke apposite to the current situation we find ourselves in by making an untoward comment looking out into enhanced sockets of elongated space, asking Harmony that if I were naked and my body had transformed into the Great Space Coaster would she still get on board. I am hoping to elicit a smile only she continues to look at me as if astonished and unaware that our vessel is blasting through our area code of the galaxy. We pass the rusty eye-drop of Mars. Somewhere I swear I can hear Meg's voice stating that she had to read the Martian Chronicles for AP sophomore English and for some reason she really related to the story near the end where a nearly vacated Mars inter-planetary phone system is all messed up and the two lonely inhabitants finally connect although once they meet the guy doesn't want to be with her let alone foster a new civilization because she is fat. The vessel marshals, emitting arcadesque bleeps as it evades several asteroids, some that look as if they could be the size of Cuba. The Big Ten are forming counter clockwise motions and spinning with dervish fervor. There are cackles. We pass another string of asteroids. Jupiter and Saturn are just plain fucking huge beyond comprehension. Tamera is scratching her head stating that one could easily place the earth in Jupiter’s unpierced whirling navel alone. Tamera makes a reference to some French dude named Gustave Coriolis. Somehow the planets are gaseous abacus beads. Somehow even though we are warping some serious mock decimals across the vacuum of space everything we have ever wanted in this lifetime is in this moment. We are headed out. Tamera is saying that most people don't realize this but there are more suns in the universe than McDonald's has sold hamburgers. She is stating that the incalculable billions upon billions of stars in our galaxy alone let alone the billions upon billions of stars in the universe we just traverse there are mirrored universes fractaled and pocketed into galaxies of consciousness, not mention dark matter which the most adroit astrophysicist's on whatever planet we now just left behind postulates pretty much makes up the bulk of everything known to man. The electroshock cerulean tint of planet Neptune is the same color of both Meg and Mark’s eyes even though both, at quick sweeping dance floor assessment are nowhere to be found. We are blasting through the chalk board of every equation known to mankind. Greta is clad in a cloak of purple emanating from the sail of her smile. She is pointing at the sprinkle of constellations, smiling. Tamera sounds like she is filling out an application for a Smithsonian scholarship as she swivels in my direction rhetorically asking me if I know that the word planet actually means moving body? The continental shards of the Kuiper belt looks like the back pieces of a wet jigsaw puzzle that has now dried. Josh is dancing with the girl who wears copious blush. The second we break through the cosmic membrane of the Milky Way Tamera sounds like she is reading something ominous from a rectangular fortune cookie slip when she states the old adage about how it’s been estimated that there’s been more stars in the Universe than grain of sand on the planet we currently inhabit yet there are more atoms in a solitary grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.
Vivian states that we have gone farther than we have perhaps fathomed so what lies ahead is a bit of a mystery, now isn’t it.
We continue to push into the empyreal of the beyond . We are leaving. We are here for only a short time. We are here for all eternity.
The moment we pass through the Oort cloud everything begins to change. The bulk of the Big Ten have completely sloughed their jackets and appear to be wearing a sort of one piece drape resembling a makeshift shower curtain. There is the sound of drums. The chess board dance floor is now showing each of us in the womb. We are essentially shrimp cocktail. Each of the Young Columbus's are roughly between five and twenty weeks old. A member of Tamera's group who is obviously really pro-life points to the screen and says yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about. Our disparate gestating bodies are ensconced in a bulb much in the same fashion we find our bodies stowed in the interior of our space vessel streaking through space at this moment of smudged time. For almost three months in utero Harmony and I both harbor a tail and look exactly the same and you could engender the configuration of a heart with our enjoined embryos facing each other tete-a-tete. A decade and half prior to our Young Columbus sojourn in which we traveled across the briny blanket of an ocean we are traveling in an inner-anatomical sanctum and we are growing and developing automatically, sans intellectual cogitation. At the front of the yacht Liz Madigan points into the centerfold gloss of OUR ITINERARY stating that we have several more historical dignitaries joining us for this trip. Her arm swats to the right as if introducing a vaudeville act. A man who looks like he could be on the cover of wheat bread identifies himself as Alfred The Great trudging straight through the dance floor replete with battle armor and sword walking straight through a seemingly bearded Nat and belle as well as several other couples. An old man in a toga who identifies himself as Chrysippus, only he isn’t reveling in the same fashion as everyone else who is wearing a toga. There is a dude wearing a turban who is not a Sikh named Tertullian and next to Tertullian there is some Islamic-looking dude named Shamz talking about the plurality and oneness of all mankind. Taking about how it doesn’t matter what iteration of the Deity we chose to supplicate and worship and venerate somehow we are all part of the inscrutable light. Somehow we are all one. Even the college kids are tilting their heads stating that they have no clue who any of these supposed dignitaries dudes are.
A rather Tolkein looking dwarf wheels in a wooden Keg that when tapped, emits drizzying sprays of maroon.
Outside the vessel continues to erupt in a frisson of nuclear flares. Apparently some nerdy kid from Group 2 was able to spot a Quasar and now wants it named after him. The further we thrust into chasms of unknown blankness the more our attributes begin to change. We are gestating all over again. In a way it feels like we are becoming something greater than ourselves. Tamera notes that appx. 69 % of Young Columbusians are now wearing togas. Dimas and Longhorn have somehow grown horns and a goatee. Their legs seem to have five x’s the normal amount of leg hair. Jim Baker has joined them and he is playing some sort of impish lute. Counselor Trevor is wearing a slope-tilted Viking hat, drinking mead out of what could pass for the Holy Grail filling out the paradigmatic genome of an inebriated frat boy. Sir Charles has both his palms pressed out looking at the bacchanalian fete, trying to keep everyone calm. Several female counselors whom Jim Baker has accused of going out and drinking with the male counselors after curfew have availed their tops as if they are preparing for a post-30's mammogram, as if they are expecting Elias Das to christen them with Mardi Gras beads. Almost simultaneously Trevor rushes up to their availed tops and begins tapping Harmony's counselor Ahlex's breasts for nourishment, toasting his chalice in the air stating that the milk of human kindness tastes like nothing short of glue and tar. Vivian is commenting into her umbrella like a microphone stating that if you look into the far left you can see EGS-zs8-1, which is at least 13 billion light years from earth. We are blasting further into the yawping void of distillate nothingness. Elias is walking over to the toga-clad Big Ten placing a wreath of laurel leaves on the top of their heads as if they have just competed in a fraternity-sponsored GREEK Olympics. For a second the Doric columns shoot through the dance floor in cement beams and for a second it feels like we are back at Bath, the televised dance floor forming the healing pond before reverting back to individualized squares.
The copy of OUR ITINERARY that Liz Madigan is holding up brushes out of her hands floating like a pair of kicked-offed panties. When Tamera says check out that Gamma Ray one of the counselors mistakes it for being a Fraternity and begins to chug. The further we blast through space the more clusters of galaxies resemble cosmic nipples. Outside of the deck Meg is pointing at the Pleiades constellation as if it is the holidays and grandma lives nearby. With the exception of Josh and myself nearly all of the Big Tenners are wearing togas and laurel leaves forming a conga line. Josh is holding on to the girl with copious blush cowering as if he is afraid of what is to come. Jim has ears that look like he is a elfin-extra in a botched Christmas special. He is skipping, performing a calisthenic fartlek. Occasionally he wields his fist into a gavel and performs another OPEN JEWELS. Heath is wearing late-70’s porn sunglasses that seem
to project out like psychedelic binoculars bearing a rather prominent duck l’orange tint. The sunglasses extend from his eyes sockets so that they look like twin Hubble telescopes,
only they keep going. When I ask Heath what he is doing all he can utter are
the words far out and groovy before stating that these lenses that have
sprouted past the angular tip of his nose like a parallax branch allows him to see
anything he’s ever wanted to witness in all of time and shit. Several older girls are being led by a ghastly-cheeked Simone into
the corner adjacent from the YC effigy coats ferrying oil lamps. Nat is still spellbound and anchored by Miss Arkansas, who has the first name of Sara and the last of a Bach concerto. Nat appears to be growing a somewhat Amish upside-down dunce cap cidery beard. Mark's friend Denis who just couldn't stop stealing worth shit at Shuttleworth's earlier in the day is on a phallic-looking pogo stick bleating up
and down, talking about Xanadu and Samuel Taylor Coolidge, who several members
of the Big Ten think used to be a president. Heath keeps inadvertently bopping into things with his optical apparatus. Tamera says looking at the earth from this vantage point with those things straddled around your nose is like looking at pond scum through a microscope only human beings are the bacteria. Alaskan Bryan is clad in a toga although I swear Coach Ricca is holding up a stop watch telling Bryan to go, the sound of an expired flint clapping above the fete. Bryan takes off running he estimated 224 loops around the perimeter of the yacht that would constitute a mile. Coach is timing him. He is yammering out splits. I wish to move and be directly next to Coach Ricca. I think about the moment after I won the Young Columbus contest and I loosened my tie and came down to Track practice and shook his hand. Counselor Dan is wearing his yarmulke and talking
seriously about the Zohar. Elbert is stating that just because he is African American
doesn’t mean he should put on horned-rimmed glasses and break out into the
we-didn’t-land-on-Plymouth-rock-Plymouth-rock-done-landed on-us bit. Somehow
Nat has harvested a waist long beard the color of sand in an egg-timer. He is pointing
into the direction of Spencer who is carrying what looks like tablets of gold
before referring to him as a polygamous charlatan. Our Wendy’s luminous evergreen evening dress buds into a
Christmas tree, quoting the old Lorax adage about when the ax entered the
forest the trees stated that the handle is one of us.
Though it is space and there is emptiness a zephyr seems to rip through the pall of the ship. The Voyinvh manuscript that is OUR ITINERARY takes flight as if with wings.
Sir Charles, the only Counselor who isn't participating in the fete has his arms spread out saying comeon guys, this is enough.
The Jeopardy! screen is now showing chromosomes accompanied by sea plankton and an armada of microscopic nuclear war coated Taradigrades that look like muffled manatees. Sam is on the edge of the vessel where the Big Tenner’s have recently been urinating. For some reason Sam is wearing a Mickey Mouse Club Beanie,sucking on a pacifier; his body clad in a wooden-whiskey barrel around his waist with suspenders and water wings. He is holding his
YC 93 coat in his left hand. Sam keeps looking over the edge, as if he is riddled with anxiety while standing on the high-dive during free swim at the Y. I want to go over and comfort Sam and tell him everything is going to be okay. The Big Ten are lined up and they are chanting. Tamera quits quoting the successive numerical arrangement of π and begins to talk about different epochs in the earth's existence, gesticulating in a funny way, talking about how one must view the welcome mat of planet earth in terms of Millions of years and that it would take the avg. human being counting one integer per second almost a month of counting 8 hours-a-day-seven-days-a week to hit a million yet it would only take them only a little under a half an hour to count two thousand years back to the era of a culturally venerating Christ. Vinny is riding a bicycle with wings and has a sort of extremely early 20th century camera affixed to one of the handle bars which he has to grind on the side to capture film. Harmony and I are swaying back and forth. There is a feeling that the history of the universe as a whole is one ocular blink in the eyelid of an indefinable anthropomorphic God.
We continue to blast into the inscrutable wonder of everything there ever was.
The first of the Young Columbus girls to start taking off her clothes is Daisy. Her YC jacket and top floats towards the mountainous heap of YC '93 jackets. As she wreathes her panties down past the knobs of her prominent
calcium deficient knee bones the center of her body begins to flutter like a
monarch butterfly learning to levitate below the wink of her navel. The Italian Girls are topless and joined at the hip. Both Sheila and several of the older female counselors have unclasped their bras and set them on fire making a fist with their free hand, talking about girl power. When Jennifer Flood unzips her Young Columbus coat her bare bosoms fall out like sort of exotic produce. Rose has her face painted like a forlorn harlequin and is sucking helium out of balloons shaped like planets in the solar-system we have just passed saying my name in her high pitched southern drawl. The vessel is thronged with the cavernous bays of youth. Jim is still playing what sounds like the lute. It is hard to hear but it sounds like topless Sheila is stating that the party looks like a scene already painted by someone synonymous bosh. The kids who have not transformed are frisking the front of their official PARADE fanny packs looking for more film. I look up and see bus-driver Chris at the helm of the yacht his hands stationed on a giant oak wheel as if he is steering a steamboat, as if he is waltzing with the currents of time. The dance floor on the yacht is now emanating a hissing scarlet. Part of the dance floor looks like a seedy backroom masochistic lair. The wraith of Mary Queen of Scots has a rolling pin and is giving toga-clad members of the Big Ten spankings. Baker and Dimas are initiating themselves in some ritual where one is hiking a vicarious football to the other and then gets stuck. Vivian has her eyes closed and her umbrella lifted above her head even though we are indoors. In the midst of the melee Rita brushes
past me. Even though I am dancing with Harmony locked by both her gaze and the tips of her fingers I holler out Rita's first name professional sport starting-lineup style only to have Rita turn around, noting that the area where her forehead and whimsical eyes should meet looks exactly like the back of her head. Meg’s visage which always looks kinda blanched really looks blanched right now. We are rising up and we are one and we are perennially dancing. Rachel who danced with Mark to the Red Hot Chili Peppers is naked as well only she has sprouted fairy wings and a wand and is fluttering near the chandelier at the top of the vessel. As is Kazu, whom I recently danced with, who is some sort of oriental butterfly buzzing a haiku in a language not know to man. Harmony is staring straight at me. She is finally
looking at me the way I have been hoping she would look at me during the entire
trip. She is looking at me as if she is spellbound and horny and perhaps, just
a little bit in love. She is looking at me as if she doesn’t care about the
apocalypse, she doesn’t care that the world is coming to an end. The only place
she wants to be is right here, dancing, in whatever passes for the vinyl clad girth of my arms. Vivian’s umbrella now has a reptile slithering through the top like some sort of medical symbol found on the off-white of a Doctor's lapel. The dance the Big Ten is doing slightly resembles high-intensity cable-access post-menopausal aerobics performed with leg-warmers. The Jeopardy! floor is asking questions that are much more
profound and sociological deeper than anything Lynn Minton could ever posit in her
levity-inducing national syndication written on the same
reading level as Weekly Reader junior high column. The floor is postulating questions about immortality and the overall randomness of existence. Tamera references a Newtonian formula and then blinks before she begins to look like she needs a hardcore academic exorcise. Every time the Big Ten powwows past Denis is always lagging behind on his pogo-stick. For a second the coiled stem of Denis's automated exclamatory mark gets stuck on ruffled edges of the copy of OUR ITINERARY quavering around the floor of the yacht. Denis pogoes up and down as he frees the paper. Carnivelesque clad Rose picks up OUR ITINERARY configuring it into a paper-ship hat, which she places on her head beeping her harlequin nose twice in succession. Tertullian points as if in the direction of a Socratic dugout and states in clear English that everything transpiring on the floor is quite traducian, if you logically think about it. The vessel is blasting through stratospheres of preordained consciousness. The far side of the ship the BIG TEN are looking for members of Eric's group talking about sacrifice. Talking about death being inevitable. Talking about how this is the only way we can go on. Spin Doctor Kenny sounds completely out of character when he states that he is going to go to the side of the vessel to piss into the nearest black hole and then, dude, watch what happens.
All of the female counselors are wearing Big Ten robes and leafy Elias Das christened tiaras. On the far end of the ship Longhorn and Dimas are tossing chairs. igniting a bonfire, alighting the heap of Young Columbus jackets near the hull. They are cackling. They are immolating our complimentary YC attire. They are killing our collective identity. They have created an altar out of our coats. Tamera walks past and states that she is on the 13th trillion digit of π only it doesn’t make sense until you hold the numerical continent in front of a fun house mirror reciting it backwards on one foot. She states that if you cube π and then break it in almost thirds piling the hieroglyph vertically you will have the sign of the deity.
The name of God.
There still is no sight of Mark.
It is time and we are fifteen years of age. Vinny is calling for close-ups. For a money shot.
On the screen I see Harmony holding a rotary phone to her ear stating that it is not my fault that we
can’t be together for all of eternity.
Smoke rises in crackles and tufts from the bonfire of incinerated YC jackets.
Behind me the toga clad Big Ten are beginning to howl.
The screen on the dance floor shows people copulating. It is blinking fast. It looks like members of our group only it is hard to tell. Unclothed bodies shaped like upper case alphabetical letters. Fluid is being volleyed back and forth in stringent jack-hammering thrusts. There is abuse and there is pain and there is a mixture of sweat, the alloy of release. There is cataclysmic yelp and scratches and facial-caterwauls and the howling of tongues whose language is not yet known. Some men are with men and women are trying to devour each other with castanet licks of their tongues. Mary Queen of Scots seems rather pissed that none of the Big Ten are willing to put out, especially after she availed the hem of her dress several times. There is almost always a thrusting in the manner in which our boat vessel purrs and accelerates before blasting off into the temporal ether. Even sex seems like it is germane to this trip, to the trip of life that we are a part of something, blasting past the fibrous gypsum constellations. Somehow we are all brothers and we are all one and we are all in this moment together as one even after death.
Vivian begins to open her umbrella slowly even though we are inside. Where the dome satellite of cheap vinyl props opens there is a cross. Vivian holds up the emblem of Christianity above her head. It looks like the cross I brandish above my head as I ferry down the central aisle at church on Sunday Morning. Several members of the Young Columbus who are fully clothed and not participating in the fete are down on one knee near Vivian's cross much in the same manner in which Justin performs his nightly devotions, one prominent being the polite Baptist boy from Alabama. Jim Baker is skipping naked. He is calling Harmony porky. He is calling me a butt-fucker. Harmony is still dancing like she has no clue we are being swallowed by metempsychosis equation of space-time. She is looking at me like she is still on the Thames. She is looking at me as if she was hurt, as if something in the past inexplicably abused her only now she is seeking non-pun alluding harmony. Somehow if I can only find Mark I feel that all will be well with the world. Harmony is still all starry-eyed and lost. It takes a moment to discern that the circular dome of a stage light is encircled strictly around us. From over my shoulder it looks like I can see Mark who I have been looking for since we blasted off, is bowing in front of Vivian's cross-umbrella, holding what looks like a Walmart bag only it could be Connor from behind since both Mark and Connor have almost golden hair and look almost identical from behind .
Smoke rises in crackles and tufts from the bonfire of incinerated YC jackets.
Behind me the toga clad Big Ten are beginning to howl.
Like the wraith of Mary Queen of Scots Alfred the
Great is the color of grade school chalk and can seemingly pass through bodies.
He looks like he is usurped from one of Tim Flanagan’s Dungeon and Dragon's
campaigns back home. He is observing. He is smiling. Even though I am gradually
appalled at the Big Ten’s behavior Alfred is looking at them with an almost
boys-will-be-boys glint stowed in the ghastly swallow of his brow.
The screen on the dance floor shows people copulating. It is blinking fast. It looks like members of our group only it is hard to tell. Unclothed bodies shaped like upper case alphabetical letters. Fluid is being volleyed back and forth in stringent jack-hammering thrusts. There is abuse and there is pain and there is a mixture of sweat, the alloy of release. There is cataclysmic yelp and scratches and facial-caterwauls and the howling of tongues whose language is not yet known. Some men are with men and women are trying to devour each other with castanet licks of their tongues. Mary Queen of Scots seems rather pissed that none of the Big Ten are willing to put out, especially after she availed the hem of her dress several times. There is almost always a thrusting in the manner in which our boat vessel purrs and accelerates before blasting off into the temporal ether. Even sex seems like it is germane to this trip, to the trip of life that we are a part of something, blasting past the fibrous gypsum constellations. Somehow we are all brothers and we are all one and we are all in this moment together as one even after death.
Vivian begins to open her umbrella slowly even though we are inside. Where the dome satellite of cheap vinyl props opens there is a cross. Vivian holds up the emblem of Christianity above her head. It looks like the cross I brandish above my head as I ferry down the central aisle at church on Sunday Morning. Several members of the Young Columbus who are fully clothed and not participating in the fete are down on one knee near Vivian's cross much in the same manner in which Justin performs his nightly devotions, one prominent being the polite Baptist boy from Alabama. Jim Baker is skipping naked. He is calling Harmony porky. He is calling me a butt-fucker. Harmony is still dancing like she has no clue we are being swallowed by metempsychosis equation of space-time. She is looking at me like she is still on the Thames. She is looking at me as if she was hurt, as if something in the past inexplicably abused her only now she is seeking non-pun alluding harmony. Somehow if I can only find Mark I feel that all will be well with the world. Harmony is still all starry-eyed and lost. It takes a moment to discern that the circular dome of a stage light is encircled strictly around us. From over my shoulder it looks like I can see Mark who I have been looking for since we blasted off, is bowing in front of Vivian's cross-umbrella, holding what looks like a Walmart bag only it could be Connor from behind since both Mark and Connor have almost golden hair and look almost identical from behind .
There is no way that what we are experiencing will one day be gone.
The next it looks like close-up from the Brady Bunch showing us a half-century later, wrinkled and moribund and coughing and old.
For a moment I swear I hear Pam from last summer cackle and call me Charlie and for a moment I swear I see Little Betsy, dressed in her River City Boys Band uniform run between the legs of Lynn Minton. I hear her giggle. I am holding Harmony. She acts like she is completely oblivious of the dithyramb transpiring around different vectors of the ship. I wonder why Harmony isn’t praying. In the corner a topless Sheila who can draw my hands has an easel and canvas and is wearing a beret even though she is w/out bra. She is making Vitruvian strokes on her canvas. She is stating that 2 million years ago the hands she would be drawing right now would look like flippers and two million years in the future the evolutionary prehensile dactyls human beings associate both with grip and with hugs will resemble something no one in the room can currently fathom but will almost invariably be synthetically loaded with computer chips enabling the cognizance of the universe to be summoned in a single snap. I want to be a smart ass and inquire how human beings are suppose to masturbate 2 million years from now. I have my right handed saluted over my brow like a poker visor. I am searching for Mark who now inexplicably wants me to address him with his middle name like a coda. I am searching for Sam and for Rita who I can’t help but feel I was supposed to connect with in some way. I am looking at the Jeopardy! screen that has been showcasing the planet below and it is suddenly riddled with longitudinal slashes as if the entire planet is wedged in some sort of late-80's VHS you have-to- get-down-on-your-knees and breathe-into-first for the contraption to read the film device. The planet is rewinding in rather annoying high pitched squeals. The continents are one then they are under ice then they are baptized by water then they are one again. The planet looks rather like an embryo in a womb. Tamera states that there is just no way humanity with the finite intellectual snorkel of our cerebellum is capable of fathoming anything over nine digits with commas in terms of calculated years let alone an entire epoch. Tamera says something about checking out that eustasy. The earth is still riddled with horizontal screeches is unwinding, becoming unborn. One second everything is blue and it is pretty obvious that water has everything to do with everything and the next the moon seems to be dyslexically boomeranging around the earth and the earth is friable breaking up into shards, oscillating, swirling counter-clockwise around itself then around the binding socket of the sun until what we are watching is the solar system being born in reverse, which looks like something Baker just pointed to over a contemplative squat before flushing. The solar system is unbuckling itself into a navel vortex. Everything is happening. I try to divert Harmony to the screen below our feet or to the fact that the vessel has become some sort of lunar rocket or that everyone around us is getting naked to no avail. The Dignitaries whom none of the college councilors have heard of look at the screen below with astonishment. Even Dylan who is surfer-philosophy minor chic says he has no clue who these guys are. Josh is making a three-finger Eagle Scout salute in the direction of our esteemed guests while Elias Das continues to christen the top of each forehead with a nimbus of laurels. Tamera is stating that, elucidating logarithms propounded by the best nuclear physicists in the world we really can't understand how the planetary hulk of gravity holds everything together in one place and that it probably has something to do with the evanescent residual convective sweat that is time which humans are capable of perceiving only very tersely in moments of drug-induced ecstasy if ever at all. Tamera uses the word Eoarchean and Devonian. She makes an illusion to an incumbent summer movie and states that humanity simply has no clue how precarious and over all sanguinary life was on this galactic domicile we lease from the universe with a co-signer of Uncle Time 65 million years ago. Tamera calls our planet a heavily graffiti'd and thrashed arboretum'. She is saying that life has the ability to fuck and to give and to be mentally recalcitrant and propagating even in the most dire of social topographies. I can still hear little Betsy giggling, which almost invariably makes me think about Dawn Michelle back home.
The screen reverts back to images of our collective body. We are on the Young Columbus trip only we are old. It looks like we are in our mid-eighties. Dimas and Longhorn have walkers. Baker is publicly extolling the wonders of his recent liver transplant. Several of the female counselors have perms that looks like gray Q-tips. We are old and we are walking only it seems to take us forever to get anywhere. We each ferry with us a distinct odor. Several of our escorts as well as a few of the counselors have already kicked the proverbial bucket. The elasticity of the human flesh is wizened. We are slow. We are walking through London with a molasses-rivaling gait. We are headed with our heads down to the vessel we have appropriated in the spring almost a half century past.
On the screen below there are dwindling specks of rock followed by a simultaneous searing followed by fractions of the planets decimated on a screen.
Alaska Bryan is still hauling-ass only Meg Weaver my morning running partner appears to be challenging him. There is something about the way Meg Weaver runs that is reminiscent of a gazelle. I want to race Bryan here and now. I want to show Coach that I can break the elusive five-minute mile and run with an elite group. As I look at the shadow of Coach Ricca he finally swivels around. The Coach I venerate is stepping out of a keyhole-like shadow of himself. For a moment there looks like there are two Coach Ricca's before I realize that the shadow Ricca is placing a cap on the top of his head along with glasses and I realize that it is Coach Mann, my history teacher. Coach Mann is smiling at me the way he smiles at me in the classroom when the Varsity Elite from CLS are goofing off in the back row. He looks at me and begins to walk into the direction of the Dignitaries from the past. Tamera wonders if, surmising the ullage of the corporeal cask of our bodies, if our flesh isn’t just some random protein-fueled beaker that consciousness is a psychosomatic ruse to conceal ontological conception of the oculus moment that is all of eternity. For the first time I turn to Tamera and tell her to fucking can it with the astrophysics equations von Braun. Several members of the Big Ten walk near the crenelated sides of the ship availing the bottom ruffle of their attire peeing, holding each other’s cocks like semi-waggling kindergarten diplomas. Spencer’s roommate from Montana, who has been a mime the entire trip, is cackling, hissing, talking about how much fun it is to piss in a gasoline quote rainbow puddle that is really a galaxy, wondering how many b.b. planets the pebbles of his urine is decimating with a single squirt. The screen seems to FF with little screeches as we witness the universe born at an accelerated pace. The solar system forming around the yolk of the sun, buoyed in orbit, the bottom of the screen is showcasing succinct sates. We are watching a FF or the chronology of time, man evolving from something that looks like it is about o be battered and deep fried at Long John Silvers into a marmot into a highly trained ape into something that is walking, preaching, being crucified. Several members of Dan's group actually seem somewhat awed that the bulk of classified humans who have ever lived and reproduced on the forehead of the planet is nowhere near what today is classified as white. AT 4000 BC North America is a vernal utopia in a first chapter Book of Genesis sort of way and at 4000 AD the entire continent is a red with neon lights. At 8024 AD several of the continents look like they just received a boob job. The earth is giving off Industrial steam. It is mortgaged by mankind. Watching the planet gestate and give birth and move through tectonic cycles and atrophy and die just like all things in the universe. Tamera points at the screen sounding pedantic when she inquires to no one in particular if we know what the word eutrophication means. Around 10000 AD vessels are escaping the turf of the earth in droves. The earth looks more like how Mars looked when we jutted past it at the beginning of the comic vector of our Parade tour. The earth is altering shades of crimson and radioactive scarlet, the continents are unrecognizable and look like a masticated saltine cracker. For a minute the oceans are the color of mucous and the next they are arid valleys. The further we accelerate into time the pebble of the planet does several belly flips before the mass of the sun begins to extend as if it is giving a paternal embrace to the first four planets in our solar system. A kid from Dan's group points and makes the analogy about the planet looking like it is being fried at Burger King. The sun keeps on expanding, melting, blanketing everything with a nuclear au revoir, with a faretheewell before our small suburban cul-de-sac of the diminished cosmos fuses into a crested nuclear halo of nectarine nothingness.
To nothing at all.
Vivian is stating through her umbrella microphone that each of us has already won the Young Columbus contest of somehow experiencing this consciousness in the same limited finite scope and frame of time, attending the sojourn of finding ourselves with the itinerary of a body slipping through the sight seeing tour of tumbling years and that the return home into the blankness we originally hailed from is inevitable and a little scary, now isn't it? Tertullian stops conversing with Coach Mann for a moment and points at a flying saucer that looks as if it could be usurped from the cover of a BOSTON album, claiming that some dude named ol’ man Enoch is crashing inside. Coach Mann shoots me a look telling me David there is someone over here I would like you to meet only of course I can't move. On the floor there is a picture of Buddha. The enjoined televisions screens begin to oscillate and a picture of Shiva dancing. Vinny is calling for a money shot. He is saying cut. On the screen below I look exactly like I look right now only I am three years older and I am looking at myself and I am crying and I feel all alone in the world and I don’t know what I did wrong.
Simone is endeavoring to huddle the virgins as well as those who are praying into the direction of the Umbrella-Cross into an amoebic bulb. There is biting and there is sweat and darkness. The girls from her group with the exception of Daisy is each brandishing a oil lamp. Simone is changing. She begins to jounce in abbreviated squirms. She is foaming at the mouth only her saliva resembles some sort of Halloween-accentuated fangs. She is communicating through a series of disgruntled snorts akin to Jennifer Flood's boyfriend. The remainder of the oil that was poured on the YC coats as some sort of ablution is now being trickled on Simone in plops. Even though my view is partly occluded by Nat's ever growing beard I can make out that the top of Simone's forehead has gone feral and is covered with slathering bestial sprouts of canidae hair. Spencer states that there must be a full moon somewhere, look. Simone is now ambling on all fours. She is feral. She is salivating. She looks like she is ready to snap at anything with a pulse. As if being petitioned Simone claws and hikes up the top of her already lacerated blouse. A row of cleavage fumbles out. In lieu of having a stately bosom she appears to have what looks like an octave of udders. Members of her group genuflect around her one knee configuring a nativity. Jim Baker plucks the OUR ITINERARY hat off of Rose, calling her Bozo, goading Rose to get in there and suck, making contact with a whoopie cushion as he kicks her from behind. Jim places the paper-hat itinerary on his own red-headed self striking a chin-up pose with his palm pledged into his midriff a la Napoleon prior to Waterloo. The Italian girls look like Victoria Secret angels holding hands forming perimeter of limbs, dancing in a semi-inebriated flounce. There is something graceful and mellifluous in the way the Italian duet hovers above the far end of the dance floor. They looks like they should be bronzed on a vase bearing Grecian topiary. The Jeopardy board and know-it-all Tamera have shut up. From the reflection in the overhead chandelier it looks like suddenly She-Wolf Simone is placated, nursing her group.
The only one not dining on the nectar being Daisy.
Outside flying saucers continue to skid past like hippies playing disc golf at Bradley park. Coach Mann is smiling at Alfred the Great and Shamz of Tabriz like he smiles at me in class. His smile is reminiscent of the violet sheen emanating from Greta's forehead every time she smiles. With his gray beard Nat clearly looks like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel variation of a Deity. Nat’s girlfriend keeps waggling her bottom while she dances like she just finished peeing outdoors and has to drip-dry in tempo to Nat’s stolid rumba. Like Harmony she is communicating only with Nat through a series of Morse code blinks. Though I am glued to Harmony at the wrists and waist I am able to bend my torso metronomically in Nat’s direction, wanting to speak with him for the first time this trip, wanting to ask him, now that he is the Christian Deity incarnate, what is going on. Wanting to ask him just how random it is that we all somehow found each other in the first place. Wanting to ask him why it is that we were given this trip, surrounded by beautiful visages of flesh, making post-adolescent connections that will invariably surf past the shoreline of incumbent adulthood, falling in love, before each of us returning back to that place hence we came, no longer together.
Baker and Dimas are stripping off the remaining YC Coats. The only kids who are exempt from forfeiting their coats are the kids who are down on one knee a praying in front of the Umbrella Cross Vivian wields. It is seriously pissing me off that I can't find Mark. It is pissing me off that I seem to have lost my best friend. Longhorn continues picking up the coats of the females who have voluntarily gotten naked, hurling them on the embers of the searing blaze cackling, Mephistopheles bartering fresh souls for inky signatures. He is picking up coats in the corner where both Harmony and myself are dancing hurling them in the direction of the fire. I don't want my Young Columbus coat incinerated. I don't want to lose my identity. Again when I endeavor to move I am held in stagnation by the optical blink of the creature I have christened my European bride. She is looking through me. She is smiling. For a second I swear I can feel the two of us float. Baker is running naked along the candelabra dotted table where Mary Jo and Liz Madigan and Frank McNulty are seated collecting random coats. The table where Lynn Minton and CEO sit is furnished as if it is at a Madrigal dinner. There are candles in medieval holders and bowls of exotic fruits and two epees forming an X. The historical Guests of honor seem to nod every time someone asks them a question. The mural Sheila is painting on the far side of the ship shows the smoldering coats as Mt. Vesuvius with an acropolis looking building nearby and the entire group participating in a Bacchae. Jim Baker is Zeusesque and Spencer is a trident-toting Poseidon. Sheila is painting with a scurrilous ardor, which, because she is topless, means that paint has splattered up and down her bosom. The second I am almost sure that I see myself in the painting Sheila states again that she is sorry, she cannot paint my face. Only my hands which at the moment are melting into Harmony. Although he is clad is only a wheel-barrel and wings Sam adamantly refuses that he is not sacrificing his Young Columbus attire. Baker and Sam are playing a sort of tug of rope with the only Young Columbus jacket left attired by the members of the group who are not praying. Both Sam and Baker are tugging back and forth, dipping with galactic incline. The moment Baker and Dimas move into the direction of Sam he imminently drops his coat and takes off running. Baker is the first to point his finger and start high-tailing ass after him.
Outside flying saucers continue to skid past like hippies playing disc golf at Bradley park. Coach Mann is smiling at Alfred the Great and Shamz of Tabriz like he smiles at me in class. His smile is reminiscent of the violet sheen emanating from Greta's forehead every time she smiles. With his gray beard Nat clearly looks like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel variation of a Deity. Nat’s girlfriend keeps waggling her bottom while she dances like she just finished peeing outdoors and has to drip-dry in tempo to Nat’s stolid rumba. Like Harmony she is communicating only with Nat through a series of Morse code blinks. Though I am glued to Harmony at the wrists and waist I am able to bend my torso metronomically in Nat’s direction, wanting to speak with him for the first time this trip, wanting to ask him, now that he is the Christian Deity incarnate, what is going on. Wanting to ask him just how random it is that we all somehow found each other in the first place. Wanting to ask him why it is that we were given this trip, surrounded by beautiful visages of flesh, making post-adolescent connections that will invariably surf past the shoreline of incumbent adulthood, falling in love, before each of us returning back to that place hence we came, no longer together.
No longer one.
Coach Ricca continues to yammer out splits. Meg is
gracefully inching ahead when all of a sudden Bryan appears to riding on a
unicycle that has a banana seat with a lawn mower engine attached. Even with
the machination Bryan is struggling to keep up with Meg.
Baker and Dimas are stripping off the remaining YC Coats. The only kids who are exempt from forfeiting their coats are the kids who are down on one knee a praying in front of the Umbrella Cross Vivian wields. It is seriously pissing me off that I can't find Mark. It is pissing me off that I seem to have lost my best friend. Longhorn continues picking up the coats of the females who have voluntarily gotten naked, hurling them on the embers of the searing blaze cackling, Mephistopheles bartering fresh souls for inky signatures. He is picking up coats in the corner where both Harmony and myself are dancing hurling them in the direction of the fire. I don't want my Young Columbus coat incinerated. I don't want to lose my identity. Again when I endeavor to move I am held in stagnation by the optical blink of the creature I have christened my European bride. She is looking through me. She is smiling. For a second I swear I can feel the two of us float. Baker is running naked along the candelabra dotted table where Mary Jo and Liz Madigan and Frank McNulty are seated collecting random coats. The table where Lynn Minton and CEO sit is furnished as if it is at a Madrigal dinner. There are candles in medieval holders and bowls of exotic fruits and two epees forming an X. The historical Guests of honor seem to nod every time someone asks them a question. The mural Sheila is painting on the far side of the ship shows the smoldering coats as Mt. Vesuvius with an acropolis looking building nearby and the entire group participating in a Bacchae. Jim Baker is Zeusesque and Spencer is a trident-toting Poseidon. Sheila is painting with a scurrilous ardor, which, because she is topless, means that paint has splattered up and down her bosom. The second I am almost sure that I see myself in the painting Sheila states again that she is sorry, she cannot paint my face. Only my hands which at the moment are melting into Harmony. Although he is clad is only a wheel-barrel and wings Sam adamantly refuses that he is not sacrificing his Young Columbus attire. Baker and Sam are playing a sort of tug of rope with the only Young Columbus jacket left attired by the members of the group who are not praying. Both Sam and Baker are tugging back and forth, dipping with galactic incline. The moment Baker and Dimas move into the direction of Sam he imminently drops his coat and takes off running. Baker is the first to point his finger and start high-tailing ass after him.
“I can’t believe this shit,” I say to God the Father Nat, pointing around the Caligula pandemonium of the room. I wonder if Sam is alright. I wonder why the BIG TEN have decided to chase him relentlessly around the bow. Nat is clearly God the father. He looks exactly like the God I envisioned the first time I listened to Blasphemous Rumors and it scared the ever living shit out of me. He looks like the same person I supplicate and pray to every night on the caps of my knees in my bedroom as the nylon sails of the college girls next door dip their torso as they rattle out of their stonewashed denim attire. I am expecting an answer. I am expecting God the Father Nat to be different from snooty Nat. The banana seat unicycle looks like something marketed as abstract. Sam appears to have a limp as he hop-scotches across the perimeter of the boat. Baker is clawing straight after him with pincers. Jim is diagonally cutting across the dance floor when for some inexplicable reason Harmony begins tugging at my belt, still looking at me straight in the eyes. Sam is hauling some serious ass. It looks like he has little cartoonish ellipses accompanying his sprint. He runs near Alfred the Great and Coach Mann. He cuts near Tamera who is still pointing at the screen using her National Geographic vocabulary. Both Dimas and Longhorn are following Baker charged in tandem by the Big Ten. Spencer is blowing into a bugle a la cavalry yelling charge. Nat scowls at Sam when he runs into the direction of where he is still slow dancing. Jim juts past the Young Columbusians on one knee praying before the illuminated plus sign purportedly concealed in Vivian's umbrella this whole time. Sam has no where to run. It appears that everyone on the dance floor is seriously about ready to get mauled. A bandied She-Wolf Simone continues to purr as Sam hurdles over her and trips toppling into the table where Liz Madigan and Mary Jo are seated with their legs crossed. When he arises Sam's Beanie has been supplanted by a rather FDRish top hat and monocle and cigarette holder although he is wearing the wheel-barrel and water wings and running with his hands protruded from his sides. The moment the white of Jim's palms begin to squeeze around the center of Sam's neck Sam immediately grabs a dim-lit candelabra seated by Frank McNulty and hurls it in Jim's eye scaring his forehead with wax,
Everyone is frozen. Baker begins to keen in a caterwaul incensed with pain. The DJ is switching tracks on the boat in its entirety is acutely focused on Baker. After his wail of death the only sounds visible throughout the vessel is the subtle-flatulent purr of the motorized unicycle, the intermittent suckling sounds of She-Wolf Simone nursing her virgins sound like they are coming from far away.
Sir Charles is the only counselor not wearing a toga. He is wearing a referee stripped shirt, blowing into a whistle making a T-with both hands saying alright guys. Time out. I am stagnant. I cannot move. Both Longhorn and Dimas shoot Sam the menacing 'who-the-fuck-does-he-think-he-is' look. Justin take one look at Baker and states a thats-gotta-hurt. I look out Coach Ricca still yammering out splits for sub-five minute miler Alaskan Bryan.
There is another squeak. It is the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots. She is looking at Spencer, making thrusting motions with her rolling pin between her ghastly thighs.
Baker is swiping wax from below his eye as if it is an ivory tear.
I look at Sam.
I tell him to run like hell.
Sam fakes right, near the incinerating mountain range of alighted Young Columbus jackets. Lead by Dimas the entire Big Ten is running. Almost inexplicably they have brandished torches and pitch-forks. Sam expectorates his cigarette holder. He runs next to Bryan and Meg Weaver. He makes a figure-eight around the table where Liz Madigan and Frank McNulty are seated. He cuts through the dance floor and fakes left, Nat giving him lip telling Sam to watch it. Several of the other counselors who are now in frat mode are chasing after Sam as well, Somewhere along Sam's sprint the official ITINERARY has become cemented to his bottom akin to a KICK ME sign, Jim is foaming. He has fangs. I can't understand why he feels the need to take his frustration out on Sam who has been innocent of the Big Ten and their shenanigans. Sam who is always convivial and is smiling and is in a good mood.
Baker dives after Sam, grappling his ankles, attached to him as if a banner. Baker is now completely on top of Sam pummeling him several times in a row. Because Jim is also completely naked his penis flaps in various directions like a flippant needle in a worthless compass. Sam spits up spats of blood with every knuckle landed. He can't move. He is trapped. The fellow toga-clad Big Tenners are still forming a toga line cheering Baker on. The moment it appears that Jim is ready to pounce on Sam there is a smack on the side of Baker's head. Vivian has christened him with the top of the cross umbrella. It was almost as if she was trying to knight him before bopping him over the head with her tour-guide ushering umbrella mallet. Vivian is telling Sam to run like Hell. Baker scowls at Vivian, mumbles something into his chest how she has marred the entire trip by talking into her microphone the entire time. Nat shoots Vivian a look like she is appropriating his personal space kicking his ankle in her direction as if she is litter.
Again I cannot move. Sam pushes past the dignitaries who are standing on a series of rococo plinths. Both Tertullian and Chrysippus are waving oblique triangular pennants, giving Sam a little cheer. Shams of Tabriz seems to be lost in a dervish trance. Sam commences to run around the circumference of the ship near where the motorized unicycle Bryan is battling Meg Weaver. For a second Sam is running next to them. Bryan states that this is just the incentive he needs to break the five minute barrier even though he is pedaling on what appears to be a unicycle with a lawn-mower engine affixed. Dimas and Baker are on Sam's heels. I can't fathom exactly what sort of vendetta the entire group has against Sam. Even though they are part of the Big Ten brotherhood Baker juts Bryan in his Adam's Apple, coercing him to tumble off the unicycle which motors ahead on its own fender-bendering Sam from behind, coercing Sam into performing an underwater back-flip before toppling on the banana seat of the motorized unicycle in a body surfing motion as Baker dives after him holding Sam by the ankles. Mary Queen of Scots somehow has her wraith-rolling pin lodged in the back of the unicycles cuts right entering the yacht headed in the direction of the discotheque forming an Fibonacci spiral as if skids around the circumference and then swirls into the center of the floor. As the unicycle blasts in the direction of Eagle Scout Josh he begins to unzip his date by the waist trying to step into her body as if she were a Babushka doll,wriggling as if it were an oversized pair of jeans. Nat again, feeling compelled to speak as the voice of all things whiny and petulance, informs the mob that he is trying to have a romantic moment here. As the unicycle and Big Ten whizzes past, Nat is somehow able to extend his foot so that the toga clad mob topples like classic dominoes.
The Jeopardy! dance floor is showing a picture of the human brain with close-ups of the frontal lobe and some conish looking gland highlighted in back. The virgins continue hard-core suckling into parts of hirsute Simone that none of us knew existed. Nat is busy explicating his trip move to his date telling her that it is a wrestling move he used for the Tremont Turks to come in third at Regionals. The unicycle is operating independently as it bowls into the topless Italian duet circling counter clockwise around Simone's group. Jim seems to be taking this moment to go on what he calls a toga-panty raid, snatching as many togas as he carousels around the group. Both Kazu and Rachel with whimsical afflatus and wands commence to cast imprecations of death into the direction of the oscillating unicycle all of which appear to be futile. Several Toga members who were tripped by Nat are adjusting the laurel leaves on top of their heads like poker visors and begin to sprint. Sam is giving several elbow jabs into Bakers visage only Baker is mainly making contact with his left water wing as the motorized unicycle heads towards Simone.
“Harmony, listen, you need to let go. You just need to
let go.”
She refuses to blink. Her grip refuses to yield.
Sheila is painting a scene where Baker is on a chariot and he is eviscerating a rather Abbot-outfitted Sam.
When the unicycle hits the manger where She-Wolfe Simone is nursing her group it performs a perfect loop-de-loop rather acrobatic 360, the banana seat belches upon landing juggling both Baker and Sam into the air landing back on the banana seat only in converse order so that a naked Jim is now by himself on the seat and Sam is somehow in his arms. Above the rococo plinth Chrysippus is saying good show. The unicycle slams into Trevor and several of the other inebriated female counselors and when it emerges Jim is wearing Trevor's Viking helmet. The unicycle is headed towards the outer deck of the celestial vessel running straight over Our Wendy transitioning her Christmas tree outfit into shards of holiday firewood. The motorized unicycle heads straight for the rail when it bounces off of Greta still clad in her iridescence helium bubble, a violet bauble of ocular consciousness every time she smiles the bubble blinks as if it is wearing a contact lens and Greta is always smiling. On the back deck there is a clumsy elephant holding a quill who claims to be writing this all down while balancing on a mouse. Having been perturbed She-wolf Simone continues to salivate after them followed by Vinny who is in Sam's group who claims not to worry, he can help while filming the entire time. The Unicycle skirts on the railing outside, the swirling wink of passed galaxies canopied as a thespian background. Greta continues hovering in her purple bubble and when the entourage chugs into the membrane it immediately pinballs the opposite direction bowling over the Big Tenners that have come out to the deck back inside the main floor. The unicycle again performs a vertical 360, the train of Mary Queen of Scots and gnawing salivating Simone is on the upper deck where Chris is steering the boat. Jim says the word Gotcha! as a maladroit film noir detective might pronounce the phrase gotcha. The motorized unicycle encircles the steering wheel before it boomerangs towards the interior of the ship again. While both are on the banana seat Baker begins pummeling the shit out of Sam. He is striking him on the side of his face. She Wolfe Simone is gnawing into mistaking it for some sort of bone followed in tandem by Vinny and his early 19th century bike with wings yelling out action into a dunce cap.
As the unicycle zips into the main dance area Sam is independently hurled from the stem of the bike near the pile of smoldering jackets where the Big Ten begin to pounce on him trampoline style.Everyone is piled up in a rugby scrum. The billeted cosmic vessel is bobbing in directions Baker imminently head for the Medieval looking table pricking an epee off of a X'd sword display fastened above Lynn Minton. He makes a whistling motion with the sword as he says touche revving up the unicycle. The scrum continues to bubble as if it begins stomping on Sam, the wraith of Mary Queen of Scots lifting her translucent gown while brushing up against various members of the Big Ten. Even from beneath the corporeal bubble of flagellating limbs Sam lets go of a serious yelp when from out of nowhere She-Wolfe Simone performs a diving snare on the mass of bodies spawning more laurel leaves to go flying in every which way direction but. Without thinking Sam leaps on the smashed tables where hours earlier we feasted as one. Josh is still galumphing in his girlfriend’s body like he is in a potato sac race hobbling to one side of the floor. Jim is forming circle eights around the perimeter of the boat lashing his epee in the direction of Sam, nearly missing him as Sam leaps from the smashed table gripping the crying chandelier that seems to precariously droop before dropping sliding head first into home base across the dance floor perpendicularly on the caps of his knees. Sam blasts straight in the direction of bearded Nat eliciting scowls insinuating a bridge in some sort of personal space. When Sam gets up a Heavily bearded God the Father Nat is holding Miss Arkansas in a waltz, kicks the side of Sam. Nat turns and continues with his waltz.
Sam is now on his knees as Baker circles around him heading diagonally to the far end of the floor. In addition to swaying back and forth the overhead chandler is reflecting the Jeopardy! floor so it makes it looks like the room is crying images of us in variegated hues of strobe. I can see Sam looking at me for help. I can see him turning to Heavily bearded God the Father Nat and saying please. Baker has a look of steamed vengeance tucked in his eyes as he revs the unicycle several time slicing the epee in Zoro motions ready to joust Sam, telling him to die fucker.
Die.
Even Sheila pauses for a second with her mural. Baker’s horseshoe laurel leaf goes flying as the
motorized unicycle splinters into a triumvirate of wheel, banana seat and engine. Baker is upside down untangling himself from a web of crystal
gossamer of the chandelier. Sam gets up from his cowering
position. Vivian picks up the umbrella cross and heads back into the direction of
her supplicants.
Sam is all alone. Jim is above ratcheting back and forth in the chandelier. There are several creaking sounds followed by a look out. She-Wolfe Simone is headed straight in the direction. Sam moves right and just as he is sprinting off the dance floor a heavily bearded Deity Nat again juts out his right leg, causing Sam to trip while, simultaneously the overhead rococo chandelier plummets ball dropping New Years Eve style.
His wooden wheel barrel is reduced to splinters.
Jennifer Flood's boyfriend joins then and begins to talk about the salubrious nature of hemp all the while Sam is seriously getting mauled.
Shamz of Tabriz is spinning in a dervish swirl. When the paper airplane Itinerary Justin launched in his direction ricochets off his left elbow onto the dance floor.
For a moment I feel if I could grapple the Itinerary and read it I would know what would happens next.
I would know just what in this moment to do.
Sheila is painting a scene where Baker is on a chariot and he is eviscerating a rather Abbot-outfitted Sam.
When the unicycle hits the manger where She-Wolfe Simone is nursing her group it performs a perfect loop-de-loop rather acrobatic 360, the banana seat belches upon landing juggling both Baker and Sam into the air landing back on the banana seat only in converse order so that a naked Jim is now by himself on the seat and Sam is somehow in his arms. Above the rococo plinth Chrysippus is saying good show. The unicycle slams into Trevor and several of the other inebriated female counselors and when it emerges Jim is wearing Trevor's Viking helmet. The unicycle is headed towards the outer deck of the celestial vessel running straight over Our Wendy transitioning her Christmas tree outfit into shards of holiday firewood. The motorized unicycle heads straight for the rail when it bounces off of Greta still clad in her iridescence helium bubble, a violet bauble of ocular consciousness every time she smiles the bubble blinks as if it is wearing a contact lens and Greta is always smiling. On the back deck there is a clumsy elephant holding a quill who claims to be writing this all down while balancing on a mouse. Having been perturbed She-wolf Simone continues to salivate after them followed by Vinny who is in Sam's group who claims not to worry, he can help while filming the entire time. The Unicycle skirts on the railing outside, the swirling wink of passed galaxies canopied as a thespian background. Greta continues hovering in her purple bubble and when the entourage chugs into the membrane it immediately pinballs the opposite direction bowling over the Big Tenners that have come out to the deck back inside the main floor. The unicycle again performs a vertical 360, the train of Mary Queen of Scots and gnawing salivating Simone is on the upper deck where Chris is steering the boat. Jim says the word Gotcha! as a maladroit film noir detective might pronounce the phrase gotcha. The motorized unicycle encircles the steering wheel before it boomerangs towards the interior of the ship again. While both are on the banana seat Baker begins pummeling the shit out of Sam. He is striking him on the side of his face. She Wolfe Simone is gnawing into mistaking it for some sort of bone followed in tandem by Vinny and his early 19th century bike with wings yelling out action into a dunce cap.
As the unicycle zips into the main dance area Sam is independently hurled from the stem of the bike near the pile of smoldering jackets where the Big Ten begin to pounce on him trampoline style.Everyone is piled up in a rugby scrum. The billeted cosmic vessel is bobbing in directions Baker imminently head for the Medieval looking table pricking an epee off of a X'd sword display fastened above Lynn Minton. He makes a whistling motion with the sword as he says touche revving up the unicycle. The scrum continues to bubble as if it begins stomping on Sam, the wraith of Mary Queen of Scots lifting her translucent gown while brushing up against various members of the Big Ten. Even from beneath the corporeal bubble of flagellating limbs Sam lets go of a serious yelp when from out of nowhere She-Wolfe Simone performs a diving snare on the mass of bodies spawning more laurel leaves to go flying in every which way direction but. Without thinking Sam leaps on the smashed tables where hours earlier we feasted as one. Josh is still galumphing in his girlfriend’s body like he is in a potato sac race hobbling to one side of the floor. Jim is forming circle eights around the perimeter of the boat lashing his epee in the direction of Sam, nearly missing him as Sam leaps from the smashed table gripping the crying chandelier that seems to precariously droop before dropping sliding head first into home base across the dance floor perpendicularly on the caps of his knees. Sam blasts straight in the direction of bearded Nat eliciting scowls insinuating a bridge in some sort of personal space. When Sam gets up a Heavily bearded God the Father Nat is holding Miss Arkansas in a waltz, kicks the side of Sam. Nat turns and continues with his waltz.
Sam is now on his knees as Baker circles around him heading diagonally to the far end of the floor. In addition to swaying back and forth the overhead chandler is reflecting the Jeopardy! floor so it makes it looks like the room is crying images of us in variegated hues of strobe. I can see Sam looking at me for help. I can see him turning to Heavily bearded God the Father Nat and saying please. Baker has a look of steamed vengeance tucked in his eyes as he revs the unicycle several time slicing the epee in Zoro motions ready to joust Sam, telling him to die fucker.
Die.
Just as the unicycle blitzkriegs across the pastel sephirot of the
dance floor Vivian begins to move in the direction of Sam wielding the Umbrella-Cross like a javelin. Like a spear. She is sprinting as if she is trying to catapult
over a barrier that doesn’t exist. Baker
has his elbow corked back ready to attack. Just as Baker’s blade is ready to castigate
Sam’s neck Vivian jabs the umbrella-cross into the roulette bull's-eye center in the wheel
of the motorized unicycle. The spokes seem to gag. For a second everything is
in slow motion and for a second as I am holding Harmony I swear the entire
scene as it is relayed in front of me is being shown below on the Jeopardy screen
in slow motion. Baker appears to back
pedal. The banana-seat unicycle then pauses and skips prompting both Baker and
the spoked wheel into the air performing a trinity of consecutive somersaults. At
first Baker is vaulted into the overhead sloping chandelier eliciting shards
tumbling down only now they appear to be gems. It feels like the universe is
crying. Like the universe is PMS’ing. Like the universe is crying freckles of
stars ferrying planets of life.
Even Sheila pauses for a second with her mural. Baker’s horseshoe laurel leaf goes flying as the
motorized unicycle splinters into a triumvirate of wheel, banana seat and engine. Baker is upside down untangling himself from a web of crystal
gossamer of the chandelier. Sam gets up from his cowering
position. Vivian picks up the umbrella cross and heads back into the direction of
her supplicants.Sam is all alone. Jim is above ratcheting back and forth in the chandelier. There are several creaking sounds followed by a look out. She-Wolfe Simone is headed straight in the direction. Sam moves right and just as he is sprinting off the dance floor a heavily bearded Deity Nat again juts out his right leg, causing Sam to trip while, simultaneously the overhead rococo chandelier plummets ball dropping New Years Eve style.
Glass is everywhere. It feels like the universe is being born.
The autonomous operated motorized-unicycle triangulates into the end of the toga stampede. Denis's phallic pogo stick goes soaring rendering him backwards, overhead into the swelling shards of the crying chandelier. Vinny keeps on calling ACTION, stating that he needs everything to be more explosive. As if performing typical BIG TEN shenanigans faithful roommate Justin purloins the hat off Baker and folds it into a classroom paper airplane chucking it at the Dignitaries. Heath is still wearing his wavy-gravy optical apparatus. He is saying wait. He is walking benignly into the direction of mass of togas. Dimas lifts his hand up in a halt sign telling the fellow revelers to chill. His wooden wheel barrel is reduced to splinters.
The Big Ten have encircled Sam kicking him in an orchestrated series of stomps. It looks as if they are trying to put out a fire. Both Dimas and LongHorn are getting a few kicks in. Even some of the topless girls are getting in a few licks. Congratulatory antics are awarded for detaining Sam. Dimas picks up the errant itinerary. Longhorn has it open and Dimas is crumpling something verdure and green inside. They are rolling the Itinerary in a long conical shape like one of my Grandfather's cheap cigars before alighting the edge on the altar of burning coats, passing the receptacle counter-clockwise, each taking it up to their respective lips, each saying ear.
Jennifer Flood's boyfriend joins then and begins to talk about the salubrious nature of hemp all the while Sam is seriously getting mauled.
Shamz of Tabriz is spinning in a dervish swirl. When the paper airplane Itinerary Justin launched in his direction ricochets off his left elbow onto the dance floor.
For a moment I feel if I could grapple the Itinerary and read it I would know what would happens next.
I would know just what in this moment to do.
"You look like God the Father, man. Do something, brother! Do something!!!"
Nat shoots me a look like if I don't shut the hell up he is going to exile me.
“Nat!!!” I say his name again, Sam still has the Boars apple wedged into his mouth like he is somebodies gimp. He can’t talk. In a way Sam looks like a Penguin. He can’t move either his chest or arms due to the water wings apparatus. The Big Ten is lifting him up. He is having a hard time speaking, tears skiing down both cheeks simultaneously. Everyone wearing laurel leaves assists in alighting him over the sill. They are throwing him into the cauldron of the cosmos. They are counting to three. Vinny is again seen on his bike with one eye in the camera in one eye yelling cut. Sam is saying no. He is saying please even though it sounds muffled. Even though it sound like he is phonetically saying the word squeeze.
Sam's body is above the rail overlooking of the vat of infinite nothingness, the ovoid of eternity. Vivian is still semi-rattling from when she struck Baker over the head with her Umbrella Cross. She looks at Sam with a sour-expression sewn into her lips insinuating that somebody should help that kid. Alfred the Great is next to Coach Mann refers to CEO Frank McNulty as Aelthered pointing his sword, as if ready to charge. I try to move to help Sam only Harmony still has me cemented to the dance floor. Again when I turn to God the Father Nat he swivels his Cream-of-wheat mixed with gravel beard pretending, like he has the entire trip, that he has no clue who I am. Vinny has bartered his pre-prohibition John Ford director's attire for what looks like a homemade Batman costume. He is telling Sam to hold on, brachiating from part of the chandelier Tarzan via glen, the camcorder he has used to chronicle the trip in its entirety velcroed to his shoulder like a parrot. Batman Vinny boomerangs into the laurel-countenanced bevvy slipping over the side, tumbling into the everlasting void of space. He seems to float rather than fall.
In a way it is almost beautiful the way he continues to hover and drift as if in galactic peace.
A voice is oilcan squeaky followed by the word wait which sounds like weight accompanied by a pervasive silence on the ship. Sam is still stranded above the rail. Even though his mouth is muffled he appears to be stating the Lord's prayer. For a moment everyone on the ship is unable to move. Much in the same fashion that I have been glued to the stump of the dance floor all night the entire fracas is subdued. Heath is stepping closer to the frenetic mob who are looking at him in a kind of jilted curiosity. Drips of chandelier trickle on Sam like freshly bartered pieces of silver while still muffled he is communicating in a stifled string of yelps. He continues to wince as hands are placed around his body. From my still-life periphery there is something in the way the Big Ten are raising Sam over the top of their shoulders which makes it look like he just kicked the winning field goal while time expired.
I turn to Nat who again is not paying attention in the slightest to the bartering exchange. For the first time in this trip I tell him how I feel about him. For the first time in this trip I say fuck you.
Heath is talking about weight again, doffing his wavy-gravy optical apparatus walking in the direction of the Barabbas-bartering mob.
The entire blob of togas holding Sam again become still-life.
Sam is getting up. He is speechless. He is not saying a word. Although I am technically still swaying back and forth with Harmony my face looks like I am giving Sam a hug. More gems are crying from above. The breeze I feel on my left earlobe emanates from the flaps of Vinny’s pre-prohibition bike buzzing in my left ear like the anecdotal Chinese hummingbird inadvertently spawning a hurricane by flapping its wings. I look around the room. Alfred the great is next to Coach Man. Even though we have been blasting at space at obscenely warped calibers the middle aged balding DJ has kept the music blaring the entire time. There is a skid on the record counsel and there is a pause on the entire ship. Vivian is now on the ground still holding the umbrella cross up like a flag that if it brushes against the earth will be burnt. Nat seems pissed that the music has stopped. Harmony has no clue where we are at as she continue to gaze into my forehead while we are buoyed back and forth. The tandem of Meg Weaver and Alaskan Bryan have halted from running around the perimeter. Bryan is spinning the errant wheel from the motorized unicycle around his forefinger as if he is stoned.
I look at Sam. I want to go over to him. Below the
Jeopardy! screens is showing us when we are dying. They are showing members of
the Yong Columbus aching for breath. Just as our dinner-dance cruise left the
Thames river now we are leaving the place we came from.
Heath says weight once again. Ironically Heath is still wearing his red YC '93 coat.
It sounds as if he is talking about a scale. Throughout the duration of the pause
I am not entirely sure what Heath is doing.
Heath says weight once again. Ironically Heath is still wearing his red YC '93 coat.
It sounds as if he is talking about a scale. Throughout the duration of the pause
I am not entirely sure what Heath is doing.
The group as a whole seems to take a deep breath before Sam is spiked down as The Big Ten make it a point forming a party train and trampling over his body in huffs as they reach Heath. With his arms stiff as vertical wings Heath is lifted up. From the chandelier above I can see Heath’s visage reflected in the crying shards of glass, a look of unprecedented tranquility stowed on his lips. Instead of heading towards the railing the group is parading Heath around the dance floor. They are lifting him up. Heath is calm. He appears to be smiling without smiling. There is chanting and the next thing I know Dimas is making a sign with his forearms as Heath’s body is hurled atop of the snickering conflagration of YC coats. The moment the cadre of limbs tosses Heath on top of the coats there is a crackle. His body is burning. Until cognizance arrives the scent of burnt flesh smells almost like various forms of poultry cooked over a campfire in late autumn. The entire toga-coated blob breaks out into Huzzahs. They are pumping their fists. They are making little horn signs with their hands. I am furious with Nat for not helping even though he is clearly God the Father. I am almost equally pissed off at Harmony for not being capable of letting go.
Baker is cackling in a way like he has just achieved something sinister. More steam rises and fizzles. Heath’s body is becoming
one with the collective mount of charbroiled coats. More cheers are heard. Tamera
makes an analogy about ritualistic fertility sacrifice in third world tribal
cultures. As I look in the direction of
Heath I swear I can make out part of his skull and several molars. It is as if
he had a job to perform. It is as if he is looking down on the remnants of his
body offering a smile.Sheila's picture now shows what looks like a train of horned incubuses making a sacrifice to Pele.
The half-smoked OUR ITINERARY continues to skirt across the dance floor only I can’t move. It is had been trampled on when the Big Ten decided to hurl Heath on top of the incinerating heap of coats as some sort of ritualistic sacrificial scapegoat. The groovy-time space lenses attiring which Heath used to scrutinize the protoplasmic gurglings of life is smashed, flattened by the derailed locomotive of fluttering togas.
Mark is still nowhere in sight.
Bryan has just picked up the broken motorized unicycle and is spinning the wheel around the center of his forefinger looking like he is stoned. The hairy creature I thought was Rita has her hair pulled back. She is wearing a catholic school girl uniform and is down on one knee near where Vivian is holding her vigil.
The room still smells like Heath.
The floor beneath is showing various members of the YC
trip supine on a gurney, wheedled with life support tubes, fighting for breath.
Dying in our twenties. Our thirties. Our forties. Dying of a car crash. Of
infectious diseases. Losing our hair compliments of drugs that cost more than our yearly
mortgages purportedly used to fight whatever ailment is inside of us. We are
leaving. Sam is pensive-eyed. I don't even know if Sam knows Heath. He is sniffing. He is on the ledge. He is pointing into the direction of Heath's remnants charred on the YC '93 jackets. I want to go over and solace Sam. I want to go over and give him and hug and call him brother, explaining to him that it is not his fault. The wraith of Mary Queen of Scots appears and places the gnashed-glasses on her spectre chin, making a comment that she can see through togas and check out that package over there.
Sam is saying that it should have been him.
On the dance floor there is a picture of Christ trussed on a plus sign configured out of uneven planks of wood, bleeding profusely all over the place from his side liturgically lambasting some guy named Eli. A naked Baker picks up the remnants of the half smoked semi-singed itinerary and makes a long swipe through the back center of his anatomy before crumbling the Itinerary into the size of a wilted homecoming corsage.
On the dance floor there is a picture of Christ trussed on a plus sign configured out of uneven planks of wood, bleeding profusely all over the place from his side liturgically lambasting some guy named Eli. A naked Baker picks up the remnants of the half smoked semi-singed itinerary and makes a long swipe through the back center of his anatomy before crumbling the Itinerary into the size of a wilted homecoming corsage.
It seems like all of life is an inward voyage to an inscrutable unknown port.
On the right side of the dance floor Jim Baker accosts Vivian. Without asking he grapples the vinyl tip of the Umbrella-Cross with Vivian at the opposite end sawing back and forth. The students who are down on one knee praying still have their chins tucked into their
necks seem oblivious to everything that is around them. Heath’s remnants are still charred, quavering in sentences of smoke
around the vessel. Jim publicly announces that he is going to bitch slap Vivian if she doesn’t let go of the cross before flagellating her cheek twice with the back of his hand and when I try to pull away I find out that Harmony has benignly wielded the tips of her fingers into the front of my jeans only instead of fishing out the virile stem of my anatomy she is holding the receiver to a phone telling me that she is madly in love although I am not sure she is talking about me. A naked Jim just can’t stop pummeling the shit out of Vivian.
The moment Vivian lets go of the Umbrella-Cross it appears to be propelled by remote-control as it hovers in the air before landing on the variegated oracle of the dance floor. It looks almost like a scroll, an orphaned diploma of esoteric knowledge salvaged from the library of Alexandria as it swelters and burns. It lands right next to Harmony's feet only when I try to pick it up I find that I still can't move the top half of my body and that I am still dancing. The Umbrella-Cross is illuminating an electric amethyst almost correlating with the color of the sky when we were still on the river Thames Both Jim and Vivian and are racing toward the Umbrella-Cross only Jim seems like he has an unfair advantage. Even though Harmony is statuesque I do what looks like a hokey-pokey ball-chain kicking the relic as far as I can over to the center of the dance floor, near where Nat is dancing with the annoying girl from Mark's home state. Both naked laurel-haloed Jim and Vivian emit audible screeches when they stop and twist directions headed towards the cross. The moment Nat looks at the cross his Beard falls off and he gets down on one knee as if he is ready to propose to Miss Arkansas. There still is no sight of Mark. I feel a subtle prickle beneath my waist. Harmony is still looking straight at me although her fingers are attacking the center of my belt in a whispering series of clings. I can feel her hands press up against the bare white of my stomach as she unfastens the cyclopic button of my jeans. I am unsure of what she is doing. When I look back at her she is still smiling although the tip of her tongue is lolling through the front of her lips. The Umbrella-Cross continues to pulsate and purr. It looks like if you stuck out your forehand to pet it would bear maw and fangs and snap at you in the recoil of vengeance before it begins to hover only slightly, near Nat's genuflecting knee cap. The Jeopardy! screen on the bottom of the dance floor is riddled with a planetarium of lollipops as the floor itself spins around. Baker and Vivian are still sprinting towards the wand although they now find themselves on opposite sides of the dance floor. The helix zipper on my jeans rips apart in disparate strands. I am embarrassed. Harmony has her pointer finger dipped in the front of my underwear. Harmony's fingernails are obviously manicured. She is pawing at the vortex of manhood below my navel. Her fingers are smooth. It feels as if she uses hand lotion several times a day. The Umbrella-Cross microphone is hovering in the center of the floor. The Jeopardy! screen has transitioned into a hall of mirrors. The Umbrella is a cross one seconds and a question mark the next. It is glowing an appears to blink. It's electric sheen is being reflected in the shards of what Chandelier is now left. The vessel begins to oscillate like a ceiling fan and both Vivian and Baker find themselves on opposite sides of the dance floor. Baker skids across the televised screens making a high-pitched squeal with the raw caps of his knees just as the televised turf swallows the umbrella. Suddenly the Jeopardy! floor is no longer asking metaphysical
queries or showcasing second trimester vignettes of each member of the Young
Columbus trip. Suddenly each screen
looks like soil made out of iridescent preschool glitter. Suddenly the
dance floor is shaking like it is about ready to ejaculate. Harmony is still
standing still-life and statuesque as if she is posing at Madame Tussuads. Something
is happening. Nat pulls a Moses as he raises both hands parting-red sea style. Where the umbrella has toppled the dance floor immediately begins
to fuse up with a vernal stalk. For a long moment that seems to stretch out into the underlying bridge of all eternity it is an odalisque. At first it looks like a stripper
pole only growing into a kiosk. The Odalisque of Heliopolis fructifying, bearing the buds of feral boughs brushing straight up, past the ceiling tiles forming a botanical mast. Soon the entire dance floor is a mosaic teeming with flowers and pomegranates
and exotic birds, glades of Angel Trumpets tufted in a bouquet of Narcissus and Nightshade. Water Hemlock, Moonseed speckled in a parade of Daphne. There is an orchard growing around the tree of life wreathed with the breath of lilac and Morning Glory. A spring of oleander canopied in perched lips. The hibiscuses look like slightly tilted lavender vaginas. It is the birthplace of all mankind. It is the book of genesis. It
is the gulf of vegetation. A sliver of the Euphrates is skidding through floor
in pellucid tributaries and aquatic drifts.It is the Garden of Eden.
The botanical copse of innocence.
A prelapsarian paradise.
Harmony and I are directly next to the center of the Tree of Life and we are dancing. We are swaying back and forth. Every time I try to leave Harmony continues to shovel her fingers down the front of my pants. She unearths a pair of running shoes. It feels like slight of hand when she whips out the TO DAVE: Love Renae identity bracelet that was just on my wrist all of a second ago. Every time Harmony plants her fingers down past my navel I feel she is going to cup and massage part of my body but instead she continues to wield out hammered keepsakes from my past. A report card from Manual informing me no matter how hard I try I am still performing mediocre at best in Mr. Thomas and Ms. Peabody's class. A piece of copper she tells me will be pretty substantial and vital to my life someday. She sticks her right hand down to her elbow and uses her left hand to unearth a Charlie the anvil salesman anvil throwing it behind her shoulder with ease as if the anvil were constructed out of nerf. Several of the purported virgins who were suckling on Simone's superfluous cleavage are giggling with their hands cupped around their lips every time Harmony fishes inside my pants. A topless Jennifer Flood gives Harmony a look insinuating why doesn't she just go on right ahead and dump this loser who obviously doesn't have anything between his legs except the juvenile bric-a-brac of the unwanted past. Harmony continues to reach down in my pants only this time she reels up the Gideon Bible that is always in my front pocket, tossing it nonchalantly yet prophetically I-Ching fashion behind her shoulder like a used prophylactic. It is a melee. The Andean-range of YC coats are now completely incinerated. We are losing our identity. We are melting into the conjoined nebulous. We embark closer to the blinding squint of light. Lynn Minton says all rise as if she about ready to read from the Book of Luke before blowing what could pass as farting sounds into an ivory-coated Didgeridoo. Frank McNulty and wife along with Liz and Mary Jo get up and head for the side door. Everything is golden even more so than the sun which Vivian kept warning us was retina-searing. Below the floor continues showcasing each of the Young Columbus with gray hair and glasses and a cough which sounds like we are yakking sandpaper in lieu of phlegm through the tubular stem of our collective throats. We are gradually expiring. Our flesh seems to be sinking into a wrinkled gnarl of the mitigated bark we find ourselves ensconced in, the periscope we squint out of trying to make sense of whatever flicker of consciousness is our world. We are losing hair. Our sex organs begin to droop like damp gourds in autumn. We are losing vision. We make quizzical hard of hearing neck tics every time someone asks us a query. Everything is blurring past us and for some reason at an accelerated velocity, the movement of our vessel . It is an abbreviated shot we are reclining in a sterilizer bed with nurses with extremely white teeth and all we are is somehow a statistic on a slate appropriating so-called opinions mortgaging the pay check.
When there is a cathartic moment that too much of our life is spent as a digit, too much of our life has been spent bowing in genuflection towards the venal tongue of a bestowed currency
I swear I see the elusive OUR ITINERARY which Baker wiped his ass with now an origami transcript quavering like a dove stuck in windshield wipers near the top of the botanical specimen landing near a wreath of hyacinths. Most flowers I have never heard of but all are refulgent. Tamera reverts back to scholarly savant mode as she delineates the differences between Roseary Pea and Monkshood, budding indigo wreathes of bougainvillea, the subtle tangerine snap that is Birds of Paradise. The Hydrangeas are a riveting teal that are just an olfactory orgasm. The whole ship feels brand new like spring. Harmony's right hand is still fishing around my pants and right at the moment I am almost certain she grapples the screen door handle of my manhood she makes joke, calling me David Edward The great Pretender. Vivian who is still out of breath obviously gleans the insult gesticulates sans Umbrella in the direction of Harmony telling her that that’s a good one before motioning in the direction of the wand which is now sprouting an iridescent bark. So far the only exotic plant I have been able to identify are hostas and rhododendrons although the hostas are velvet in hue, the color of the night on the Thames. Tamera is stating the botanical names of the of the plants as if she is quoting a serial prison number. In a moment of perspicuous lucidity I realize why I am so enamored with Tamera. Tamera is Enya. The winsome princess fairy tale elf whose music I was enamored with while I rehashed my speech over and over in the 1992 Young Columbus contest a month after Caribbean Blue was released. Even though Enya wasn’t singing about the Cosmos I feel I am billions and billions of worlds, even trillions, even more than said mitochondria on the planet we have just left. Worlds upon worlds without end before uttering a Celtic amen.
Meg is wearing a toga. Her upper cleavage is lunar visible. She is wearing one of Elias Das laurel leaves identifying herself as Diana Aricia. Like Tamera and Greta somehow my early morning running partner knows something I don't. The only word I can think of to describe Meg is pulchritudinous and I don't even know that word yet. She is radiant. She is singing. She is surrounded by the tonal crescendo of life.
She is
walking into the direction of the garden that she classifies as a grove of
light.
Music begins emanate, it sounds like an amalgamate between Buddhist monks chanting and something by Mozart. It is diaphanous, an unknown key-signature, florid altimssimo, nightingale assoluta: the river of humanity key-signature in the string quartet demarcating the chorus of time.
Finally I see Mark.
My brother is wearing a medieval robe and has a tonsure haircut. His bangs resemble the altar haircut girl from Harmony's group and the tall-lanky Big Ten wannabe who is always vandalizing my pictures. Mark is holding the elusive itinerary that has been fluttering around that no one can seem to get a hold of for more than two seconds. In a way Mark kind of looks like the acolytes in the Lutheran Church I attend Sunday morning. He is quiet and demure. Alfred the Great is pointing his sword in Mark's direction as if it were a boner addressing Mark as there goes thee young Theophilus.
I call out to Mark the way we have been bantering elbow jabs the entire trip. I call him Cadfael. I tell him to tell it like it is. He looks like Martin Luther hammering the itinerary into the Tree of Life.
It is OUR ITINERARY only there is no destination but now.
Harmony’s palms are still groping inside my waistline. For a moment I think she is squeezing my package as if it is ripe produce before she pulls out what looks like my plane ticket home.
Mark hammers OUR ITINERARY into the frontal lobe of the bark staccato-like, five times in a row, like the cops who knock on the screen doors in the south side where from whence I hail. The glossy paper no longer has the words OUR ITINERARY branded on its brow. Instead there is a proclamation in Latin, in bold lettering In Tempora Restitutionis Omnium Quae Locutus est Deus which I read aloud even though I don't understand a word of it.
Even though when it exits my lips it sounds like I am saying her name.
"Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt."
The ship begins to titter in the manner it began to titter on the Thames before blasting through the metaphysical periplus of everything that is known and unknown. Alfred the Great mounts a Hippocamp next to Sam and shoots like a comet back into the direction from which we hailed a sword brandished in front of him, stating huzzah, stating all hail Trinovantum!!! The wraith of Mary Queen of Scots is using the vertical tip her rolling pin to give herself pleasure. The polite boy from Alabama and several other females who kept their attire on during the cosmic orgy via praying are being lifted into the top of the ship, through the ricocheting orbs of the chandelier in a beam of light.
There is a lip of Heaven. Vivian is saying quite right. She is saying that we are really here, now aren't we. She is saying Hurry up please it’s time like she is quoting a poem. She is saying that we have arrived a bit ahead of schedule.
Music begins emanate, it sounds like an amalgamate between Buddhist monks chanting and something by Mozart. It is diaphanous, an unknown key-signature, florid altimssimo, nightingale assoluta: the river of humanity key-signature in the string quartet demarcating the chorus of time.
Finally I see Mark.
My brother is wearing a medieval robe and has a tonsure haircut. His bangs resemble the altar haircut girl from Harmony's group and the tall-lanky Big Ten wannabe who is always vandalizing my pictures. Mark is holding the elusive itinerary that has been fluttering around that no one can seem to get a hold of for more than two seconds. In a way Mark kind of looks like the acolytes in the Lutheran Church I attend Sunday morning. He is quiet and demure. Alfred the Great is pointing his sword in Mark's direction as if it were a boner addressing Mark as there goes thee young Theophilus.
I call out to Mark the way we have been bantering elbow jabs the entire trip. I call him Cadfael. I tell him to tell it like it is. He looks like Martin Luther hammering the itinerary into the Tree of Life.
It is OUR ITINERARY only there is no destination but now.
Harmony’s palms are still groping inside my waistline. For a moment I think she is squeezing my package as if it is ripe produce before she pulls out what looks like my plane ticket home.
Mark hammers OUR ITINERARY into the frontal lobe of the bark staccato-like, five times in a row, like the cops who knock on the screen doors in the south side where from whence I hail. The glossy paper no longer has the words OUR ITINERARY branded on its brow. Instead there is a proclamation in Latin, in bold lettering In Tempora Restitutionis Omnium Quae Locutus est Deus which I read aloud even though I don't understand a word of it.
Even though when it exits my lips it sounds like I am saying her name.
"Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt."
There is a lip of Heaven. Vivian is saying quite right. She is saying that we are really here, now aren't we. She is saying Hurry up please it’s time like she is quoting a poem. She is saying that we have arrived a bit ahead of schedule.
Now haven't we.
The boat seems to dock on a refulgent inlet on a cosmic pond, sawdust expired supernovas beneath.
The minute the side door opens a wavering sheet of crystallized photons streams into the vessel. It is a deluge of pristine light.
We are here. We have arrived at whatever our final port is to become.
We have arrived.
More and more people seem to be moving toward the front of the vessel.
Elias Das is again dressed circa 1960ish airline stewardess making geometrical hand-signals orienting the direction of the exits thanking us for riding Young Columbus airlines where we fly from here to eternity and back again and Time (Thames) does not exist. One of the boys in Dan's group is telling his counselor that that was fun, asking if he can do it again. We are disembarking into a bubble of light. The screens on the bottom of the dance floor are the color of a Fragonard geranium casting cuboctahedronesque ratios and three dimensional arcs.
Elias Das is again dressed circa 1960ish airline stewardess making geometrical hand-signals orienting the direction of the exits thanking us for riding Young Columbus airlines where we fly from here to eternity and back again and Time (Thames) does not exist. One of the boys in Dan's group is telling his counselor that that was fun, asking if he can do it again. We are disembarking into a bubble of light. The screens on the bottom of the dance floor are the color of a Fragonard geranium casting cuboctahedronesque ratios and three dimensional arcs.
We are leaving.
As we are disembarking several members of our galactic cadre are seen crossing themselves. There is an overall sense of panic that the imminent pangs of judgment and damnation is upon us. We are walking into the light. Tamera is stating that there should be more than just this, the final port of our tour. Several members of Daisy's group are looking for She-wolf Simone asking if they are going to need their passports. The YC coats are completely incinerated forming a burnt mattress of vinyl incense for the ghastly Mary Queen of Scots to recline. Tamera is wielding a Rosary informing me that I don't know Mary Queen of Scots from Bloody Mary from whatever hole in my head surely there may be. Some how Jim, Longhorn and Dimas can't stand the sight of the impinging light and it causes them to cower as if kowtowing in worship . The tree is a color of a Peacock plumage only it is electric and glowing. The television screen on the bottom of the dance floor are showing our bodies each as an individual heap of dust. We are mulch. We are soil into the stem of the tree of life.
This is everything we are or ever will become, the cremation of our limbs, the disintegration of every solitary molecular cell.
Tamera pedantically adds that, because of a little something called entropy, even this moment in the metaphysical plurality of the afterlife will blink out of being and it will be like none of this even historically existed at all before inexplicably placing an Islamic turban over her the top of her head hovering on a Persian carpet in the direction of cosmic mecca.
The gilded auroral doily of the fringe of whatever Heaven, whatever new Jerusalem, whatever next world there may perhaps be is terrifyingly blinding. Tamera says sonuvabitch perhaps an interesting theorem to consider is that our bodies are only a corporeal transient womb germinating for the welcome mat to experience the glorious virtues of the ineluctable death that is to come.
There is no apostle with wizened beard who looks
half-asleep checking reservations. Even though the John Major tour guide seems to be rattling some sort of keys, talking about Christ' church, explicating the infinite details of the eternity. We are leaving the ingot of the cruise vessel. We are leaving en masse. The wings that Elias Das is passing out as a stewardess clearly resemble the mathematical emblem for infinity. Somehow eternity is here and now and somehow hell is here and now and somehow all of what we perceive as being life is either an illusion or a heightened shadow of an illusory sigh. Tertullian is gesturing in either a wave or like he is trying to tell us something. I try telling Harmony that this is just like at the end of Return of The Jedi when all the wraiths of the dearly departed galactic knights are congregating in ewok village only Harmony is no longer in my arms she is floating into the direction of the light. The Young Columbusians are leaving. They are dissipating into the refulgent wink of eternity. The last thing I hear as I am headed toward the exit is Big Ten give it up for ever and ever. They are smurfing it up as they enter the spangling den of the next world. They are giving it up. I am looking for Harmony. I am being swallowed by the consciousness constituting the end of time when the light snaps shut, there is darkness and there is a set of eyes and darkness again. I am all alone and I am surrounded on all sides. Harmony is blinking. She is looking at me. Her eyes are forming planetary ellipses. She is saying my name, benevolently, maternally. She is saying my name every time she smiles.
The moment I am being reeled into the coppery fluid of light I am yanked back in a whiff finding myself falling back around the bark of the Tree of Life as it detumescences, as it shrinks, as it becomes the ugliest Christmas tree you have ever seen Charlie Brown, as the screen I have been holding the preordained love-of-my life on begins to flutter and wink showing pictures of earth. I am realizing somehow that I am witnessing all of this in the pueblo-tint of her acorn forehead. That what I thought I was seeing on the dance floor is being reflected back to me in optical octaves, the cosmic-concavity mirrored blink-lash of her eyes.
***
I am a poet. I am reading her poems. I fill up a spiral notebook a month of poems. It is the only way I know how to express the lava-swirling hiccup and tic erupting inside my chest at all times. It is the only way I can detail what the fuck is going on. Sometimes I write ten poems a day. Somehow all I want to do is write all the time since I returned from Paris the previous summer. Somehow Harmony and I are close again. We are closer than we were on the Thames that evening when we traversed the entire universe in a blink and subtle blush her visage emanating time-signatures in front of me as we danced and lost ourselves in the impressionistic fresco, the sun waning in sockets of the west.
It is a year later and we are writing each other letters the size of biblical epistles. It is a year later and sometimes we rack up 200 dollar phone bills a month taking to each other throughout the night. It is a year later and at first I don't even think it is a romantic rapport we share, just a deep friendship,
It is a year later and she is the coolest human being I have ever met.
It is a year later and I can't seem to get whatever was in my life that I have somehow lost.
It is a year later and I am making plans to go to Spokane, to walk the 500 plus 500 plus 500 miles just to kiss her forehead.
Just to see her again.
It s a year later and running is the last thing on my mind although it is the beginning of track season. I hate being at my high school. I feel like a failure all the time. Harmony has already told me that she is taking AP college classes so that when she graduates she will already have college credit. Sometimes Harmony reads THE WASTE LAND to me in a British accent. It is three o'clock in the morning and I am reading her poems. The first two Harmony tells me that she does not like. The third poem is about a bird. I is about holding something close to your chest with wings that is looking for a nest. Something that had to peck out of the place it came from to be able to fly. Something who still hasn't found its way home.
"Yes," Harmony is telling me over the phone.
"That's the one. I really like that one a lot."
***
Harmony and I are dancing in what can almost be described as an dyslexic ellipse. It feels like Harmony’s nose is trying to benevolently till the soil of my left shoulder blade. Whitney Houston is seismically hitting chords that seem to be off any known sort of tonal graph. Right before I tell her that I am sick of hearing this song, that I never really liked it in the first place. That it is overtly anthologized and overly commercialized and that the diva didn’t even author the original version Harmony tilts her head even closer into the proximity of my neck. Her smile carols that she loves this song.
“Yeah,” I say, discerning that divulging in a lie is inevitable. “I love this song too.”
Now it seems to me that the reason I spent three tortuous years rehearsing my speech and vying for the opportunity to serve as a young ambassador for my community was simply to find this moment, to find Harmony. To find the lavender bud that is London in Spring. To find Mark who seems to somehow correlate into everything I have ever wanted somehow banked and cupped in the geometric marrow of my arms. There is a moment of oneness. A moment that we are here, on this boat, in the serpentine river that is time. That this is the Thames. It palpitates in the chest. Big Ben’s erection casting a distant totemic-tint as we cruise through evaporating avenues of time. Somehow the moment is stretching, time unflapping itself as sheet music, Young Columbusians swinging from treble and bass clefs like monkey bars, like the yellow jungle gym behind the school where you grew up. Somehow everything this moment is welding everything else I have ever experienced on the scope of this planet into a blink.
I have the girl. I am dancing with Harmony. I am looking in her eyes.
We are holding each other close, my vowels are stretching across the top of her neck, as if involuntarily my lips keep on configuring into an asterisk. We are swaying back and forth. I am holding her close. Mark is nowhere on the dance floor. From the optical wing of my peripheral vision I can hear several members of the Big Ten trying to cajole Spencer into dancing slowly with Daisy.
We are holding each other. The DJ seems to be playing exorbitant number of slow songs. It is like he is my wing man. It is like he is throwing me an alley-oop. It is like he is chauffeuring me an assist. I have spent the last three minutes making out with the caramel-slate of her forehead. Somehow when I am dancing with her I see Rita. She is blinking her eyes. She is smiling at me. For a second I think I fucked up. For a second I think maybe I should be looking to apologize for not calling her last night, trying to explain that it wasn’t my fault exactly. Trying to tell her about the shenanigans of the BIG TEN. Before I know what exactly is transpiring Harmony has spiked her chin somewhere below my neck planting her entire face on the side of my shoulder.
Now it seems to me that the reason I spent three tortuous years rehearsing my speech and vying for the opportunity to serve as a young ambassador for my community was simply to find this moment, to find Harmony. To find the lavender bud that is London in Spring. To find Mark who seems to somehow correlate into everything I have ever wanted somehow banked and cupped in the geometric marrow of my arms. There is a moment of oneness. A moment that we are here, on this boat, in the serpentine river that is time. That this is the Thames. It palpitates in the chest. Big Ben’s erection casting a distant totemic-tint as we cruise through evaporating avenues of time. Somehow the moment is stretching, time unflapping itself as sheet music, Young Columbusians swinging from treble and bass clefs like monkey bars, like the yellow jungle gym behind the school where you grew up. Somehow everything this moment is welding everything else I have ever experienced on the scope of this planet into a blink.
I have the girl. I am dancing with Harmony. I am looking in her eyes.
I am making serious forehead hang time with my lips. Harmony's forehead has transitioned into an I-max movie screen and I am seeing the forehead of every Anastasia Blake in the cool summer air-conditioned frost that is backstage at Peoria Players. I am seeing myself groping the finger tips of Dawn Michelle as we form elliptical loops around the teal-fountains of Northwoods Mall. I am next to Tina the strumpet who lives with her step-mother all of five houses from where I reside in the direction of the setting sun.
Tina is taking off her clothes and she is naked and I am looking through a plexiglass frame resembling a deck of card being randomly shuffled. I see the college girls next door and I can't sleep because I have an erection and I am waiting to see if the girl with her hair pulled back will take off her clothes. I am seeing Karen Christmas from Two Young Columbus ago and it is the back of her head talking into a phone like a mermaid and a conch. I see Jeany's pasty visage wearing an Annie Hall assenting tie and Andrea who still, even in the forehead of the cherub I am holding right now, smells brand new,
I am seeing Mary McQuellen who I can hear in the background while she yells out my name,
Yelling out my name in gratitude when she hears that I won the Young Columbus contest.
She yells out my name like I have taken her somewhere she has never been before.
Tina is taking off her clothes and she is naked and I am looking through a plexiglass frame resembling a deck of card being randomly shuffled. I see the college girls next door and I can't sleep because I have an erection and I am waiting to see if the girl with her hair pulled back will take off her clothes. I am seeing Karen Christmas from Two Young Columbus ago and it is the back of her head talking into a phone like a mermaid and a conch. I see Jeany's pasty visage wearing an Annie Hall assenting tie and Andrea who still, even in the forehead of the cherub I am holding right now, smells brand new,
I am seeing Mary McQuellen who I can hear in the background while she yells out my name,
Yelling out my name in gratitude when she hears that I won the Young Columbus contest.
She yells out my name like I have taken her somewhere she has never been before.
I see Renae Holiday at our first official date, Renae telling me that the reason her forehead is so big is because when when she was a four-finger year old moppet her mother kept wielding her hair back into such a tight pony tail, Renae late last autumn when I just could not refrain from kissing every facet of her anatomy.
I see Renae and she is making out with me outside of Westlake in the bitter chill of the autumnal rain,
Harmony is telling me to wait. Just wait for a moment.
Wait.
***
Somehow during our cosmic reconnaissance mission I realize that come three years eclipsed time our European sojourn will be like what I can now remember about grade school, like the Young Columbus trip itself is fleeting, disintegrating into atoms even while we are living it and all of this will soon be gone. As in no more. As in wherever we are going we will have vivid memories for only a finite amount of time and then somehow memories will supplant other memories and all of the anticipation and preparation for the trip will be like it never transpired at all.
It will all be gone.
***
I tell Harmony that it is a Dutch flight. I tell her that I am leaving in less than three hours. I tell her that wear I am seated on the globe the sun is starting to peck its golden rim into the horizon of the east.
I tell her to close her eyes. I tell her to wrap her arms around her both shoulders and squeeze as hard as she can.
I ask her if she can feel my arms around her.
***
It is the one year anniversary of that night a year later. I am running every day. If I can break 4:45 in the mile I have a shot at advancing to Sectionals. I am struggling to break my time from last year. As with fall freshman year I have a stress fracture. I am hurting. I shouldn’t hurt so much all the time.
My respite is her voice. My solace is the memory of everything that happen that night, her breath fogging the bottom of my neck exactly a year ago, holding her close.
I have already phoned Mark-Andrew.
It is a year later and I am re-reading through the journal with chicken wire handwriting. It is a year later and I am madly in love with Angie Shufflebiem. It is a year later and for the second year in a row somehow I have been blessed with the coolest English teacher on the planet. It is a year later and I still get up at 4:30 in the morning delivering papers. It is a year later and, once again, the math-slash-bio class I am in is kicking me ass. Is making me feel dumb. It is a year later and everything is suddenly quote Alternative. It is a year later and the grunge leper, empirical rock messiah of our generation just shot himself. It is a year later and I don’t know where to go except for the place I have already returned from.It is a year later and Frank just won’t fucking quit whipping his dick out every time I collect from him. It is a year later and I still, for the most part, feel all alone every time I enter Manual high school. It is a year later and the remedial clicky show choir I somehow find myself a part of has this weird masturbatory jerk-off ritual. It is a year later and everyone is listening to CHANT and CRASH TEST DUMMIES, It is a year later and I am infatuated with Opera, wearing a chic blazer and a turtle neck as I sit in the balcony at the Civic Center of Opera Illinois production of La Boheme.
It is a year later and my cousin is seven months pregnant, graduating salutatorian at the high school I would have given anything to attend.
It is 1994 and I can’t stop listening to Vauxhall and I. It is a year later and I think Under the Pink by Tori Amos is the most aesthetic riveting melodic mantra of emotional exposition ever recorded.
It is a year later and my cousin is seven months pregnant, graduating salutatorian at the high school I would have given anything to attend.
It is 1994 and I can’t stop listening to Vauxhall and I. It is a year later and I think Under the Pink by Tori Amos is the most aesthetic riveting melodic mantra of emotional exposition ever recorded.
It is a year later and the college girls who I used to squint through the saluting plastic of the blinds have moved out, suddenly, and a long haired sandpaper bearded man who doesn’t work yells every five seconds when we park in the none-driveway separating our respected sub-middle class
It is one year later and REALITY BITES has supplanted SINGLES as the coolest movie of all time.
Every time I see Ethan Hawke I want to fire up a cigarette.
It is a year later, the night of April 13th I go for a walk at the exact moment I left the planet a year earlier.
It is a year later and she finally came back to me.
It is a year later and she finally came back to me.
It is a year later and I am telling her everything. I am telling her I remember everything about that night. I am lost in serpentine hiss of her breath. She is undressing my neck. I am in my new bedroom since I have a phone. I can’t stop inhaling her breath. She is quoting TS Eliot. I am inhaling like an asthmatic.
I am kissing her over the phone.
I am kissing her over the phone.
It is one year later and I am going to find her somehow once again. I am going too find her again in London. I am going to pillage back that night the way Mark and Denis gratuitously pillaged the condiment receptacle in Shuttleworths, regain everything that was somehow lost, find that person I was and the pulse of whatever it is I am becoming.
It is one year later and I called Harmony back up telling her that I remember everything about that night.
I remember her taste. I remember the time signature and vowels of her breath.
I remember everything.
So, I say, using the word Audacious, using an ACT word, being audacious, telling her again once again so.
Do you think if we could somehow do it all over again.
Do you think you would let me kiss you?
***
Youth is dancing. The transitory wisp of youth coalesced with the subatomic illusory stage curtain that is time melted into the dwindling veil of the bruised Thames' sunset. On the polar side of the river stars have already begun to voyeuristically poach through the keyhole of the sky. Nat is dancing with the high-pitched blonde headed girl with his palms pressed down below the back of her waist, as if he is trying to employ her lower lumbar as some sort of sensual vertical Ouija board. Every time Spencer gets on the dance floor he stomps his legs as if doing half-hearted hoe-down before sprinting back to the seats while Daisy’s entourage erupts into a confetti of feminine giggles. We are dancing. Several groups, mainly instigated by the female counselors who look like they know what is like to have a botched prom have formed a football huddle and are swaying back and forth in a corporeal orb. Everyone is dancing. Rose is dancing by clasping her hands into dual fists and punching then slightly near near her neck. A dwarfish venison skinned bespectacled boy from bus 4 is performing break dancing moves from 1983, forming a ceiling fan with his limbs, oscillating semi-clockwise on the floor. Even my roommate Justin and Chris from Nebraska bleat their heads in maddening sync to the tempo. The reporter of whom we are not allowed to talk to comes over. She is all semi-tinted glasses and perm. She is smiling. Before I know it she jumps into the throng of undulating bodies. She is moving. The journalist who has made Harmony her working-class toady is kicking it. She is busting a move. Lynn Minton is dancing in a way as if she is double-dutching performing a slight pivot skip in tandem with the beat. We are dancing. Strobe lights continue to unearth mountain range silhouette of shoulders against the far end of the vessel—it is youth and we are dancing as we are not here long. It is youth and we are forever between the ages of 12 -18, hormones coating our palate, muscles developing to their apex, forever strung in the abeyance of time. The apoplectic glory that is the ephemeral overture of youth. The DJ is playing the Cure. He is playing the pinwheel bridge of Friday I'm in Love. More couples appear to be getting closer than perhaps Liz Madigan would like to acknowledge. Josh and his blushed-cheek running partner have danced consecutively for six songs straight, even holding hands slow dancing during the Village People while everyone else on the ship formed alphabetical emblems with the upper hemisphere of their bodies.
Snow’s Informer is beginning to kick out of the side speaker. The last song I want to hear.
Fuck Snow. Fuck this verbal-dribbling he pawns off as rap.
The DJ then cozens us all to Jump by playing a certain track.
The entire vessel is once again rattling, reverberating in skipped syncopations of time as we glide down the Thames. Daisy is dancing with someone else other than Spencer only it is fairly obvious that the only reason she is dancing with him is to make Spencer somewhere envious. I walk out on the prow and stand next to Sam, facing the opposite direction of Big Ben, like a stalk. I want to use the same line I used on Mark when I told him not to jump its not worth it. But instead, I just stand next to him for a moment as the vessel continues to whirl creating fractal shaped rippled in the Thames below.
On the far end of the boat there is Sam, standing by himself, his eyes lost in the dusk of the Thames, hands thick as angus sirloins downtrodden and deeply clenched in his pockets.
I tell Harmony one second. I tell her to hold on.
Sam is completely by himself. You can stand from the opposing side of the ship and make out his pensive cowl. Sam is the most affable feather-hearted person I have met on the trip this far. I’ve never seen him sans smile. He reminds me of John Candy. He reminds me of my best friend Hale from back home.
I pass Rose again. Heath is starting to dance even though it looks more like he is jumping rope for a hardcore cardio workout. The Big Tenners are staring at the Italian duet above puddle of adolescent drool.
I move outside. Sam is the first to speak.
Sam is the first to speak.
“Oh hey, Tony.”
“You looking for mermaids?”
Sam smiles. We have just passed Big Ben. Parliament seems to stretch out next like a finely cut plateau.
“You alright brother?"
Sam doesn’t respond. He continues to look out over the antipodal bank when everyone inside continues to congregate and vacillate their limbs.
We stand next to each other not saying anything. He looks down, offers a healthy sniff then turns again in my direction.
“I’m sorry.”
I tell him that there is no need inferring to apologize.
He is looking over the railing. It is almost like he is trying to squint looking for verification of his reflection in the River Thames even though it is beyond dark and the Thames looks like
“It’s just that I miss this girl so much. There’s this girl, I just can’t stop thinking about. We were pretty close last autumn. Things just didn’t pan out. I miss her.”
I place my hand over his shoulder like some kind of fictitious cloak. He nods.
“ I guess its just like seeing everyone hanging out and having a good time….” Sam pauses, takes several more sniffs as if he is a sommelier.
“I mean, I’m in London, man. It’s a perfect night. Yet somehow something is missing. I just feel empty inside.”
"Tell me about her?"
Sam steps back and says what. For a minute it looks like he is sucking on a pacifier. For a minute it looks like he is wearing water wings.
"I don't know Tony. I mean, it's not like you and your girl. We met at Forensics camp a couple of summers ago and it's like...I never thought I would see her again then I randomly bumped into her at a speech tournament and we've been Pen pals ever since."
Sam reaches behind his waist opening his wallet as if he is showing some kind of Federal identification.
"Here. That's her. Her name is Samantha."
"She's a pretty girl." I say. She has black hair. In a way it looks like she is already related to Sam in a first-wet dream second cousin sort of way
"Yeah, I mean, everything was cool on this trip and everything then I just started thinking about her. I mean, I just started missing her like crazy. I looked at the dance floor and saw all you guys dancing and holding each other
I look down in a contemplative way the way I have been seeing men in movies bartering a heart-to-heart look down my entire life. I tell him that everything is going to be okay. I tell him that he is here, in London, on this night that looks like a film negative of some apostolic Christian’s variation of heaven. I tell him just to enjoy.
He calls me Tony again. He has not addressed me as David once on this whole trip.
I tell him that maybe somehow everything will be alright. He nods in almost a gruff way.
He then looks out like he is squinting out into the horizon at the end of a Louis L’amour novel.
“It’s so beautiful here. I mean, somehow, everything is perfect. Yet there's still this void. This doughnut in the center of my chest. This hollow place yet everything is perfect ”
I tell him that’s because its suppose to be. He smiles.
I stand next to Sam. Below the river Thames brushes across the nose of the vessel in nautical eddies
I stand next to Sam. Below the river Thames brushes across the nose of the vessel in nautical eddies
It is spring. Everything smells brand new. Like we just purchased a case of something that has never been used and once we open it we will never get it back again.
"Like go back inside bro. I mean. There's a lot of cute girls dancing. I mean, just dancing. Just so you have a chance to lose yourself beneath the flicker of the dance floor. We're in London, man.London. Let's just go inside."
Sam nods almost stoically several times. It sounds like he is snorting in reverse. He is shuffling tears.
"I mean, when you get back to the hotel room at the Gloucester, isolate yourself in your room for a couple of hours and tell her about how beautiful this night was on the Thames and how all you could think about was her. But for now we're in London, bro. Lets go out on the dance floor.
Let's go dancing."
"Like go back inside bro. I mean. There's a lot of cute girls dancing. I mean, just dancing. Just so you have a chance to lose yourself beneath the flicker of the dance floor. We're in London, man.London. Let's just go inside."
Sam nods almost stoically several times. It sounds like he is snorting in reverse. He is shuffling tears.
"I mean, when you get back to the hotel room at the Gloucester, isolate yourself in your room for a couple of hours and tell her about how beautiful this night was on the Thames and how all you could think about was her. But for now we're in London, bro. Lets go out on the dance floor.
Let's go dancing."
“Yeah, maybe we should, Tony.”
Maybe we should.
***
I say what followed by an exclamatory stalk. Harmony’s breath is a sprinkle of giggles
Harmony smiles again and says yes. She says she finally flies back home a week from what is now today.
"It's kinda cool. I'll be an ambassador for my local district."
Harmony begins to explicate that she is really excited with meeting and interfacing with the hierarchy of the Girl Scouts of America.
"So this is like only the first part of your overall trip then."
Harmony smiles. She says yes.
Harmony says that actually, her school had their spring break a week before she left for England so she will be out of school for almost one month time.
“Since I had the week off before leaving for England I got all the assignments in advance and completed nearly all of them except for my AP English class where my teacher told me that I needed to write a first-person narrative account about London and what I found
I continue to speak with Harmony. She has a paper route. She gets up early every morning just like I do. She didn’t win the contest by giving a speech. There was a list of finalists and she had a tete-a-tete interview with the judges and when she returned home her mother was waiting for her with phone in paw informing her that she has just won the contest.
“It’ll be so nice. I’ll be staying with my grandmother. I haven’t seen my grandmother in ten years so it should be really special.”
***
The last song we dance to that night is by U2. We have just had our emotional tete-a-tete. She has exploded by not exploding. She has exploded by being kind.
She has squeezed my hand the entire time.
The sun is now almost completely behind Big Ben and Parliament casting shadows on our ship.
I am singing to her. I am telling her that I can't life with or without.
Maybe we should.
***
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say to
Harmony over the phone in the Gloucester. It is two o’clock in the morning. I
have just spent one hour massaging Harmony’s coat with the wet tips of my
fingers. I can still smell her body on
my lower neck. It still feels like she is in my arms.
There is a pause. I have long since forgotten querying
over the identity concerning whom she
danced with earlier in the night.
I repeat the same questions again. I ask her to tell
me something that I don’t know about her yet.
When Harmony clears her throat it sounds like she has
just turned on a porcelain dish disposal before speaking in complete sentences.
“Well, did you know that I’m not going back to Spokane
directly after the trip.”
I say what followed by an exclamatory stalk. Harmony’s breath is a sprinkle of giggles
Actually it’s kind of cool. I’m going to be in New
York for a week.
“The city?” I say, incredulously. Not dawning on me
that while my trip is almost over hers is only somehow just beginning.”
“Yeah, there’s actually a nationwide Girl Scouts
convention and when my Girl Scout leader heard that I won the Young Columbus
and saw my itinerary and asked if I would like to be an ambassador from my
district.”
“So you are going to be in New York for a whole week?”
Harmony smiles again and says yes. She says she finally flies back home a week from what is now today.
"It's kinda cool. I'll be an ambassador for my local district."
Harmony begins to explicate that she is really excited with meeting and interfacing with the hierarchy of the Girl Scouts of America.
"So this is like only the first part of your overall trip then."
Harmony smiles. She says yes.
“You’re going be missing a bunch of school, then?”
Harmony says that actually, her school had their spring break a week before she left for England so she will be out of school for almost one month time.
“Since I had the week off before leaving for England I got all the assignments in advance and completed nearly all of them except for my AP English class where my teacher told me that I needed to write a first-person narrative account about London and what I found
I continue to speak with Harmony. She has a paper route. She gets up early every morning just like I do. She didn’t win the contest by giving a speech. There was a list of finalists and she had a tete-a-tete interview with the judges and when she returned home her mother was waiting for her with phone in paw informing her that she has just won the contest.
“It’ll be so nice. I’ll be staying with my grandmother. I haven’t seen my grandmother in ten years so it should be really special.”
Mentally I skip back to the first time I espied the
sight of Harmony in the dance floor at Stratford-upon-Avon and remember that I
initially thought she was one of the Italian girls from New York.”
“That makes two people I know who aren’t heading straight
home after the trip.”
Harmony asks me what do I mean.
“Nat, the other winner from Central Illinois, the one
who ignores me all the time every time I try to say hello or be civil, he’s not
going back home right away either. Apparently he has some family reunion in Pennsylvania
he is attending.”
There is a pause. For reasons unknown Harmony is
sounding awkward.
“Yeah, about Nat, there’s something you should know…”
***
The last song we dance to that night is by U2. We have just had our emotional tete-a-tete. She has exploded by not exploding. She has exploded by being kind.
She has squeezed my hand the entire time.
The sun is now almost completely behind Big Ben and Parliament casting shadows on our ship.
I am singing to her. I am telling her that I can't life with or without.
***
"Harmony's 18 she can do whatever she wants."
The voice of the matriarch says to me, over the phone, long distance.
I am leaving for Europe in eight hours. I am leaving again for the third time in three years.
***
The moment Sam and I re-enter the top of the ship Harmony is in front of us. She is smiling. She can tell that Sam is despondent. She walks between the two of us. As if calculated she wedges between us. She grabs my right arm and Sam's left. She can tell that Sam is downtrodden. She is smiling. We dance together for the remainder of the number. Sam's arms looks like they are racks of meat. He has swallowed us in a hug, In a wreath.
"You guys are so cool. Thanks for dancing. Thanks man, I can't thank you enough. Thanks brother."
Thanks.
Sam is looking at both of us as if he is ready to cry. He grabs my right hand and cups it into Harmony's left.
"You two." He says, pressing them together as if he is trying to weld our palms into one.
Harmony seems bashful as we begin to dance. We are dancing even though we will never see each other again. We are dancing as if we have known each other for a filched angelic stillborn feather of eternity. We are dancing and we are somehow one. We are dancing when we have only known each other exactly one week tomorrow. We are dancing as the vessel concurrently nods up and down the Thames River. We are dancing knowing that we are somehow a part of something while not understanding exactly what it is at the time. We are dancing. We are the commercialized heavily materialized runoff, the residue of youth. We are dancing even though we are inhabitants of a country that is more or less a giant shopping mall. We are dancing and we have found each other after all this time, We are dancing and, as with the consciousness of the universe, we will go back to whatever area ode we hail from. We will go back to the overtly sterilized hallways of our respected academic institutions. We will leave the dream of the past seven days, jettison the fairy tale turret, slough the union, the friendship, the joy.
We are dancing and we will never die.
We are dancing.
"You guys are so cool. Thanks for dancing. Thanks man, I can't thank you enough. Thanks brother."
Thanks.
Sam is looking at both of us as if he is ready to cry. He grabs my right hand and cups it into Harmony's left.
"You two." He says, pressing them together as if he is trying to weld our palms into one.
Harmony seems bashful as we begin to dance. We are dancing even though we will never see each other again. We are dancing as if we have known each other for a filched angelic stillborn feather of eternity. We are dancing and we are somehow one. We are dancing when we have only known each other exactly one week tomorrow. We are dancing as the vessel concurrently nods up and down the Thames River. We are dancing knowing that we are somehow a part of something while not understanding exactly what it is at the time. We are dancing. We are the commercialized heavily materialized runoff, the residue of youth. We are dancing even though we are inhabitants of a country that is more or less a giant shopping mall. We are dancing and we have found each other after all this time, We are dancing and, as with the consciousness of the universe, we will go back to whatever area ode we hail from. We will go back to the overtly sterilized hallways of our respected academic institutions. We will leave the dream of the past seven days, jettison the fairy tale turret, slough the union, the friendship, the joy.
We are dancing and we will never see each other again.
We are dancing and we go outside screaming every time the vessel chugs beneath the shale-gray rafters of Tower Bridge.
We are dancing and I am lost in the clef-notes of her eyes. We are dancing and we are pressing our shielded genitals against the other, as if TV remote were lodged in my jeans in lieu of a Gideon bible. We are dancing and we are supplicating, kowtowing to the chorus of synthetic noise, yearning to enter the ovum of the others eyesight, the blink of the others smile.
We are dancing and it is London pervasive dusk spattered across BIG BEN and parliament is the color of a light plum; a weak alcoholic wine cooler, the whistling splash of spring zephyr hitting the back of our neck informing us that we will be here forever. That we have vaulted beyond the vicissitudes of time. That we have arrived on the bow of this ship only to find solace in the movement of the other.
We are dancing and we are not yet sixteen years of age.
We are dancing.
We are forming rhizomatic branches of light with our bodies. We are dancing. We are moving from darkness into light and back into darkness once again. We are dancing because the foison of youth beleaguer the hiss of all eternity. We are dancing because we will not be here for very long even though no one bothered to tell us that. Even though everyone we have ever met has lied. Even though it will always be springtime and we will always be fifteen years of age. Somehow the group is together as one, clad in scarlet coats and cameras, walking through different avenues and experiences of being, chronicling the experiences of pain and loneliness and suffering, the mass of red cells, one pulsating bellowing unit, still somehow finding themselves on the Thames river, dancing, holding close, trying to be one, trying to grow and give and love and intrinsically just belong. That I would somehow find the creature akin to what I discerned last summer in the scent of Andrea’s hair to the smile of Anastasia Blake’s pomegranate cheekbones to the bubbling wit of Dawn Michelle’s late night phone conversation serving as a prelude to the confusion of high school, wading in a hallway trying to come up for air between classes, being blatantly ignored by Angelina Lighthouse while feeling lost in Cool Joe Thomas’ BIO and Mrs. Peabody algebra class—the feeling of working for something so assiduously while failing to achieve it. The sight of the girls next door rattling their torso’s through the voyeuristic slant of the blinds before unbuttoning their bodies, releasing themselves when they are all alone. Somehow in this moment the Parade group has become one.
Somehow it is not just about Harmony (although it really still is all about her) but it is about the group as a whole. It is about Spencer and Daisy and Justin, my roommate, after disparaging everything I do as he drips down on one knee doing his devotions every night. It is about Trevor and Charles and the crazy guy who looked just like my high school English teacher drunk on J & B scotch in the hallway. It is about not getting along with the fellow representatives from my group. It is about losing myself in the feral unknown, the strangeness of a land I have never been before with a school of strangers I will never see again. It is about unearthing something about ourselves that was somehow already there all along.
It is even somehow about old Jim Baker always making uncouth comments.
Spencer and Daisy are dancing. They are not dancing in the fashion in which Nat and his girl are dancing but they are dancing. Daisy looks over at Spencer smitten. She looks over at Spencer like she is madly in love.
My eyes are welded shut like a garage door.
I move in closer. Her eyes are closed.
I wait for everything in life to begin all over once again.
After five months of incessant re-writes and 1000 of hours cursing the staticky brow of my laptop the next (uh, 28,000) word chapter of my (what was s'ppose to be spring novel) PINTA PARADE arrives... this is the apex dream Fibonacci spiral of the novel that left my heart post-coital tittering and my chest giving everything that was left inside of me only to somehow give more....it begins with the gradation of skyline solidly transitions from film negative fauna to an obsidian shade of dusk and ends with the foison of youth beleaguering the hiss of all eternity....
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