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My imagination is my worst enemy—no, that is not true, but the comfort it gives is never warmer than tepid.
Work. A slag-heap word that blots out the sun. My two saleable talents are picking oranges and playing my guitar. I must be five hundred kilometers from the nearest orange tree, and I have never, ever played my guitar for anyone. Now I understand what fuels dronehood.
“Good evening, Mama-san. Quiet, for a Saturday?” “Saturday already? The days don’t find their way up this far.”
Anyway, the object of the amnesia game is to remain in cozy ignorance of where I have woken up for as long as possible. I count to ten but I am still clueless. I am getting too good at this game.
I should open the window, but moving would set into motion all the unthinkable consequences. For as long as I lie here, no new crisis can begin,
Tell you the truth, I never wanted to be a god. My daddy insisted, and when he insisted there wasn’t no arguing. I flunked the Ivy League colleges, and wound up at a divinity school in Big Sur. Surf was up, sand was golden, and oh, so were the babes, begging your pardon, ma’am. I skipped most of the seminars and just scraped by, mostly thanks to the old man’s string-pulling. Only miracle I learned was the water-to-wine scam. This war zone is my first posting. Heaven, ma’am, is another word for nepotism, you dig? Cronies of the Almighty get the stable democracies, leaving us nobodies to stick
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God clicked his fingers, his surfboard rose from the ashes, and he leapt aboard. “Mighty fine passing the time with you, ma’am. If you run into trouble on my turf, send me a wing and a prayer, you hear?” Crouching in a kung fu position, God surfed away. Mrs. Comb watched the divinity dwindle. “Aye. Well. I won’t be holding me breath.”
“Worry about the future next week.” Mrs. Sasaki pours the tea. “In the meantime, rest. You don’t so much solve problems, as live through them.”
Mrs. Comb tightened her headscarf and wondered why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most. She could not understand it. She could not begin to understand.
“You know, we are all of us writers, busy writing our own fictions about how the world is, and how it came to be this way. We concoct plots and ascribe motives that may, or may not, coincide with the truth.”
“All m-my life,” he mused, “I searched for the truly untold tale in sealed caves, in lost books of learning. Could it be that, instead, profundity is concealed in the obvious? Does the truest originality hide itself within the d-dullest cliche?”
The world is an ordered flowchart of subplots, after all. Look at all these cars— driving past and never colliding. The order is difficult to see, but it is here, under the chaos.
I form the thought that reality is an unedited script performed once; that the truly untold tale is life itself. This seems extremely profound for about ninety seconds.
I am thinking about Ai about ninety times an hour.
Making a pass at Ai would be as uncouth as yelling at a flower to hurry up. Plus, if she rejected me I would have to microwave myself out of existence.
The cloud atlas turns its pages over. Crows dissect a pile of trash. Tokyo is the color of a dirty eraser. Summer left without notice or ceremony. Drones in Jupiter Cafe tuck into their breakfasts.
We counted the stars. I counted her birth-marks. Never knew bliss like that. Never will again. Whatever.
I think the most powerful poison is the malicious word. Its effects may last a lifetime and there is no serum. Forgiveness may soothe the inflammation later, sure, but there is no actual serum.
“Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.
I can remember her perfume. How she looked that first rainy day I saw her washing up. So this is why love changes the course of history. Love. Love? Love!
So little lasts. Mountains, classic songs, friendships, perhaps, and not much else.
