Robert Colpitts

On one side of the ring, we have Faith, optimized for buttressing wary strangers into bravado and decimating wary fighters sponsored by the Never-Lasting-Always-Searching-*uddhist-Cream-for-Endless-Happiness-(but-what-do-you-talk-about) made by AO Corp-non-corp-never-that-no and sporting eyeglasses made by Hide-Me-Now-EFC with purple boxing trunks and a bullet proof vest made by Experience-Inc.  On the other side of the ring is that freaking elephant in the room that no one ever talks about, and on top of it is the world you have not experienced and never think about.  It mostly contains dying black people, imprisoned minorities, battered women, homeless people, and yourself. 

The fight today is brought to you by ________________ — “Never share, never blamed.”

The bell rings and Faith, with a deft series of mountainous haymakers aimed at the upper trunk of the elephant, murders the *&%& out of the elephant et al.  They end up lying cold dead on the floor of the ring.  Faith wanders off to the side, ashamed of what she has done.  She catches my eye, and I give her a reassuring nod (I am in the crowd holding a sign that says, “*^&* you if you don’t like singing.”).  The umpire, wearing a luscious red and green polka dot lace halter top and other than that only a smile, is trying to get the elephant off the et al which is not working and which is, by the way, the reason you don’t talk about the elephant in the room, moreover, why you don’t knock it the *&^& out (you wait until it has left and then nuclear-nuke-gossip it to juicy dirty smithereens which is why the umpire is a half naked man wearing a halter top, because you cannot talk about the hanging penis and scrotum of a possibly-cross-gay-dressing-naked-man until the nuke session post-elephant departure either).

Faith jumps off the ring, and through the roof–hundreds of feet in the air.  I can tell by the trajectory of her jump that she will land in the backstage area.  I get up from my seat to meet her, but the filthy guffawing fat-face beer guzzling idiot next to me is blocking my way and guffawing and seeing absolutely nothing in the distance (like “what is there really to see over there” and “could you stop looking at the dead elephant please?”) and his big bubbly floppy legs are so big that I cannot imagine him swaying them to the side to let me pass (the rolling-jelly-legs already taking up the maximum volume permitted by stadium seating, and at that point you’d have to reshape the seat into a crooked parallelogram to perform the feat of him shifting to the side), and it is absolutely incredulous and impossible to think about him getting UP–the big U-P that big-uns like him apparently forget that not being able to do is a HUGE PROBLEM seeing as we loco-mote on two feet in this society for the most part).  I think about telling him that he and the elephant are not that different, but decide it would not be efficacious, so instead of asking a human to move or insulting him, I step over the back of my own seat, my right foot landing between the right leg of a person who has shimmied left and the left leg of a person who has shimmied right.  I then maneuver my way across a row of people who are completely capable of doing that half-standing-so-my-knees-don’t-stop-you move that people in theatres do to allow people to pass, even though it is always a bit annoying and everyone hopes that that is the last time that is going to happen in a given evening (“fuck I forgot intermission”).  As I exit the row, I can still hear the fat-beer-guzzler, his sweating, pulsating lower lip articulating something about how sick and awful those black bodies are “har har har” and “another beer here har har har” and saying something offensive to his overweight, but by no means AS-overweight, wife who obfuscates every offensive dickering comment he makes with this cute little smile that says “GOD don’t let me die alone, please don’t, please please please, tell me how abusive my husband is, no he did not hit me, no he did not say that”–in any event, lots of beer and seat and fatness and I get backstage only to find Faith crying and K-Box holding her hand.

There is no need to ask what the crying is about.  We are made to bring our fists back so we can swing them as hard as we can and regret our violence later. 

What surprises me is what K-Box is repeating to Faith back there in that backstage area.  K-Box: “When are we going to get a mommy,” over and over again.  As Faith’s weeping seems to deepen and keep rhythm with the ten syllables that K-Box drones repeatedly, I wonder if Faith is crying because of the murder(s) or because of the sentence.

Suspicion eating my soul, kind-of, I stroke K-Box’s hair and ask her, “Why are you asking, ‘When are we going to get a mommy?’ for?”

K-Box looks at me with these big brown eyes and says, “If woman is born of Man, then all Men are Father, and all Women are Daughter, so when is there Mother?”

I think she’s hiding what she is really feeling, and I tell her to come to the quick the thick the heart of it.

K-Box squints and says, “You aren’t doing your job.  When are we going to have a mommy?”

I knew she was going to say that. I mean I knew it up there when I was writing about the fat man.  I knew it when I first used the word “haymaker.”  I knew it when I went to the bathroom between working sessions; I knew it when I was writing email.  I knew it was the right thing for her to say, but I feared it.  I want to crawl into the lap of the fat man and drink beer with him and drown deaden kill my brain my thoughts my creativity drown drown die…

No I don’t.  I like this clarity.

Faith was born of me.  Immaculate conception.  K-Box, I don’t know where she came from, but she likes Faith, so we let her hang around.  I make them do everything I say, so why not imagine that somewhere there is a Mother out there who will let them do whatever they want.  Wouldn’t be nice to live in a world where Faith does not destroy?  Where K-Box doesn’t have to wonder?  Where everything fits nicely in a bundle made my Mommy?

Ah, fat clarity. 

I say to them both, “I don’t know.  The day someone reads these words and has the balls to match them.  Then we know our Mommy.”

And in come the press.  Hundreds of them snapping pictures and asking Faith questions.  She stops crying, and stands up, emboldened by her victory tears.  She addresses them one by one by one.  I take K-Box’s hand and walk away.  Then I get this grand idea to run as fast as we can and that would be fun, so I start running and she runs too.  She yanks her hand from mine and races me.  She is much shorter than I, so I beat her easily, but when I stop, she, running at full speed, rears her right arm back, and let’s go a brilliant haymaker that misses my head and returns boomerang-like against her left ear (arm becoming rubber during haymaker sweeps and all you know that right?), which, consequently, knocks K-Box out.  I pick her up and walk towards something that smells like food.  I imagine that the entire thing will end up in me eating lunch and I am right.  It is pleasant to carry K-Box there, even though she probably needs to be taken to the hospital judging by the stream of blood that connects the lunch table to the haymaker-miss location.  Faith, I imagine, is looking for someone for me to marry.

So silly.

Better earned
Never said
Lastly burned
Dead in end

So it is
That one
Patient
Dream

You know
Is going
Going
Gone

But you are
Too tired
To bother
Saying

Farewell

“Row, row, row the boat, gently down the ravine.  Unraveling, unraveling, unraveling, life is but a pin drop beating ocean liver dung,” says K-Box as she balances sprightly on the edge of a ravine.  To her left is 650 feet of tumbling-body-splitting-rocky-yucky-bone-crushing jutting stone.  To her right is a desert–an empty endless curved beach as dry and hot as the surface of the sun.  “Oh, I’m picking out a death face for you.  Not an ordinary death face for you, but the extra best death face for you to buy…”  She is optimistic.  You can say that.  Facing it like an optimist.  Sparing us all the sob story.  We know what its like.  A ravine.  A desert.  What kind of choice is that?  We don’t want to be there.

“A lovely bunch of flowery thoughts will come to me.  The jump bump yip yap storyline to save me from my tip tip tip ovvvvvvvvvver–” she almost loses her balance, “–and the hope smile gets better all the time thing that keeps them from actually reaching out.  What more can you ask for?  Nothing, so just let it be.”

One thing that defines her is this strange ok-ness with the nature of it.  Two sided juice maker thought:  who tosses out the rind?

“Who travels across the world to find the perfect place and then discovers that the journey is the answer?  That is like going into your empty refrigerator and finding out that the emptiness is what fills your stomach, not the food that left that refriger-empti-spacinator.”  That would be the empty spot that used to hold food.  K-Box is a mystery, what can I tell ya?

So what are you going to do K-Box?  Now that you are here?  What are you going to do?  For the next few minutes?  The next few hours?  The next few days?  Do you have days left?  Will you –gulp!– before that?  You know?  How long will it take?

“I’ve got a lovely bunch of though-ti-ti-thoughts.  Here they are a standing in a row.  Big ones, long ones, some as loud as a megaphoned-maginfied airplane engine explosion festival.”  Explosion happening after the revving, of course.  “So now, Faith, where are you?  Where are you to send me words of comfort?  Where are you to stomp my predicament into a cloying coy little knot-song?  No where.”

She’s right.  No one is coming.

And so K-Box, she sings, she dances, she leans, she falls, and that is how K-Box came to an end.  Bloody mess the whole way down.

Yet with every ending, there is a beginning, and, somewhere in-between, a big fat middle.

Row, row, row the boat, gently down the ravine…

Sam, oh, so cute, there he is, shaking in his boots.  Afraid of the BIG TALK.  But Faith and I are on the case.  We’re there to help.  She and I are ready to go.  At the gate.  There for him.  That is, in case you DIDN’T GET IT YET, we’re there to HELP SAM because HE IS NERVOUS.  I think we’re all on the same page.  We all understand that Sam, standing outside of the door, ready to go in, have the talk, is nervous and Faith and I are there to help him.  He’s holding a book.  I didn’t mention that.  Inside that book are some notes.  I don’t think he needs them, but that is why Faith and I are there for him.  The book, a sign of his nervousness, has to be taken away in order to eradicate his nervousness.  Because one of the tips I will give him is that if you don’t look nervous then you won’t feel nervous, and Faith and I are here, as I said, to help him, so why not go forth and give him that advice when the time is right, right?  So, Faith and I are right there, right at the moment, right beginning getting ready to do the one thing and the one thing only that I wanted to say in one sentence, so here I am saying over and over and over and over and over again in a hundred different ways: Faith and I are going to help the nervous Sam get in there and give the BIG TALK.

So, you’ll understand me now when I say:

“Just go in there,”

Telling you that:

Faith said that.

Or:

“Listen to yourself.”

Telling you that:

I said that.

Or:

“Shut up.”

“I’ll say what I want.”

“Shut up.”

“Fuck me.

And you are ok with either:

a) Faith doing the shut-up character

Or:

b) Me doing it

…knowing that Faith and I are there to help Sam, and each (Faith or I) is just as likely to say “fuck me” as the other.  You are, like, totally comfortable with this idea by now enough so that and such that you understand what quotation marks are and you can guess where they are going and who is saying what. 

We are HERE TO HELP SAM because HE IS NERVOUS and now EVERYTHING YOU SEE THAT FOLLOWS is THAT ADVICE.

I should let you know that because I set you up so absurdly blatantly obviously disdainfully, you should expect that I will intentionally confuse you a bit by not following WITH the advice MENTIONED ABOVE.  In fact, I am doing so right now (or not doing so, depending upon how you look at things–sideways or upright glass and all), and I don’t know why you didn’t expect this, because what are expectations but things to be manipulated, because fulfilling expectations is what you do to BUILD TRUST IN REAL RELATIONSHIPS, but with an audience of people who are there to be entertained, you gotta surprise them, it being so much like a roller coaster. So, be on the look out for the advice to not pertain to Sam, but to you, or no one, or your dog, or the sun, or humanity, or prepare yourself for there to be no advice at all.  Prepare for everything, including all the advice appearing in a subsequent post a year from now.

I offer Sam this advice:  “Sam, here’s what is going to help you.  When you go to give the Talk, you will find that your audience won’t understand you.  Some will tell you that is just human nature.  It isn’t.  So go in there and talk idiotically.  Say something like:

“‘Happiness is freedom.  Freedom is happiness.  If you are happy, you are free.  If you are free, you are happy.  We’re talking about happiness and freedom.  Both of them.  Both of them separately and together.  Because being together is what you need separately and what we need together.’

“Repeat yourself over and over and over again using the same words the same words the same words, so that you will be, at the very least, understood, and they will shake your hand, and they will pat your back, and they will be happy to have met you, because they all understand the idea that something about happiness and freedom was talked about and thanks for that because they can use the words happiness and freedom in a sentence too.”

Faith says:  “The most important thing to do is just not do it.  And I don’t mean to not do it in the metaphorical sense that by not TRYING TO DO IT you actually DO IT BETTER because we all WE ALL love PLENTIFUL CUTE IRONY.”

Oh Lord.  Faith.  Oh Lord.  How do you explain this?

Sam goes in the room suddenly.  Faith and I are surprised by this.  It was sudden.  No more advice.  So little time.

Yet explain.  Explain.  What has he done wrong?  Should he not be in there?  Explain.  WE WE WE WANT TO KNOW!

Sam is in there giving THE TALK.  Explaining HIMSELF.  It came to a HEAD.  He is SHARE(ING).

I say to Faith:  “Not so nice to leave people confused.”

Faith:  “People live in the world they perceive.”

I would make the argument that it is nice to be helpful.

Faith:  “Like anyone is ever going to notice.”

Sam returns.  “It went great.  They really understood me.”

Well, fuck me. 

“What DID YOU SAY IN THERE?”

Sam smiles.  He nods.  He paces.  He wanders.  He pauses.  He watches.  He smirks.  He stops.  He jumps (tiny-like).  He sighs.  He stops again.  He looks ready.  He says, “I told them ‘black bar bad and think about it.’”

Shaking of heads all around.  The three of us.  Sam, Faith, and I.

Black bar bad and think about it.

(The double-you at the beginning of the ‘what’ up there was part of a ‘was’ and the ‘hat’ in ‘what’ from ‘that.’  So the loss of that ‘t’, and a Franken’what’.)

One finds oneself knocking at the door of discovery every time the mind runs loose.  Or:  One finds oneself begging at that door every time the mind is a caboose.  Or:  Perhaps not.

Faith, Sam, K-Box, some grey-hair named Gravy-Cup, and I stand in front of a monk who keeps saying, “No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.”  Sets of four.  Light.  Somber.  Angry.  Calm.  Light.  Somber.  Angry.  Calm.  No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.  Sam and K-Box bow repeatedly.  Faith looks at the walls of the temple we are standing in.  Gravy-Cup looks like a-sleep a-sheep a-nose a-pose.  The air of the temple smells like decadent plug-in air freshener mixed with rotting plants.  My shoes have holes in them. 

I ask Gravy-Cup, “Who are you?”

Gravy-Cup is awake.  “Me?  Oh, young man, my name is Bertus, but my friends call me Gravy-Cup.”

“Why do they do that?”

No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.  No bowing.  Light.  Somber.  Angry.  Calm.

Something grabs Gravy-Cup’s attention, and he wanders away. Probably looking for a chair. 

The no-bowing series is getting to me.  I grab K-Box and Sam by their arms and lift them up.  (“Listen.  Listen.  Listen.  Listen.”)  They look at each other.  That is, until the droning no-bowing halts, and the monk smiles.

Faith tells me what I wish he had said:  “Take a little frame.  Put within it a moment of hope or regret.  Look at it.  Now stop looking at it.  There you have it.”

Because with a whisper of mystery, your sunshine is teased.  Free.

Faith is wise.  “So be it,” she says.  “So be it.”

“So, the first lesson for you today, man-in-training,” Faith begins, “is how to keep people from being angry with you.”

We are standing in the middle of the desert.

“Let’s pretend, dearest skinny one, that no one, at this moment, is angry with you.  Let’s pretend, as I tip toe away, that I am happy with you.  Let’s pretend that you are in good standing with the entire world, and you are left in the desert by yourself.”

I know her lesson.

“You see,” she continues, “even then, you have no control over whether or not someone is angry with you.  They might discover that you are missing, and be angry with you about THAT.”

I know her lesson.

“The point is, you are in the best position to manage that anger, by manipulating that image.”

You are not you and all that.

“By lying to them.”

Yadda yadda yadda.

“About your anger.”

I’m not hearing you.

SLAP!  To my face.

“Tell that to your fucking morality!”

SLAP!

“Say it!”

I really don’t know what she is talking about, but I can tell she is angry with me, so I feel like saying something, because she is making it so clear.

“Say it!”

Ok.  I say, “Anger is their issue.”

“Wrong!”

I say, “Just because I do something, doesn’t mean I deserve it.”

“No!”

I say, “Better to be patient with the–”

“No way!”

I stop.

“The lesson you must learn is that there is no such thing as someone being angry with you.”

Because the moment I think it…

…it is there to be seen.

“Up in the cabesa or whatever–your head-space.”

So if I write it down, I’ll believe it.

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…”

So help me God, if I don’t get what I want–

“So then, again, you follow your own rules, sir, or why bother?”

What am I afraid of?

“I know, I know,” she is jumping up-and-down, “you’re afraid of them being angry with you.”

Hence the desert.

“Forget it.  Even if you were a softy, softy, you still couldn’t avoid it.  NO ONE avoids the DEMON THOUGHT!”

Not exactly demon thought.

“Not exactly DEMON THOUGHT!”

“Faith, do you know why I like you?”

She does not deign to answer, but does delight to smile.

“You smell like anger all the time.”

She smiles.  “You’re horny.”

Sucks.

But, seriously, the nicest person in the world offends MILLIONS!

“And if you hate me because I don’t love you, I’m sorry for you, but we should have dinner.”

If you hate me, let’s have dinner.

But why not say, “That’s ok.  Because it’s all my game.”

All, everything, mind tricks.

Like stop forcing people who hate you to have dinner with you.

“Like stop forcing people who hate you to have dinner with you.”

As if, what will happen, is a miracle.

“Pokadots.”

She’s extremely _______–all tied up like that.  Sitting in a wooden chair.  Hands tied together, and tied, longingly, to the middle spindle.  Legs roped against the front legs.  Upper thighs duct taped to the seat of the chair.  Neck pulled to the top rail by a spiked collar with leash attached.  Chest fasted to the back of the chair by an anchor chain.  Her ears fastened to two sleeping hamsters resting on the floor to the left and right of her chair.  Feet pasted to the floor with Elmer’s glue.  All that is free is her jaw and her tongue.  In one word:  she is not going anywhere.

I look at her, and she looks at me, and I hope it is enough.  But it’s not.  She makes me feel so guilty all the time.  Like binding an imaginary dream woman who I am told says cruel things to me is wrong. 

“I woke up to someone snorting the pledge of allegiance as if it were a cure to cancer,” I say smartly. “The words freedom and liberty are in a playpen smoking Queen-Anne’s Lace.  A title, called Former Love, unites the heavenly people listening and watching, and the ever-non-cynical-tip-toeing-livers do what they do and die black, sad, deaths.  This, you understand, is my justification for you being there.”

She offers nothing.

“And therefore, the question on the table is whether or not I love you.  The question there asked now lies–there.  For showing me THAT.”

It is true what I said about the pledge.  I heard it.  Some woman called it like Baptist-calling-Jesus-of-the-Black-caller-inspired-vociferous-type.  “I pledge allegiance..” with an especially hard hit, “…with liberty and justice for all!”  So I tied Faith up.  You see, such grandiosity cannot be but revenged.  Someone must suffer for the sins of the sisters.  So Faith there.

“So the question, as I said, is whether or not I love you.  If you walked like sunlight from my translucent male skin, which you did, and took all the dreams I had of ever being you with you as you wander the streets and say everything I wish I could say, which you do all the time, and will came and will went and will stood and will watched, then how do I know if I love you if not because I simply need someone to envy?”

Faith is silent.  She will not beg to be let go.  And any word–ANY WORD–would be begging.  She will sit there for a hundred years.  A million.  And never speak.  I will feel guilty, and I will let her go, and she will walk away without saying a word.  And she’ll ignore me–FOREVER.  So, I’ll have to pretend it never happened, which, to the man who ties up women and makes them do whatever he wants, should be a great thing, but we all know, yes we do, that the conscience nicks a bit every now and then at the soul, especially for things like this, so I will, oh so badly, want her to talk about it, to admit it, to share it, to blame me, to convict me, slander me, belittle me, hurt me, beat me, lock me up, something, anything, just so she acknowledges that I tied her up in a chair like this, THAT AT LEAST I HAVE POWER OVER MY MANLY IMAGINATION, that I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I DID tie her up, and she DID hate it, and it DID happen.

“Don’t wake up the hamsters with all that thinking.”

I fling my head about, and stare at her profusely.  She has her eyes closed.  She is napping. 

“It is a simple nature, that of the dog,” she sniggers. 

If she’s not careful, I will wake up the hamsters.

“If you’re not careful, the hamsters will wake and free me.”  Now divinely serious.

The hamsters wake.  They stretch.  They yawn.  They analyze.  They plan.  They climb up the string that holds them to Faith’s ear lobes and free her ear lobes.  Then working together, they take off the collar.  The leash and collar fall to the ground; on the way, the spikes from the collar cut the rope binding Faith’s hands to the middle spindle.  By this time, the hamsters have gnawed through the linked links of the anchor chain, which falls softly to the ground.  Then, amazingly, they split up:  one hamster licks the glue off of Faith’s feet; the other unties the rope binding her legs.  Faith smiles at the hamsters.  Then she looks at me (as the hamsters release the duct tape), and stands and walks away.

I keep watching the black distance as if there is something to learn from it.  But all that is left is my emptiness.

You see, that is why you can’t be nice to women.

Sam, excited, shows up at the CORPORATE HOME BASE of the educational exploitation company that he has been working for for some years.  Today is BE A MANAGEMENT BOSS DAY, and Sam couldn’t be happier.  Corporate is on the twelfth floor of a large building, and he has to show his ID in order to get a picture of himself on a sticker that he has to put on his chest.  The elevators have music and tiny TVs.  Sam is wearing a tie.  The carpet smells clean.  The doors to the office on the twelfth floor are also locked, and a cute little secretary has to buzz him in.  He has to sign in again.  He has to wait.  Security is good here.  People are walking down hallways carrying paper.  Work is being done.  Work he shall manage.

He waits.  The waiting-sofa is comfortable.  The coffee-waiting-empty-table is clean.  Sam pulls a magazine from his briefcase and reads.  Twenty minutes pass.  He worries.  Is he supposed to be here?  Did someone forget him?  One secretary is twirling her hair and staring at her computer screen.  The other is talking on her cell phone.  Sam decides against asking them why things are taking so long.

Half an hour passes.  Sam worries.  If someone he knows sees him there, he will have been caught waiting.  But if no one sees him, the secretaries will know he has been forgotten.  They will know he is purposeless and unnecessary.  Yet, if someone does find him, they will have shown that he is purposeless and unnecessary.  He turns his eyes down.

After forty-five minutes, Sam has to urinate.  Sam approaches the desk, and the hair-twirler gives him directions to the bathroom and the three-digit code he needs to open the door.  Sam is somewhat calmed by the additional security.  The code works.  Sam enters the bathroom and urinates without splashing by pointing the urine stream above the level of the toilet-water-line.  He washes his hands, and appreciates the hand drier and the soap.  He has to be buzzed into the office again.  He returns to his sofa, and reads his magazine again.  He has been there an hour, and when he finishes his magazine, two hours have passed.  His embarrassment has calmed somewhat.  Since no one has asked him what he is doing there, he settles in. 

Another hour passes.  Sam is bored.  Emboldened by his boredom, he strikes up a conversation with the hair-twirler.  She tells him that there is a room with coffee and tea and donuts and bagels and fruit over down the hallway there.  Sam smiles.  “Oh, that sounds nice,” he says, “do you mind watching my coat and briefcase, and if anyone needs me, just tell them where I am.  Name is Sam.”  The hair-twirler nods and returns to her screen.  Sam wanders into the room with tables and coffee and bagels and donuts.  He has some coffee.  He has a sesame bagel with cream cheese.  Toasted.  He makes eye contact with people who make eye contact, and laughs to himself when people who enter for a bagel make a joke or talk about a television show he is somewhat familiar with.  Finding the environment pleasant, and a large round table with many hard chairs preferable to a large round table with one soft sofa, Sam moves his jacket and briefcase to the coffee-donut-bagel-tea-water-talking-lunch-bag room, and settles in.  He did not tell the secretaries where he was going, but he does not care.

Hours pass.  People nod at him when they enter, and nod at him when they leave.  Sam has a strong desire to check his email, so he leaves his briefcase and coat, and looks for an empty computer.  To his surprise, there are rows and rows of empty desks with computers sitting idly.  He returns to get his briefcase and coat, and he finds Faith sitting at his table.

“Sam, what are you doing?”

Sam does not answer.

“Sam, let’s go.”

Sam sits in his chair with a thump.

“Faith, I don’t want to go.  I am supposed to be a manager today.  I haven’t even started.”

Faith smiles.  “But, Sam, you’re almost done!  The only thing you have left to do is to feel self-aggrandizing and to do something that proves it.”

Sam hears Faith.  He takes in a breath.  He leaves his rib cage hanging when he lets out that breath.  He feels large.  Important.  In charge.

“Now, find something to be in charge of.”

Sam looks around the room, he sees the bagels and decides that he is charge of keeping the bagels organized.  He walks over to the bagels.  He organizes them.  He decides that the cream cheese should not have flecks of bagel in it, so he picks out each fleck.  He decides that this policy should be implemented corporation-wide, so he finds a computer and sends an email to all district-regional-national-local managers telling them to communicate to all their education-exploitation-ground-force workers the new bagel organization policy.  He is pleased when he finds that he has received his own email from his own district-regional-national-local manager.  He returns to Faith. 

Faith:  “How do you feel?”

Sam:  “Like I could go home, take off my tie, and have a WIFE.”

Faith:  “What have you done?”

Sam:  “So much that it will require a committee of three to tell the tale.”

Faith:  “And tomorrow?”

Sam:  “What is a tomorrow?”

Faith smiles at Sam.  She pats him on the back. 

Sam smiles the only way that Sam can–broadly.

(Though secretly, as he exits the building, he thinks people are trying to take his job away from him.  He probably should have managed the font color, time-idioms, and hallway-passing policies.)

K-Box:  “Some people are just not worth using.”  She’s sad.

“Cheer up kid,” I say as K-Box hovers over the coyote-eaten body of her lover, “it is not as if you will be blind your entire life.”

“Big eyes are winnin’ these days,” Faith chimes.  Faith is here too, and she is not sympathetic.  Hoo hoo.

K-Box sees the weimaraner puppy that is with us sniffing the body and shouts (while lunging):  “Get away from that body you mutt!”  The dog darts away.

Faith and I know what need not be said.  We don’t say it.  K-Box doesn’t notice.

The sun is out.  We’re in the desert.  We are assembled, K-Box, the weimaraner, Faith, and I.  Someone other than I should have brought water.  I’m just saying.

The dog is circling the body looking for an opening in K-Box’s defense.  K-Box loses focus and turns back to us.  “But, how was I supposed to know?”

Faith offers, “TBT.”

“What is that?”  K-Box asks.

“If I told you, then everyone would know.” Faith barks.

I’m really upset by this.  If secrets are to be deduced, then what point is there in making a secret of the method?  Locking the combo in the safe.  Just saying.

I’m obviously annoyed:  “WELL, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THE DEAD BODY?  WE CANNOT LEAVE IT LYING THERE.  WE ARE IN REAL TROUBLE.  THE DEAD BODY IS LYING THERE AND WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING WITH IT!”

K-Box seems bored.  Faith is on the phone.  The dog is asleep on the body’s stomach.  K-Box wanders over to me.

“Seriously, Robert, what is TBT?”

I think if no one is going to do it, I’ll do it, so I maneuver the body north towards the north pole.  I have a gruff and muscled voice now that I’m working. I respond to K-Box:

“TBT is a film that you watch when you listen.  The film is what is underneath every consonant in a person’s voice, every flicker of a facial tick, every word left out, every breath not taken, every subtle little human utterance in body, mind, and soul.  You need only notice how a new player was mentioned just a little too hurriedly or a detail left out a little too long–”

Faith chimes in.  “But it is much more subtle than you think.  It is often your subconscious that sees the film.  It is your primal self.  You know and see immediately what your conscious mind does not want to admit.”

I finish, smartly, “It is why we say, ‘I should have known.’”

K-Box stares at me.  The dog is ahead of us trotting jauntily.  The sun does not seem impressed.  Nor the body.  The theory is a sham.  All theories are, in a way.

“You should have known,” Faith says.

K-Box:  “I did.  When I asked him for it, he said something weird.  Like he was hiding something.”

I drop the legs of the body I am pulling for a moment to catch my breath.  Faith takes up the legs again, and drags the body.  I’d prefer if both the body and I got some rest.  You know.  Just saying. 

“And now he’s dead, and he’s not hiding anything,” I say.

One:  dogs don’t drag dead bodies unless they’re nuts.  Two:  connections drop all the time, but only every so often.  Three:  everyone hides things, so you don’t need to worry about that.  What you have to worry about is the nature of the secret.  Like the three of us.  We’ll always have this secret of dragging a dead body across the desert.  Or four, if you count the dog.

K-Box says, “So, that’s TBT.”

Faith:  “No.  It’s not.  TBT is the method whereby you find out the nature of a person’s secrets through persistent silence and properly placed utterances.  It is the way you can see the color of things a person is hiding.  It could have prevented this.”  Faith points to the puppy eating the foot of the dead boyfriend.  That does not happen in real life.  Puppies are sensitive to the feelings of human beings.  Just ask one.

K-Box does not yell at the dog this time.  The dog, therefore, moves away.  K-Box wants to know the TBT method.  She says so:  “What is it?  How do you do it?”

I say:  “You say something really…”

I am standing, I suppose, on the edge of a graham cracker, looking down into a pile of mold.  There are thirteen unlucky fairies buzzing around my head, and it takes all my will power not to swat them like flies.  My shoes are tiny crinolines, which do not hold up well in rain.  One tooth on the left side of my mouth feels dirtier than the rest, and my tongue keeps reaching up and back to feel the source of the grime.  My rib cage is slightly lower than yours.  Two Sundays from last, I made the acquaintance of a peppercheck, a dolphin, and a tudarachimey, but I have since forgotten their names and lost their phone numbers.

I’ve asked the thirteen fairies to carry mirrors so that I could see myself at all times.  The fairies keep falling down.  The mirrors crash and tear their mini girl bodies into a tiny bloody mish mash, but the fairies reassemble themselves and the mirrors and fly back up to provide me with endless self-reflection.  Something above me cries my name, and I realize it is procrastination, telling me, “Now now now now now now now now.”  I try to eat the graham cracker I am standing on, but I am unsuccessful:  every time I move my feet, the cracker underfoot moves too.  I sing a lullaby to the fairies, and they all swoon and crash to the ground.  You don’t want to see brutalized, crushed fairies, so they are all alive, lying on their mirrors.  Some swim in their reflection. Some kiss their own fairy lips.  Some try and smash their mirror, but, you don’t want to see bleeding fairy hands, so the mirrors are unbreakable.  But not their little fairy fists.

Screaming.  Singing such songs.  Simply.  None of it stops the incessant buzzing.  Yet, invite it in for tea and listen to its tale, and you’ll find the buzzing is not that buzzing bad.

Hopefully, Faith didn’t hear that.  She only understands two questions:  Do you know where the other thing is? and Are you aware that you are full of shit?

Yes, I’m glad that Faith isn’t here.  You see, I have come here to this moment to say, “Love never comes at the right time,” and I know she’d roll her eyes or pat me on the back or say something mean.  I’d be mushy mushy like the fairies.

Then she appears!

Just kidding.

It is times like these when I say, “Well, I didn’t do this, but I did do THIS.”  Just like when I say, “Love never comes at the right time, you try so hard to fit it here, move it there, take it there, or even, oh my God, push it away away away, but, la la la la la la, love it comes when it comes,” when I mean, “wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, oh, my word, wait a minute!”

Kind of like Faith.

Just kidding.

One other thing.  “That is like everything else.”

And another.  “Wait and see.”

One more.  “If you don’t know which path to take, walk with someone.”

I realize that if I want to eat that cracker, I’m going to have to eat my foot.  Isn’t that just SICK?

A doo do doo.  They are dancing.  A woo wo woo.  All the time.  Faith and the crew.  Oh, I’m sorry, Faith and the Crew are dancing the wild willy.  Yes, they took off their clothes, and, yes, gave up their beliefs.  So the wild willy goes.  Faith does not lead, for the dance calls for followers.  Faith without leading is naked Faith double-folded.

One, two, three, they all fall, like snakes, into a bucket lying on the floor.  Chopped in half.  Naked halves bleeding in circles.

You think that kind of thing is gross, but somewhere in the world right now are piles of murdered bodies.  Many places in fact.  Faith dances on their bodies, but does not dare speak out.