Sequence

1. HELL You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down, the infernal hatreds. Shoot them. Shoot them where they live and then skip town. Or stay and re-engineer the decrepit social contraption to distill the 200-proof elixir of fear and torture the...the what from the what? And didn’t I promise, under threat of self-intubation, not to envision this corridor, coal-tar black, that narrows down and in to a shattering claustrophobia attack before opening out to the lake of frozen shit where the gruesome figure is discerned? Turn around, go home. Just to look at it is to become it. 2. PURGATORY, THE FILM He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know. She was the second born of a set of estranged identical twins. They met, hooked up, and moved in with her mother, who managed a motel on Skyline Drive. But always it was the other, the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined in the shadow of the “Vacancy” sign or watching through the window below the dripping eaves while they made love or slept. The body is relaxed and at rest, the mind is relaxed in its nest, so the self that is and is not itself rises and leaves to peek over the horizon, where it sees all its psychokinetic possibilities resolving into shapely fictions. She was brave, nurturing, kind. She was evil. She was out of her mind. She was a junkie trading sex for a fix, a chief executive, an aviatrix. She was an angel to the blinded and the lamed, the less-than-upright, the infra dig. And she was even a failure. She went to L.A. to make it big and crept back home injured and ashamed. 3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL They put him in jail, why we don’t know. They stamped him “Postponed.” But he didn’t mind. The screws were almost kind. He had leisure to get his muscles toned, mental space to regret his crimes, and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates he was free to remember the beauty that not once but a thousand times escaped him forever, and escapes me, too: ghosts of a mist drifting across the face of the stars, Jupiter triangulating with the crescent moon and Mars, prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew... 4. HEAVEN There’s drought on the mountain. Wildfires scour the hills. So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills searching for the fountain, which it finds, believe it or not, or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver rises from an underground river and makes a few of the hot rocks steam and the pebbles hiss. Soon the mammal will drink, but it has first to stop and think its reflexive, impeccable thought: that thinking comes down to this— mystery, longing, thirst.