wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

Not Clouds

The house is flooding is the indication I get from the man outside running emergency loops in the intersection, where drunk van drivers, notably friend William, are sliding in the fresh snow. Nothing stops at a time like this. There is a moment in which things can be rescued, but it is the same moment in which things must be left behind, and that moment

almost passed before I managed to undo my belt, and did pass before I noticed her standing in the corner, watching my boxers fill with cigarettes, shoes, a wallet and a raincoat. "You may not watch me

undress," I said, unable, for the moment, to be politely embarrassed, under the circumstances.

She accepts and signs for a delivery, examines the receipt, and complains about the price. Always.

The waves gobble up the stilts beneath the house. We will soon be inundated. I'm afraid. Moments before, I had seen them coming from the deck, but had thought they were clouds rolling, my own clouds even, from the smoke. That's how I get here, on the roof near a car, a truck and the running man.

I ask friend William to slow down. He points to the man. He points to

I decide to start the car myself, to get out of the honking truck's way, and to leave before things get worse. Things are about to get worse. The common complaint I hear is: "There are not enough cues." I left her behind, partially for that reason. Things were about to get worse.

The man interrupts his loops to flash me

a lighted OPEN sign, indicating passable roads and a feeling of safety, endless and thick.

I loop the sign, a message

I loop the message, a sign, over my head and

over my head and head

10.

and head for

11.

the passage.

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

-- H. Melville, "Moby Dick"