Day Two

I slept somewhere between morning and a couchsurfing Canadian filmmaker’s loud living room departure. This morning a phone call and then a cab ride and then I was gone. I left the dirty city and all the smells and the bats and the smears of dog shit and arrived at a castle by the sea. A topless shaman met me in the tower and we sat there, my eyes spilling open and his feeding my heart.

He made me tea. He was an illegal squatter. He found me a savior. We drove and did errands, I was happy just to be in his presence. Few are like this, men whose eyes beg you not to lie, beg you to unearth that which was buried and singeing your chest. He asked for orange juice and I got him some, and he flagged me a cab and then he was gone, or I was, and it never happened, the exit to Brazil and South Africa and every other city where the ocean forces you to love something, even a stranger in a nearby tower.

And then the second. And the words. And one minute’s confusion becomes another minute’s clarity and the only answer is to sleep, long and hard, until the dreams untwist the knots that other people tie behind your back when you least expect it. And the knots you tie around your own self, in front of your own eyes, without a peep of protest.

I bled myself of demons in my dreams.

And then poof. Awake. And then lunch. A salad. Alone with the textbook. Alone in the city in all forms and all places and alone, far, not just miles but thousands of miles, from home. This is real alone, the kind when you knock on the door of your self, you hear echoes. From this far away it is murder to avoid yourself. From this far away the you is forced, shoved, re-adhered inside because otherwise you could be swept away by any number of shamans, faux messiahs, new refugee lovers.

And my class. It was exquisite. To teach is to perform and they have all seen things far beyond my imagining, slaughter, to be precise, murder and slaughter and blatant human beings behaving like wild animals, only animals with their hearts cut out.

My students. They were brighter and more focused than any classroom I have ever taught, stomaching worse than the worst. And I was at peace, finally, for those two hours, exploding grammar into weird physics lessons and odd explanations of words through cooking and marriage analogies.

I am possessed when I teach. I leave the room and enter my head and strings are grabbed from every field I ever wandered, tightened at the middle and spewed back at the pupils. I want them to learn more than they know. For them to learn is for me to re-adhere.

This is the goal now: to reverse the ungluing. I drew pictures at a white island sushi stand in the middle of a boulevard, watched a man drop a snake down the subway drain, and still another get chased by the police. I saw a fourth get his head shaved in a parking lot and a fifth shove his tongue down his girlfriend’s throat. As dead as one might feel in the process of coming back inside, something seethes around me without my permission. I am alive, whether I like it or not.