Film

I have a friend who films the parts of her life that no one sees. She films her bus rides to work. She films her naps and her trips to the grocery store. When she has a cigarette on the fire escape, she films her slice of skyline and the moment’s particular light. The only exception: she doesn’t film herself on the toilet. She’s a modest girl, my friend.

She says it’s because when she meets the man she’s destined to meet, she’ll want to share her entire life.

So every day she watches her co-commuters in a four-inch digital display. She eats lunch on the fountain in the park, her bag and jacket to one side, camera on the other. Walking down the street, she has problems with depth perception, and stops short when she doesn’t need to.

I tell her look, nobody’s ever going to watch all that. It’s boring. Nothing happens.

But if he watches it, she says, I’ll know he really knows me.

One day she met a guy who films his own unseen life. I’ve called her a few times since then, but she never picks up. I heard she quit her job, and nobody I know has seen her. I imagine she’s at home, alone, taking notes on his subway rides, memorizing the seven ways he can walk to work.

It’s been a few months, but I know she’ll call. We’re old friends, and in my head I’ve got a hundred of pieces of her life that she won’t remember. We’ll go out, she’ll bring her new boyfriend and we’ll laugh over old stories, even though they’re boring, and nothing really happens.

Stray

They live in a museum, their studio a converted storage closet with a double bed, microwave, hotplate and refrigerator. The bathroom and shower are on the third floor, past the Juan Boza gallery. Life there is not comfortable, but it’s cheap, and at night they can roam the darkened galleries, drunk among flag-sized canvases of political fables, a three-foot wooden sculpture of a kneeling woman with a shock of real human dreadlocks and, in the gallery closest to their room, a lone Kandinsky in blues and greens, a woman with insect wings dropping down on an unassuming man in a brown bowler.

Katie imagines the bedroom as a tipped-over cardboard box. Three dark walls are spotted with mold, the ceiling sags and the floor is overlaid by a brown mat carpet that squishes underfoot. But the fourth wall is a floor-to-ceiling sheet of plexiglass, and pulling the shade up is like opening a giant eye over New York Harbor.

Below, sailboats and harbor cops, cruiseliners, the Staten Island ferry, catamarans, garbage scows, barges and freighters, the waterway traffic even at four am crawling like cockroaches in an alley. The Statue of Liberty stands like a green dwarf before the slab faces of Wall Street. Seagulls, sky, the Verrazano and the glowing minarets of Jersey City spewing black magic, incinerators stretching their infernal fingers over the flickering face of the water.

She stands staring out the window, dressed for the club, but not wearing the proper expression. Black water drips from her eyes. Gray cheeks flank red lips. Her heels are red patent leather.

At her feet, Remy sleeps like a puddle of cognac, the muscles in his butt twitching as he dreams of bearkilling. With his stress-free life and relatively low levels of alcohol consumption, the pit bull is the healthiest of the closet’s occupants.

“That was always the deal,” she repeats. “I’m free to see whoever I want. We’re both completely free.”

Clay glances up, then returns his concentration to the scotch in his lap. He sits cross-legged on the bed, and the glass shapes his hands into a perfect circle. A single malt yogi in boozy meditation, made holy by virtue of the fire that softens and helps him to accept.

His response—“I don’t want to be free”—goes unspoken.

Katie arranges the silver bangles which slid up her arms when she covered her face with her hands. Retrieves her drink. Washes out her mouth, crushes the last slivers of ice as her eyes move over the river. When she turns back it is without passion, without fire to color her vision, to make things shimmer and live. Not even the predatory look she sometimes gets during fights or sex.

He fears the orderliness of her thoughts. The efficiency with which she weighs her options. The terrible clarity with which she must see him.

“Do whatever you want,” he tells her. “I don’t care.” Four fingers of scotch, no ice. His only remaining method of attack. To make himself so pathetic that to leave him would be an act of murder. “What is freedom, anyways?” he slurs. “Huh? And how many dicks do you have to get stuck in you before you’re free?”

She’s not shocked. They’ve almost finished the bottle; the malice is right on time.

*

Katie’s job is to take out young lawyers, eat lobster and drink champagne, watch Yankees games from a club box, attend cocktail parties uptown and generally be attractive.

Sometimes she’ll date them, most of the time not. But eventually she finds one she likes.

“He makes me feel things I haven’t felt in a long time,” she tells Clay. “He took me to a protest this weekend, and we’re going to a town hall meeting in Hoboken on Tuesday night. You should meet him. You’d like him.”

She goes out, and he stays in bed reading, shooting tequila and chewing on the same half lemon until his teeth ache. In the silence he considers breaking out the wall of windows, standing on the ledge, eyes all full of water and air, the lights of the city winking from the black and broken bay.

She doesn’t come home that night, or the next day, or the next night. Monday night she calls. “I’m at Mark’s place. I didn’t want you to worry.”

When she returns, she is wearing new clothes, smoking Marlboros and talking about the ballet. He sees himself next to her. Decrepit, a drain. He fills himself with bourbon to simulate verve, wants to speak, preferably to say something shrewd, passionate. But there is nothing inside him except drear and Old Crow.

“You should go out. Meet people.”

“I know people. I don’t like them.”

“Mark is taking me to dinner tonight.”

“Golddigger.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Are you coming home?”
“We’ll see.”

Mark takes her to nice restaurants, brings her gifts, pays her compliments. He is funny, he is handsome. He is going to The Hague to defend Ecuador in a dispute with the United States. He talks about the promise of socialism, drinks two glasses of wine with dinner and always drives her home.

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“What about me?”

“Of course I love you.” She presses her cheek to his. Even while he thinks she’s doing it to hide her eyes, he falls into a painless sleep.

*

The paved world is too hot by early June. The first fringe of wet heat is already soaking into the air, up pant legs and dresses, radiating from the pavement, muscular and foul as a tongue.

Just east of the Verrazano, though, there is a point where the sea wind, funneled between Staten Island and Brooklyn, is pushed back by the river’s exhalation of city air. Here, salt wind whips off the thick seeping. This is Remy’s place of recovery. Between the strip of cement devoted to pedestrians and the strip of pavement for bicyclists, a strip of grass for dogs and pigeons, pigeon shit and potato chip bags.

Remy off-leash would chase off the pigeons, roll in the shit, then bark at the foil wrappers. If he must be tied up, he best likes to stand on the stone wall to look towards the sea. He doesn’t track the freighters or sniff the wind, doesn’t lunge at passing gulls. Whatever he dreams about the sea, it draws off his mind but brings him no peace. For a half hour at a stretch he stands taut, expectant, wary.

His humans are quiet here, too. Or when they talk it is not the kind of sound that offends the ear.

“My check-up is on Thursday.” Behind black glasses, her eyes could be unguarded.

“I know. I already took off work.”

“You don’t have to come.” Katie glances out at the ocean, up at the sky, at Remy, then at Clay, who is staring back at her.

“I like your dress,” he tells her. “You look good in blue.”

“Thanks.”

“Did Mark get it for you?”

“Yes.”

“It suits you.”

“Thanks.”

They stand for a while, still as Remy, staring into the sea wind. It is almost noon, the sun throbs, the pescaderos are packing up their tackle boxes. They’ll return after their siesta, closer to dusk when the fish have also napped. The joggers and bicyclists, rollerbladers and powerwalkers are gone. Katie’s hair dances.

“Are you scared?”

“No,” she says. “No more than usual. You? Have you heard anything?”

“Not yet. Maybe they forgot about me.”

“Maybe the war will end before your deferment does.”

“Hm.”

“I still don’t see why you don’t just go back to school. Get a masters in something or other. So what if you have to take out a hundred grand? It’s better than the alternative.”

“Hm.” He looks up to the sky. A gull stretches its wings against the wind, hovering, motionless but striving to make some progress until eventually it wheels like a white kite circling back towards the city. “Sometimes I think I want to go. To see it, you know. If I live, my debts are clear. I’d be free. I could come back and write about it. And if I die, I don’t know. That’s their problem.”

She watches to see if he’s cleaning his thumbnails or staring too earnestly into her face. No. He’s leaning loose against the wall, legs splayed out. His face is relaxed, rather than slack with booze, and cocked to catch the sun.

The minutes pass, and bring with them no particular revelation. “I don’t see how anyone loves anything anymore,” he says. The lack of bitterness in his voice alarms her.

She breathes his despair, recycles it into measured words. “After the second time, I hated my body. Hated the stomach that tried twice to kill me, hated my legs as they shriveled up under the covers, hated my back for aching all day. I hated my scars for healing halfway. I hated my heart because it wouldn’t stop beating. But I never hated life. I cursed it, despaired of it, and I feared nothing more than losing it. Every part of my body wants to live. Don’t you feel that? Do you not love it? Do you not love being alive?”

“This isn’t living. Working all day so we can buy things? That’s not life.”

“What do you want then?”

“I don’t know. Revolt.”

“Why don’t you come with me to law school? There are people who are fighting, Clay. Just because it’s not with bombs and guns doesn’t mean there’s not a war going on. There are armies of people who feel like we do. Human rights, civil rights, labor rights. Economic reform, government reform. Corporate responsibility. Consumer protection. There are fights over fair trade agreements, intellectual property laws, technology transfer, food security. Don’t just sit here rotting. It’s not doing anyone any good. Especially you.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So I don’t feel anything. Anything except disgust, anyways. I don’t want to fight those people. I don’t want anything to do with them. They’re sick. The system is sick. Fighting it, I’d soak myself in sickness, and my despair would eventually outweigh my anger. I just don’t have enough anger in me.”

“Then what do you want?”

“To disappear. Preferably with you. Preferably to Spain, or the south of France. Seriously. I want to apply for political asylum. I’m a refugee. I’ll learn their language and pray to their gods. I don’t care.”

“You don’t have enough money to leave.”

“Stop clogging my pipe dreams,” he smiles. It’s his first smile of the week.

“I could go to school in London. You could live with me, get a job as a waiter or something. What about that?”

“Ugh. London is New York without the sun. I want to go somewhere where the people have some fire in them, you know? When the French got sick of their rich people, they cut off all their heads. I want to hang out with people like that.”

“Well, I could go to culinary school instead, to learn how to carve them up. We could solve world hunger while we’re at it.”

“The rich are too fatty. But I’m sure with some Mediterranean spices you could make them palatable. Lemon juice and capers, a little white wine.”

“Or spicy people fingers with fries and a cold beer.”

“That’d be good. But I don’t think there are even enough rich people to feed the hungry for a day.”

“They’re high in calories. We could serve small portions.”

“True.”

“So let’s leave together. When your deferment is up. I’ve got enough money for both of us to live for a while. When the war is over we can come back, and I can do law school then.”

“Let’s worry about your check-up first.”

“I’m not going to worry about it, Clay. I’m done worrying. I’m just going to live. You do enough worrying for both of us, anyways.”

Clay says nothing. It’s too nice a day.

*

It’s six-thirty on a Saturday evening when Mark comes to the museum. Clay answers the door in a shirt, tie and boxer shorts.

“How do I look, eh?” he besieges the guest. “Upwardly mobile?”

“You look drunk,” Katie answers. “Put your pants on, and take off that tie. It’s creeping me out.”

“It’s important to maintain a professional appearance. Appearances,” he mutters, but loses the thought in a drink. “How’s about a round?”

“No, thank you,” Mark answers. He is calm, sober, and his tie does not seem to give Katie the creeps. He smiles, tries to be a good sport. When they leave he will ask her any number of questions about why she lives in a closet with a raving drunk.

“Mark. Nice tie. You have a very professional appearance.”

“Thanks.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Let’s go,” Katie cuts in. Gathers keys, wallet, phone, slams them singly into her purse.

“But you haven’t told me yet if you like my professional appearance.” She ignores him.
“Well, you look like a professional, anyways,” he mutters into his drink.

“What?”

“I said you look like a slut.” She’s wearing a sweater, khakis and black flats. They’re going to a gallery opening.

“Simmer down, pal,” Mark inserts, looming, if not with extra height, than with the authority that comes of not being an utter degenerate. Clay looms back, his authority derived from a half bottle of Clan MacGregor.

Then, through the fog, Clay sees the brilliant hilarity in the situation. Mark and Katie want to bang their genitals together, and it’s killing him. He could solve the problem with the turn of a doorknob, maybe a plane ticket. But this is impossible. All Katie has to do is stay. Equally impossible. So in a storage closet in a museum, a ridiculous non-problem with at least two simple solutions is quickly becoming a crisis. He has to laugh.

Because it’s absurd that people who love each other know best how to cannibalize one another. Silly that the person inside and the person outside could resemble each other so little. Funny that he can still laugh and laugh and laugh. He laughs, and sees that misfortune is not an impediment to joy, just a distraction from it.

Laughter because Remy is licking his own ass, and he’s still the most intelligent person in the room.

He laughs because when he stops laughing, he’s going to kill someone.

Still chuckling, he picks up a butcher knife from the sink and shows it to their guest.

Mark begins edging towards the door. Katie glowers.

“Clayton. Hathaway.”

He stops laughing, the mania leaves his eyes. That’s all he wanted. To hear her speaking his name, endlessly repeating it, bringing it to life.

Precisely the sort of existence she intends to avoid.

“Give me that.” He does so unthinkingly. She puts it in her purse, point out so as not to damage the printed canvas. He wants to shred the little bag before it funnels off any more of her care and attention.

“Go,” he mutters. “Don’t come back.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Guess.”

“I’ll be back in three hours. We can play cards.”

“Yeah. See you Monday.”

“After the show I’m coming right back. I promise. Hear me? I said I promise.”

“Fine.”

“Promise me you’re not going to hurt yourself.”

“Define hurt,” he says, one eye closed to pour a precise four fingers.

“You’re not going to kill yourself.”

“I promise no such thing,” he answers, though he knows the moment has already passed. When she leaves he will lie on the couch, drink his drink, and another, if necessary, and that will be that.

“I hate you,” she says.

“Mark, nice to meet you. See you again, gonna stab you right in your stupid pink shirt.”

Mark scowls, but says nothing. Katie pats the dog and leaves, and Clay whips his tumbler into the window. The plastic wall is shatterproof and the tumbler strikes on edge so the only result is a thump and an unsatisfying bounce to the floor. An asterisk crack in the window, whiskey soaking into the carpet.

He retrieves the glass and finds it unchipped, a well-made thing.

He sits on the bed holding the empty, well-made glass. It pleases him. Pleased, waiting, he is sure that something will happen. Soon he gets up, pours and drinks a shot, cracks ice from the tray, fixes a reasonable drink and returns to the bed. Something, something will happen.

Remy gets up to make room for him. Though it’s past his bedtime, he allows Clay to fondle his ears, flatters him with a few thumps of the tail. A young dog, he doesn’t know much yet of the psychological effects of disability, but he is empathetic, and has protective feelings for the two-legger who fills his bowl and shares his walks.

When Clay puts down his full glass and looks towards the window, Remy knows how far diminished are his chances for a restful night.

But he is patient. Katie will come home. They will drink their drinks, make their sounds, shed their false skins and wrestle and moan until they fall asleep. Tomorrow will come to the tiny room, and tomorrow night all three will return here to rest, all three of them wound up together.

He understands that we love what is nearest, that we must love the people we have on hand. He knows because he was once a stray himself.

My New Friend

There's a small man praying to my stomach. Little black bowl of hair over a too-large navy t-shirt and he has thin, cola-colored limbs. In the millimeter between his palms and my belly, static electricity, standing hairs, something else.

“Hi.”

No answer. Last night’s ocean now merely bubbles ashore. The trees twitter and hum.

I tap him on the shoulder. “Hi. Thanks.”

“Mai pan rai. Gop chi ni lat, mark bai.”

Ah. Right.

He stands, paunch pushes a Penn State logo from an American-sized t-shirt. From the waist red pants fall like a divided dress, dark to the knee and flapping wetly against his calves. A Swiss Army rucksack sits at his feet. “Mi jaat nuk, di mai lai,” he says, pointing down the beach towards two black suitcases beached on a snowy plain. Holes in my sun-bleached sight like flies on white silk.

“Di mai lai,” I say. “Okay.”

He flicks thumb from wrist towards the cases and sings, “eeehnn.” Then, “tang cha ni lat. Lak bai?”

“Lak bai. Okay.”

“Okay.” His smile is eerily genuine.

Older and fatter than I’d thought, the little man exudes the energy of a child, but his words are clipped, controlled, didactic. Eyes alive he stands planted in the sand, staring at the alien luggage with a faint smile, as if looking into a memory or a dream. “Lak bai,” he repeats, blinks, then turns and leaves.

“Wait!”

“Lak bai!” Let's go.

We go, he talks. Points out the sky and sea, sand crabs crawling on a soaking mound of clothes and hair. Maybe he's telling me how things work in his country. Luggage and white people fall out of the sky. We wear the t-shirts and the crabs get the meat.

I show him how to pull out the handles, and we drag the suitcases westward down the beach. For the woman's corpse he leaves a shrug and a smile.

We go, he talks. A lot. Points out the stones where the beach cuts its teeth. We climb the great grey bluff, stand on the lip of a bowl filled with soil and trees. The island like mound of emerald wax cooling on itself. This is the westernmost point of a peninsula. Across the bay, another shore, hills bouncing down and down the coast to the end of the sea. “Mi muk, mai mai. Bai nai.”

I think he said that his is a giant nation.
“Doramir,” he says, and throws open his arms like releasing a flock of sparrows over the land.

I'm going to die here.

*

It’s cooler under the trees. Leaves shield my tingling skin. My companion names the trees and the birds. Demonstrates the bass resonance in the tented, exposed root of a hundred-foot tree. A jungle drum. He breaks open a pod from a tall blade of grass, and out crawl ants. They taste like lemon. I let them crawl on my tongue and the roof of my mouth. He twists a cluster of white berries from beneath a broad white leaf. They have the aftertaste of pure vodka, send vibrations into my fluids. Sunlight enters my fingertips. With enough of these berries, I could walk home.

The trees require translation. They are too tall, too thin, too tied by moss-covered vines. Coconuts like cannonballs wait for a favorable wind. The ground is bare and sunspeckled, shade incomplete and soil overly sandy. The air is clean and full of sea.

He talks. Miles through the trees and spiderwebs, footprints flanked by suitcase moraines. The trail opens on another empty beach, empty sea, empty sky. Waves drag back a stony shore, clacking like an abacus. In the sand, two suitcases lying dead on their sides, one spilling white cotton guts.

My friend has a bow of twine stuck under the tie which holds up his pants. He loops and leashes three cases, leaving one and the rucksack for me, and he trundles off like a beetle with his load slung over his back.

The fatter, older man talks while I fight my lungs. “Okay?” he turns around to ask.

“Okay,” I smile. I feel an ancient, foreign pride.
He’s left a horse and cart tucked between wax-leaved bushes. It’s loaded with suitcases, purses, duffels, sleeping bags and, twine-mounted on the front, an airplane seat. Maybe 24-A.

My friend waves me into the cart. I put down the armrests and press the drink button. The horse heaves, wooden wheels climb out of the sand. My friend gives me a wineskin. The water inside is hot and perfect. He walks with his animal, turns around to give me short, pointed explanations apparently meant to answer any of the questions I might have regarding my surroundings. “Telephone?” I say, gesturing with pinky and thumb. Furrowed brow, he imitates and laughs. “Tell la fun.”

In the afternoon we share a mango and a fist-sized ball of glutinous rice. I watch him mold cakes of rice, chew the with bites of the wet fruit. Juice and starch make sweet soup of my spit. We eat sitting on the cart, looking down the packed dirt path. An orange and green lizard crosses the road. A breeze rises and falls. He smiles at me, and I realize I must have been smiling.

The things I have lost: my money and my passport. My shoes. Ten t-shirts and a bottle of sunscreen. A bad magazine. Katie. The ability to communicate.

I could use the sunscreen. Otherwise I’ve lost the money that ruled me, a passport to a life I despised. My job, my home, my parents. What have I lost? I am here. I breathe. I even have a friend.

I’ve lost the freedom to choose the terms of my enslavement. The chance to shovel my life into the engine of a self-perpetuating war. To take the side of justice in a massacre of innocents. I’ve gained from those losses.

I’ve lost debt collectors, the military police who’d eventually have knocked down the door. A job I didn’t want. I’ve lost the urge to kill myself. Circumstances will try that for me. I’ll resist.

My money and my passport. Someone speaks a voice I know. Noises blend. A dream of Remy, asleep on Katie's feet. Her body next to my body. A dry wind, a dream of falling.
I wake on a beachgrass plain. The sun hangs like a fat, red fruit over the break of world's end, low scrub and red earth rising on breaths of loam. Swaying grass bled by the setting sun. The earth stretches, waking for the night. No noise, no trees to cover the high, mango-streaked clouds and the endless bleached blue. Nothing but a breeze, the cart's progress and humid heat like cream coating the skin. Yellow flowers scattered among the low, waxy leaves. Soft dirt parting for rough wheels. In front, my new friend dozes. His horse knows the way home.

*

The jungle is black when we stop at a small wooden house among the trees. There's glass in the window frames, a kerosene lantern hanging on a hook beside a green door, sunflowers in a garden. Palm fronds and banana leaves top the house like a fat green hat. The trees are loud and alive.

My friend gives me the Swiss Army rucksack, child's face folded on the faultlines of his smile. “For you,” he says. “For helping.” He understands when I thank him.

Down a short gravel path, a shed hung over a stream. He holds the lantern over a hole in the wooden floor, the water beneath catching some of the flame. He holds the lantern over a cistern in the opposite corner. On its rim, a pink plastic bucket and a cake of soap. No toilet paper.

His house speaks a language I partially understand. The living room smells of old leather and earth. Low wooden tables surrounded by cushions. On the polished surface, water rings and a half empty mug of tea. A long, low leather futon, shelves with knick-knacks, candles and ceramic elephants. A reed mat spread across the packed dirt floor. The timber-braced ceiling gives me a foot of clearance.

He shows me a room with a mosaic floor, blue and orange diamonds. Another cistern, another pink plastic bucket, the kind a child would carry to the beach. He mimes scooping the water, dumping it over his head. There is a drain in center of the floor.

His stove is an iron hook planted in the dirt. From it hangs an iron pot over the embers of an old fire. The kitchen smells like wood smoke. There are black stains on the ceiling.

My friend scoops two bowls of couscous. We eat on the back porch, in hammocks, spooning food from the bowls in our laps. Trees, water and dark, the air thick with breathing green and the sorrowful howling of monkeys. In warm couscous, caramelized onions and raisins cooked sweet and soft. Garlic and oil. My stomach and throat open again. Hot belly. My guts still work.

He tells me something and leads me inside. Points at the shower, points at the outhouse. I nod. “Thank you.” He goes into his room, returns with an armful of sheets, a blanket and a pillow. Aligns cushions on the floor, covers them with a white sheet, its sides spread over the dirt. Over that, a blanket, and over that another blanket. I wonder if he's cold.

“Sabai nui,” he says. “Goodnight,” I repeat. He goes into his room again and slides shut the white wooden door.

I cry for a while, then open up the rucksack. Black lace underwear, but big enough to fit me. T-shirts and a towel among dresses and shoes. Toilet paper, thank god. Toothpaste and a toothbrush. A wallet with a few euros, a German driver's license with the smiling face of a dead lady. I accidentally read her name. It's Caroline Zurbe.

I make two piles. In the first, things I can use: the t-shirts and towel, jeans, a pair of pyjamas that will fit, a pack of Larks and a lighter, toothpaste, floss, and a toothbrush, a nearly empty sketchbook and a bag of vine charcoal, a box of pastels rubberbanded shut. TP. Then, things I might be able to sell: make-up, dresses, shoes, underwear, dead Caroline's passport, paperbacks in German and a hairdryer, in the event that I come upon a place with electricity or Germans.

I brush my teeth in another language. The tea-stained foam I spit on the floor makes no sense beside the screen-covered hole in the floor and the smell of wet earth. I undress in a corner, am chalk white except for my hands and arms, which are purple and throb. Neither color belongs.

Dumping the water over my head is like being electrocuted. A dull throb in the top of my head, and the rest of me goes stiff and brittle as ice as the burn travels down my neck to my belly and back.

The soap is a cornered yellow cake. It smells and lathers exactly like any other soap, which surprises me.

I scrub the waxy sweat out of my armpits and crotch. The cold water sluices away a wave of my old life. I was off my face, pour a layer of cold onto each eye, another directly in the center of my forehead.

I forget English, though I know I speak it. I forget my parents, though I know they had me. Forget Katie, though I’m sure I love her. All the things that made me a me disappear, but I remain. The parts I wash are mine, and the thing that does that washing must be me.

Legally, I am a dead German woman. In reality, I am the same deaf-mute thing that sucked life from the circumstances of its birth. That crept through the dirt towards the buried sun.

I sleep three inches above the earth. It fills my nose and steadies my dreams.