My Amputations - Excerpt

Again, as in a recurring dream, Mason opened the closet door and stepped hesitantly into its huge darkness, its nonlineal shape: he pulled the door shut then crouched there on the floor--which seemed to be moving--with the breathing of The Imposter. This dimness was not illuminated by the glowing Mason felt. He could smell the man: his sweat, his urine, his oil. The skin of Mason's eyes was alive with floaters. Faintly in the background--perhaps coming through the wall of the next apartment--Sleepy John Estes was signing "Married Women Blues." Mason pushed hard for the beginning, some echo or view. Anglo-saxon, monosylabbles clustered there. He couldn't remember how it all started nor even his muses birth. He called her Celt CuRoi. Yet memory was expanding...Low clouds crawled against a terrible sky. Lots of rainstorm damage trees, house, fences. His birth-?-came like that. He swore to date, the year, the damage, the blood. And afterbirth...And his broken-grasping for sea, land, form. Why'd he remember overturned cars, the Great Flood, a woman up in a tree, words: nigger, jig, darkie, convicts at gunpoint working to rebuild a broken dam, a six-hundred-or-more death toll...? and, and from eighteen Woodrow Place? River moving out to lake, to sea, to ocean. Sea?...Already searching for it:to float upside down in its membranous-liquid grasp. Giant sharks might be deep in it but Celt would guard...yet she, too, was only a beginning-not a sailorette, joe, just ah...bug-examiner like Lil Massy: transparent wings, pink underbelly bright and silky as panties-mating dogs smell like a rainforest full of moss and rotten logs. First letter of alphabet fascinated them:a house:Egyptian., farmer's joke; picture on box of crayons; then D: door to darkness, closed-off mystery. Together they went down the earth-passage-underworld's first level. Celt and Mason dimly expected to encounter themselves waiting-locked in a dark, secret, everlasting closet. Instead, they stood uneasily on the bones of a dog-like animal dead a million years. On level two they plowed through the remains of a dinosaur already taped and labeled MRF. They uncovered the majority-but were too innocent to connect...to force. Strutters, diwalkers. V was clearly an upside-down hat: it protected them the way back up where - just before the exit - they stumbled into the clutches of cruel aunts with syphilitic-eyes, long-eared witches, drunk crab-shaped uncles, the broken-yet joyous, powerful, love-bound-spirit of the people: his - and by spirits, hers, too. They tasted salt, sugar and felt the frozen ground in winter; watched bird feel, were stung by fishfins. Turkey rot! Mason and Celt discovered it was possible to fly-even with broken wings: flying was not why you are, but how: and then why: it was also not rushing downsteam on a raft or being engulfed by a storm or swept away in a flood. It was how he got to know Celt. Before Celt he'd been a blind bat struggling to embrace the sky: his spirit existed before he was born: he simply stepped into it-as through it were a Union Suit. At sixteen he was unfinished; eyes: large, blank brown things. Did his mother Melba love him? She was certainly not his muse. Look at her apron: too clean: something is wrong. Is it that she doesn't like him much but loves...?