The Stench (Pt. 1)

See me, my God, and find place in me. Take me, my God, and find home in me. In places most consigned to perdition, arid and wasted, bring me water. Let the water contain Ye, and let it enshrine me with its being: You. Yea, approach me with the final water, that being Love (a word synonymous with ye) and take my stride and find it in the cracked sunbaked surface which stretches like removed skin for miles and miles and caking the tallest mountains and cathedrals to ye. That is my love, its spread, its distance. My prayer of water. Let my tongue and throat be singed with your Life, your Spirit, and your Son, in the form of that all-removing organ which colors and covers our most surfaces of the ever-watching eye of our universe. It is to ye, my Lord, which I pray, because only you can deliver them; because only you are responsible; because only You are possible.

    Amen.

***

    There were innumerable attempts, on my own part, to assess the set and exact date of the world's end. Such things are sins, I know, and I’m deeply ‘ligious, but it’s the failing of Imperfection that does that—not me. We are a seventeen-head pack when we go down what Devin called the throat of the world, down there in that starless black to which our sky is stone. The sight of such black, not in light’s absence but in powder, is what ‘riginally left that Devin to begin prophesying about how things would end. I remember, he would say,

    “How can this hollowed earth, black on the inside to such a degree that we are remissed to breathe, be not dead or on the verge of so. It is impossible. Earth is dead, and we harvest her teeth before our baron.”

    It was coal that made it so. Coal why we’re here. Coal. Coal. It is black and can be made into carbon-heavy coke and that too is why we are here. There’s little else to find in the ancient deserts until you go underground and witness why we were put on this earth and not in to begin with. To be in is ‘tirely different even to understand. There is no up, here, and there is no down. The parallels between the surface walkers and me are like moles to the great apes; we are not the same. There are yet no stars, no light, no air, and no beginning or end to each hole we go to dig. Armijo says that it’s much bigger than we think; he calls it the crust we dig in and that even though it’s the smallest layer it goes on for miles and wraps around the ‘tire planet and then goes deeper and deeper beyond what we can imagine. It’s the kosmos, we found in that dark, breathless like water and fully effacing. We come out of it darkened.

    I asked him one time why it went so deep. Groping along a tite near the wall, he said,

    “Cállate, los molestas para siempre.” I don’t really know what that means.

    Upon our exit during the day which I take to recording it was near-night. First thing I saw was the orange what-i-think-to-be Tupui on the bluff of the horizon, there, looking stately. I don’t know my places very well but as I pass the sign near my described throat I see it: 

    The sign itself is colored a near-oppressive green and caked by sand and rust all around like scars from an infection. I flick the words around my tongue and it doesn’t do much other than reveal my lack of them, bouncing around. I didn’t even know no Maxwell myself, though he must be wealthy if this is his property. I cannot properly imagine a view into the hollowed earth goes cheap.

    Stepping further out I saw the rolled out bilious green carpets leading up to the foothills. We were seventeen of us coming out, each a-gazing either down to the surface which we were once under or to those mountains which I can’t say I care about too much. Their points are soft beyond any type of conviction. I don’t like soft, much less in mountain or in man. The thought-to-be Tupui down there past slanted stick houses, that sure was not soft in any kind. I took to it when I came down from the Carolinas; we remain equally destitute. High there I cannot breathe and down there I cannot breathe, the absence and crowding of light are not conducive to air in any manner. It is ‘lone, too, ‘cept it dun't need to breathe.

    Wilhelm pulled next to me—we elected to call him Will most days. Down from Germany he was. He said to me: “Bad times ahead for us, I think. Meet me up ahead, later. We go.” So I remember it, anyway.

    I walked along the path-harded trail up to the town, itself barely made of anything other than coal and teeth. My leg is bad, too, and I left a little lopsided ditch in the trail; I got cursed from it, now and then. It looks like a snake, that half-higher part.

    The town’s self is about the farthest thing from God that I can see man creating, built by burrowing and coming back up new again, richer. Every house like the cocked brow of a rooster, taken at an angle and shallow. One man could shake the hand of another through the window, the size of it. Main street is perhaps the basest mockery of it all, a saloon being the only place to talk without somehow paying. I was never a talker, especially then; I couldn't get the words out from underneath the swollen tongue I got from biting it during my youth. The words set down to write much easier than to speak them, found I. We got along well after that, and that’s when I went to praying—not just on Sunday, but whenever it could be managed. I worked on a large one to be preached someday; I hope I can be a preacher, someday. We are nothing without Our word. I got to the bar quick as I could, for it was Saturday and it was surely to be crowded the greater the sun failed and scraped past the hills that night and the dark further murged with the depths I too could not trace.

    I stepped in. Inside the place was covered in a ceaseless and permanent yellow haze that seemed itself to be alive with every flash of fleeting smoke and contain something awful portentous in its different yet right-at-home place amongst our tribal and night-ridden shades. Every man moving through the smoke looked to be a piece of driftwood in a polluted river of molasses—women there too. There must’ve been fifty men there. This was a time in which I would estimate the end of the world, and I begun to agree with Devin a little more: it couldn’t be too far off. Everything made of splintered wood because trees don’t grow out here.

    I went to the bar looking for Wilhelm—his stature was easy to find. Tall, slender, and paler than most; not built for digging by most accounts aside from his memory which many considered to be photographic. He called out to me:

    “We meet. I introduce myself to you: Wilhelm. Perhaps you may have seen me.”

    I stuttered, “We’s all seen you, I think. Head taller—than everyone else—what’d you want to talk…about?”

    From his look I could tell he was put off by my talk, but I had to pay no mind.

    “Anyway…what is your name? I found it, down there. Before you say what, know what I mean. It is the glow, mister. And that is our freedom, friend, covered in darkness. We will find it together and be rich together.”

    Yet again I had no idea what he meant; language of the talking sort was not my strong suit.

    “What?” Said I.

    “You may ask why I would tell you. It is a good question. I cannot get that far down. I need you to get it for me while I stay up and guide you.”

    “What?”

    “Gold, man. I have found gold.”

    For a moment in his long, grey face I could see a flick of desperation and madness. The type of man to find death to be hilarious gazed at me from his broken-saucer eyes that moved only to scan and obtain in a not-mamalian sort of way. He didn’t find it, he couldn’t have. He was looking for it, the durn man. It is fine to look, but some things are unsearchable. Even the Lord say to call Him to find the unsearchable, though one would probably say that gold in pitch dark is perfectly searchable with our own eye and not His. A star in a clouded night, it is.

    “We go tonight. After dark—nobody must see.” He said to me. His voice was not a request.

***

    There was a time in my New Mexican life in which I walked around the town. I remember stumbling ‘cross the mine town in my drunken stupor, I was a-drinking, then, and I couldn’t help but walk through the steamed and mudded road across the main, back then. It was before I banged my knee. It was no good. Sometimes someone would rob me, and it was no good. By what I now call the lord I was then destitute, not a cent that I promised myself in the enterprises of the southwest. I hated the mountain.

    My father had been to a church for money and seeing that sneering cross atop a shanty roof I took it to mean a bank with more words to say and went in lest I starve and die so far away. So far away I was, the coldest rock of space could not compare to how far I was. How often I tried to think of home and the readied sand could only come to mind and never home. Even my mother had her face blotched by that crushed fine, that all-consumer of my memory, it took it right away, and that was why I stayed in my cups: I could only hate the world for making me forget. 

    The church was not much standing: rigid with cracks and baked pinyon that gave it a roasting smell and the Cross hanging above the tallest what-could-be-called point was more directional than symbolical. It looked to me like a bank. I went in. Back there was a man sitting before what resembled a pulpit made of recycled chairs, with nobody standing; he looked Hispanic to me and I had rarely ever seen one where I was from. My father maybe fought his father, I don’t know. 

    “Sit. Lonely around this time of night.”

    It is lonely all the time, I wanted to say, but my malady of hesitance grew worse with every sip and in such states I was all but equivalent to mute. Mutes communicate through eyes and so I looked at him and he looked at me and we were both reserved only to our clothes and naked in thought and I had never felt such ways towards any man. I thought about loving him like one would love any savior and destroyer of perdition but he was not those things and I knew that.

    I sat.

    “It is less lonely now. Such things are miracles of God.”

    Are you a preacher, I wanted to say, and yet again the stops were put and I was driven down to silence and mere groans like settling rock. Above us in soaring and diminishing circles a pack of right gnats hovered around a hanging oil lamp.

    He didn’t say anything for a while, that man, and I was left to staring at his knees and my own, his dirtied and wet and mine perfectly clean. Preachers can’t be doing that kind of labor, I thought, and deduced that he was not one. He wore straw and I wore thin linen because it was all there was, no good. The floor was no floor, at all, only sand, but we sat on carpet that to me also felt of Mexico in its reptilian sense of angle. We sat alone. Alone. I cannot find a similar word.

    “I know, our filths are innumerable.”

    I wanted to tell him that I could not be filthy for filth was common and the dis-earthed mud around me was too pushed into the flesh of us to be anything other than the river to the ocean but I knew he wouldn’t believe me but he should. He needs to, I wanted to say. He should believe me, I wanted to say. In my patheticisms I wanted to believe that he would believe me above his God because it would mean something more than a wagon-sized rut-down church in a town gone from Rome.

    In that lugubrious air we found what I would like to think was meaning in our collective miasma; we were sick, sick with money. Many have certain looks in the eye, just about the iris, to the obvious extremities of one's face, showing the condition. It is a slight stretch, a ratched and tooth-size distortion from the colored pit to the flesh that twitches enough for a close looker to see. I’ve seen it pick up there many times in my own mirror, beginning to think I had gone leprous, and for the first time I stared at a different soul and saw it moving back at me, up along the rims of the face and turning it into a sour and putrid thing that couldn’t be helped—for it was sick, that it was, and at the time it was is. 

    “Mon…ney…I’s…got…to get…yer money…man!” I spat out the words because I didn’t know how to say them or speak them in a way of sense, but this place was not of sense because we were not of sense sitting on the floor when we could have done it outside with only the firmament as our roof.

    “Aye. Is there life beyond this earth?

I wanted to say no because the universe must be cold and dark because all things unknown to us is cold and dark, from below to up to water to sky. It is all cold, and things dun’t live in the cold.

“We walk this earth so curious to answer the Question, but we cannot read it; be it so? Know, when the Nueces gave way to the Republican Union did we not feel the first breath of extraterrestrial life bearing down upon us, though only North they were? The Question is that of our condition about the eye that you dutifully noticed; be it you thought I would not notice? It is the mark of God’s ultimate wish, to be sick, to suffer. What earthly God is such? They were only North, and He is only up.”

I touched my eye and started down with every sudden twitch, for the womb does not seek to see and out of it I found myself giving birth to the Question and to the counting of each of my counterpart’s hairs and finding he had none and never had none. He was naked to all but flesh and even it was diaphanous and full of churning, the churning of Blood and Providence and the Fall through the sand and to Raton. The ultimate inspiration as I move my ink now and my eyes of that moment, sick, sick with money.  He is only Up.

The man picks me up by the hend and grasps my hands and places them unto his thighs, pulling from his deep pocket a single star-faced cent and burying it in my palms with the solemnity of a loved one, for to him it was loved and now lost. Having satisfied my desire for money I walked out of the Church unchanged and capitalized. Only Up, yes, Only Up. Perhaps I could believe that I was not sick.

***

Now with Wilhelm I saw to his order because the value of money was not in cups but in, and freedom gold was. I heard from California not many years ago was gold found and the whole of the state was caught up in it, to the point that the southerner I was at the time became aware of it. We keep it for ourselves, I wanted, and then we took and sold it and could buy any carriage to far away, maybe even Albuquerque.

“Wait for dark. I will be at the sign. Wilhelm left the bar and got away to some place. He slept and ate alone most times, today being the first I heard his voice calling to anything, much less myself.

The bar’s crowd was beginning to diffuse out all sides and every man still inside found himself to be involved in businesses nefarious, which I strayed away from. Noticing the decay, and the slowing of the ever-murmuring yellow fog present, I decided to step away and wait for the pitchest of dark. Returning to the front lip of the place I saw the stepless ghosts and shadows of those passers and keepers going through, faceless and motionless yet imbued with momentum, scant leaving footsteps in the mudded-sand. Occasional oil lanterns, too, though they were only the more vividly swallowed in fragments by the ever-growing night. It was upon me to see that the snuffing of this flame was another indication of what I now wanted to call the end of the world. Finnywigin to reckon with the truth, I enlisted in the tacit agreement of finding the signs wherever they appeared, which was everywhere from the sickness to the yellow; yellow being the worst of all. In the visage of fevers and money the denses of smoke and rotted teeth, I only found suffering in that color, that color.

Along this second Sodom I elected to go back to my dwellings and recoup myself, for the erring day was beginning to draw its last breath; with each inhalation it drew gusts from zephyrs and sturred each appendage of the earth like hair in the wind, there. Each twist and pull towards nautical direction loose yet irresistible and undeniable in its larger pull, like a laughed yet serious strong-armed pull into the sea when one did not know how to swim, which I did not.