A Safe Bet
How do I make the sound beep so that you actually hear it?
That enggh enghh woke me but did not get me up. I laid in bed, listening, wondering what the trucks were up to so I could write it down. Why were they backing up outside my window? Why not just go forward early in the morning? What had already been done so that it needed to be turned around and redone at this hour?
It is a shitty hotel on a shitty street. Nice hotels don't have enggh enggh outside of their windows.
The less money you spend, the noisier your life is, the harder it is to find the words for precisely what is happening to you. No one would understand it anyhow. There are plenty of things in life where the words just sit on the surface of that thing, they blanket it, they hint at shapes and dimensions, sexy in what they reveal and what they don't.
They make it tender to play at the grotesque.
The lack of coffee in the lobby is another special feature of the shitty hotel. The percolator is completely dry, no dregs or lees creaking out of the spigot, like I once imagined the top of a camel's hump to be, close to the idea of liquid sloshing beneath it, but never expelling it.
Why did everyone tell me camels could go weeks without water because they held the water in their humps? That was just another lie, filed in a whole lineage of lies, that fed my rapacious gullibility. Instead, now I know that the whole hump of a camel is filled with fat. It provides energy, not hydration. Sally the camel has two humps but she has dry bones.
I leave the shitty hotel completely unsatisfied, scurrying toward the first scheduled obligation of the day, on the glitzier part of the Strip.
The water my body has to offer the earth pours in large gasping plops from my orbital sockets. I am weeping because I did not expect to see the four faced shrine here and I write into my notebook the inscription, as if it were a sacred part of the precious offering.
THE CASTING CEREMONIES FOR THE FOUR-FACED, EIGHT-HANDED STATUE OF THE BRAHMA WERE HELD IN BANGKOK, THAILAND ON NOVEMBER 25, 1983 AND MANY IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS AUTHORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL DIGNITARIES PARTICIPATED.
Teardrops are not even teardrop shaped. Instead they start more like the shape of a hamburger bun that turns itself into an umbrella shape as it falls.
Yes, an umbrella is the exact shape of rain.
One shape repels the other shape, knowing it is separating itself from itself but unable to stop that rather abusive cycle, in the end.
I kneel to pray on the padded prayer bench, whose vinyl coating doesn't receive my tears but rolls them onto the ground where they wait patiently to evaporate, while I wish for my own release.
The scent of burning incense sears into my nasal passages as I murmur my desperate supplications and fragments of scent grasp my nasal hairs with their tiny smoky hands until I have ceased to be anything but musky floral fumes.
I solidify back into body and obligation and head in a direction that is on my way.
I will not run after the phony monk in the umbrella hat, but I do quicken my steps, knowing his own will slow when he hears me behind him. The con artist must be aware of his surroundings, with all his senses providing him information about where his next mark might be. The phony monk con artist doesn’t know it just yet, but it will be
me. He will want to convince me to donate funds to his imaginary church and I will absolutely do it, after he shoves the luck or love bracelet onto my wrist. This is what I know will happen and this is what is now happening.
"Love or luck? Love or luck?" He insists I choose with rapid, impatient speech. He looks closely into my face, peering and seeing perhaps something desperate, or perhaps pathetic.
I don't know, I cannot see myself, only him.
I look at the ground, avoiding his questions, struck mute. His socks are very white inside of his plastic sandals. He hands me a notebook when I don't answer, and a pen. “Write your wish,” he instructs. “Love or luck?”
I write down peace instead. He grunts now while reading my note, a kind of unhh from deep in his chest and gives me also a plastic jade Buddha necklace, shoving this over my head.
"Peace? You wrote peace? You want peace? Now you Venmo." he says and shows me his QR code. I nod, because this is a part of it, this is something I cannot miss. I will lose money in Las Vegas and I will do it this way, to the man I now know is Yize Li, the phony monk with umbrella shade on his face. I look it up later, this name, Yize. It means on the one hand. But right now I am on the other hand, I want him to know I know him, his real face under the shadow. I look up and hold my face of knowing to the light so he can figure it out.
There aren't any tears forming now, but they were there ten minutes ago. I’m sure the tracks are evident. "Peace," I whisper to him and to keep from drowning with me, to keep from dying, approximating a very real benediction, he swiftly grabs both of my hands fiercely and kisses my palms one after the other, with lips as dry as the Sahara.
This is Thursday.
