THE beginning of the infinite

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Preview:

From the forthcoming novel to be released Summer 2023 by K. Sebastian

Dark gutters, burning with desire in the night of neon, escapades, and promenades and sing song sirens dangling from the string of God’s good graces, spinning in mad earthly tones, shaking grey and tumbleweed across the citydawn, an ether into the post unknown. A rocking chair sits in the intersection, a city sign pummeled by wind and bullets, ornamental to the clogged wheel of decadent warlife, There’s an old lady who walked a mile in slippershoes and she sips tea in the memory of the citybrick, rocking the chair in the intersection, red light to green light or yellow and when yellow it pales her sharp canyon wrinkles, connecting her spine to the miles unwalked or woven into skin stretched over a plastic bone, and perhaps she is dead. It’s likely that she is. She has walked the infinite mile and she cannot close the curtains at the intersection of Dune and Liberty, for the cause of all man’s woes are found in the softness of bones, and in the quietude of God, the quivering trembler of silence, and the unknown spike of violence. In the bumbleblue honeydew morning the muffler smoke presses the lingerfrost and the truck takes me towards the hills where hanging plastic bags slimwalk across pavement, skipping yellow lines into the dander woods, hanging from any grey stick in the bush, sentenced to the gallows of the times. In the eyes of passerbys a vagrant stare finds mine and the wind whipple-whoahs of time chapel the Gods into the courts of self, and I’m the beckoner of what woes

could come. I shout at myself, tap pistol on the glass, the gold teeth find mine in the mutual stare, and embrace nonesomuch hinting at war or violence, but of a dove clipped in wing, like love is pressed under rolling tire, poetic and shimmering, bloody and acquainted with the oily verse of romantic plumes. The shopping cart full of empty bags and crinkled cans. He stops to piss in the sidewalk cracks and hasn’t fucked in so long, or maybe just a night ago, for the price that might be right is whatever the going moral rate is, shot and bitter. The brick hangs off walls and alleys here. I jumble their messages like Tetris in the morning glow, somber in the bloodbuzz, splattering a cardinal wing and shoe fly hoax across the wall, painted in mural ink, posted “we loved once and it was beautiful, if you believe,” and the “believe” is trailing off in wall stutter. And the grocery stores are evidently empty of their best foods. The lights hum on and the mosquito buzz signs cherish their taking of the day, their taking of the light. All the ammo is gone, all the war’s been fought. Somewhere along the line I’m going to see a man and I’m going to see a woman stumble out of the alleys, their eyes fresh with smoothlove and sweat and cum, pushed into each other in the postmodern pallet, making waves in the ocean of the other, pressing shoreward, and I’ll think “that could be me” if I so dared to walk beside but I probably will just think on Big Sur and the tenements of the Midwest instead and all the time I spent there, lying in mattresses pulled of springs, bent, across the floorboards of old mills in Michigan, and how the thought of the walls and those kneeling before them was just so pretty, so serene, so tapped into something riveting, like the first time the blues

were found on the chords and frets, stretched across betting hands, and there was a promise, but not unlike ones thrown into wishing wells, or like the lottery tickets under my feet when I plant them on the concrete below, and step across the dead gardens, and avoid the wood holes in the porch, where a gun was buried, and is now clearly gone. Junkies took me for a ride. Grind the teeth into the night. Bone dust and buttery blight. I’m not so lonely as I am betrayed by my ideals. I think somewhere in us all is death like an abortion, not truly lived, but robbed of a soul, or the chance at it, or even, if you concoct, a chance to fail. From the second story window where I knew home, the mail piles up, from months passed into eternity, and there’s no one else home, and they told me it would be this way, that all things back east had gone the way of the sea, dry, witherblown, tarped in the weeds of serene. The weeds of warm dreams. I never knew their names. The churches here were burned in a purging and it probably felt pretty good at first to claim the man as sovereign, despite the natural law, the one that told us this was coming, the post rapture candidates, the enlightened ones, sipping on bourbon and bullets, making love under haunted holes and gassy skies, inked in the despair, dried in the twilight. From the rooftop I see the city below, it cries in swift deals, it cries as it ever did. As if we did. We didn’t solve anything in the occupation, in the victory, in the entanglement and enslavement of human fates. We knuckled our hands to feed. Grey grasses in the alleys. A deal goes on. Slip hands into pockets and pockets into fingers and why keep it to the alleys, move it to the streets. Let it sling or linger. A cop car long past the smolder, a badge tangled in the gutterweeds of

cigarettes and gum, coffee cups and water weighted bags, and nudges grateward. Waitin on the rain. Tangled. Sun hangs gelatinous, newspapers scrape the curb. I kick with my boot and the page withers into a smoke, like ash or dust, the word unseen, once dark ink, yellowed to a darling age. I pull the gun to my hand, squint and aim. I don’t pull the trigger. It seems like something for a better man to do. Instead, I tuck and walk and slither my way through the streets, down the mile into the city, where I am free to know the world as it is, wretched and in bloom, cupping the rains of struggle and lust, decadence and despair, the lovely humid bloom of moist bodies hungering, thirsting, churning, seeking, finding, buying- time. Coffee. A cup in hand. Light breezes funnel the alleys, smoke and cindering land. Broad daylight, a junkie leans into the needle. Point and prick in the deadvein. These times try the soul. And lovers boil into the sheeted greys, tardying divinity. Hand steady on the coffee cup. Clinic lines crawl and sprawl along rutted streets. A man discards a cup, coughs, and mumbles into thinning air, and the woman in the rocking chair has died, and some teenage boys with leftover blood laugh and sneer and mock the woman, confessing their act, their push, their tug and blow, their sweet release of innocence, how they “just wanted to see her hit” and how satisfying it would’ve been for a truck to roll the dice on the dim hour of her life and if I had the bullets I might’ve done these poor boys in but only in the name and act of grace, the pummeled grace, God’s little tender Thomas hands, because there’s a conversation missing from their minds, and they’re walking a mile they don’t understand, the degenerates, pirating beauty, in their unwrinkled eyes,

wasted flesh. They’re all on their highs in the city glow. Geronimo on the eighty mile stretch. Captured and made-a-molded in the carnival wed, red skin and tied to the tilt of the old red sun, mocked and loved, like moldy bread thrown to doves. But in my staring I get to thinking that maybe the sun needs to set for one good last time and we need to wither as sunflowers do, slowly in the biting frost, commencing to wander off or tilt our spines earthward, pitying ourselves and at last, perhaps, each other, on the way to forlorn soil. But it just comes up and on like some unwanted lightbulb might, and strikes a heavenly match where I wander. And I’m forced to watch a man zip his pants and go right into a round of whisky and swinging fists, talkin about how it aint his kid, and even if it was, he’d rather it washed into the storm drain and drown. Infantile, cry sweet, softened sounds. Sirens touch the alley voids. The boards read about the reset and the jangling change. We were supposed to be one and finally human in it. A gluey moon bloom promise soon shoveled unto me and you and dancing in poetic smoke, and we would know the rain dance and the gold of old rope, tied around the necks of no one, for in one, free, and no guns to shoot, and no blood to bleed, but see, it’s not like that, it’s merely an illusion, and we live in the grave now, and the war was fought now, hip swinging, gun flingin, midwestern, Wyoming cowboy bullet bruising war hounded fightwars that we waged to save this continental place but it was lost in the ruination of reason or in postmodern madness of sex and love and dipping our toes into surrender and feminine weakness, and half these men wear skirts up tall and you can almost see their longcocks hang to

the knee now, and I wonder about my own member, remembering me, now. Christ, face down and drunk. Stained glass broken out, tickled shards cut along the ground. Toothless humble madmen bleed their blood and smile their voids at me as I walk by and this is somehow normal. I fucked a whore, they say, and she was good. But I aint felt so good today, and perhaps we take the exchange to bubbled rooms and faces of agony and watch each other stroke off behind veils of glass, and in the ecstasy of that, we’ll honey color the plexi, and she’ll look Egyptian as I oil the wall plates in human form. But not me, I think, not here and now, I fought a war for this, and I remember reading that the Irish fought them in the rain, and for the rain, in droughts and famines, too, that enslaved and depraved the spirit, and their women in redrunning hair and milkcream skin dancing across the meadow lanes, so pretty, so serene, like wild horses, like we do it for, always for, in love, still to be true to the world in its highest form, warding off the great reduction. We had no peace in it. The goal was always conquest, submission, not even death. It’s preferable to be a ruler of men than their governor of death. Opiate vaccine. Seaside detest. The black waves roll towards the sea wall. A boat hangs in the dock, bodies float salted and bloated by the plank, face down, slicked in the curl foam. Pity. Another man leans against the rail, he scruffs his chin with his palm, nods along and pulls a cigarette from his mouth, tugs on the collar and tosses the torch toward the body. Hell of a thing, he says. Hell of a thing, I say. The day procures. Salted meat in the dimsun. It is my turn to fill gasoline cans, the metal ones, not the plastic ones. I drink the coffee down and step over cardboard signs

Photo: Jeffrey Stockbridge

windblown and sewn into waxed ink. God Bless, am a veteran, looking for work. It should have said something about rented time, box truck blues, seraded edge of the world, warped and anew. It didn’t. I went home and found those cans and didn’t think about the signs again and at the gas station with the blinking light all cosmic like, cratering the pump tar in disco orbs, a real thing of a woman finds my eyes beyond the veil and she nods nervous like, in the pre war mysteries, and offers a crinkled undereye which would have meant something of a blush if I had known and she so offered me time to nod back and I did, filling the old red can in the midday idolizing warp cool of autumn’s break. It went into “would you like a drink” to which I asked if we were doing that now and aren’t we all transient and I suggested my hand towards the amber bottle of glass half full and she said id like to do that now, you must know, it’s the eve of my second termination and I’m feeling slightly old world about this one, like there’s some tug at me and I suggested that death was a-walkin beside and she said he’s merely walking through and God is redemptive through your conscience if you can find it there and I said, maybe you’re right and her name was Antonia. An Italian Swede and a tall slender thing with the quirks of humility tied resin deep in her skinny bones and I handed back her bottle and her hand shook nervously as if I had wronged the modern world for all the wonder in it, and the bottle was warm where her fingers felt my prints, and I watched it slide into the palm and into her draping pocket, so enveloping, and she pulled her face to smile and said “it’s early in my term, do you ever pray?” and I couldn’t find the

words. It’s not something I can seem to find. Well, I best be off, I dared, and she suggested that she understood and from the front seat cab I watched her wander down the sidewalk with delicate tiny kid innocence, walking over the cracks like she counted them and not the needles, and I couldn’t help but feel something, so I stopped her and said “do you need a ride” but I almost felt evil for dampening the innocence in her momentum but she accepted and there was a rose between us planted like a garden in the depths of a dumpster dive, discovering something pre in the post, a wave of conjured sweet salt, brown sugaring my brain in the strangest way. The tenements hung ornamental on Liberty and the old woman was missing from her chair and in my sentiments I had to believe she left that chair near the tipped shopping cart and walked over the bridge and out of the city into some other America where cafes steamed with the outpour of bacon and coffee and pie, and tin signs bounced to open and churches were looking for the Lord not in a vindictiveness but in some supreme outreaching love, planted seed-like, but un-maneuvering or wavering in the steed of troubled winds. But if I had to guess, she was burned or dragged to the river and the flies were to gather and the salt bloat would wash cool grey waves over her body, and the young would dance in the pre-dawn days of abuse and take the memory of a life lived and stand on it, absent of humility, trusting only the narcissism, the true despair of the times. But the chair still stood, and we both thought, in the timid quiet, how strange and lovely was the chair, with it’s twisted woody arms and its chipped legs, and perhaps its age, too, which would only kindle fires when the

unforgiving night wrapped its arms around the gluey blue moon, somber and not blood, like the promised wonders of Christ in God’s crimson unblinking eye, on the supposed return, before the re-nailing. Tragic, really. Antonia lit a cigarette but with eyes that lifted heavy weights to mine she reconsidered and thought to ask if that was okay but of course it was okay, I said “sure, it’s okay,” with a nod, of course, and she turned her head back to the rows of stifled bodies, pining for the pushers to feed, bread lines stretching and neon signs tilted off the axis of their posts, their bodies devoid of might, pining in the need of something not modern, but ancient. Tracing lines of constellations along their scabbed arms, and the hunched backs, and all the war was fought for this to commence. A fire in a bum barrel. Crusted coffee cops in the gutter ways, rotted teeth admiral gold, an old skeletal upright pulled another from his mouth and flung it gutterward, and in the momentous ache, a smooth black oily smile, as if to say “it is finished.” The tooth rattled towards the grates and Antonia smiled and I squinted and for the first time since it all began, I knew the world was lost. She dimmed her cigarette on a second thought, pulled the bottle from her coat and began the twist to free the amber liquid from the glass, but turned the cap back in a moment of hesitation and said “there, that’s where I live” and I acknowledged and brought her towards the curb, where she stepped out and said “Thank you,” and I nodded, as I remember, and she walked towards the fence, chainlinked in the crooked mud, globs of torn grass scattering the gateway, and bags of trash flowing over the dumpster wreathed in the grey midday. Her feet sank in mud but she did not seem to care, her

slender legs skipping steps along the ascendance to the top, weaving up the maze of porches and banisters, missing railing and posts, color washed from the stain and paint and fade, a sorry building, to be sure, but she did not seem to notice. And when she disappeared on the third floor there was a bounce in my foot and off I was, down Liberty, along the washed brick and boarded windows, the promises strewn about in broken glass, bus stops crowded with sorry eyes and scattered souls of a thousand tongues, the tempest of tumult, the sketch of a bulbous drunken nose or ten, the heckling jackal teens and the open alley addicts and the despairing elders and the hungry and tired and sick and loathed, and all was left to see, all so pristinely inglorious, the culling of the mind, culling of the limp handed loves, the prostitutes, and their paths paved towards ruin. Thought to myself “not today” but it’s funny how we put it off, not merely to utter off a word of “never.” But at the stoplight there’s a temptation, it’s what the reds do in their pausing glow, and I half masted the window and to be sure she came over with her skirt hiked high and her lips drawn wide and cardinal, black circled pale skin eyes and hair only slightly dissheveled, to suppose it had only been early in her day’s affairs, and I popped my door open on the passenger side and she climbed in. I wanted a name but she surely lied with her suggestive “I call me Lucy,” and so we drove and she asked why, and I explained in some off handed way the need to hide the sin between alley walls but she scoffed off the thought of sin and said “there’s no more sin, honey, don’t you know” and I shot back with a stare that warned her back into the seat, and she, in her

annoyance, said “we can fuck anywhere, baby, just pull over” and when I pulled over I told her to leave and she demanded money for her time and I said “ I did you a favor, best thing you can do is cross that bridge and get off Liberty” and she told me to “fuck off” and in that moment it was clear that I did actually want to fuck her but I instead drove off and found my old house atop the hill where my guns were missing from the ripped plank confiscation moments some months or years before, if I remember, and I sat on the stairs next to the hole in the floor and thought about Antonia, and whether I was going to light a candle and watch the sun take shelter behind tenement roofs, and the rats take hold the night, in some few short hours, or whether the all-night liquor stores provided adequate nutrition, or if the rust belt wars had truly finished, and all was done, and the world would truly so soon know the emptiness that was brought in on a push cart across the floor of time, at first slowly, only to be turned on a dial to quickened paces, and at last, delivered to a continent in tempestuous ruin. I sat still, tempting the edge of the world, boots pressed into the wood, caught on Antonia’s stare and Lucy’s breath, undecided on which one mattered more, in the empty scheming decadence of me, the world, the beckoners, the beauty, lost.