The End of the World Book: A Novel

H

H <= ,  It has been well documented that with the appearance on the horizon of the AIDS epidemic, and with the subsequent disappearance of the species known as the gay clone, gay men, associating body hair with clones, and therefore with death, began to shave off their body hair, in a frenzy, and in an attempt to make themselves deathless. Although this attempt to deceive our mortality proved to be as futile as Thetis’s efforts to make Achilles immortal by dipping him in the River Styx, in the process, we became as smooth as the sculptures of Praxiteles, which were famed for their life-likeness. Equally drastic changes occurred in the once wildly picturesque landscape of gay pornography. Whereas much of that vintage so-called pre-AIDS porn took place in nature, and the majority of its actors were very hairy—so much so that one feels as if one is observing a document filmed not in the distant decade known as the 1970s but during an even more distant epoch, for example, the Pleistocene era—early-AIDS and post-AIDS porn rejected nature and moved inside. The majority of this porn takes place in pastel bedrooms and crème living rooms; there are lots of glass coffee tables, and the men are as smooth, though not quite so transparent, as these coffee tables. < 106 = < 107 = But, in the meantime, what happened to all that hair? It is not generally known that in the early 1980s, that period of economic savvy, enterprising entrepreneurs in polka-dot bow ties found a use for the hair. They began to collect the hair en masse and ship it off to warehouses in El Salvador. They went so far as to visit the morgues and shave the bodies of dead clones. This hair was and continues to be used to stuff pillows and eiderdowns. It is more than likely that you are sleeping on the hair of gay men, some of whom are still living, some of whom are long gone, but this probably has nothing to do with those nightmares you have been having. , ,     Hairs first began to sprout on my legs at the end of 1983, the summer I turned twelve. I was, to put it mildly, disconcerted. I remember going into the kitchen to complain to my mother, who was peeling potatoes at the sink. Intending to cheer me up, she took me to the bookcase in my brother’s room and pulled out one of her old Glamour annuals, which contained interviews with various Hollywood movie stars from the 1940s and ’50s. She turned my attention to an interview with the actress Betty Grable. According to this interview, Betty Grable seriously loved hairy men, particularly men with hairy chests. I haven’t a clue why, but I’m just crazy about them, she claimed. The actress actually went so far as to say that she was slightly repulsed by men who didn’t have body hair. Before concluding the interview, she stated (with a wink!), I wouldn’t dream of dating a man who didn’t have some hair on his chest. Upon learning of this, I immediately returned to the kitchen, took a pair of scissors out of the drawer, and went outside . Sitting on the back steps in the warm sun, I proceeded to cut the hairs off my legs, going directly against the desires, the orders, and the directives of Betty Grable. , ,   Ever since this incident with the scissors, I’ve felt somewhat ambivalent about my body hair. But this is changing. For example, recently I had a dream where I met the pop singer Justin Timberlake out at a club. Actually, it wasn’t Justin Timberlake per se, but a version of him, a kind of cover version of him. (Similarly, in dream, whenever we encounter ourselves, it is not our actual selves that we are encountering, but cover versions of ourselves. Unlike cover versions of songs, which are generally mediocre versions of the original, these cover versions of the self are far superior to the actual self.) As I was saying, I met Mr. Timberlake, whom I am by no means a fan of—either in dream or out of dream—out at a club. He looked a bit different. His hair was darker, and I noticed he had a very hairy chest. Afterwards we drove home together, and I kept on looking at the hair creeping out from the neckline of his T-shirt, but I tried to ignore it. I told him that I loved the color of his car, and asked him what color it was. He replied warm rabbitfur brown. This dream was sort of like a Socratic dialogue (except with Justin Timberlake—actually, more like a Socratic dialogue with myself) in which I questioned myself about my own opinion , and then the dream took over and asked more questions, ultimately showing me how inadequate my opinion was, and helping me go beyond my opinion, i.e., if Justin Timberlake doesn’t shave his chest, maybe I don’t have to. Maybe Justin Timberlake and Betty Grable (and my mother) are all correct. Dreams are instructive. , ,    And one must remember that in the grave our body hair will grow back quickly, so quickly that our corpses will be unable to shave it off, and if the state confiscated our electric razors and our disposable razors and our Nair hair removal, our hair would < 108 = < 109 = return and carpet our bodies like wildflowers in spring: we would all be a little more mortal; we would all be clones. ,  My mother dyes her hair red. She began dyeing her hair red in 1943, when she was fifteen, and the Holocaust was already well underway. That year she also read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea . Suddenly, the business of dyeing her hair took on great meaning, especially the waiting for the dye to set, the anxiety over the outcome of the color. In 1945, when WWII ended, to celebrate, she dyed her hair a shade redder than she normally dyed it. She knew she was running a risk, but in the context of the end of the war, and sailors, such brightness could be overlooked. After the Holocaust, my mother continued to dye her hair. Once a month, she bought hair dye from the local chemist ’s. Leaning over the basin in the bathroom, she would apply the dye with a soft brush and then occupy herself for an hour. While she waited, she’d make herself a cup of tea, watch a daytime soap opera, or read a big-print mystery. There was a science to it. These days I am told she goes to the local hairdresser’s, where a nice girl does her hair for her. Heredity is the process, small and mysterious, by which living things inherit characteristics from their ancestors. My three sisters all dye their hair red: in my family this is the limit of resemblance. ,  Before too long, I may have to go get a blue rinse or a lavender rinse, like my godmother. Or I will also have to dye my hair red with such cunning that no one can tell, just as my mother does on a monthly basis. From that day on, passionately, I shall correct my identity.  Interesting things happen when you get a haircut. When I was a kid, I remember more than one occasion when the barber cut my ear with his bright silver razor. Once, to distract me, he gave me a copy of Playboy and turned it to the centerfold, which I stared at while my ear continued to bleed steadily. Today, whenever I go to the barber’s to get a so-called crew cut, I often think about Joan of Arc and everything that resulted from her crew cut—being burnt at the stake, etc.—and I worry that, just like hers, my crew cut could also have unforeseeable consequences. My barber gives me good advice and says things to me like, Homie, no need to flinch from the blunt side of my blade. Generally the aftermath of my haircut is less dramatic than that of Joan of Arc’s, but there is always a deep depression that immediately follows a haircut. H If you look closely at my body, you will see that it has been produced cheaply in a factory; it has an edge, and a bit of elastic at the back, like a long and scary mask.   We’ve all got necks and we’ve all thought about hanging ourselves , at one time or another. We’ve all gone to Home Depot and spent far too much time in the section where they sell lengths of rope. I gave up on the idea of hanging myself years ago, realizing that in my case it was just not practical: there was simply no length of rope in the world that was long enough for me. While one end would have to be tied around my neck, the other would have to be secured to the moon. Still, the other night, out of curiosity, and for old time’s sake, I hung a noose from the highest, sturdiest branch of the peach tree in our front yard. Although I quickly gathered that I would not require its use, and that a rope had failed me yet again, I left it hanging there, to save myself the bother of untying the < 110 = < 111 = knot. I wanted to keep my options open; and after all, I thought, the rope could very well come in handy for someone else. H, T In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the effects of the second wave of the industrial revolution on rural England can be seen everywhere , particularly in the more efficient forms of sadness emerging in humans; there is an increasing speed to his characters’ melancholy. Yet the grayness of the English landscape is being constantly and exuberantly interrupted by the simple movement of young farmers taking off their breeches, bending over, and exposing the bright pink of their assholes, which pierces through the gloom, suffusing the landscape with a shade Hardy called bonnet pink. H B,  As a boy, I enjoyed reading about the exploits of the Hardy Boys, particularly any story in which the swarthier of the brothers, dark-haired Frank, who was older by one year, was kidnapped, taken to a mansion, blindfolded, and bound to a chair that was usually placed in front of a grandfather clock. I also enjoyed their Detective Handbook, in which I learned that asshole printing was the principal means of positive identification for boys, particularly boy criminals. In the chapter titled “No Two are Alike,” I discovered that the asshole of every boy is unique, and that although many assholes are similar, none are identical. One Marcello Marpighi, an Italian professor of anatomy and pornography, stumbled upon this fact in 1686. The chapter also explained that there were eight basic asshole patterns; I have retained a memory of all eight patterns to this day, my favorite ones still being the classic plain whorl and the denser, more intricate accidental whorl. Sometimes criminals , like the infamous John Dillinger, who was seduced by the FBI in 1934, tried to erase their asshole prints by burning their assholes with acid. However, at the FBI there were thousands of gray filing cabinets containing the inked asshole print of every criminal ever arrested, and these records were classified according to both an alphabetical and numerical formula. On a more melancholy note, I learned that asshole printing was used not only to solve criminal cases, but also to identify boys who had died in airplane crashes and other disasters. Once a boy is dead, the chapter concluded, the specificity of his asshole leaves the world.  In many of the photographs taken of my mother as a young woman, she is wearing a hat. Often they’re very big hats; I recall one photo where she’s wearing a huge, black hat; its brim is upturned, threatening to fly away. As a child, for some reason I imagined that in this hat she looked like Mata Hari. All these hats were lost to time except for one pillbox hat that was kept in the top cupboard of the closet in my parents’ bedroom. It was covered with a sort of ruched material that must have been white once, but had gone gray; the hat had come to resemble pictures I had seen of the brain. When no one was around I would try on this hat and say to myself, I am wearing my mother’s brain. I’d often ask her what had happened to the rest of her hats, and she would tell me that she had no idea; a look would pass over her face like the crisp shadow cast by one of those hats’ wide brims. But then my mother’s face would brighten. She’d tell me that it didn’t matter; when she entered heaven all those hats would be waiting for her, in their boxes. Upon arriving in heaven, the first thing she planned to do was to take those hats out of their tissue paper and try them on, one by one. < 112 = < 113 =  We have visited so many gay men in their tasteful, sparsely decorated houses that we have lost count of both the houses and the men inside these houses, in which, on first glance, not a trace of dirt or dust is to be seen; nothing appears to be out of place. On closer inspection, though, everything installed in such houses, even if it appears to be clean, is actually residing at the edge of decay, and everything, while it seems to be in order, in reality teeters on the brink of the abyss and at the edge of the higgledy-piggledy. With these findings, we can safely say that gay men are the neurotic Viennese hausfraus of the twenty-first century. Though, in Freud’s absence, I’m not sure what we can do about it.   One morning when I was in third grade, the health authorities came to our school. They had us form neat lines on the handball courts and carefully checked our skulls and the state of our spines, writing down the results on yellow pads of paper they kept in their clipboards. Although I was disappointed that I did not have curvature of the spine, I was elated to learn that I had head lice and was to be sent home immediately. That week I spent in quarantine with my mother was the happiest week of my life. Every day she would wash my hair, which had been cropped close—like Joan of Arc’s or one of those French collaborators who slept with the Nazis—with tincture of larkspur, a shampoo that stank of tar. Afterwards, she’d sit me down at the kitchen table and run a comb with metal teeth through my hair to brush out the dead lice. Their minute, wingless , almost transparent corpses fell quietly onto the sheet of semi-opaque wax paper she had laid out. Last night I dreamt that once again I was a child with head lice. In the dream I could feel their tiny hooked feet clutching at my scalp and their little beaks drawing my blood. Then, just as my mother appeared, bearing a silver comb and a roll of wax paper, I woke up. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that I was no longer a child, and that I had been cured of head lice; upon realizing this, I sank into a depression that stayed with me the rest of the day. ,  I think it’s interesting how much the heart can hold. Sort of like a vast handbag. Yes. My heart is like a bloody handbag with crude stitching, hanging from a red leather strap; the strap is attached from the vena cava to the right ventricle. My heart is like Anna Karenina’s red handbag, which matches her plush red lips, the one she takes on the train after she’s first met Vronsky, on that night journey where she’s trying to suppress her delight, but she can’t. Let us be more like Anna Karenina. Just like her handbag, my heart contains all sorts of things: English novels, and paper knives, lots of paper knives. And like Anna, I have a tendency to surrender a bit too quickly to delirium . It seems the heart can hold so much—it amazes me just how much my heart can accommodate—but then suddenly it seems it’s had enough, and then? Let us recall Anna Karenina. ,    The history of the heart begins around 1200 AD with the Aztecs, whose complex religious practices emphasized large-scale human sacrifice; this frequently involved ripping out the heart of their sacrificial victims with a big knife made out of volcanic glass, and holding up the heart to the sun, to get a better look at it in the light. I’ve been a big fan of the Aztecs ever since I was a kid and saw an etching of one such sacrifice. When confronted with the opacity of the heart, what they did seems very practical. Shortly after, on May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the despicable English; long after she was all ash, her < 114 = < 115 = heart refused to burn. Everyone who had come to watch her burn went home, but Joan’s heart sat in the near dark, casting a low, squat shadow. Afterwards, the heart went through a relatively quiet period , that is until the late nineteenth century and the arrival of the author Henry James, whose early novels were fairly simple but whose style became increasingly complicated in a concerted effort to reach his heart, which was red and hard and curved, its elegant lines somewhat resembling the red granite tomb housing the remains of Napoleon at the Hôtel Des Invalides. In the twentieth century, nothing of great interest occurred to the heart until the birth of my father, and the appearance of his marvelously bleak heart. When he is not using it, he places it on the mantelpiece on a little stand, so everyone can admire it. And then we must return to my heart. Unlike St. Joan’s, my heart is highly flammable. Sometimes I experience this fourchambered organ as something Bach might play, blood pumping out with the melodies; sometimes it hangs there inside me like a red Chinese pear. But then there are those other times, when my heart feels like an impostor, just like the man who uttered, Louis XVII, c’est moi, claiming to be the true son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but who, after all, turned out to be nothing but a clockmaker. After he died his heart was placed behind glass in a royal necropolis; over two centuries, it came to resemble a small piece of driftwood. Now there is a problem: what to do with this false heart? I need you to drop me off deep in a forest, so I can go searching for the monster that keeps watch over my real heart.  Very little is known about heaven, except for the following: all wings must be taken off immediately upon entering heaven. Wings are detachable: they are inserted into the wearer’s skin on bits of twisted wire, like the wire we used to attach those raffia flowers we made when we were kids. All along heaven’s walls there are wing racks, just like coat racks, with hooks spaced apart at regular intervals. The economy of heaven is built around disposable razors; all inhabitants must work at these disposable razor factories. There is no carpeting in heaven. This puts an end to those little electric shocks we gave one another in our first year of school. It destroys the possibility of receiving carpet burn when engaging in sodomy on the living room floor. Heaven has a concrete floor. Heaven will be hard on the ankles. H, G W F In 1807 German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel published his first book, The Phenomenology of Boys; it quickly became a favorite of Continental boy scholars. In this book Hegel stated that the historical sequence of boys was crucial, and that various boys represented successive phases in the historical development of boys toward ever-greater stages of cuteness. Hegel taught at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin, though, as he noted, it was at Heidelberg where I gained my deepest insights into the essential nature of boys, obviously because at Heidelberg the boys were by far the cutest. Some of his other titles include Boy (Logic), Boy?, and Boys Are Not and Never Will Be Systematic, Even If I Want Them To Be. More than any other philosophy-lecher, Hegel established the philosophy of boys as a major field of study; no attempt as ambitious as Hegel’s has been undertaken since. H M Sometimes when I think about the Holocaust I feel that the only way it could have been avoided—and that perhaps it would have been all for the best—was if everything had stopped with the socalled Heidelberg Man, who lived in Europe when it was nothing but glaciers some 400,000 years ago, and of whom there is no < 116 = < 117 = record except for a segment of his lower jawbone, found in 1907, near Heidelberg, in glacial gravel.  Despite all our rather fancy Hieronymous Bosch–like visions of hell—this idea we have that hell will be one monstrously scenic panorama—apparently in hell there is really not much of a landscape to speak of. The surface is flat, like your mother’s ironing board, except for a ledge that runs along the length of hell, narrow as a ribbon. There is little variety by way of postcards. ,   Apparently, when you arrive in hell, first of all they let you freshen up and unpack. You’re allotted five coat hangers and one drawer. Once you are settled, the first activity, as it were, that you must participate in is the fitting of the chains that you are to be shackled in for eternity. The chains are not real chains but chains made out of crepe paper, in shades of pink and green, very much like the chains we made on rainy days, when we were children. Once you have been fitted, you are instructed to move extremely carefully, so as not to tear the chains. ,   There is plenty to eat in hell and after every meal they give out mothballs, those small white balls that fascinated us when we were children, which we found inside the pockets of coats and jackets in our parents’ closet, and which closely resembled candy, but were merely deterrents to stop the moths’ pale, fluttery bodies from feasting on sleeves and collars. ,   I’ve got bad news for you! You assumed that when you died you’d finally escape psychology, but no: it seems the discipline of psychology continues on after death. According to Carl Jung, who is now in hell, psychology in hell is just the same, but reversed. For example, while I am still alive, I am what you would call an introvert in both the technical and non-technical sense of the word. I am shy, somewhat unsociable , and my mental interests are less in people and events than they are in the exciting world of my own inner thoughts. In hell, it seems I will be an extrovert, hardly interested at all in my dreams, and mainly interested in parties and current events. Most likely I will be one of those extroverts I can’t stand, outgoing to the point of being annoying. And although currently, while alive, I am also what you would call a narcissist, in hell, according to Jung, I will be far less caught up in myself and far more considerate of others. People who didn’t like me on earth and thought I was self-obsessed will like me a lot more in hell. ,   In hell, I am told, the rules of punctuation are very simple. In fact, there are only two forms of punctuation. I imagine this must come as quite a relief to hell’s weary citizens, things already being hard enough. When one ends a sentence in hell, instead of using a period , one makes a mark resembling the pointy tip of a devil’s tail. And if one wishes to emphasize a particularly strong feeling at the end of a sentence, one draws a little pitchfork, standing upright, which basically serves the same function as an exclamation point. It is interesting to note that pitchforks appear far more often than tails, hell being a place that brings out exceptional feeling. When one seeks to express one’s immortal suffering in hell, one conveys it through short, simple sentences. There used to be a third form of punctuation, resembling one of the devil’s horns turned upside down; this served as the equivalent of a comma. However, it was removed from hell’s grammar just over a year ago. At first this resulted in a certain < 118 = < 119 = amount of misunderstanding, along with shortness of breath, but people have adapted their style, as people will do. ,   Remember when you were a kid at the beach on a really hot day, and the sand was so hot, as was the bitumen in the parking lot, that you ran across both surfaces going ouch ouch, and in the process burned the smooth soles of your feet? This is what hell will be like. Hell will be deeply nostalgic. Your eternal damnation will be spent walking on tiptoe.  The flower I most associate with my mother is the hibiscus. In particular, the dusty pink hibiscus. There’s a huge hibiscus bush near where I live, covered in hundreds of these flowers, their petals creased and pink like her skin. It’s perpetually in flower. Naturally , whenever I walk or ride my bike past this hibiscus bush, I think of my mother. I think of hundreds of my mothers. All of them with dyed red hair. I imagine she has found a way out of this terrible and beautiful singularity and has been launched into immortality , unlike the hibiscus; whenever my boyfriend picks one of the flowers and puts it in a vase on the ledge above our kitchen sink, these flowers die quickly, always by the end of the day. - Once in a while I forget who I am and I think that I’m the white hip-hop bride of Jay-Z, which is funny, because although I love hip-hop’s exuberance, and although like so many white males I gravitate toward this music in a concerted effort to forget my whiteness, I don’t really like Jay-Z. Yet still, there are times when I am convinced I’m going to marry him, and am almost certain that he’s bought me an Oscar de la Renta gown, all beaded and crème, like a heavier version of my mother’s wedding dress, and I’m carrying this gown everywhere with me. But even though I’m about to marry the biggest hip-hop artist around, and despite the gown’s exquisite beadwork, I’m still really insecure; in fact, I’m positive that before the big day Jay-Z’s going to break up with me.  Hegel believed that history was tapering to a sharp point, like the tip of a witch’s hat. Doodles of witches’ hats can be found in the margins on every page of his lecture notes. History is a witch!, he was fond of saying to his students, and you are history’s bitch. ,  At some point humans will no longer use the word boy. Instead, we’ll refer to young men as black holes. I love black holes, those stars that can’t bear being stars, like a boy who can’t bear the weight of being a boy, and so collapses in on himself, sucking everyone and everything that is around him in, all objects. Surely everyone has known a boy like this, a boy from whom nothing, not even light, can escape. Surely everyone has gotten dangerously close to such a boy.  I think I am mentioned somewhere in the Bible, if I remember correctly.  The most significant cultural product to come out of the West in the late twentieth century is what is commonly known as the hoodie, those sweatshirts with hoods that boys and young men wear. Eventually, the only thing our generation will be remembered for will be the hoodie, our most noteworthy cultural achievement, though, in a way, hoodies originated with monks in the Middle Ages, so in this sense we are not even original. Hoodies are illegal in public places in English cities, where < 120 = < 121 = video cameras are everywhere, because the wearing of a hoodie does not allow the cameras to see the boys’ faces, and thus gets in the way of proper surveillance. The English authorities are acknowledging not only the resplendent nature of boys’ faces but also the transcendent power of the hoodie, though a hoodie is really nothing more than a shadow, a shadow worn by a shadow, a shadow that can keep you warm, a shadow you can hang on a hook.   Hegel claimed that he was inspired to become a philosopher when he was just a boy, playing with a hula hoop made out of birchwood, just like the hula hoops the Nazis used in their mass rallies in sports stadiums, where thirty thousand boys would hula-hoop as displays of Hitler’s armed might; boys and spectators alike were hypnotized. Something in the hula hoop suggested the movement of thought, he wrote. Hegel also claimed that unlike his ex-boyfriend Immanuel Kant—or that cunt Kant, as he disparagingly referred to him, who liked to go out walking through the birch forests to get all his ideas—he did his best thinking whilst hula-hooping; in his later years this became a problem: he could not think without his hula hoop. Still, Hegel hula-hooped his way through systematic philosophy and met the deadline for his final book, titled After My Death, at five o’clock on the afternoon before the Holocaust.  I think I’m getting a little bit better at being human. I’ve become more used to that continuous, low droning sound, and to the idea of death, and until death, the fact of duration. Now that I’ve finally worked out the system, it’s quite easy, even relaxing. At times, life takes on a quality that is almost vaudevillian, structured as it is in a series of short, independent acts. Though I shouldn’t speak too soon: sometimes I get so over being human that I begin to search out other possibilities of what I might be—a dog’s muzzle, or a boy’s bicycle—and the alternatives look promising. H  Surely there is nothing more revolting or disturbing than those so-called Hummel figurines, which are much loved by white supremacists and by women of my mother’s generation. These German figurines first appeared on the horizon in 1935, two years after the Nazis’ rise to power. Standing four inches tall, these figurines are mainly of plump Bavarian children with chubby knees and fat, rosy cheeks; their swollen heads are usually out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. As a rule, the boy figurines are dressed in lederhosen and alpine hats; the girls wear traditional dirndls and kerchiefs. The children are generally depicted in states of idleness, lolling beneath the shade of a birch tree, or feeding geese, though occasionally they are represented in states of pain (see Hummel figurine number 7,641: boy with toothache). The Hummel phenomenon was the result of an artistic collaboration between a nun fated to die of tuberculosis, Sister Maria Innocentia (formerly Berta Hummel), and a porcelain manufacturer by the name of Franz Goebel. It is of interest that although Hummels were immediately popular, they were almost immediately banned by the Nazi Party, on the grounds that they did not adequately represent the “noble Aryan race.” However, some historians of the Hummel suggest that the ban was for entirely different reasons, namely that Hitler was deeply unsettled by the uncanny proximity between his misshapen physiognomy and that of the Hummel. Far from being distortions of the German race, the figurines were suppressed for being far too accurate. Of even greater interest is the fact that after WWII, when workers cleared out the ruins of the so-called bunker, the < 122 = < 123 = underground structure in which Hitler took his own life, thousands of tiny fragments of Hummel figurines were found amidst the debris. Despite concerted efforts, the figurines could not be reconstructed.  God, I love hummingbirds! I like how stressed out they are, and how they move their wings so quickly—sixty to seventy times a second—that they look as if they have no wings, like their wings have been amputated or hacked off. Their wings beat as fast as the eyelashes of anxious boys, as fast as we humans tend to think. And their intricate flight patterns are weirdly similar to our patterns of thought: they can fly not only forward, into the future, or hover there, in the present, but they are also the only bird that can fly backward, just as we humans are the only creatures so hopelessly committed to thinking backward—that is, to remembering . It seems like all hummingbirds can think about or care about is nectar, and if they couldn’t get it, they’d kill themselves, slit their tiny violet throats. At night they must collapse into a state of honeyed torpor. Always on the go, on those rare occasions when you see a hummingbird pause on a branch, to take everything in, it really doesn’t resemble itself.  The moon’s been hanging so low in the sky lately that I keep hitting my head on it. I’m beginning to develop a stoop. Its starkwhitebrightness gives me a headache. I bet if you licked the moon, it would taste like aspirin. Soon we will live on nothing but aspirin . Soon we will all be hunchbacks. H,  I have nine voices, all of them terrible, just like the dreaded Hydra and her nine heads. Whenever I encounter any one of my voices, they horrify me; I’m turned to stone, like those who gazed upon the Medusa. Whenever I cut off one of my voices, two more voices grow back in its place. To truly kill these voices I have to behead them, one by one, and burn the neck of each voice, but then there is the one voice that refuses to die; to do away with my immortal voice you’ll need to bury it under a heavy stone. < 124 = ...