35 Memory hook

Cop gone, Kindred fifty miles on, roadside, engine blown, car abandoned, walking the center line like it's an open vein, heartland bound.

White vehicle honking, can't squeeze past, edges up until the driver side mirror clips Kindred's swinging right hand, glint of sunglasses.

G-Men from 1945, again? Rubber gloves. Engine leaking dark oily pools. Death rattle after the chase. Kindred looks ahead. His father down.

They had rolled over and slid upside down on the roof. Truck spinning in ever diminishing circles like hands of a Dali clock running down.

Kindred watches himself, age nine, slide out the window. G-Men beating his father with a length of chain. Their car, a true nondescript.

Shotgun on the back seat, pump action, 12 gauge. Taking it out, the long barrel banging against the door frame, glinting hard black steel.

Two heads swinging around, eyes locking on danger, hands reaching for service revolvers, shock of brain pattern recognition. Boy? Boy??

Behind them Kindred sees now what he did not see then, his father throwing something into the desert, sagging back, gurgling wordlessly.

First blast a tight cluster of pellets, hornets from hell, face pulped and head gone at the same time, standing headless corpse, toppling.

Kindred's father rolling over onto his back, blinking like a salmon, mouth bubbling air pockets tinged with pink direct from lungs wheezing.

Kindred, five feet tall, pumped the action, swinging the shotgun and the second cluster missed wide right, rogue pellet eye-centric, zing.

Entering the left eye of G-Man #2, popping it like a party balloon and angry travel through the back of his brain and out, death dealer.

Kindred dragging his father to the government vehicle and getting him into the trunk and slamming it down, turning the ignition, rolling.

90 miles an hour west dead straight along the desert highway, chasing the dying sun. Kindred the Kid twirling the knob, radio up, Sinatra.

Left behind to bake on sand ridged like a serpent's throat, or the carpet in Joy Motel, the Watcher's eyeball, poppin' hot, superglazed.

Two hundred miles of horizon pulled before Kindred the Elder spit the words out. Kindred the Kid kicked the car into a spin, screamed east.

And now, 23 years later, Kindred replays the scene on the reflective lenses of a stranger's sunglasses, knuckles mirror dinged, memoryhook.

Red dot on the horizon growing larger, turbines whine, vehicle from 1945 approaches, fills the moment with raw Detroit metal hurtling east.

Kindred sees himself age nine at the wheel flowing past like a fold in time, water rippling decades unspooling, his father in the backseat.

Timesmack and Kindred confirms these two men here in this white vehicle on this day are the G-Men from 1945 and he needs to kill them again.

Three hours later, light spinning roofly on vehicle lawful, state cops pull over to investigate. Two black uniformed, white car, red dead.

One has an exploded eyeball, the other no head at all. The skinny cop squints sunward, nodding up and down, got a professional job, he says.

Kindred long gone, hitchhiked clear, traveling fast, no baggage but memories light as a sunglassed stranger's last earthly gasp, deadweight.

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34 Baby's heart

Paid my dues at the front desk, eighteen bucks to a guy named Sagan. He tipped his head, like a connective wire before an execution, zzzt.

He slowed down, handed me a manila envelope. Had my name, the name of the motel, it was stamped forwarded from the Joy Motel. Dammit all.

Shuffling out back, corn field, stalks talking, I can hear their voices. Elbow my way in fifty yards and sit down. Manila crinklywrinkly.

My name in redpen, blood oath. Familiar script, aggressive K. Cornerbiting I tear it open, spit out the paperscrap, mash it badboy soily.

Tip the envelope and gravity pulls as gravity does and the black and white glossy slips out and falls like a petal from a monochrome rose.

It's me. I'm dead. Blank head. Blood red. My face is mashed into the lap of a woman wearing a floral dress, summershift thin, me eyeglassy.

In the picture, future-me is breathlessly innocent, mouth open, saliva bubbling at the corners, her small hand mashpushing my head down.

Relooking at the envelope. Handwriting hardedge K. Familiar, yeah. That's mine. I sent the manila surprise to myself. From the Joy Motel. 

Postmark 3-15-72. Sent to the Third Mind Motel. How did I know where I'd be on this day after hours of wheelspinning on a westward quest?

How did I get this death image? Why did I die? Who is this tiny woman with the bony hand smothering me into her lap, bigheadedly deadeyed?

Folding the photo until it is the size of a baby's heart and stuffing it pocketly. Hawk slips westward sliding above on God's last breath.

I bounced in my seat, threw my back out, opened the car door and retrieved it. So I meet an old dame in the next 4 yrs. Memo:avoid old dames

Simple as that, stick with the schedule, snipe the disciple, avenge dad's lovegone, emasculate Hitler a generation later. And then, discord.

Kindred hadn't gone a single exit ramp from that shitty motel when a squad reeree'd out of nowhere, zeroing him. He pressed his jugular.

An old trick, get a move going, effects of the meds vamoose for a bit, waiting behind nerve bundles until Johnny Law skidoos to the sunset.

The cop walked up to Kindred, kept it quick. Handed him a note, smelled like corn, told him it was in that envelope, wagged his finger once. 

Kindred saw his teeth marks; it was where he bit it open. Cop all smiley, told him he was lucky, littering was legal but only until 1973.

Random scribbles, did he write this, in haste? The cop car did doughnuts in a Stuckey's parking lot off to the left, clue or distraction?

Dad's old flame had moved on. Scott AFB, southern Illinois, near St. Louis. Space Command, reported for duty the day Jackie grabbed JFK DNA.

Dammit, might as well just start paddling the Mississippi. Deep down, Kindred seemed pleased. He thought of ships in a Midwestern night.

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33 Nazi juices

I left the room, always in first-person narrative and obsessive-compulsive perfect, books stacked neat, blood spatters facing northeast.

Rearranging everything just right, motel shampoo: label front, just like the Benton soap. Made my thoughts click clack click back. K-chack.

Freeze frame, I heard what sounded like vacuuming, yet the cleaning lady was dead. But, who replaced my soap. Someone watching the room.

Time to bolt, the parakeet molting, open door next door we're at war band the bomb and bang the boom think Kindred think I say out loud.

Something the monkey told him, nights before. The turbines were actually travesty generators, Nixon used a cut-up technique, tricky Dick.

Vampire monkey simply a chimp with rubber teeth, a joke. When I tried to eat him, he squelched like an old bakelite radio circa 1945. 

Sack come and. Even I didn't talk like that hen I was off my meds or took too meeny miny mo. My dad had a lover, not my mother, Ft. Bliss.

She left him with old scars for a new job, Wichita. Which was it? No. Nebraska. Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha. Strategic Air Command.

Where he needed to go, another disciple needed discipline. I-80 straight line, heading west into the black. Bye Dick, enjoy your 'shrooms.

Karin Offal. Looked like Supergirl, if Supergirl was German. Didn't have that Nazi hairdo, smoked like a fiend. And Dad loved her to death.

She looked like Lee Remick. Years later, I saw ANATOMY OF A MURDER. Jimmy Stewart, 1959, small-time lawyer. No Mitchum. Remick black widow.

Not that way with Dad, she loved him back and hard.They shared secrets and dreams where torsos spun and bled across shifting sands. Red ants

or black oil, hard drops of blood on pursed lips in dark dreams on a secret summer night. I watched from the door of our trailer, nervy.

She was on top, her spine creased like a book you read before lights out. One hand drummed against a glass of scotch. Paper clip echoes.

It was the night she left; I watched for hours. I had never seen a woman's breasts before & I had yet to hear the damp voices like tongues.

Dad made sounds I had never heard him make, monkey sounds, oh how they bounced. I did not understand what was happening to me internally.

The cover story, she was going to Huntsville AL with the rest of von Braun's madmen. July 4, 1950, she boarded a Greyhound bus for Omaha.

Dad died nine years later, always had a photo in his wallet, Dad & Karin at the Proving Grounds.Her smile; she could've had a cape & tights.

Trutrh, justice and dear old dad fucking a nazi bitch up the ass three ways to son day. 18 years? She'd be mid-40s. I would strangle her.

Trutrh. Damn, I was hiccupping word thoughts again. I pulled over just past Cedar Rapids to take my meds, sedate my quantum thoughts.

Lucid, like a shot of chloring up my nose, I realized that whenever I typed on the Galaxy Twelve I thought of paper clips dropping on glass.

Damn. CHLORINE, rhymes with Doreen, think spell correct. Memories messing with me bad. I sat near a Sunoco gas pump and wept. No reason.

Hours of flatness later. Tired, not ready to call it off, bam down an off ramp. Burroughs Pop.1977, hit Gysin Street, The Third Mind Motel.

Midday nap. Yawn. No turbines. Proper caps and periods. Maybe it was the smell of corn. Dreamt of the damp trailer filled with Nazi juices.

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32 Brainpan burn

Turbines power up, dullpulse rumble beneath the floorboards. Wall bulges, retreats, repeats, heartbeat. Airpulled under door, deep inhale.

Kindred toes woolfake hallway carpet, ridged like the inside of a throat. The Watcher stonestill as Buddha in the doorway of 266, on guard.

Sprinting Kindred glimpses hot white eyeballs as he passes, pupils contracted to pinpoints, redrimmed black keyholes, unblinking thinking.

Smacking glassdoors in fishbowl lobby, sidewalking in bare feet, cigarettes glow in ambulance windscreen, fireflies immobile, pinstuck dead.

Kindred slaps driverwindow palmhard, glass crinkles, a push and it falls away in soft round pebbles. But the ambulance is empty, idling low.

Fireflies were reflections of flashlights, cops yellowtaping exterior balcony, dead cleaning woman legs akimbo over the railing, mannequin.

Play acting? Not real corpse. Kindred processing visual input, notes Dick Overtone appears to be supervising police strike force, so rigid.

Overtone drops plastic cleaning woman into dumpster, cops disperse, mumbling. Crewcut mesomorph hands Kindred a driver's license, tattered.

Signed by Johnson Dack, Watcher killed at the Trinity blast, 1945. But the picture is Kindred's father. Kindred uncertain, squints, what?

Conspiracy? Attempted cover up? Red herring? His father co-opting Dack's ID so the G-Men would assume he was dead? Or am I hallucinating?

Kindred the Elder, whitefaced in goggle glasses peering at the nuclear sunburst, windwashing burnt skin with sandblasted savagery, primal.

If my father died standing outside the shelter, then who rode with me across New Mexico? Who was pulled from the car by government agents?

If he died, head of the program, maker of the pompombomb, IQ 210, no wonder he became the iconic leader of the 12 disciples. If he died. If.

Was I so brainscarred I did not could not would not recognize the man in the car as the road rolled away in dry snakeskin patterns after us?

Yubbadubba brainpan burn. Valveleak on brainstream download Life of Kindred, 1940s, Inject 3.2. Subject misfiring, needs corrective action.

Maintenance Report 2009.1.27.1b Technician unable to override burn on Subject: Kindred. Note Inject 3.2 corrosive mismix. Issue pain recall.

Observation matrix indicates Subject: Kindred behaving v. erratically. Should be considered Dangerous Level 5. Uncontrollable, unstoppable.

Ambulance drivers unable to execute exit pickup. Forced to abandon immediate area when facing imminent confrontation with Subject: Kindred.

Send two armed technicians to pullback ambulance when Subject: Kindred is sleeping. Warning: Two burning cigarettes on floormat. Extinguish.

Recommendation (needs signature of commissioner): Disavow responsibility for any actions committed by Subject: Kindred due to brainstream.

Kindred squatting on the carpet in the doorway of 266, face to face with the Watcher stony chairbound monitoring hallway activity. Eyelock.

No noticeable chest movement, no respiration, eyeglazed, grayskinned. The Watcher a statue, rockharddead. Kindred thumbclosing his eyelids.

Kindred shedding ownskin pinkly, steaming nozzle showerscalding. Highwhine turbines. Stepping out, toes splayed, rebirthed, a brandnew man.

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31 Galaxy twelve

Falling through the verbs, impaled upon a noun. Snowblind I wonder: did the Watcher see the future as Trinity tapdanced on his eternal soul?

Birthed as a small red dot, as if the blood of the doomed, spit forth by a typewriter ribbon worn to shreds. Not a dot, a period, full stop.

The dot growing like a red balloon being inflated by the gasping breaths of an asthmatic, in ebbs and tides. The printed word, unchained.

Kindred napped for a few pages, everything was static between his snores. He rolled over in his dream, fell to the edge of the discards.

A draft woke him up, a discarded draft, pages disheveled, slipping from 20# white linen double bond he was in a bind dropping dots of ink. 

Snow covered the farmlands of the Great Plains. Kindred in freefall, arms out, whee, he was nine again, daddy let him on a ride at Riverview.

No not snow no no no closer what no stay away not fields not borders squares and lines not star routes or fire roads no post office anymore.

E-lectronic brainwaves he heard the wind like typing on a keyboard then a SLAP like satisfied hitting a button named SEND. Postage stamps

the squares were more blank pages, shadowed snow drifts = scratched out lines in pencil wha? who used pencils anymore? Kindred did, right?

BAM, he hit. Smelled linke Ticonderaga#2 lead. Couldn't spell erasures, he seemed to recall scratching joyously his head his ass the words.

Linke? What kind of word was Linke? Kindred tried to scratch it, tear at it with his fingers and his teeth manic. Typo behind a clear screen

Banged his jaw bang a gong war what is it good for good god jaw Kindred poked his finger at the whiteness, like tapping on a glass corpse.

What the scene shift as I looked from behind the hard light Baldo the Magnificent keeps moving his one finger like a nicotine fit, he's gone

and I'm back outside the fourth wall screwball I hear a typewriter my old Smith Corona Galaxy Twelve (What is Hewlett Packard? Tax guys?)

I let myself slide down the pages to the sound, past red balloons of circled words (the ones I would replace) and there he was: a monkey.

Typing at hyperspeed, pages yanked pages yanked one after another my story? his story? why would a monkey have a story? A monkey vampire?

Musty smell of wet sci-fi paperback drenched from leaking skylight in a tiny library in Nebraska. Kindred on his back on the carpet wakes.

Tired bones brittle clattering like a Johnny Walker bottle full of dominoes he staggers to his window and wipes clear the hotsteamed glass.

Flaring lights in freezing rain, the hiss of blood in arteries cranial. Rustling of fist inside greasy bag of buttered popcorn, ear tickles.

Car idling in the parking lot. Not a car, a van. Not a van, an ambulance. Two occupants impassive. Always waiting, a springloaded beartrap.

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