Chapter 1 - Parallax

Chapter 1

Parallax

Demming New Mexico, 1985

I learned to properly worship Satan from a guy named Cole, in the mid-eighties, in a hotel room, in Demming New Mexico.  It was also the first time I paid for sex, and the first time I shot a man; both unrelated to my "dark mentor".  Some generational wind had blown his great grandparents across the whole of the US after blowing them over an ocean, between here and Wales, or Ireland and all the way up to a damned barbed wire fence in the southern New Mexican dessert, which is already rare on barbed wire.  There they stayed until the Welsh washed off and three generations worth came, bloomed, hungered and went down into red dirt, until poverty, and powerlessness was all that was left, that and Cole.  His lineage survived the Romans but was beaten by the welfare state, and now he barely shared a trailer with his ex-sister-n-law and her progeny and just didn't fucking eat in favor of cigarettes and whisky.  We mostly stayed in my room at the Baker or down the street at the Old Mission Cafe, where for hours, we would sit at the table next to the Bussers door and say words that would have damned us if anyone listened.  He used to tilt the world like he was trying to peer around inside of a comic book pane, and if he could just trick the physics, just snag it on the edge of the frame with his shaking fingers, he could see through that window what was not written into existence yet, as unborn as it were unreal and whatever it could be, I think Cole thought he could be it too.  And maybe that was escape, but escape was my word, not his.  Cole was returning.

On the many journeys we would take at those Formica tables in the Cafe or the heavy wood one in my room, we would come to bridges made of syntax in poor reflection and he would steady an idea of himself against the nicotine and alcohol, making a slow knife of his left hand through the air.  Short.  Dispassionate.

"I am left hand path, man.  I am left hand path."  he would shake his head not looking directly at his hand.  "not all that shit over there" he would indicate with his right hand in a half hail, half halt gesture, also, not looking.

And there in that internal brazier that lit his eyes, the babies, all of those babies that were him, would be thrown to a brass Moloch, and from that smoke of self incineration that I worshiped about him, there rose only the loss of their part in a long and un-broken song.  He shook his head no to that story, and a tear formed.  He shook his head no and wiped his hands on his dirty pants, like he was left here, stranded by a purpose that forgot to check the ships manifest and didn't notice that they were missing one of their own, that he was there in front of them, waiting, his human camouflage so convincing that they marked him absent while he screamed, waved and leaped the chain-link fence, and ran through the jet wash and watched the Time he should have been in, move away, then move farther away, and then become reachable only through pain and sorery.  In the booth he looked around, and through the glass and glow of his eyes he saw that moment, and I could see the trees moving, as the moment came and went again.  He was there, is there now, where the world turned right.  This is about the farthest coffee could take us.  We arrived early and late, but we always arrived here.  Alcohol was next, it opened a large door but only briefly, then only blood could keep it open.  We killed rarely, very rarely, but bloodshed threw open what the crowbar of drugs could only let us glimpse.  Bloodshed could draw a smile from both of us, wash us in relief, and make plane that which reason and thought could not make known.    

I think about him often, and now, as I sit at a worse table, and without good company, as someone who found passage on a similar ship, I looked out my porthole and the man in the desert below, destined to be left in time, a good answer to a question that may not be asked again, an actual satanist, though I always saw him as a stoic with an ironic hobby.  Wounded.  Brilliant.  Tragic, but a man.  He shakes his fist at the rest of us, as we turn to the inflight movie and he drowns in a dessert, marooned in time, and would damn us if we returned, would damn us all if he could have his way.  Please God, someone give him his way.  

I tear the add out of The Review that was almost certainly a Hail Mary of Dark Energy released through time to my own subconscious and extruded in ink and wood pulp into a color photo of Lescombes Winery, and what could only be a Black Muscato advertising same, in lovely downtown Demming NM.  My God.  My good old friend whom I have left, is still alive, still drowning.  How long can you swim?  And why will none of us save you.

I Feel it of course.  I rise to stand at the door.  It looks like I am stretching, going to the sole unisex bathroom in an eatery designed around eating there/here., to shit, an old man like me, a bathroom trip is a nuisance to others.  and before the door, before I reach, I know, If I turn the knob to the left, I will exit the bussboy door in the Old Mission Cafe, in the ruins of the past, a place not yet destroyed by the fire we lit 30 years ago, and I will emerge onto the streets of Deming only to see him, Cole, my brother, casting his gaze askance, in my direction, at me, having known as I know now, that I can open that door, go there.  But the archetype is strong today, it saves my life like an olive from the can about to roll to the floor, it pulls me back by the elbow, youokaycan wecall someoneheyshould wecallsomeone sirdoyouwantusto call s ome oneone...  

"No, I'm fine, I'm just old".  I open the door and go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet in my pants.  I am followed by a few well meaning 30 somethings that are really just processing something about their own old parents, and while I am sure someone calls an ambulance, i convince them i cannot shit with the door open, which they will not let me shut completely, isheokay, iddonowht, nohes talkingyes..  I repeat the motion with my right hand.  I twist it in a way like he used to cut the air in my room.  I turn right.  I always turn right.  Cole walks past the ruins where we once sat for many hours of our lives, and feels it.  That fucking guy is gonna stop drinking and smoking someday, and save up for a car and then, I, and we, will all be well and truly fucked.