In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was the light that would shine in the darkness, even to the ends of the Restaurant,but the darkness did not comprehend the light, nor the Restaurant the Wordnor I the Restaurant, and I couldnt speak the Word.
Through the loading docks night-shadows, my steps clocked weak percussion to the traffics thrum. I saw seven garbage bags stuffed with sauces, cheese, brownie, ice-cream, caramel scum, ketchup, swirled potatoes, blackened grease, French fries, your gold locket, chunks of chicken, burgers, steak, sodden napkins, stray utensils, melting ice;I saw silhouetted forms, hunched before floating embers, beneath smoke curling skyward in the semblance of a face:
and the pavement shuddered—crackling, rose, breaking as pebbled foam over the crest of a great gold whale.? Its eyes were rubies; its tail rose from under the earth and thrashed up at an orange moon—
Those who had gathered for smokes or cocaine now broke into opposing camps: the cheering and the afraid, or so I am told.(And, within, the telephone rang.)I ascended the stair—to the landing with the abandoned register under dusty photos of Volcano Joes once-favored surf spots.Fear rimmed even the leaky tea-vat, trickled out over plains of cracked and unswept wood toward me; it was also my job to mop and sweep.
They will wonder how much I could have seen.
This should suffice:We know that when the warriors swarmed naked from under the upended canoe that had hung from the wall between the yellow crossroads-semaphore and old Trysteros horn, the night was not yet far along and we who were living were not free, either to shrink or disbelieve,even as the canned sauces and torpedoes fell from wall-shelves like aluminum rain.
And that ancient maple choir—velvet-robed, viscous-voiced, spangled with flower and ice, studded with points of wet silver light, stuffed into the Restaurants old-time telephone booth, mouths splayed howls against cracked amber glass (as Id always pictured them)—revived:and wept and prayed, wept and prayed.
It was then that I, small in my voluminous aprons soiled black, thought I saw you at the glass table, eating eggs, which we both know are not on our menu, from a silver bowl that could not have been ours, either, opposite a fat man with a wooden sled on his lap and a newspaper dividing the space between you.Those roses,” I shrieked, pointing for the table-centers tin vase: those will never bloom!”
But you saw or heard nothing; my demon, idiot love;the spears began to fly.
Company tanks came down the spiral stair. Volcano Joe Himself, wild-browed, sinistral, skin a cruel leathered tan, grinned at the processions head—he was goofy-foot on a gun turret beneath The Restaurants colors of Red, Black and fun, the raised standard whipping high above his head.Only the glass that was already his eye, deactivated by a turret of surface-breaking reef in 68, spared him lost sightwhen a stone-arrowhead struck, spraying glassblood down the wreck that had been his face,but there was no time to exult or to grieve;
blood of an impaled Guests rare rib eye steak juiced from a Section 30 2-tops checked plastic tablecloth, puddling with the floors gentle declineand I got the mop again.
From the telephone booth, a creaking banshee hymn:I am the Truth and the Light concealed between stacked clipboards cataloging clean dispensations of tasks—
A trapdoor opened beneath the storerooms floor, and, Lo, a crystal tide swept out along the channels, flooding the graveyard behind our Store, where the dying whale flopped on cracked asphalt, its great golden tail carving swaths through re-gathering tourists who crowded, relentless, for photos.
A scroll pinned by arrowpoint to the alley-wall unfurledand I read off the Enemys objections: Who is our narrator?Do we reject this whale?What the fucks going on?You gave me your job, or something like it; they called you the hyacinth girl,” a sobriquet I could not understand, but which revived my suspicions, particularly when I saw the leers on certain swarthy Servers faces.? I hated them then, I hate them now.I should have taken you away somewhere; I should have trusted no one—
In the parking lot one night not long after the event, when I came to pick you up from a double shift so that you would not have to take the bus, we discussed:—Im so sorry.—So am I.(:As the deer panteth for the waterso my soul longeth after thee.”)costume jewelry
In the storeroom I saw the Devil, eyelids stretched over his face, crouched between halflit shelves, wheezing a Word I couldnt bear to hear; I covered my ears with my apron, closed my eyes—worse.Over intercoms and hollow spans swollen with grief, my inbox chimed—but I was forbidden to go or even to think of you, Sweetness, Lover, Womb.
From the heart of the parking lot next to the Restaurant at the end of nearly all things, I write to you, my love.? Stop.”
In a vision of wet limbs and carfog I saw your hair grow damp, rope-like, and swing between sweaty faces, one perfect, oneI hate.
Stop!?!” I typed, in a rage.
Here is a joke that T-Rex, our bartender, told—a tasteless, insulting, unfunny, racial slur that I will now reproduce without emendation or irony:
What da local boy wen tell da haole when he wen take one giant lead off third base?What?What, you give up?? You no more one guess?Nah, brah, what he wen say?Das right, haole: go home!”Ha ha ha,Shit, brah, I fucken hate haoles.Yeah.
In the womens bathroom rumor holds a ghost but I have never seen her.
O, Honolulu night.In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk with you, in dreams its me alone that gets to peel your shimmering skin away and swallow whats inside.
How now,” she said, How now?? Have you lost the sense with which you were born?”(The ringing phone rang ringing, ringing its ringing ring,I couldnt help a single Guest, not one)
Enough, quoth the Happy People Greeter, who was studying to be a marine-biologist and who would shortly be dead, and who also pole-danced at her uncle the Viscounts dive, down Sand-Island way, but it was too late:warriors stormed back through through the heavy wooden doors that I and Tommy, the balding ex-shift-leader (caught doping down pre-shift; demoted) held open most Friday nights—We need a sub-HPG asap, folks.”
In dreams I have your body.In dreams I have your touch.Your warmth, your toes, your sweet embrace.Its you I love so—XXXXXXXXXXXXX
We watched them recede into the night as they chanted traditional war chants—with some irony, I thought—and hefted our Greeter above their heads.
I saw seven shot-glasses empty at the bars four corners,tiny contests on television screens,a wrinkled regular,withered limes,dust—You, my only love, my cherished, alone, in candlelight (but the Restaurant does not provide candles!), the book I wrote of proverbs quips and psalms, proverbs,clutched open in your hand, frail white fingers quivering, as you remembered me—or else the fat one, my enemy, cheap devil.
Unto thee, oh Lord, do I deliver myself up.”
After wed collected the blue-books and tallied up responses,after wed sent purple taro-mash tonics (complimentary) to the tables that hadnt fled, after wed listened to the squashed sparkling choir sing the usual midnight anthem (penned by Corporate ),after a certain amount of sighing lamentations (more or less assumed at that hour after any busy weekend night),after all of these things,the Finale descended as a cloud of sweet-potato light:
1) At the center of the bar-pond, the geese became swans and T-Rex fell into the trough of ice I myself had brought in buckets.
2) Trick-or-Treaters swarm the gates!!
Third):
From The Restaurants far corner I heard a voice, crying out of our Stores own wilderness:
I dont love you anymore, you said, and I need my check.
Beneath bins of dirty plates, utensils, cups, sizzle platters all acrust with cheese, I dumped our offal into more plastic bags, dragged these out for the whale-shattered dock, glittering now with golden innards, and slick quivering chunks of what had been within(plankton, puppet, harpoon, Jonah, rust),sifting through which (with spears, canoe-paddles, a palm-switch) the warrior Chief? and certain of his men to whom he called out (in a tongue I interpreted by pitch alone):
Men: relieve him of his brain, his heart, his balls, his eyes,” indicating, with an outstretched arm: me.And they moved as if to obey, so that I foresaw—and in truth embraced—the end.But your voice—Your voice, Sugar, Plum-Lip, Honeyfuck, Balm of my Life:You sang in a voice so sweet that even the rocks cried out, and cracked themselves and the warriors sheathed their spears in their own black and crumbling hearts and I saw the whole of that monolith collapse, suck itself down into a sinkhole of cement and wood and glass and food (cooked and un-) pulled down into pooling cess—
Over an incessant intercom the voice of one Store-Manager breaking as through stone:WE HAVE SEEN THEM SMOKING BATU FROM THE GLASSPIPETHEY ARE GONE.HERE ARE THEIR APRONS, ONLY THE WINDS HOME NOW.
And it was as if Id never had you to lose the memory of the last time you traced the troughs of tear-drenched hollows beneath my eyes, as you leaned in to kiss me goodbye.
(This was before the war.)
A horns blast; radio; cries.Do we meet them at the gates?? Are there gates to meet them at?
The list of those who died a thousand bloodless afternoons in our Restaurants
wilted gloam:T-Rex, Tony, Justin, Heather, many more (the names go just before the faces.)How I needed you the night the ice vaults cracked and yielded glaciers, solid as bone,the night the hoards spilled from the opera-house across Ward Aveand I could not Greet them fast enough, could not, could not . . .
O city city I sometimes hear the yowl of waiter-wraithswho bear platters down boneyard alleywhere the dead men lost nothingonly the mops home—and also buckets and sanitizer—
In the grill-smoke, where the men who have no words cook sterile food,the secret notes in gesticular code,the scents:tomato, lemon, oil, garlic, meat, coffee, tropical tea, cigarette, vodka, ganja, batu, mushroom, powder, needle, pillcrush, sweetness, lover, home,o, god, release me from regurgitated air
(Your name the Word I no longer dare—)
In cold steam we lock the vault behind us and waltz down cellar-stairsto the treble thump of a lavender heartthat glows at the basements core,our aprons stripped from our bodies,round the bathing light we dancea duet of shadows dispatched from the bodys thudding chorusof thunder and fried heat, fear.
Here is what they can take from me:A highball shatters—The rest is silence.
c.f., Jon 7, 33-31: Pain.