The Pleasures of Lesser Triumph

The One Teeth said unto the Lord: O’ Lord God and Father, acts of consumption devastate my Life. And the Great Lord God speaking from His Throne said: Staging and Petty Palavering! And the Lord and God Almighty signaled with a gesture of His Hands that Life is exactly a series of moments that announce to the vigilant ostensibly practicable sites for withdrawal.
--Book of Genesis, 13.

We stay up almost all night because then we want to see the little prowlers out across the dark. It is our last night together. You can see them thin and shadow. Patty Clap of Thunder puts a cup over their bodies, scoops them up and out, one at a time. She shudders as she puts them out. She says a prayer as she sets them out: May you be blessed with the harmonious light of our Lord God and Jesus Christ in Heaven. Patty Clap of Thunder don't take kindly to those who say she's a cripple which ain't true by no means. "What's the problem," her mom says when she turns up for the last time as she ever was before. She says: "What the fuck you think bitch. I'm fucked up. Can't walk for shit." Her mom says: "Just who are you any more?" Patty Clap of Thunder says: “There ain't no me no more so don't ask. She's gone on a search for the errant figure that randomly destroys.” Then Patty Clap of Thunder just says one more prayer like this: O’ Lord, I am overrun by what comes out of my own self like if it was a rescript from God the Almighty. Now I know one thing O’ Lord which is that God Almighty is so many ways and legitimately so.

Eyes like birds going on up to the sky, too near the gallow's edge, The One Teeth’s shuffling her sneakers in the dust and rubbing her hands together wearing greasy poorly fastened clothes. The fidelity of Patty Clap of Thunder's death has overtaken the present even as she stands hooded on the gallows. All the women and children are dancing slow shift stepping. "Everybody does things wrong dear Lord and I'm just praying you hear my cry," The One Teeth keeps crying out. Summer sun puts the air with dark hot heat. She shouts: "There is no proper law in this here land." She looks around at everybody with tears in her eyes. They stand so still and cry quiet and without tears most of them. They pretend to cry. Everybody stays real quiet as she hangs and vibrates in different circlets heavily from the top. Even though now there's just shadows all across her life. Patty Clap of Thunder says: "This is my new death." She says it from under the bag over her whole head. We all know the body is still alive. She wants to say things she believes she won't be able to say later. She says: "The laws of this land are defined as incompletely defined forever and ever." Then, at last, she says: "This is for my own good. Don't do the things I done." Then a stirring comes out of the brush. 10 White Deer comes on out, dainty as candies made of sugar crystals. 10 White Deer clips Patty Clap of Thunder down from the gallows with its sharp front teeth, carries her away on its back. 10 White Deer says nothing looks at nobody. Before you look again they're gone. The One Teeth was wishing for this, which precludes the formation of any total system of prediction. "What good are my wishes!" she cries it. She begins whistling in a mournful way how people do that. The sky is filling up with smoke and ash from fire.

Out in the woods with 10 White Deer Patty Clap of Thunder is totally free for the first time in her life. For cold nights she curls against its pilose body and 10 White Deer says nothing. Foraging for leaf and grain, grass shoots and lichens, fragrant flower buds, she is hungry though not unbearably so. 10 White Deer don't know nothing but except as an object of the world. She feels sorry for 10 White Deer since, evidently, 10 White Deer is immortal. Patty Clap of Thunder didn't want to have no feelings whatsoever. What they do every second (such as where to sleep or which berries to eat) is based on an unarticulated aesthetic edifice.

10 White Deer conveys Patty Clap of Thunder up to a colossal concrete structure standing in the forest. She'd heard of that place during childhood, during a duration of perhaps two weeks when her father believed, despite her entreaties otherwise, that she was deaf, and on a particular night she'd heard an old time story about it, though her father, in only the robes sitting on the edge of her bed, thought she could not hear him telling. He'd said: It was just a story make believe. He'd told it as they sat amidst the cool air eddying up their legs and eating plates and plates of ice cold potato salad eating to their hearts' content.

1.)My eyes light up at night, in other words they shine out. We are walking out on the break-water at Empuries. The sun is down but the sky is showing blue and light. The smell of the water is nice with the warm air blowing it up and the sounds of the water moving through the rocks and warm waves breaking on the sand. The breezes blow around our faces and ears. It feels so soft and our bodies are silently running. I keep remembering all the times me Lenore and America came down here after school and stripped down and ran naked across the gray rocks, and swimming while all the old ladies stood or sat knitting their hands together and watching us. All the times we lay on top of our sleeping bags by candlelight sketching each others' genitals with the blunt carbonized ends of burnt sticks and eating the dark red tomatoes we picked off the stinky vines growing in America's back yard. All the times we helped America's enormous-knuckled sun-burnt father roll up his fishing nets in the darkening breezes. His name was Warm Summer Breezes. I always told him his name was so beautiful. He said it wasn't his real name. That his real name was Victory. But he never laughed. He always looked like if he was getting bit by one single ant, like if he was suffering one small discrete and pitiless pain. He would see us laughing and shake his head. He would say: "Seeing kind and relation you go out and over your way through the world." America would laugh at her father's superstitions. When Victory disappeared at sea they never buried. America says: "That's what the dead become." 2.) The marks first appeared and I knew right away they were from Warm Summer Breezes. It was a series of signs: The air smelled like gunpowder. First the mammals will decide to never touch each other. Then they will stop eating. It will take about two months. The subjects may lose the desire to drink, in which case death comes quickly. They will become prone to a lethargy that is not (apparently) evident to the subjects themselves. In other words they won't even (appear to) notice their increasing infirmity. Warm Summer Breezes says: "Apollos, I give you strength and fleetness and the ability to heal all ills.” 3.) We will not here in this case be ‘proving’ the ‘existence’ of hypothetical particles (spores, bacteria, viruses, etc.) since that would take a lot of know how which I am presently unfit to generate. Logic Machine is the critical key to the present research. If I hide Logic Machine then I can't remember where it went. So I send it on its way. When it returns we will see if it saw a lot of real stuff or not. Who really cares? Logic Machine will discover if it's true. I have about one quarter cord of dry pine stacked in the corner. The ship hold is smoky and the cold is deep. We stay near the fire. Lenore just crawls around in the ship's hold. We feed him the squirt stained socks. He has an incredible personality too. Talented! Intelligent! He tells me how beautiful I am! He says it with his eyes. He says: "You're so beautiful!" He says: "We'll always share these intimate moments. My memories will keep this alive forever!" He promised! Our intimate moments are extremely specific and beautiful. There are so many markers in life that make him remember our intimacies. He says: "Even in ten years or more I'll be able to picture these moments. It's incredibly significant!” 4.)There was a massive inflow of water. The water destroyed the hotel and the water was swirling everywhere and carrying them all away. Cross the street into the hills right there. Then it began to become colder and colder until we huddled up inside the sod ship and we decided that it would only float for three months. Some were thrown overboard and the sharks got them. I don't need anyone to tell me what’s happening right now. 5.) Many days and nights at sea. Tuna fish 50 pounders. Making sashimi on board. Delicious! Reef tips trailing the craft. Sails in disorder. Otherwise no land in sight. Sailing is so beautiful! Water everywhere. Sleeping days and nights. A deep breeze. I'm having a great summer out here on the sea. I have recently discovered that I am immortal. You haven't lived until you've sailed the seven seas! Around bed time America comes up to me with a little fishing knife she keeps worn in a wooden holdster on her belt loop. She has placed a sort of bag over her own head with a hole to see. She says: "I'm sorry." The other one was Apollos who kept saying she wished she was special. I kept saying: "Apollos you are so special. So special!" But she really didn't believe it since she believes in equality in a very far-reaching way that dilutes the way we mostly habitually think about any thing special. She kept saying: "The world is collapsing." I say: "Maybe so." I told her that she would live totally free forever anyways. So she was looking all around at the water and she said that the land is hidden but said it distractedly, with a confused urgency. I told her that her body was extremely beautiful especially the butt. It turned out that she had a little tiny wiener around one inch long. Oh the times we spent together! Through cloudless summer skies! It was a beautifully tender relationship which brings me back to sailing. Apollos: You only barely disappeared one night when the swell was pushing up over the sides! I miss you Apollos, in the depths of my soul!
--The Accounts of Victory, 1-5.

The colossal verticality must be infiltrated and the only way is to fly. So we fly up higher and higher to the very top of it. It was the first time we ever flied. It was so scary but the forest was tender hearted and not the evil. But we thought if we flew down through the columnar verticality pure cement and iron that we would suddenly forget how to fly and then perish. So we float slowly down like acrobats being lowered gingerly to the entrance but we aren't lowered by nothing only our will of flying. (See below.)

Once we go inside we start to walk through a lot of passages. Some of them rooms are all wax with workers fixing it. Some of them you can buy the kebab. There is a secret world inside there. This world is part of the world anyways. But nobody tells about it. A lot of people know about it. But they don’t say nothing. The sun shines down above us and warms our heads. It was the same very sun. I wish so badly that I could go back to the past but I never ever can. It’s impossible. We go to a room to wait. I can’t believe we made it! They take us separately in. I see a lot of things like if they had a workshop. The front was like if there was a lot of mirrors and white leather sofas. They want you to get ready to find out a lot of stuff. Like your future! Who really cares? Plus if you knew it then suddenly you won’t stop it at all. All the people look at me when I come back out from the workshop. They didn’t tell me nothing. It was just one man with black hair. He showed me what looked like a few magic tricks about the senses: seeing and hearing and also about talking. The One Teeth is gone. We will forever be lost in love! It don’t matter. He showed me candy made to look this way: like the senses. He said if I had some questions. I wanted to be so polite. I didn’t ask him nothing. He barely spoke at all. He just suggested it. You wouldn’t want to ask him nothing. You wouldn’t want him to put a curse on you. The senses were just for if you didn’t understand nothing. I came on out. Everybody looked at me but I never looked once.