was staring straight ahead out the windshield at a plume of dust that grew larger and larger because it contained a car filled with vacationers. His hands were gently smoothing over the folds in his trousers around the general area of his crotch.
The service road leading to the crater is made of a brown asphalt material, roped on both sides with dry red earth and plains of scrub brush and an occasional loping boulder pocked with holes made by the friction of wind-driven sand. In the distance, in any given direction, all you can see is the general curve of the earth and maybe the beginnings of mountains far away in purple tones looking like goofy cartoon hats or sideways faces. The sky is a bowl; it is like the inside curve of the eye if it were mirrored and it’s filled with a dusty white blue that catches like imaginary chalk in the throat and it contains the hot disk of sun and a hot wind that buffets the sides of the car and enters over the top of the window glass. After the tourist car passed, and he could make sure of its disappearance in the rearview mirror, his face turned toward me and began the slow swim through space toward mine. His rich dark eyes set into the general outline of his face slowly obscured my view of his hand undoing the zipper of his trousers and reaching into the resulting envelope of cloth, “You ain’t a cop are you?” The heat inside the car was so saunalike that I was pouring sweat down my face, under my arms and over my chest where it cooled in the slight breeze. His face was an inch from mine when he saw the answer – no – in my eyes and his tongue slipped between parted lips and entered my mouth.
Someone once said that the ancients believed that light came from within the eyes and that you cast this light upon things in the world wherever you turned. I remember wondering if the world disappeared or was cast into darkness when you closed your eyes, or, even further, if you died, did the world die also. This guy was so intensely sexy I almost couldn’t look him in the eye. His body had such presence or something, I don’t know what it was; perhaps his height, his large hands, the way he might look sitting in a chair with his clothes having disappeared and his legs pulled apart with me in front of him standing, his head viewed from above, or kneeling, his knees viewed from a close angle. Or maybe it’s the shadows of his crotch where it meets the plastic cushion of the chair my face a camera, moving into a slow close-up of his dick, the head of it peeking from the fold of foreskin, a sexy soft-lined pink eye in a hard organ and the sense of it warm in my palms and maybe I just want to feel the sense of it sinking upward in my wet mouth; maybe it’s the feeling of my moist palms running over the front of his chest through the folds of his open shirt, soon to have him more naked, his dark head tilted back and small pockets of pleasure sound escaping from the back of his throat. Maybe I just anticipate seeing that light in his eyes, that glitter of life glazing over in the heat. Or maybe it’s the way his arms lift up over his head in the limited space so I can better lick the heat of his body.
If light does come from within does that make us walking movie projectors? Are we casting form onto a dark screen? When I move my eyes very slowly from left to right while sitting still, I can feel and hear a faint clicking sensation suggesting that vision is made up of millions of tiny stills as in transparencies. Since everything is generally in movement around us, then vision is made up of millions of “photographed” and recalled pieces of information. In the seventeenth century a jesuit friar by the name of Scheiner engaged in an experiment where he peels away opaque layers at the back of the eye and revealed a faint image, a transparency of what the eye had imprinted upon it at the moment of its owner’s death. Another scientist took the excised eyes of guillotined prisoners and studied them under a microscope to see if there were any legible images imprinted on them. This scientist wanted to see if an image was recorded despite the black hood placed over the guillotine victims’ heads at the moment of decapitation. He reported finding one image that was fairly consistent in the eyes he examined: something like a small cloud with two tiny arms waving out from the sides.
Sometimes when I’m caught in the flow of rush-hour traffic in the tangled arteries of interstate ramps and elevated roadways that surround an enormous and unfamiliar city, I come to believe that I no longer exist and similarly all the forms and shapes of metal and glass that contain what appear to be human beings are also a fragment of imagination: something like a vision cast into time and space from something outside of myself. I move to a place in the back of my head and merely witness it all. I am amazed by the undefined spectacle of this vision as I pass through, waiting for the code or the anchor that reels me in, brings me through its contours and sets me down like gravity.
He was whispering behind my closed eyelids. Time had lost its strobic beat and all structures of movement and sensation and taste and sight and sound became fragmented, shifting around like particles in lakewater. I love getting lost like this. I’m trying to recall where his hands were, or how they felt under my shirt, or grasping the back of my neck while his tongue licked across my jaw, over my throat. I’m trying to recall the drift of it, trying to recall where we were. I remember sitting in his car, mine parked a few yards behind his in the side weeds. We were in the front seat of his salesman station wagon with the windows open and my door slightly ajar, the two of us jerking off and the rear-view mirror adjusted so I could see the span of road behind us while he kept his eyes peeled, scanning the road in front of us, both of us looking for any signs of cop or trooper cars that might glide up silently and unannounced. But in the rearview mirror I saw nothing but empty space and earth and sky except for the lower part of one electrical stanchion – it might’ve been a radar tower – two grazing cows beside it and nothing else but the curve of the earth and out in front of the car through the frame of windshield: nothingness and here we are, here I am, some fugitive soul having passed through the void of the cities, skimmed across the emptiness of landforms and roadways through holes in the mountains westward to this one point in the dead road where vehicles have stopped to rest in the boiling heat and the entire landscape is silent except for the dull flat whine of insects and the dry brush. The oval stones and straw-colored vegetation and cracked red earth and everything feels dried and red except for the pale hanging color of the sky emitting a tone that matches or continues the tone of the human body in absolute stillness. And to be surrounded by this sense of displacement, as this guy’s tongue pulls across my closed eyelids and down the bridge of my nose, or to be underneath all that stillness with this guy’s dick in my mouth, lends a sense of fracturing. It’s as if one of my eyes were hovering a few feet above the car and slowly revolving to take in the landscape and the small car with two humans inside slowly licking each other’s bodies into a state of free-floating space and semiconsciousness and an eventual, small, momentary death.
Periodically a car would come. It would start as a bright spark in the distance, a glint of hot metal joining the earth and sky, and soon the unraveling shape of clouds of dust would rise beneath rear wheels, and after a long and soundless moment of this speck vibrating against the horizon, its shape would slowly become discernible and fluctuate into largeness and take on the shape of a tourist’s camper or a small sedan and it would eventually gain color and the dark windshield would materialize around a face or two that were first just blank smudges and then would gain features as hot air and sound drifted by. In the moment of their approach, we would stop, rearrange our anatomies, zip up our pants and assume the body language and gaze of tourists losing themselves in the sky for an afternoon. Our hands always the hands of fear and apprehension – mixed with pleasure and frustration – until the car revealed its occupants and intentions. The momentary disengagement from the accelerations where the mind travels in sex, the multiple hands floating back and forth on the textures of trousers waiting for the vehicle to disappear so they can resume their rituals and rhythms of unfastening buckles and zippers, and our faces turn away from the hot shield of sky and burrow into the folds of each other’s clothes and bodies.
A solitary tiny bird drops out of the air onto an oval-shaped blue stone and pees noiselessly onto its hot surface. The hallucinatory sensation I recall from the depths of fever is the idea that this guy and I are part of the same vascular system; he and I are two eyeballs sitting in the dark recesses of a metallic skull viewing the world through the windshield the way one’s eyes would if they could proportion and transmit information independent of each other as well as recall separate private histories. The automobile is a vehicle of motion just like the human body, its motor, the brain, claiming or recalling
