I Will Follow You Into the Park

You slipped out of the house halfway through the Vincent Price marathon. I don’t think you could’ve seen me. We went downhill together; I think I wet myself somewhere along the way. You stepped through the east gate onto the green, the Walpurgis Night bonfire already heaped and leaping high with benzine. You hung around the edge and watched the glow and though there were people there you knew, you didn’t talk to anyone. You passed, not even a ghost, less than a ghost through the crowd. Glances fell over you – someone with a beer bottle in hand opened his mouth to say hi or speak to you, but thought better of it. Now you’re gripping a bottle, half-drained already, and I didn’t see you pick it up. You stop and look up at the bandstand and watch a local duo do Simon & Garfunkel. You mill around and slowly edge to the edge of the garden, which is the west gate to the park. Then you turn and walk out the west gate, a wrought-iron resting on the edge of a botanical garden; a single road winding around the carefully arranged plots; plots of fern, lantana, sunflower and peony. In bed, before coming out here to watch you, watch but not to be watched, I had finished reading Malone Dies. I liked Malone Dies. It’s by Samuel Beckett. I don’t like Samuel Beckett, but I liked Malone Dies. I’d like to quote a passage when I’m done. Voices follow us for a while, and I think I thought I saw you duck and double back to the main park along a small, rutted side path and I retraced my steps along the main and poking by head past the wrought-iron I saw you milling again. With the crowd. Again.

Come into my garden. I beckon to no one. And whisper again: Come into my garden.

You have your profile to me, a small exchange with someone I don’t see. Not even a glance out the corner of your eye.

I slip down the path and slip into the bushes, the lantana, blooming out there on the surface but down in the thicket, empty space and dead branches and the dead branches are broken. I make love to the dirt. When I finish, I scramble out, caked in dirt (Soaked in bleach!) to see your head bobbing behind a row of white roses down the same small path, going away from the lights of the green. A blaze shoots up to the right of us, your back to it but you throw a glance over your left shoulder in time to catch the final spire twisting out into the air as some twiddle-dumb-twiddle-dumbass squirts out and empties a bottle of lighter fluid onto the bon.  

There’s dirt clogging up my foreskin and when they see I’m gone they won’t know where to look. My attention wanders to the glows of the green for what number of time I do not know. I watch all the clusters and clumps of unreliable narrators – God, I hate the unreliable narrator! – clump and unclump and clump again as they drift to and fro along the overstuffed lawn. The kegs are empty, the band’s gone indie, there’s honkies waiting to be mowed. Faint, faint, dimly I see someone slumped back, deep into a lawn chair, wondering what they’re going to do to him in his sleep-stupor.

I nod to the left and the girl is gone. Where are you? I low-creep along the flowering hedges and see your feet through a gap in the brambles just standing there. Do you finally sense that someone who’s been near you this whole time? I think you have. Back to the green on that same damn path! I beeline around the corner as fast as a crouching man can and see you move along the shadows, and keeping along the shadows you might hear a rustle but it is not a rustle it is not a rustle it is the swaying of every branch after I have passed by –

They will find you, still blonde and with a light peach fuzz along your body your body they will find it’s not hard.

I gradually inch my way in – she – you – howls into the dirt.

Think: Richard Speck

Think: Tony Costa

Think: Rodney Alcala

There is a pop & I think firewerks but there are no firewerks on Walpurgis.

You lift your face and it is mud. Then, I chew on the mud and when I pull my lips away from yours I am also mud.

Think: Carl Panzram. Think: “Today I am dirty – tomorrow I’m just dirt.”  

Then I know the sound: A log burst in the bonfire. Some twirl around the fire and drop back onto the logs arranged around. Du musst tanzen. Ich muss Schlafen.

There’s a tree intruding on the end of the line of roses, curving away from the last bush but throwing its topmost branches back over it as if arching its back - its roots twisting into the path and heaving dirt. The wood of the tree is pliable, the tree is bendy. Both a hanging tree and not a hanging tree, when you can loop a branch around your throat but it won’t support your weight, but sturdier than a sapling it might. The branch bends way back when I turn to tongue the trunk then I feel myself bob. My belly pokes out my shirt.  

I think I’d like to quote that book now. The one by Samuel Beckett?

And this is how Malone Dies:

‘he raises his hatchet on which the blood

will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he

will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more,

either with it or with it or with it or with or

or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his

fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never

or with his pencil or with his stick or

or light light I mean

never there he will never

never anything

there

any nore’