DARWIN

I feel now that I should write about Las Vegas, since I am going to leave.

For the past five years, I have been living in the heart of Paradise. I had often thought this, and when I looked at a map of Paradise Township I found that it was really the case; if Paradise were a body, this is its heart.

The thing I think is most important to write about is Darwin, a man who lives outside the Sunrise Villas (sometimes) as an enormous bird. He is not there now, and he has not been there for many months. The last I saw him he was in a dentist’s parking lot along Eastern Avenue, just on the other side of Harmon.

I have been watching Darwin for some time, and I have tried to write about him plenty, but it is perhaps a mistake to do so. Anything I write about him will not resemble the fact of him. He is listening to his headset, a sports game, I think basketball, and I think he roots for Kentucky, although I believe he is from Wisconsin.

I think what I want to say about Darwin, is why he means so much to me, why I think he is of course the maestro and somehow holding the strings of this whole place, holding them together in such a way that they make the sound of a mother’s cavalcade.

And too

There are the harmoniums right now in the caves of Mercury, diamond kite-shaped creatures, transparent, eating the song of their planet, eating the vibration, eating their planet’s light.

[[[ we’re a threshold]]

And there is the sound of fruit which Darwin makes, and this is the sound of a body becoming the fruit together: the body becoming an apricot, a cherry, the whole bowl.

The thing is, I like the way he uses space. He sits in an antique chair on the sidewalk, here in the heart of Paradise, with his five or six shopping carts: so that this is a place to sit, under this blue sky.

And there are not many people using the sidewalk, so it isn’t such a problem for him to use the sidewalk for his own things.

And he listens to his headphones.

And I used to ride my bike past him, and we both would wave and say hello to each other, and when we hadn’t seen each other in many months (because he was in the dentist’s parking lot on the other side of Harmon) we met in the office complex lot beside my house, beside the Sunrise Villas 9 and Bigelow Space Mansion, and we waved, red faced, and we both said

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!

And to see him was like a train roaring close in the night, and you are asleep in the little upstairs bedroom of a blue house that smells like the rain, and outside there is a tree as big as the big dipper, and there the train tracks; when the train comes by it shakes the house, and your bed moves back and forth like a bowl of pudding, like some wild eye of the sea.

Will you come back?

In another year! I might come back!

Because, I am going to leave.

[[[In war the dark is on nobody’s side; in love the dark confirms we are together]]]]

—J Berger

I like the way other people here use space, here in the Heart of Paradise.

My friend TK is living in a burnt-out house’s garage, one block from Paradise Park. When I first met him, it was four years ago and he was living in the flood channel. He was living with RIP, Melissa, James the young boy, and an older man whose name I cannot remember. They called their dwelling HELMS DEEP, because the entrance to it was like The Narrows. TK had, and still has, a dog named Spanger, who could hold a skateboard in his teeth, who can put his head into your real name.

There was a kitty refuge that they made when they lived in the garage that is now burnt down—Rip and TK—because the woman who lived in the house really owned two properties, though they were foreclosed, so there was a lot of space, maybe an acre of land in total, and so the cats got their fare share, they had at least half of it, and when the place burned down a lot of those cats died, and one wonders what Spanger the dog can smell now, what he thinks of this whole catastrophe.

I call TK my friend, but I do not act as a friend to him. I say friend in that the world has limits, and the sky only goes so far.

When I think about Darwin, and I think about TK, I think about what it means to survive here, in the heart of paradise, what it means to use this place as a cell to hold.

And I will not say too much about myself.

And you see, there are seven palm trees around me, and they are in the sun. It is the evening and it is August 17, 2014. And I have been told that it is the scorpions that are the keepers of these palms. Up there is a scorpion palm-tree council, and they are counting out our names in groups of three, and they are erasing them from the book.

I have never seen a scorpion. This whole time. Except for the two which are dead in a jar inside my house. They are on the table in the living room; Candy and Al gave the jar to me, with the two dead scorpions in it, because they had been hunting those things, hunting them at night with a special light, and these two were not the Mexican desert kind, they were the Palm Tree kind; they are small.

And my neighbor Nick helped clean my house and he said there were two baby dead scorpions in the ceiling vent in the master bathroom, though I never saw them.

It was Candy and Al that first told me about scorpions, told me the scorpion king would come in the sky and he would be riding on top of a pyramid and all of history would be open between these bricks.

Candy is pink and she floats in the pool.

I want to say

That the sky is so big here