The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

Hotel in Glasgow, Michigan.
Winter, 1979.

I can’t stop my heart from beating. Carefully spaced apart contrapuntal periods of grace and rest before the tympani thump at the base of the stump that forms the arterial anus of the world.

Train station in Kansas.
Winter, 1979.

There was an old man in the midst of dying laying in the gutter rubble that seemed to have heaped itself up like a dune of trash against the long northern wall of this old train station. Nearly three, perhaps four, feet in depth of the strangest refuse I had ever seen; it was a snarling dead creature that had been laid to its own uneasy rest in the soft neglected dirt near the tracks. It seemed to have a constitution of corrugated iron with huge twisty ducts that hadn’t yet lost their gleam as a form of intestines through which damp cargo was once shuffled and now the nests of rats, veins made of rubber tubing that snaked around, into and out of shadow. Buried here, as if he were being slowly assimilated into the devices of this construct, lay a man that wore clothes that all seemed to be various shades of a homeless color with a dread pallor in his face to match. The only things that moved were his eyes as he watched me pass. I had wandered behind the train station proper to find a private place to relieve myself because the restrooms within were condemned. I think he wanted to reach out to me. I noticed there was a certain satisfied torporific languidness about his person, his body language was blunt and easy to read. I tried to smile but I know, just by the taut feeling in my cheeks that I had failed miserably. A tendril of smoke slowly crawled up through the damp gray air from the remainder of a cigarette in his left hand.

I turned to walk away but not before I saw a dark stain slowly coalesce on the front of his shabby trousers like a frightful statue pushed from lowering shadows into glaring light.