If in our sleep we dream of dreaming, and of nothing else, then we might understand the terror of the times; it’s the failure of disaster — which, like every unwelcome guest, like the guest that is sleep, arrives always an hour too early, during which you’d hoped to prepare, wash and clean, skim the newspaper, have a bite of something to eat. We lie poorly; we toss, we turn — and even our turns are turned, a last leaf fallen as flake, blown in its cycle back to the very beginning of mornings, time and again if only in each iteration estranging, as any ending’s already known, is thought of nightly and always, just disbelieved until the grave, the sittingroom, standingroom Shiva, the mourning of neighbors, of family, friends; the impertinence of year over year ringing real from our guts empty but churning, the imposition unsettling, a calendar left blank with no lineage to mark the days or the numbers, or else rived altogether too many times and again into black, which is total: two different cycles, run both at the same time yet opposed, wash and spin dry, permanent press and delicates, that was Wanda’s department, as it was Arschstrong’s: how he used to take care of laundry for PopPop, the cooking, the cleaning, what not, for sex a kneel and a mouth and for worries, an ear he couldn’t hear out of without the ringing buzz of his aid. Another knock, yet another and again and the tired old nude wipes himself from the toilet, green fires of money lap from his sit, there’s more where that came from stacked in the shower, behind the pink curtain, watermarking the tub with its filth. Finally out of the closet — all of his closets have been cleaned out. Arschstrong walks from bathroom to bedroom in which he painstakingly puts himself through a suit three decades old, he hasn’t in years, gathers his handluggage packed (a horde of what matters, his passport, license, new limitless creditcards that just came to mild interest, plus toothbrush and paste to be carried on); only then does he go to the door, no need to peep himself prepped as he knows who it is, and if he doesn’t then the stranger can’t be worse than expected.
