60) Though I wake up in the backseat of a squad car joy fills me! I bleed from the flashlight wound to my head. I bleed! My stomach hungers for food. What gastronomic delights await my new tongue! My appetite and thirst are boundless. I shall ride a pony, bury my face in the fleece of the first cur I come across, stroke a cat, perhaps discover why the gods loved them. I shall swim in cold water and warm and feel it for the first time. I shall make friends with men. And as I am driven by the angry policeman, (I will win him over) I enter the limits of a small town called Browning. Funny. Nothing turns to shit, dies or browns in my presence anymore, and will not ever again! I now understand why the good Doctor put me through the awful ordeal of travel. I understand his effort to teach me the ways of the world, not to destroy or kill, I could not avoid my nature, but so that I may join in its circles. Truly a most sublime reward for monstrous service. He is creative, after all, beyond vanity.
Down the main street of Browning I see museums where great displays of the world's past are stored. I will study there. There are plentiful trinket shops so that I may find colorful adornments for new a beginning. Food stores for hunger. Bars for slacking thirst! This town has everything the tender abortion I am could want! And people. How I wish to meet them.
But first I must flee the squad car since the officer does not respond to gesture. Dr. Creep forgot speech. I remain mute. Stupid oversight. I try the doors. They do not open. I try kicking out the windows. They do not break. Lastly, the wire that separates us, it is unbreachable. They've thought of everything. Still, I have confidence they'll tire of me, the police. They'll let me go when they determine I am just like everybody else, a walker of sidewalks, a drinker, a bright, purposeful thing standing harmless by a lamp post, dressed proper for friendships and nights out. I've a lot to learn. They shall see that I am willing to learn, and let me go.
After a fine drive through town we arrive at a squat building of uninspired gray concrete. Other police meet us. I am roughly handled while taken inside. After a spell of posing I am put under a powerful hose that knocks me down repeatedly and cleans me. Next I am taken soaking wet to a room without windows, and doors made of bars. I shiver, alone. I shall have to wait here for some time, then my adventure can begin.
Police gather at the bars to stare at me. They tell me that I have been accused of committing horrible crimes all over the world. They produce drawings and pictures others have managed to secure of the episodes of my travels. It is all true, of course, but I am now something different, I am no longer that thing. My gestures are less like the Maori, warlike, threatening, than in the Hawaiian style. So I think. Nothing gets through to them. But then they show me one handbill with a banner that reads Dead or Alive. I am worried now. More dancing. Incomprehension follows.
But I begin to see the point. Yes, I have done awful things. Men, women, and children have perished in my presence. Enough life to fill a valley to overflow has died at my hand. I understand their anger a bit. They demand payment, balance to my bad play. I see. They open the iron door. They introduce me to three men of a red cast: Thomas One Lie, Joseph Can't Kill, and the robust Won't Stay Jim. My first friends. They enter the room. I open my arms to them. Before I succumb to their blows and heavy stomps, I now understand Dr. Creep's greatest gift of all: Death. I can end. And to my new friends, thank you, thank you, and thank you.

59) We waited obediently all night long, resigned to the designed enmity of the other, and witnessing, in the bone pale moonlight, the train of emanations still dissipating skyward from every breath of us. I could not see mine but I know I am full of death too. I could not think faster than the souls pouring forth. The insects are almost funny. We stamp our feet in amusement at the brace or bank of flies, silverfish, the mounds of cockroach we exhale. But then a stream of people are breathed and we ripen to quiet. Oh, the slave, the subject, endures what they must. Yet we know nothing else. We are not on circles of the living. We are creations sans difference. Singularities. Original. Well, four originals, no, four copies, we repeat indifferently the other. N,S,E, and W, our masters have no imagination. We creatures are the same. But for our eyes. The servant of the West, they are cold blue. East has flakes of yellow drifting in white emptiness. South blinks, but I believe its are violet. And mine? I am unable to remember, say or ask. Why the variation? A new thought. A dead end multiplies reflections of where it all went wrong. Finally, if eyes are adornments from other gods, they did not deign to dwell among us tonight.
Morning. Out of nowhere, emerging from shimmers of turbulence, like the aura of a migraine, the cardinal points appear just behind each of their creatures. Again, like their creations, N,S,E, and W, they are all the same. They are repetitions, too, uniformly shrouded. I feel Dr. Creep behind me. He places a hand on the obsidian crust of my shoulder. All the Doctors do the same to theirs. We creatures steel for the fight.
Dr. Creep says, 'In your backpack are stones. Take them out.' I do. As do my enemies, at the behest of their gods. I hold the lot of them in one hand, ready to hurl and destroy. Dr. Creep, North, says, 'Throw them gently in the middle.' We all do. All of the stones fly through the air landing together on a simple arc to the ground. That's it? Wait.... The air ripples. The ground shudders. Clouds embrace. In moments there appear children, hundreds of them, sprouting from the earth. They stretch or cry, claw at the blue sky, hitch their mourning, pirouette, fall back down or stumble. Children. In halved moments they recognize kin, they separate, run to their respective cardinal point. Dr. Creep is surrounded by his own, as are the others of his kind. The children pay no attention to me, they are too full of the joy of being reunited with a father absent millennia. Much gleeful shouting and happiness. We creatures glance at each other. This is it? This is our war?
Dr. Creep, whose visage I still cannot reckon, says, 'We wanted only our children back. You shall never see me again. You are free to live the life of a mortal, your reward.'
And in the time it takes for the time it takes, he releases me from bondage. The noose of eternity is loosened. I sense my body change, to diminish, to freshen to flesh. What is this?
Dr. Creep spirits away upon the North wind, teeming brood dissolved and airborne in tow. A residue of laughter lingers as they vanish.
So follow the balance of kinder and gods from the other abject stands. We creatures are free.

Silence. The four of us, we monsters, are amazed. Release, such as we've never know, spreads across our faces. We feel the wind for the first time. The sun beats playfully upon our heads. My feet spontaneously blister. Hunger prowls. Thirsty us.
Still we gasp as animals rush the void we've made. No more death, please. Life nears, but does not die. Cattle descend the hillsides, eagles bank above, coyotes resume their howling ways. Deer emerge from the brush to drink at the streams of their ancestors. And nothing dies. We no longer can kill near or far. Our intention is blank. We monsters wander off, thankfully lost in the world of the living. East's servant goes south. West's wanders north. South's spins in place for a change. I wonder what is in the west.
After erratica in step, each deviation from north savored, I come upon a field of horses mingling among a dump of vehicles. I cringe, hunker down, still chained to the habit of death. But they are curious, the horses. They approach my fetid self behind a wreck. My eyes are tightly closed when I feel hot breath down my back. I am found out. It is not Dr. Creep. He is gone forever. It is a horse. I stand. And for the first time in my stupid existence I touch without killing. So soft is the mane. How firm the wither. I bury my ugly face in its neck. Smells I've never known swamp me. I dare feel happiness.
But then a whinning truck disturbs. The horses drift away. The truck approaches. Again, I hide, inside junk. The truck comes to a stop near me. A uniformed man steps out. He looks right and left. I watch him in fear. He does not die. I am emboldened to know about his kind. Though I cannot speak I am sure he will embrace me as one of his own. So I climb out of my junked steel. He sees me. I take a few steps toward him, as friendly as I can mimic. He smashes me with a flashlight, I think it was. I black out, like a man.

58) The night passed in silence. No sleep. The mimicry of man holds no more charm for me. I am a defeated little mocking bird. So I remained awake. I stood motionless though the moon lit the earth well enough for running. No need to hurry, I decide. Even a gravedigger keeps hours. And that's all I am. The bull frogs that heralded night with burping roars are muffled as though stuffed with mud. A great horned owl fell dead at my feet. I hear stirring in the brush, trees cracking. What will I have done by pausing here? Morning shows. The extent of destruction, when the world lit, astounded me. Elk and coyote, massive bear, lay scattered in fields of brown grass. There were other carcasses. More and more. Sure. All came too close.
I leave. I run. I run. Down the mountains to prairie.

I am the first avenger to arrive. I know it is the right location for I recognize the place from a pictured brochure I've carried in my stupid backpack, the brochure titled 'Indians of the West'. I am alone in gentle, rolling fields. Very alone. I am pelted by a shower of dying birds. They muss and rustle their last in my surrounds of tall grass. Robins, crows, the beloved sparrow, golden eagles, carrion eaters at large, all carpet the hissing green. And rabbits, voles, gophers, snakes. In moments I've entire taxonomies of done for animals about me. So very alone.... Yet there may be goodness here. Perhaps there will be no reckoning, perhaps Dr. Creep has played another joke. He is not here. No on else is here..... Alas, hardly has the thought vaulted my brain when I see approaching in clouds of dust and parting seas of wheat, from the East, the West, South descending from the North, my counterparts. They run, too. They may have been filled in the beginning with exalted thoughts of a destination proper to their cardinal point, for peace everlasting. But like me, belonging to North, I belong to him. We are belongings. We know war is our metier. The others abruptly halt. A hundred yards separates each of us. They are all in rags, like me. They are tall, bulked heaps, blackened, with coarse bestial hair and savage features to the extremities. Spilled philtres streak their chests. They reek of rancid tallow and shit, as must I. I've had time to catch my breath. They heavily pant, on their breath I see faint mirages of creatures they've slain on their travels, a roiling bouillon of souls, camels, wolverines, giraffe, dragonflys, hyenas, polar bear very hard to discern; they exhale ostrich forms, Siberian tiger, goat and mongoose, piranha, seal, many men, women, opalesque children, the panda, Tibetan pheasant, horses of the steppe, salmon and howler monkeys, cheetah and swine. Is this a display of menace, warning, the threat of murder? Death can't put fright in what is not really alive, us. No. None of us fear anything. But maybe we can regret, feel remorse. I don't know. We bulldoze mysteries into the abyssal trench of the brain. Here, now, we share a baleful stare, deep, deep sorrow, we see it on the other's face, all of us shamed at the emanations on the breath. Such a pointless incineration of life, life turned to piles of ash on earth and swept clean from memory's floor. All for vanity.
We wait.
All of us carry satchels.
We wait and wait.

57) I am one day's run from the meeting place, where the carnival of revenge, the grotesquerie, the circus maximus of hell, occurs. What ever I call it I cannot be prepared for the quality of destruction that will follow. Having had millennia to feast on inflicting cruelties and to cultivate mayhemic scenarios, the cardinal points, N,S,E, and W surely have honed hatred of each other to an atom-splitting point. What can have been worse than eternal reflection on the annihilation of their children? Can there be a greater pain than to tred upon loved ones for millions of years, to witness an entire world of strangers come into being, every plant and animal, down to the lowly microbe, thriving on the bodies of their young? How they must despise the earth, every living thing upon it, all entities flourishing with the fragrance of their children, soaked up through roots in the flower, or lingering on the breath of every gaping maw. And stone. I can imagine immemorial pounding, scraping, or smoothing of the same, in the miserable effort to coax forth a kinder. Cliffs battered by howls, the despair at erosion, I can hear them cursing at rivers transporting increasingly smaller bits and pieces of the loved, dispersed to the ends of the earth, never to be brought together, like the bit of Mozart, exampled from the pantheon of men, Mozart in the fire smoke of Mongolian horsemen, snagged in the eye of an Amazonian pirate, coherence is lost. Volcanoes, especially, were not spoken of, methinks. Perhaps they should have been worshipped, N,S,E,W, it can act as a salve. Worked well for Absolutes hitherto. But man, the world's sole conjugator of terrestrial rhythms and incorporeal remainders, never found them. Like the god of gravity or a god or things caught in the middle, or a god of fat, or of the tooth, of the broken vessel, a god of minerals or of rot, there is no god of invisibles as such, these and many more, have never passed through the credulous gate of man. Frogs, bees, the fithy cat have had their moment, as has the more obvious heavens, mountain, chance, breath, the zero, there are so many. But the cardinal points, never. They were merely assumed, poised as the initiation of greater schemes, necessary sores man bled and healed off and on as he scurried about the globe, singing praises to erstwise gods all the way.
Yet the cardinal points would have done nothing with the earth. Are they not to blame for their enduring calamity? Look what vanity has brought them, what life incidental has done without them! They are neither lords of water nor air. They obtain on globes, orbs, geometric things. They are useless to the life that has arisen. Yet they plot revenge, and under the limp banner of the sublime.
Life is in peril. I have meted out death as indifferently as they will, but on so small a scale. I no longer want to kill, to serve my jealous creator. Yet I am Dr. Creep's servant, I am the servant of the North. The monstrous is as the monstrous does. I am driven to begin the end of days. Tomorrow.

56) My clothes have been reduced to rags, torn apart by the world. Garments that once had color are now shades of dark grey, like wet ash, with darker brown shit accents and dull green streaks. I have reinvented camouflage. Good for me. My boots have split open at the soles. Only my backpack retains a bit of bright shine. My hair is matted, and clumps come off should I try to pass a hand through. I've not seen my face for weeks. God knows its condition and color scheme, for my body has secreted a greasy paste the texture of rhino horn over my back and chest, broken through by tunneling parasites. I am comforted that something lives off of me. Life finds a way, I often say. Back to reality. My sutures are inflamed. Welts weep. My feet and hands are curling to cudgels of an ebony cast, while all nails of the same are hard mustard-hued ripples as though impressed upon by trilobites. I seem to be rotting and encysting at the same time. Not that I am other than what I've ever been, it is that I am more of it, and less, it's true. Hardly matters. It is not as though I have a future. I should be glad for the shiver of sentience Dr. Creep runs through me, even if it feels more like drowning in tar, or favorably compares to the pitiful life of the cranefly, born without a mouth, no way to sample the world, to eat or drink or rest, given a few days of egg-laying spasms till starved.
I have only mimicked the behaviors of men. I believe that suggests envy. Yes, I have desired their banquets by the pool, a fat pig turning on the spit, and the stuffed chairs in libraries, their beds softer than clover, overlain with goose down coverlets and satin. I know something of their styles of copulation, its variation and quality, from pictures anyway. I would not know how to begin to do such things! The Doctor is a cruel hoaxster. I suppose it is his fault he gave me eyes but mine that I see. To his credit I have enjoyed wine, and all the clawing at air for support as I happily stumbled. The list of his credits is quite short. Yet, I must remember, I am not meant to compose; I level. The day of revenge is closing. I can sense it down my petrifying spine.
And on so excessive a day of mentation I come upon a valley of horses. Just the thing to break a morose spell. I've seen many horses out here. Of all sizes and herd formations. They are rarely alone. There is nothing solitary about them though I have seen them singly with a rider. I am sure their life is hard but all they want to do, beyond the grazing, is frolic. They sometimes fight but soon turn to play, clearly their highest activity in life.
But as happened a day or two before (I've become quite the historian) people intrude. The valley echoes with the roar of trucks. The horses elude them, run as one animal. How can men do a thing to them, I laugh to my internals. I love running, as well. I understand their joy. But then I see the men have added a helicopter to the mix. The noise produces panic and agitation in the herd when it hovers close to them. They scatter. Fragmented, the men can now easily choose two here, one there, to pluck. Which they do. Horses tumble in tangles of rope. Others fall at the rifle shot. So, it is not hard to outthink a thing in fear, not for the men chasing horses, not for me to smite men. Again, I descend. I will interfere. I interfere. Everything dies by my indifferent agency. Though the remove be great, men die, the trucks seize, and the helicopter, emiting dainty circles of exhaust, smashes to the ground. But I cannot direct what I do. I cannot select. The horses die, too. The valley empties of play. There is death all around me. I am filled with shame and repulsion for what I am.
To bury the vision, I run from that awful valley, I run in remembrance of horses. I run toward gloomy clouds gathering. I hear the thunder, feel it shudder through the hell of me. I see lightning among the peaks. I climb fast. I enter a summit clearing. I stand. I wait for punishment. I am struck. I fall. So this is pain. I stand up. I am struck again. My shoes are blown away. Smoke pours off of me. I stand again. I am hurt. More. But I cannot die. How sick I am of death, every death but my own. Dr. Creep, end the misery of me.
There is an end only to the storm. The sun reemerges. N...N...North.
I thought my sorrow could not be greater but even my parasites have died.

55) I am crossing at the highest elevations, along the cold spine of mountains spiking the violet horizon. Life is less plentiful up here. I carry a smaller bail of pretty souls to forget. Peak after peak roll up the earth. It is almost as if I am spinning the world, like a circus elephant atop a ball loosed by painted clowns. What a curious pret-a-porter idea, just batting around my head. I've never even been to the circus! Perhaps the idea assembled itself from the tiny bits of my knowledge of men, and Dr. Creep's designs for me, of course. And no sooner do I think it then I come upon an instructive, unwholesome place. It is a valley, a cup of snow, really, a couple dozen rods of land between two elevations. I espy a group of thick men, heavily armed. I don't know how they got there; by themselves, heft and girth considered, it is unlikely. Horses must be nearby. The men mill about, they tred upon alpine flowers and shuffle among stunted pine. There is a light wind. Voices carry. I hear words in my tongue. A few words are isolated and bounced off to me by the great ear my stony watching place makes: Home. Truck. Shit. Forty-five seventy. A truck climbs, approaches and winds down among them. A large mesh cage sits on its flatbed. Something lolls within it. On some days only a list of things occur to me to recount, things I've destroyed, killed, or have rapidly passed in a blur of the same. But today I have an object, one and only, that I might concentrate on: One thing, one life, one basin of dirty water to watch drain: A cage. No, two. Each containing a some pearl of learning. Much excitement attends their arrival. Two men get out of the truck and move to the cages. The first thing released, or dragged out on a leash, as happened, was a creature I've seen once before: an Ibex, improbable, but here. Massive horns of white and black, a narrow, stripped body, low to the ground. Savannah or the Steppe? I am graced with a memory of its passive self. And as I savor my reflection, but before I understand what I think, lost in phantoms, I hear a shot ring out. The animal falls a few feet from a man who fired, for I see the smoke of his rifle carried off. Adulation. Cheers. High-pitched howling. Done. Attention shifts. It is the turn of the second pearl. I know this animal too. It is so weak it has to be carried. Two men hoist it by the legs to a patch of clean snow. Three men gather around it to argue about who shall take what is a lion. Mane, silver-tipped with age, bury the hands that prop it up against an icey cornice. Revived by a cold it has never known, the lion steps. Another shot. The lion falls. Cheers.
Disturbed, I descend from my place to the bloody show. The men get me, my malevolence, right away and fire. I am hit often, but owing to my nature, it means nothing. Once upon them, they are vanquished in an instant. I kneel beside the lion, its eyes still open. I lay on hands until it is nothing more than tuft and vapor. My aim.

54) Running on this night with only a slivered moon to light my way has led to collisions and stumbling, over stones or whatever that was just then. I have ended up in dead-end valleys facing sheer rock cliffs and have had to depart from the pole star to find a way out. And there are the fences, of grisly wire and wood. I have gotten tangled, my clothes and flesh lightly shredded. These barricades are everywhere. So puzzling in such a vast land. I am sure they keep roaming and hungry things in or out, case by case, though I have not seen or heard a living thing, firstly because of my much improved talent of killing an greater removes, but also because night is for quiet hunts and the hiding game. I have learned so much during my travel of the earth: Vile knowledge such as life's frailty, how soft the body emptied of life, how helpless the fawn, the flower, the child in cold, moving water; pleasure knowledge, simple bird songs, shattering glass, the sigh of a soul, lost no more, ascending skyward; obvious knowledge, that night follows day, rivers run to larger waters, that illumination is a must for practical tasks like rushing a landscape. I have pieced together a manner to carry myself upon the earth, a very general comportment, it is true. I can't share my ways with any living thing, I do take the time to add stylings and refinements to the heap of me if I am chanced from far away. A voice might say, There goes a graceful racer! Or, See how well he lays upon the boulder! Best ditch sleeper I've seen! And so on. I should like to be approved of even while doing awful things, with the indulgence of the good Doctor, if I do them well. If this be vanity, then I am vain! More knowledge of my being, right down to my frozen core of nickel or coal. Good to know. Which is yet more! Such a heady spiral I climb, such a graceful commotion of mentation I lean into. I will not choose which image but take both to be mine. Others may occur to me. I'll assume them all. This thirst for the assumption of images, taking charge of the miniature stories they tell, methinks, hints at the sublime the cardinal points hoard and measure within themselves. Or not.
My learning instructs me to wait for light. I pick a sandy spot. I smell smoke. Just over rubble, down a ways, I see a merry fire and figures about it. I will not investigate at all for I would do them harm. Instead, I will be content with wiffs of their smoke. (More pleasure knowledge.) My backpack, filled with idiotic objects, I use for a pillow. The bottles of pebbles from Dr. Creep are a burden to carry and an annoyance to lay a head upon. Still I do, and I sleep. Pleasure knldg, etc.
I dreampt of being torn apart by dogs.
I woke up in snow. Over the rubble the fire is out. The men are draped in white, like me. They are still. No steamy breath. And to think I could have had fire. Further away I see their horses. They see me. Silence. I run from them as fast as I am able. I will not look back.

53) Night approaches. I have been running for many days. Firstly, to get away from my stale entanglements in the wastelands of Matamoros, but, more importantly, to finally arrive, wherever. It is a puzzle that I still don't understand. Obscure ends make me run faster. Mortals. Stillness makes me run faster. Silence, etc. When the world settles around me I am left to be the agent of disruption plus. I am the great remainder. I bring my own climate or tremors. I am a shiver poised at the heart of things. I fell trees, buckle pavement, I wreck the bric a brac of natural wheels. I hear sobs at my magisterial loping by, as strong family relays, here, in the desert, lose washers or food gathers or fire building members, at my glance. I hear lowing among the placid cattle, who, through the culling agency of me, faintly recall their glorious fathers, the bulls of Greece, and what they once did to men sporting close. I can't help them. The oft-filled fields of them sprawl and die in farting tons of the same. They loved the range, down to the last strangled cud of grass. Yet I know good deeds when I see them. The hectic fox, the grouse, the climbing rat, the watering mule, or lost sheep, see the fish in a rainwater pool of granite, all the akimbo cyphers of animals I do not know, gruelling under the sun of me. They escape my shadow, long enough to copulate, in the most heroic extrapolation. Might as well be mirrors as mates they find. A barren minus, at the glass. Dark gives dark back. Sun gives back sun. The sameness of death triumphs. Heroes.

So what. I am not troubled. It is my way. And I have found so exampled a place. A graveyard. The earth may be deep and wide elsewhere, but here, it is aborted, sacrificed, designed by men. The graveyard mingles inwardly. Within its fence is more fence. And standing water from tears. The ground subsides in places, exchanging rot and air. Not well tended. Tumbled markers and statuary, effaced stones, broken concrete slabs, the usual indifference. Casual obliteration. Rain, wind, etc. It is the fault of the landscape, the pulverizing roots of trees sprouted from grandma's ailing chest. Fat, robust children, slain, bring forth lilacs and plastic flowers. What I like best are the family plots, flesh of a common name, their stones lean and touch each other. Were it not for the highway laid against them, one might be forgiven a trivial recollection or two.
But why indulge mud and bone when there is a future to win?
North.

52) At the edge of Matamoros I can see another city begin a mile a way, in the direction I want to go. I am not alone in this urge. So many want to go further. Though there are plenty of bridges and paved roads connecting the two, all are stopped up with barricades. Vehicles form lines to cross as far back as I care to see. Dark smoke billows the length. Too much waiting, too much visibility for me. So I must find another way. And I do, along a lazy bend in the dirty river, a river not grand at all. But before attempting these waters, I see a vehicle filled with uniformed men on the other side, a much reduced version of the strictures interrupting the more popular ways over. I size them up. They are tall and strong. When they get out to piss they tower over the grass. So strong was the flow of urine they make the weed and tussock bend. The men are pale, well proportioned, armored and armed. Binoculars. They have badged hats. They are not of the same wretched kind teeming at my back. They are complete, with a full complement of order and corporeal rigor in their bearing. No club foot, or hacking, or stoop, no diseased manner among them. At least from my viewing place. All points to caution, caution. No simple fording, this. I shall wait to see how others manage it, what strategy they employ. Oh, I could simply stroll across the water and end them with a gesture; but I might prefer a game today. Methinks games. I need only the rules.
I do not think they have seen me huddled in the creosote. So use to devastation they do not notice the growing ring of dying bush around me. I've chosen creosote for that very reason, it appears always to be dying. The men go about their business, watching the foliage for a shudder, speaking quietly among themselves, a laugh now and then, and, of course, pissing. The body needs all manner of release, its valves open constantly. Funny.
We begin even. That is how it starts. A game needs an imbalance, a first move. Behind me I hear stirring, noisy running to my left. Further up river a group of kids burst forth and leap to play in the water. Immediately the vehicle, whipping up a dusty cloud, is dispatched to meet them and counter their ways. I crawl on all fours, scurrying from brush to brush, to catch a glimpse of what might happen next. I hope learn the rules. In pursuit of the kids, those on the other side play well. They are out and after the scattering boys who are captured one by one. I haven't scuttled far when I hear breaking shrubs and branches to the right, near to where I just was. Another group, now men, enter the river there. It is as though this is the same scene repeated, with all the same people, aged a decade. Another vehicle races up, nearer to the men just crossed. Again, there is racing and loud chattering. And again, all are captured. Good game, but the rules are one-sided, favouring the pale, armored kind.
I'll just have to cross my own way. I rise. Feels good to stand up. I walk with slow deliberation. At the river's edge there is still too much commotion among the jostling teams to take note of me. So far, so good. But I am hooded and prideful. It is not long, a few steps into the noxious river, when the alarm is raised. The captured are handcuffed, stacked in a flatbed conveyance I did not see arrive. So the armored ones are now free to take a lively interest in me. They do. But I do not run. I walk. The uniforms gather, they wait for me to cross, thinking I am like the others. But I am not. They approach. I smile. One by one, like frail flowers in a heavy hand, they are crushed. Now that I know I am not a man it is easier to pass through them. Four, eight, fall, never to get up. I walk. The flatbed is all astir. Panic. Fear. The driver tries to speed away. The captured are tumbled off, and run bleeding to all directions. Those who've chosen the river return cannot swim constrained at the wrist. Drownings occur. I only walk. Of the rest, the shackled rotund or weak of foot, they retch and moan, make cries as I'm used to, then blink out like a porch light when the morning comes. Death is all around me. Others try for their destination. North, like me. If they are faster than I they'll make it. They don't. I tread over these soft stones paving my way. Forget me not. Only the driver escapes my sphere of influence. I don't care. I've somewhere to go. I'm coming, Dr. Creep.

51) While away from Dr. Creep, on board the Black Swan for so many days, I was free of the sense of his hovering. Bad dreams no longer occurred. My brain filled with a welcomed monotony. Water, water, everywhere. I had no thoughts for great spans of time. I was a blank. A beautiful zero, an empty set nesting in simple math. Sun after sun, night after night, etc. But he is back. Whether behind the next tree, staring down from a balcony, the eyes of a swamp crocodile following my step, or the dust of him in my knotted hair, I again know he is near. Were I a sparrow he would know that I fell and where. But now I understand a bit the why of it. I have been guided, marched, shepherded, more like herding. From timeless hibernation in Antarctica to my profoundly awakened state as I stand at a final border, a river, to cross today, he has been preparing me. I have been given time for the world to be shown. Every day brought new memories. No, that is not right. I merely remember the day and the day before and the day before that. I can put together a serial, pictures and movements, for my mind to explore as it might. Dr. Creep has allowed me to see how time might move. I have no thought of my life before him. I have had scattered irruptions of phantom recollection. I have ugly dreams. But without the world, it is nothing. Though I cannot care, I am unable, it is that the Doctor wants me to understand that others care. They care about their lives, their buildings, monuments, their issue and the other little fires that keep them. I do not need to be warm or cold. I do not need to eat or dress in clean clothes. I do not want for baths or ointments or powders. I never tire. None of the afflictions and joys of this world mean anything to me. I am shown important worldly cares so that I may better destroy them at the behest of the good Doctor. The more exquisite the spider's web the more grief that follows its destruction. I am not meant to lend a hand in the building but in the tearing down. I have no other purpose.
And my talents have gotten worse. Here, as I stand at the border of this Matamoros place, already the grass around me has retreated as though burned by acids. My pestilence spreads to shrubs and trees. Birds fall in slow circles. I hear death rattling in subterranean burrows. Dogs chase their tails and drop. The last meal of a man, after a full breath and a pouring of sun light, is the sight of the awful heap of me. I merely gaze, I protest. He dies just the same.
Yet the cardinal points are not men nor are they gods. I have to be shown what they love, what the other, each, loves. And I am to destroy it. The good of me. All I am for.
Now to cross a river.

50) All my wounds have healed but the greatest one of all, my destiny. It has been revealed to me and it opens like a malignant flower in my chest. After much floating I am ashore at Matamoros, a place where two countries grind against each other. The day grows hotter. I shift in my clothes for a patch of cooling dampness lingering from my fine swim. I have discarded my heavy coat. There are trees offering shade but they are all too far away to help me. I keep my distance, walking along railroad tracks and by fetid ponds of many colors, passed mounds of oily slag and machinic debris, smashed crates and wire, here vigorous weeds feed through the bodies of slain or starved dogs, stunted flowers are drained of color by lazy, bloated flies, black and irridecent green, their pollinaters. The ground percolates blistering vapors. Scratched and bruised children play in vehicles stripped of doors and glass. I hear pounding and pleas from within a locked trunk. Though I remain a stand out in appearance up close, I have found that in this neighborhood my terrible aspect blends in with the locals. Around me I see an abundance of diseased souls, twisted or blotted, bodies confused with demons and poison. Not to worry, all wear new shoes.
I have seen agreeable portions of the world, I have drifted happily over the ocean. Though no naturalist I know the acrid wind scrubbing this margin is most foul. And this is the lesson Dr. Creep teaches. I must move, wander, what have you, or where I pause will, in time, come to resemble the sore crust I now walk upon. But it is not that I thereby do a bad thing. It is just that I may do it in the wrong place, waste my talents where the locals can destroy perfectly well by themselves, all without my monstrous posing or prompting. No, my destiny lay north. Unfinished business is to be done up there. Three creatures like myself are to meet. Each is driven by its own Doctor, as it were. Although he did not spell it out, I am sure that, again, we come to harm the other, annihilate what the each has come to love most in this world: East, West, South.... And what wil become of me? I do not know what sublime means, whether it has a meaning. But they want this most high word for themselves.
How blind and indifferent are the lives of men to so obscure a ruinous scrimmage to come. How out of sorts will be the bird, the lion, the whale, to the destruction to be wrought by these little gods and their vanity.
Dr. Creep is the name I gave him. Now I know he is a cardinal point for I am created to do his bidding. His name is North. And he is most sublime. My fate depends on it.

49) The Black Swan is sinking. Water is seeping through rotting boards, through the hull, once the bilge spilled over. I am listing. No longer a sprite bobbing, my boat is heavy, dragging, mixed with what it once had lovingly repulsed. Port and starboard have become confused, now they shift, change places, with the movement of my flood, inside the ship itself. I've two oceans dying to reunite. Pieces of the boat are coming off in my hands. My bed or nest, the coil of thick rope, has decayed to a coarse paste. The railing has fallen away. Objects slide unobstructed into the water. I hear cracking in the masts. The great wheel from which I played pilot is broken like some discarded metaphysic of departure and return. Glass portholes and all of the captain's cabin windows shatter, one by one, as I pass. Amongst the debris trailing the ship I can see the rudder, a riddle of worm holes. The sun taunts me with the perfect illumination of these things.
How much longer until I go swimming? My two busted gulls will sink with the ship. I cannot save them. I had taken to signing with them. We had something. Both fell into the hold where I can sometimes see them, shimmering, when the filthy water tosses them out of shadow. Who knows, once the water becomes high enough maybe they will effect an escape. But to what is my sorrow. The larger sea? There they will repeat their misery on a grander scale. I must steel myself, what there is of me, against such sadness. They are members of a cruel kind. They need a long death to give them time to understand the error of their ways. Now they feed on my excrement and offal heavings. Learn, my terrible twins! Send your cries to the ears of your wheeling brood. Teach!
I shall begin swimming while the sun is still sky high. I can see the shoreline from my perch most high. The boat is sinking so fast that little eddies and whirlpools form where water rushes in. A larger creature, then more of them, arrive to explore the submerged deck. Out of the hold float my gulls lost in thought. Time for us all to go. I've my backpack of pebbles, knife, brochures, whatever the hell else. I keep it with me for sentimental reasons. I do miss Doctor Creep, the way you miss a book burned into a pile of ashes. I plunge into the ocean. Matching right arm to left, stroke for stroke, I ply the waters well enough not to drown, though I do a little of that, just to break the monotony. I can no longer see land so I follow the routine course of sea birds. As happened once before, fish die all around me. From the very small to a bloated sunfish, they roll to the surface, dead supplicants to so pointless a god, me. How fruitful is the sea! One day I shall make a great fisherman. For the souls of men, I will have to wait. Unless death is my metier. Perhaps that is my part. Perhaps death is the prayer I answer. But can a fish or any other creature afflicted with a private tongue pray? And the mute? Can I pray? My thoughts are wet.
Later for answers. First to shore. The sun sets, etc. Twilight, a multitude of strokes, darkness. No birds but lights show me the way. I've done well. Brighter. Close enough to hear laughter. Couples frolic on the beach. Singing. Small fires and lamps throw teeming youth into hectic foreground. Even shadows are happy. I might join them except some of them, perhaps all, pray. Must make a wide pass. I swim toward a dark patch of beach. My feet touch the bottom. I stand. I struggle a little through abundant supplicants. I sit in sand. My breath returns. Turning back to the ocean, I leave it with no regrets. Such variety in that grave! I make my way to rocks wherein I may hide. In a little tumble of a grotto, no larger than a folded man, I find security. The air is warm. No sooner do I draw my knees to my chest when pitch pours over my eyes, it is Dr. Creep.

48) I have been adrift, above engine and sail, practicing indifference for the last seventeen days. The boat widely pivots about unseen contorsions of water. Water is everywhere but for a simple line of land I sometimes glimpse, a few lights, when dark. I should have kept my two Knights, so heavy is my solitude, only for a moment to only one more moment. Perhaps another. I have sun so bright it brings to my ocean a kind of fire. I have dark clouds, more commonly. Clouds help me to see into greater depths of this water world. Seems I've a special affinity for birds, they seek me out, they come all the way out here to rest, perched four square against the wind which brought them. I've nothing to offer but my brooding self. Can't imagine what they see in me. Especially after a bad episode which sent them away for a day. One bird, a gull, was injured. Must have happened along the way, but it fell from the sky onto the deck. I heard it collide while I was within an immense coil of thick rope where I have taken to sleeping. The gull was to its feet at once. Then I could see how slack was its left wing. It hung like the drapes of a whore house, not red drapes but a pure white, a lay of white feathers disordered by the wind. If you know gulls then you know they share a monstrous trait: should one of their kind be hurt in some way others will gather around it in an ever closing circle or noose, to be poetical, and begin pecking at their injured kind. The gull will finally die from this assault, but slowly, over a cruel length of time. I have watched this occur when I was of a more brutish turn of mind, back when I delighted in ugly natural justice. But now that I have also killed my kind, through not fault of my own, and now that I have found the sense of it obscure, even if self serving, I can no longer tolerate pecking or scratching or clawing, biting, crushing, or rasping with a rough tongue, as do the lions, or piercing, sucking or poison spitting, these and many more torments, I can no longer tolerate it among generally similar creatures. All may hunt, all may inflict any grim technique unto a prey's death. I can't care about that or I would be up all night and day of every day, an interfering busybody bringing only starvation. But cruelty, as afore mentioned?... NO! So, when this cracked winged gull fell from the sky, I was waiting in my coil of sea rope to break the circle, as it were. (Listen to me! I am a heap of shit, as it were.) Other gulls began to gather round. One or two made a lazy pass, looking elsewhere, across the bow, behind at a black patty of shit they just let go, or above, should it please the god of birds that it suddenly strikes the busted gull atop its downy skull. Stop! I rise from hiding and heave a ship's tool, a wooden, beautifully lathed thing meant to do something. My aim was precise. I clobbered an offending gull. All others wheeled away, pronto. The panicked noise was first pleasing to me until I saw the one I hit, too, had suffered a broken wing. Now two birds dragged wings like whores' drapes, not red, but white.

47) On board the Black Swan, alone, is the finest time I've passed on this earth. Seemed dreary at first, but not this windy morn. Solitude is my surname that only here my genes may fully express. Well said, you incoherent wonder! I will explore my freshly minted world with an open mind. Firstly, I run the decks, back and forth, gripping ropes to swing, turning the great wooden wheel, and I found a way to run an assortment of colorful flags up and down a pole designed for the task of signaling and swearing hopes and fears to others. Such pleasures did my body have under the sun. Then I visit the upper reaches, the pilot's cabin or preserve. I am much higher up, well above the deck. I can see the world in its entirety, blue and gray depths, all heaving and roiling, fringed by mountains at a great remove. Magellan, Columbus, the mighty Cook, though a lowly yatchsman, I assume their blissful countenance. Yet I remain stony so as not to disturb the crew with unsettling romance. Great beasts swim just under us, to continue. The bow shudders, planks groan in play. How beautiful the sounds of my Black Swan so repulsed by the ocean, like a splinter in the inflamed finger of an angry child.
Sadly, I also see the hold, my former prison, where down in darkness rots dead men who, in another time, I could have called mates. It is only right that I toss them overboard, bury them at sea, as is the mariner's way. I descend the pilot's perch, one always must, from deck to hold. Down the ladder I see them heaped. Their graceless tangle is my doing. Whether repentance, remorse, or artlessness, my profane doings must be undone. I pick each up, throw them over my shoulders. They are so heavy when empty of life, they are filled with bad air and omens and busted bones, their stiff limbs curse and curse. To be dead, rusted shut, all screws stripped, shoes a'bursting with swelled feet, rings cut into fat fingers, oh, the dessicated eyes that once wept at cruelty and the sweet things of life, to be dead is stupid. All show. The dead need sensitive handlers or they are lost twice. These two are fortunate they have me. I see their loss. I will remember them.
They do not splash when they hit the water. Waves merely crest over them, and they are gone. I say the words 'goodbye' and 'goodbye' for each. Short, to the point. My day goes on.

46) He said, 'Be still'. The good Doctor left me shivering in the dark. I could not make out his features. And when he had touched me he did not die. He must be immune to my murderous touch. No surprise. He chuckled, more to himself, when I showed him the handbill with my picture rudely drawn, the handbill the crew had tossed upon my head as curses rained, 'criminal!' etc. His parting gesture was to point out another small boat tethered to the stern. It was floating just fine. Had I chosen the wrong one? Was I to try to escape again? Why the charade?
The awful cries of the crew, when they found their fellows dead in the hold, filled my brain. To escape is to escape. I can hardly be faulted for doing what anyone in my position would do. I am, instead, rather proud that death came to only two souls. I am almost a hero. It could have been much worse, so on. But still, there is a tone or timbre to mourning that sets it apart from the usual complaints of the day. Thus do I believe.
I watch the crew gather around the empty, black center of their brotherhood, all of them by the rail whence the skiff did sink. Voices calm, almost reduce to whispers. They stand quietly. The ship turns away from the shore. Further out we go until the lights from shore are nearly extinguinshed on the horizon. Then I hear the ship engine stop. We slow. A gentle rocking resumes. There is no effort to reset the anchor. Down a ladder descends the pilot, I have to believe it's him. The crew is silent as the pilot joins them. As a group they melt into the night. I stay hidden, as the Doctor instructed. I must have remained that way for minutes, until I guess the danger to me has passed, though really not knowing what else to do. I get up, finally, to escape, I suppose. I crawl toward the stern. The little boat is no longer tethered. In a turn odd to me, the crew has assembled therein. Rowing. Dr. Creep is among them. I am left alone on the ship now drifting aimlessly off shore. I would have called out, but I am not able to speak. What good would it have done? Why come back to me? Perhaps Dr. Creep, always good for a joke, sent them out looking for me? But then why did the pilot also leave? No, Dr. Creep is saving them or they've had enough, they no longer want to imprison me. Barring a hidden fold to a plan, they've been made to abandoned ship. What to think.... Well, I have the larger vessel. Room to move around, stretch my legs. I am a captain of the...the...Black Swan. My cargo is death.

45) When I had lowered the lifeboat into the water I was rudely surprised to find it was not worthy. It was without a floating chance. The sea began to pour in from a dozen rotted breaches. I grabbed ahold of the rope and, as the skiff sank, I was obliged to cling and thence climb back up the hull of the ship. Some escape. But, with the skiff disappeared into the modest off-shore abyss, other moves came to me slogging though honey. I am not a good climber. I am a poor climber. Life, however elaborated, will find a way. Inside me there is a spark, an urge, a flame(?) that is undeniable. I know Carlos had it, and his friend, the Knights of the Short Straw, they had it. I saw it in their failing eyes. Mine was stronger. I am no more deserving, merely stronger in so small a way that, nevertheless, makes all the difference. Some, of an otherworldly persuasion, hold precious smooth, rounded stones, even though, and someone should tell them, a machine can tumble the most jagged rock to perfection. Further, remote worlds, planets, all the suns above, they are all round, to the aided eye. The moon, I'll start there, is clearly. So, perhaps the rough stone is the rarer? The world likes edges, me thinks. Too great an idea here. Then, now, while hanging, myself listing the ship a bit, I wondered, would I ever find a life urge stronger than mine? I am not even trying! Of course, the stars were of no help. Jumping fish retreated. No assistance at all came to me. Well, the wind pushed me this way and that. I was banged onto new hand holds. Still... Tears nearly fell.
I was desperate. My cold hands, those of a freshly minted killer, seemed to make the rope weak. I swear, it began unraveling at my touch. But I made it. Back on board, I had to find a place to hide. I tucked my soul into the darkest shadow and waited. Another man came down, stomping in rubber boots, down from Dr. Creep's room of confidence. I espied him peering into the hold. He shouted out the alarm. Others came running. One descended into the hold. More shouting. Another noticed the dangling ropes over the side. They put together my escape as it should have been. Words, words, more words. Lights were trained upon the deep. Pitiful lights, designed to only provoke stupid fish to the surface, for an easy kill. Shouts. 'Nada'. And 'nada', again. The ship began to heave. The searching crew was shunted to one side, so powerful was the thrust. Shore bound we were. I wish I were in possession of a fuller nautical language so as to render the practiced activity more precise: boatswain whistles, knots, marking twain, hoisting, so on. Dull, dull. Keep a clear head. I am the filthy, fugitive thing in deepest shadow. All I need to know.
Another shadow approaches near to me. He stands close enough to touch. His gloved hand touches my brow. He brushes away my wet, matted, hair. He smells of heavy oil, ash. Too long in the fire. 'Still, still, your panic'd heart', he says. 'North'.
I am the needle in every haystack. I am the rare coin in a shopkeepers till. The last living bird of a kind. Or puzzle piece. I am the thing that finishes a mystery, the solitary trinket hinting strongly of Atlantis. The 'it' of childhood games. I am alone. Dr. Creep, leave me alone.

44) I lay the men to rest, side by side, in the Date Garden. I put one stilled hand in the hand of the other. Carlos and his small friend. I name them Knights of the Short Straw. It is the least I can do after having done the most I can do, to them. I notice the night is temperate, the air fresh, as I climb the rope ladder to the deck. I am free. Of the pit. Here and now, I do not want any other man to die. I must avoid the balance of the crew, six, while making my escape. They must avoid me, I mean. I am pleasantly surprised to see lights on a nearby shore. A heavy chain is plunged into the water. We are at anchor! Perhaps we were never far from the coast. Perhaps we were never under way. It was all a trick of my guilty conscience, if I had one. Maybe next I'll wake up and my life hitherto will have been a miserable dream, but dreamt by a wonderful family man, or a gentleman about town, a dapper dresser, full of wit and insight, a man of bursting wallet, generous, too, often inviting complete strangers to dine and drink in fine clubs or bistros, or even in my own home, which is large, plenty of room for games of chance and chess, for singing and grand conversation, and a reading library of hoary volumes full of mystery and hate, violence, regicide and gloom, there would be numerous bathrooms for even the most discriminating evacuators, down every painting-lined wall. I'll stir from the four poster with only a dissipating vapor of stomach sickness to bridge the somatic divide. Nope. No dream.
Where is my backpack? I've found a suitable lifeboat but I cannot leave without my backpack. I don't go far. I almost trip over it after finding the lifeboat. The contents are largely useless so I needn't check for theft. Not much I could do if I found the brochures missing. Kill them all? I think not, not for brochures. Of them, they are pretty, they have neat, even folds, between each is boldly written detail about, and fine pictures of, waterfalls, ducks, horses, mountains and rodeos. One features 'Indians of the West'. An interesting group. What are they doing? What do they do? How curious these riders on horseback. With weapons. The woman, too, is armed.
I can ill afford to linger over them. I get into the little boat. There is a skill to the lowering I do not have. Progress is slow. Halfway down I worry more and more about the noise I am making. I nervously look hither and yon, waiting for the detection that will send more men to their deaths, when what should I see through the windows of the ship's control room: Dr. Creep in silhouette. The spider's body itself! He is talking to the crew, now he's gesturing a sharp meaning. Dr. Creep is here. He will think I am a murderer again and again. Too many times. I must get away, sever the apron strings. I cannot take seeing disappointment in his eyes, eyes made of smoke and the dust of ages. I have not looked into them, but I know he has witnessed monuments weather away, the miraculous becomes mundane in his hands, and, he made me, in his image. That is how I know him.
Time to row to shore and... North.
Goodbye, Doctor Creep.

43) I cannot tarry for instructions from Dr. Creep. Deciding a thing or two on my own has brought me to this awful place, this I know. No luxury of detachment, still less a miraculous intervention is for me tonight. I've wanted a shred of independence, now it is given of whole cloth, so to say. I'll try to use it.
The little dead man stuffs away neatly, hidden by beams, the hull, or what not. Once I've done him this way, like a dung beetle does, I realize the rope is useless to me. There is no knotted hook that I might throw onto the deck so as to hoist myself up. New plan. I have to unstuff the little fellow and lay him at the trough drop, visible to those who will follow to check on his behalf. Once this is done, I must hide nearby in the shadows, which, frankly, is all there is here. I have the element of surprise going for me. But then I think, won't the one who next arrives, another short straw, won't he call out for his gang, his brethern, to come help him, especially if I am not to be seen? So, I've another plan. (Independence clouds the mind with plans.) I shall lay under the dead soul, and in that way create the illusion that I, as massive and as redoubtable as I am, could possibly have been knocked out or crippled or made dead by his fall. Funny story I'll tell myself again later! I cannot resist a laugh at the thought that so miserable a cooling thing I now am beneath could be made to seem my fate. I have been crushed by stones, buildings have fallen upon my head, I have been shot, frozen, fed toxins, etc...and now this little man ends me? I think not. But the one who now appears at the opening of the hold, he is convinced I'm down for good. He calls out, 'Carlos!' I quicky revisit my plan. I subtly move 'Carlos' arm, and I moan in a foreign manner, with accents and oomlauts. I feign life in him. The man above does not call his gang. Instead, he listens to his heart and drops a rope ladder down. He descends. He is unsteady. And when he draws near I can smell foul drink. He bends to his mate. I make my move. I merely grab his arm, yet he expires, as does the sparrow, even when held by the most loving hand. It is as though my touch alone...wait...I'm wondering...wait...wait.... He crumpled at my touch, this soul. Did I do this? Dr. Creep?

42) Night falls on my sixth day of confinement. No sign of Dr. Creep. Hence, I must act by myself. Dependency on him has its fine rewards, to be sure, but my intimation of his Greater Design, that he wants me to join in, even while I am knee deep in filth of the hold, compels me to take a commanding role in my own fate. It follows that I've learned a little something of my multiple captor's routine, or of their variance of the same. In the beginning of my presence on board they enjoyed gathering for hearty torment at the trough drop. There were seven of them then. I assume one stayed piloting the ship, so I must believe there are at least eight men on board. Now, it seems my novelty has worn off for but a single soul shows up at my feeding, and he appears to have drawn the short straw. My portions of sour fish mash have been reduced so that this diminutive man might do the work of lowering and hoisting alone. Will he be alone tonight? On this lovely temperate evening, perfect for escape, I have such good fortune that, yes, only this simple man appears. To put him at ease I obligingly cower. He lowers the trough. He shouts the routine insults and waits for me to eat and wretch. Which I do, but with a difference. I grunt a bit more to let him know I have finished. He lowers the rope. And as I tie the knot to the handle of the trough I give the rope he holds a great pull. How far do the mighty fall! He hits the ground with god's speed. Yet he still has life enough to beg, or maybe he is talking to his mother or asking why I did the great pull or he is fretting in general. I can't tell. I don't understand the tongue. How many times do I have to endure moments like this, when foreign words translated could clarify, and better, make beautiful a last breath? I have been witness to a veritable Bartlett's of final words, but I don't understand any of them. Should I ever be asked what so and so said before an end I shall have to honestly decline to respond. To the last man.
So. Here on the floor, beneath me, is a man. I appear to him in the light bouncing off the murk of the Vomitorium. He is afraid. I am not fearsome, but he is very afraid. I lay hands upon him to end his suffering. He flashes out like an ant under glass. He is a small, dark man, with a complexion burnt by the sun. Very rugged to the untrained eye. To me he is an old parchment grooved by the steel pen of dead work. What a malign moon, author of life's heartless tides, must have rolled him here! Can it be imagined the folds within folds of the robes of christ that brought his life to mercy at my feet? You can tell I plainly like him. He is weak, frail, his heart resides just a few inches beneath his breast. Like me.
Suddenly, I remember a sunny day from my youth, (a moment, anyway), when neighborhood kinder pulled the legs from a harmless spider. One by one. The legs each twitched on and on when laid atop the heated pavement. Laughter ensued, as here on this ship. The body of the spider was left sans power of locomotion. Still it tried to walk on its shreds, its stumps, (joints?), pivoting on its tender thorax. Oh grim destiny! Eight men on board. One has just died. Seven legs left to pull. Oh! Curse my endless night, curse this gross symmetry, that an end repeats a beginning! Repetition with no due process. So what. Humanity aside, I must get away. N'est pas?

41) I am under the distressed opinion that there is nothing natural in this world. I could begin with my rearranged, scarrified self, but I won't. Instead, I am a Jonah or Ahab, not in the belly of a whale, but the filthy hold of a ship. Jonah and Ahab are strange fantasies. I am no fantasy, I am real. Also artificial. I am both, as were the slaves imported from hither and yon for work and cruel, life-long entertainments. I think I may be a real slave at this point in time. I am brought a fermented crush of fish in a big bowl or such. My captors lower an offal trough of the same down to my prison from the deck, my water, too. I can hear them laugh while performing this task. Especially when I am obliged to reattach the trough from any given yesterfeed. I am a good slave. I eat and drink everything they bring. I am very real when retching my soul onto the smeared floor, the hull, whatever. I've chosen a place for the latter activity, in a corner well off the hatch thrown open at Torment Time (as I now call the occasion of the trough decent). As for evacuation, the final ridding of my perturbed system, I've chosen a shady spot bounded by supports and iron girding. It is as far away from where I drag the trough to eat as possible. Down here I experience little purposeful movement apart from my ramble from the retching spot, to trough, to shitting place. And more: I've been here for three days and so have begun naming stations along the route. First there is the Vomitorium, very Roman, very imperial, then comes the trough drop I call the Salon, from there I walk along the Esplanade to the Date Garden, a much welcomed few feet of circulating fresh air created by minor imperfections in the ship's construction, soon I come upon the Frontier, a porous boundary, just before the Savoie, my crapping place, becomes overwhelmingly foul enough to chase naming away.
Yes, I have thought of combining the Vomitorium with the Savoie but I've learned I cannot make the distance before doing one or the other thing. You understand, I must preserve the Date Garden.

The knocking of my boots upon the floor is a kind of music. I've taken to music. The spirits onboard join in. They are many.

After three days I know Dr. Creep is not here. He may have lost me. In this other world, I'm being taken on a brigantine by pirates or simple kidnappers. They rain down on me the sound 'criminal, criminal'. In a moment of weakness they tossed a placard or handbill on which I am claimed to appear among the crudely drawn lines. Ugly visage. Someone has seen me and been alive enough to provide a sketch. I am wanted here and there. I've done nothing but have only been a mute dreaming of and marching North. I will not take much more from my captors, though such a diffuse sentiment is a long way from a plan. I must plan getting away.

40) Dr. Creep? Are you here...? Where am I? I never would have arrived unannounced in one of those dirty little beach houses. I would not have kicked in a door. No no no. I'm not that way! I take death very seriously. Not my own. The death of others. You know I have no instruction. 'North' is not enough. It could be enough if there were not so much life between me and the end. Where is the end? I do not think 'North' is an end. It is only a direction, right? Dr. Creep, why am I so stupid? Please, what are you going to do? It is dark in here. But I thank you for the weak light, as far as it goes.
See me. Though my back pack, all of my possessions have been taken, I am not afraid. I am just a little troubled.
Thank you for the new bandages. I feel well enough to look around a bit. Am I in the hold of a ship? It smells like humanity down here. Real lovely. But also spices. Maybe fruit. Doctor, I am not angry. Can you appear, please? I did not mean to threaten you. I am not able to mean anything. Further, I have not talked with a single soul. I can only get close. Then my throat closes. I.... O.K., too much about me.
Are you taking me back to the ice? I do feel movement. Gentle rocking. I am in a cargo hold. I am going somewhere.

Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor....I will shut up now.... North? I hear gulls. North.

39) I rarely observe people alone. Though they may be alone in their thoughts and behaviors, people move together. I would like to join them in their work and play. Certainly my ugly dreams always include another, or more. But, sadly for me, I cannot fall in. The reasons for such a condition are out of focus. I only know Dr. Creep has made fraternizing out of bounds. He says it is for my own protection. For just as one knows the heavier bottle will smash the lighter, that the crow will menace the sparrow, and that an unwashed hand makes for a poor soup, I cannot do well amingling. So has the Doctor warned me, though in less colorful terms. A cordon sanitaire surrounds me. Fate. I need only recall, most recently, how the child who saw me leave the church unsteady with a belly full of wine, roiled inwardly. How he/she/it trembled! How they struggled for help words, how they made urgent gestures at the sky for salvation. And how my isolation became the tiny child's as I passed: a listing heap of pleas. How very alone is this babe with prayers that will never be answered! I cannot but make young and old slump to the ground. And animals. Things crumble. Dr. Creep must answer me when I ask the wherefore and the why of this. He calls it fate. I may not want it. I do not. I must force Dr. Creep out into the open. He must be made to join me in a conversation about the terrible path my life has taken. He must be made to help. I need a correction of some kind. I am not well.

As I run, a glance behind reveals only a few, maybe a dozen, on my trail. The little church has many friends, it seems. Still, there are more hills here than pursuers. I need to find a place to hide. I am surprisingly fast in the open, even while soaking wet, which I remain from the rain falling again.
I have an idea. It occurs to me when I first smell the smoke of a small house fire. Over a rise I see below an entire beach front of homes of cold souls. House fires pour smoke over the scrub beach. And I think I'm alone! Dr. Creep, you had better get here quick. I am going into the neighborhood. I need to dry, my gut is aflame. Medicine, medicine. I am descending to be among the poor folk. They are defenseless, Dr. Creep, aren't they? In each house is a story that will never be told, or if it does, will never get out to the world. Small people suffering small hiccups of life before small fires. I will choose one, and they may well be done for. Woe unto that private hearth. We shall see.

Here I come.

38) Rain. Rain. Walking in clothes heavier than one's self is a discipline known to penitents, deep-sea fishermen, and those with no home. There may be other groups, but they don't occur to me under this deluge. I've not gone on about my boots. My glasses have been a silent prescription. I have not worn them a single hour. They were made for the desert. Sure. Of my boots, this is the one happy note of my trudgery. Within them my feet are numb to the cold, impervious to the rough shocks of this awful country. Whether fording muddy pools, beshited streams, or decorating the earth with tracks upon tracks, they've proven a plus. They have helped with my balance, very much needed because of my ruined toes, the Doctor's caring focus it seems so long ago. They will have to be removed. Frostbite has killed them, finally. I think I now know the why of the pocket knife. I am used to discarding anatomical bits. My body-wide suturings tell me I'm discriminating. O.K. I must find a place to chop.
Rio Gallegos. So a weathered sign reads. I find a little church with separate living quarters. They are the first structures I come upon or see, when the rain relents. Such nice little shacks. Far better than any of my recent dwellings. Except for the cave, who would not prefer a cave, cast by the earth itself, to a hovel, however well protected by a local god?
I kick in the front doors of the church and stand there before the divine, as a fierce, muddy mess. The local god is deaf and blind to foreigners. Good news. I take comfort. I am not seen by the deity. I think gods provide what amounts to a black cloak for those who do not know them. And they speak in only one way, one tongue. Neither do spirits know how to tell their worshippers that a crude, alien thing passed through them. I am a red ribbon drifting in swells on the surface of a sea. An empty bag snagged in brush. Incongruous, but pure background rubbish. This Sunday the sermon will be about how their front doors came to be kicked in, not with any accuracy about who might have done it. Locals did it, kids, in search of the chalice wine, it'll be said. The parishioners can take it. They crave signs. Contrarian events make them more convicted believers.
I have intruded to find a dry place to review Dr. Creep's divine brochures, and to remove a couple of my offending toes. What the hell, I'll find the chalice wine. It does sound good, I must admit. I will drink it only for the credibility of the blame to follow upon the kids. And I will drink to dull the pain to come. Where, oh, where. I bust open a few low cabinets. Then high cabinets. I cannot find the wine anywhere. I do not think to look in the refrigerator until the hollow statuary itself has been smashed. I've made quite a mess. Those damn kids.
The wine tastes like worthless grape juice. It is hard to have the patience for the alcohol. There has to be something to transubstantiation to endure this cold, sugary swill. But, then...Magic! I begin to feel warmly stupid. Time for my surgery. No sooner have I removed my shoes then... Who is there? Gasps and cries echo in the church. People have come. Maybe from the other building. They stammer about damage. I peek over a pew to watch them rush about. Seems they've noticed the clear muddy prints I've left on the floor. They follow them in to the first room I rudely searched. More sighs of alarm. 'Dios mio'. I just may learn this language before they're rid of me.
I've heard enough. I get the hell out of there. I am out and running. I am leaving. It would have been a simple memory had not a child seen me.

37) Morning....North. My imperative. My command. I think of nothing other. Dr. Creep has given me the key to my coherence, my order. It must be that there exists in the North some great destiny, a resolution to my plagued condition. I can hardly wait for the moment when the plants and animals sing or sigh to me, when the wind and rain yield to clear paths, and when the sky full of stars bends down close enough to kiss, if that is what can happen. I need peace. It will be mine. In good time. The ever precise Doctor intends to lift a veil. But his ways are obscure, elliptical. Hence, I need to look more closely over the contents of my backpack. Specifically, I recall pamphlets to museums and geographical destinations in the North. Perhaps among them is a description of my rest.

The rain is pouring. I abandon the stodgy vehicle. Float it away, please. The earth is awash. My coat is permeable. Soon I am ankle-deep in mud, and wet. Constricted. Discomfort narrows the mind. I cannot see more than ten feet ahead. The noise of the downpour is deafening. I follow the road. No vehicles pass. Only the most vigorous wild things could enjoy this. I am bent by the force of the rain. My gut-shot bandages are soaked. Could It be cleansing? This one hopes.
The wind rids me of the stench of my being. The sun peels away layers of conflict. Rain is a general wash. The elements work me as they would a pebble. The rough rock is eroded to a smooth paving stone.
North.

36) Perhaps I am waking up a bit, the bestial within me is weakening. It is a good and puzzling thing I do when I slow the vehicle down and, despite the fire, I drive back to the couple I threw insensate or worse in the grass. I have the urge to help. I must, of course, steal the vehicle, but I think I should help enough so that they do not suffer an ugly burn. I am afraid of fire above all else, so, Dr. Creep, if you are watching, you will learn a little of my selfless, charming side. Do I dare toy with heroism? I can't be a hero until I actually do something besides idle near the couple, as I am doing now. I feel a temptation to heroism, it is like a deep spiritual tickle, even though those words mean next to nothing, I mean, really. So, Doctor, here I am. There is fire now on both sides of the road. Yet I am out of the vehicle. I am standing close to the pair. I can see physical features and adornments specific to them. I actually sense their distinction, that they have lives to live, plenty of life left, assuming the best. Man, woman. He is wearing white trousers and a white shirt, open at the dirty collar. She is akimbo in a plaid skirt held together by a jeweled pin. They both have gray hair. Doctor, I feel the heroic urge rising. Flames leap to brush a few feet away. I must act soon. Doctor, now I see, I am worth saving. I have it in my power to step in and leave a clear impress on the fates of others. I can be a force for good. Oh, Doctor! How bright is this light!

The flames are closing upon the vehicle. The tires might begin burning, just as the shoes of my insensate couple in fact are. Can it be heroic to save the vehicle, and myself, alone? It is very hot. Heavy smoke makes it harder to see them. Something stronger than heroism is twisting in me. The usual: fear, pain, and my old friend, the terror of fire. Dr. Creep, I must escape now. You saw me poised to do a great thing, didn't you? Had you been standing somewhere near I would have saved them. Just to show you. It is a little your fault the pair now smolders. The best I can do is make sure they are deceased. Which I do with his and her stones.

It is getting dark. The dust and smoke rises behind me as I drive away. I cannot make out the place of the events of a few minutes ago. It is as good as gone. All just memories, now. I feel better. The vehicle is safe. I am safe. So something good did come of this. In the back seat is a fancy basket, but nearly everything contained has been eaten to wrappers. There is a little wine left, surprisingly. Malbec. Dark, brooding, inky. Like every night of my stupid life. Easy, easy.

I did not drive for long until the vehicle stopped running. I spent the night inside, tucked and curled around my luke warm core. I dreampt of a slaughter house. I was working there. I wielded a buzz saw in the manner expected. Cattle were reduced to smaller and smaller parts, all in a worthy effort to finally fit them into the tiny mouths of people. They were waiting in a long line down the road. I was the second step. The first was to end the life of the cow. My job was to take great hacking swats at the upended things. In my dream I slipped in the mess at my feet. My saw put an end to me.

I woke up in sickness. I had wretched down my front. I wiped the bile from my mouth. I looked through the windshield outside at the clouds. They faintly reflected fire or lights from a city over the hills. Cold weather was coming. The clouds were parted, open in places, drifting slowly, in any case. Two bright stars briefly shown like hateful eyes looking down on the filth of my life.

It will be dawn soon. Dr. Creep, where are you?

35) I do not like running. I am a thoughtless beast when I run. I am not a beast but a man forced to drift into bestial ways. I may resemble a beast. I shall take this up with the good Doctor. There is no one other to select me, to mark me with a sign, so that people, however reduced and repugnant themselves, know at a glance that my lumbering self, the heap parting the smoking grass, is like them in a small way: the running from errors or defects fate has thrown. But I fear it is only a dim somewhere, among a near-extinguished tribe badly in need of fresh soldiers, perhaps, where I might find a home. It is my own fault, yammering on about a home. Should I rid myself of so stupid an idea, then I might find peace, as I knew in the ice, when I was giving my life away in tiny degrees. Home is a place to finish all at once: I do not believe I can. Dr. Creep will not let me. Home is wandering, such as I'm meant to do. So why does home occur to me at all?

Fire. It is fast. My burnt meat's smoke mixes with that of the weeds. It fills my nostrils, and is just behind. Faster animals pass. I follow them, and the givens of wind and lay of the land, to safety. No siren sounds here. Fire may burn for days and no notice is taken, I suspect. Few trees, fewer buildings, no one cares.
As I blunder though the freshvine, watch the alarm birds bank, I see a break ahead. An automobile runs through it. Good lord, a highway. I rush ahead. Silent road. I hug the brush. Lads bound by as the fire follows at my back. A vehicle appears, a solid box of a car. It meant to skirt the flames, which are now at the berm of the shoulder. God bless the lads who mounted the road just then. The vehicle swerved to avoid them but hit them just the same. For me, o.k. The occupants are out cold, maybe dead. I throw them to the grass. I take their place. I can do this. I watched my little host back in Ushuaia operate such a machine. Among other occasions. I've got the thing running down the road.

34) The bird has yielded a pitiful few mouthfuls of meat. The carcass is in blood-spotted disarray, with parts scattered as though by a witch doctor casting a very evil spell. I meant the bird no ill will. I am merely hungry. Weakness feeds on weakness.

I must start a fire. I have my matches and a world of tinder. I hope a day will come when I do more than nurse an injury in the morning, walk briefly to my next mistake in the afternoon; Thence to run and cower the evening away, and finish with a night of fitful sleep in a damn narrow I hope no other animal wants. I will do more with my days, starting tomorrow. But for now I must keep my fire going and... burn my meat. Quite burned. It is not hard to start a fire or keep it going. It is the putting out where real skill is needed. From confinement in a circle of stones, my fire leapt to tall brush. It was swept along by wind enough. Alarm birds, that is what I shall call them, inclusive of the one I burnt, dart from hundreds of concealments on my bit of playa. (Stupid dogs found only two.) Fire has no brain, but it makes a great one of the many who carry the stories and fear of it within them. It is in me. I am afraid of fire the way other people are afraid of god. Above all else. So please excuse my limited tries at stopping it. What little stomping around I did, yes, I'll admit, was for show, so that the good Doctor will not think less of me than he may already. I must be into negative numbers. The fire leaps into the trees and, too, begins grazing the hillside. Who can guess where it might stop. Purely rhetorical mutterance.
It is evening nearly, so begins the running portion of my day.

33) The good Doctor left me with a tidy pile of supplemental provisions. He gave me matches. Perhaps I will cook, should I come across a thing made palatable by such a process. A fire to warm me is also on my list. I am not bothered by the dark but I can feel cold. He gave me a pocket knife, one which includes a screwdriver and a bottle opener. First too little, now too much! Should I encounter a screw anytime soon I am too close to hostile locals. And all the bottles I've seen have already been opened and are empty but for a bit of rainwater and plaques of living filth. Some forms of life have no ambition. He's also included a salve for minor cuts and sunburn. I'm gunshot, for god's sake. Skin cancer? Even if a tumor should flourish on my forehead today it will be days beyond my ability to count before I succumb, an eventuality Dr. Creep would not permit in any case. Another jacket, to replace the one left behind at the pool, rounds out his gifts.
Still no map. Though I most likely could not make much use of it, for that I would have to know where I am; nevertheless, it would be a new way to view the monotony of a world of hillock, valley, scrub, playa, hillock, etc.

I stuff my new objects into my backpack. I try to stand. Not bad. The bandage is wet. I've another one on my back. The bullet must have passed clean through. More good news.
I step outside into the sunlight. There I see a sign attached to the wall of the hovel. Framing a foreign message are two illustrations, one of ducks on the wing and the other of a hunter taking aim at them. But what really gets my attention is that the sign in held in place... by screws. Just then birds burst from hiding into the air. Two guns fire, one right after the other. Birds fall from the sky. One bird, just a bit alive, takes an odd bounce, under its own power, into the roots of a wind-felled tree. Shouting, then. I duck back inside. Dogs, how I hate more than one dog at a time, bound headlong into the field. One easily recovers its prey. The other whines and frets. It runs an erratic pattern. More shouting. More whining. No luck. I cower as the hunters come into view and join in the search. They, too, stay wide of the roots. Birds are so small, let's forget that one and go elsewhere, 'ahora', I know the hunters are clucking to each other. They move on, but not before the dog that could not find its master's kill stops, perhaps drawn by the stink of my wound or of my grey flesh generally, or my heart, now pounding, and peers into the dark of the hovel. It stands and stares my way. I press so hard into the rear of the hovel that I can hear the boards strain. The hunter calls his animal. But it will not stand down. The man nears and yells again. Still it points my way. He kicks the dog hard. Now it runs. And runs. I feel regret that I cannot merely reveal myself to show that the dog was right. But I would only invite more holes in my hide. Better a dog kicked than me. I've always felt that way even as the distinction is oft times razor thin. Off the group goes. The shooting will be better in the next field. 'Si'.

I let hours pass before I venture out. I will recover the injured bird neither the hunters nor their dogs could. The painkillers are wearing off. I must clutch my gut as I walk. At the roots I find the bird, panting and broken. Its wings hang as limp as empty sails. I have a pocket knife.... I shall keep the rest to myself.

32) Dr. Creep was gone before I could manage more than a nuanced groan in pursuit of his shadow. I would like him to one day stay, to sit with me after he has cleaned me up from a worldly bruising. He has no bedside manner through which it is said healing can often be accelerated. Not to give me a chance to thank him, but to leave me muttering the inventory of his helpful deeds to only myself, this I do not care for. To be alone is to be alone. But to be alone with the great Doctor just beyond my arms to hold, surely that is to be very alone. We could talk about many things. Why he cares for me. Why he does not say to me more than command words. Why he gives me things. Why I dream crap. Why I am pummeled, run from, stared at. Why people perish or disappear when I am around them. I could sound like a child bursting with joyful curiosity but for questions which follow upon my misery and solitude, crushing to the souls of children, if I understand them. Which I do not: Why is the sky blue? Is the moon looking at me? Why is mommy crying? Will you sleep under my bed so that I know the scraping and the dull shove from beneath the mattress is you? I do not know children. Yet I must have once been one. I remember little things, just. I remember fabric brushing across my face. Mother in a summer dress? I remember birds flocking above a public dump. Being given a rolled newspaper to swat flies that lit upon warm siding of a red house. Children love tasks. I remember mowing the lawn before fierce hail fell, a voice yelling at me to hurry. Daddy? Maybe. Enticing. Tempting. Useless. Like collecting postage stamps or minerals in tiny display boxes. A cold show, to be sure.

Minutes later I found I could sit up in my dim surroundings of rough board and tar roof. I am not brave but unique. So what. Perhaps I need to be provocative. If I willfully put myself in harms way can I force Dr. Creep come to my side? A good question. Finally.

31) Everything is starving here. Starved fox course starving rabbits. The clouds are rainless wisps. Dry leaves rattle along empty stream beds. Can anything here survive another day? Do living things here consume just enough to be able to search for just enough tomorrow? Repugnant to live in perpetual want.
I did not remain at the pool long enough to understand those people, and they were certainly well fed, but I know they too have ugly, repetitive hungers. Staying clean, maintaining their girth, replacing bullets expended through the crosshairs. I am beginning to hate this place I have just begun to cross. And everything in it.

The awful night passed. It is dawn and I am alive. My wound has been cleaned and dressed. I am groggy, dull with analgesics, but I see a shadow pass across the threshold: Dr. Creep. Blessed Dr. Creep.

30) The water felt good. Today I thought I had finally drawn the better hand, that is until the pool splashers reversed their course. Out of the house they stormed, angry, wide-eyed, throaty, and well armed with a common go-to weapon: the machete. One small man had a rifle. Nothing to explain. Time to run. I grab my clothes poolside, but leave Dr. Creep's gift of the weather-proof coat. I had only my backpack to conceal my shame. I ran faster than them all. Fear and shouting seemed to tire these once proud people. Down a hill side, across playa and vine, one by one they lost their breath. Only the small man with the gun was able to follow. Running pell-mell ended me in the pocket of a steep rock fall. Panting, I turned to face my pursuer. I didn't need to wait long. The brush parted and there he was, the small pock-marked soul. It was his leveled gun that held my interest. He began by stammering very loudly in that same unknowable tongue. His tactic was as poor as my own, which was nothing more than a pointless effort to blend into the stones. He gestures with the rifle for me to walk back the way we came. I am taken prisoner. I cooperate and advance, yet, though under duress, I offer my hand in friendship. An angel passes. The small man takes a quiet step back, there is a hitch in his breath, his eyes roll off of me. His knees buckle and he falls to the ground. I've done nothing, but he falls to the ground. This is one custom too many, my first thought. But this is more real, my second thought. And as he falls the gun discharges. I stand over him for long seconds. I must have been in shock, for suddenly my belly is aflame. I've been shot.

I can hear the others, drawn by the report, catching up. I have to run some more. Around the rockfall, deeper into the woods I go, bleeding through the dirty, wadded clothes I press against the hole in my gut. It was late afternoon. I was getting colder. I paused to put on my bloody clothes, and in taking the time for this I found I was very near a ruin, a shed or small barn overgrown with freshvine, etc. There is a threshold but no door. Inside it is already dusk. I do not feel well. I lay on the wooden floor among the leaves, spiders, and creatures I'll encounter only in total darkness. I might die tonight.
Dr. Creep...please....

29) Voices carry on the wind. I hear laughter. Give me a moment. I thought I was alone. Damn, I was reflecting just fine. Though, it is true, Dr. Creep, my sole companion, has been silent for days, and the world, a mumbling show. But now I hear laughter. And a machine. Over a rise I see a valley with vineyards, and beyond, a big house. So maybe I want to descend the rocks and hide among the stock. To eat fruit hanging. To be with souls. Yes, I do. All my errant yesterdays I bind with vine.
A tractor works rows away. On hands and knees, I crawl toward the house. For laughter's sake. (This from one who cannot remember laughing.)

Steam rises from a swimming pool. People in hot water. I could be there, warm and washing. They do not see me until I step upon a rose colored patio. Shouting. Panicked splashing. They scramble away. So much for new friends. I am not discouraged. I removed my garments, more like peeling, and into the water I dive. I do not like to see myself without clothes. My suturing is an ugly violet. I do not look at anything but the pool plaster opposite my stroke.