I never said.

Regrets of the Head.

I do regret not opening up my eyes and allowing him to see into me, just that once. I do regret that now. I should have been more generous. If I had it to do over again perhaps I would. What in the world did I have to lose? I'd already lost my entire body. What was left? Fear I guess. Of what? Of him seeing me? I guess. But what? What in me could have been so terrible? So impossible to behold. God knows I carried it around inside me all my many days. Carried it like a faithful slave. But he was a different kind of man than me. Such a gentle soul. Kind. You could see it in his eyes. Not a mean bone in his body. Kind enough to stop on his Sunday walk and pick me up at least. Carry me all that ways. He wasn't obliged to do that. He wasn't under any orders. He just found it in the goodness of his heart. The goodness of his heart. And mine had long left me. Nothing there but this gruesome head. It must have been truly terrifying to him. I doubt he ever even brought himself to tell the story. Tell the tale. Who in the wide world would ever believe a thing like that? A head in a ditch that talks? That pleads for forgiveness. That moans and groans with self-pity. At least that part of it's over. No more bobbing to the surface. I wonder about him, though, sometimes. My last contact with the tribe. I wonder if he ever made it back to the wife. The little lady. The love of his life. Or if he's still wandering up and down those roads, poking at things in the ditches; talking to trees. I should have let him see into my eyes. Just that once. It might have been a help to him. It might have brought him some peace. To know the two of us were entirely separate. Complete opposite ends of the stick. There was never any danger of him becoming me. Falling into the pit. He was entirely himself. It was me that was split. It was only me.

Indio, California.

Floating flat on my back in the bare night sky, rippling yellow pool lights in stripes across the deep end. Staring up at the wide splash of desert stars as my son tries to sink himself to the bottom, exhaling all his wind, like he might become a dark boulder. He won't sink. He can't get himself to sink no matter what he tries. He's like a dry stick, blond hair streaming out as though he might have fallen from this very sky. I remember the two of us jumping into the bass pond on the ranch back home. Middle of summer. Temperature up in the high nineties. We were diving down deep into the slimy green water trying to retrieve an old sunken raft. I came up gasping. That was the very first indication I had something seriously wrong with my heart: Desperate breath. Ache in the armpit. Ropes in the neck. The panic, although I kept it hidden from my son. He kept right on diving while I pulled myself onshore, facedown, spitting dirt.

Now the clear world floats way above. Cassiopeia in a perfect 3. Desert wind. Us below. Lipitor. Zetia. Ramipril. If this were 1876, I'd be dead in a heartbeat.

Wisconsin Wilderness.

"Funny how some little impulse, some notion like that can pop up and here you find yourself suddenly snowshoeing across the Wisconsin wilderness in dead winter." This was the thought that came to him in the midst of his heart pounding, breath gasping, eyes locked down on the brand new pair of bright orange Atlas snow-shoes he'd bought at Fleet Farm. He'd seen a pair just like it hanging in the back porch of his brother-in-law's place, prompting this whole new adventure. The real spur, of course, was his little "almost" heart-attack experience going back to October on the West Coast; that was the real catalyst-"an event like that;" "out of the blue." One minute he's eating sushi on Sutter Street, the next he's collapsed at the bottom of the glass steps of the hotel, tourists brushing past him with their black luggage. None of the classic symptoms; no pressing pain in the chest, no stabbing in the left arm, just flat out of air and the back of his neck tied up in deep knots. It seemed to him he still hadn't quite caught up to the full impact of it. Caution regarding the unseeable organs was something that had never occurred to him. You can only imagine the heart inside there, pounding away in its red cage. He'd seen the ghostly tomographic images after the failed stress test but they resembled nothing like his mental image of a heart-his heart. The gangly left anterior descending artery dancing out across the page like some Japanese fighting dragon with two very noticeable constrictions, thin as horsehair. But to actually feel himself to be the possessor of a diseased heart was almost impossible. His new idea now was that he thought he needed to push himself physically to some brink to find out exactly where the boundary was. He'd followed all the doctor's admonitions about not smoking, avoiding fried foods, stressful situations (that one seemed next to impossible since the very knowledge of his new condition seemed to turn every situation into a possible threat). He religiously downed his daily dose of five colorful pills: anticoagulant pills, cholesterol reduction pills, ramipril, Zetia, a specially coated 325-milligram. aspirin and now, here he was intentionally going out of his way to exercise and raise his heart rate like some aerobic moron-the kind of dutiful citizen he used to hold in highest contempt. He could hardly believe his about-face. What a man would do when he had a gun to his head. How he could suddenly forsake his most sacred obsessions, abandoning entire aspects of character he had taken to be immutable. He had been a solid, deep-inhaling smoker since he was twelve, pilfering Chesterfield butts from his old man's ashtray. That pitted musky teakwood memento hand-carved in the Philippines in the figure of a native man squatting in his loincloth gently embracing a chicken in a wicker basket. It had been part of his father's booty brought back from World War II in a green army duffel and shuffled from house to house during his peripatetic childhood. The black bowl of the thing always overflowing with half-smoked delicious butts he'd carefully straighten and preserve in a Yuban coffee can buried out behind the tangerine tree. At night, from the blue foothills, he would draw deep gusts of smoke, squatting in the same posture as the little native man; staring deep into the broad valley, eyes tracing the snaking car lights along US 66. He became dizzy with nicotine and imagination. By the age of sixteen he was totally addicted and indoctrinated into the strong belief that manhood and smoking were synonymous. There was nothing he did without a cigarette clenched between his fingers or his teeth: mowing lawns, working under cars, saddling horses, even necking with girls, the ubiquitous cigarette became a prop of necessity. Now he'd actually managed to cold-turkey for two and a half months. He could still feel his tongue yearning for the bright sting of smoke.

He remembered the collegiate-looking doctor in a red bow tie hovering over him the morning after the stent procedure saying, "You've already gone twenty-four hours without one cigarette. Why don't you just try stopping altogether?" He remembered wondering how many times the doctor had used this exact same ploy on other victims; hitting a man when he's down. He had flopped the hospital sheets back away from his legs and saw the cloudy deep bruises turning a ghastly green on either side of his crotch where they'd inserted the long catheter, probing it up through the artery, searching for the dangerously collapsed areas. He remembered watching the eyes of the surgeon as he worked. The eyes following the path of the catheter on an overhead monitor while the hands manipulated the journey in some strange dance of high technology and raw human coordination. On the morning after, there wasn't much pain at all. Just a deep vague ache like what happens when you get hit with a hardball in the soft inner part of the bicep. An extremely black nurse came in with his street clothes draped over her left shoulder. She laid them out on a metal chair and told him he could get dressed now, they were releasing him. He remembered this woman from the day before with another nurse who could have been her twin. They kept firing questions at him in a singsong way as they prepared him for the procedure in a small curtained anteroom: "Where's your home, honey? Where's your family? What kind of work do you do?" None of these questions made any sense to him in the face of his current health predicament so he said nothing and meekly smiled at them as though he'd temporarily lost his mind. He took out his Wisconsin driver's license and told them they could take down all the information off that. That was the best he could do at the moment. He hadn't brought anything with him. This whole heart business had caught him completely off-guard. He'd just climbed into his white Suburban and driven straight from downtown San Francisco, across the Oakland Bay Bridge right directly to the clinic, halfway praying he wouldn't have a heart attack in the middle of traffic. He thought that might be a terrible way to die. Reminded him of that old Beatles song where someone from the House of Lords dies at a traffic light. All kinds of random dumb things were going through his head and he panicked at the idea that his mind was not going to come to the aid of his body; that these two aspects of himself were, in fact, completely divorced. One of the extremely black nurses cast him a wry grin and said, "Don't worry, darlin', we'll be your family if you haven't got one." He felt strangely reassured by this. After he'd stripped down and managed to drape the open-backed blue hospital smock around himself and push his cold feet into the ridiculous terry-cloth slippers they'd provided, the nurses ushered him out through the curtains to a chrome gurney. He remembered a certain sense of humiliation climbing up on the thing with his bare ass sticking out and then lying down on his back seeing his white chicken legs ending in the silly slippers. Now a set of male nurses took over, outfitted in green pajamas, white shower caps, sheer latex gloves, and plastic baggies encasing their feet. They had the physiques of men in their mid-to late thirties who avidly work out with weights as though terrified of suddenly losing their youth. It bothered him slightly that such personal concerns outside their medical profession could distract them from the business at hand; that they might easily mess up a minor detail in the procedure that would prove fatal or worse-make a cabbage out of him, on life support. He tried to tell himself calmly that none of this mattered; he was in the hands of fate. His mind wouldn't listen.

They wheeled him into the operating room and parked him under a bank of intense halogen lights. One of them depressed a brake and tested the gurney to see if it might somehow run off on its own but it held firm. Large monitor screens loomed down at angles from the ceiling. One of the green male nurses explained in a very flat even voice that he was going to attach a sterile bag around the penis and testicles in case there might be some involuntary urination during the process, in which case he should feel free to cut loose. He remembered nodding to the nurse as though giving permission and then felt his sexual parts being collected as someone might gather up plums at the grocery store and stuff them into a bag for weighing. He wondered how many times in a week this nurse might repeat this process and then he wondered again about the body-building. The idea that he might piss himself in front of total strangers bothered him more than the possibility that something could go terribly wrong in the catheter's sojourn into the long and winding cardiovascular system. A chunk of plaque might easily chip off and rush directly to the heart or the artery might entirely reject the implanted stent and the whole game would be over, just like that. The whole game.

"Can't believe that was-how many months ago and here I am now-Snow. Ice. Subzero. Maybe it's not such a great idea to push this thing. You don't really know what you're doing, do you? Sucking in cold air can't be so good for an ailing heart. What if something actually happened-I mean out here in the middle of nowhere? Who's going to find you? First of all you'd probably freeze to death if the heart didn't finish you off right away. It would take days for them to track you down. You never even told anybody you were coming up here. Very smart. There you'd be-stiff as a board, wildlife sniffing all around your corpse. Fox. Badger. Great horned owls landing on your chest in the night, pecking at your eyes. Critters shitting all over your sorry self-what's left of it. Who's going to know? You could lay out here for weeks before they'd track you down." He kept moving; shuffling through the crusted snow like some preprogrammed android. He had no real plan. He wasn't counting his pulse or measuring miles or going about this in any sort of scientific way. He was just crashing ahead through the cedars and pines, hoping he wasn't going in circles like the proverbial lost desert rat. What was he actually trying to prove? he asked himself but no answer came back. Nothing but the pounding blood in his head, the gasping breath. "This was stupid," he began to chant. "This is really dumb." But nothing in him stopped. His legs kept churning; his arms kept swinging. He tried returning to his original idea-that it might just be possible to find the real threshold where the body gave out entirely. But then, how was that supposed to work exactly? Would he be able to sense the very early stages of a full-blown heart attack through some mysterious prescience he couldn't assume he possessed and then draw back and save himself with a raw act of will which he also found deeply absent? In fact, suddenly, nothing in him seemed deliberate. It was as though he had become possessed by a maniac intent on provoking calamity and he was just along for the ride. He charged on, sweat pouring down his ribs and the insides of his thighs. The back of his skull felt like it might blow off. In the distance someone was practicing with a high-powered rifle; the dull thud of the repercussion drilling through his chest, straight to the heart. Now the whole world seemed to be about nothing but the heart. Like when a baby is born into the family all you can see is babies. Or dying-someone dying in the hospital-but that wasn't right. The rifle went off again in a staccato flutter. His heart seemed to match the report, thumping up through the stem of his neck into both temples. The air was so cold the moisture from his eyes froze them shut when he blinked then cracked back open with a sting. He was losing sensation in both thumbs even though he'd pulled Thinsulate gloves on over thinner wool ones then encased both hands in puffy red mittens. The rifle kept on thudding in regular intervals. He wondered who it was who could be so utterly bored that they needed to come out in weather like this and shoot random holes in a pine tree. But then, who could be so out of their minds as to lash snowshoes to their feet and slam through cold woods pretending to be a man on a mission?

A slim plane silently etched its way across the blank sky. He kept marching far below. He thought about the passengers at twenty thousand feet, heading somewhere-somewhere warm and tropical. Mexico, maybe. The thought of Mexico always warmed his heart. There it was again-the heart. Coming up again. How many aspects to it? How could something so animal become fractured into so many parts? Montezuma. Rivers of blood pouring down the halls. Glimmering shrines to the Dreaded Duality. Two monstrous eyes encrusted with precious stones, girdled with serpents and clawed lizards, necklaces of silver hearts and below, dripping in golden chains, the very human hearts freshly torn from the hairless chests of teenage children-ripped out of them with obsidian daggers in the shapes of eagles and dogs. The walls and floors of the oratory were so splashed and encrusted with blood they had turned a deep ebony black, throbbing in the pit of the jungle. He marched on through ice.

Distant Songs of Madmen.

Sometimes, lying propped up against the half-opened window, a great calm would come over him listening to the distant songs of madmen moaning in the streets below. He could never make out the exact words but melody lines would weave together; weave in and out of other sounds like faraway sirens, trains, TVs from other open windows, babbling news. There was some peace in the distance, in the listening, in the longing wails impossible to be answered. Peace of a kind that had no ambition, no plan, no political motive. Peace for its own sake.

these pills

the orange one

blue

yellow

two white ones

in the palm of your hand

lined up across your lifeline

to ward off what

to delay

to prolong

to keep away

what

until one day you just fall down flat

and the family starts calling itself on the phone

the network begins

he's down again and broken

different bones

can't remember shit

wanders off now to different towns

he thinks he had a past in

can't keep him in his room

got a call from Lubbock

Missing Persons

man couldn't pronounce his name said it sounded like