What follows is the back half of the chapter you saw recently. My brain is reassembling itself and words are flowing like water. God bless these ciphers that I can pass the self through and re-encode as novels and stories. The two ideas I have for the title of the novel are The Width of a Human Heart and The Sound of Your Thunders. The latter is from Proverbs while the former is a poetic shorthand I’ve been leaning on in private writing. I have yet to decide what the final title will be. I will ride this wave until the water goes back to the sea. You have to cherish when the words assemble themselves automatically in your head.

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The Epistles of St. Robert (part 2)

His bleary eyes, blood-shot already from the alcohol, made the whole world spray out color like an astigmatic eye focused on distant brake lights. That was fine, he felt; all he needed was the feel of the keys under his fingers and the years of typing would guide them true, or true enough that corrections could come quick. There was just so much to say, to condense, to convey. Why hadn't he visited her? He knew his own pain, had cried about it enough on his own, whether at home or homeless, into his own bitter dirty palms or the soft chest of the Angel and the firm shoulders of his friends. That couldn't have been the only reason. He'd felt pain enough as a child and still ran to her, clung to her legs through elementary school, relied on her to protect him. When he thought of her in the abstract, this thing from his past trapped up in a penitentiary, transformed sometimes in his imagination to a gothic keep or the balustrade of a distant enemy fortress or the solitudinous monastery on a forbidding outcrop of near-Satanic rock, he could ask himself these questions and dwell on the mysteries. But the minute she became flesh to him, the mother he knew, a woman named Susan that had birthed him and raised him and fought with his father and loved him too and saw to a house that would not crumble so long as she stood firm and fell to pieces so fast after she was gone, his heart would stop. It felt like grabbing an electric fence; his whole body would flinch and hold fast, tense and immobile, like a predator was passing and a single breath could leave the fatal telltale sign that would lead to his throat being clawed out in a heavy-pawed slash. When he typed, it was much the same. Writing to the abstract mother was easy. It was a sequence of formal greetings and the niceties of polite small talk, the commiserations of one human to another without the concomitant emotional presence that might complicate things. Writing to the mother of his flesh and blood was an impossibility. How do you summarize so much confusion and pain, meld it with the agonizing joy, the way his heart had been bursting apart from art and death, from drugs and desire, from the breaking waves of his complicating art, from the debt and small bills, from the Georgia heat and the visions of water when they would cut everything loose and drive to the ocean just to stare out at the distant yawning horizon and imagine islands no one had ever seen and would never see again that they could go to and be free? He wasn't tasked with writing a letter. He was tasked with writing the last decade or so of his life and why he hadn't said anything for so long. How could he? He couldn't.

Robbie brushed at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, knocked loose something that was fucking with his vision, saw the clock in the corner of the desk and the computer on the other side of the room. He checked the time and date. It was two days previous. He right-clicked, updated the clock, set it to eastern standard time, reset it, but it still said the same. He'd gained two days. His dad had talked about this before, telling stories Robbie had dismissed as the drink-addled ramblings of a sick man. His father would tell him about the throes of his addiction, when the booze cut him so bad he seemed to get time all mixed up, recalled memories that hadn't happened yet, memories that weren't quite delusions because he would run into them later, when they were finally happening in real time. So much of his father's life, he had been told, had been lived in that recursive double-time, like carrying the loose sheaf of pages transcribing a life and dropping them only to shuffle them together and keep walking. There were recursive loops, patterns of days that seemed to scatter between each other and bounce off of each other like a billiard against the rail. It felt like it had to be some fucked up error, some stray neuron stroked by the alcohol, some intensification of deja vu his father was too stupid to realize. Robbie had read in one of Devon's old psych books from that abandoned run at college that they now thought deja vu might be caused by delayed firing in the eyes, the same event hitting the brain twice in quick succession creating the distinct feeling that you'd been here before. But he refreshed the clock again and the computer still screamed at him that the former-four days till the Angel's return had reverted back to six, to the day after his leaving. The money in his pocket was no thicker, though, and the papers of failed drafts in the corner no less dense. He would have stopped the drinking but he loathed the idea of being sober without the Angel more than he loathed this confusion of time fucking with his sense of stability while drunk. He opened the window, smoked a few more cigarettes, and went back to work.

Maybe if he just started from the beginning. He'd stopped visiting, yeah, but he could tell her why. Hey Mom, I'm sorry I stopped going to see you. I was just so angry, so hurt. You were my rock, my sense of safety, the wall that kept my father's rage away. Seeing you beat that woman senseless, watching her body fall limp like that and thinking like everyone else gathered around that she was surely dead, it broke something in me and I haven't felt safe since. I went to school and I was the faggot again, without the walls that kept me safe, and I had to keep my head down to keep people from finding out, letting slip the truth and meeting me on the walk home to beat me bloody. I tried to sell some porn as a peace offering and got outted for my trouble. Dad couldn't love a gay son and I couldn't stay in that house anymore. And I was just so angry and so let down and so scared that I didn't want to see either of you again, not with my eyes and not with my heart, and I didn't realize how much that was poisoning me until my friends started to die, Mom. I went away to a college town, followed the liner notes of my favorite records to a place in Georgia I could be among my own, and I fell in love and made gay friends and didn't have to hide and we made art and made love and expanded our minds and then they started to die, Mom, they just started to die. It wasn't AIDS anymore but the drugs. The breaking out the window of life was casting us thirty floors down to the concrete below and, beneath, the grave. I was hurtling toward that same window, Mom, still am, and I'm so scared I can't stop it in time and I'm so scared I won't be able to save my angel and I'll be alone again and I just won't know what to do. I don't know at all.

That couldn't be the letter. He couldn't burst back into her life after so long and lay an atom bomb on his mother's heart. He was still so furious with her, sure, but Robbie knew he just... he just couldn't.

The calender was five days ahead now. Another writing session and it was on day three, then day four, and he felt time was okay again until he heard the door slam the way it always did when the Angel refused to let it swing gently in his haste and he knew he was on day one again, then day three again, then day two, in mad spirals. The booze and cigarettes compounded in heaps and from the corner of Robbie's eye he saw a queer figure, a blackened shade with long hair and a slender face and a look of tenderness in the eye but then it was gone and the calendar said he had only a little more than a day left and so he sat and he wrote. But this time it wasn't a letter. He had an idea. If he couldn't write to her with his heart, he could write through the forced rictus of laughter. She could read the outlines of his years of confusion through the latticed pattern of jokes, acerbic and manic. If he couldn't be himself, he could be someone else, and that person could send her a dispatch from the homosexual frontier of his tender adult life. Greetings from Sodom! It's hotter than hell and there's no shortage of salt in the sea. Stay a while in the bed we tucked in the spare lot and have a chat with the Angel and me.