For Jack

Jack,

The night we got the closest we've ever gotten to having sex, you told me you'd asked a woman in a bar, "What are you, inside?"

It was one of the few ways, you assured me, that I'd ruined you for anyone else.  What fun is a woman if she doesn't really know the answer to that question, after all?  What fun is a woman who doesn't take the time to consider a great many other questions about herself, for that matter?  I think you liked about me that I always took the time to have an answer for you, whether the question was, "Do you ever feel like a ghost?" or "Do you like to feel afraid?"

Of course, the problem with that is I always took the time to have an answer for you, and those were not always answers that you liked.

Do you remember when we took that drive...

You've insisted to me that you're a number of things, inside.  That the chemical makeup of your soul is 5 or 6 different places, depending on your mood, your gender, your like or dislike of me personally.  Sometimes, I can feel you crawling away from me, trying to differentiate yourself from me.  Others, I feel you making yourself an extension of me, accepting that we've always been brothers.

The other day, Rosie broke her Vitus chain.  It was hanging on a Glade plug-in by the bathroom, and she pulled it out to use her curling iron, and things lined up, and the chain popped when it touched the live metal, and melted.  Every time you break a piece of jewelry, I know the superstition that creeps along like a crack in your heart to mean all things are lost and nothing is sacred.  Her face looked the same.  I forget why I wanted to tell you that.

The difference between you and me is that I know we can't choose who we are.  John didn't choose the scars on his face, Brad didn't choose the cruelty in his heart, and I didn't choose to be what I am inside, which is the ruin of Eden.

Last night, I dreamed you were trying to convince me Eden was my name.  I woke up too early, and Brad was fighting the sleeping bag to wrestle it off his chest as he overheated.

We sleep in the low cavern under the stage set for the bumper cars.  There's a hollow place beneath the platform, snaked with cords and punctuated with support beams.  It makes me feel like we're sleeping under the porch of a house he and I never lived in, where he teaches me how to hide from the other boy soldiers and not be afraid of spiders.  Light spills in from the painted garden lattice shielding us from the rest of the park.

We picked Coney Island because it's the inside of Joshua; the chemical composition of his soul.  It's his moods which make it summer or off-season.  His appetite which forces us all to subsist on Paul's Daughter's hot dogs.  Joshua is a carnival inside, but he's all the wiring and hidden compartments and graffiti underneath the veneer of the carnival, too.  He's the Rough Rider roller coaster, sure, but he's also the 6 people it killed.

We came here to write our second book, part of it taking place inside Joshua, here in the dream of Coney Island.  After this, who knows where we'll go?

I liked best when you told me you were an airport inside.  I liked it because it made the most sense, but like usual with you, all things you told me about yourself were done in defense to obstruct the real you.  Every nice and beautiful thing, you turned against me somehow.  No, Jack, it's not really an airport.  It's just a Polaroid of all the things you wish you had, and watched me take from you, right?  The beautiful friendly stewardess in you I once thought was my best friend is really the painted Stepford denial of your humanity.  Her smile is gritted with self-loathing, and loathing of me.

You let Rosie fall in love with pilot after pilot, each one slapping her ass as she exited your cockpit, vowing never to call her again.  Handsome pilots, who know all her favorite songs and use them to seem more compassionate than you ever are in practice.

I've never seen you care.  Not about anything.  Not really.

So it stands to reason you've never been able to find yourself inside.  You'd have to care first, or really want to inhabit yourself.  You'd have to know you were magic, and stop relying on all your lovers to tell you that you are.

-E

P.S. I still haven't forgiven you for last time.