The Shimmery Lights In The Valley Below
Paulus Kapteyn
I talk to the bank associate. She sends me a tax form by UPS.
I take 20 mg of potassium. It helps. I’m doing more exercise.
I’m worried the lawyer will set me up to lose money.
They take my low potassium serious because I have low blood pressure.
I’m distracted. The rain is slow.
I haven’t heard from the manager. I think he is using the prospective tenant to get money out of me. First you fix the basement and then the tenant moves in he said. I was too lazy to resist him. I had done the month before. At least the house is fixed up and will sell on the market. I half a blood pressure pill and I don’t feel dizzy.
The muscles tighten and release.
I see the tree or is it a hand? There are feelings that can’t be named. It is happening to me.
They don’t understand his nature. They hear a sound in the brush they can’t locate.
Her helpless eyes when she was in her early twenties were like her mother’s eyes when she was gravely ill. She gets away with whatever she wants she said about her mother. She stabbed the air with her hairbrush in anger. Her face was flushed. Her mother said the same about her. She gets away with murder.
Bobby gets up at 3. She has insomnia. She thinks it’s what happens in middle age even though she had many sleepless nights in her twenties and went to a sleep clinic to do a study. They woke her up late at night and let her out a side door into the late NYC city night. Now she uses a mouthpiece for sleep apnea so that she doesn’t wake up in a panic from not being able to breath.
The numbers are slightly off. I take a potassium pill. It is oblong big and white. It is easier to swallow than the pill I break in half not knowing where it is in my mouth.
The lawyer is slow and deliberate. He writes a memo. It is informative and clear. His memory is vast. He has been doing what he does for so long that the same things are happen over and over. He records the hours he works on each phase of the case. He doesn’t move to the next step until the bill has been paid.
I drive on the four lane highway in L.A. chasing phantoms.
The shimmery lights below in the valley.
Underneath the mountain sealed containers of radioactive material. Amongst the rocks and the brush the cult members chant and worship.
I don’t hear from the lawyer. Maybe he heard from the opposing lawyer.
The serpent gives the archangel Gabriel a fat white worm. It distorts his reason.
Let them kill each other, he said indifferently.
The garden has a lien. She lures the pervert to the gazebo and stabs him.
The asymmetrical features are held up by resignation and the contract.
I sense her eyes on the leaf. She turns the page of a 16 century text on the source of the universe and the laws of nature.
Bobby wants to tighten her skin. The procedure costs 17 thousand dollars. She has done the research on line. She will look fifteen years younger. She showed me before and after photos of the patients on line. She was a mess when she had her skin burned by a laser last year. They gave her an opiate pain killer. She sounded like a ghost trapped in a house.
She covers her neck and hands.
The hyper critical thoughts I have about the boy are the thoughts my father had about me.
I turn off at the exit. I make a U turn to get on the highway. I go south for a mile. I get on the loop to the highway going north. Bobby uses her arm as a signal. When it crosses the dashboard there is no mistaking it.
I received the certificate of redemption from the Jersey City tax collector. The lien is paid off.
Are you deranged I said. Bobby once again lifted what I said and placed it in her thought process. I said it twice, are you deranged. She vomited twice. Once before we got to the library and the second time at the library. A latino woman asked us to leave the library.
It’s five she said. The library closes at five. She wasn’t the librarian. A man came to return a book. A man and two women left with their child. There was a poster of a Latino activist with her arm raised into a fist. I didn’t know her. She was good at organizing and putting herself and others to use. Liebniz the philosopher believed like the activist in doing the best you can because god does everything with perfection. I’ve had mentors who said the same. Did they get the idea from the sixteenth century? The waves crash into the rocks and the cliffside. The wind is violent. It could blow a man out to sea.
It’s the beginning of April. It’s a cool sunny 60 degrees out.
He got his teeth fixed, he said. He hated pretty boys. Above all he hated weakness.
He didn’t care for the young man’s parents. He thought they were parasites living off of his largesse. The father repaired furniture. It’s amazing how two ugly parents can make a good-looking child he said. He marveled at his wife’s good looks. He thought her siblings looked like they were deformed. He had a few playgirl magazines in his seventies playboy collection.
He thought of himself as a rational man of distinction. He used the simplest mean to get something done.
He behaved like he had the fundamental rules to the universe like an ancient philosopher that practiced geometry. He didn’t care for anything that was gratuitous or sentimental. He lived in the present. On a rare occasion he sang an ancient song from the homeland when he had been drinking. He didn’t care for hair. He had none and he saw no use for it.
A transient comes out of the library bathroom and another went in. Lusty cagey women in their late sixties and seventies beautify the town. A documentary was made about a serial rapist that had been a teacher at the high school. There’s a dark undercurrent in the small American town.
Sorrow, regret and the smell of Eucalyptus trees follow me down the coast.
A billboard sign in Spanish with a number for work.
Where do the manual workers stay in north California? In Portland they stayed at single room buildings. That is long gone. Now there are empty condos.
The inviolate widow of dark interiors and murmurs
Corrugated farm land and the sea mirrored in pale eyes
Where are you she said. I can’t reach you.
She has a stare. He has seen the stare with the women who stayed with him when they should have left because he had been too scared to leave them. She will get back on track when she is with her child, he thought.
When was the last time we had sex, she said. I need intimacy. I need to have sex at least once a week if not twice a week. You’re not here. Where are you? You’re staring into space.
The inviolate widow of dark interiors and murmurs
Corrugated farm land and the sea mirrored in pale eyes
If you’re not thinking about it it doesn’t exist. I’m not thinking about the pain. It doesn’t exist. I have blocked it out. I can block out the pain but then it comes back ten fold.
I didn’t seen the rock face when I was here last year. Now I see it.
He smells the river. It smells like rain. The shade is like the interior of a city. I haven’t heard from the lawyer or the manager. I have to sign the lease in Docusign. I think I know how to use it. I can use Escape if I want to get out of the window. I have screen trance and anxiety breath. I wash my face and hands. I don’t use soap.
The student liked to be seen talking to the young pretty girl. He didn’t like her. He held her down and made her feel helpless. He smiled omnisciently. She had blood in her mouth. He didn’t feel anything. She told her parents. They pressed charges. He passed the exams. His father was proud. He gave his mother an I told you so grin.
He escorts a woman with a short neck and a billowy purple dress. In romance she doesn’t care about age or gender.
The thinker advances on a system. The dreamer undresses in his garden.
The Arab teaches Greek philosophy. The European eyes his scabbard.
I believe in the March weather and the small yards in the county
fleet at Helen’s hem
centuries of lava and the floods
a foot deep massive river
O small communities of the American city
He used to be a vice principal now he is a social worker
He used to drive an ambulance now he skis
He collects records and serves coffee
She is studying to become a psychiatric nurse to help the addict and the mentally ill
She married her woman lover from Greece and plays with her granddaughter in the yard
The young man in shorts, the evening March sun under his arm like a basketball, takes a photo with his phone of an old Mustang car parked in a driveway of a neglected house.
Paulus has had work in Lungfull.