I have been given a reprieve.  It was nothing that I asked for.  A man came to the door, the other day.  Behind him, the banana trees waved at me, trying to upstage him with his serious face and his neatly folded note.  I offered to let him sit on my bed while I read the note.  He refused and stood while I sat on my bed.  There was no other furniture in the room; the note smelled of some sort of aftershave.  Most directors of popular movies look like schooner captains.

When I left the compound, everything that I owned fit into a small green duffel bag.  It was not mine; its previous owner had been put to death two weeks before me, and they burn the dead's belongings at the end of the month.  If it hadn't been for the reprieve, my belongings would have burned with his, and their dust would have comingled in the fire, and in the wind afterwards.  It's as if a marriage has been averted.  Although I expect the air to be less humid, maybe breezier and cooler, than inside the compound, it is not.  It is equally hot whether you are a free man or not; the knowledge of this humbles me.  The banana trees are still waving.

It is a ten minute walk to town.  Absurdly, halfway through, I am tempted to turn back, which disturbs me.  I spend a while staring at lushness burning on the other side of the road, wondering why I would want to turn back, if I have somehow become one of those types who've been inside for so long they can't bear the thought of their freedom.  I decide it is merely that I am afraid to go into town that makes me want to turn back.  If I could just keep walking out here, with the sunlight hitting my shoulders like a horsewhip, and the sweat running down my face, I would be happy.  I would be happy just to keep walking, but arrivals are inevitable.  That's what I learned, having a cemetary next to where I was; even the people not going anywhere eventually arrive there.

The palaces of the dead are filled with their silent courtiers, their invisible mistresses, the handmaidens of decay.  It is a place as filled with intrigue as where we are, where we work.  I am caught between lingering there in their halls, admiring the descent of a burning sun, like a blood orange in the sky, and going back to where the living make their way, with their hustle and their noise and their smell of their sweat, rising off of them like steam.  The happy and mostly unnecessary bustle of the living, designed to remind themselves that indeed they are moving, indeed they are aching, indeed they are living, and they'll happily knock into the street anyone inclined to disagree.  Our mouths, raised in the churches in song, really are doing little more than howling to make sure we are not buried by accident.

Those of us who surrender to sleep easier than others, us brothers of the black lotus, frequently feel closer to the dead than to the living.  We are equally members of the same grave fraternity, sharing as we do the same sidelong view on the world.  If only I could lie somewhere and let my open eyes pool up with rainwater!  Then, maybe, I think I would feel happy.  Even the homeliest of movie actresses radiates a brilliant charisma in person;  the power necessary to force your personality through a camera lens allows them to cut their way through a crowd.  Actors and actresses are like Mayan Gods, cutting through the crowds of people with scythes of radiance.  Beautiful, fiery, empty things.  Gods.

As for me, I'll take the statuary any day--arms eternally open in greeting, eyes cast downwards regardless of weather.  Statues are always at home, always at rest, no matter how concentrated their sculptors make them.  I can see the village now, beyond the thick fronds of the flirtatious palms, set at the base of the mountains.  There is nothing here but here, which means that it is essentially the place that I left, only larger and without a bed for me yet.  The only thng the town offers for me, apart from being a place to arrive at, is a place for me to leave.  But would it be the same wherever I travelled?  Is every place merely a place to arrive or a place to depart or a place to rest.  The living are always displaced, then; this world belongs to the dead and to the statues, who only move when moved, who come and go absolutely no more than someone else deems fit.  The rest of us merely make our way, pushing through crowds, stumbling down paths under the lash of an oppressive sun.

And for those of you who wish to know the nature of my crime, I can tell you only this; I was in a place for so long, I mistook myself for that place.  I was behind a camera so long, I mistook myself for the lens.  I was the frame around the image for such a long time, I mistook myself the film's ending for my ending, and I brought my terrible curtain down upon the cast to the terrible and eternal applause of my silent statuarial audience.

--10:30 p.m.
8/6/00