Close to the Knives. David Wojnarowicz

rising through my solar plexus beneath my t-shirt and the sensation grows upward, spreading like some strange fever in my chest, catching only at the throat where small pockets of sound are contained. In a moment the vehicle I’m steering passes by the scene and I’m left populating the dry plains, the buttes and the cloudless sky with the touch and taste of flesh. I fill the gullies with small but heated fictions.

      There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought. So when I see the workers taking a rest break between the hot metal frames of the vehicles, it doesn’t matter that they are all actually receding miles behind me on the side of the road. I’m already hooked into the play between vision and memory and recoding the filmic exchange between the two so that I’m without a vehicle and I have my hand flung out in a hitchhiking motion and one of the men has stopped his pickup along the stretch of barren road. Now I am seated next to his body in the front seat. We are traveling and speaking soundlessly and he eventually turns off the highway onto a series of dirt roads that end among the psychedelic patterns of the tree-filled hillsides and there are my hands before me and there is the almost inaudible click of his zipper riding down between the fingers in slow motion. There is the taste of sperm at the edge of a lake cast into shadows by the surrounding mountainsides. There is the hungry unreeling of all this in the unraveling landscape of dry scrub plains through the front windshield and the rearview mirror. And here is the solitary form of my body leaning back in the sunburned interior of my car, foot pressing on the gas pedal sending me forward toward the gray veils of rain drifting across the white a hundred miles away.

      Like the ocean’s movement where every seventh wave is higher and more furious than the others, small pieces of last night’s sleep return in the eddy and flow of the day’s turning. The guy in the prison recalls something of his history: he once worked in a canning plant on the edge of the coastal town, in the warehouses that were large darkened metal buildings swept with the cool chill of massive refrigerating units. Under dim ceiling bulbs he spent days and months packing cartons with unlabeled tin cans, each can containing some kind of liquid, forty-eight cans to a carton, thirty-six cartons to a wood palette and then metal strapping bands tightened around each block layer to keep them from tumbling. Each minute of the day was spent making the same gestures of the arms: lift, swing, deposit, lift swing deposit, tape lift drop and push. He gets lost in himself the same way I do at some point I forget I’m in a vehicle, much less driving. After years of this work he begins to dream of the cans sitting packed away in the vast recesses of the warehouse waiting. He slowly developed the sense that each can contained a life, each breathing in forty-eight rhythms to a carton thirty-six cartons to a palette, thousands and thousands of palettes. And the combined sounds of all that consciousness waiting and waiting in the stillness of those dim buildings woke him up some nights tangled among the bedsheets laden with sweat.

      I feel that I’m caught in the invisible arms of government in a country slowly dying beyond our grasp. There is something singing of this, something in the currents of wind and breeze floating along the black electric cables lining the roads, something I can’t see or touch but moves in the shape of vowels and uttered sounds like the spinning soft bodies of birds playing with the sky. I play games with the road to shake myself up, at times squeezing my eyelids closed so that I drive quarter-mile stretches without sight and it becomes a fight to open my eyes before the side of the road overtakes me. It’s as if a second person is sitting within my body at the wheel. The body that holds the wheel understands the danger that mounts by the moment and the second body smiles in the dark interior of the first. When the eyes finally open, they reveal nothing new about the world except a slight shift in landscape proving that increased mortality teaches me nothing. There’s no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence. No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

      Late at night when most of the traffic on the highways had exited for motel sleep, I turned off the road and drove up a dirt hill toward a truck stop hidden for a moment in the folds of the landscape. In a series of wheel motions, a neon-outlined teepee slid into view out of the darkness. I needed some coffee because the road started becoming confused with the sky. Small rocks turned up by the wheels pinged under the car’s belly. Down along the service road the prehistoric silhouettes of sixteen-wheel rigs ground their gears in the blackness to shift back out to the main road. As each cab swung by me there was a video blaze of tiny green and red ornamental cab lights framing the darkened windows containing a momentary fractured bare arm or dim face filled with the stony gaze of road life. In these moments my face travels an elongated neck out my side window and floats up into the shadows of their open windows to place its tongue in between the parted lips of each driver. I could feel their arms reaching through the breeze of our moving vehicles to embrace me from behind.

      Pulling through the darkness and the swirling dust I parked in front of the building. After stepping from my car and moving across the nightsoil toward the plate-glass doors, I noticed a green beat-up chevy parked under the fluorescent drift of building lights, and behind the shadows of the driver’s window, as if swimming in the depths of lantern seas, was the amazing and beautiful face of a navajo man in his early fifties. He sat hunched in the driver’s seat unmoving, his face tilted as if in wait for someone familiar to exit the silent doors of the building. I stopped for an extended moment lost in his distances. He was trapped within the glassed-in diorama of his metallic-and-chrome vehicle, within the museum of his own natural history as viewed through a white boy’s eyes.

      It was a tabloid moment in time. Issuing between the static waves on the car radio as I entered a small city in the west was a news story reporting that a teenage Native American boy in a small but resilient automobile had made a wrong-way turn against the rush of oncoming traffic in order to mount a curb and run over a college student waiting for a bus. The boy’s car then turned back onto the road and disappeared in the morning rush-hour confusion.

      Driving around the city, it didn’t take long to realize that if you didn’t have a vehicle, a machine of speed, you owned poverty. It was yet another city dying of a disease whose anatomy was just beyond the inhabitants’ grasp. Its origins may have been as a trading post in another time but now it had become a government war town filled with a half million workers employed in the various research centers attempting to perfect a president’s dream of laser warfare from the floating veil of outerspace. Local papers were filled with patriotic hard-ons in the face of recent successes in the nearby desert where researchers were able to knock a dummy missile out of the clear blue sky with a laser discharged from a device the size of a refrigerator. Other than the clouds in the sky, an occasional bird or dog and the anonymous nomadic poor, all movement in the city was confined to the automobile. Those who owned cars, when witnessed close up in the tiled halls of shopping centers, had a vague transparency and thickness to their skin. The city during the day was bathed in a hot white sunlight; a steel-pounding heat coursed off the walls of miragelike architecture in the waves of desert wind. There was a distant energy surrounding everything like fear because there was nothing about the architecture that the eye could settle on; the eye was constantly adrift almost as if it were experiencing a small panic. It was an architecture of a population anticipating impermanence or death. It was a vacuum turned inside out, prefab materials of housing resembling the dry husks of insects halfway through their molt. All along the sidewalks were the people reduced to walking; the desperation of whole families sitting in lethargy on the curbsides lost to the sounds of automobiles; the swollen slit-eyed heads of drunks bobbing in the blue air as they staggered along the sidewalks. Owning a vehicle, you could drive by and with the pressure of your foot on the accelerator and with your eyes on the road you could pass it quickly – maybe not fast enough to overlook it completely, but fast enough so that the speed of the auto and the fear centers of the brain created a fractured marriage of light and sound. The images of poverty would lift and float and recede quickly like the gray shades of memory so that these images were in the past before you came upon them. It was the physical equivalent of the evening news.

      The motor replaces the horse; the speed and the intent of the vehicle replaces the