POMPEIAN GRAFFITI, REVISITED

Time is a fallacy and the arguments that prove this are no less fallacious

—Jorge Luis Borges

You’re mapping the sidewalk of a city you are not accustomed to, because you missed the last train out, for a tenderness you couldn’t slip out of—wouldn’t slip out of, you wanted to negotiate with the world for more of it. You thought if you hit the right curb at the right time, and if the traffic were clear, the avenues clean and blameless, and if things fell into place, you’d make it, but it’s difficult to accommodate all this when you’re running on three hours of sleep—cortisol, you can feel it accumulate—the edges of your eyes itching with light, you conjure voices in the air and start arguing with them in your head, to stay alert, on the edge—from the bridge a man hunches over the railway track and sighs into the emptiness, under the bridge a silhouette tilted against the wall—men on the horizon hopping over tracks in incomplete gestures. The light between them trembles like a lake in the breeze. Limbs of emptiness punctuating the daylight, trading places, changing textures—you want them to speak to you, to keep you awake, you want to live a life besides this one, in a world beyond this one, under a weight besides this one. You want to account for everything everywhere all at once except for yourself—how the pillar of the bridge sleeps in the moist earth, and the gaze of the man in the watchtower scans wave after wave of time vibrating in the twilight. To him you are a clot of time drifting from nowhere to nowhere and there are folds of crimson in the sky, wrinkles of blank among the tree leaves and the fences—silences between horns, and gestures of hands raised into the light—cuss words etched into the walls beside the spit of a man beside a name crossed over a name—each an eternity crouched together like the off hour men playing a game of cards by the gutter,

—and suppose a shadow interrupts the routine of everything, cuts through the fences—enters the yard, skips and swivels, hops and ducks—crushing the grass and startling the squirrel beneath the tree, it crawls sideways to its destiny, to make a point, to hurl a gesture, to make meanings shift and render everything volatile again. Suppose the brain of the world is yanked wide awake and the awareness of it all starts moving on its haunches. The vehicles halt and the men come marching in, and the sirens howl offkey back and forth across the horizon. Suppose there is a certain vengeance in the air as the volumes of televisions go blaring up along with the share prices of guns and bombs and drones and mortars. Suppose you have to pick a side even though all sides are drowning, and the world is on the brink of something, and you don’t have time for all this because you are running on three hours of sleep in a city you don’t know the ins and outs of, and things aren’t yet what you want them to be. Suppose you had something really clever to say but it’s too late now, and the world like a whimper comes whistling down upon itself, despite the share prices of guns and bombs and drones and mortars. And the montage of your life runs through your brain like a river—your mother, her mother, your friends your lovers, the tenderness of the water that almost claimed you until your father interrupted the dream, the sliver of light under the windowframe and the bone protruding out of your knee—memory colliding with memory as the cosmic all of everything crunches into the clot that it came from—into an atom of God, then nothingness, on the other side of which is a labyrinth of light, illuminating a life besides this one, in a world beyond this one, under a weight besides this one, and you’re a clot of time drifting from nowhere to nowhere, with an unnamed thirst in your throat, for the here, and the now.