from Visions Of A Mexican Wrestler

There are no options but sleep and dawn anyway, so you wait, and inside time’s procrastination the time you once were will surrender to a defogging. Though the physics you peripatetically study hardly respects a one-way integrity in big-T Time, your dyslexic ignorance that was never detonated with Francisco’s White Rock burp-bomb (no timer unless you count that wick-like fuse), nor tacked shut into a brown and sweet-smelling MURIEL AIR FILTERS cigar box along with the plaited clutter of phonetic and color-coded flash cards and “word dominoes” (a tree trunk forces its roots through the top half of one domino, the woody tendrils disappear into a heavily-inked line that is the boundary of the bottom half where the short “A” vowel sound stares from its cyclops eye out at you; it took you embarrassing time to know that the individual halves of the dominoes were not meant to be matched, the object pictured above named with the sound upended by its own imperatives below, but rather to be put in a chain with all the other game-pieces) you spent many slow afternoons with as you gagged your reading into finer and finer samples of sound, what read to be seen as the roll or cleave of your own growing 8 year-old tongue, its grey-streaked pinkness and bumps, in a small hand-mirror, the humping muscle in magnification as leviathan and listless as a whale, and the nearly concave image is jostled through a series of uninspiring blindings by the throbs of your pulse keeping the aqua edge of the shining from slicing your fingertip grip with the fat blade of numbness, such subtle confoundings in the physical differentiation between “sh” and “ch” then taken out of abstruseness not by this imperfect steadiness of your mouth and your hand, connected by the fact that one is impersonating the other, masking itself with the other one’s being forced out of its plainly viewed hiding-place, but being integrated by a reiterated cooperation between your ears, your eyes and your atrocious pronunciation—this ignorance nicknamed “dyslexia” that, even now that it is self-evident and self-informed is and will always be your rhythm, veers hard from the symmetry physics attracts. Left and right, east and west, swimming, walking and crawling. You may never be issued a driver’s license, you may spend the rest of your days sweating your imprint into the vinyl of a bus seat. But the time will chase itself down and arrive because it is driven by a will all its own, because it cannot remain content as it was and must astonishingly be again. All over again. It is that kind of time (you know and knew), untrainable, that for all your years of this loveless span is anticipation. Five years ago you wait outside the corrugated steel walls, waist-high in muddy water sprinkled with the dry yellow of grass clippings, in the mild planetarium G-forces warping toward hypertrophy under the influence of cascading glutamate, you wait becalmed and anew. Though you have never spied her eating other than that eerie night, your certainty is that Drew’s mom is a tough vegetarian, so you fall asleep that night in 1975 with your compulsive twirling of your hair transformed into a scratching of your head. She asks for a Jumbo Jack, Drew’s mother asks “May I?” But when the time does cross the dim threshold and walk up behind you to place a beckoning hand on your shoulder, you will not be taken, or jarred, or awed, or quaking. When this departed night yet to come comes up on a late overcast Northeast Dallas March 1975 night of dimly rinsing street lamps at your corner intersection it is certain that the polarized radiations of security from these lamps, yellow globes on Ionic and civic-green vertebrae grenading into cicada friction and broken arrowheads of sodium aiming scorching colors after dishonest boys, are in another change of the seasons wholly out of phase the late overcast Northeast Dallas March 1975 night of this imminent time due to fog or limestone fossil dust from TxDoT construction projects that have commenced again now that the end of the day has lengthened the frequency with which headlights make instant movies out of the causeways of your city. A starling chatters. And earlier this very overcast Northeast Dallas March 1975 you, chubby and puffy in the face as if you have had an allergic reaction to the deep sleep in which you indulged the night before, stretch out along the old crease your leap-frogging metabolism fueled by dextrose and biotin and as plumped in forearms and thighs has “installed” (you mother likes to say of any sawhorse-bordered road work that inconveniences her, “Oh good; they’ve installed a new hole.”) in the compressions of the old box spring-less mattress that makes your bed in the rear room of the 3 bedroom, 2 bath house your parents settled on many years before they filled their ledger with the figures of a family. Arousal is slow, and think about it or the possibilities it could cram into its dimensions. Because if you were to black out in one of the sleep compartments of Skylab, a small fan such as cools the switching (as opposed to static) power-supply of Drew’s Altair 8800, assembled from parts in glassine packets, would have to whir and blow away the CO² which builds up from your REM respiration and unchecked in its build-up might suffocate you as there is no gravity that will disperse the gas into a further orbit there inside the bud (the solar panels are the cluster’s rudimentary petals) of the NASA craft that never, contrary to your mother’s analogy with the newspaper’s wire photo held flat under her honey-spotted saucer one summer morning, does actually look to you like an Olmec-sized bust of Ozymandius; and your father bites through his multivitamin pill, not quite Geritol but generic cousin to it, at this comment, staining his front teeth with the bisection of niacin and riboflavin and candied minerals. And isn’t it Drew’s proposal in 1972, the year of the nation-wide high school contest to pool ideas for Skylab experiments, to study on-board this “classroom in space” the effects of weightlessness, such as the absence of convection currents in such an environment, upon typical rates of wear in micro-circuitry; that is, these components’ and peripherals’ zero-g deterioration measured against other mechanical “burn-out”, such as the gears in the pedometer linked to the bicycle ergometer ridden upon by Astronauts Bean, Garriot, and Lousma in joggings which, though stationary, cumulatively alter the spacecraft’s overall wheeling dynamics? Wobble. Untrue. Self-contained cultures of incubating planned obsolescence are to be plotted against one another in Drew’s hypothetical hypothesis. And it is no secret, or there is no real use in asking of Francisco’s Fat Andy with strenuous hectoring, “Well, what do you know?” your dyslexic emphasis running backwards towards the “what” and not ambushing the “you”, that Skylab’s great conical hull is NASA surplus, the corporeal consequences of budgetary hypermetropia. By 1972, more money is being allocated to the Red River Ordnance Depot in your state’s Bowie County than to Cape Kennedy’s colossal Vehicle Assembly Building where the Saturn V’s stage tanks are judged by headset-minded mission control to be too massive to loll free of any purpose or of any public relations (your father’s often sarcastically drawled “p.r.”) boostings. And you recall, but without the aid of newspapers or TV anchormen or Government Printing Office pamphlets, Drew’s oblique bluffing that he is not crushed in losing—rather in not winning—that national competition. His project is deemed not feasible given Skylab’s already abbreviated life-span. No meaningful results possible given the time left for rapid decay commencing. Should you count up or count down to this time? Besides, the mission’s third crew are soon to grow patchy beards and practice effortless Vitruvian somersaults drifting from water tanks to storage lockers in the workshop’s Upper Deck in a sort of indolent rebellion your father casually seeing the film on 10 o’clock action news while brushing his teeth says would be best appreciated by enlisted men and utility infielders not yet cut from the Cincinnati Reds spring training roster. You yourself did see the letter Drew received from the LBJ Space Center on NASA letterhead, you hold it up to the slant of 3rd period Study Hall light because the watermark might be normal. “But what they don’t get is that, if the computer goes, so does everything else—navigation, life support, all the observatory equipment. They’ve manufactured themselves a central nervous system, but they don’t want to understand how reliant they are—fuck, I mean, let them crash. I’m not one of their 25. So what, so I missed out on a trip to Huntsville, Alabama!” What? You think that NASA does appreciate their own system, but you are not convinced that they do grok the chaotic sympathies of that system’s constituent iotas, not even if they become overworked. Do decimal points float differently off the Earth? But you choose not to correct Drew on his definition of what cooperation at this level of complexity resembles: not unforeseeable FUBAR. “They chose some chicken farmer and a damn spider to be” Drew never does conclude, and instead of asking yourself why you don’t speak up you think of webs from a spider stoned by no acclimation to preserved houseflies and gravity-less conditions spinning mad webs all through the costly capsule, Skylab haunted now by used-up human resourcefulness. The gold medal, orb-weaving spider’s name was Arabella.