The Purveyor
by paulus kapteyn
M is going back to Kentucky. He likes the midwest. I can feel his interest wane. I think I saw pity in his eye. He likes the old buildings in Louisville. He says the cortisol wakes him up at 3 in the morning. I have to return his record.
The student reads his book and takes notes in a notebook. He can’t be older than nineteen. His legs are spread wide. He holds his book up to his face. It is wide open. His forehead is vast and flat like a prairie. He was here yesterday in the early morning. Maybe he’ll be here tomorrow if I wake up early. I remember what I was like at his age. The feelings I had then are gone. I wasn’t as self possessed as him. It seems like he is fleeing from something or someone. He left without me seeing him go.
I can’t use my phone here. It’s a haven from technology.
I laugh at death when I talk to M. I don’t want him to go to Kentucky. I’ll miss his delayed synapse and his record collection.
M and I drive to the gorge. We emerge from the two rivers that meet as one. He has a nose bleed. I pray for his deliverance. He squeezes my neck.
I feel sadness. I drive down the boulevard to the ocean.
I feel empty. I drive down the boulevard to the desert.
I feel sadness. I drive down the boulevard to the desert.
I feel empty. I drive down the boulevard to the ocean.
I saw the white mountain at the Cameo motel, where you can get a hotel room for 77 dollars a night, having driven by it many times, that was not behind the cloud bank.
M goes to the record dealer on Belmont to buy a record. M thinks highly of him. Seldom does he buy a record after having looked at them for hours, removing them from their sleeves. I bought a few records from him last year. He has an intelligence that puts him at a remove. It feels like he knows me from another life. I have resisted his whiles not wanting to give in to his need to sell. He has AA meetings at his store every Sunday. He is wise about addiction disease and ghosts. He like M looks through you at something else he saw long ago and can’t forget. He thinks I think his AA meetings are a cult. I know they are methodical and necessary.
M lives in a small room apposite smaller rooms with men in recovery. Everyone in this murky town is an alcoholic or in recovery. M lapses into silence and memory. He has a sentence at the ready, the same one he has been using the past day about his insomnia.
There is a record M leant me I want. It is of Coltrane’s wife playing a harp. It takes me to another realm. I saw the video that was on cable in the 1990’s of her acolytes on Criterion singing in white garb. I was stuck by her vacancy and devotion.
I post. I agonize about likes. I doubt. I think I will find the answer in the desert. I look for it in the ocean. The mountains are behind a cloud bank.
The purveyor comes looking for me. He can’t find me. I have done the work. I’m solvent. I’m symptom free. I’m not in debt. He contacts me. I lapse. I feel nothing. I get on the screen. The purveyor on the screen is like every man you see and forget. There is nothing off bout him. He intimates a queasy fuzziness. I feel like I didn’t take the pill to feel complete. I have arrhythmia. The synapses misfire. The purveyor on the screen talks over and at me. We laugh to acknowledge death.
I have had work published in Magazine1