I REALIZE SOMETHING
(Thivai speaks)

I got up off that concrete, bare-assed, naked, and thought to myself: I've just been pretending I'm a pirate and mean and an Arab terrorist and have no morals. Actually, I ain't none of these. Then, I almost started to cry, which I don't usually do, cause I wasn't anything and cause I was all alone on the concrete and cause my asshole hurt.

Then I stopped thinking 'bout myself cause I was bored and I looked around me. The sun was shining in its full brightness like it had always shone before this and there was nothing around me Nothing except for stone, sun, sky, and water. This was a ruined suburbia. I thought, if there's nothing around me, there's nothing for me to do. But I've got a life on my hands: my life. I could off myself, but I won't because I love my life.

Inside me I saw two hearts pierced and pinned together by an arrow. Half of the arrow was white and half, black. A leafy scroll winding around the pierced hearts was black or white.

Because there's nothing in this world, I can be the King of the Pirates and rape and murder and roll all the gold and IBM stock in this deserted world between crab-infested toes. Mine. I'll also be the ballerina whom my grandmother longed for me to be. Then, I'll wear decollete hand-beaded gowns and journey to parties with thousands of lovers, parties where stars fuck and fuck each other over and become too burned-out to fuck. The male half of me'll rape the female half of me, which, I know, isn't very nice, but what can you do in a society which doesn't recognize human needs! Since there're problems in every society, even a revolutionary Algerian one, it's necessary to fuck. Then, having fucked and been fucked, I'll be at peace. This is what I told my grandmother when she was trying to force me to be a ballerina. But she never listened to anything I ever said.

As soon as I had settled down in my mind and in the broiling sun and had stopped drying, it began to rain. One moment would be dark as if the sky was bruised and the next moment was lightning flashes, thunder booms. Total confusion. Each thunder lasted longer and longer until each thunder was rolling for a long time away to the other side of the world, the side to which all but lightning and darkness had once fled. The once-dead worm-river was growing as if it was in a night- mare. As ifI was in a nightmare. Brown water or wormy-skin was licking my toes. The sky was the pain inside me. I didn't mind where it hit my flesh cause it was never going to go away. There's nothing to do in rain but sleep.

I dreamed of the St Valentine's Day when I had believed that the cunt was dead.

Being a man means living in nothingness.

When I woke up, the sun was awake and full and there was no one around me. Maybe there was no one anywhere. Like no garbage. I had felt lonely, lots of times I remembered, but not in the blaze of that full sun. When the sun's so strong. even concrete turns into sun. My soles were lucky I wasn't wearing concrete shoes.

The sun was the laziest thing in town.

I saw a boat or something lying about thirty-seven yards down the canal. Lying tied to a stick. A dog who's been whipped; stick stuck in the boiling concrete. I unleashed the dog and put myself in its or his or her mouth. The dead don't bite. I slipped out from shore a yard or two, letting the dead wood find its own place. in the water and sun. Driven by the sky, the current carried us dead along the endless concrete. Dream-ridden by sun, all was OK by me.