At some point I must concede that I have been eating far too much paste for a man my size. This is why the medicines won’t work...my doctor is furious with me when I tell her. Well, she says, I’m afraid there’s really nothing I can do for you then.

But doc, I say to her, I can’t feel anything...

She looks at me a moment, and sighs, and then scribbles one more prescription, and grateful, I rush to the pharmacy with it. But there’s a problem--it’s the word "collusion." Somehow in the translation of my doctor’s handwriting, a ‘u’ becomes an ‘i,’ and within moments, I am rattling along a railroad track in an empty boxcar, picking up speed at an alarming rate. We move through states, tracing ancient county lines over toxic chemical disposal sites. Around me is the smell of hay, and real disease. My feet are asleep. There is a moon in the corner of the boxcar. There is a rhythm to this movement that I cannot quite grasp without the proper medication. It is all related of course, somehow.

Afterwards, I kneel and cross myself and ask forgiveness. It has been two hundred forty-three years since my last confession. A soothing voice prompts me to continue. Go on, my son. I tell him about the silences. I tell him about the disingenuous affections. I tell him about the pretentiousness. I tell him about the self-serving hypocrisy, and rampant uncontrollable judgment. I tell him about that crystallizing moment in 1997 when I realized I was on an inevitable, irreversible course of total regression and devolution. I tell him about the doubt. I tell him about the overwhelming awareness of things. I tell him about the crippling emotional x-ray vision. I tell him about the stubborn refusal to play along. I tell him about the infinitely looping moments of despair and shame when I have used up the last of my carefully hoarded exclamation points. I tell him about the perversity and indulgence. I tell him about the supremely perfected detachment. I tell him about all the chili cheeseburgers. I tell him about the mismanagement and misdirection of anger. I tell him about the fundamentally flawed worldview.

And once I get rolling, I find I cannot stop. This is always the problem with me. The world is my confessional, and I do not hesitate to lay myself completely bare before it. Raging courage, or insanity? So much I cannot say to your face--if you would ever even show your face. It is complete mirrored silence or this--very little middle ground allowed in a world dangerous as ours. All the good phrases have been bought, all the good sentence structures co-opted--I cannot express myself without hawking some new miracle cure or beauty treatment, or infringing on some corporation’s registered service mark.

When it is over, I am weeping out loud and wiping the snot from my nose with the back of one hand. Father, I say to him, You must understand--we are an army of perpetually hungry narcoleptics creeping silently from behind mirrored wallpaper, crucified on our words, and our sheepish grins. Witnessed only by other night creatures just as silent and alone as we are, this is the disembodied sweat of dreams and empty white canvases propped sullenly on office cubicle walls.

After a few moments of silence, the priest says, I want to tell you a story, my son. In the Saharan marketplace, he says, we meet and haggle over trinkets and punctuation. It is an ostensibly unsanitized charade of carefully placed indignation and coarse language, and gestures, but in the end, we all walk away with the same secret grins and jangling pockets that droop to the desert floor and swish heavily with the gravity of each step. And in the evenings, we will complain to our loved ones about the stubbornness of our fellow merchants, and our loved ones will cluck their teeth and shake their heads in sympathy, but every one of us knows--without the barter, without that collusion of commerce, our days would be empty as the sheltering sky, our tea cups filled with sand, our eyes burned into their sockets. And if one of us were ever to fall ill with disease, the others would hasten to the bedside of the sick with ointments and spices, and herbs from the Far East, all of it given over freely, selflessly, with a love supreme. Without hesitation, we would each take turns keeping close, silent watch, until our comrade finally rose from bed, healthy once again, and cursed our sorry compassion, and ordered us away with fiery words, and teary, grateful eyes.

When he has finished his story, the priest pauses and coughs, and I imagine him taking a sip of water. Now, he says to me suddenly, Ask yourself this, my son: what is it exactly that you are so carefully preserving? The merchants in the desert, the poem in the empty boxcar, the three silent sisters burning in the sun, the cabinet full of antibiotics, the shelf of pickled internal organs, the dust crumble of ancient remains in the face of future archeological unwrap...

Here he trails off, and after a few long moments, it soon becomes clear in this new kind of silence that even he cannot revive hope. I hear him begin to weep. I want to comfort him, but I am afraid the tears are contagious. Carefully, I reach into my pocket, and then before me, I lay a period, a comma, the letter o, an apostrophe, and several exclamation points. These I save for last. Here, I say to him. Maybe these will help.

Above us now, the bells toll the hour, and I take this and his choked silence as my cue to leave. Outside, the day has given way to dusk. I move out into the coming night, invisible after dark. Vacant stare in place, I am the midnight otro ego on the prowl once again. A lifetime spent feigning sleep, and eating electricity.