Tanya and her mother hold each other. The bombing has begun. We sit on concrete pillars outside the Federal building and carve our dissent with invisible daggers into one another's arms.

"My grandparents are Zionists," Tanya says. I write this down in my notebook. I write: G-parents, Zionists, angry w/war protestors.

There is so much I am trying not to feel right now.

At some point along the way, I must have split from the other me. I recognize this now. I see her on the sidewalk with signs and she is the other she, and over there he is the other he, and somewhere the other me continues on somnambulistic, oblivious, happy.

1:1.

"There is so much I cannot afford to feel," he says.

(In the basement of the mosque, I hold myself very still on a folding chair.)

I cannot afford to feel this.

Somewhere is the other me laughing and playing and continuing to fall in love.

Blue pill? Red pill? Too late. Rabbit hole descent. Infinite regression.

"Welcome to the real world."

--doomtekatekdoom--

This is the sound of indirect motion. This is the sound of the soul's (random) crawl.

Tanya and her mother sit at a bus stop and hold each other. This was a day to feed the homeless and hungry; now it is a day to wait for buses that may never come.

Complacency. Complicity. Compliance. Words force their meanings out of me like fever breaking sweat through pores. I am infected with errant phonetic structures and other biological weapons. Spectacle blows through and over me, all white smoke and ash, six billion scraps of paper falling gently to pavement, text blanketing the street. Punctuation snow.

"'How do you engage the complacent? It's not so simple as just initiating drive-by dialogue in the momentary pause of red traffic lights,' he says to me," he says.

This is the world we have made. In my belly are the twisted, gurgling remains of micro waves and cheap fast food and co-opted kindergarten memories.

(In the evening, my sisters and I visit the street of our earliest childhood. It's a park now, no signs of our memories' architecture or geography. We pretend to recognize trees. Planes fly close overhead on a landing path to San Jose International Airport. I wave at them, and imagine how small we look here in all this ridiculous, sculpted space and foliage. The Guadalupe River still runs nearby. I imagine another evening in September, twenty-five years ago, when I might have occupied this same space, in this same kind of light, the moon in this same position above us. The landscape here is exquisite and still; we are alone; that old quiet sound of wind in dry grass; I wish I could scream.)

It's the silence of ashes in the fall.

It's a shelf life of eighteen to twenty-four months.

It's the dead giggling heroically, weeping insouciantly.

I open my mouth and gulp down 2,200 calories of lie. My hollow belly fills; my heart explodes.

In the pores of my skin is the voice of Sam Cooke, etched and lodged there like ancient sound waves in vinyl grooves. I spin and watch the snippets of sonic flake scatter, disappear.

"I was born by the river
in a little tent
and just like the river
I've been running
ever since
it's been a long, long time coming
but I know
a change is gonna come."

And Tanya says: "It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die...I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky...it's been a long, long time coming, but I know...a change is gonna come."

As for my own grandmother, she struggles to formulate a coherent response to all this. Her foggy mind sifts through the ruins of soap opera lives for survivors. Her search-and-rescue dogs grow more and more depressed with each passing moment.

She sees ash-covered skeletons of men and women from Days of Our Lives sitting in the trees outside, waiting to be saved.

"It's been a long, long winter," she says. She carries with her a plastic Baby Jesus doll, and the first hints of an infinite thaw that never comes.

She thinks she is still in Alaska. She prays to St. Anthony, but she cannot for the life of her remember what was lost.

During breakfast, she mumbles no-words to herself and quotes Zhuangzi. "The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it; catch the rabbit and you forget the snare," she says. "Where shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him?"

To celebrate her birthday, we gather for a prayer vigil and revive our senses under television's warm glow. We are all pixilated equal in CNN's eyes.

Meanwhile, an old father crouches and holds a harmonica to his mouth--his warm lips still cling to the skein of an ancient melody, and for a moment, we are all transfixed together, suspended in the im-mediacy of his loud, sudden outpour. The spontaneous sound of his soul gathers us close around the dinner table, and we lean in, and cheer him on.

For just a moment, we sit together like this outside the machine, family again, and remember all that we have forgotten, and all that we have lost, and all that we have never been.

--"Last night I had an idea," my grandmother says, and Tanya nods. "It was formless, shapeless, lacking in context or spatial dimension. It was all mine."

(In the corner, the shadow of Edison's spirit catcher sits idle, refusing invention.)

A child.
A field.
A red.
A moral.
A finger sliver of nail.
A full.
A verb.
A have.
A word.
A soft.
A given.
A loss.
A replication.
A replication.
A replication.
A replication.

A Permanent Autonomous Zone of red lipstick on your windshield:

NOW THESE WORDS ARE IN YOUR HEART.

They will not dare to park here again.

The world is gagged, carried away on a stretcher.