Stowaway

Then quickly, wordlessly, as vaporous hallucinations, the two officers slipped down the narrow hall and out the oaken door onto the powder blue porch with its bright white swing.  There was a blaring certainty out there.   The volume of the white sunlight was penetrating everything.  Both men were a little bit bent by the leaded glass, their bodies rippling on the other side.  They were being seen in cracked refractions as if through a waterfall, frozen.

Out of view, forgotten, the rumble of their motorcycles reminded everyone to look again outside.  But even that was only an idea.  Crumbling into the hot black asphalt, there was nothing left of them.  The hum.  The purr.  Fading into the background, into they symphony of a summer day, the retreating engines reassured them that they were safe and, at least for now, quietly removed from the official radar.

He had not been found out, but Milo was still anxious.  Wedged in the darkest corner of the doorless closet, he was shaking a little.  He had slipped off the solid land of his simple upbringing, his naive past, and found himself in a body--godless and cynical--that had been too well-educated by the world.  Where was his fearless armor?  The mail he had stitched together out of the accidents of experience had become a comfortable new skin.  He was content with his knowledge.  He was satisfied by his insight.  He was "at peace with" the once unnerving fact that he was miles and miles away from anywhere that he might call home.   

All animal, Milo had become something made of urgency and instinct.  He was always half wanting to get laid/half wanting to have a conversation;  the itch for others, that sickness, was inside of him.  Milo had become what he was and what he would be.  But the self that was here, now, hyperventilating and afraid to speak seemed even to himself a stranger.  This was a hitchhiker, a parasite, a stowaway;  this was the ghost of someone he had not been for decades. 

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Was there constancy in the body?  The mere substance of skin and bone did not assure that.  His own limbs, his whiskered chin, his fragile back and temperamental penis had convinced him of the transitory nature of body and form.  The physical was far from permanent.  It was no anchor to the world.  

So Milo asked himself:  Could he imagine anything persistent in the other elements?  Could he conceive of the soul as anything but a religious delusion, a comforting lie?  Could he conceive of the mind as anything more than this tangled, overgrown garden.  Reclaimed by the jungle of meaning, nerves and words and other weeds were wild there and his synapses snapped and rattled like snakes in the undergrowth.  It seemed that they were all working extra hard to forgive and accept what is a natural and inevitable confusion.

Milo was breathing in broken gasps.  It was as if he had been drowning.  Now.  It was if he had broken the glassy surface--the lake's metallic eye--and reentered the world.  He had held his breath for five unforgiving minutes.  It had felt--the burning of the stagnant air, the sharp edge of some unidentified object pressed against her right ankle--beyond the terror, somehow exhilarating, as if he were reconnecting with the realness of the watering hole, with the essence of being alive.