Or words more or less to that effect,
what my old buddy’d say to me, if some-
how we hooked up one more time for a
private moment with nobody else listen-
ing in. But eavesdroppers or not, bet he’d
pass on the message I paraphrased above.
No reason my old pal should be shy about
repeating his rule. Especially since no
one, in the forty or fifty centuries pre-
ceding this one, nor in the interval of
thirty, forty years since I have been face
to face with him, no matter what they
practice or preach, has come up with a
more compelling, self-evident rationale
for how folks should behave in this best
of all possible worlds. Mystery (chaos)
abides. Whether a person wants to cre-
ate art, shop for clothes or dinner, wage
war, fall in love, discipline kids or crim-
inals etc., etc., no recipe exists that guar-
antees success. So why shouldn’t my friend
say please yourself. Same rule for prison
inmates or Presidents of the United States.
My old pal would shout, scream, cackle,
laugh, giggle, holler, preach his rule today,
just as he used to expound, expostulate,
rap it in the middle of campus parties,
street crowds, into a mike, into your ear,
into a garbage can while he was barfing.
Let me quickly, unambiguously assure
you, Mr. Jackson, that in no way, shape,
or form am I equating what I guess might
guide you to sing as you sing and what
guided my former friend to take his la-
dy’s life. Discovering as you perform on-
stage that you please audiences most ex-
actingly when your singing pleases you
is immeasurably distant from my buddy
discovering that terminating another’s
life and pleasing himself could go hand
in hand. Rather, I’m illustrating, admit-
ting my own confusions, worries, fears,
my inability to decide on my next move
in this story. My next choice. Whatever
the ramifications of any choice—choices
as different as how to sing or whether to
kill or not kill—nothing is knowable until
we choose. No less mysterious after we
choose. No matter our intentions, we’re
involved in guesswork, after all. Gutwork.
Trapped inside ourselves. Our minds.
Our feelings. Selfish, arbitrary, and dark
as my once-upon-a-time friend’s.
And that truth cuts much deeper than
different strokes for different folks, I be-
lieve. Any point of view not the only
possible one. Always many. Always
changing. Smallest piece of something
represents, replicates, renews, becomes
larger, becomes whole. The whole always
fragile, shatters, incomplete as the small-
est piece. Both the entire shebang and
each infinitesimal byte forever exchang-
ing places, and we can’t have one with-
out the other. Though often I wish I
could forget, Mr. Jackson, Freddie Jack-
son, that endless simultaneity, recover
those flurries of forgetfulness.D
istance from Phoenix to Flagstaff,
Arizona approximately one hun-
dred and forty-five miles. A drive north
of about two hours, eighteen minutes on
I-17. If you are interested, time-lapse vid-
eos posted on the Internet can get you
there faster, in anywhere from 1:42 to
47:10. The two lawyers, one in charge,
one to drive, who met my son’s plane at
Sky Harbor airport in order to escort
him to a jail in Flagstaff, where he’d be
locked up until tried for murder, may or
may not have been in a hurry. Being in
a hurry doesn’t necessarily get you any
quicker to where you wish to go. Nor
does the wish to never arrive at a partic-
ular destination necessarily retard arrival.
I wasn’t in the car hauling my son to jail
that day in Arizona, thus can’t say who
was in a hurry and who was not. My son
a fugitive for twelve days before he calledhis uncle and asked for help. Before his
uncle called us and we engaged lawyers.
How do my son’s twelve days of running
compare to my old buddy’s seventeen
years of flight and hiding. I should know
better than to ask such a silly question,
Mr. Jackson. As if aging and loss and
cancer and fear and mourning and de-
spair are not species of time. As if in-
stead, time consisted of a certain quan-
tity of repeating, unchanging, definable
units, like inches, miles, pounds. As if
the length and weight of a boy’s time on
the road were measurable, a fifteen-year-
old who hasn’t maybe had sex yet or at-
tended a funeral or slept alone away from
home a single night with no family, no
adult, no companions keeping him com-
pany, as if such a boy’s terror after kill-
ing, for no reason, he comprehends his
roommate in an Arizona motel on a plea-
sure trip supervised by an expensive, élite
boys’ camp in Vermont, as if anyone not
that boy might grasp how time passed
for him on the run or passes now in prison
where bars and cages do not stop the
running, but torture and bend time so
time collapses, empties, or swells like a
corpse decomposing, or towers like some
suppurating beast many stories tall with
bloody talons pawing the air. Stink,