It is a screaming

A pentatonic, a dissonance, the monster is a collection of tones that barely tolerate one another. The mask. The mask. With the music comes the mask and the eyes, the eyes. He wants to hear the eyes. He hears the vibration of the scar, the frequency at which this unstrung cello vibrates. Resonant, sonorous, the scar seeks its bow, camel hair against unwilling flesh, untuned sorrow. * * * More things about which I am not permitted to speak. But this is what it feels like: There are spasms in my teeth. My legs twitch, my jaw locks. I fall to the ground and no one can tell if I am alive. Slowly, slowly the face of a young woman comes into focus. She is an emissary from the gendarme. I do not trust her, I do not believe in her. The brave men stand back while she clears their path. The brave men are afraid of me and this is before the stigmata; this is before the thumbprint of the beast. * * * And then you wake up and it’s America. You wake up outside in America. Gotta get up gotta get up before the morning comes. Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me. Make it easy for me just for a little while. Monday, Nebraska. Freight. The Train. Boxcar Willie and the Banshees. The Irish dragged the banshees here to terrify the Sioux. They succeeded only in scaring themselves, their children, and their animals. The Indians did not know the language of the banshees, but it did not matter. They had their own evening wraiths, and the banshees had no interest in their affairs. For the Indians, the living dead were of greater concern. The whiteness of the shroud, of the grave, is nowhere near as forbidding as the whiteness of the skin, of the teeth and the litany of lies that spill from their mouths, as if even the most casual untruth cannot bear to share space with the radiance of the spirit. The monster hears the story in the wailing of the train. It cannot it will not restrain itself. The monster is compelled to ride the train as freight, but it cannot plug up its ears. Whoever made him did not know what he was doing, and he hears every sound, smells every smell, but he is not allowed to see. And somehow he knows there is much to see. He can hear the scar, he can feel its vibration. Somehow he knows it is a map. How he knows this, he does not know. But he knows that he is the progeny of a demented cartographer. The rock, the river, and the tree are less inviting that he had hoped. He has come from France. He has crossed the Arctic circle. He has seen the ice of Lapland. There were no tiny men. There were no magical deer. The world begins to take some kind of shape. The monster is learning not to fear the wrath of saline, the injunction not to look back. What he will do with this knowledge remains to be seen. Looking back, what will he see? What is there to be seen? He knows that he is being followed. He has heard the footsteps of his pursuer; he has come to know his stride. What is it that he wants? What does the pursuer want? The map, the scar, the record of where the monster has been. The prophecy of what yet may come. I am at the river and I feel nothing. Despite its majesty, it is nothing but a hollow, the shape of something lost, of an attachment undone. I had assumed coming back here would awaken something else, something other than the creature. But now, there is only the echo of the sadness once carried along by the current, once breaking around these islands, breaking upon these banks. Now littered with boutique contrivances, bordered by a concrete path wandered by dim-witted eccentrics, the river has been robbed of its voice, its sorrow. Even in the dying light, the embers of fall now lit in the trees of the islands. If it sings, I cannot hear it. This is alarming but not without precedent. The first time I saw the Nile I found it underwhelming too. The Nile, when I met it, seemed a collector of stories. The Mississippi set its stories to music and invited all to dance. Only on subsequent trips to Egypt did the Nile begin to open up. Frozen, the colossus of lions at the base of the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, forever braced in preparation for the kill, they started to speak to me. They started to roar. Perhaps this is why I cannot hear the Mississippi. Perhaps Yemanja is upset. Perhaps I need to go to the Amazon. A new water, a new baptism. I will wash away my collection of sins by casting them upon the water. You do not know what disaster will come upon the land.