They shot him by the side of the road. The sun was tangled in his hair as he leaned against the car. He fingered his chest, just over his heart, as if touching it directly. —My car broke down. —You need oil and a belt. Take off your shirt. You could consider him compromised. There is no universe where he is not a hitchhiker asking a rancher for help, where he is not plugged in like a lamp. The doctor has to crack the ribs to get to the lungs. The plumber has to pull out the sink to get to the pipes in the walls. The pornographer has to adjust the bodies to catch the slant of the light. He moves them like furniture. In the barn, the rancher spreads a blanket and their clothes fall off considerably. They are technicians. It is a compliment. They clock and clam like eels and the night goes mink. I want to be them. I want to be like them. I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched. It’s awful, my watching: the refusal to participate, the ogling and smug superiority, the approximation of a true desire. It’s fake, but it isn’t. It’s art, but it isn’t. They’re pretending but it doesn’t matter because they’re actually doing it, exhausting themselves as the acting evaporates, peak beauty, that moment—the swan dive, the little death, a bird flying into a kitchen window, open or shut, this or nothing, it strips the bolts. The cameraman is standing very quietly. It looks like he is weeping

I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.

They went to the lake to talk to the fish. You don’t know them. She cut a circle into the ice. The teeth of her new saw flashed in the light. All the arrows of her thinking pointed in the same direction. What happened to her old saw? I can’t tell you everything at once. Let’s say there are mountains. Paint them white as January. The snow falls down. Does she think the fish will tell her something? The thrust of the story depends on the answer, on whether she’s reasonable or not. A boy on a trampoline goes up and down, up and down in his invisible elevator. He is learning how to think about it. He is learning how to feel about it. His face is a newspaper. His heart is sweet candy. The forest is deep and wide. I am trying to tell you something. I set up my premises and they get knocked down. They get knocked down and they get up blurry. The speed of conversation is faster than the speed of thought. It takes too long to say it right. It takes too long because it is a philosophy. The bird has plumage. The mob has torches. This isn’t a story about my day, I am arguing a point. It accumulates. We’re running fast at a plate-glass door. We’re running fast, expecting it will open. I can’t give you what you want, I’m thinking in shorthand: small on the page but big in the head. Something is moving below the ice. I am trying to tell you but you’re not listening. It seems there is no end to this. The snow falls down and the argument jumps its tracks. And the argument begins to weaken. And the argument is beginning to weaken.