The edge is an absurd place to be. The edge, understand what is meant? The place
before the word is written, the space before the first sentence illuminates and violates the
horrendously spectacular space of possibility. The edge. That perpetual flickering mad-
ness of sacred sanity frothing in an effervescent fizzle of spontaneous erection.
Attention. I’m not there yet. I’ll try again. This time, we’ll let the guidance of a character scurry us down the lines. Abagale, the first name to bubble into being. So be it, we have
Abagale, and a perimeter begins to form:
a shadow undresses. A roundish nose, an expressionless pair of eyes, long curly black
hair, chest hair, and thick, silver eyebrows. A uniquely forged shadow hovering in the
ubiquitous mind. Our collective madness.
Action takes place. The mid-Manhattan library, Abagale walks through an aisle
searching, no, inspecting the other shadows. A girl with hair as red as a phoenix drops a
green, hard-covered book. Abagale sits down at a table on the third floor, contemplates
the camera inside an opaque black orb hovering above the HSBC building across the
street. He opens a book to the twenty-second page, his favorite number.
elevator stared at me with a gaze that made me so uneasy that I was on the verge of
hitting him, or vomiting. Of course, it was his slippers that still had me fascinated, they
helped me maintain my balance. Still, the way those brows of his spoke, those crazy
brows going off in every direction as if at war with everything and nothing–well, you
understand, it was too unbearable for me to handle then. The day had been wild enough
thanks to what Catherine said to me at the apartment that morning. And now, imagine,
having to face this maniac in those blue cotton slippers of his!
Abagale pauses. A security guard tells a man sleeping is prohibited in the library.
The book is placed into his black leather shoulder-pack.
Abagale descends. He takes the stairs.
Home. He takes off his shoes, sits down at his desk, begins to write I haven’t found
what I’m looking for yet, but I sense I’m getting closer. Everyday the world is speaking
to me with a greater clarity than the day before. I know I’m getting there, there–I feel it,
as if I’m near the edge of it, it–as if it were just one final leap away. I’ve been searching many years–many lost years, I did not know I was searching–that’s okay. It is becoming all apparent now: I’m going in the right direction. There was a little girl of six or seven skating on the ice today. She had on black roller-blade knee and elbow pads, and had the loveliest wavy brown hair flowing through a football helmet that she wore. She skated
magnificently. She didn’t fall a single time. I felt like I was skating with her, though
I was sitting at one of the coffee tables which surround the ice in Bryant Park. I was
secretly cheering her on, even pretending that I was her father.
Yes, I’m getting closer, it will happen any day now. I must have patience. I’ve decided to
attend a party this new year; I’m certain it will bring me closer, just one more inch is all I
need.
Dreams set in. There is a hunt in the rain forest. A fear is realized, Abagale is not the
hunter. Awareness rises, a spear is spotted, the silence, heard. The chase begins, the
asteroid panic burgeons with every palpitation of the heart. The stomach morphs into
dough. Every agonizingly slow stride churns the absurd rhythm of a psychological-body,
a self aware, uncontrollable dream-state, into an iron rust decaying. The women surround. Stones, chiseled faces in the flesh with eyes as empty and cold as white statuettes of biblical demons, they enclose: Snakes burst through their ivory hearts! Abagale awakes,
desperately he tries to sever the arm grasping his chest.