Tarot Sour by Robert Zimmerman Page A

itself, is analogous to a living animal. And at the end of their lives, in the midst of their death throes, such animals will writhe and convulse, wildly, savagely, with the hopes of staving off death for just a bit longer. And, like an injured animal, this convulsing will lead to unpredictable behaviors. Time will begin to overlap with itself. Individuals and objects might exist as simultaneous duplicates of themselves at different ages. They might disappear altogether for a time before reappearing someplace else, if at all, and might appear as incomplete, fragmented partials of what they should be. A man without a face, perhaps. Or a rock that might be hollow behind its shell. Or perhaps filled with something it should not be filled with, filled with intestines. They are wild, fantastical claims, and even I, who glimpses bits and pieces of these claims directly from the sun as I gain Cifezzo’s life story, have trouble believing that they might have any real bearing on the world. Philosophy, as theology, is not much more than a guessing game at how an endtime might appear. If there ever really is an endtime, chances are good that none of us will be around anyway to compare it to what predictions have been made regarding it. So I believe, for too long.
    It is years before I fully accept Asam Cifezzo for the visionary that he really is, years before I can no longer pass off my séance with the sun as a heat stricken hallucination. I am married to a beautiful young woman whom I eventually persuade myself is as beautiful as the girl who I had watched die next to me in her cot in South America, with her eyes bulging and her veins inflating with the green venom that had worked its way into her lungs. In fact, after a year with her, I have almost forgotten about that dead girl. Only in the quietest nights does her soft chirruping voice sing out to me through my bedroom window as a loon call, singing amo-o meu doce, como a lua ama o sol, para sempre a parte meu doce, e sempre em busca . I love you my sweet, as the moon loves the sun, forever apart my sweet, and always in pursuit. The song she would sing to me with a voice sweetened with coconut milk and banana leaves.
    We marry (I and my wife, not I and the dead girl of my youth), and we are happy, and she becomes pregnant. The night I fully embrace the philosophies of Asam Cifezzo, she is lying prone amidst a sea of moths and faceless doctors, while I sit twiddling in the waiting room. I remember being transfixed by the clock face on the other side of the room. I watch its second hand tick off years, watch its face transform from a grin to a sneer to a cry. Grin sneer cry. There is an old woman across the aisle with a translucent red boil on her cheek. You can see the blood flow under the skin. What I would give to be here for a boil. Or that little boy with the rash on his neck. What I would give to be sitting here suppurating. For all I know, at that moment I am already a father. I see her, my lovely wife, two hours earlier, bleached in the white fluorescent light, strapped like an experiment to her stirrups, I watch her begin to slowly, casually, split down the middle. The cracked skin of her feet, the sagging plumpness of her breasts. The pits swallowing her eyes. How stark a contrast, since it all began.
    It seems only days earlier, her mauve silk skin laying repose on the sheets. The moonlight dulled wine through the curtains. There is no music playing, we have never listened to music during. But the city sounds, a flutter flap of pigeon wings. A swarm of electrons buzzing in the tubes of a neon sign. A car horn and the muted shout of an irate driver. The ticking of her clock. But what we really listen to is the hiss of ruffled sheets. The paper smooth scuttle of skin sliding across itself. The gentle cooing, the creaking of convulsing muscles, the sound of a distant brook running over mossy rocks. We are only half human that night. Our bodies are half shadow, fading in