So much happens in the world that I am not
privy to. Once, and this was during peacetime,
you spoke to me of a game of hide the warhead.
They were everywhere, you said. Except where
you might expect one to be. And not that difficult
to find. A human metropolitan Philip K. Dick land
scape was just one Where’s Waldo set in which the
where, with its pointed head painted red, had imaginary
glasses from one angle that were a lucid optical illusion
from another. How you taunted as you taught with a glint
of this could most definitely be true in your eye. Mere man
or limp-fisted ape of a scam? A cocky concoction in which,
with your long-striding and very particular off-kilter gait
one critic might find a brilliant performance of intellectual
introvert cum zozo that in retrospect seems much less drama
and more twisted and skewed by the truth of an impossibly-
storied past, unfathomable until now. Now, when I’d give gold
or, having none of that, my very all for those neo-noir maps you
must have carried with you in that trench coat you’d never be seen
without, your San Franachronism, I called it, as a tiny fracture cut into
the corner of your lip, the side of your face that barely moved, and yet
for a second or two slid like a rut into the half-crook of a smile, even as
the rest of your face went slack-jaw—as if only you were in on the world’s
most sinister joke in which the clueless rest of us would’ve by now evaporated
ten thousand times into the mushroom-shaped punch line of anti-matter laughter.
