anti:freeze

A body, when revealed again to the earth's surface, will tell the story of its own burial. If eye caps dig into the underside of the eyelids, if screws wind through the jaw to clamp the mouth shut, if cotton is packed into the ears, anus, nose and throat, the body was embalmed. Which really means it was most likely buried with funeral rites. For the archaeologist, this means it was excavated from a cemetery (perhaps one long forgotten) and not a random burial site. Embalmed bodies are not normally buried in random plots.

The skin flakes away after an embalmed body is lowered into darkness. Cracked, like the surface of an old painting; shattered like a dropped mirror. When the body's fluids leak into the coffin lining, conditions become perfect for mold - a thin layer of black spores spreading over the skin's surface. The softest under-parts decay faster because of the moisture, while the brain is preserved in shape and form. Embalming reverses the direction of decay - legs first; torso and head last. The forensic taphonomist searches for these signs; determines if a body was dug up from the grave of an unknown cemetery (for even these go missing, become anonymous) or if perhaps a murderous shovel sealed a lost man's fate beneath the cold dirt. Sometimes there is no skin or casket left, and the eyecaps and screws must be sought out in the soil layer, loose, like bones popped from sockets.

It's the peeling-paint skin that amazes me. The paint of old houses on Iowa highways. The paint of closed-down car garages and gas stations. Of unrestored chapels and ancient caves. When a body is not preserved, the skin cracks and slips away in pieces, like little continents, drifting into the soil, disappearing into the sediment layers.

When buried by people who long to keep you alive, your body becomes a kind of painting, with a delicate layer of color and brushstroke. And when buried by murder, it collides with the chaos - chaos, of course, not being lack of order or cause, but in the mathematical sense. Continents colliding, landscapes merging. The body's true nature revealed.

there is always construction in the Pearl District. but the new buildings aren't half as beautiful as the skeletons inside them . . . this picture was taken in the Brewery Blocks neighborhood, using my Lomo. I love the green color, the play of light . . .

Sometimes I picture Ashley in his grave; wonder whether his skin is still smooth, his eyes still blue or long since decayed. I wonder about his last moments, whether he knew the heroin was a lethal cut when he cooked it down, if he was alone when he tightened the leather belt around his bicep; plunged the needle into his vein. He had that kind of strength where the muscles are round but not hard, and because they weren’t developed by fistfights or weightlifting, but by skateboarding and play, they were soft. When I think of the needle puncturing his skin, I picture it piercing through layers – his baby fat, the emerging muscles of a man – heroin and quinine like magma in reverse, burning through his insides and creating new islands somewhere deep. I think I always knew we never had a chance, and maybe that was part of the attraction.

You can either use a spoon or cut the bottom off a soda can. What you’re looking for is a concave surface, something to dissolve the heroin in. Silver can tarnish, and when it does silver oxide contaminates your gear – a dirty hit – so avoid it if you can. If you get that in your blood, you won’t forget it. Your teeth will chatter like it’s eighty below zero, even as your insides burn, and you’ll throw up so hard you’ll swear your stomach was about to come up with the bile. Clean your spoon with an alcohol swab. Take the chunks out of their bag and smell them – make sure they smell right – a little like vinegar, with a little sweetness, too. After a while, you can tell different cuts by scent alone, just like flowers. It makes sense. Even after the cutting, the boiling down, the filtering, and the mixing with other chemicals and powders, heroin is still made from the poppy flower.

Place a chunk in the spoon, crush it, and add water, using the syringe to measure 50-75 units. Heat until it’s dissolved. Use the plunger from your syringe to mix it. Roll a cotton wad or use a piece of a tampon and stick it in the spoon. Then stick the syringe in the cotton and pull the plunger back slowly. This filters out particles you don’t want getting in your blood. Don’t hurry when you stick the needle in. It’s when the needle first pokes your skin that you feel the best. The anticipation is its own kind of peace – what’s inside that syringe will soon be inside you: potential energy on the verge of kinetic. You’re holding potential in your hand.

and if we existed as anything, it was as a kind of potential . . .

Sometimes we let our hands hover just barely above shoulders or clavicles or cheekbones, like air surveyors mapping mountains and caves, sending out signals that bounced back as radar in the darkness. Our fingertips flushed hot, the air between us magnetic and charged - potential energy on the verge of kinetic - but we resisted the attraction, refusing to touch so we could revel in longing a few moments more. We could have drawn intimate maps from those studies, but even still, I never saw his needle tracks.

Lately, I am attracted to honey. The image of honey poured from metal bowls擁nto spoons, onto the soil揺as been haunting me. I think of it like resin or lava, liquid that痴 capable of hardening into stone, preserving the remains of the most delicate insects, or surrounding a bubble of air and locking it forever in hard time. But unlike resin, which hardens forever into amber, or lava, which cools into a new layer of crust, honey can be cooked down again and again, heated up so the crystals melt into golden syrup. Time can be reversed, taken back to its potential, and the syrup can flow again in one viscous stream.

I think this is why I started putting honey jars where I find syringes and needles by the river. I carry a cloth with me, and when I find a needle and syringe, I pick it up carefully, with the cloth protecting my hands. I unscrew the jar lid and slide the syringe into the liquid. Suspended in sugary amber, the needle becomes a kind of fossil, sacred as a bone. The honey will harden into crystals; surround the syringe with opaque clouds, burying it inside time. All you have to do is cook it down, and everything becomes clear.

I love the way he leans so far back when he drives, how his right hand holds the steering wheel and his left hand hangs down below the side of his seat. He never grips the wheel tight or leans forward to check for cross traffic, and he doesn’t stop the car to roll a joint – he can do it with one hand. His whole body reflects a kind of fearlessness or fatalism, a condition to which I aspire but never achieve.

If I could cook down my memories, melt them into one fluid substance, distill them down to their essence, and mold them into one simple shape, I would. If I could make them as direct as an injection, as smooth as the most potent morphine, this story, and maybe my mourning, would be done.

I buy a small bucket of pollen from the beekeeper at Farmer’s Market, which I carry home in my palm like a grenade; terrified I might drop it. The bucket is clear plastic, with a thin lid and metal handle. It’s slightly overfilled, and as a result, the lid keeps popping open as I walk, so I kneel down and pour a little pollen into the grass. Against the green, the little balls of orange and red are bright as candy. I reach down and squeeze a few between my forefinger and thumb, rubbing them down to a fine powder. My eyes sting and water, and on my thumb, bumps are already forming – contact eczema, from my allergies. There’s something in this pollen that speaks to me. The poison, the sweetness, the danger in knowing what will happen if I open it. My allergies are intense, but I’m drawn to it anyway. Maybe because it’s so raw. It still has potential for sweetness as well as death.

why the metal bowls for the honey? why not ceramic - earth transformed into stone? metal because it melts. metal because it is elemental. the honey poured like gold. a kind of alchemy.

I love the roughness of the numbering here*, on what will someday be fancy lofts in the Pearl. I love the way process is exposed, how passing pedestrians get a peek into the structure . . . the work.

Whenever I pass by construction sites, I think about the strangeness of building a space - spending long days wiring the lights, installing water pipes, smoothing plaster - all the time knowing you will soon be forbidden from entering. Those construction workers will not be living in the lofts. They will not carry keys to the very doors they lock into each shiny hinge.

And when I think of these things, I think of my dad. He sometimes worked construction (sometimes worked as maintenance at a chemical plant). In his life outside work, he was still constructing: building spaces he could never again enter, the dark and unfinished houses spreading inside him like suburbs, all starting to look the same.

*photo by me, using the lomo. taken yesterday, when the sun made a rare appearance . . . hours later, it was raining again. alas.

When there痴 a junkie in your past, there are questions. Did you ever watch him shoot up? Did your fingertips trace his needle tracks as your hand caressed his arm? Were there were scabs and sores where the needle pierced his skin? Was he was cruel when he was high? Could he still get it up? How you could have ever put up with it? People tell you it was good that you left him, that you did the right thing. Staying would have supported his habit. Waiting up late while he ran drugs would have driven you insane. You could have gotten arrested. What about AIDS? What about Hepatitis?

The more I answer these questions, the more my memories change. I close my eyes and feel Ashley痴 lips on my neck, the chill and tingle down my throat, the cold spots where his tongue left saliva behind, and in that saliva, bacteria or viruses swimming as the spit evaporates, a little trace of illness mixed with desire.

"If you really want to understand seizures," I told my friend, "Just think about heroin."

Brainwaves, regular. Cyanosis. Angels and demons. People think of seizures, and they think of chaos. But really, the brainwaves get regular, patterned, calcuable.

He lit a new cigarette with the burned-down tip of his old one, flung the butt onto the sidewalk. "Weird," he said. "My old roommate was epileptic, and he said the same thing. He said it felt good."

This picture is the closest image I can find to the way a seizure makes me feel . . . everything bright around the edges, glowing with auras invisible to everyone else . . . the ghosts escaping from the wood and concrete and raindrops.

*taken with the lomo on a rainy night, no flash of course, streetlights dim.

Something fascinating has happened to this street corner, now that the bus stop is indefinitely closed. The space has become closed, too. I decided to sit on the bench inside the shelter, so I could change the film in my Lomo and rest my injured foot. Almost every passerby pointed out the "Bus Stop Closed" sign.

"You can't catch the bus here," they said. "You'll have to go down two blocks." They were trying to be helpful.

But really, why should the shelter be closed just because the bus stop is? Why should I let a sign dictate my movements? It's a perfectly good bench. In the shade. Protected from rain.

March 2000. I wake up from deep sleep, stricken with the feeling I’m being watched. It starts as a tingling on my scalp, lightness at the tips of my fingers, a sensation that spreads to my knuckles, and I tense my fists. My arms and legs feel paralyzed, all the muscles tense and ready to leap out of the bed, but unable to do it. A shadow moves over the floorboards, probably just a tree branch blowing outside, but I gasp anyway, as a cold current caresses my face – not exactly like air, a little heavier, like breath. Ever since someone sliced the screen from the window of my old apartment and tried to jump into my bedroom – a roll of duct tape in one hand and a knife in the other – I have been waking up in these panics. I’m never sure whether to trust my instincts or close my eyes again and fight the urge to check the door locks.

My fiancé lies next to me, sleeping deep, his curls spiraling over his cheeks. I pull a piece of hair away from his mouth and draw a blanket around my shoulders before climbing out of the futon to check the kitchen. It’s empty. The tiles are cold against my bare heels and toes, and the ticking of our old wind-up clock punctuates each step. I stand at the window for a minute, staring at the security lights of the church next door, waiting for someone to leap out of the bushes.

That’s when the chill creeps over my skin. The color blue rises into my consciousness, floating there, a balloon of color. The blue of cyanosis, my blue lips after a seizure. I twist the radiator dial and smell the old dust that flies off as it heats up.

Ashley is dead, I think.

And just like that, the air is light again. The room is warm, my fear is gone, and I realize I have been visited by a ghost. Ashley is dead. Why did he choose to tell me himself?