The Face by David St. John

Author:David St. John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

XXIX.

Somebody says, I know you as I know myself, because loneliness

& your mouth are both such cruel mirrors—so, waking in the cold hotel room,

I say out loud, without being able to stop myself, What? What did you say?—

&, as if from sleep, a voice replies, No; I think you heard me….

Chains on the water: fully in error. The black corsage hanging from the limp

Silk strap of the silver gown collapsed along the floor. Streaking the window, the dawn’s hair.

XXX.

Then it all comes down to this, doesn’t it? Fucked-up or fucked-over,

You start with a little of this & a little of that, & pretty soon you

Wake up here, at Edge World—& you don’t have a clue when you lost it

Or where, or who you might have been with. It doesn’t matter; sooner or later

Everybody ends up…here, at Edge World. Just my kind

Of theme park; & maybe it’s your kind of theme park, too? So maybe

You go for one of those short, three-day “Lost Weekend” passes—

Not me; I’ll hang in there for weeks at a time. I’m what you call “dedicated,”

& I’ve found that some artificial incentive can help steady you for

A favorite ride—mine’s “The Abyss.” It’s really for just one person. You

Stand at the lip of a black chasm, strapped into a silver, spring-loaded harness,

As, below, at the bottom of the abyss, a few emaciated dingoes & starved

Pit bulls tear at the raw carcasses of lambs. Icy-blue gas jets keep spitting up

Flames to keep the dogs & dreams all hopping. But for me, the best part is this:

The far face of the canyon wall is really one big movie screen, & scenes of

The most horrifying

& humiliating moments of your life are looped together, running endlessly,

Edited so that the really desperate episodes crescendo into a burst of self-pity

That sets even the dingoes howling. Here & there, I recognize scenes (of myself)

From earlier Edge World visits, though I swear I don’t recognize a single

Face in that sticky sea of bodies. Finally, after you’ve watched for a while,

Some attendant walks on over & simply

Pushes you off the edge. It’s all free fall then, not even caring

If the harness holds, or if the uncoiling cords bungee you back up toward the sky;

The pit bulls snapping at your ass are like the sweet howls of little putti in paintings

Of any Renaissance Hell. Still, it’s always hard to decide about the next ride—

Anything else seems like such a letdown…But I’m thinking now

Of trying the one called “Musical Beds,” competing with a dozen other

Edge World visitors in what’s said to be the cruelest ride, since the losers

Are taken off to sleep with farm animals who’ve been surgically equipped

With perfect masks of ex-husbands & ex-wives. The one good thing is that

The winner, woman or man, finds him-or-herself with Brigitte Bardot &

Alain Delon, in the middle of their love-making scene from Histoires

Extraordinaires, both of them pulsing with such vivid expectation it’s hard

To believe they’re just laser-whipped holograms—somehow, they’re so real

In their virtual, sexual steam, well, it’s a whole lot like

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