I.

I arrived yesterday morning on the all night train after a slow churning trek through the White Mountain's range. I’d not slept more than a few fever dream quarter hours in the coach and I’ve spent the balance of the night in the gentleman’s cabin being talked up by a table of the travelling brotherhood. As their numbers were great and I the sole non mechant, my presence was tolerated while they talked shop. I think perhaps the redness of my eyes and the glaze of night sweat over my limbs set them at ease that their trade secrets couldn’t possibly get far. They even stood me several drinks, perhaps thinking me little more than a rummy out on a bender, too out of my mind even to track the converse.

The mountains were of distinctly western aspect in the earliest of morning life. Ghost white with a chalky dust coating anything that stayed still. Leaving the Nevada deserts, I intended to see the lush wonderland of California. Instead, these mountains simply heighten the fierceness and foreboding of the desert landscape. As if the barren sands were given free play to display their direst aspect, these crags and canyons must remain ominous to human flesh. What deserts could be if you would lend them malicious life. We, however, shrouded in steam engine casing need not make consort with these inhuman dangers.

But beautiful as well in the specter light of dawn. And eventually we emerged out of them into the vacant planes. Our pace increased, I spent the sleepless morning with my eyes shuttered and my head bobbing.

I arrived in Santa Ynez {change} with only the possession in my pant and jacket pockets, countable on only a hand’s worth of digits. Among them two coins, one to buy my first night’s stay and the second my only hope on the tables. As elegant as the flip of the remaining coin, but with somewhat longer odds or greater rewards, I’d at least be cleaned up when I was finally ruined for good. I’d envisioned it in full, tho it’s bad luck to plan your demise in such detail that it certainly must come true. Somehow I anticipated that the moment the ball stopped and I was on the instant totally lost that the guards would know—simply know—my state and drag me out, possibly to be shot or at least left bruised in the dust. No need to wait for the creditors, no need to alert other interested parties. Tho flat on my back in the desert, dust in my mouth, my eyes, was where I left the vision. A vague notion of desert birds, carrion and eventually bleached bones floated somewhere in the epilogue.

My rooms, let for my single coin—on the barrelhead, were sparse and worn to the fringes. Clean, however, as hot alkali dust as an antiseptic effect. The pitcher was already full when I entered the room and I cleaned my face at the wash basin. I hadn’t seen my own reflection in several days and it seems to have been for the best. A persistent sweat and grime from worry and lack of rest seemed to have plagued my visage. The cold water snapped me into myself. I cleaned my collar and changed my shirts. Dress code at the Opera House was more lax than one might imagine, but those uninsured and with only a single piece of silver to their names, appropriate dress can get you at least as far as the first table. They may smell on me the ill luck I’ve been carrying with me, but might as easily scent it like the desert’s carrion birds or just as easily dismiss it entirely. I have never been the sort to call attention. In certain fervors, certainly I have called undo attention. But for the most part I am simply another body to be drained dry and returned to his own devices in whatever corner of the world from which I’d come.

There’s a depressive sort within me that is of an intellectual bent. Neither care for the madman they must share a shell and a soul with. A looked into the glass on rough skin and sunken eyes. Even buffed up with clean cold water and cheeks razed, I was nothing more or less than the retch I felt.

As the light cascading through the curtains took on the sorrowful dim of winter twilight in the west, I finished my toilet in the fanciest I could manage. My tie was worn at the knot, from where it’d spent its entire life, the same knot, rubbing up against itself. My waistcoat held a demure shine that always made me feel a little more fit than I was. In fat men a waistcoat can work some magic on their bellies turning them from slovenly to dignified with just as much fabric. Mine had been the reverse and was like to fall of of me if I hadn’t gotten it tailored during my last repose in Garberville.

I swung and locked my door. My room let onto a wooden walk that shared the entrances to the other cottages. There wasn’t but one man making use of the porches; he was smoked the short fat butt of a cigar that smelt like he’d had it up out of the floor, tho he looked nice enough. He tapped his brim as I walked past, his eyes as silent as he was but nonetheless gave me a look of commiseration. For what I don’t know. Sometimes a body just knows when it is around kin or those of a similar malady. Like dogs lazily sniffing the air who even in recognition wouldn’t think of breaking their own repose.

Into the casino that first night I had the high hopes of a ruined man. Fearless in an emboldened and unthinking way. I looked as fine as a man in my condition can want and tho a little more meat on my bones and the perkier look of a full night's rest would have been ideal, I yet felt keen. My mind liked that juxtaposition of finery and failure. The final bare appearance of civilization about to be stripped from me—and the room as well, as my failure was sure to loose the snarling dogs just below the surface of all men. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but in a gambling room this far from civilizations heartier grasps the illusion of community ruins only so thick.

The hall had all the glories of this western life. A full and perpetual din that frothed forth out of the door and onto the street. A din that snarled at the edge of a brawl, cried out—howled!—with primordial lust of winning and losing equally. And entering, it was clear, the more typical kind of lust as well. A good number of ladies adorned the room, tho only—as with those other adornments: chandeliers, glass bottles and paintings—with an expressed function of logic, work and purpose. They were just enough to catch one's eye at ingress, to bespeak the flash the room wanted to muster.

The room, essentially, was an outsized barn built with high visible rafter beam. The type of room men have always felt comfortable with because you can stand at one end of it and survey its entirety majestically. A structure like a Nordic alehouse Hrothgar would have comfortably sat at the head of. No portion of the room could hide from your view. Helpful too for the proprietors looking to catch a cheat or disrupt a fight before it damaged any of the more expensive furnishings. The great sacrifice of the style was its cost to the prostitution racket. Without an upper floor to easily retreat to, there was little hope of plying men too far from the tables. Clearly the decision was made in gambling's favor. And surely the saloon a door over could supply such needs to those celebrating or sulking.

The room breathed a sort of malevolence that comes from too many men all sharing the same goals. The air was what might be considered competitive, tho the amount of civility and decorum required of the gambling hall, say versus the playing field, squelched all appearance of outward aggression. Of course this in turn mired the entire room in a palpable frustration, which all but guaranteed the occasional flare up of violence on an ill timed stare or an ill turned card.

Tho I was sensitive to all of these emotions floating around the room—and not a little unnerved by them—I have always been able to find my own kind of repose in a gambling hall. All the din can, with the right timed hearing, conjure up the great orkestar chaos.

The room and I, however, were quiet yet. A few grumbling men having taken up a side game of whist, it was yet unclear if any gambling at all were taking place in the room. While some men can make a wager of anything, I'm of the sort that enjoys the great wash of engagement, a room filled with eager men, cigar stubs chewing to anxious pulp all awaiting the same axe to drop. Be it a horse to cross the line or a ball to drop in the Roulette wheel doesn't matter. Just the retention of that furious moment, an ecstatic calm in which time stops at the very heights of passion and anything might come in that following moment, heaven, hell or all the more likely their chaotic intersection in the routine passions of earthly life.

How anyone has ever enjoyed penny bets is beyond me. How anyone has lived their lives quietly as well.

I rubbed the one scratchy coin in my pocket to sense its reality, its immanence. My mind was on odds for only half a second before it ran beyond me into the realm of chance. A one to ten odd on the face of it looks reasonable, even good. But my life that has brought me to this little town in the nolands of California, a tiny strip of old Russian rule, so close to the continent's edge and yet a desert? This is the realm of incalculable choice, a near infinite mass. And now it must matter absolutely what game I drop this coin on, or not at all.

And the coin becomes a burden to me. No longer infinite chance, but crucial choice. I plunk it out of anger down on a game I despise. Essentially a coin flip, 50/50 odds. And soon my coin is two. Frustrated by the pointlessness of limited gain, my coin and its fresh minted twin go down again and come back four.

I gather them and head to my real home in the casino, the roulette wheel. By now a few more patrons have trickled in and true games seem to have emerged. The four become sixteen in a single drop of the ball. I am not interested in splitting up this little family, or hedging bets as a generality. And they are sixty four, tho at this point their physical beings disappear and in their place less but larger denomination coins.

You see, chips, in this part of the world at this lonely hour in the middle 1800s are not only a luxury no one can afford, but would be quite a liability. The standards of currency are hard enough to maintain when we are concerned only with the standard currency. Introducing any form of stand in would produce such instability that the thin layer of civility that covers the pent up violence of this world would surely crack.

But less coins meant less option, less safe guarding, less cover from the truth that at any moment I could lose all. Soon I had sixty four of these larger coins and I could feel the heat of the room swell around me.  The rising tide of risk was carrying me with it. And just as suddenly, without pronouncement and almost without anticipation, this growing pile of coins was swept away. On a single spin I had lost all.

Or so for a brief instant I thought. All too brief tho. The dealer shoved back at me one lonely scratched coin and an attendant shining twin. It seems I had, in the confusion of exponential growth, neglected and let ride my single scratched coin, which had experienced its own tumults without me. Had swelled and sunk, but never left the table. It returned to me as two.

Defeated. I had no energy for the rest of the night. A pale loss, as ridiculous as every pale win. But enough money to pay for my room and board tomorrow night. And another chance to play the same single coin game tomorrow.

I sit writing this in the half dawn. The time in-between days where I sit sleepless fearing both past and present. Tomorrow or today, whichever it has become or remains, I will stake my whole soul and hope finally to be rid of it one way or anything. No more of this pale life with its miniscule and tortuous ups and downs.

II.

And now a day I ill remember, but must record as best I can for it best accounts my illness. My two-fold illness and its intersecting mysteries. Events have unfolded that would rewrite this day, before I have had an opportunity to get it down. But I will tell it full, as a day cut off from both the night before and the morning after. As a moment sundered from time, for surely it felt that way then. Perhaps, in fact, it will prove more difficult to reinsert it into a properly temporal narrative. But thus is must stand.
__________________

I'd woken up with the first sun's flash into my windows. Despite the cold of the night, the heat was instant. After the short night sleep my skull was cracked wide with the sun's lightning. As if instead of the day emerging, I'd gotten caught in some sustained lightning flash, a brilliant white out that broke the world open and washed everything out from within it. The moment of lightning was appropriate to thunder. Tho it has always seemed to me that they aught be simultaneous. Lightning carries with it its own type of thunder, a sheer crackling mass. Tho thunder is hardly a letdown in experience, it must be in its existential character.

Regardless, the sun had risen and I was at its mercy; my head ached.

Writing through the night in the pale lost spaces of the day had left me wretched. I was both sleepless and lost within my own nihilistic reflection. The whole world felt a nothing to me.

Eventually I scrapped myself up, splashed cold water from the basin on my face and escaped the stilted and dust filled air of my room. In trade I encountered the blinding day, a deadly heat that buzzed at the horizons of water evaporating en masse. A rapture of available waters, not to be returned to this condemned place, but transported to happier climes. We sinners left to peril. Left to tear each other apart.

The little row of lodger's cabins let onto something of a longhouse, a partially exposed three-walled structure fit with a series of linened tables. To one side our hostess—by all accounts a hardened women to be treated as any other permanent feature of the landscape: respected, possible feared, and certainly let alone—served out the morning rations. A hearty and too hot breakfast of meats, cake, eggs and some starchy mass of fried roots. My appetite was as pallid as my soul. Every bite seemed rancid and foul, excessively oily, sulfurous.

Kindly, the men at breakfast were universally silent. An occasional turning of week old newspaper pages and the scrapping of plates was all to be heard. My mind joined the morning contemplation despite myself, casting back to my former homes and lives.

While most of the past as yet appears dead to me, I find myself haunted by the specters of past mistakes and taunted by my memories of the angels of my salvation I have repeatedly rebuked. My small middle west town could not hold my interest even before I could do a thing about its hold on my person. My mother was full goodness and light. She worked fastidiously and never griped. She lived for others and never mentioned it, not even in her eyes or the lines on her face. When she became wrinkled, the worry and the wear seemed all her own and never ate at those of us who were the cause of so much work. It was a phenomenal trick. Even once I had gained the knowledge enough to notice her many sacrifices and their direct relation to my many wrongs, I could not make into the moralizing force my guilt demanded.

When suddenly she died, I was free to imagine just such a guilt. Her ghost would not have to play any role but absent martyr; I had demons enough to torment me for having let her aid me so. But these memories were all nonsense and spoke nothing to my life either before or after she died. They only appear to prepare for her sequel, who know my mind had fixated on, Marianna. And because I did not know Marianna as purely as one knows their mother, I could make her the chastising demon of my imagination as I could not my mother.

Our home was in a small frontier town. Most other middle west towns were not towns so much as commercial centers for area farmers that would slowly accrete citizens. Glowing centers of money, they would eventually establish a set of permanent residents, but they were nonetheless primarily a leech or least a by product of the surrounding farms. Our town was in contrast born a town. Several strong town fathers, not so long ago that we have forgotten their specifics, but already with the gleam of myth, came out into the frontier with a town fully formed in their heads. And with them their families. All had been Russian peasants, were still in their own minds, Russian peasants.

The middle west had the appeal of familiarity. Of barren, icy lands, frozen earth and meager scrub brush. It was like discovering the homeland over again without an estate owner above you. No tsar to take your bright and fit young men off to war when the fields needed tilling. And so sprung up a Russian village with its full cast of Russian characters and Russian troubles.

Of course a Russian village in the heart of America could not reproduce itself unchanged. I am the premier case of this. I was built in the crucible Russian excess. But unlike a typical Russian village which would have scorned and shamed me, perhaps made of me a drunk to die off in the winter snow, I was let loose on the surrounding world. Perhaps in the older world I could have been made a soldier and my excess could be excused as virility, tolerated as an element of exchange. But such was not the case.

My father taught me to work. But more he taught me to enjoy certain thrills. The joy of risk in the fore.

A small family lived beside us and shared our lands. Without serfs, or being serfs, many new land arrangements were established. Our neighbor was a crippled man, but had brought a small fortune to this land. He was also a tinkerer and produced at his forge many tools to aid in the farm work. Still my father grudged the labor he had to do. And I his son. The tinkerer had only a daughter, Marianna. My father began to think of our neighbor as something of a landowner, a noble living off my father's sweat and mine. There was a break. I did not know from what it sparked. But soon their was a fence and hired men.

For me it meant the loss of my little sister. I had grown up with Marianna. And now, without her, I was suddenly cast out of my adolescent world and thrust in among adults. Hard, sad and failed elders who wiled all their time and money away in drink and cards. At first I despised their wastefulness and lethargy, but it soon grew within me as well. I would work harder in the fields for the loss of my father's partner. And when my father died, an overworked barely old man, I did not weep, but only worked the more.

And the poison of this excessive work gave on into nights of debauch when I could free myself from the farm. What was lethargic in the older men, became a form of energetic spite in me. I would find the biggest corporation town and drag all my earning with me. There one could find any number of young men with the same angry energies bursting forth. One could take their money, or fight them with all ease.  Or on the calmer nights we would all drink together until every bit of money and credit had expired.

These faceless men in the new and hard world bore no connection to me or to each other. They came from nowhere and carried no allegiance. My patronymic, born in my town like a treasure, could mean nothing to them. All bonds we held could only last as long as a winning streak or the liquor held out, only temporary cessation of hostility. True distrust never fully abated.

Not long into this life I'd mounted large debts and terrible thoughtless crimes in the darkness of wild sprees. The width and breadth of my troubles remain to be nearly totally obscure. The follow me like a cloud more painful for their amorphous immensity. Most recently my father's farm was taken in total and other threats were made, vague notions that what passed for the law would certainly come calling upon me soon. And so I move. I move on to new terrible towns, filled with pained men and look for a final tipping point.

_____________
This history does little to explain much of the night that I was entering in upon. None of these occurrences can explain this pure passion in me that seeks some absolute space. They came to my mind at the breakfast and now—a morning on—they seem somehow portentous. But my concerns are blood born and not crafted from experience. I desired that day to be rid of something so completely and totally. Perhaps history is precisely what I needed rid of. And perhaps thinking it more thoroughly than I had in years was such a purgation or preparation for it.

The rest of the day I spent in my stuffy room. I lay on my bed sweating as in a fever fully clothed. My boots and gators strapped on, ready to leap at any moment. But I simply lay. At dusk I rose and walked to the hall.
_________________

It was stuffy and all too bright in the gambling hall. I lost my sense not only of time, but of being. I became transfixed, I recall, on the spinning of the roulette wheel, the elision of red and black. I bet red every time. The numbers seemed a ridiculous blur and tho I longer to win it all, they seemed absurd. Any given number was just the barest element of a streak of colluded red and black. That red and black were distinct became itself a puzzle, a mandate of my faith. Every time red. Until I was to my last coin.

Dusty, scratched thing I'd put aside after my first winnings to pay the next days room. The same failure as the night before.

The simple pendulum swing of win/lose had left me dull and empty. Winning and losing ceased to be of interest, each play was only a further sustain of play or a step nearer its end, its finality. But the number still mocked me in their utter emptiness. No, they were multivalent, but they counted for naught in my mind. Any given number was not itself, but odd or black or partitioned into a limited group. Nor could these clusters offer me any repose. The half-hearted between lines like the dead desert land that encased us here. That nebulous floating. My mind was aghast, lost in these reveries of dry, floating and uncertain worlds. The fever of meaninglessness was upon me.

And yet the last itching coin seemed ripe for meaning in its dread. Uncertainty would itself mean. I could force meaning onto the dumb coin. Even floating between the lines could take on meaning if only I were willing to stake my life on it. For surely, this last coin lost would cost me something like my life. If not killed outright by my former creditors, the desert would with all ease consume me. No gentle soul to be found in this place, nor religion.

No, in fact. No. The coin must certainly be my death knell. There are cliffs not far from here, an hour's ride perhaps. Surging waves of a mighty and vast ocean. If the coin is to mean it must mean certainly. I cannot simply dry out in the desert, where chance again could thrust in front of me some meek help, some brief respite. Respite which ushers in certainty, floating and all of the inbetweens.

No. With this coin, I wager my body to the sea. And I will go tonight. I will go on the instant. A cabman might refuse me, but I must certainly be able to steal a horse. And meaning will meet me at the water's edge.

I set the coin on double zero. The American singularity. The western edge of the world. The last bastion of civilization pushing ever further. I couldn't help but be bothered that zero was of the same value. But oh, it wasn't. No. Zero, while free of odd and even, of black and red, was only still a number, a thing. It had its place in a certain logic. Double zero was outside of logic, an excess of desire to be more. More nothing. Absurdity itself. If I were to be castigated, I would be so at the furtherest remove from calculation and logic. I must put myself out on the cliff already. And see the swelling waves already out in the distance that will break only after my body on the rocks. Waves that, calamitous, will supervene my own demise.

The wheel spun almost before I was aware of it. And its spin did not seem to stop or to slow. My breathing was quickened and shallow, I'm sure, tho to me at that moment it seemed the very pulse of the beating world. I was caught it the spin of the wheel, the meaningless blur of red with black. But their lack of meaning now held nothing for me. Their blur and wash could mean nothing, it was the æther in which I lived, but it could not compare with the illogical finality of my senseless numbers.

And when the slowly came from somewhere, my head felt fit to burst. The lights of the room spread throughout my vision, collided with each other as spilling water or blood. Sounds too coalesced into a senseless hum that filled my head. As the ball dropped, the wheel continued its cycle. Zeroes, yes. But how many, I couldn't say. The numbers began contract and spread in my vision. Doubling and singling themselves with my breathing. Nothing would sit still, everything was movement, creep and blur. The light was overwhelming, blinding me until the thin white boundaries of the numbers themselves began to recede.

And suddenly I knew I was in a swoon, about to fall into a fit. And it was all light.

III.

This morning I was woken by Mariana dabbing a cold towel on my forehead. She had been by my side throughout the night without a minute of rest. Her fretting embarrassed me once I had regained enough of myself to feel embarrassed again. She had seen me early in the night beginning to gamble at the parlour's tables. I hadn't seen her then, but had not expected to either. She tells me that she ignored me until she saw that I had taken up drinking champagne. Her concern piqued she kept her eyes on me the rest of the night.

My own recollection is fuzzy at around that moment. I've written of this experience, of the swelling light and noise as the play of the table consumes me. I have still in the clear vision of the moment prior to my collapse. All this, but nothing remains of the world about me in these memories. I know nothing of the room, its people or history. They simply all bleed together in the approach of the moment. And even before they are meaningless window dressing, a babbling cacophony. It does not surprise me that even Mariana would remain simply an element of the mise en scene.

I do not, however, recall the champagne. It is as if I were drunk before even partaking in it. Marianna saw me stand in the midst of my final bet. I knocked against the patrons next to me. I dashed several drinks from the cart behind me. I careened downwards toward the floor, carts and stairs crashing with me. Some of the players must have laughed at the comical drunk. Some ticked their tongues in disapproval. But I was not drunk. Or, if drunk, that was not the cause. I have, I am victim of, the falling sickness.

Marianna had me taken back to my rooms and has kept watch over me since. Once I was able to rise she set me down at my little table and made us tea in the samovar. We sat together for quite some time silently. She judges me is all my mind can tell me. And yet when she does speak it is only to comfort to me, to make me forget to fit and the fever that proceeded it. Tho it is hot here, the tea is a comfort that reminds me of our old lives, of quiet rooms and the daily motions that propelled us through them. Marianna talks of our middle west town, reminds me of my mother, long dead but always near, as Marianna says.

...{more}

It is only late in the day that she can no longer keep from me the rest of the night's events. How easily she recruited others to help return me to my room. How I was still to have a room destitute as I am. How she has provide me such fine tea and biscuits. My spin had won. And I had not fainted at that moment, but bet again the same. And spun again. And once and twice more still. And each had won until a fifth spin still the double zeroes. It was then that my faint came upon me. All those spins I had been within a vacuum, that pulsing breath of one or two zeroes, lost in their blur. I had, in that time, staked my life five times and each time been given it back. But none was enough to convince me in that mad state. None until my very body refused more. I went to ground. And Marianna had me brought to safety.

All this day with me and not a word. Not a single sigh to tell me that I was a rich man, that she was the aide of a wealthy man. No. Just her humble being. The same girl form the town that had always been somewhere around to help my mother nurse me through these fits. What miracle this? She must be a saint. And I must be some more sinner tested, but still protected.

_______________________

Having rested the whole day only to find out that I had thousands awaiting me, I was brimming with energy. The world became a frantic rush of exuberance. My body, however, was still weak from my fit.

"Marianna! My dove, we must get out into the night. We shouldn't waste a minute more here in this shack. My angel!"

"You amaze me. Minutes ago you were in your sick bed, a puddle of a man."

"So I was. But I've been made anew by your care, by your words! We must not tattle on any longer. There is a world out there for us seize. We must accept what life has set before us and exalt in this moment. Come, out we go. If the night is cold for you, we will buy you furs! If our hearts remain cold, we'll drink champagne!"

"Please, we can't. You need your rest. We cannot simply return to that world which has caused you so much ill. I cannot come with you if it is just going to be the same scene again and again."

"Marianna! You must come. You have nursed me from the brink. My sweet village angel. You must. You have bound yourself to me in your love, your care. You must have finery. A night's escapade. You must live with me here. We will remake this town in a single night. No longer a burglar of sad souls, but a carnival to fete the lightest of souls!"

"I will come, but only to keep watch on you. Only for a meal."

But already I was scurrying her out of the room and into the night. The night which was indeed too cold with cold clarity of light which only the still desert can bring. A silence too. We were at an outpost at the edge of nowhere, far from the slowly growing villages of our middle western home. Had I brought Marianna out to this desert with my magnetic force? Had a coaxed a simple angel to this deadly edge of the world?

The sound of the casino sat emergent in the distance, a small patch of light at the end of a well trod path. Its pulsation caught my eye, seemed ripe for the fresh made carnival I wished to force upon the world. No, not force. Simply show. Embody. Become. My love could open up the latent possibility of this joy. Like an earthquake pulling apart the dust below us and easily immersing us in the life that waits just below our feet, always eager to come upon us.

For now, we will eschew the casino. Marianna's concern ruins it to joy. She cannot see how all the joyful engergy could come to be out of just a pit of sorrow. But the two are brethren! They are of the same nature one gone good, the other bad. For now, however, I must show her what I mean, I must show her the joy this fortune can make of the world.

On the quiet side of town we find a little parlour. Its men seem already to have word of me for better or ill. I sent the boy to find a furrier. And set the rest to work on a nice hearth fire and a large repast.

Simply my words sent the room scurrying, awoken to action. An exhilarating feeling. A great change from the shutter of loathing when you enter a room as a destitute man, that tensing of muscles that anticipates some dread interaction, some small but painful inconvenience. But ah! Reactions both. I see now the web of power between us all. The little strands to link us, good or ill, to all men. Like a pulsing change across a filament I felt my own effect in the room. These men, Marianna, this entire town were my community, my brethren. I owe more to them in this moment than I owe my younger self or any future version of myself I can predict. In every moment that passes we enact the continuance of this community. Simply by not killing each other, by not giving reign to our baser instincts, we have become a family. Tenuous tho it may be.

These revelations ignited excitement within me. I could scare remain in my seat. Marianna beside me looked tired.

"Champagne. We must have champagne. Marianna, you must celebrate with me. But no my dear, sweet angel, not what you think. You think me an excited plutocrat, revealing in his wealth, testing what new pleasures it will afford him. But no dearest one. I believe I finally understand you and your goodness. I believe I have been awoken to a true faith. To a love of man which can know no limits or bounds. It is our glorious connection in all things. These are my brothers. I don't command them as an emperor, but ask them to produce the marvelous world that can be between us."

She only canted her head at me like one would to a raving man. I was excited, that is true. I had stood up from my chair as I spoke. But now I kneeled before her and clasped her hands.

"Oh, Marianna. I know that I'm raving. But you know what I say is true. All my life I've scorned your kindness because I couldn't understand it." Weeping into her hands. I wanted to smother my face in those delicate hands.

"No. I must be honest. I hated her kindness. I hated it and feared it. You brought me to rage with those forgiving eyes, lingering on me in silence. Filled with forgiveness that could only speak to me as guilt and pity. But Marianna, that means I must have always understood you. I knew the power your forgiveness held and I couldn't accept it. But now, but now! Everything is so clear before me. We are all brothers! But Marianna. You sit there so silent and shocked. I know I rave, but this is revelation. For all your knowledge, for your pure knowledge of this love, you neglect one thing! This knowledge must open up the ground beneath the world. The world must shake and tremble with such knowledge! Men cannot be men as we know them. The world not the world. And this be true. How can you sit there with sad and loving eyes when you know such things?"

She spoke to me gently, but I cannot recall the words. The gentleness in her voice reaffirmed my knowledge ten fold, a hundred fold. Each word a cascade of exponential growth in my pure faith. And it was this purity that made clear to me the situation. I have been a monster my entire life. Marianna an angel. The purest good I have ever met. But such being can never be the instruments of revelation. They who know all can only transmit in these intimate settings. I. I, the transfigured one, malicious and cold, can feel the igniting spark of goodness so clearly. I can understand what full transformation must mean. I can tear the ground for revelation because I have experienced that shattering.

"...be calm." Her speech concluded. Having understood so clearly my purpose, I sat and composed myself.

"You are right Marianna. You have always been right. I am calm now. I had been caught off-guard by these understandings. I have let myself get too excited by them. Let us eat and celebrate the new world I feel opening before us. I can be a good man as I never thought possible. And I owe it, Marianna, all to you. We must celebrate tho. The beginning of this revelation is joy."

The boy had returned with an oversized seal fur coat proportioned for general, of some ancient slavic combat. I bade Marianna wear it anyways. Tho sheepish she accepted and looked a silly, tho much warmer girl. And so we were feasted in the warm light of a small wooden room with fire all around.

"To the transformation of wicked men, Marianna!"

______________

These rambling aren't incidental. I was greatly carried away from myself in those moments. And I must confess no less now as I write them. I feel each new revelation over again, alive with all that same power. But now each rings in my ears with shame and failure. I have looked deeply into the truth and have acted a fool before it. My face blushes to think of it. But I cannot quail from writing it. My current sorrow must tinge the telling.

As we ate our meal, Marianna tried repeatedly in delicate little ways to calm my wildest ecstasies. She quoted to me small fragments of scripture, spoke on the quiet soul in solitude. She tells me that what is a flood now must be tended on its ebb like a open candle frame. That the barest breeze might extinguish it later on.

Of course this sounded fantastic at the time. I could barely escape the roar of truth, let alone image it in wain. I laughed at her. A joyous laugh, but I laughed into her face, into her kindest sympathies, her sweetest attempts.

I had begun drinking champagne. I called the patron over to us and insisted he and his staff join us in, that he bring more drink for us all and cards. Soon, I know not how time began to sway and shimmy, we had transported not a small portion of the casino's life into this small tavern. I sat upon a dais to one side of the room with a small table one it and watched as the people I had called caroused around me. I felt in them all the glorious life and community I had imagined possible. But I was getting drunker. And soon I lost the tread of this idea and was simply awash in the celebration.

I began to stake on the cards more than I could have imagined having a night before. I was, however, also staking plenty for the hands I played against. The money leapt from me as it does for all who are not made for it. I was happy to dispense it around me, to watch the circuits of communal connection come alive in the transmission.

Feeling lusty and full of froth I called over one of the girls. She practically leapt up onto my arm and seated herself on my flank. The waves now were crashing around me. All were hearty and raucous. I soaked it all in from the center no longer sure of anything but that this immensity of energy was wonderful and awful.

For a moment only I remember Marianna and searched the room for her. She must, quite reasonably, have sunk away from the great debauch. Failing the find her, I returned to the girl on my arm, the game and threw myself headlong into the spree.

I had, however, already lost my head and could remember or control a thing. I must have spent my winnings twice over even before that moment. All those glorious filaments burning with filial connections, I was poisoning moment after moment. What I thought was building a faith between us, would turn only to enmity and death. It sprung all from only this chance winning and could have no life beyond it.

All this I couldn't know. But would strike me when I woke upon my floor still full in the middle of the night. My memory began to return shortly after waking. I'd made it back to my room, but not without dragging the fete in with me. The calm little room was destroyed. I could recall only that eruptions of violence had broken the game almost simultaneously. That I was pushed to the center of it all. Called upon at all angles to know what happened next, not resolve all troubles, to pay tabs. I was drug into the street. Throw, scorned, laughed at. The violence had not banished joy, but dyed it a new malicious shade. I was beat joyously. Stripped of anything valuable as a silly game. Eventually they moved off to the casino as a rabid pack of animals. With a thirst I had whet. With an evil, evil energy.

I too must have retained that dispirited essence. My room was in shambles. I must have entered it like the most violent fool. Whether ecstatic or wrathful I know not. But I had awoken on the couch, still dressed head pounding and heart aching. And still this witches' hour surrounds me. 

______________

It will be worse when I do as Marianna says and let myself believe that there isn't any past waiting to catch up with me. As yet, I can't begin to imagine such a thing. At my heels always these villainous things of my life, countless treacheries dog me. And while it seems like simple existential woe, self-castigation in direct proportion to my unrepentant life, I still can't believe that there aren't real flesh and blood creditors waiting around ever bend.

And I am not a paranoid. There are indeed creditors and many. Each, I'm sure, dreaming of some special pain that can serve in place of unremunerated payment. But my own desire to punish myself causes me to doubt their logic. What could hurting me, even crippling me do to me? My own pain and suffering cannot by a measure replace any harm I have done. I know, for I suffer as much as possible already. And yet I am myself, this same stream of days that leads me endlessly into these sprees, to my every collapse in heat or passion or fright. Every new day perhaps I am set again before the altar of my own forgiveness. I am free to accept this unutterable freedom, to become something new entirely. I burn to be rid of these weights a tow and move off unhampered into that new day. I know my weights to be both dauntless and naught. I could drop them on an instant and run off to love Maria forevermore spotless.

And yet. Again the stagnant day buzzing with desert heat. Again I am before myself in the glass, my pale and scraggly face. I sit too still hoping to hold myself, but already I know I cannot go out to face that night. Out into the sport of it all, drinks, lights, women and most of all the tables. Each offerer my precisely what the day cannot: a chance to finally lose myself entirely. What in the day is a silent weight that I can float subtly above and yet am tethered to, in the night is raucous and careless stuff to be flung aside in one motion. But all that is lost to me now. All a thin illusion I can no longer grasp. I am too failed even for sin. There is no joy to sustain that fragile lie.

Perhaps I will loose it only in death. Perhaps the cliffs are the only portion which can meet my needs. Certainly not some creditors first. Certainly not a sister's scorn. Tho a duelists pistol shot has a certain elegance to it. Tho the ball could tear carelessly through non-integral flesh and leave me a sad and even weightier mess.

No, the cliffs are the things. The ocean's bigness.

IV

After last night's scandal, I escaped to the coast. It is some ways on, but I used the last of my winnings to hire a cab. He left me at a coast town with a gruff "good riddance." I suppose he thought I would throw myself from the cliffs. And truth told I wasn't sure myself that I would not. I was in a panic, certain all was ruined for once and good. Marianna couldn't see me after that scene. I could scare imagine seeing myself.

The town was dark but for a single post lamp left burning at town's edge. Still I crept silently feeling myself a vermin, a villain in the midst. On walking I found the town less saintly than my imagination had it then. Perhaps on the edge of nowhere a town like this was built as an outpost for miscreants. Still, I kept silent and slinked past. On the coast, I indeed found cliffs lapped by the might ocean. A fatted quarter moon stared me down, lit me against the high grass. I stared. i stared until I stopped my not thinking. The guilt, rage, mistrust were all a haze and a cloud, a dark disastrous thing filled to the brim and ready to push me from my perch, collapse me into the black waves, into the rocks that broached the water's fragile surface. But not thinking became a silence all at once. The beat pounding of the waves was more relentless than I could be. they bested and broke me. I couldn't crash at their feet and mean anything at all. There wasn't to be a crash that would change a stitch the action of those fierce waters.

The ocean, alive, comes at you. Its surges are always toward you, a just barely contained force. And yet its continual motion hides nothing. It is always vibrating with its infinite power. How could this not be our original source? If not literally, it must speak to us as our metaphorical home, initial chaos, full of force, power and life. How could dirt feel like our home? Are we such nothing to ourselves that we take dust as our kin above water? Who has ever felt in their in most depths that still? Perhaps a goal to achieve, but certainly no innate resonance. And to leave all animus to god's breath? No. The waves are clearly home for us. Even if home is being torn asunder. Especially.

Soon the colder early morning broke my reveries and drove me back. I nestled into a dry pine needle bed beneath bastard redwoods.

I awoke to swift kicks to my ribs by the same curmudgeonly cabman. He held a thin cigar in the corner of his mouth like a menacing factory. The kicks were, however ugly their bearer, not intended to do more than wake me.

"Quit, quit. I'm up. I paid you fair." But he had nothing to say to me and simply settled his coat and spun around, revealing Marianna at his heels.

"There's your prince miss. I'll be at the tavern. Send for me when you're ready to depart." He spat the ground, but then looked sheepish before the lady.

And then at once she was down at my side clasping my hands and weeping into them. "Forgive me. I didn't know you'd left. I didn't know how you were. How it was. I should have seen you. I'm so sorry."

She wept and I, amazed, couldn't speak. For all I wanted her to understand, to forgive me, she couldn't be to blame. Her perfect love, I couldn't bear. Her perfect love which could cover me, but never understand. Everything, but understand. That one fragile thing. Terrible, terrible knowledge leave me be. Never let me be.

"Peace, Marianna. You cannot weep me if you do not know me." I said with a rancor impressed upon me that I felt, but knew to be alien. But still she persisted. If knowledge was indeed the issue, she cared not a whit for it. And I? What have I ever cared for knowledge? There is no knowledge in the game, no logic that can dissuade the hand of fate from dropping upon you.

[more]

But Marianna would swallow me as the sea. More than the sea! There is nothing in Marianna but good. Undiscerning good that cannot love a good man more than a villain. That cannot distinguish the most vile spree of excess from the penitent man begging just a moment of solace. And what in the face of that can a man be?

And on she wept like one having committed a terrible wrong. I look at her now, in a single instant. I imagine more men would hate this women. That a man must hate an innocent that weeps for the depth of sin. Her guilt in the face of a spotless life makes plain the immensity of the abyss below the sinner. The cavernous pits are never so real or grand as in the sight of the self-condemned innocent. And I, a rake, will burn, extravagantly, torturously. This is the emotion the martyrs call upon us. It calls fear and the depths of hate. Even without thoughts of hypocrisy. No, we only think the martyrs to be self-congratulating hypocrites after. Only in their absence brought my violent death can we tell ourselves safely that their love for themselves drove them to do the ridiculous. But never in the face of them. Only hate.

And yet I felt nothing but a deep sadness looking at her now. A sadness touching at its depths a kind of exultant joy. More than peace, something complete. My thoughts of knowledge, my thought in total, meant nothing next to this feeling of entirety.

I couldn't speak. But sunk to my knees and wept with her. We would stand eventually and return to our rooms. I record this now still in the thrall of that moment. My little candle flicker and the steam off my tea move in a sort of synchronicity with my quill. Joy that is more than peace. And I know not what thoughts.

V.

Just after the false dawn we were in coach heading north. I battled still with the idea of running away. But Marianna assures me that it isn't so. The town we leave has drunk my blood, but I owe it no more for the price. She paid my day's let on the room before she left this morning. Gathered her small belonging, for I have none.

To the people of that town, I must seem a rake. Dashing off with my millions and a frail young girl under my spell. Never. But too long I've been compelled by the images I must strike, by the weight of my associations. Too long I've been driven, headlong into any event that could sunder those ties. Even within myself! Preying for the duelist's ball!

But really the reverse of such wagging tongues. An angel whisking me away heavenward, beyond all past ensnarements. But where can she be taking me? Where might I find a land which separates me from myself, the bearer of all these ills?

Where all I see is a man fleeing his problems, Marianna contends that I am free. That I may be whatever I wish from this day forward. Or again, a new man tomorrow and yet again tomorrow. That no damned history must travel with me town to town.

Sitting in the couch with the soft hills and scrub oak surrounding me, I cannot bring the last few tumultuous days full into view. My mind is fluid with the events and each will pass me in its turn, but I can contend with the whole yet. The landscape itself seems to affect my capacity for reflection. Dull dun colored hill that swell and cap and recede again into further hills. These are not the Sierra crags that inspire heights and limits to the mind. The very ocean—this morning seen thrashing like a cage beast beneath angry cliffs—is now a vast and distant glass. Its black-green etching a sorrowful distance.

Marianna is a Christer. I spent my youth laughing through my teeth at her type. I had wit and luck and saw no truth in such talk. But her faith in me through these upheavals carries no logic I can discern apart from that of a Christer. She has a reverence for the quiet I have never been able to muster. Quiet could stare me down in half of a minute. Her patience is unparalleled. She has saved me with her patience.

And yet, tho my very soul has been stayed from the brink by the force that could only be a Christer's, there is no Christ for me. How interesting that truth feels as it simply reveals itself with such lightness. As if faith were not an agonizing battle fought for millennia. And perhaps I am, in fact, the beneficiary of this long struggle. Who can, the first truly free Western man in a dog's age, simply have no Christ.

What have I then? After these revelations? These self-inflicted lessons? After Marianna's faithful aid? I have yet my own truth. These hills that pour past me now, experienced—pouring—by dint of man's invention, but here for no cause but their own long personal histories. That I too am a part of those long histories. Subterranean undulations. The ocean before. The cliffs. The spree. The table itself! All those heights from which I so perilously have toppled. They are my faith and have shown me my truth. Hard spent on truth, I go now to find truth in calmer climes. But for pain, they are no less true.

Marianna's Christ watches over me still, as all faith lives in the world through the faithful, all acts through their actors. But for me there is only Marianna. My little sister, my little soul. I have felt endlessly guilty above all things for entwining her in my own desultory path. I could never have wanted my life for her. I have begged her countless times to free herself from me and follow where her virtue my lead her. And she has laughed in my face! Laughed with sparkling eyes and a joy I cannot canvas that I am precisely where her virtue must lead her. Finally I see that I cannot be guilty but for my own life, indeed that there can be no guilt before her at all. I can only hold my guilt for myself by myself. This is her great lesson to me. If I am not guilty before Marianna, I can be guilty before no man. For I have never loved nor wronged any person as I have her.

I can only close these notes by staying that I hope I might recall revelations made at the precipice also in the lolling hills. That tomorrow I can bring down the jam and bread to make a meal for my family or any other with such knowledge.