He says he's going out to look for adventures
and wastes gallons and gallons of gas until he
sees something worth stopping for. He sneaks into
a construction site and, from a surveying rig,
steals a mirror that only reflects the eye of the
beholder. Adam says he's found Beauty. Or he takes
me to a playground lost in overgrown weeds inside
the loop of a freeway on-ramp. Or he leaves town
to mail an empty envelope with postage due. In
the midst of this driving around, he manages to
crash his car three times in three days.
Nothing really bad. All he has to do is take the
dents out of the right door and fender, where he
gets hit by cars on Saturday and Monday, and clean
up the blood from the guy he ran over on Sunday.
I don't see him for a week after that. When I
do, I ask him what's up. He says, "I'm painting
me."
Adam's shown me the self-portraits. One with a
tail, one with feathery wings. Both with the same
smile and devious eyebrows. They are perfect.
* * * * *
An apparently straight time line is actually a
wave pattern. Each antinode in the wave is marked
by an event repetition of the antinode before last.
The second happening is not an exact duplicate
of the first. It is a pulse bounced back, a ghost
repetition, an echo. |