* * *

And then I am in Chicago and I can’t sleep for months and I envision a father and son stuck in a dormitory established for the refugees whose houses have been destroyed in our rotten carcass economy. There are soldiers guarding the dormitory, which is in an abandoned health club. And there is a boy wailing with rotten teeth and he is begging for someone to yank his teeth out and eventually a doctor appears and gives him morphine and pulls his front teeth out; this image is confused with the image of the boy being poisoned by another doctor; the father confronts the doctor who poisons while he is sewing up the wounds of an anonymous body beneath him.

And then I hear:

“Look, there are men here who are instructed to abduct, men who are instructed to rape, men who are instructed to steal, men who are instructed to offer false kindnesses, men who are instructed to rip out hair, to burn, to smile, to tie up, to flatter, to stab, to spit and to feed. I am instructed to poison.”

And as the bodies in Chicago come and go between the concrete of the dormitory floor and the mud of the next world, they murmur from one voice to another. Cover me up, say the voices in the mud: Are we well covered up now?

You are well covered up now, you are well covered up now.

But really they are not covered up at all.

* * *