Crouched on my Eames chair staring at the television all day. A few inches from the screen. Flickering details. Devouring my favorite brand of cigarettes, packed in a colored plastic hardbox. I am aroused. My wife lounges in Chicago. Secretly screwing the girlfriend next door. My ____ too big for her. Or is it the color of my hair?
Tasty scenarios arrive via email at the cultural center. The cell phone rings sporadically. Its heavy breathing my lullaby. In the thick air of nighttime metallic acid, I somnambulate. My assignment shows up on Wednesday: execute the fisherman.

snake in the forest
the blood pimple of australian
flaming phallic cactus spotting the desert
love on the sidewalk

Years later. Cruising. Hitchhiker by my side. Big American Car. Slinking through Iowa. Corn blocking the sun. Perambulating via Nebraska. Wheat rotting the air. The shimmering asphalt mirage. Cruise control narcosis at 160 kilometers an hour. Sunyata. Motels filled with agitated travelers wearing polyprophene shorts, gas masks and wraparound orange-tinted sunglasses. We surf the radio. Stoned on religious stations, especially preachers like Dimitri Diamond, who offers a vial of authentic River Jordan water for every $ 100 donated to God’s righteous cause.
Few truck stops remain along this lonesome prairie trail. Mostly multinational franchises, soiled formaldehyde carpets and countless massacred insects of every hue, shape and design. At the 100t Meridian, along Highway 80, I pull off the blacktop to inhale a cheeseburger, fries and chocolate milkshake. My hitchhiker stuffed in the trunk, following orders. The tallest highway sign in the world festoons this ghost town, advertising everything and nothing. Nearby the dilapidated museum of its missing son, the American painter Robert Henri.

two chairs copulating
sitting white suit angel
jumping monkey/ forest at sunset
palm trees on fire

Memories before. Springtime in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Verdantridges. Sunsets kissing alpine meadows. Sybarite mountain goats. I hole up in Estes Park: the hotel where Kubrick crafted The Shining. Sipping blue agave tequila beside the 1920s swimming pool a blanket defending my sun-chapped skin from the slap of the crisp breeze. I catatonically flip through Vogue, Elle, Dazed and Condfused… On a Saturday, after a four-hour meandering hike to the top of Long’s Peak, I unearth assignment # 3567. Liquidate the forest ranger of Campsite Elk Horn.

polar bear strolling / trees at sunrise
glowing swimsuit / jelly fish levitating
forest in the mist
metal palm trese / the empty whiteness

In another place. Seasick passenger on the dinghy between St. Maartens and St.Barthes. Engines rattle gurgle pop. Our spit of cork caresses the monotonous turquoise. No sharks kissing. Only the void. Docking requires precise maneuvering to avoid the prick of coral reefs. Stranded in a 1990s resort infused with Mediterranean cuisine and staffed by the alienated local populace, I eat sushi somewhere else eight times a day. The ocean waves too choppy for swimming. The surfers congregate at noon sipping Mai Tai’s and smoking hashish. I collect color photo brochures detailing the dismal tourist attractions of this paradise, throw them into the wastebasket, promising myself to rent a sailboat and fish for marlin. My next target. Someone who scurries daily at 6:20 in the morning between points A and D. There is no B and C.

wet haired girl packed in a chevy
dog on a chair
strange bird / blue borealis
red plants in a pattern

The grimy streets of mid-summer Cairo. Posters of Egyptian movie stars repopulating the city: girls and boys bleached blond and bikinied. Suffocating pollution baking the pores of my skin.Dizzying call of the muezzin. Garish Tutankamun’s mortuary statues. Stale roasted peanuts and fresh cold beer at the Nile river’s edge. These are a few of my daytime things. Spirits hovering about the alleys. I meander the City of the Dead by moonlight. Innocents and not, slumbering on rooftops. My hotel daters to professors from all over the world excavating treasure at the pyramids. I study the one who specializes in quantifying the migration patterns of the lotus and the serpent.
In the casbah, during the evening’s musical revue I quaff the heavy perfume of belly dancers, sticking my nose underneath their gyrating hips and undulating tummies. I wait a long time for my next assignment. And it never comes.

sign of happy man eating
blond taped to a naugahide truck
stars sparking the night
plastic sheep / puffy clouds

I terrorize my Parisian waiter. He quivers each time I grab the next cold brown dish. It is dangerous to eat this stuff.You’re to poison me I exclaim. He despises my gruff dialect. Thinking me a plebeian. But I put the stars in the firmament. In a very deep repose.
A nondescript office, the color of beige. What have we here? Me in my white lab coat. Scientist of systems archeology. The study of fragments. Images. Answers. Emptying out all their objective and subjective. Detective story. Uncovering and covering the clues. I press the wrong button on the phone bringing the emergency medical crews to my door. Something wrong with you? Digging in the backyard of the Stockholm cottage. I never ask why. Related to drugs, war, love? I take out the local tribal leader.
Flashback to the hotel on the beach Punsan. Confused karaoke, angry promises, sloppily eating octopus soaked in brine. Washed down with a slug of fireworks on the sand. My job: find the cook in the large tower restaurant. Instead I meet my end.