He closed his eyes and remembered the Catacombs under Paris and all those skulls and all that death and he had laid down on his back on a bed of bones, high on mushrooms stairing up at the arch vaulted ceiling, watching the shadow’s play against the ribs of the arches and it occurred to him all in a moment, that he was Jonah in the whale staring up at the inner gullet of a great fish swimming under Paris and that further more, that signature stroke of Roman technology, the arch and the key stone were nothing more than the ribcage and the vertabrae turned over on its side… It was so obvious. Why hadn’t other civilizations seen it? Hadn’t killed big enough fish maybe… still, leave it to the Romans, he’d thought, to turn carnage into an urban infrastructure… all that water all that sea all those aquaducts and ampitheatres born out of a ribcage like Eve and he had read Moby Dick out in the deserts of Utah and Arizona and Nevada, while camping out in the National Parks. He’d actually started the book at Moab and was struck by how it sounded like Ahab and on a rafting trip past red rocks he’d heard the guide talk about Uranium and the Manhattan project and how it had all been mined out of the red Moab earth, the color of an Indian. The rest of the trip, reading as the sun set against the desert stones, next to a juniper fire with a can of river cold Budweiser, he had imagined he could see the whale breaching white above the horizon line like Shiva in the moonlight. At Lake Powell by the Hoover Dam, he started trying to write a novel… Not just any novel, “A Great American Novel” It was set against the backdrop of Las Vegas and contained the central image of a great pigmentless fish that had been living deep under the Moab stone in an enormous underground aquafer. The Americans had accidently woken it up and it crawled out of it’s cave… A mamal, it slouched arcross the dessert like a great walrus towards Los Alamos and beyond. He’d never gotten much past the third chapter, but the image came rushing back at him as she talked about being a cave salamander.
“I should try to finish my novel,” he ejaculated.
“What? What novel? You have a novel?”
“Unfinished… I started one after college…didn’t everyone?”
“No. Everyone has a screenplay… or an internet start up… How old are you?”
“Ageless and all knowing,” he said. “Call me Ishmael.”
“Just don’t call me late for breakfast.”
I digilloged a cover from Martin McNichols with this hand written poem by Sonja (with a nod to T-Rex) and the “CONFLUENCE” still from her L.A. video clip.