10 - Sorrow-Acre

Exercise 10: Patterns/Used Literature/Sorrow-Acre: "Take a story you love [...] Write three different summaries of the story, in 200 words, in 50 words, and in 10 words. Let these three summaries sit [...] for a month [...] add narrative prose [...] between these short pieces of prose. Connect them to each other [...] Slowly turn it into a coherent story. 750 words."


I have chosen to work with Orphea by Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta.

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I haunt the desert, I walk, I hide beneath sand, I sweat. I find nothing, I see nowhere for entire stretches of movement. I teach myself how to float, hover above the sand so my feet don't burn. I want to find someone but I don't want to find someone but I won't find anyone. I have been here longer than I have been alive but I don't think I'm still alive which would explain that. I shout into the desert "Hello is there anybody there with water," and I think I hear somebody else shout back 'Hello is there anybody there with water." There are no echoes in the desert, I expect that I just reheard myself.

I can see footprints sunk into sand so I follow them, careful to float above and not disrupt the patterns. Shoes that could fit my feet found at the end of a trail, the footsteps change shape at this point. I can see a road, a car parked next to the road. Since I think I am invisible I shout out to the man "Are you available to assist me," and someone shouts back "Are you available to assist me." I know the man is not me but maybe I can only hear myself. Perhaps I'm suffering delusions in the heat or maybe there is a delay in the speed of traveling sound or maybe I'm just confused fucked on desert heat and sleepless bright nights. A coyote sizzles on the highway.

The man's car is parked on the curb of the road and looks like it would work if I turned it on. Inside the car is a reel to reel tape player and an empty bottle of water. The car airs scent. On the other side of the car I see a man. I will follow him:

A man in the desert masturbates in heat reaching 40 degrees Celsius. He wonders if he will die as he comes. He gets into a car and turns on a tape full of static, driving down an empty highway. He stops in a hotel room, drinks a glass of whiskey, drops it on the floor, and dreams of an accident and a woman. He comes on a photograph of the woman from his dream, then sets the photograph ablaze. Before driving the next day, he smashes his tape player with the heel of his shoe. He drives with the windows open, heat sweltering, his head throbbing in the pain of dehydration. He stops only once, pisses in a water bottle, dumps it onto his head, then continues driving. He arrives at another hotel, his final destination, where he books a room, looks out the window and waits. A car crashes and he walks outside, grabs the head of the woman from the photograph who has been decapitated in the wreck, pours gasoline on his body, fucks the disembodied head, and lights himself on fire.

I did not know that I could see dreams now. I haven't dreamt forever but I haven't slept in as long. I watched the man burn to the ground before anybody else noticed. The car accident kept the attention, I swim in the hotel pool. I swim in the pool for three days and hold conversations with myself underwater until I realize I'm not holding my breath. I must be dead but I don't mind so much because I'm still around. I can still see and feel. The water feels good but after two days it heats with the sun and I feel like if I had real flesh it would be boiling and tender.

I decide to leave the pool, but I don't know where to go, so I sit int he back of a jeep until a man gets in it and drives to another hotel.

A man dreams, follows a photograph, listens to static while his car floats through the desert. He comes regularly, pours piss on himself, checks into hotels. The desert is everywhere. A woman stars in films, he has her photograph, he dreams. He watches her die, fuck her head, and sets himself on fire.

My lightness beging to smell of piss and come but I don't know if that's me or the men I keep following. I have ashes stuck in my lungs and I am not a crematorium. I want to build a machine that will give me a physicality that I can impress upon others. After watching so much death I want to feel my body die again, want to die again. I don't remember the first time. The next man I follow is the same as the others but I try to talk to him. "What is death" I ask him "what is death" he asks himself I ask myself and the is the answer I can come up with seems to be interchangeable with life.


Death: three come shots, two hotels, one woman, and static.