O Drearysome day, gunny-grey and rain not drops but a fine diffuse haze. Bus window is the emergency one, red handle Pull it! Pull it! That would be a fun, a sight, if I rattled someone so he tipped back into road river Splash!
Then.
Vict.
The spect arrives no sheet, no ectoplasm and wrapped not in chain but slick black raincoat. He’s standing at busfront stiff as a hard-on and white as a bleached femur, his suit is printed in the Illustrated New Cyclopedia under the word “suit” and also under the word “square.” So ghost he ain’t, he died but I am deader, he once undid but I am a more undoer.
We were a pair, we were not even a pair we were a one, “inseparable” what they call companions so fast, as lightning. We struck twice. I knew him through ages before we knew we were young, grit-grimacing sandbox summers and a camp with an Indian name where we became blood brothers under a rite we invented.
Our eye-beams are touching, but there is no arc. Vict doesn’t recognize me, I can tell. I cognize him one because he is so changed. I saw then his shoulders eroded sixteen springs and also his wings shorn and his eye was spintry. Never saw I such a spintry one as that Vict’s eye. I made. If he won’t connect me I can lever, or if he’ll know he know but not how or who.
Some people assume I am homeless, an acceptable explanation to justify my patchworks, my lack of seams. In fact this is because I have torn out all tags, markings. Through this unseamliness I make myself noone. How much noone? Now I can test. To fool him so close like to fool myself, to hide myself from the searching eye of myself, game of hunt-the-thimble where I am hider and hunter and also thimble.
Heck-o! I cry. Hale! What devil emptied you on our green globule! But he is practiced watching ahead like to death, hearing things unremembered and not me in front of him here could be anyone. I pluck at him with magic. Victor! I hue, piercing, punctual. Where are your spoils? Have you written my histories?
(That names are formule ancient croaking spirit-mumblers knew this. (Mine is Jims, I fear not tell you.))
Vikki-vikki-vikki-vikki—!
This has gotten him. Knocked off his gutwagon he squinced, knew then he knew me but couldn’t figure how and finally admitted: Who are you thing? How have you figured me? Did we walk in a dream?
Here I mighted gun YES dummkopf and spell out our histories which he has not writ but the delicious shock of him was already annoying. A thimble is something in the shape of a human part but hardened. NO!, I say instead spittle to his nosel a little bit, You could be anyone but I know these hiddens anyway. Here is your Chinese zodiac animal and here is your favorite brand of breakfast cereal.
He is reeling but not recognizing. I feel a prick. What am I a thimble for? My needle should not poke me.
My eye has become spintry. How can he still not get? Am I that good? I cannot be noone, not really. Think. I am no some things, no Vict, no prosopragnosticator. But I am no nobody truly. I am no backwards Omen. Is he pretending? Is he me-ing? What if he is not even Vict? Friend or faux, how could he be he, and not know? Like a foundering, I list—
I know your birthday Brontë’s and I know the color of your childhood dogs which was red and black and yellow and black. I know your technicolor guitar fancies and also I know your buriedest and most destroying secrets which I will shout out now on this bus. And I gulp a big breath of air. But I am waiting for Vict to sing first, waiting for him to say the word that will speak me into existence and destroy me.