Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 10:15:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: g/m no sex  "Stair Steps"

Stair Steps
    By
Timothy Stillman

(Dedicated to Henri in ennui and to Omar for introducing me to him in his
plight---alas)


Stair steps, I remember. And flanks of boys walking up them into stars of
the sky as if there was one haunted, haunted reminder of other winters and
winter winds, a child's cough, a momentary hesitation, as though the world
were gone wrong, but that only my imagination of animation. The night was
made of sable and lack of finesse as though the boys under their skins had
organs that played different music, that touched to little more than
spectacle and the blind did not see as did neither the sighted. And they
walked upward, as if dancing in solemn on a slimly on a pencil edge, the
sides of the world sharp and sheer and downward into forever. Their heads
were bare as they. Their hair was long and looked unclean. There was grime
on their bodies, and hands did not hold railings that angled at a
slant. They might be another world gone wrong or some song that was a
momentary tarantella in someone's head before the composer rested it away
from that someone, put it in his own head and thus ossified it forever,
giving up even its skeletal remains never.


There was no music, or voices or laughter or cutting one or ages or history
or past future to know sooner or later they would look back on, there were
all the skin colors in the world, this or another, the eye hole fabric
filled one pattern or another, as it seemed the skins of the boys were
prattled on by some uncaring god who gave never as good as he got and
thought there should be a contentment in them for that. There were the boys
shuffling, or not, marching, or not, along at a lonely pace, the kind of
walking through sudden winter frost, with summer still tacked so unfirmly
in his mind, a piece of territory, where the spiral staircase is immaculate
and clean and shiny like black glass. Sudden surrender, and I watching as
they devoutly, when will I stop trying to make them human,? go up those
stairs, round and round like being pursued o slow by an invisible mean hand
holding an invisible meaty thirst hammer, clocking them in motion as
underwater slow as their walking, not by rote, but each with that special
talent one hears of in Sunday School.

Desolation and night are knocks on their doors, as something wears their
cut close hearts and lends it only for a season to them, all ages, all the
shades of naught in them, as though they would like to find the stars up
there in the headless sky, to protect themselves never, to be bare forever,
to never try anything else in their lives but one more protracted glissando
into not tomorrow but to wherever they are at this second, this planet and
this planet between seasons, not one or another, and the boys are 20 in
number and their hands are on their swinging arms by their sides. No one
even pretends to be swimming in a sea.

They are here for no reason, there is no fiduciary claim on any of them,
none of them has ever been inside a: school, bank, church, home, arms of
someone who loves them or fakes it, a dream, a reality, a nightmare, a
solarium, for they are drift wood with bony knees and bonier arms; they are
not celebrities, no one is punishing them, for it seems all their lives
they have been walking up these stairs that seem sweepingly endless, for
there is only the supreme blackness around them, guided only by the bright
fevered light coming out of their sweat box hot bodies, though they are not
perspiring and they are not overly warm in the night air which is chill;
they do not know the chill, on the other hand, I do, and they do not trudge
nor is there a momentary act of boy-ness of boy antics, nothing to
momentarily break through the demure cages and say this is the animal act
me watch me and see my gyrations and shenanigans, for no one thinks of such
a thing, except me. There is the desire to get behind them as they walk
slowly one after the other, politely, with no determination, for they could
be doing anything...shooting marbles, diagramming a sentence on a
blackboard in a school room, shooting hoops, ogling girls, playfully
grabbing or grappling, getting a vaccination at the doctor's, going home,
sleeping, playing with their dog or their cat, doing homework...

--all of it makes no sense, none of it makes anything but sense, and no one
is ashamed of being naked, clothing would be anathema to them and would
kill them, even one sock put on by someone who knew how, only I am clothed
as I stand at the stair case base and look at their self-lit bodies on the
night walk on the night spiral stairs to some glassine glows up above them,
and I fear when they endlessly reach the top stair, they will reach out to
the glows that may be stars, to anyone that is, but them, and they will
jump for one and each will fall down far into pits unknown, see each the
other, but having no intelligence and no guile, will follow the boy in
front of him to his endless fall and never die for there will never be a
surface to slam into, only breathe perpetually taken away over and over and
tumbling their boney flanks and their limp penises, their cart wheeling
arms like a blow toy in a summer breeze or with a child's breath, blowing
the little yellow pinwheels flatly round and round again, and that way
death can come over and over and the blood stream will go mad in
conjunctive angles, but the heart will still most unwantededly, unwillfully
beat on and on.

 Organs would play a different tune then as I watch them ascend and yet
each boy, the furtherest one, the nearest one to the bottom of the stairs
are all equi-distant to me, close up and far away at the same time even
though there is movement in underwater cadence, there is never movement, as
I realized I've been waiting to know I am seeing them from the front as
well, and how I have ached also unknowingly to see one tiny erection, one
short moment of life in one of them, to prove they are alive, not
selflessly at all, but if I could pretend even that one of them is alive,
and by alive, I mean sentient, then that would prove I am alive, somehow,
and sentient too, and if one stumbled and fell backward, would he knock the
others down like bowling pins and would they tumble, still in mute order
and dignity down and down rolling into each other till they became a snow
mass of boys like a snowball down a hill, accumulating and the entity of
each boy overlaid with the entity of all the others and thus the end of
them in one huge mass of many eyes and vast numbers of hands and legs all
still existing in a sick joke of fate that did not even make the spiral
staircase for them specifically for it too was neutral. They are forever
the ageless age they are now, and seemingly made of flint, seemingly made
of steel for bones, the kinds of boys Fagin used times a million, who would
break your heart even as they were breaking your bones and kicking your
head in with feet of hobnails.

Their bodies do not eliminate for they were eliminated long before
their...birth...whatever that was, if ever, they walk and they are quite
good at it, though not even trying, one breathes unawares after all, so I
clap my hands in mock applause, knowing they will not hear, for now I see
they have no eyes or ears of noses or mouths, yet their colors shine bright
lights of them, their penises are wearing coats, their tits also do not
exist, their balls are not in view, still in the body cavities of the boys
who are boys because that is the word that only vaguely approximates what
they might be and I feel their warmth from their cold exteriors and
interiors and some day some century some millennia I may have to open one
or two up and feel their interior heat, for it doesn't matter, there are
more being created at the bottom stair, they are suddenly there like Jell-O
for a second, then they become like the others walking away, toward whom
they flow and follow, and the staircase spiral up, for there is always room
and no one touches the night deep and dark banister with their hands that
have no fingernails, and this is as it should be. Someone sneezes. Who and
where? I am the only one to notice. But-- the boys stop immediately and I
am momentarily afraid they will kill me for no reason. They will think I
did all of this and would be wrong, for I am in the dark as are they, but
not the darkest dark like they.

They wait. For nothing. The game is over. And without the game, then start
a new one, as they turn around, as one sprocket of a well-oiled machine,
and start walking down the spiral staircase down to infinity of below, for
infinity above and infinity below are the same, the key to the whole thing,
I stand again at the bottom of the stair case and watch them coming toward
me and watch them going away from me, I would like to scream, but they are
doing it for me, and when the last one passes me by, I fall in behind him
and discover I am beginning to have trouble seeing which would worry me in
other places other times, but does not do so here. My left index finger's
nail falls off, and I finally belong, then thoughts running out of me like
mercury out of a thermometer, my last thought, why had I been feeling so
sad for these boys? Then was sad no more. I walked. They walked. I was
suddenly naked and grimy and my bones made now of steel as the need for
food sex companionship reason sanity order left me and I was flensed, I was
safe.