A tortured sound, why did she hurt this way, and supplicate an unknown prescence? Why was she crying in the windy rain, crying out her gray histories of pain? She moaned and moned again. It seemed the only action she could manage. The wind lifted the sound and stretched it out over this barren wild land; stretched it and swallowed it and spat it out, singing. This was a song of wretchedness, a black wretchedness which she sang to the dead sun, swamped inside the wild rain.

She awoke. Her eyes bright open, and aching with fettered tears. Her eyes searching to understand where she might be; kneeling and praying in the cruel tropic rain. She was turned toward a wall, now, but this room was black with late night shadows. Wall? What wall? She stretched out her hand, preparing to turn over, and felt surprise burn up her arm like electricity as she touched a thigh. Whose thigh?

She whirled around to see a man's body, outlined brown under the exhausted sheets. Well, goddam, who is he?

Her hands know, but her mind cannot remember. This face is known by her trembling thin hands. Her fingers have memorized it, with its teasing bumps all over the cheeks and its coarse hair under the nose and chin. Her fingers and tickled and chased themselves inside the small ears, like black goblins on either side of the head. Oh hell, who is this man? She could recall no name or past that belonged to him. He was simply present, and unexplained. Her body shivers in her heart's confusion.

"What's the matter, baby. Why ain't you sleep?"

The voice is the wind that usurped god in her dream, wailing under her thoughts and carrying them away in its raw, unchained motion.

"Had a bad dream."

He coughs and snuffs and snorts, like a sick horse. Wraps his arms around her shoulders, brushes his lips against her neck and goes back to sleep.

Her throat fills with thorns and she wants to scream. The thorns prick into her life and bleed fire. Why should he comfort her in his lame-ass way? She doesn't even know his name. She mustn't awaken him again, oh no; but it would be better to move, to vanish, than scream, for she has no idea where the scream would take her. So with infinite slowness she begins to wriggle from his embrace. He is unaware.

She aches as if more than his arms are holding her to this bed; but she continues, and slides finally to the foot of the bed and breathes for the first time since he dropped back into his snorting sleep.

Her eyes are close to blind, but she can smell the contours of the room, and knows it is familiar. She knows this room in the same way that she knows the laugh creases besides the man's brown mouth. She knows she has clothes in the closet. Why are her clothes in this closet, though? And in her mind, she cannot remember having ever been in the room before.

Afraid to open the closet, or rummage in the chest of drawers, she slips on a pair of jeans and a dirty undershirt that are lying on the floor. They belong to the sleeping, snuffling unaware man. They fit her body like his embrace. They are comfortable and familiar, holding her inside their odor of male sweat and cologne. She walks to the bed and looks at him again, smelling the shirt. Yes, it is his shirt. But who is he? She feels somehow sorry to be leaving him, and with her clothes stuffed in his closet, too.

She stoops quickly to kiss a particularly friendly crevice beside his nose and then she is outside.

This is night air, open, too open, for all its vitality. This is the night air for which she had been longing, though she did not know it herself. Yet, here is nothing that takes her home; or welcomes her on a nostalgic journey to who she is. She is outside in the screeching night air; this night air choked to suffocating with all the voices of those who have forgotten their names, or have not heard them spoken yet.

A Glance in-Him: