THE WORLDS GREATEST

PRESTIDIGITATEUR

Even though his life had not felt the actual force of mans rage, mans hatred
toward another, Zim was deeply bent inside by the weight of that violence. Perhaps he
felt it most acutely from the inside out rather than the outside in as violence is most prone
to be felt and thereby understood. He was no virgin to violence even if he had not been
so raped himself, in fact he worried that now he could be surprised and swayed by
nothing the world could muster regardless of how terrible. It seemed that somewhere in
his soul, this empathy for his fellow beings had all but vanished, all that remained of a
caring self was the alarm and horror he felt when reminded what man could do to the
truly innocent of the world, the wide eyed, speechless and confused by love animals.
Deep down, but not so deep as to be more imagined than realized, he knew that at some
future time he would have to prepare for a confrontation with this violence, as that was
the way of this world, it could be avoided only so long, despite that part of him that
believed, no hoped, that perhaps enough time would pass and this encounter with mans

inner rage would become like so many other aspects of this life: a possibility that no
longer had time to manifest. A river with no water.

Under the August stars, warm stones to his back and a cool breeze flowing over
him, Zim lay atop the highest wall of Mount Helix, the town below him to one side
anaesthetized in the four am mist, the ocean of dark desert to his other side. Three a.m.
and off in the distance, the faint glow behind the muddied hills of Mexico where a
neardistant race huddled, listened. Looking at the glittering town where he lived, the
amber lights of the streets, the white lights of the homes, the red lights of the cars making
their way through the invisible arteries and veins that gave this town life. Down below,
they make no sense, no discernable pattern. Up here they make all kinds of patterns, sign
and images, probably no one ever figured when they laid out the lights upon the ground.
He knew this town better than any place on earth, its streets, its buildings, the people who
lived there, the animals, the stores, the buildings, the potholes in the road, the trees where
there were trees, the flowers where there were gardens, the crooks and crannies he knew
as well, the spaces beneath the front porches, the attics, the rooms out back, the garage,
the tool shed, the alleys and the sudden spaces between buildings, he knew all this, knew
it well. Just as he knew this hill on which he now lay, this omphallus as he called it,
which bulged from the desert valley below, a rising mound of earth, wrapped by clenched
fingers of stone, a wall that ringed the narrow top, squeezed upon the pinnacle, from
which a bold white cross erupted into the sky.
I wish I had a smile that people believed, he thought while laying upon the wall, a
smile that naturally broke across my face, or even unnaturally as long as it was

believable, recklessly exposing teeth and lifting cheeks, a smile that you only have if you
practice smiling as a youth, learning early on to be completely unafraid to smile, to be
anxious to smile, to see every opportunity when a camera is pointed in your direction,
when a person asks for your hand, when you are presented with a cake, a present, you
respond with a broad, joyous and happy smile, practice a smile like a an actor would
practice a role until you got it down and you knew it looked the same no matter which
way you smiled every time you smiled, from each and every angle, no matter how the
picture was snapped, no matter how long you had to stand there with that expression, in
every picture and snapshot, everyone would immediately see it and say that is you, you
can always tell Zim by his smile, thats Zim alright, cant really tell it is him but you sure
can tell thats his smile. But no, I didnt practice smiling, he thought as he lay upon the
wall, instead I grew up so self conscious that when I opened my mouth I believed I was
exposing strange nubs of bone protruding through lumps of hardened flesh. As if I was
opening a gash, a nasty gullet, a gap where jagged bits were released and so my smile
became tight and closed, a line drawn across my mouth, underneath my nose, not
bringing even the slightest sparkle to these eyes, and so in every picture taken of me,
struggling differently with my smile, and in every picture I fail, and in every picture I
look different, so that no one knows me, in a group of four or more no can find me unless
they spot something familiar such as a plaid shirt I wore every day that summer and then
they would say theres Zim, I recognize that shirt, or look at those shorts, no one else but
Zim would wear shorts like that, and so this is how I am recognized and I guess that is
how I am remembered, Zim a plaid shirt or Zim a pair of sorts that no one else would

wear, not a smile or face, just a shirt, or a pair of shorts I can no longer even find, and so I
guess no one remembers me which means she will not remember either.
She told me she was leaving, he thought as he gazed at the sky while he lay upon
the stone wall, and it never occurred to him that she would offer him a reason to leave as
well. Perhaps, he should say, she revealed for him his desire to leave. The reasons to
leave here have always been abundant, no lack of any such reason, not ever. And so this
woman that he barely knew, had no real involvement with, certainly not what anyone
would call a romantic involvement, this woman, a friend maybe, an acquaintance really,
they were more like business partners, she was the vendor and he was the customer, that
was just about the gist of it, the most of it, yet this woman, this business associate, but
even that may be too strong, for all she did was serve him drink and all he did was drink
those drinks and pay her of course, for which she thanked him, and he tipped her, pretty
well, for which she remembered at least one thing about him so that when he returned on
another, a new occasion, they would have something to begin a conversation, something
to stage another chapter, albeit false and meaningless, in their relationship, in any case,
this woman was indeed the catalyst (a word he despised outside of chemistry and even
then it was a word that connoted indestructibility and there is nothing ultimately
interesting about something that never changes) that now had him thinking, had his mind
set on leaving as well. Now of course he would not be leaving with her, he thought while
laying on the wall, that of course would never happen, and she did not even know he was
thinking of leaving, nor did she probably care, her mind being full of all she had to
consider given her change in circumstance and all the aspects of life that one takes
completely for granted except when you uproot yourself and you have to face all these

myriad of things from the smallest items like where is my toothpaste to the larger items
such as what will I now do with all these hours in my life I never knew I had when I had
routines and all sorts of other ways to waste and ultimately never notice these hours of
time.
I love confrontation, he thought while he lay under the stars, that moment of
unknowing between two people when all is discomfort and fear. That moment of time
when anything could happen because you dont know what preceded this moment, the
person before you could reach for your throat, stab you with a knife, turn and run, spit in
your face, smile at you, embrace you, invite you inside and fuck your brains out. In other
words, I love my job.
Must meet two hundred people each week. Stare into their faces, invite them into
conversation, peek into their lives. Two hundred confrontations a week, fifty two weeks
a year. That makes for ten thousand and some change in encounters that last all of about
seventy five seconds each on average. Not much it seems. Indeed, it is as if we are all
walking around in the dark and then suddenly strike a match in the face of another human
being, catching them completely unawares, unprepared, without makeup, without clothes,
without warning. For the seventy five seconds while the match burns, we introduce each
other, present the problem, seek a solution, come to a decision, then leave. Pfft. The
match goes out and it is back into darkness we both go, the world too random for us to
really ever find each other again.
So in this way, he thinks while lying upon the stone wall, everyday I peek in upon
lives squalid and ruinous. Everyday I see the worst of people, the real side of people. Not
the fake and pretentious aspects you witness on the street, at the office or during a

ballgame. No, I see people how they really are, denuded, candidly revealed by the rooms
and homes they inhabit. I see what they cant hide by dressing smart or driving a newly
detailed car. And from what I have observed, I know that while many truly believe that
life is fragile, a human life is actually harder to squash than a fleas. Go ahead, console
your own misery with talk about hopes being dashed, and dreams destroyed, as it is
human life will continue, continue on, no matter what. You cannot stomp it, break it,
tromp it or kill it.
In reality, where I work and where I live, there are no dreams, neither ones to be
gained nor destroyed. Hope is a shallow daily need that is satisfied with a swallow of
malt liquor or eyes finally closing upon sleep. I have come to realize that people do not
need legs to walk, arms to pull on their clothes, eyes to see, brains to think and or tongues
to talk. Humans live with the misfortunes they have inherited and adapt to the handicaps
they acquire, and so adjust their happiness quotient accordingly. Strokes, disease,
dismemberment, amputation, pox, acne, cancer, chromosomal aberrations, neuronal
dysfunction, whatever the deformity, the infirmity, or the enormity of the grotesqueness,
humans take it all in stride. They will not die, they will persevere, carry on, in fact the
more meaningless their existence the harder they are to exterminate and the more sordid
their lot the harder they try to reproduce, that is, I mean, to fuck.
When I started this job years ago, I figured I was walking into the casual sex
emporium. I mean I always envied the cable guys and the phone repairmen, the pool
boys and the gardeners. You knew they had sex at least once a day, if not more. Their
work was sex. Their lives were sex. Knock on the door, have a cup of coffee, twiddle
around with a crew driver, take off her pants and have at it sex. Especially the cable and

phone guys, they are at a different house every time, crawling on all fours through the
bedroom, alone with the missus, yea, they have seen it all and done it all. So what could
be so different for the paperboy? In fact, I thought back then when life was more theory
than experience, that I had it even better than the cable and phone guys, because I was the
Paperboy. I was their Paperboy, the call me anytime paperboy, the hey I need you
paperboy, come paperboy come. I mean you cant do that with the be there between eight
am and twelve noon cable guy or see you on Friday next week after two pm phone guy.
The paperboy is always there and always ready to serve.
Alas, it didnt work out that way. So in my abstinence I have created theories as
to why. One is the actual word boy. Attached to my moniker, boy makes it seem that I
really am an adolescent and while that may appeal to a certain minority of the population,
there is a perception, I believe, that I dont know how to do it right, like I will shoot off
before I get unzipped, or I will have to go and tell my friends or confess to a priest or fall
in love after ejaculating in front of someone and hang around the windows at night. Even
if it wasnt the word per se, no one expects a man to be the paper boy. Not a real man
that is, with a real, hardworking penis, that is.
We glide through streets, most evenings into the night, cutting a strategic path
between deadbeat pensioners, welfare moms and working drunks, playing a numbers
game based on the probability that one out of four customers behind in their payments
will be home, that one half of those will answer the door when we knock, that one half of
those who answer will want to pay, and that one half of those will have the money to pay.
The odds dont look good, not on paper anyway, but there is a psychological edge to
factor in. First of all, only the customer knows I am the paperboy. To everyone else in

the complex I could be any number of headbangers come to collect whats due. I come
walking through the courtyard or across the nice little suburban eighth of an acre they
have, metal box in my hand with their account information clipped to the front, why I
could be IRS, gas and electric, the repro man, child support services, welfare fraud
everyone assumes the worse, mothers sitting on their porch steps stop chattering when I
come into view, gangbangers turn their heads, little kids drawing in chalk on the sidewalk
see me and dash off to warn their moms and dads, the entire world lives in debt and fear
of collection. So when I come to the door and give it a rap, I first will get that classic
look of surprise, the who me? whats this? But that all dissipates when I inform them that
I am the paperboy and I simply need to collect twenty five dollars for the past three
months. Then, then I get the smiles, the well of course, what? did I forget, how could that
be, Larry I thought you paid the paper, didnt we just pay you, how much do we owe,
really sorry about that, we love getting the paper, you are great, you never miss a
morning, I come out here at five a.m. every morning and there it is, sitting there waiting
for me, the only thing I can count on you know, I gotta have my paper, I am really sorry
about that, how about a tip Larry, you got some thing extra for a tip, here take this, its not
much but we appreciate, thought you might be someone else, Im expecting the gas
company, sometimes you just get a little behind on things you know, but to tell you the
truth, I can live without gas, cant live without my paper though, thanks and well pay it
on time next time, when is the next time, dont worry well pay next time, you wont
have to come all the way out here again, but thanks for coming, you have a great day. Of
course it isnt always like that. There are the people who have never paid for anything in
their life as far as I can tell and they are the ones who have figured out the system and

just ride it for all its is worth. I can tell these people the minute they begin to talk. They
arent intimidated by someone knocking on their door, they have learned that
headbangers are all threat and no bite, they are protected by law from harassment from
collectors, but they will listen to you, looking like they are watching someone across the
street or looking for rain, and when you are done they just kinda smile and say, Im sorry
I cant pay you right now, or I dont handle that my wife pays all the bills, or I thought I
sent that in a few days ago, in fact someone just called me, was that you, no, well
someone just called me and I told them that there must be a mistake, I have been reading
the paper for ten years and I have never had these kinds of problems before, perhaps you
need to check your records, you have, well I dont know what to tell you, I am sure the
payment was sent, but I have no way of checking on that right now, can you come back,
next week sometime, when my wife is home, usually in the evenings, after seven, but not
on Wednesdays thats her bingo night, your not going to stop my paper are you, its not
my mistake, there is something wrong with your system, I dont want to come out here
tomorrow morning and find my paper isnt here, you understand, so I hope you can clear
this up, but let me know if that payment isnt there, I am sure it is, but be sure and let me
know. Yea these people have figured out that they dont need to pay me, they know that I
will go back to the office and stop their delivery but they will call and scream at some
poor CS gal they never scream at me, they cant yell or intimidate a person in the flesh,
these are for the most part weak, pathetic people and the clerk will restart their paper
while she chews off another nail and picks another zit that has popped up due to all these
assholes that call and call her names all day long, and three months later I will have to
knock on that door again to collect another three months of dues. The best customers

though are the ones that have never missed a bill payment in their life, who feel that if
they have one thing of value in their life it is their spotless, shining credit. I knock on
their door and they honestly think that I am there to sell them a new garage door or
collect for the local mission. When I tell them that they are behind in their payment on
the paper, their faces drop as if I was a messenger that just told them their son had died in
Afghanistan. Noooooo, they say, but how could that be, there is panic, confusion,
sometimes indignation, but never at me. Sorry, I say matter of factly as I hear excuses
like these all day long, which I do, Sorry, I say, but I just go by what the computer tells
me and no payment had been made, but how could that be, where is my checkbook,
thats not possible. I love the fear and panic this brings out in these fragile beings, I can
only wonder how plain and vanilla their lives must be for blood vessels to constrict on
such minor news. But I love these people, my customers. I truly do.
I sit at the edge of two worlds, he thought as he lay upon the wall. Ghosts still
fight while I confuse the languages. Spirits still search for something left behind. Who
could have imagined such a world? Nothingness as its most identifying feature.
Timelessness its only hint of history. A landscape that has nothing to say to any of us. All
a secret. And this is paradise. All the bodies that ventured out there, sucked dry and
blown apart within days. Still fighting a war here. Not sure who is who, what side is
what. Body is where the desert and ocean come together. Body but a leatherbag of
saline. Heat breaks the mind, but water is the key to sanity. Give them a drink and the
girls will come home safe. This is where our history disappears, sucked into the abyss.
Conquistadors bore gilded crosses across the sand, seeking to merge fates. Share sex and
blood. Aunt M meet Uncle P. Suppose I should seek a darker shade. Whats the point. JJ

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wants to know. Between a mindless landscape and an unanswerable question, I grow old.
Between a body and nobody, youth spent. Wasted huh.
The desert: great nothingness. Encapsulates this place, the American spirit.

In the desert nothing moves towards order. All order towards disorder: he mused
while laying atop the stone wall. What mathematics has taught us: if it makes sense, it is
suspect. Patterns exist outside the mind. Irishman proved Einstein was wrong. Bells
Theorem: reality is indeterminate in and of itself. Burge: Simplicity is beauty. Stupid
student of his who couldnt write disagreed. What was not beautiful about an equation
that went on for pages, that it describes the world is a beautiful thing. Argument ensued:
stupid student was told to keep further discussion for another time. Simplicity: a sign that
we are at best mistaken. Burge the Barge. Unmovable. Entropy: Second Law: Order from
disorder: In the gaps of our knowledge, there may not be a god. Problem is: if we resign
to our stupidity we will start looking to plug the gaps. May stop asking: how does a stone
fall? Do we know yet? Then what do we do. What most do: Nothing.
A dogs bark. A chorus of others responds. A dropped glass. Message on a
billboard. A strangers cologne, subconscious pheromones: trivial, unknown things
become the arbiters of experience. We seek greatness out of the banalities that are our
lives. How chance occurrences produce ineluctable effects: stochastic determinism.
What happens if I take note of all things, do I change the course of history? Fart can have
greater effect than a gunshot. Earthquake in Chengdu: could my assclap have started
that?
[description]

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The world looks infinite whether you look at it from beneath an immense night
sky of stars and clouds or whether you look at it up close, you nose pressing against it, he
thought as he lay on the wall. I had never succumbed to the lure of the outwardly infinite
world, he thought, no real need to travel, see other continents, different colored earths,
fleshier palms, scarred villages, darker faces, no need to smell anothers sewage and
offal, no need to wander down strange alleys filled with rodents, emptied food tins, dark
waterseep, no need to smell strange and distant aromas, no need to test my body against
the spices, peppers and germs of another culture, no need to kiss an alien mouth, to feel
the hairless and sweaty arm, to smell the urine, to feel life jump out at you, pull you in,
under, no, no need to wander, to stray , there are always too much to see up close, too
much that could never be understood just beneath our nose, right here in this foreign
territory called home, no need to learn another language, no need to follow a Jeep up a
rugged dirt road where people lived in incestuous solitude amidst the insects of the
rainforest and ask why? no need to watch black Apollos swing machetes in the brutal heat
against a wall of sugar cane and ask why? no need to look into a barren dirt floor home
where babies play amidst flies and chickens and ask why? No need to see a man drive a
stake up the anus of a live mongoose then set it on fire and ask why? No need to see
dying people sleeping in the rain on walkways outside overcrowded hospital rooms and
ask why? No need to see a family stoned at a bus stop by a bunch of skin heads and ask
why? No need to see a grandmother bent and broken to less than four feet in height by
carrying bundle of stick on her back and ask why? No need to see dogs butchered like
pigs, hung from hooks like cows and ask why? No need, no need. It was all here, all
right here, too much was here, in fact, too much to take in, too much to comprehend, to

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understand, it required more than a lifetime just to have the patient to stand still and
observe, let alone attempt a calculus of the near and accessible, as he liked to call it, the
movement and rhythms of the neat and accessible, patterns of matter and being that took
place in each and every drop of life, every shard of existence, the details and algorithms
of the nearly attainable, as he also like to call it, for he still had not discovered, not really,
the joy of the outer, the communal sphere, the extended and perhaps infinite web of
existence, that could indeed be observed up close and within the confines of ones city,
whether one lived there all their life, or else in one's room, where one was confined, or
even in one's mind or in a single thought, yet truth has more than form, he was yet to
realize, it has more than to it that can be captured in so oblique a manner, it has history, it
has depth, despite its smooth and flawless appearance in the center, it has frayed edges,
knitted with inconsistent edges, color bleeds, fade, holes appearing, tears, seams once
invisible stretch and begin to disintegrate, and that which he did not yet understand, that
is the beauty of truth and the absolute wonderment of stupidity, where frayed edges meet
frayed edges, holes overlap, tears rip into each other, and so with such maudlin garments
we carry ourselves through life, somehow, somehow.
You arrived in Shanghai alone and following the recommendation from a
guidebook you asked a driver at the airport to take you to the Peace Hotel. With an
occasional smile at you through his rearview mirror, he drove you through the endless
cityscape, the buildings a mixture of spheres and spires and jagged skyscrapers and
curved semicircular hotels, buildings shaped like birds, like a stacks of plates, like giant
three pronged forceps, like an ocean liner standing on end, erupting like fountains,
corkscrewing skyward like some ocean shell, everywhere building cranes feeling about

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the sky like insect antennae, fluorescent lights illuminating the freeway ramps in blurred
stripes of greens blue and reds, a massive statue depicting a broad muscled Chinese hero
conquering the wind and pulling the sculpted clouds behind him as if a cape or shawl,
colossal murals of Chinese athletes now living in the U.S. looking down on historic
temples and squares with Mao like stares. You arrived at the Pudong and your driver
dropped you off in the middle of a crowd that parted only briefly when you opened the
door, a tangled knot of young girls and men that then collapsed back around you, tugging
at your sleeves, taking your hands, pulling your shoulders, come with me, you need a
guide, I make you for good time, as if you were some kind of rock star you thought, they
surrounded you, moved with you as you pushed your way to the lobby of the granite
building where two uniformed doormen finally cleared a path for you and allowed you to
enter the polished marble hotel lobby without your desperate entourage. You drank
faintly chilled watery beer and sat in a jazz bar which was right out of an old movie about
expatriates where unsmiling waiters hung around the bar until you called them with a
raised hand and a skeletal band of squinty eyed octogenarians who had lost, it seemed,
the ability to smile, an affliction perhaps of age or repetition who played without verve
old Dixieland jazz staples when the saints come marching basin street blues tiger rag the
trumpet players zipper undone showing off his white boxers each taking turns at
anguishing solos until finally they quit without notice, walked off the stage and you were
left alone in silence looking around at the couples and small knots of businessmen who
all seemed to have other agendas in this place. You found yourself consulting your
guidebook again and ended up walking a few blocks to a club for Americans and
Europeans where you merged into a crowd that spread across three indoor bars and a

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wide open balcony where young girls who spoke perfect English came up to you and
began to talk as if they were emissaries there to greet you, they were teachers,
accountants, a nurse, a stock trader, so they
said, and you went to the bar standing behind
a short messy haired man from Canada, you
would learn, who turned around with his
handful of drinks and seeing your face smiled
eerily and then said in a low yell I have never
been in a place like this, he shouted, for three nights I have been fucking my brains out
and off he want laughing. The next morning you awoke at dawn to the clatter and
drumming of construction and outside your hotel room was a vacant lot where a building
had long been demolished, on the remaining pads of concrete between fields of brick
strewn rubble some old people stood in the mist and practiced their tai chi, like ghosts left
after the destruction you thought. In shorts and t-shirt, you went downstairs with your
camera, found your way to the back to the hotel, then ventured down an alleyway that led
you to the vacant area you had seen from your room eleven floors above. The people
doing their tai chi were still posed with arms and legs moving slowly and lightly through
their birdlike routines. You began to take pictures as you got closer and when the people
saw you they stopped and quickly began to disperse. A few waved arms and hands at you
to leave. Clearly sensing their displeasure you turned back and headed up the road. In
front of you were several red white and blue tents covering the sidewalks. As you got
closer you saw that these had been erected as roadside sleeping quarters for workers. You
took some pictures of a tent where the flap was pulled aside to expose the cots which

15

were merely pieces of cardboard set on wooden poles, beneath which were the slippers
and shoes and ceramic pans that could have been urinals. Within minutes a green
military truck came barreling down the road, lights flashing, and you knew it was for you.
You put your camera down and began to walk. The truck pulled up beside you and the
man told you in English to quickly return to the hotel, there was no picture taking in this
area. You knew you had to obey.

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