surrealist exercise #3:
August 17, 2010
Joaquim Phoenix in a Dream Honouring Robert Bolaño
Joaquim was sent to escort me, in a black Peregrino,
to a triple-tiered desert complex. It rises from the sand,
he tells me, like a periscope of smoked glass, and inside
a South American paradise fit for a business man: many
chandeliers of kaleidoscopic resin, an open bar, young
women with caviar and soft roe painted across their naked
breasts as a delicate offering. The appropriate music always.
We’ll both get paid. I’m the only girl in the car, snapping
chicle with my teeth by the minute; unfolding someone’s
lost Jacob’s Ladder toy at each Exit. I’m still struggling to
understand how I got here. I wonder why I’m the only girl,
but I understand his instructions never to leave the car.
Despite the Peregrino, he looks awful. Joaquim Phoenix’s
head sits above his shoulders on a dull pivot. Like a man
in a bear costume, he has no neck. I can’t imagine him
naked, even abandoned in dreams, instead wrapped in his
waist-long dreadlocks, felted into moldy flannel. As we
drive, I see teenaged rancheros exhume a grave. I see
chunks of toilet bowl strewn across the shoulder. I see
empty Industrial Parks. I can name them on my fingers.
I see Joaquim aim two fingers at a passing car and shoot.
I close my eyes, and open them again to a grove of clouds
miming a treeline. I see an arch of amber lights blink at
the car; beyond that, the low tower.
