Remember when . . . a man falls out of an airplane? Do you remember? I bastardized the title of a Barry Yourgrau collection, the first line of a Barry Yourgrau story. I lurk in irrelevance, but you saw the damn photograph yourself. I'm not talking content, I'm just talking about the cover of the book. I mean, the picture's right here for everyone to see--don't you remember?! In bookstores and libraries. Most recently reprinted on page 38 of Vol. 62, #1 of the National Enquirer, August 4th, 1987; possibly thousands of previous printings. The shutter clicked on Washington's traditional birthday seventeen years ago. I'm thinking of smashing light blue ground into white, always, always three-dimensionally. But hell in the photograph you can't tell, it's so grainy black and white. I'm not implying a damn thing. My brain is an impasto salad, and all this happened way the fuck over Tokyo. No it didn't, it was way way down in Sydney. The airspace was Australian, the airplane JAL Tokyo-bound.

The photo is attributed to a nameless amateur trying out a new lens, but that's a fucking lie! Your memory seems a bit addled, but: I do remember. I should. I was there. I took it. And then I pushed him. I pushed him and then I took a picture of him, falling, falling. Those stories and captions tell about the teenager stowedaway in the wheel well and that after take-off the wheels began retracting. All this is true. But then they say because of that and then he fell. Lies! I was there. He didn't just fall, I pushed him; wheels up their asses, he fell because I gave him a swift kick of my foot, I stomped once on his finger tips. Then, fall he did. I thought, what a great photo opportunity. Then I kicked him out. With significantly more than his imploded split-second of self-realization I followed, gracefully diving out and up and off to the side. Got it? Got it. Perhaps, you inquire hesitantly, I was following in another airplane? Helicopter? Care to go on? You don't remember a damn thing. Call me the guardian angel. Call me a mean son-of-a-bitch.

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Remember?

I was dancing, I am always dancing. My friends, they all remember me dancing. I dance like lightning, streaking through the clouds rising from the dance floor. The dance floor is less than water. Blue is my favorite color, I look good against it. See my legs scissors-kick? Now one arm floats out, limp with sensuality. Baby, I'm casting my spell. You will fall. We will dance. Do you remember the nights, all the days, days so bright we danced, dancing on and on so breathlessly clear? Surely! See how my wrist is cocked just so right now? Now. So beautiful, the brilliance to which diamonds pretend. We will twirl through blues, so deep you'll be yanked out heart and lungs. A step this way or that, what does it matter?!! You will remember. The white, you are incapable of ever forgetting. The white will be big and spacious and cushy, a bleached sofa to your tastes though not in any way you'll ever notice . . . the white haunting you forever, you with me forever. Listen to the wind whistling past your ears. To be a wild caress. This second will last longer than everything else combined. You are the eternal memory, and then splat.