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myself eternally trapped within the alien sleep of wakeless,
unspeakable things.

***

Soon, I was traveling the haunted countryside, wandering
the dust of forsaken places, where artifacts of the Great
Darkness still stood, heaving with mystery. In the distance,
rising up from the mists of dawn and the green tresses of the
wandering woods, I saw one of my favorite monuments, The
Tower of Teeth. How many mouths were plundered to make
the monolith, a thing taller than any man-made structure
in the world? Here was a piece of art holding dream like
a dam, threatening at any moment to drown the world in
unreformed revelation. Most intriguing was that not all the
mouths harvested for their teeth had belonged to earthly
bodies. But the tower was as much a monument to banality
as dream, for even in the face of such proof of paradox, there
persists a belief in a solid world, a desire for the deadness of
dreams, a want for nothing but nothingness. And the tower
was but one of countless artifacts of the Darkness, a fact that
through its denial outlined the enormity of man’s addiction
to dullness. But it rode high in the grey sky, blatant, if not
altogether vulgar, tempting those who might believe in it
to question the fitness of their pragmatism. I wouldn’t let
man’s collective tediousness darken my spirits. Not today.
Around noon, I saw dust tumbling across the thickets
and heard the asthmatic wheezing of an engine in need of
repair. I emerged from the woods to see a rusted-out shell
of a bus heading toward me. It was crawling along a narrow
stretch of dirt road that seemed to move randomly about the
woodland, as though it were looking for something. The
man behind the filth-splattered windshield smiled at me and
brought his groaning vehicle to a halt.

34 | Mark Anzalone