You don't remember? No.

Joseph ate his teeth. That's what his jaw did all day (&night?). It moved around, locking, grinding, & shifting, making sounds like he was eating his teeth. Once someone observed, "man you can tell when this cunt is thinking, you can see his jaw go." He could stop it, it was to a degree controllable, but once he was distracted, engaged, or consumed with something, it would start again. He wished he could take off his skin and dance around in his bones, Mr. Seward B. style. His bones made similar protests.

His tongue almost constantly inventoried his teeth. Their anomalies, the sharp ones, the wiggly ones. He was also very interested in the tastes he experienced with different cultures in his mouth, at different times of day with inconsistent hygiene. They weren't placed, but he would feel an association with a taste. Almost an emotion. Cigarettes eventually gave him an old & familiar taste. Sometimes he would try coupling cigarettes with beverages like coffee to try to re-create a taste. The challenge was in the administration, the punctuation of the cigarettes. There was also a great suspicion that minerals and vitamins and different foods lent him certain frameworks for these magical tastes.

Whenever his left hand, the palm itched, he would refuse to scratch it because it should mean that he would come into money. The problem with this was that he wondered if he continued to do or acknowledge this sort of thing that it would condition him to itch before regularly anticipated pay dates, thus robbing the mysticism by replacing it with monkey-style conditioning.

This particular Friday he wanted to throw away anything that didn't have a strong & beautiful power, wasn't imbued with happiness and start over. His management of his memories had been a recent consideration, though it wasn't a new development, in that it was often convenient & spotty. In truth, his head would rummage around when left alone and find all sorts of awkward things to show him, like that rubble lady in some movie. You know the one. Stay away from peaches & flower fields in Oz, he thought to himself. And bodysuits. Unless getting into the ocean and only when it's needed. Cover the bases.

In the video game where you are a spaceship and you shoot asteroids that move more and more quickly until they overwhelm you or you slow them down by cheating, there is a function, a feature where you can hyperspace to another coordinate. Just *Zip*, and you're somewhere else. If there was such a button, and Joseph was able to just relocate and abandon the imminent doom of asteroids with big, fuckoff memories and their ores, he had done so countless times. One of the problems with such a mechanism is that you don't know if you will end up hopelessly in front of the biggest unseen asteroid only a useless fraction of a second before you're done.

So his teeth were inventoried. And often his psyche would inventory itself as he counted and associated his teeth with his tongue. Fortunately, his teeth didn't evoke unwelcome emotions without a small effort. If he decided to go looking for things in the great heap of the Past, he could find things. Not anything that he was looking for, but random things which he could piece together with other things until they evoked an emotion. It felt to him that it was an enormous and useless crime scene, anything of beauty rendered clinical and cold, and disregarded as outside the scope of the useful. This too was not a good habit.

As he took a shower, he thought about the time in Crown Heights, one of the last times he tentatively lived in Crown Heights, on Sterling Ave, that he was in the shower, having taken a drug, a relatively harmless one, and he experienced the universe disintegrate around him, starting with the tiles in the shower, then his field of vision, then everything else until he was alone in a void. He surmised that he had died, and that it just didn't end. Even dead, maybe especially dead it kept on going. Maybe still standing / lying in the shower in Brooklyn, maybe dead, he confronted the metaphysical challenge with defiance. He may have shouted his own name, to remind the Universe who he was, and to remind himself. The bathroom window was always open, though at this moment it was not there. Eventually, the Universe reintegrated and he laughed hysterically that it had put him back where he left off. He wondered what he would have to do to actually die for good, if it were possible.

So in his shower, as he performed the loosely organized ritual of washing that went from top down, he remembered that he could actually be dead right now. Not in that he was still alive in spite of insanity, but that he could be actually dead, not alive at present. A dead entity having a shower. Or a non-existing entity. A solipsistic soap bubble. He considered how it was imperfect that all rituals had association to previous executions of the rituals, and they could not be performed properly with such imperfections. Did he have to redo, redevelop the ritual, or make a new protocol to provide sincerity, authenticity to the ritual? Or was all that comedy, a warm and playful notion from the top of his monkey skull? Fuck if he knew, but in the process whatever entity he was stopped feeling oily and sweaty and he was finished.

He met Ms. Briggs at a very dark moment. Neither of them cared. She was staying in an apartment, an empty apartment that everyone had moved out of and was welcome to him for company. He didn't have a place, just a bag. There were insects and the windows were all permanently open to the amber lit and black night & the insistent sun. There was art in the neighborhood, on shop signs and wherever, in the same colors and style of a sort of angelic flying picture. There was an inscription on the piece they had found painted on the inside of the panel where a transom may have been at one point above the door. Inside the apartment. He couldn't remember the words, but he remembered the colors of the wings. When he left NYC, she saw him off at the top of the stairs and the elevator doors to the platform in Penn Station. She was a friend. He promised that he would see her another day. He has called her parents' in the desert of Southern California and exchanged emails early on. He didn't know her email or physical address, but knew she was in Australia. As of the last time he heard from her, by postcard. She may not exist either, for all he knew. Or she may be dead, or may have always been dead. His memory of her was she as a desert moth on a moonless night. Silent & invisible, unpredictable.

He also promised himself he would return to Barcelona. At least make it back once more. If he had ever been there. There were tables of this type of obligation in his psyche, some of which he had to take at face value without supporting evidence.

In the shower in Crown Heights where he died, he remembered a conclusion of the experience being his addled head stumbling around a Poe poem. The poem is:

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

But he didn't know anything but the last four lines. As Joseph considered the poem, he was ambushed by the first time he had heard and interpreted Castles in the Sand by Jimi Hendrix. It was a precarious memory, an object surrounded by spent bullet casings and possible murder weapons all on a carpet the color of dried blood. So he disregarded the elucidation of that experience to himself, as it meandered off on a trail towards his father. Maybe the piles of memories were organized, not chronologically, or alphabetically, or even experientally. In some organic & divine calibration of category. Maybe they were.