Dear Sam,

Last summer in Vancouver I walked into an art opening and there he was, sitting on the window ledge—this famous Canadian. His chic glasses convinced me he was an intellectual, though he was glamorous enough to be a movie star, his shirt black, his hair wild and gray. Beside him perched a petite woman dressed in dark arty clothes, with a shoulder-length perm and a perky nose. I whispered to Lisa Robertson, "She looks like a poodle," and Lisa snapped back, "Yes, she's his poodle he takes her in to be clipped!" The girlfriend is a performance poet who does one-woman shows "with lots of cleavage." Whenever she turned her head her boyfriend would try to catch my eye. I was wearing the same red dress that figured so prominently in my Quincey story—right now it's wadded in a pillowcase on the closet floor, slated for the dry cleaners. I wandered into another room and stood with Lisa by a table heaped with lychee nuts and grapes. Mr. Famous appeared in the doorway. Then at the table. He grabbed a couple of grapes and stood there a few feet away and stared at me as Lisa filled in his details. "He hangs out with a crowd that get married a lot and when they get divorced they never speak again to the people they used to be married to." Her lumpy cranium flails beneath the full moon as she rips the transgressor limb from limb spattering the cornstalks with blood. Then he left. A few minutes later I looked up and there were those eyes again roving like beacons above the grapes, then they went away only to return again and again and maybe even again—like in every other movie on TV tonight: a bare rectangle of earth begins to undulate then a splayed hand pops out the grave is no longer a grave he never said a word to me. I watched him closely, acting like I didn't notice. Both of you and I, Sam, are fuckees positioning torso and appendages in sexy diagonals and waiting for the big thrust. It enters our nethers as a tube of funk and muscle and sprays out our rubious mouths as gossip.

A thousand bedrooms couldn't solve my problems.

Sunday night KK urged me to sit on his face: "You can be a stack of records and my tongue will be the spindle that plays them!" This image gave him a sense of power though I was the one who could bear down and smother him…tottering on the brink…when he came he said "I'm open" then he gasped "Christ, everything's rushing in!" I thought no it isn't it's just me the world as always is out there beyond your reach. I kissed his forehead his brains whirling beneath my lips a self-contained cosmos like the homunculi in Bride of Frankenstein a ballerina beneath a bell jar a lascivious king with a squeaky voice I lay in his arms breathing our bodies soft as warm butter I have no need for genitals with all these…cells.

Happy Halloween! This is the day when the ordinary grows enormous oozing slime around the edges when aliens roam the streets with too many legs and eyeballs or not enough when physiology swells within you rendering the flesh flimsy as tissue paper there is no stopping its inevitable implosion…glistening like rubies if rubies could rot it sucks you into another dimension rattling the walls corroding your moral fiber…tiny bits multiply to zillions with a group consciousness bent upon destruction pins poke out of the face of something that forgets it is dead…species meld—a man with the head of a pumpkin or a woman with a vampire's heart…the radio announcer assaults you with the tackiest Dracula accent: "Imagine if the creepiest costume around is you in a bathing suit! [Šcreepy musicŠ] The last thing you vant is to be scared of the way you look!"

In this topsy-turvy world the Dead roam the streets while the Living study them in an underground mine…a scientist feeds dead soldiers to his pet Dead, Bub, who bolted to cinderblock lumbers about in the small circle his chains will allow. His clothes are shredded his decaying flesh hangs from his bones like pink lace. Through the miracle of operant conditioning no longer is Bub an uncontrollable cannibal like the others, he listens to Beethoven through walkman headphones reads Salem's Lot. The scientist hands him a razor, Bub slowly lifts it to his face and shaves off part of his cheek. The scientist concludes Bub has MEMORY. And when Bub feels his Dead spirit rising and roars his Deadly roar, the scientist throws him the leg of a colonel which he gnaws like a pit bull. It's not the flesh he craves but the faint scent of life that still clings to the colonel's leg. A mortal-like expression spreads across Bub's bloody face maybe he flashes on his chubby childhood in the Midwest a mysterious impression of I WAS or maybe it's just another autonomic contortion he reaches out his arm as if to grab something. Then he pauses, looks at his crumbling hand. Confusion. He lets it drop. The Dead, of all people, know the incredible pull of Life.

Black marker on the zen bakery's bathroom wall: Gender is the Night.

...

Halloween is a vacation from those dreadful plot points. I'll forget about Quincey, I promise.

It's debatable whether the Dead can drive cars. They lurch about in the uniforms of all classes and professions. They like to eat brains. If one of them bites you, you'll become Dead yourself. If you chop them in two their guts will squiggle out of both halves of their body, thick bloody worms, and the top half will crawl toward you snapping its decomposing jaw. Decapitated, a Dead head will fall to the ground and stand on its neck as if the neck has rooted itself, the head will then flail about in circles, shouting at you violently in a big-tongued way. Some Dead can be killed by electrocution, others by a bullet in the cranium. The Dead are always ravenous, even when their digestive organs have been shot away by a flame-thrower.

A record-breaking heat wave hit Vancouver the week I arrived…I am standing in Stan Persky's kitchen my cotton nightgown clinging to my sweaty chest as if it were Kathleen Turner's blouse, the one she spilled the cherry soda on in Body Heat. KK and Stan are at a writing conference—I thought I was alone—so what's this heavy metal music in the back yard blaring so loud it woke me up? Barefoot, groggy and fumbling with the thin blue ribbon on the front of my gown I peek through the window…a young man absently throws rock after rock at a maple tree. Stan's street hustler friend turned gardener. He's attractive in a caveman sort of way: blond hair shagging wildly to his shoulders, tattoos, tanned muscles leap-frogging across his naked chest and arms he looks so…anatomical his jerky regular movements tremble with eros…everything about him is impending like a pit bull bound to break his leash. I feel like Lady Chatterley, afraid to take a bath in this house where he has all the keys, where he's trimming the hedges of Japanese yew, he looks up at me with piercing eyes then he reaches for a huge machete and begins to sharpen it my neck's a feeble tube of breath and jugulars. Because the body I dwell in happens to be female there is no place for this scene to go gender is the night so once again I opt for clothing over narrative—I hurriedly dress and begin to wait. But, what I would have given to possess (for just half an hour) a gay male body with a fistful of cash. Sam, how I'd love to live in your writing, to fuck with abandon as if that were the easiest thing in the world to come by—I want a selfish fuck, anonymous, alienated, a fuck devoid of the daily—I want to fuck like Caligula like a god on top of a mountain or in a dark mildewed alley garbage oozing from my knees like body fluids—I want to be voided to have my cunt turned inside out by the void, to fling myself like you so violently into Life that neither of us would ever survive.

Trick or treat—

Mina