sidesaddle with a group waiting patiently in a queue for customers to
arrive. Stationary with time passing amuck, and content with empty and
drowsy space and flies buzzing about his face, his life defied money
and motion. "Get out of the way. If you can't fasten a doorknob take
a broom and sweep up that mess in the back of the restaurant. I don't
know what you are going to do when you get older. You can't even cook.
You can't do anything and even walking you trip over your own shadow,"
said his father. "You should see his cartoons," said Kazem. "The boy
can draw." The cartoon of himself had signed the wedding papers and he
and his cartoon wife were standing near a monk as relatives came by
with bowls of water rinsing their hands. Flies buzzed around their
faces. A worker, selling Buddhist statuettes, necklaces, and rosaries,
picked her child up, pulled down his pants, and let him urinate in the
parking lot.
"Love," said the cartoon of the mosquito, "makes up the vernacular
of pop culture. It is innate as a quest. It lances life's old festers
granting a mood of the new. For the male it is a consistent
alternative on nights when the hunt for new females becomes
unsuccessful. Both sexes need to believe that their own physical
attributes will be passed on to posterity. For sociable creatures the
illusion of having a permanent foundation for their lives in marriage
and family is indispensable. So much goes into this ineluctable lure
called love and marriage: most of all a void so enormous that we chip
through other skulls to record the memory of ourselves in that watery
mass called a brain. On overpasses and sidewalks you've noticed those
weak starving dogs with patches of fur missing from their bodies. They
too sniff around other dogs in the hope of confirming and making some
permanent documentation of themselves on those brains. Even if they
don't have energy for sex they still document themselves. Men are
programmed to deliver the raw material of themselves in any dark alley.