And you feel a certain lightness, a headiness, perhaps, if you dare, euphoria. Everything is brighter, clearer, practically transparent. Your senses take moments in huge gulps and you are drunk on the world. A fine sheen of sweat covers your skin and a rictus grin covers your face. It's all so wonderful. Then you try to touch it.

Every surface is brittle and strange. You run your fingertips over a smooth formica tabletop (is this your kitchen?), then your hand snaps back in reflex; you fear a cut, but the blood's still in--just barely. You look around and the clarity is awful. Suddenly the world's an answering machine with six thousand messages, each one claiming to be from God, each one telling a different story. It occurs to you, maybe the bones know, but they're silent.

You hear the click-click-click of the black dog's nails on the floor, and you run. You run blind, waiting for the earth, too long ignored and now too much regarded, the earth to open up and crush you, just so she won't have to listen, or talk, anymore. At least not to you.

Two days later in a Philadelphia coffeeshop and it's all still another planet. You live on espresso and stale pastry. Every asshole here has a theory about the cosmos, but it's been staring you naked in the face for two fucking days and you're all out of theories. Everything makes sense. Can't look at a goddamn gum wrapper without seeing a telegram from some obscure, long-dead Hindu deity or whoever.

A grizzled old man, looks like an Apostle in a tatty brown professor's suit, sits down at your table. I got a theory, he says, and in an instant of total clarity, like so many before, you know how to kill him, painfully, without getting caught or feeling bad about it. You don't kill him. My theory, he says, and I know it's true, is that time is evil. Church bells ring and make everything solid, see? That's the start of it.

Then we got clocks everywhere. First it's cloth, but then it's metal--now metal, that's solid. Guns, too. It don't get no more factual than a gun. The ticking of your digital watch (you look down at your wrist, feeling guilty somehow), you can't hear it, but that crystal does sixty cycles a second, a little humming gear in the biggest goddamn machine there is--the Black Iron Prison.

So what's the machine do, you ask, ignoring the tickling familiarity of that title, failing to add asshole, feeling hostile, the world's going all brittle-bad again. --It makes you forget, he says. It's a prison, like I said. Bill calls it the maximum security birth/death universe. Bill? Nevermind. So what's it making me forget? He points at his skull and says, almost without sound, God.

Fuck you, you say, thinking, another stupid preacher. You walk outside into the hostile night, killing breath of winter whispering in the air, hungry for asphyxiated families burning couches to keep from freezing. Ironic. You shake your head to remove the vision of the choking children, but shaking your head hasn't worked in a long time either--your skull is paper-thin, glass-delicate, brain exposed for the world to read and write on. Then you hear your watch chime, beep-beep. You hate that. Don't know why you turned it on. Looking at it, you hear church bells, bong-bong-bong-bong. The first sounding shatters your skull and brings you to your knees. Each one after nails you to the earth, to the sick and dying world, you feel the rancid breath of disease.

You hear the click-click-click again. You are terrified, unable to move, glass shards are your eyes and you see ten thousand things. One huge paw looms large in your vision of the pure clean gutter water flowing past your left cheek. You look up, and see the dog. Perhaps he is some cross between a labrador and a mastiff, all huge and no, not unfriendly. Chillingly neutral, somehow. It looks through you, eyes making a tunnel back home, the formless place where everything sings meaningless.

The dog looks behind it, licking its chops and pricking up its ears, very doglike, suddenly, and trots off. Wait! Wait! You reach after it and discover you can stand. But it's gone.

Looking up, you see a raven. It lands on top of a parking meter in front of you. Its eyes, unlike the dog's, regard their own inner things. It looks at you with one. You forgot this. You forgot. The bird turns into letters, a swarm of them, every language, and they shoot into you, a deadly arrow. But you keep standing, remembering, this is it, this is you, you remember. Remember.

Everything falls away. The bird's bones, spent, leap and fly away, leaving smears behind. You have final truth now, and it eats at the world like turpentine destroying new paint. Lies run into the gutter, lies flow around your feet, lies drain out of you and you weigh almost nothing now. Birth and death and every meaningless lesson learned from protein to human to supergiant red sun, thinking its plasmic thoughts and sending out satellites to aid the people of truth--that would be you--then shrinking to ultimate places, the most definitive you are right fucking HERE.

The truth is a city. Tattered, garish crap still covers your vision in places, but you see now. It is final and quiet, for now. The city stretches everywhere. You thought it would be something nicer, or simpler.

This small enlightenment doesn't bring a truth of unity. It's the prison you don't see every day, less entrapping than the candy-coated version to which you've become accustomed. You feel freer, if endangered. You start to walk.