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My hotel room is red and dark but kind of nice. The lights sometimes dim going out without my noticing, just this kind of slip-sliding around, following the TV glow. I was sent here. My friend. He told me he would give my mom money. She’s having a hard time with all that’s going on. (I picture her and hope she is well but it’s best we not talk.) This is Amityville, New York, a great place, different now, much smaller but also much safer, more “focused,” someone called it too, which I didn’t really get.  

The mirror on the other side of the wall is dark. I don’t look like much of anything at all. I think I wrote it but the girl I was dating then may have. I just don’t remember, which I guess is fine, is maybe to be expected when you travel a lot, which I feel like I’ve been doing even if I can’t quite remember the places. I paid extra for two TVs. I have to have them both on. Try to cut through the noise. How long have I been here for? I ask him when he calls.  

“After he kills his family and himself, a part of him stays in the basement, where he hears, every few years, a few gunshots, or sees someone enter, terrified, then leave. He listens for a long time, and he hears the voices of other families, another Ronnie,” in some sense they are another Ronnie,” someone seems to say, a voice, as in another version of himself, and though they may not be named Ronnie, and though he knows they are not him –– one may be a high school student, may have blond hair, or may be a Led Zeppelin fan club member, or may have been molested by his father –– or maybe are named Ronnie, or probably are named Ronnie, he knows that they are different and will experience different things. Like Dungeons and Dragons characters, born of dice rolls––randomness––but rigidly held to some gameboard, which like life cannot be reversed through, but that one has to move forward upon, barrelling toward a bad conclusion, death & loss, a true losing, but within a hard sequence, a series of events that are fixed, and between forced events, little playable movies that function like checkpoints, like a series of baseball pitching machines, organized into a straight line, feeding the ball forward, thump thump thump of slow sliding, being *popped* forward ushering them toward a conclusion, the hard ending. He stays like this awhile, listening, until the thing that he is –– he imagines himself as resembling a little black smear on a hardwood floor, or a black spill in the carpet. Stiff & hard, or a black swirl, a mound like self-snuggling rope, or shit, black shit, raising with a point out of the gully of a toilet bowl –– dissolves, or evaporates, or vanishes (probably sinks) down, down, down toward ever less clarity & feeling, an inevitable sequence that glides trackwise, toward an end and exit, experienced as nothing (first ending his relationship to the world, and then himself) & whatever insensate trace flattens like march snow, and he is gone.”