Our Lady of 1983

We witness miracles daily; any sufficiently distant event is indistinguishable from a miracle. What we do not understand elicits emotion—at times intense. The nature of that involuntary response determines character. If the unknown makes us afraid, we gravitate to stupid, macho leaders who stoke our suspicion of outsiders and change. If we order the thing on the menu we’ve never heard of, if we seek out new life and new civilizations, if we embrace the unknown as the greatest life force for good, then we live in peace and non-judgmental harmony with our neighbors. As you’ll hear in the title story, are we driven by our love of light in the night or our fear of the darkness? 

"The Greatest Knight of His Age" -- with "Sitar Jam" by Tad Neuhaus, Joanna Dane, and Loren Dempster

"Autumn Eyes" "Breakup Breakdown" "You Are the Wind and I Am" -- with "Multitudes" by Nadje Noordhuis

"Indifference"  -- with "Skillz" by Bill Gillard

"Time Without Clocks" "The Poem that Compares an Awareness of Mortality to a Stuck Pickle Jar"-- with "Tap Out" by John Mayrose

"Our Lady of 1983" -- with "Title" by Bill Gillard

"The Path of Least Resistance" -- a song by Bill Gillard 

"i. e. Got Me a Girl" "In Lines Like Seaweed on the Tide"  -- with "7-23-25-5" by Tad Neuhaus, Joanna Dane, and Loren Dempster

"The Gravitational Constant" "Autology" -- with "Aversion to Submersion" by Tom Washatka

 "Visions of Half Sleep" is a dreamlike soundscape, a collaboration among artists in northeast Wisconsin. It is Bill Gillard's words and voice along with music by many.

More from Bill Gillard

Website: www.billgillard.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This episode is titled Our Lady of Nineteen Eighty Three. It features music by Ted Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Nadia Nordhaus, John Mayrose, Tom Washotka, and Bill Gillard. Hypnagogia, Presomnal, Anthipnic sensations, Phantasmata, Praedormitium, the half-dream state, dreamlits, the wakefulness, sleep, transition. These all describe the land between wide awake and deep sleep. The borderland realm where we are neither alert nor unconscious, awake nor asleep, where we are neither our daytime selves, nor the free roaming spirits of the dream realm. We are there right now in this pre-dream condition. Welcome to Visions of Half Sleep, a radio show by Bill Gillard that features music by artists from all over Northeast Wisconsin. The idea is that the show takes place in the middle ground between wakefulness and deep sleep, the time between when your head hits the pillow and when you've completely vanished from this world. The words and music ease you into this other world, the place we live for one-third of our lives. Poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Aikbeli, Greg Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad Newhouse, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, Drew Whiting. Find out more about the show, about the musicians, the writing, all of it's at billgillard.com. Dreams have a species of coherence. Fragments of one vision rest on another and careen off still another until something new is birthed. But we do not enter the dream world in a mad rush, no. The journey from wakefulness passes through the middle realm of half-sleep, a rocky highland where we spy deep dreams as they build scenery and fill their casts. We are aware, and yet not. We shudder as the dream realm flashes into bright life. It's been two days now, and he could not get up even if he had the energy to try. His bare hands rhythmically and unconsciously dig small holes in the sand at each hip, his fingers sinking to find a place slightly cooler. His legs itch under the steel greaves and cuises, not to mention the sabotons, which are filled with so much sand he cannot move his toes. If only he could loosen the straps and the curse at Koolet. But he cannot reach behind him. The richly ornate pauldrons allow his shoulders to move only a few degrees backward. Up until three days ago, he'd had a dozen squires that he used heedlessly. It already seemed like a lifetime ago. He cut such a dashing figure in his ornamented armor, suitable for the great knight he is. The battle had been brief and the captives many. The invaders arrived on several barcantines that they now loaded with Sir Gervenal and dozens of his men at arms. Sir Gervanal objected loudly to the treatment he was afforded as a knight and a gentleman. He raged into the night long after most were trying to sleep after a long, long day of conflict. Sir Gervanal thought it his duty to object to the shoddy treatment he had been afforded. He owed it to his men to insist on a knight's dignity. By the next morning, his captors had lost patience and dumped Gervinaul onto a dory near the shore of a tiny island. His men-at-arms remained mute when the greatest knight of his age was rowed ashore and unceremoniously dropped into the breakers at this remote island in full armor before the dory returned to the invader ship. Gervanal chalked that up to cowardice on the part of his men. As he struggled to his feet to face the invaders, he expected to hear the clash of swords, the shouts of men fighting against injustice. Instead, as the invaders raised the dory for stowing, he saw his men leaning over the ship's rail, chewing on meat, their mugs steaming. They stared impassively across the breakers at him. The Barcantine raised anchor and sailed away. Gorvanol staggered onto the beach and above the high tide line. The sand, his fatigue, the water that sloshed from each point in his armor made walking an excruciating act. By the time he reached the tree, all trace of the ship was completely gone. The morning sun broiled down on him, nearly steaming him inside his sloshing armor. He pressed his back against the shady side of the tree and slid down, seated into the sand. That is where Gorvanal sits and waits. He knows his men will find a way to overpower their captors. They will return to him. He knows this. Nevertheless, the third day, sunrise, midday, afternoon. Gorvanal needs all of his strength to rotate around the tree so that he can keep the sun on the other side of the trunk. He rocks back and forth against the smooth bark of the tree, hoping to catch the clasp on the cule. If he could loosen that, then maybe he'd be able to free up an arm and then get the armor off him. And then the fourth day. Afternoon. Gourbenal looks at his bear, scraped in raw palms. His lips feel as if they have been sealed shut. He no longer makes the effort to avoid the sun. He cannot move. It seems to him that his vision has dimmed. He hears nothing but a loud hiss in his ears. He closes his eyes and thinks about his two daughters. And then his wife, who is the most patient and forgiving person he has ever known. He no longer feels the sting of the flies who buzz and flash. He knows that his wife will be happier without him. His daughters, his bright girls, barely know him. To die, it occurs to him. This is the best thing I will ever do. His face feels as if it is smiling, but he cannot be sure. He squints into the sun as it lowers in the western sky. It feels warm. I should have been a better man. He thinks I had the chance. I had many chances to be a better man. Waves crash onto the beach, the horizon a thin, bright line through an infinity of blue. It's beautiful, all of this. November brings me back to see it once more. This hole where leaves and sticks and fish decay. Above the falls, cold wind, your dusty autumn eyes. You broke in English. You broke bread, broke through the misted glass wall. You broke ranks, broke into me, I broke cover. After long years in hiding, we broke out. And for me, you broke ground, you broke me open. We broke a sweat, you broke my ribs, and we both came back alive. Broken back, we broke camp. Broke down, broke stride like a fever breaks at daybreak. Then you said we needed a break, break off, break free. We'll both break even, you said. Break up, break down. You are the wind, and I am the desert, and love is the sun on my brown shoulders. You are the wind, and I am the desert. Love is the sun that can vex you and drives you away off into the hills where you teach the soft green leaves to sing the song I could never learn. Killing just to kill, and unconsciously, too. A species of seafloor draggers and burners of anything, beaters and shouters, wasters and takers. Bell sees himself as part of the long line of comfortable criminals. Americans for whom the earth was not enough space to spray one's urine. Language can accommodate these ideas, he thinks. The past tense, he thinks, has arrived from millions of species in this epoch of death. While he stands off to the side, content to genially teach what has become irrelevant for reasons that have been twisted by wicked lassitude. Life cycles, evolution, biochemistry, and how his charges can profit from them. They return dully as investment bankers and hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers and tools of the machine, enabled by Bell and the lofty standards of this factory on a hill that stamps out lacrosse captains for Yale and so much merchandise. Misled parents add zeros to checks to curry God's favor. A worthy life, worthy life? Does a bee think in such terms? Does an ant ant whalers stopped at Galapagos to hunt pinta giant turtoises? A source of food for long and profitable voyages. The past tense for them. Spix's macaws once thrived in Brazil. Now they're gone in the wilds. Poachers. Another species to the past tense. The Western black rhino that thrived in the savannas got hunted to extinction. The Yangtze River dolphin lived for 20 million years, but got shifted to the past tense in about five decades of industry. The individual helixes and the corrugation of life co-equal species who are on their way from where they've been to where they were impelled to go. Now tattered and threadbare, along with thousands of others in just these past few efficient decades. Decades. Bell wonders about a worthy life. To add more humans to the system of eradication, a worthy life, a worthy life? His self-indulgence has no limits, he thinks. He chose comfort and ease, past tense, and facile answers. He cannot undo this. He counts his own among the smug grins of graduates with full wallets and clenched fists. Bell sees in its mind's eye, his face on the graduation wall, each boy poised to get what is coming to him. Then he imagines the surface of Mars, the wonders of the science fiction imagination laid impotent against the cold and vacuumed reality of endless aridity and death of all things. Through what he has done and what he has failed to do, Bell is an accessory to the slow eradication of the systems of life, his transcendent joy. Who speaks in the language of the spring breeze, made by her swaying hips beneath the light of the rising full moon, and the music of the freight howling love at the darkness. Noon is the board accountant who tells Bell that no, he will not be getting a tax refund, and instead, he owes the coming year's salary to pay for reconstruction of the road that runs through campus. 4 p.m. is a girl on a bike cruising the campus lonely. Her parents didn't think about how it all might pan out for her among geriatrics with low noise tolerance, gardens filled with prize-winning fragilities, and loud boys. If only there were an ice cream truck, Belle's late afternoon self-muses. 4 a.m., the other side of the globe from that forlorn girl, is the much-desired ice cream truck driven by a 16-year-old kid who read the fine print and understands that his pay is determined by the number of miles he puts on the white Ford, not the number of creamsicles he drops into the sticky hands that clench sweaty coins. His chimes Doppler up each sleeping block as he turns deserted corners at 50 or better. 6:30 in the morning is the neighbor bringing in the garbage cans and starting his lawnmower. Belle would like to murder 6:30 in the morning. Dusk's raven-haired beauty is home for 10 minutes as night comes on. She sits for a moment to catch the last bits of Terry Gross. She smiles at Belle for her reflection in the storm door. As they hug, Belle makes sure she faces the moon that rises like a gift over the Abbey's tower and through the budding trees because she loves the moon. And Belle wants her to keep loving him. The light fades, and he's tired. But not yet sleepy, hungry, but not yet frail. Hopeful that the remaining wakeful hours bring one or two more bits of joy. Then her phone dings. She's got the night sky app. A minute of waiting, and the ISS slips between wispy clouds and winks brightly down at them. Two people who don't know the precise time, whose calendars rarely agree. Two lines that seem parallel, but that have diverged. Clouds between their bright goodbyes in the gathering darkness, you can see the blue. Skittish about all the things that didn't end up eating them. I wonder if anything makes a man afraid when he knows exactly what will kill him. And soon. A radio experience that is one hour long. It's poems, music, and stories, the illusions that flash in your mind in the moments before sleep. Stories and poems by Bill Gillard, music by Bill Gillard and others. All details are available at BillGillard.com. This episode is titled Our Lady of 1983. It features music by Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Nadia Nordhaus, John Mayrose, Tom Washotka, and Bill Gillard. Shirts carefully disheveled, pretending to love beer, chest bumping high fives. When someone said something about a woman, any woman, likely not present, they'd be too afraid to say anything that might actually be heard. But you could almost see the lifetime indentation of pocket protectors across their sunken rib cage, the way they checked their watches to make sure they would get enough sleep so they could be at the library in the morning when it opened. For now, though, they were in full party mode, flailing their arms to burning down the house, prancing like roosters who were doing intentionally bad Mick Jagger impersonations. One hand out supporting a thin plastic cup filled with warm weak beer. A few brave-hearted women made an effort to dance, but they seemed resigned to another Friday night like this. Knowing that something was happening somewhere while they were stuck with these moldering scraps from life's dumpster. The party was self-destructing before everyone's eyes. But even that was not wholly uninteresting. If you and your friends cannot pull off a good party, it behooved you to pretend to take some perverse joy from bad ones. The self-respect in the room wouldn't fill a beaker. But if you ended the night with more of it than anyone else, well, then I guess that's something, right? To paraphrase Tolstoy, as one of the men in attendance was doing for a gauzily drunk young woman, demonstrating that it is unnecessary to read everything assigned to him in English class, his major, just to stop when you hit something good, something to say in class or to a girl to make you seem like you know what you're talking about when you really spend each night not reading, but just walking around, looking in windows, trying the doors on cars for one that's unlocked. Not to steal, but just to sit in the car, think for a while about another life, check for what cassettes they had, which one was in the deck, look in the glove compartment, touch another person's life. You didn't have to read all of Tolstoy, or even half, or even a chapter, or even a full paragraph. Tolstoy, his new favorite writer, was conveniently pithy right away. None of that messy waiting around for the good stuff. The single iron gray hair on the pillow, the Snowdons of yesteryear, the rest is silence. The girl, he didn't know her name, but he called her Chicago because she wore a Cubs t-shirt, neatly avoiding even the discussion of names. He hoped she knew his name. It was Billy. But that never seemed to be a problem with women. They just knew stuff somehow. That was fine with him because he knew stuff too, or at least he could fake it. She smiled glassly up at him, smelled the beer, the international fragrance of youth. While he paraphrased Tolstoy, good parties are all alike, he said. Bad ones are bad in their own particular ways. He sat on the couch, sipping that same plastic cup as everyone else. But his was filled with a green liquid. The duck, he never came out of his room at night except to mix drinks in the bathtub in the hall, said it was it was Gatorade mostly. Billy tried and failed mostly, never to get drunk, because the first time he did freshman year, he ended up booting, and while he laid in the grass outside his dorm, he could think of nothing except the line his professor wrote on the board, and spent an hour translating it as if nobody understood English. Gazing up into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity. My eyes burned with anguish and anger, which of course Billy had not gotten to because it came to the end of a long story, but which the professor droned on about in class, ignoring Billy's better point about the symbolism of the street being blind. Chicago's head fell awkwardly on Billy's shoulder, asleep. Pastel. Take this party, for example. He waved his arms around the room, speaking loud enough so the others would hear and come over to listen. He jostled Chicago gently with his shoulder, pretended to reposition himself to get more comfortable, because he didn't really want anyone to see him. With a passed-out girl on his lap, it would be the most interesting thing to happen that night, and his friends would spend the whole week talking about it. So he spoke ironically and loudly, hoping to be rescued from the predicament, but no one noticed. Muttley fondled the beer tap, pretending to care something about the marriage of pressure and malt liquor. Held the tap in his hands erotically somehow, and lost. Slug chatted up the younger sister of one of our friends who was just visiting for the weekend. Oh Lord, if only she knew where that could lead. Unfortunately, her brother Mookie was in no condition to help her avoid a regrettable evening. He'd been suckered into a game of Mel, the card game of oblivion, fueled by grain jello shots and riscible trivia. MC'd by the only one who understood how the rules change from moment to moment, the resident good old boy and living, breathing devil from hell Pokemon. Techno was over in the corner, pavloving that new exchange student he met in the lab. Billy knew her too. He had lunch with her, even. Walked into class with her a couple of days ago. Not that he knew her name or anything. She looked out of place with her black skirt and stockings, tan shirt and necklace. Not like the rest of us, Billy thought, probably wondering how she got talked into leaving. Wait, where was she from? Belgium? Her name was what? Was it Amy? Did she say? Something like that. Probably had some weird European spelling. He imagined a bunch of umlauts. Well, she could do worse than techno. At least he had a guilty conscience. And it was all just impure thoughts on his resume until now, anyway. Still jonesing for his first mortal sin. But they just aren't all that easy to come by, especially when you're looking for one. No, there was no way to help Billy Wriggle out of this. Chicago had passed out, it was official. So he sat there, watching a movie on TV. It was in another language, and the screen kept going in and out of focus, but that was okay with him. Kind of fit the mood. He put his arm around limp little her, the best case approximation of their future married selves he could think of. He tried to sleep, there's no reason to stay awake. Among his friends passing out at a party had traces of social cachet, and that was better than nothing. At some point, the lights were switched off in the party room. In the darkness, every time he moved a little bit, she felt a little farther toward him, her chin caught on his arm, her head tilted weirdly. She slipped again, this time between his back and the couch. That wouldn't do. He stood up, tried to catch her as she fell. He missed, her head bounced, but she ended up looking more natural there on the couch, more or less. His head felt foggy. It was time to get out, leave the incriminating evidence behind. What a stupid party, anyway. He took a step toward the door, then turned back. He couldn't leave her like this, so he lifted her legs up off the floor, arranged them like she was sleeping. So at least she looked a little bit comfortable. Then he walked out of the party room and out the front door into the southern night. Not many people were out at that late or early hour. Here's how parties flow. Early in the night, people are outside, eager to be seen, loud and wild, nothing but possibilities, pure potential energy. Those hours spin past, everyone carefully nurtures the energy around them, feeds kindling to the young fire, like that guy in the Yukon who walked from Sulfur Creek to meet the boys and kept getting killed by fate or bad decisions or nature or God with a small G. By about this time, in a sweet southern magnolia blossom night, it becomes clear who has survived at the warming fire and who has frozen to death in the Yukon. You either got a basket full of potential energy waiting for you in her room, brushing her hair, considering how kinetic to get with you, or you got nothing. Billy was not an optimistic by nature, but he told stories in his own mind where he didn't end up all alone at the end of every night. That was closer than some of the other guys got to having it actually happen. Something real and true that another person could verify. He walked across the quad and heard some life in the distance over by the student center. No, not tonight. A walk in the garden may be the best thing. Maybe a freight would roll through. Maybe he'd see a raccoon. That'd be something. Hands in pockets, he feigned a purposeful walk. No telling who might be watching. And if they saw him, they might think he actually had a reason to be out so late. Who knows? Maybe he'd get lucky. And someone would assume that reason had to do with another living, breathing person. The gardens were at the edge of campus, a series of postcard paths winding through trees and clearings, perpetual summer, flowers everywhere all year round. The climate seemed like cheating for a northern kid. Like if you couldn't stand a little bit of snow for three months out there out of the year, then you weren't really living. Magnolia blossoms hung limply from the branches. They had peaked weeks ago. Now the petals sagged after a season of procreation the way Billy imagined everyone else on campus, except for him and his friends, who were at that moment wilted, spent, sweating in sheets not your own, a bony arm to sleep on, trying to find a comfortable position, thinking of a way to slip away without talking, wondering how history class will go with all of this new depth. Billy found himself against a tree among many trees, forehead pressed into the bar, punching the trunk gently with both hands, a heavy weight in the late rounds, adrenaline long since spent. The tree langed out over from the edge of the clearing, a spot where the garden path curved down the hillside from its leafy summit. It would have to do. He unzipped. Phaser set to kill, and the golden arc made lakes and archipelagos and the roots at his feet. It was cathartic. It cleared his bladder and his mind, mostly anyway. The party ran in thin rivulets toward his feet. He remembered being a boy and playing with water in the mud. In first grade, a nun made him sit in a closet in his underwear while she washed his clothes. That was nice. He stepped away from the urine, rubbed his eyes, tall wrought iron lampposts lit up the path at long intervals. Most of the path was in darkness, but as long as the next lamppost was visible, a night walker's mind could fill in the way to the next donut of brightness. Five lights down, on the other side of the clearing, a person. Bent at the waist. Billy wiped his eyes again and stretched. A woman was down here. Woman? He thought about staying in the shadows to watch her. That'd be too weird. Calling to her, she'd have a heart attack. Think he was going to kill her or something. Best to take these things head on. Hands in pockets, he worked he walked toward her on the path loudly, feigning again that he had a per. He thought about staying there to watch her. That would be too weird. Calling to her? She'd have a heart attack. Think he was going to kill her or something. Best to take these things head on, he thought. Hands in pockets, he walked toward her on the path, feigning again that he had a purpose. He would say something like, Hello, as he passed, make eye contact and everything to let her know she was safe. He passed the first light. She didn't look up, four more to go. What could she be doing? Is she sick? Is she demented? She looked okay. Familiar even. He hoped it wouldn't be one of those drunk moms who showed up in the weirdest places on parents' weekend. Another light. The woman looked up, startled. Billy tried his best to smile to put her at ease. But that was a mistake. Better that he had hidden in the underbrush and waited for her to pass than have an encounter like this. He'd be lucky if Campus Security didn't arrest him like they did when he dressed as a Cuban sniper last Halloween. How can a person dress like that without getting into the spirit of the thing, too? That's what Billy wanted to know. But it was too late now. He kept walking. And then she waved. She smiled. One more light. Black skirt, black stockings, tan shirt, a necklace. That exchange dude. Billy stopped. What was her name? She waved to him and said, Come over here. He looked over his shoulder for anyone else. No, they were alone. Come on, she urged. He tried to walk confidently, tried to suck in his stomach, throw his shoulders back a little bit. She crouched at the edge of the path with her back to him, her skirt stretched tight against her backside. A faint vertical valley at the center of it. He could see prostraps beneath the silk blouse. Closer, a single hair, one of hers, stood straight up from the top of her head, held aloft by what? Body heat? The electricity of her body? Billy almost fainted. What could he do? What could he say? Nothing came to him. At her side now, knees weak, mouth dry, he wiped his hands and his jeans. For a moment, stupidly, he stood looking down at her, convinced if he stood there long enough, he could feel the convection of her body, the warmth of another living person rising to meet him. She looked up, smiled. Down here. She pointed at the bright edge of the lamplight in the grass. Billy Crouch dropped to one knee awkwardly next to her. Here and here, she said. For a moment he didn't see, then startled, he leaned away. There! She breathed and hooked her arm in his. Billy looked down at the fragrant circle of light cast by the lamp and the thick grass. Millions of insects massed, climbed, chirped, clutched, and shivered. A sharp line separated bright and dark in the darkness where they knelt, there were no bugs at all. Inside, a wild celebration of illumination. Amy leaped to the shadow directly beneath the lamppost, the dark center of the bright donut of light. Her brows billowed, made Billy gasp. She landed in the bugless and black circle at the lamp's base, the holy land of the insect pilgrimage, the glowing circle around her, a writhing carpet of devotion. Billy dropped to both knees outside the circle, watched. She held the light post with one hand, leaned closer to the ground, laughed at something she saw at her feet, laughed at these things that craved illumination, their tender little lives, their simple desire to escape the darkness, to wait through long sunlit days to be there when this miracle happened. Billy leaned forward to watch colors dance through Amy's black hair, strangely luminescent, as if giving off its own pale glow. He whispered, I'm right here to the air, to her, to the light. The warm breeze found the back of his neck and made him shiver. I write a lot of lines, a lot. The only one that ever did what I wanted it to do, i.e., got me a girl, was this little piece of a song about a small town girl moving out on her own. She left in the summer night, just walked out the back door, across the yard, across the spinach farm next door, down the gravel road to the truck stop, the interstate, where she waited for an honest-looking driver to stop in and fill up. But it took hours. Made her think hard about her life. And then a storm rolled in in my line. Turn your face into the rain. Then she learned something important about herself that night. My band played for gas money in those little roadhouses in the corner of any bar, the tables pushed against the wall. People want to dance. That night I saw her, face framed by a beer sign, all dressed in blue. She smiled and turned away. Then I sang that line, and there she was again. I could feel the heat coming off her body as I sang that little song in that North Country Bar. We loaded out under the awning by the dumpster in the cold autumn rain. And I filled the back of our van with cymbals and drums, amps and keys. Woman in the shadows, back to the wind, turned to me, turned her face into the rain, didn't blink. Her eyes and mine. I held notes. She breathed deep. And I laughed. Hey, you want to get some coffee? Okay, that's two lines that worked. I don't remember seeing the snow start. Here inside the warming sun shines through porch windows into my study, where I sit and push a pen across a page, as if it were a snake, tense, striking again and again at a skittish small thing. Just past the next pen stroke, out of fang's reach. The fangs that leave a jagged black line across the page, the pen that leaves a jagged black line across the page, where they have both missed their prey. Whence the snow, the cold that penetrates the walls, a thin skein of ice on the window panes, the second skin, invisible before, but now unmolting itself, crystalline and pure. And whence my breath, visible in lamplight. I don't remember these first flakes falling. New white skin over the earth's tender belly, smoothing over jointed complications until all freezes beneath layered gauze. A sharp memory lies bandaged beneath webbed experience. My hand stiffens, its reptilian self, who dreams of basking in sundappled summer lowlands, instead testifies to deepening cold, the skin of decay. But I was bolder then. During the course of his 45 minutes, I gently shoved Hassan's chair inexorably forward across the polished wood floor, until his feet hung in the air a foot above the tier below. And he punched helpless at my calves whenever Father Doyle turned. Not often to the chalkboard, until with a slow crash, Hassan cartwheeled forward into Bruce Chow's indignant back, both of them sprawling onto the floor, clutching knees and ankles, until the eclipse of Father Doyle, whose seismic rage dimmed the lights, played the skin of innocent Bruce and Hassan, and it left me paralyzed by what I had wrought as a silent bystander for all Father Doyle knew. And the most courageous act I'd ever seen was when Hassan looked back at me with anger in his eyes, then instantly relented. He could see the fear in my eyes, I guess, and my D in physics. Then set his desk upright, apologized to Father Doyle and to Bruce, then sat down and reopened his physics notebook. I don't know why he didn't ID me. I certainly would have. Except maybe Hassan, this giant of a young man, knew he could catch what Doyle was throwing. And in that moment when he made his decision, he wasn't sure maybe I could. Maybe that's why. And he wasn't wrong. Let me tell you, Father Doyle was just about the scariest thing since the H-bomb that we learned about in chapter four. But not better. Certainly not written better, although few of any age can say they have. Spent not nearly enough time in a canoe in Maine. I've lived longer than Poe and happier. But the horrors of the blood spring a page just as sure as spring days do loved ones eager for more than my company. I've lived longer than Fitzgerald, his boat long since surrendered to the current. While mine marooned in rushes, born neither to the past nor the future, on a battle erect in mud. I've almost caught up to Richard Wright and Emily Dickinson, whose mirrors would have envied mine, white and male and free, and who made great art despite the slings of outrageous fortune. These words too, lounge on an easy couch while I do other things with what little time I have remaining until I end up on the poster. Sparse, talent, squandered. And that's it, my big idea. A biography series about people not listed among the great, but people like me, for whom a single life never got started, for whom the main channel of the river diverged along the way in all of this tall grass, when the water table dropped, a drought of a life human, a broken poetic form. An ancient omen, the warning in our tired blood of all that wakes and waits in the coming blackness. We meet our nightly death, surrender our will, our purpose, ourselves, to visions of half-sleep that flow from that midnight realm, our fragile lives, these tired lights, they make soft shadows. We float silently toward sleep's moonlit gate, gossamer life in this black blankness, this nightly death summoned, we surrender now to haunt the land beyond the moonlit gate of dreams. In visions of half sleep, visions of half sleep, visions of half sleep. Visions of half-sleep is a radio show by Bill Gillard. It features music by artists from all over Northeast Wisconsin. The poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Igbelli, Craig Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad Newhouse, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, and Drew Whiting. All details are available at BillGillard.com. We'll be back next week at this time for more visions of half sleep. Until then, pleasant dreams. This episode is titled Our Lady of 1983. It features music by Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Nadia Nordhaus, John Mayrose, Tom Oshotka, and Bill Gillard.