working title: until we remember to dream

I am listening to young Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris," and thinking about retrograde flowerpots, doorknobs, and a garden with Japanese clocks when a fellow shows up looking a lot like a man who put a blowtorch to his youth, everything he used to be and much of what he never was right there in the ash around the edges of his eyes which right now are hidden by dark glasses. You could have thought he was Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ when the girl with the mortician tattoo, crossed shovels over a tombstone in a coat of arms kind of look, brings a bottle of red wine and glasses to the table where he might be sitting with a view of the river and the burden of memories we manage to forget until we remember to dream. She hands him her tennis racket, and he pushes the Ray-Bans down just enough to peer over them. There are caverns and canyons in his eyes but nothing to match the abyss that devours hers in the embrace of chaos that is the only way she can imagine she just might be alive.

The day is overcast, late afternoon, with the feel of a storm blowing down from the Gorge. The silence between the stranger and the girl is stretched out so taut you almost expect them to perform a high-wire act on it. So he says, what kind of girl are you anyway? She says she's the kind who smokes French cigarettes and reads Dostoevsky in Russian and makes bad coffee. He nods. Boredom becomes him though it's but a pose. He is too troubled to be bored. She breaks out a deck, shuffles the cards, and deals a game of solitaire. He is clearly relieved she does not expect him to play.

A gypsy xylophone and zither band sets up on the patio. They are pretty much ignored by the clientele, bohemians erstwhile and practicing, random dandies, chess freaks, Facebook Marxists, café existentialists, ubiquitous poets. A bearded figure off to the edge of things smiles wryly as his pencil dances delicately across the sketchpad. From off in the distance come the gay cries of children riding the ferris wheel and carousel down the way.

Richard! Richard Cameron! A man with a black patch over his right eye approaches without waiting for the invitation that was certain not to be forthcoming. He is an excitable young fellow, short, with a pudgy face and curly beard, a notebook in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. He places both on the table and retrieves a pen from his jacket pocket. His name is Mika. He is a freelance journalist. Some dub him a muckraker, others a scandalmonger. He tugs at the eye patch and likes to say his perspective is from the left.

Mika's questions come rapid-fire. Do you have any comment on the sparse attendance for your recent appearance at Powell's, which drew only seven people and two of them showed up to return your latest book for a refund? Are you writing new poems? Do you have plans for a new book that might answer your critics? Did bad reviews have anything to do with the breakup of your marriage? Why don't you believe in God and what do you have against transgender people anyway?

Richard Cameron is ill at ease. He looks this way and then that, crosses his right leg over the left, then the left leg over the right. Just then Gena Angellis, his agent, makes the scene, a no-nonsense type, say fortyish, with henna-colored hair she wears in bangs and cut straight across a bit below her ears. She wears a black jacket and a short black skirt that shows off her StairMaster legs to good effect. Richard has no comment, she says to Mika and hands him her card. Call me during office hours if you want to make an appointment for an interview.

The girl with the mortician tattoo looks Gena Angellis over, like she might be impressed if being impressed were an option she allowed herself. Having reached an impasse in her game, she scoops up the cards, shuffles, and deals them out again. Her name? It could be Bongo Kirkland.