David is man composed of six-parts water, four-parts funk, and seven-parts despair.

David is the dude who operates the giant slot-machine-like industrial dishwasher where every fork, knife, cheese grater, and forgotten Sweet-and-Low packet passes through on a daily basis getting a fire-engine blast bath to nudge off and annihilate lipstick residue, dried oatmeal nibbles, calcified ketchup, and other such dining casualties.

David has said a total of four words within the span of seven months:
Yah’? Yep. Nah. Wha?

Never spontaneous. Only when provoked by questions from an authority figure.

Sometimes I eat left-over wedding cake and watch him from behind the coffee cup racks.

More than sometimes. I do this often.

David has washed his uniform, perhaps, a total of zero times in the span of seven months.

I think this because when David places soup ladles on the top shelf you can see the yellow stain of half-a-year’s worth of funk encrusted in the pits. Like aerial views of forgotten backyard pools.

When exposed, the pits’ seams lurch in a sort of psychedelic, Carrie bending-spoons-with-her-mind way as if the threads are trying to break away from the fabric they help hold together, as if they’re attempting to escape from their fetid existence. Lemme out!

I fantasize about bringing him a piece of left-over wedding cake and a section of the want ads.

I fantasize about going to the Shopko down the street and buying him a pack of white t-shirts.

I calculate the amount of time it would take to walk to the gas station to buy him a beer and a bar of soap. And I wonder if that profound despair staining the pits is not the threads lurching away but some manifestation of David himself.

1.
We promised the other to only eat vegetables for two weeks in advance, smudged our bodies daily, and hid bottles of vodka and red wine in the distant caverns of our neighbor’s apartment. We beat ourselves with branches Finnish bath style and prayed to earth fairies and spoke of our souls as bursting stars of love and light and peace. No coffee, no cigarettes, no pork, no beef, no chicken or tuna and a maximum of five grapes per day. To bed at nine and to wake at four! No listening to Tina Turner electro-pop and no stopping for sweets from the bakery or ogling men on the metro. And even if neither of us ever went to bed at nine or awoke at four and even if it’s hard not to stare at people on the train (because what else can you have to do but stare) and even if we sat in the bar drinking Kőbánya pints and eating pork rinds at noon before boarding the bus, we still kept saying to the other in-between wiping oily fingers on our jeans that we gotta be pure for this.

2.
We gotta be. Because this is where the Dalai Lama camps out, this is where Krishna and Jesus and Buddha and celestial creatures we haven’t even conceived of come to play, where spirits and visions and winged-translucent-glittery things enter your body through a metaphysical trap door and induce total-soul trip outs. We gotta be conduits, we gotta be love and light, treading one-step below nun-hood, we need to be ready.

3.
But the mountain wasn’t wrapped in Tibetan Peace flags or foaming Technicolor sludge beneath its grass nor did it resemble a churning vortex of vegetation as I’d envisioned the earth’s heart chakra to be. It was a mountain. So we sat and waited.

4.
Two Hungarian hikers found us sitting in the trail.
I knew enough to know that they were friendly, that they were asking us where we were going, what we were doing, that they were asking us where we were from.

I only knew enough to respond with Mi nem tudom.

We don’t know.

When my father was a young man, he blew off that fleshy part of your hand, the part across from your thumb, when a handgun exploded in his right hand while shooting clay pigeons in some abandoned field near Augusta. The skin that has since grown over looks like a macabre leather quilt stitched into his wrist and ending at his heart line.

Also when my father was a young man, he climbed in a car with his buddy, best-friend even—this guy named Kenny Wineman who was dark and handsome and played on the football team and had the tendency to get blitzed Tuesday through Sunday and drive around Chippewa Falls with apparently no concern for the deer or bunnies or small children crossing the road. And on that day when my father climbed in with Kenny, they ran over two kids and skidded into the trees, car aflame. The children died. Kenny did community service and my father had a deep valley of flesh ripped from his back, crisscrossing his spine, the scar healing like a topographical map, pillowy and newborn pink at the seams.

When I was younger, I would watch him shirtless and swearing and lugging things around the front yard unable to fathom how such deep gashes were able to heal.