The Semiosis of Real Presence
August 31 2026
Good health and friendliness for the morning of every evening. Ventura Boulevard swelled and sank, stucco in the sun. Peter’s car was broken so he took an Uber. The air was soft and smelled of orange blossoms.
The Uber stopped for a girl on a bright corner. Her hips came at Peter’s window as if they had been launched. The V of her shorts was at the level of his head. She opened Peter’s door and said “Oh.” Peter hurried to move and gagged himself on his seatbelt.
The girl rode up front. Peter watched the light on the shops and he watched the lamplike oranges. He was thinking of two things: first, the girl must have been looking as she walked to the car, and Peter’s window was open, but she did not see him sitting there or she pretended not to. Then Peter was thinking about his friend Josue. Last night Peter dreamt that Josue met him in a little room and that they were both glad, and friendly. Josue drew a knife and stuck it between Peter’s ribs. When Peter woke he found he had come in his sleep. Peter was a heterosexual man and also he didn’t like to be hurt; he supposed the dream had something to do with intimacy.
He was riding now to Josue’s work to return the book he had borrowed. The book was in Peter’s lap and it was heavy and its hard corners blundered into the flesh of his thighs. It was a book about Moebius. “Moebius disturbs and consoles,” said Fellini. Peter thought of those words with pleasure. Music waggled out of the girl’s big headphones.
In Studio City the traffic slowed and then went still. Peter looked across some feet of tar and pavement at two men who stood together on a building’s wheelchair ramp, candy-colored shirts rolled above their elbows. They were between a low plaster railing and the mass of the building, hacienda-white, windowless, and the light drove toward them from every side and form. They stood looking in each other’s faces and their faces were affable but stupid, as if they had been surprised by a sound and they were listening to its echos. It was the heat and light. A whole weight of white on them.
The Uber stopped in front of the restaurant. Peter went to the alley. Either side of the alley was high with bougainvillea. The pink was gigantic and had all the characteristics of a mirror except that Peter could not see himself in it. He looked aside and down because although the bougainvillea was beautiful it put sun in his face. Back of the restaurant and a big cold shadow, delightful. There was a wire door to the kitchen and there was a set of steps. Josue was reading on the steps like an escapee in the corner of a ceiling, every bent limb tense. He was gripping Henry V and smoking hatefully.
Peter said hey. “How is that?” he asked, conversation.
“How’s what?” screamed Josue.
“Henry the Fifth.”
“It’s okay.” Josue took his cigarette into his hand and changed his knee so that Peter could sit beside him. He’s such a prick that I come the one time he’s nice, Peter thought.
Josue told Peter about something he had read. “Check it out,” said Josue. He said that the Talmud orders ways of dying by how difficult it is to get the pneuma out of the body. “The best kind of death is like a hair drawn out of milk.”
When Peter thought of it he saw a black eyelash on a surface of milk. On the flat head of the garbage bin and around its feet there were jacaranda blossoms. “The angel of death stands over whoever’s bed and drops a drop of bile into their mouth.” Josue put his cigarette in his mouth so that he could use his finger to define a trip down.
Peter took an Uber back to Studio City. Tuesday routine, though the Uber made it expensive. The coffee shop was a little pink square. It was too small to sit inside of. There was a line of two which bent weirdly so that Peter stood holding the door open. A milk nozzle blew. The baristas were talking. Buoyantly, one asked: “Has Shrek come in yet?” As she spoke the man before Peter moved to the counter, revealing Peter, revealing the barista to Peter. The barista looked into Peter’s eyes and her face went limp and sorry. “Not yet-t-t!” said the other one, from whom Peter was still concealed.
The barista gave Peter his cappuccino made with great care. She wanted him to see her expression and he knew it but he was looking with interest at the surface of the cappuccino, marked with a wheat-staff of brown. “Thanks,” she said, and then she quickly said it again, and then she said “I mean thanks for coming in. We love seeing you.”
Peter was trying not to spill the coffee on his hand. “No problem,” he said.
In the Uber in the afternoon Peter enjoyed the faces of the trucks and the shapes of trees. The trees seemed to reach at him, like a hen’s foot. In suburban traffic the air eased over a hill and the trees high on it. It was a courtesy toward others to take offense at insult. This part of Peter’s character was mean. He hated dignity. His hate fell out of his arms like too much laundry. His hate embarrassed him to himself. At any rate it was an honest, ground-floor function of his character. It was an act which went straight down the hall of its own nature.
Peter sat at the edge of his studio with two brushes in one hand and his hands between his legs. He gazed out the cheap thin window at the place across the street from the office complex. A blue pool lay oblong behind the slats of a fence, lurking comically. It was like a Gorey monster, perfectly still and too big to be secret. Yellow leaves poured out of a green tree below the phone lines, above a brick one-door structure maintained by the city and labeled Electrical Room. Tremendously, a truck arrived before Peter’s window.
In the side of the truck there were gelloid strips of hanging plastic, dried foggy by sunshine. There was a man moving beyond them in dark clothes. He was moving like he was yanking something tangled up.
A platform stuck itself out of the side of the truck, high above the ground. It was silver and blazing. There were orange safety lights on its ends and they shone uncannily. The plastic strips of the doorway fattened and parted for a red dolly stacked with crates, and the hand of the man on its handle. The platform descended straight toward the ground, slow, and the dolly went down with the man’s hand on it, as if he were forcing it down.
The man dismounted, face and dark jumpsuit and one straight leg through the doorway to the sidewalk. He moved the dolly in a difficult figure eight and passed away from Peter’s window. The man returned when the dolly was empty. Now it was only a red frame. The man and the dolly and the platform rose up, and he sent himself through the plastic curtain. His shoulders went away and then his motion too.
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