State your state of mind
Someone's behind me holding a gun to my head.
State your state of mind
by Bob Hicok
A memory. I'm in a tall building. My forehead's pressed to a window. I'm looking at a boat on fire in a harbor. Someone's behind me holding a gun to my head. An alarm's going off and a woman's climbing the building across the street. She's naked. There's a tattoo on her back of a woman climbing a building, and so on, and so on, all the way down to a speck of dust. You have very good eyesight, I hear myself think, even though hearing isn't actually involved, is it, but we don't read or see our thoughts either, so much as touch them like braille. Brain braille. Let's not think that again, I think now, in what will become a new memory very soon. I'm late for something but can't figure out what. A funeral. Wedding. Belief in god. Fear that my life's an irrelevant part in a sitcom that was canceled after three episodes. The person holding the gun asks me to pick a number between one and infinity. Infinity, I say. I am right. I begin to cry but never quite finish.
