Smash: The Ball is Out of Bounds

Golem Goes to Laos

Down on it pours a precious stream from Valfather's pledge
Well would you know more?



Golem scuffs his bare feet as sandpaper on the boards of another porch on a hillside where he sits and looks through trees at water surrounding Koh Samet. He tries to write as if he is there now, on the plane, in Laos—then on his way back again. It’s a trip he took years back for a visa to allow him to stay in Thailand—even though he doesn’t think he will get out alive. He sips a beer and tries to put himself in the state of mind that he was in when he took the trip. It was different then. More schizophrenic—more bizarre … frenetic … than the state that he is currently in. He hears waves crash down on the beach. It’s calm. Not so quiet that he can hear that something not making any sound. Not quite, but quiet. Night. Dark. Not much is making a sound. Even on the plane he remembers things black—things that went down when he was a kid. Things he can’t recall all the time because he was too young—things that seem more scary to an adult mind. Kids have it easy—they don’t understand details. Then kids become adults and the memories start to make sense in a new way. Maybe some of us don’t make the transition well. Maybe some of us remember too much. Is it possible to remember too much? Rather than worry about Alzheimer’s maybe some of us want to forget—if not just a detail here and there. Like the time when you were a little girl and you tripped your brother in the mall and looked at your mother as if you didn’t know why he fell. Like the time years later when that brother was sick, and suddenly you remembered. Had you hated him then? Like the time I shot my brother with a rubber band as he stood in his crib, and then pretended like I didn’t know why he was screaming before he fell. I had hit him in the eye— though I was not trying to. All the mean things that people do to other people. Alzheimer’s might be a relief from that. I suppose someday, when we are clones, we might be able to program our memories and delete the ones we don’t choose to remember, but in the mean time we live with them, and some of us at least know that’s best and can foresee a horror that will come about when the soul leaves, and we are left alone with only humanity. Humanity is a horror. Look at what humanity has done. Humanity has exterminated Jews or allowed it to be done. Hasn’t humanity been responsible for the world’s woes? Why don’t we concentrate on the soul I think— on fixing one here and there. Then someday we can concentrate on humanity and see it for what it is.


Golem picks up his boarding pass at Dom Muang and says he will carry the box on the plane. It might be big enough to hold a bowling ball, and it’s wrapped in string. He’s reminiscing about a previous trip to Vientiane, most of the other memories he doesn’t know he has.

It should be noted that all murder is not committed by a known entity. There are those that will kill strangers for revenge. Others kill those they know in retribution for some atrocity committed against them. And some, they are the ones who are strange: tic…tic…tic…

He cut off the retarded kid’s head and put it in a box….He cut off the retarded kid’s head and put it in a box….He cut off the retarded kid’s head and put it in a box. The words reverberated in his mind, bouncing off the walls like ping pong balls in a box—then, in the wee hours of morning, he put the box on the parent’s lawn…. He put the box on the parents’ lawn…. He wanted to know how it felt to kill, he said. Smash, the ball is out of bounds.