N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 0

KEVIN HAYES

Dead Zone

a zone of the city had been set aside to provide housing for the dead, a zone that the law did not permit the living to visit, a law enforced by a strict police cordon I made many attempts to penetrate, but the cops always turned me away never even bothering to listen to the pretexts I invented to justify making an exception for me brandishing their pistols warning that I would be killed if I chose to defy their authority. . .slowly, it dawned upon me that the best way of getting what I wanted would be an act of civil disobedience in response to the threat since the police were either bluffing & they would never open fire allowing me to enter the dead zone alive or they would shoot me dead & the law would require that my corpse be housed in the dead zone along with all the others who were dead like me. . .after I had decided to engage in the practice of civil disobedience, the next time I went to the checkpoint dividing the living from the dead, I refused to listen when the police told me they would not let me enter the dead zone thru its gate & ordered me to go back home & I responded instead by climbing the wall mounting to its top before they opened fire with a fatal rain of bullets blowing so many holes thru me I toppled over that wall & was dead upon arrival to the ground of the zone I had longed to reach, a deliberate strategy employed by the police to spare the city the expense of transporting my remains to the dead zone so I could inhabit the area my new condition required me to inhabit in accordance with strict civil law. . .

once I had passed thru the death that was necessary so that I could at last become a legal citizen of the dead zone, I was free to wander thru it intent upon finding those I had once known & loved, those who had qualified to move there long before me, but I did not have any street addresses to help me locate them, so I relied upon random chance to establish the reunions desire had ignited me to pursue. . .as I walked thru the streets of the dead, however, I discovered, much to my dismay, that all the shadows I happened to encounter looked exactly identical & I could not distinguish one from the other, a discovery that plunged me into absolute despair after I found a mirror & stared at my own reflection in it realizing that death had also stripped me of any distinctive features others could use to recognize me, a realization that meant the reunions I wanted to experience had already been experienced even though I failed to notice them. . .in my absolute despair, I slumped down to the concrete certain that my suicide by police strategy had not delivered the outcome I had expected, certain that the dead zone could never provide me with the eternal bliss I had thought it would yield, but after I curled up into a fetal ball & fell deep into a woebegone sleep, I escaped the woe when an angel came to me in my dream & taught me to cultivate my love & to wait patiently for the miracle that would surely come. . .

I slept for so long an expanse of time that five years passed before I woke up, a fact that I found difficult to believe but that was nevertheless confirmed by the date I read on the first three newspapers I saw, five years that had not been wasted since I spent them giving birth to a love that burned with a deeper passion that I had ever known, a love that drove me to get up & to continue my interrupted search vowing I would never surrender to despair again but instead would look until I recognized & embraced all those I had come to recognize & embrace. . .quickly, I discovered that the cultivation of my love transfigured the shadows of the dead I encountered so that they became living souls with faces, faces that made recognition possible, & that random chance quickly led me to gather the souls I had wanted to find together, the souls whose absence had inspired me to commit the act of civil disobedience that would cause the police to kill me, a murder that had served as the door bring me at last to the sweet reunion I desired. . .in the end, then, I had passed thru death & received all the love that death once had seemed to thwart, a miraculous fact I knew could not be denied when all our living souls had gathered & we began our endless dance thru the streets of the dead, a luminous dance that transfigured the dead zone thriving alive, sudden & gigantic flowers blooming in response to each rhythmic step we took, flowers towering far above our heads flooding the new world we had risen to inhabit with a ravishing beauty that became the music born to ignite us to dance with one another immersed in rapture & ecstasy forever & forever. . .