Kerouac was still present—and, the last time I saw him, he was voicing his opposition to the president of the United States.  He said a lot of things, most of which, to my surprise, sounded meaningful and informed.  Perhaps I’d been too hard on Kerouac; after all, he was only human, and whatever was eating at him—that made him drink, for example—might have been temporarily out of his control.  He was still young.  I figured I could get him on the right meds and he’d still have a chance at redemption.  Maybe he died in the real world, but lived on in a shifter state, emerging and learning as he appeared—as if, in his absence, he’d simply been asleep; perhaps he slept in peace in all the time that he wasn’t around.  Would he live as long as me—or as long as I shifted, or would he die for good after some unassailable event?  Would he die when I died?  Would I die?  Or would I find myself living in a shift world that belonged to somebody on another level, somebody that was awake when I slept?  Did my existence, in fact, depend on this person—and who exactly was this person?  God?  A god?

     You can’t trust an addict, though—you can’t trust them to do anything; I didn’t even know what Kerouac and I had in common—so I tried to think about that, in a positive light.  Kerouac, as I saw it, had fire in the belly—he wanted to do great things.  I too, had fire in the belly: I wanted to paint at least two thousand paintings.  That wasn’t an impossible goal—although a lot depended on routine, and getting used to a little indifference that was bound to arise on the path from one theme to the next.  I reminded myself, then, that it’s not enough to have fire in the belly if you have no sense of purpose—which is akin to saying that you have no sense of life after death—a life in which all that we learned on earth could go with us, and be employed, in the life to come. 

     I’m sure that at one point Kerouac was a child, and, as a child, he was subject to happy accidents that shaped his character—unfortunately, however, all did not end well, or so it seemed, since, as it were, Kerouac’s life was tragic.  But maybe, as I said, it wasn’t over yet—he lived on, through me, and the times when I shifted the space between us.  It was my understanding that things that happen in the shift world—such as driving in a car with Elvis, actually had physical meaning in the real world, so when Kerouac spoke to me about his contempt for men that don’t know their place, and try, in the worst of times, to leave their sphere, he was doing something.  Silas was going to run for a third term, I imagined, since he worried so much about the country, which, according to him, needed his guidance, and his radical hatred for anything that might lead to socialism—as opposed to capitalism. 

     Wealth begets wealth once you cross a certain threshold, and engage, in some sense, with your ruthless and or oblivious side.  You have no real clue as to what life is like for those that can’t raise a family because they’re too poor to do it.  You drive single women to abortion—or adoption, and then you refuse to look after the pain you created when you forced a child into a world that did not love them.  I don’t know anything about Kerouac’s family life, and, to be honest, I don’t like reading biographies; he never spoke of his family, either, so there was no way that I was going to find anything out.  Anyhow, I didn’t want to get to know the Kerouac that exploited himself to make people laugh—and that was what was really happening, wasn’t it?  A man steps into a chaotic world and, when all else fails, it’s not enough to entertain—you must make them laugh, and quickly, if you want the wealthy, our providers, to stick around.

     No, I wanted to get to know the man’s hopes and dreams—what inspired him, what made him tick, and who were his loved ones?  Eventually you end up talking about your exes, don’t you?  You want to paint over it, so you talk about it; you share the experience and, in that way, your love is transferred to the present, where it matters the most.  But that kind of thing doesn’t always happen—it can’t happen, for, at some point, we have no understanding of what transpired.  There’s no sense in trying to translate something when you don’t speak the language, and, sometimes, the pain of losing someone you  love is incomprehensible—losing them is incomprehensible.  Kerouac would tall me about his life when he understood it better, and, if that never happened, then I was perfectly happy to encourage the man that opposed Silas—and, in talking about him, if only in, or precisely because of, the shift world, Kerouac actually did something about it.