I met him almost a year ago among the redwoods and giant clovers outside Mendocino and suspected him then of being a lunatic.  He joined me one evening at my camp and just stayed.  I watched him that night across the fire and saw a tired leprechaun huddled against a strange vision of time.  He believed he had fallen into a time warp -- time slowly and monotonously repeating itself.  Not a progression, not a changing of seasons or development of events or lives but rather a kind of grim nakedness which he was somehow forced to witness. 
 
               "Imagine knowing that from now on you will forever be conscious.  It is," he said sheepishly, "sometimes exquisite, however.  I can't pretend it isn't.  The moments, the moments.  Hmm, extremes of one or the other I'm afraid.  The trick is how to prolong that exquisite state.  It never lasts though.  And following hard is something of an abyss which, for the condition of present, no matter how short the actual period, seems an eternity and without hope and well ... there is no concept of change.  This naked experiencing always looming up, always.  And pressed against it, the sense that it is going to go on forever.
 
                 "It is as though I woke up every morning to the same day.  Over and over never progressing forward, never going on to the next day the next event the next experience.  You may think I'm a jester, a fool with all my antics.  They are temporary distractions.  Life for me now, how I hate the word, is a series of distractions.  Games and stories and adventures.  Yet every morning, early before the sun has risen, in the first grey shadowy moments, I wake with cold dread knowing it is again the same, the same, the same.  The surroundings may be different but I know nothing has changed.  Nothing can ever be accomplished, nothing built, no creative effort ever lasts through the night to be continued and built on the next day because there is always a return each morning to the bare beginning.  The idea of confidence, of ambition, of even desire exhausts itself and dies in this condition.  A future requires a past that will remain intact in order to build upon it.  Can you understand that?  I have neither." 

                The vision alternately horrified and intrigued me.  He had learned to live with it by evoking the personage of the leprechaun or the jester or the mime or simply by talking non-stop.  He was without a doubt driven, or rather chased.  He told me he had hit upon the answer one night during the composition of a long treatise on eternity.  The answer he said - follow the laughter. 
 
               We stayed up all night and by morning he was convinced I was his angel.  My long blond curls and waifish blue eyes reminded him of a picture from his childhood.  He said it was a vision of his future and indicated a certain eventual release from the time warp.  I said it was probably a post card from his past.  Either way, he said, it showed progress so he stayed. 
              
               
                  I don't sleep with Gabe.  I have this aversion to his body, it has to do with genes and offspring -- motherhood.  While some perhaps are pulled toward their destinies through longing and visions of family and motherhood I seem to be directed through aversions.
   
               We've been at this underpass for two days.  These people passing us by - families from San Bernardino out for a weekend trip to the desert or suited and tied men with clothing racks across the back seat - mostly ignore us.  Gabe says we'd have better luck in this town if he hid and I stood out on the freeway alone but I say it's not reaching the destination that matters but the journey.  So we continue on like this until late nightfall.  Finally Gabe insists, says he can't stand another noisy night under this bridge so I turn the sign over, write Mecca.  
 

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