So I'm not sure if this is any good. I tried to write on a different topic for a change - something other than murder and torture and death and decay. This was difficult, but please, be hard on me nonetheless.

Also, 'tis a tad long, but I just couldn't bring myself to break it up. Could be a tad confusing as well, so if you have any questions, ask them.

Let's just tag this as "experimental".

_____

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

-Aristotle

The park bench was spongy with memories. It was full of little glimpses of men and women sitting there beside the footpath and the thoughts they were thinking and the things they were doing. Audy closed his eyes and received the images slowly, as if they were dandelion parachutes pirouetting through the air. He couldn't see them clearly, though. They were snapshots viewed through spectacles fogged up by heavy breathing. The people were indistinct smears and their feelings were shadows moving behind shower curtains.

The pictures were truffles.

He sampled them sparingly.

As Audy waited for the first early morning walkers and joggers to pass by the bench on the footpath leaves shuffled by him on the footpath like the feet of wounded soldiers as they disembarked from freighters. The wind brushed them along with a push-broom; a weary janitor with fat, worldly sighs.

Audy wished that he could sit on the park bench to get a better angle of the memories rising like cigarette smoke stench rising from couch cushions. The images would sharpen, the colors would be brighter, the impressions would be more than footprints caught in dried mud. But he knew it wasn't possible. He had to stay put, in his wheelchair, inches beside the bench at best. And he was pretty sure that his body and the wheelchair had fused together and that even someone with a hacksaw and crowbar wouldn't be able to pry him out. He was pretty sure flesh and foam and hard plastic had made twisted Siamese twin bonds. If he concentrated hard enough, he could even feel a pulse throbbing inside the armrest. He could feel the seat cushion squirming slightly beneath him like a fetus in a mother's womb.

Patiently, Audy wiped his the drool from his lips on the towel draped over his left shoulder.

Down the path, if he strained his eyes far enough, he could see a jogger approaching, her feet pounding the pavement and her pony-tail made metronome twitches in the air. Her arms and legs – choked with muscle that strained at her skin like butterflies caught in polyester nets – pumped up and down with mechanical precision. Audy admired her body. He admired it's coordination and agility and how all the gears clicked and meshed together like the innards of a greased grandfather clock.

Feet that were arched Golden Gate bridges.

Hips that pushed and twisted like palm trees being played with by hurricanes sitting cross-legged in wading pool oceans.

Shoulders that could carry the world if someone decided to place it there.

Made in God's own image.

In Audy's case, God must've molded his face and twisted his arms and bent his feet with cubist paintings as inspiration. His hands must've had slipped in the process. Maybe the mirror He had been looking in was distorted and warped – like those circus funhouse mirrors that turned concentration camp inmates into dough-mounds of flesh – and had fashioned Audy accordingly. There were mistakes made on the conveyor belts of assembly lines. Audy understood this. He was perfectly aware that in the making of millions of donuts or bread loaves, some came out looking like tumors from the faces of Japanese citizens sunbathing in the glow of Hiroshima.

But he didn't understand why they didn't just throw him away like they did with other production line mistakes after he had popped out of the birth canal.

The jogger was twenty feet away from him now.

Whiffs of happiness threaded their way down the path, like the smell of rising bread from a bakery.

He closed his eyes and let his head loll against the cloth on his shoulder.

Ten feet away.

The feelings and images focused, sharpened.

– could almost taste the cologne from his shirt in her mouth. It tasted like Birkenstock sandals and the shag carpet on the floor of a VW bus and a little like marijuana smoke all balled up together, but she loved it anyway. She loved the way his arm was creeping around her shoulder as she sat in the front of that car and they watched the city choke and heave with drunkenness, like party-goers lying in ER beds getting their stomachs pumped.

He leaned a little closer.

So did she.

Their faces could almost touch and she could see herself reflected in his fishbowl eyes.

She had heard about love and it's symptoms before, but it had always seemed so cliché, so dead and idealistic. It was a concept to be buried alive under the pages of romance novels, wrinkly with the tears of middle-aged women. It wasn't for her. It wasn't for the hip and the modern and the chic.

But.

Here it was.

This feeling gnawing through her gut like a tapeworm writhing with Cupidity, a feeling crawling up and down her spine like the fingers of a masseuse jazzed up by electric chair currents, and a million champagne bubbles – without the champagne – giving her heart jacuzzi jet-stream tingles.

And so much sweat.

As the sun set, it egged the windshield with yolk-colored splashes and made the dust motes in the air look as if someone had taken a scoop out of the night sky and filled the car up with white-dwarf luminescence –

The jogger passed.

The feelings grew fuzzy and the images slipped and smeared like sidewalk chalk in the rain as she passed out of sight.

He looked back down the path.

Audy sometimes wished that the people he saw on the footpath every morning might stop and take a seat and give him more time to savor their happiness. All he could ever glean from these people were incomplete little snapshots, images broken up like labor unions loitering on street corners by riot police. Sure, the memories were better than what was radiating from the bench, but it was difficult for Audy to ever get a full experience. It was difficult to ever get the full story.

Still, he had liked the smell of the cologne.

And he wondered what it would be like to wear Birkenstock's and smoke marijuana nails and sit in the driver's seat of a Volkswagen bus, viewing the world through John Lennon glasses.

He wiped his lips with the cloth on his shoulder.

Another woman appeared on the path, but her pace was slower and her skin was scrunched up and sagging from her bones like tattered war-time flags on slumped and tired-looking flagpoles. Her mouth was pinched and her eyes were as black as burnt match heads, but Audy felt her Moment sooner along the path than anyone else he'd ever seen before. There was music in her feelings and images. The Moment were sprinkled with sixteenth notes belched from saxophone stomachs and weezy, drawling muted trumpet gossip soaked in gin and scotch and –

– the band on stage played as if they were possessed and it wouldn't even matter if Christ was there commanding all those beautiful jazz notes to depart hence, the music was fused with their hands and their lips and their lungs and made the poor musicians twist and jump as if they had voodoo doll pins rammed into their feet like hypodermic needles.

Her feet worked hard to keep time with them.

They swung like Texas oil pumps and her arms slid and her hips swished and executed her moves with guillotine precision.

All she could see was his face.

All she could see was the way his lips pulled back like stage curtains to reveal his wolf-grin and the way his eyes flashed. The way his cigarette was perched in the corner of his mouth with the ashes hanging on to the tip for dear life even as they danced.

He was laughing. So was she.

Her blouse was soaked with sweat. But it didn't matter. It wouldn't matter if the world suddenly split down the middle and yawned like a little boy in church and every house in every building tumbled down into nothingness, because she was finally dancing with him. And they were laughing.

Around her, dresses and skirts spun like Lazy Susans and droplets of sweat flew in the air like spit from the mouths of teenage punks sitting on street corners. The lights were dim. The music nailed holes in her ear drums and put fists in her gut and she felt her hands slipping from his as they spun and kicked and swung.

He opened his mouth to say something to her, but all that came out was a trombone solo –

Audy opened his eyes.

Swing music followed the old woman down the path and slowly became less coherent and more disjointed as she disappeared from eyesight.

It was a good memory. A different one, anyway. Audy was coming to realize he preferred the Moments that came from older individuals. He liked how the images were a little stained with mildew – like black and white photographs found in a shoebox in the attic – and how the feelings were more mature and aged and perfected, like wine or cheese.

He liked the cigarette smoke.

He liked the poodle-skirts and living room radios.

Painted on the sidewalk were sun-rays squeezed from mustard bottles and the leaves performed unending interpretive dances for him.

There was a time when Audy felt guilty when he looked at other people's Moments. He felt like some kind of thief slinking into suburban houses and shuffling around in underwear drawers. For the longest time he tried to turn the ability off, shunt it, block it out in an attempt to give people their privacy. But their minds always seemed to be open bathroom stalls.

Eventually, he overcame any inhibitions.

Because why couldn't he share their Moments? If his arms and legs were to remain bent and gnarled tree branches and if his jaw was to remain superglued shut, then why couldn't he experience a little of what was impossible for him.

If he didn't have any Moments of his own, what was wrong with a little stealing-from-the-rich-to-feed-the-poor?

It was only fair.

One more, he decided, and then he would go home.

Five minutes later, two people came into view: a man and a woman. The woman was speaking softly to the man and supported him by the elbow. His feet were bent inward and his arms were twisted and pressed against his chest, hands perpetually cupped, like a kid holding bird crumbs in his hand for a flock of pigeons cooing sermons on cathedral steps. The man's head lolled. His clothes hung on him like a new suit on the shoulders of starved prisoner of war and his features were buckshot; all clustered together and empty.

The couple came slowly.

There was a rotten feeling growing in Audy's stomach as he watched them.

As they came closer – the man wobbling on his bamboo legs like a circus performer on stilts – Audy began to sense the woman's Moment but he pushed it away and concentrated on the man. His mouth was partially open and the harder Audy studied him, the more complex the man's expression became. It was the expression of a baby after being pulled from it's mother's womb, face blue, sliming the doctor's latex gloves, lungs like shriveled little apples.

His Moment was small and soft.

It radiated from him with a candlelit glow.

– and the air was as cold as meat locker breath freezing Soviet fingers. But he didn't care.

The stars were so bright.

He had never seen them this way before.

They were like God's pupils, dilated to the smallest iridescent pinpoint. They were like a sea of headlights on on interstate highways. They were angels, compressed and vacuum-packed, and held up to the sun like a magnifying glass poised above an anthill.

They were singing songs to him.

Beside him, Dad was crushing the grass and his finger was tracing connect-the-dot lines between the stars and making them into shapes and stories and people that performed Shakespearean quality plays for them way up in the sky.

They were very close together.

Their breath – that looked like floating fire-extinguisher glop – mingled together and danced towards the stars until they disappeared.

Dad's voice was heavy and it was crushing his eyelids like the grass. He desperately wanted to stay awake and alert and listen to Dad, but the moment was so warm and the voices coming from the congregations of stars dropped sleeping pills down his ears and hummed irresistible lullabies –

When Audy opened his eyes, the couple was gone.

His eyes were drooling, just like the corners of his mouth, and he felt guilty for looking at the man's Moment. He felt guilty that he had taken from someone poorer than him.

He felt guilty for his tears.

And he felt jealous that he couldn't recognize his own Moment, even now.

Audy savored the residual feelings and images from the man that had just passed as if they were the last crumbs from his last meal. His throat contracted a little and he wiped the drool from the side of his mouth with the cloth draped over his shoulder.

The park bench was a homeless man wrapped in newspapers, with images coming off of him like snores and breath laced with alcohol that didn't even stir as Audy's wheelchair hummed to life and whirred down the path, pushing through the leaves like Israel, headed by Moses, through the Red Sea.