3-28-08 The Invisibles Contact Me (At Last)

He stands on the corner wearing a brown, army-style jacket with a knitted dread-cap of yellow, red, and green, and he begins speaking to me while I am still in the crosswalk walking toward him, smiling at me all the while like a physics professor attempting to explain a particularly complicated point of string-theory to a promising but slightly obtuse student.

"Four majesties came down on the sun's rays," he says, underlining the names of various deities (Yaweh, Allah, Jehovah, Amen-Ra) with his thick, curved fingernail on a crumpled, photocopied page where texts full of sacred names and alternate histories criss-cross like a dadaist manifesto, "and they created the universe and built the pyramids."

"But the weren't black men," he continues, still smiling gently with yellowed, crooked, but strong teeth, his soft caribbean accent lilting over the traffic hum, "they were aliens and there were four of them, so how could one god create the world?"

I look at his kind face a moment and say, truthfully, "I don't know."