The Beefy, The Infinite

I meet a woman in a Taco Bell. Reincarnation is her name. She shimmers, she is ethereal, she leans on the pockmarked counter and orders a quesarito — steak — and her soul-black eyes catch the neon as she grins at me.

You’ve never met a starchild, she tells me. That’s alright.

I finish my Baja Blast. I contain her — for I contain all — but she escapes me.

***

I should tell you about myself. I am Infinity. I am void and light, I am the space between integers and the room between stars.

I don’t usually frequent these parts — the little infinities, that is — the highways, the motels, the half-Taco-Bell-half-KFCs that whisper to senses unknown. Places I am seen, but not welcomed.

***

The next time I meet her, she swings in a galaxy like a hammock, leaving a lumescent, stelliform trail like drops of nacho cheese through the starry black.

Reincarnation looks me dead in the eyes — and I have ever so many eyes — and says we are destined to meet this way, and meet this way, and meet this way

And I say does Metaphysics know you’re here?

And she says what do you think the stars want?

***

I grow to miss her, I do, I miss her the way I miss the divine geometry of a Taco Bell in 1993; its magnificent sapphire crescents and violet contours triumphant astride rampant beige.

And I wonder about her, as I pace the eons, upthread and downstream, I interrogate the Big Bang and I search the cosmic microwave background and I shake the baby universe through a sieve but nothing comes out except stardust and some cinnamon twists.

They’re pretty old, but I eat them anyways.

***

The next time I meet her I am a wind howling over the ice plains of Pluto and she wears a tapestry of suns and together we are cataclysm and flame and the taste of supernova matched only by the Sprite that comes out of the janky old soda machine.

What’s a [GENDER REDACTED] like you doing in an [UNHOLY COSMIC VOID] like this? she asks me.

A planet can have many souls, I tell her. We come and go.

See, she says, I leave and I become.

***

Reincarnation steals my souls.

A soul is merely a displaced figment of spacetime; its end is its beginning and the totality is in me, of me, about me like the shuddering decay of two orbiting black holes or a burrito left on the sidewalk.

Reincarnation breaks my cycle. She takes from me, snatches gossamer threads from between my too-long fingers and stitches them back together and casts them back into the abyss.

And yet I do not see her, only feel her quivering footsteps stealing away through spacetime.

***

I meet her at the end of the universe, where the black dwarfs sing to the empty winds. I see her strolling through dead galaxies, plucking the corpses of stars, biting into their crumbling strata like a chalupa supreme.

What is left? I ask. What could be left?

She shines alone. The beginning, she says. Life is left, she says.

To live is to end, I insist. Live less, I say.

No, she says. Live más

***

FIN