The Only Bad Thing That Ever Happened (complete)

Feet slung into the air of the living room, bones drunk on equanimity, beer gracefully in hand, God knew something he didn't say. His furry mouth, sweat soaked, the breath like chewed green grapes, and his eyes closed, he would have practically no earthly basis of reason why his life then was to become undone then. Clear-drunk, the high that seems to ease not merely the possibility of damage received, but the fact it had ever been. Warm confidence and purpose in his happy gut, gentle love streaming through his veins, arteries, nerves. Every cell within purged of the trespasses and defilements that he'd been charged with during the centuries and millennia of his strange, agile, balanced and unbalanced existence.

The Great City steamed in the abbreviated winter, sparsely occupied subways more like runaway dogs unguided in their destinations than transporters of any sort of person at all.

The television in God's living room played an ad "paid for the supporters of Nathan Rueben," who, at that time, was still a very "controversial" congressman, and then it returned to the late-night film, which on that particular evening was Duke Fogherty's The Rich Man's New Toy. These things were temptation and balm to many insomniacs -- intoxicated, sober, and everywhere inbetween -- throughout the Great City, God one of several dozens. From his beer-heavy seat, he felt the ping of a cigarette craved, but then did not wish to disturb tranquility as it had been wedded to his bones.

And God would've stayed like that for hours more, but other factors were at play:

His wife...whose name is here omitted for respect of the time passed...was experiencing life on profoundly different terms. See, in the beginning of this century, America was arriving at a radically shifting period in its already experimental, improvised and routinely hypocritical tradition and legacy. The old America, the one whose fossils sit beneath the soil and within every brick, board and beam, never really suffered shame for its vanity and severe entitlement as it committed massacre, exploitation and certain ruin for all that it perceived as obscuring its destiny to conquest. The new America, dawning in roughly 1960-61, didn't enjoy this ignorance, or at least not without hassles.

Inbetween, the wife of God found herself being squeezed by the conflict.

When she snapped from unconsciousness on the night that was to be their final residing under a shared roof, her heart and eyes and soul burned with the meanest fires of impermanence itself. Her body ached, her skin betrayed a dissatisfaction that might sever the head of a king or a president or an emperor if it had been the form of a true knife and not merely the blade of imagination that hides in the necessary anger of our condition.

A shortglass of iceless whiskey shattered against the wall.

God curiously observed its amber contents as they caught the light from the ceiling...some few granules embedded in the plaster and glimmering with a modest contentment.

"Fucker!"

He turned.

"Just sit there, you fucker!"

He sat.

"Just sit there sucking that SHIT!" She meant it. "You fucking coward! You drunk imbecile piece-of-shit coward! Sit there deaf and dumb while everything sloughs off itself and children die and disease sucks us all into the ground... Why not? You won't miss anything; will you?" He'd live. "They die," she said. "They die...they wail and suffer and they die, while you, MAGNIFICENT you sit there drunk watching television, staring at your hairy gut and your useless balls, you...you rotten piece of shit...."

God's wasted eyes full of sorrow. He wanted words to say but couldn't manufacture the least dry syllable. He mutely received her accusations.

"...And this city...this fucking turd too big to be buried, festering corpse of a liar's dream, unholy cunt of a counterfeit democracy... Ridiculous...." On and on like that, the once-detached, once-selfless generosity & concern now beaten beyond repair or comfort, dissolving into the breath of her curses, skating over his incompetent ears....

Finally, when a neighbor called the police, finally, when she had wrenched as much of the agony and disgust from her being, finally, when they escorted God from his Brooklyn home another portion of Old America settled, another day precisely on its heels.

Some energy of the house oozed through the walls of the house into the boy's bedroom. Vaguely psychic yet any formal language assigned its presence was entirely the synesthesia of his ill-rested, malnourished consciousness. Far away in identity, unbearably close in form. The energy like a kind of self-important pollution; deep below the register of what he could think & feel, like some private knowledge of decay deposited there at birth.

His diminutive frame turned in the sheets, blanket, neither too cold nor too warm, yet a cocoon of something unwelcoming and repulsive. Hard disease in a weakling body. His eyes didn't part from sleep though a purposeful effort ascended from his hairless face and he muttered protest against a force as large as the night.

This continued for perhaps an hour, perhaps ten minutes. If he had known the source of this perversion, if he could look into its black, deathly eyes, he may have, without reservation, committed to vote suicide with the most proximal device to hand no matter how crazy.

Mercifully, the face of his gluttonous predator would be unknown for another year.

His name was (and is) Spook McEntyre. He was born in the town of Waffle, New York, to a single-mother who had a good job who had a good job as activities director of the Waffle Senior Citizen Center, and he was at that time in the seventh grade at the Walter Bukowski Middle School even though he was two years older than anyone else in his classes.

He had either underperformed or barely passed in every last subject, with Science, Gym, and Economics denoting the lowliest of these marks. On those profoundly rare occasions when he scored an 80 or better, the teacher would scrawl a brief note above his name (he'd hardly read it) the red, bloated letters, a foriegn, elaborate language that made him momentarily shrink smaller than usual.

He made new friends every year (except for fourth grade, when he made no friends at all) and he lost new friends every year, when the inevitable turn to Summer deported all the smarter kids to their respective workcamps or to "the ethical preparation of young adults nearing the conquest of maturity."

He didn't qualify for either.

Instead, Spook McEntyre forced himself to sleep later -- when the focus and patience necessary to do that were graspable -- and he ate and ate and ate, pausing to change from one of the seven television channels to another and nothing else. He'd grown at a normal rate until his tenth birthday, when puberty was to invite itself sans formal permission, and everything inward bloomed at an intolerable rate, ony to halt and mildly subside three months later. (Those three months cut into him like a knife that deposited blood into the body.)

All of this compounded by the absence of a father. All of this like fingers gouging his throat.

He had taken to leaving his room in the smallest hours of the day, when the unseen sky was a robust shade of blue, going down to the basement of their 3-bedroom house. There were never clothes when he opened the door of the dryer. Only the hollow, definite space of metal that resonated through the damp air. So, he would place one foot inside it, turning carefully at the waist while bringing the other leg into its company before finding that curled purchase his body sung about even as the insect-like agitation of brainwave energy struggled and withered in his mind. In its restriction, the boy would feel the dense oppression of the house elevate tremendously in a regression towards what might as well have been the origin of all things. And he would discover an awesome vacancy that rendered the darkness of the house, the dryer into something words could never describe to satisfaction: and it grew wider, taller, grander still, throbbing, humming at the flowing edges of itself, until he enjoyed relief from all sensory input and excused himself from the dryer.

In the proper hours of the morning, at breakfast, his mother would coldly study him from the kitchen sink, while he ate cereal, the intensity inside him undiscussed.

3. Live In Your Own Time

Her right hand pushed into its respective kidney while her left took casual purchase of the counter, marble sticky with the grease in the air as it spat and floated through the rectangular portal to the kitchen sizzling with the industry and angst of the cook as it leapt up into itself and the sweat and smell and chatter of everyone eating and working in the diner. Three or four on the stools that run the length of the counter with no less than one or two empty spaces between each of them. Another dozen occupying tables and booths talking in serious tones, the sound of it chewing at her ears while she struggled to unearth, to locate a rebound from within that might deliver her though the remaining two hours of her shift. She moved her hand from herself to the counter, arched her shoulders, neck, weakly sighed. Then without missing a beat the man nearest her beckoned from his coffee and eggs that he wanted a refill. She folded her eyes, slightly nodded then made an about-face to the coffee-pot, retrieved it, and poured the man his coffee.

"Are you new here?"

She most certainly was not. "I most certainly am not."

"Sure? You look new."

While she hardly needed make-up, while her hair showed virtually no sign of her 61 years on this planet, while her figure maintained a positively glorious shape of D-cup breasts and a sexy bulge at her waist beneath her waitress's uniform, she undoubtedly could not be mistaken for "new," whether in age, occupation, or anything else.

"I come here a lot,"he said. She waited for him to elaborate on this, which he did not.

So she politely nodded to confirm understanding, then turned again to replace the pot to the giant apparatus that was the coffee-machine.

"Yeah," the man suddenly continued. "I've been attending this restaurant since 1952." He did not look more than 40 years old, making this seem like a mathematical impossibility. "I practically opened it."

Again, attempting to be polite, she agreed with what the customer was saying.

"My brother and I used t' come here after school for burgers and freedom fries. Twin brother. Except he was a minute older than me." The man then slightly wounded. "Not anymore though."

She was tired, and indeed'd heard a million similar recollections. Yet a spark of joyful compassion would reliably move inside her when people volunteered these things. It was moving then.

He continued: "He died from a cancer a few years ago. Lung cancer... Yeah. Couldn't have been more than 65 years old..."

She was unable to suppress her perplexion.

He noticed, immediately adding, "My brother regarded age rather subjectively. A curious fellow. Thomas never did things the way you'd expect them to be done. He'd always say, "You have to live in your own time." He even studded philosophy in school." Quickly explaining, "Back when philos'phy was still primited. Before a certain Smith Corzeff showed us what comes of that. Hmmph." He picked up his fork, cut and speared a piece of fried egg no larger than half a dime. "My name is Gene."

Again, she nodded, pointed at the tag pinned on her uniform to save herself the breath.

Then another man, about ten feet down the counter, called out, "Waitress?" Hands moving pavlovian back to the coffee-pot, she snapped from routine as he yelled, "Waitress: would you please stop what you're doing and come here."

"Hhhhh..."

His gasoline face as vicious as a razor, contemptuous eyes. "Need a favor," the words almost disembodied. He asked her to raise the volume of the television, which had been addressing the weather a moment before and was now disseminating recent details on the state of Tequistan, and the civil war that raged within its borders.

Said the television: "Presiden Corzeff, via an intermediary, has made yet another flaccid proposal to the United States regarding its development of nuclear weapons. Quote-- The nation of Tequistan has never, in all of its 85 years of independence from those of its closest neighbors, either issued a single threat to the United States nor acted in violence, save the rarest moments when she had no other options but to react in self-defense; Tequistan has proven herself to be a peaceful ally in the world, [then] so it is with the utmost humility that we proffer the entry of American inspectors to discern any guilt, any wrongful action attributed to our manufacture of nuclear arms deemed in conflict with policies shared by our governments -- end quote."

"You believe this shit?" said the man

The waitress, who paid daily attention to the escalating animosity between Tequistan and America, had never, would never, possess consistent feelings regarding nuclear warfare. "I really don't know," she said.

"It's a lot of fucking horseshit," he said. "That parasite would as soon sell the arms off his own mother before Tequistan was a peaceful nation. How long's that war been going on anyway?"

"Waitress?" begged Gene from down the counter.

"Excuse me," she said, then went to him.

"I'll be needing my bill in a moment, but could you do something for me first?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Could I have a smile? I was thinking of my brother Thomas, and I wanted to see you smile."

She couldn't look at anything. She wanted to cry.

"Okay," Gene said. "Just the bill, then."

4. Dead Husband

She sat down to the kitchen table to study the boy. He'd spoken less and less in the past week, and the night previous, when she'd stood in his doorway, said, "I love you," then waited for a syrupy-thick ten seconds for him to reply, before switching off the light and closing the door, understanding he wasn't going to...she'd laid in bed distressed by the fact of this, teasing out some strategy should there be some strategy to tease out.

Now, with the lazy, yellow morning strung between them and the kitchen (the house had been built without a separate dining area) Dorothea McEntyre had a certain epiphany.

"You know, Spook," she said, "you can talk to me about anything you're thinking about. You don't have to keep things bottled up inside."

He gravely continued to eat his cereal.

"Do you like the cereal I bought? Should I get some more?" Her eyes tempered with strange pity.

He made a rather audible crunching sound as he scooped spoonful after spoonful of the sugary oats into his blonde face and whatever was left in the bowl drank his milk with him. He looked her coldly in the eye, waited for her to draw the top and bottom of her face together, then sad nothing. He didn't really know what he wanted to say. He undoubtedly wished to accuse her of something, could feel the pressure of it melting and glueing the melted portions together within him, though nevertheless couldn't utter the least beginning of it, not a suggestion, not even a wisecrack. So he continued to eat his cereal, sometimes counting each mouthful, sometimes not.

Dorothea McEntyre studied her son, weighing the possibility he was an enemy. That he had been adopted and commanded by a power beyond her control and understanding. As if what she considered her motherly rights had been subverted to a cause severely cruel, severely alienating. Dorothea McEntyre's late husband often made her feel a similar way. She remembered him with a curious mixture of lust and erratic contempt, not unknown to drive her from her duties as activities director of the Waffle Senior Citizen Center in order to head across town to the Shooting Range Bar & Grille where she would, with the utmost cultural grace, order and consume one, then two, then three, then four 6 oz. martinis that she did not appear to hurry through yet were gone in scarcely one half hour. And on more than half of these occasions men of one quality and another would offer to pay for the drinks, in some cases with genuine altruism.

But she never accepted, and she never regretted turning them down. The drinks were a kind of gesture to her gone husband (whose death she was unaware of during the first year of his absence). Having a stranger cover the cost of that alcohol, in Dorothea McEntyre's mind, would be about as decent (or indecent) as letting the stranger sleep in his grave.

Her son poured another bowl of cereal.

Dorothea McEntyre didn't see any point in this ridiculous silent treatment, nor could she precisely recall how much money she'd drawn out of the bank the week before (left in her purse) she opened his bedroom door one day to discover the window open, his backpack and some of his clothes missing, and nothing else to suggest he had no intention of returning.

5. To the Sea

No physician nor priest nor diviner of any tradition whatsoever would illustrate from without the absolute center of her memory. Wouldn't draw its outline to a stranger's understanding. She alone held said memory; not Prophet; not politician; not even God, whose ring she wore.

The people in the diner knew this, whether keen or inexcusably stupid, they knew what resided in her belonged to her.

Even as they issued pithy requests, spoiled on an empty nihilism, denizens of the Great City, people of every sex, class, generation echoed with the truth that souls never, have never gone to any body other than those suits of calcium, plasma, flesh which their formers have assembled upon them; memory obeys gravity as well.

See her moving, down a sidewalk from the diner, away from the ineffable hostility and neediness of its patrons and their crowded filth and this ridiculous war and every lame piece of advice, every hollow declaration, every wasted moment of their lives.

She was moving with a sense of purpose that itself was opening the channel of something dearly crucial to human hearts and the vessels that accommodate them. Something time alone can endure the inferno of. Something so pure its finish cannot be overtaken.

Memories of him from 2 and one-fifth decades before, of a cup of coffee on Gilbert Avenue, his beard quite trim and his eyes a matching brown, conversation of her well-being, jokes about problems 50 Million miles away; God...she thought...I've met God and here we are making plans.... Then later dinner, earthly wine that went to her lips, as sweetly careful as his mouth would prove sweetly carefully in her room, experienced fingers that manipulated pleasure from her body, the glorious torture of ecstasy....

Nothing was tedious in those days. They were never formally married nor did she desire such a union: She knew where she allowed God to enter, he would enter. She gave him purchase and entry to the unreachable distance inside her, and he swam that heavenly river with an inscrutable agility, the dew of her flesh and her soul upon him, wet, viscous, grateful.

And they had many years together, years to love, to sleep, to dream. Years when God became profoundly accustomed of his increasing invisibility on Earth.

Years without blemish until that unlikely airplane came from the Atlantic, harbinger of a revelation that was waiting for so long.

5. To the Sea

The people in the diner knew this, whether keen or inexcusably stupid, they knew what resided in her belonged to her.

And they had many years together, years to love, to sleep, to dream. Years when God became profoundly accustomed of his increasing invisibility on Earth.

Years without blemish until that unlikely airplane came from the Atlantic, harbinger of a revelation that was waiting for so long.

****

In that checkerboard landscape that ran inbetween the slums of the Great City and Waffle his brittle mind and body would encounter a grotesque acceptance of poverty that he found abhorrent beyond repair. The overtaxed, undernourished dominated helplessly by the compulsion to please that which has no identity. Ten foot high hills of trashbags, abandoned and broken merchandise, pyramids of distress. Sitkaville. Desert without sand. A place of such raw survival that the buildings seemed to depend on their clustered proximity to one another to remain standing at all. Their glass & metal, crimson facades, fifty years old and older, were barren of any connection to their makers and the hearts of their makers save the undiminished gravity and propensity towards death. The air tasted of blood and body odor and refuse and gasoline and the strain of it gathered around his skinny, fragile body as though some immeasurable harbinger of traveling legs and frantic arms and a thousand disparate voices that begged for his removal and disappearance. It was enough to make you cry if you didn't know better. But he knew better.

He knew it wouldn't be easy for a 16-year-old to find a job. But damned if he wouldn't find one...

He came to an establishment that had a commercial-tone like a knock-off Chinese Odenkirk's called the Eastern Express. He went inside.

There were only two other customers and they were eating, the young man behind the buffet counter busied himself with a newspaper. Spook felt as though he'd intruded upon some private party by the way they glanced at him suspiciously from their doings.

He thought to leave. Yes? the young man's eyes asked him from the counter.

He felt like he was drunk on something in the air, made lethargic by it, even as anxiety persisted in his chest with the dramatic seizure of his pulse. The focus of the room settled on him and any preference for escape was undermined by his hunger and he approached the counter and the cautiously hostile figure behind it and Spook surveyed the contents of the buffet in their metal tubs behind the glass. The figure separated a container from a stack of many and asked him what he wanted. It all looked the same. Rice, pork, noodles, beef, two medium-sized circular tubs with hot soup, an arrangement of unfamiliar delicacies. He quickly pointed out two selections and the figure scooped these into the container. "What else," he said. "That's it." He put a lid on the container and from a stack of napkins took a few and put them on top of the container and walked the affair to the register at the other end of the counter. Spook removed his wallet and went to the register. "Anything to drink?" He thought fast and went to the cooler behind him and took a bottle of soda from it and went back to the counter and placed it beside the food and the figure gave him his total and he paid and took a seat at a near-by table.

He felt like someone or something was watching him but was nonplussed why they should have any interest in his presence. Only a cold suggestion like an empty beer can or carpenter's tape in a room soiled with the labor of demolishment. He removed the lid, realized he was without utensil, got one, returned, began eating. The figure read his newspaper and the young couple spoke idly and yet with severe importance. Spook just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and ate the food accordingly. Reflex took over and he remembered an advert: Big Money; Travel Job; Make Your Own Hours; Always Hiring. They were these signs on blue paper posted on phonebooths and various vending machines around town, taped there by young people, usually male, who didn't look like they'd struck it rich but at least enjoyed some level of independence.

He didn't have much pride where his soul was concerned and he didn't think Big Money was the answer to his prayers but maybe it was something on the way to that answer. It had to be better than sleeping in homeless shelters or returning to Waffle or turning to drugs and prostitution for a living.

He ate his food as quickly as possible and left the couple and the guy behind the counter and he hoped he'd never have a reason to return to that place ever again.

****

He felt a small jolt in his chest before he'd even looked up from the SuperPhone and his thumbs instinctively pressed hard on the screen as Dorothea McEntyre could be seen after the large picture window, stern, masculine, blue & white figure coming down the parking lot in his smaller, smaller direction. "Oh, God..."

Then the door of the Spoonlicker's like a crazy vertical trap opening and the hot air outside sweeping with and past her as she entered d as if to kill him.

Teeth, voice straight, "Good afternoon, miss."

She stopped. She had her purse and the sound of her leather shoes might've hardly been audible to the ants where they fled into certain openings, while Dorothea McEntyre moved up to the counter and the young man behind it.

As if to say, Whaddaya got? she brushed her tits briefly across the cold glass and said, "Good afternoon to you."

He undoubtedly noticed, and was indeed heterosexual. She had done something like this virtually every single time she'd entered the establishment, though.

Looking from where the moisture evaporated on the glass, she met his eye, then said, "How's the business, today?"

By "the business," he was quite sure she was secretly referring to his genitalia, but the kid maintained an even tone, responded, "You know. It is what it is. Can't complain, I guess."

"It must be pretty boring, though. Just you and the vanilla ice cream waiting for something to happen?"

"Well," the kid said, "it's not like they're paying me to have fun."

"Oh,"she said, "like, a job's a job, something like that?"

He almost thought he saw her wink. "Anyway," he said. "What can I do for you, Mrs. McEntyre?"

She faintly smirked. She shifted her eyes from him to the display cooler where 36 large tubs of ice cream ranging virtually every color one could observe in nature sat almost like metal drums rather than the whipped, frozen milk they were. "Well, I don't think I thought about that." She paused. "Have you got any recommendations?"

He didn't. "No, ma'am. I really don't eat a lot of ice cream."

"Oh," she said. "Why not?"

He thought a moment, then said, "I don't know. I just don't, I guess."

She began to lean into him again. "Is it for health reasons? Are you scared of getting fat?"

"I...I hadn't even thought of it that way." He thought of it. "I suppose it doesn't hurt."

She smirked, slightly larger this time. "I see..." Then, finally, "Well, just give me some of that over there," vaguely pointing with her arm, somehow the outline of the bones visible.

Lost, "Which is that?"

"Don't play dumb," she said. "You can see."

Genuinely perplexed, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't tell which--"

"For God's sake!" she cried. Then bending her head to the drums, "That one. The Gypsy Cream Strawberry. Is is so much to ask for a pint of Gypsy Cream Strawberry ice cream?"

"Well, of course not."

"Then maybe we can get this show on the road, alright?"

He nodded with a stunned expression blowing some piece of a word out of his mouth, making just as little movement in getting the container and a clean metal serving spoon, depositing the ice cream, securing a lid, ringing her up, and giving her her change. "Please, come again, ma'am."

She snatched her ice cream off the counter, shot him a disgusted look, then made her way to the door and through it, passing back through the parking lot like he'd teased her about her clothes or the way she smelled.

When he looked back at the counter, he noticed his phone was gone.

****

8. Tequistan Civil War, Circa 2003

Depending on who you ask, the Civil War of Tequistan began either on April 12th, 199_, when democratically-elected President Mohammed Muscoto declared a sudden halt of the traffic of rifles and munitions to the eastern half of the country where seemingly spontaneous eruptions of terrorism jumped up as terrible and natural as a plague, for the following week when a half dozen more territories -- all within the western side of Tequistan or extremely close to it -- revealed themselves to share sympathy with their eastern neighbors, as well as owning a fantastic supply of AK-47s, plastic explosives, RPGs, and men who knew what they wanted to do with them.

The country was on fire, literally and emotionally, without relief, until the first week of May that year.

Then, as now, the outrageously large number of casualties was owned on both sides, growing daily, weekly, monthly... (Yearly.) And with profoundly little doubt of validation we can say that the number of these causalities regardless of distribution or variation did nothing else so much as to influence and ensure the following days and et cetera give opportunity for another trigger to be pulled. Another grave dug. Another weapon passed from hand to hand.

Prime Minister Bazzle, in the second week of May, 199_, was to ask Britain's peaceful neighbors (Germany, France, Italy) as well as the United States of America would they give willing support to Britain's all but guaranteed and passionate effort to issue troops from their respective armies, as many or as few as could be afforded, that the remaining intelligent, majestic population of the world not open itself to the spread of intentions of brutal terrorists and the events they would author and perpetrate, that the menace of Tequistan did not determine the fate of the planet.

Said she: "Life, you see, is a delicious thing.And it inspires an extraordinary amount of craving for pleasure. Consider even an uneducated hummingbird, perfectly naive in the course of its day: it knows where to search out nectar.

"These terrorists -- indeed, terrorists of all affiliations -- are searching for that life, that nectar. And they are so righteous and insightful to do so.

"Alas, they will not halt after Tequistan has been decided: They will seek out every province, every city, every street, home and soul they can aim a weapon towards.

"We cannot let them. This aberration must be solved."

Germany, France, Italy either made polite offers to consider, and undoubtedly Germany pledged troops after the new millennium arrived, however, the general stance of those nations was that Tequistan emanated something impassable.

America alone enthusiastically accepted this invitation. Coincidental or otherwise, those suicide airplanes were to com screaming from the Atlantic into our country.

See God reading a newspaper in a Hunter Farms, now, only wanting to get off the road to some other, more personal location, and the woman behind the counter wondering who that was.

****

9. Between Nothing and the Impossible End

Glittering light that did not belong to gravity but some other present wordless dimension moved over the horizon about her and through her bones and her cells and the particles thick & thin within her blood tumbled out, away as if given by some earthly obligation to a fate she wasn't permitted to decide. "That's her." She felt cold but did not shiver, did not experience discomfort, her breath still echoing through her heart and her lungs. "Gee, ya think." And even some trace of their voices could be discerned. "Whatever. Get the legs." The exterior world was hollow, yet of a substance that reverberated from its core into the outer tangible. "Lift." And she knew who she was, her memories quite preserved in that final challenge. She knew it was the city, nothing else, not some distant place in a distance unknowable to humans.

Two doors pulled closed. And an odor antiseptic, white, pure, docile. The momentum of being drawn away from the feet, balanced sensation in her shoulders, her scapula. "We're coming in." Her chest rose and in her stomach another kind of transparency announced itself, as though liberated from a cage that was never a cage.

The attendants observed her with dull detachment; she was hardly more than ice, or furniture. One on either side, seated on benches as the ambulance hurried down Wilkinson Boulevard, beyond even Auster and Platinum. Traffic strangely sparse, the early-morning streets red and quiet, imbuing the parked cars that lined the route with a sense of greeting and good will as they journeyed to the hospital.

A flavorless memory of coffee was hers, she let it stay there, and that good man whose ring she yet wore stunted in neutrality, dumbfounded, loving, regardless how incapable he'd been rendered in the course of history, he was there in those inundating flashes of thought.

She could feel the ambulance slow, then turn, then ascend up a hill, hearing them making banal conversation as the vehicle came to the entrance of the emergency ward.

And the two doors opened, and she was lifted with the stretcher, and they set it on the ground, and they rolled her into the hospital.

More talk from the attendants, the voice of a female nurse, softly, softly, they moved her down a hall and into a room.

Light from the ceiling gave her attention some company, and then for just a fleeting instant she considered there might be a world after this one, some place like Paradise, or endless tranquility.

But, of course, there was not. Their divorce had never been any more formal than their marriage, so that in the following twelve hours, God would become a widow.

****

He knew it wouldn't be easy for a 16-year-old to find a job. But damned if he wouldn't find one...

He came to an establishment that had a commercial-tone like a knock-off Chinese Odenkirk's called the Eastern Express. He went inside.

He thought to leave. Yes? the young man's eyes asked him from the counter.

He ate his food as quickly as possible and left the couple and the guy behind the counter and he hoped he'd never have a reason to return to that place ever again.

****

Then the door of the Spoonlicker's like a crazy vertical trap opening and the hot air outside sweeping with and past her as she entered d as if to kill him.

Teeth, voice straight, "Good afternoon, miss."

As if to say, Whaddaya got? she brushed her tits briefly across the cold glass and said, "Good afternoon to you."

He undoubtedly noticed, and was indeed heterosexual. She had done something like this virtually every single time she'd entered the establishment, though.

Looking from where the moisture evaporated on the glass, she met his eye, then said, "How's the business, today?"

By "the business," he was quite sure she was secretly referring to his genitalia, but the kid maintained an even tone, responded, "You know. It is what it is. Can't complain, I guess."

"It must be pretty boring, though. Just you and the vanilla ice cream waiting for something to happen?"

"Well," the kid said, "it's not like they're paying me to have fun."

"Oh,"she said, "like, a job's a job, something like that?"

He almost thought he saw her wink. "Anyway," he said. "What can I do for you, Mrs. McEntyre?"

He didn't. "No, ma'am. I really don't eat a lot of ice cream."

"Oh," she said. "Why not?"

He thought a moment, then said, "I don't know. I just don't, I guess."

She began to lean into him again. "Is it for health reasons? Are you scared of getting fat?"

"I...I hadn't even thought of it that way." He thought of it. "I suppose it doesn't hurt."

She smirked, slightly larger this time. "I see..." Then, finally, "Well, just give me some of that over there," vaguely pointing with her arm, somehow the outline of the bones visible.

Lost, "Which is that?"

"Don't play dumb," she said. "You can see."

Genuinely perplexed, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't tell which--"

"For God's sake!" she cried. Then bending her head to the drums, "That one. The Gypsy Cream Strawberry. Is is so much to ask for a pint of Gypsy Cream Strawberry ice cream?"

"Well, of course not."

"Then maybe we can get this show on the road, alright?"

When he looked back at the counter, he noticed his phone was gone.

****

8. Tequistan Civil War, Circa 2003

The country was on fire, literally and emotionally, without relief, until the first week of May that year.

"These terrorists -- indeed, terrorists of all affiliations -- are searching for that life, that nectar. And they are so righteous and insightful to do so.

"Alas, they will not halt after Tequistan has been decided: They will seek out every province, every city, every street, home and soul they can aim a weapon towards.

"We cannot let them. This aberration must be solved."

America alone enthusiastically accepted this invitation. Coincidental or otherwise, those suicide airplanes were to com screaming from the Atlantic into our country.

See God reading a newspaper in a Hunter Farms, now, only wanting to get off the road to some other, more personal location, and the woman behind the counter wondering who that was.

****

9. Between Nothing and the Impossible End

She could feel the ambulance slow, then turn, then ascend up a hill, hearing them making banal conversation as the vehicle came to the entrance of the emergency ward.

And the two doors opened, and she was lifted with the stretcher, and they set it on the ground, and they rolled her into the hospital.

More talk from the attendants, the voice of a female nurse, softly, softly, they moved her down a hall and into a room.

Light from the ceiling gave her attention some company, and then for just a fleeting instant she considered there might be a world after this one, some place like Paradise, or endless tranquility.

But, of course, there was not. Their divorce had never been any more formal than their marriage, so that in the following twelve hours, God would become a widow.

****

He knew it wouldn't be easy for a 16-year-old to find a job. But damned if he wouldn't find one...

He came to an establishment that had a commercial-tone like a knock-off Chinese Odenkirk's called the Eastern Express. He went inside.

He thought to leave. Yes? the young man's eyes asked him from the counter.

He ate his food as quickly as possible and left the couple and the guy behind the counter and he hoped he'd never have a reason to return to that place ever again.

****

Then the door of the Spoonlicker's like a crazy vertical trap opening and the hot air outside sweeping with and past her as she entered d as if to kill him.

Teeth, voice straight, "Good afternoon, miss."

As if to say, Whaddaya got? she brushed her tits briefly across the cold glass and said, "Good afternoon to you."

He undoubtedly noticed, and was indeed heterosexual. She had done something like this virtually every single time she'd entered the establishment, though.

Looking from where the moisture evaporated on the glass, she met his eye, then said, "How's the business, today?"

By "the business," he was quite sure she was secretly referring to his genitalia, but the kid maintained an even tone, responded, "You know. It is what it is. Can't complain, I guess."

"It must be pretty boring, though. Just you and the vanilla ice cream waiting for something to happen?"

"Well," the kid said, "it's not like they're paying me to have fun."

"Oh,"she said, "like, a job's a job, something like that?"

He almost thought he saw her wink. "Anyway," he said. "What can I do for you, Mrs. McEntyre?"

He didn't. "No, ma'am. I really don't eat a lot of ice cream."

"Oh," she said. "Why not?"

He thought a moment, then said, "I don't know. I just don't, I guess."

She began to lean into him again. "Is it for health reasons? Are you scared of getting fat?"

"I...I hadn't even thought of it that way." He thought of it. "I suppose it doesn't hurt."

She smirked, slightly larger this time. "I see..." Then, finally, "Well, just give me some of that over there," vaguely pointing with her arm, somehow the outline of the bones visible.

Lost, "Which is that?"

"Don't play dumb," she said. "You can see."

Genuinely perplexed, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't tell which--"

"For God's sake!" she cried. Then bending her head to the drums, "That one. The Gypsy Cream Strawberry. Is is so much to ask for a pint of Gypsy Cream Strawberry ice cream?"

"Well, of course not."

"Then maybe we can get this show on the road, alright?"

When he looked back at the counter, he noticed his phone was gone.

****

8. Tequistan Civil War, Circa 2003

The country was on fire, literally and emotionally, without relief, until the first week of May that year.

"These terrorists -- indeed, terrorists of all affiliations -- are searching for that life, that nectar. And they are so righteous and insightful to do so.

"Alas, they will not halt after Tequistan has been decided: They will seek out every province, every city, every street, home and soul they can aim a weapon towards.

"We cannot let them. This aberration must be solved."

America alone enthusiastically accepted this invitation. Coincidental or otherwise, those suicide airplanes were to com screaming from the Atlantic into our country.

See God reading a newspaper in a Hunter Farms, now, only wanting to get off the road to some other, more personal location, and the woman behind the counter wondering who that was.

****

9. Between Nothing and the Impossible End

She could feel the ambulance slow, then turn, then ascend up a hill, hearing them making banal conversation as the vehicle came to the entrance of the emergency ward.

And the two doors opened, and she was lifted with the stretcher, and they set it on the ground, and they rolled her into the hospital.

More talk from the attendants, the voice of a female nurse, softly, softly, they moved her down a hall and into a room.

Light from the ceiling gave her attention some company, and then for just a fleeting instant she considered there might be a world after this one, some place like Paradise, or endless tranquility.

But, of course, there was not. Their divorce had never been any more formal than their marriage, so that in the following twelve hours, God would become a widow.

****

10. The Poisonous Tree

What happens in the first four years of the mind is largely imitation. We learn the primitive gestures and locution related to detection and feeding while our hearts, lungs, parasympathetic nervous system tend to the assembly of our identities, souls. The innerworld is filled to capacity with emotion that exceeds the dexterity of our toddler language. The folding of gyri isolates sound, isolates vision, isolates the hands from the perception/s of the hands. The child wails, exercises its bowels, clenches its small fists with eager strength, the imprint of its name forming. The days add to a year. The year becomes two. Some faint manifestation of the will & ego emerge. Thrilled to demonstrate its juvenile talents, the child stands to make its legs equal to its hands and the symmetry inspires and reinspires that part of the self that celebrates its discovery.

And peers loom to join its dramatic enterprise.

****

When he was 5, Nathan Rueben concluded there could be no greater purpose of a human than to become a magician. When he was 10, he wanted to drive racing cars. When he was 15, he just wanted to be alone and he prayed with all his heart that he wouldn't die a virgin and that his next dream wouldn't include any daring costumes or fire-resistant uniforms. It was the mid-1970s, then, and so a career in politics wasn't out of the question.

His parents, Edward and Deborah Rueben, had led quiet, uncontroversial lives. They'd met during wartime, in the late-1950s, in a place that has since been renamed the Republic of Malpurn. Back then, it was known as Korea. It was engulfed in civil war as the northern population of the country were demanding "fairer" prices on goods and contracts related to the same from the southern population of the country, and the southern population insisted that the concentration of wealth in Korea was located in the north and that if any satisfaction was to be enjoyed by both parties it depended on an investment of infrastructure and its apposite labor from the north -- for which the south would gladly compensate their trusting neighbors to the full cost of construction of the infrastructure as well as 75% of profits for the first two years under the condition that the south, whose workforce was all-but-exclusively farmers and artisans of likewise skill, should be granted full ownership of the new factories in order that their children and their children's children might ultimately appropriate the means to educate themselves in the world beyond the humble concerns of digging ditches and molding clay and sewing garments. For this, the south was prepared to offer the north 34% of control of all companies' stock at entry-level prices before said shares were officially open to public-purchase. (To those taking the math seriously: That means the north would've had an influential share of every company in South Korea in a year when plastics, electricity, and medical research rivaled the Return of Prophet in worldwide anticipation. They could've turned pennies into millions.)

The north refused. They accused the south of being greedy. They invaded on March 1st, 1950.

The United Nations intervened with little delay and the United States, Great Britain and others provided aide wheresoever they could. Edward Rueben and Deborah Rothstein, a dentist and a chiropractor, respectively, enlisted voluntarily. Neither was particularly keen on politics or religion, but if pressed for answers to those questions both would agree that humankind was beholden to itself and that peace on Earth was as valid and reasonable as any other great cause of the race. They performed well in their trials. In the humble parlance of their group, they were meatball surgeons.

The war carried on for a little more than three years and concluded in a stalemate in '53 when the U.N declared a ceasefire under the threat of ballistic assault to delinquent parties.

Edward and Deborah returned home to the United States and were married the following year. His family cheerfully included her in all their affairs. Hers did not reciprocate. They sensed an arrogance about him that they alone lay claim to. They disowned their 26-year-old daughter on her wedding day in the summer of 1954. It was, quite ironically and incidentally, ten years to the day on the eve of presidential hopeful Crawford Frances Dublin's assassination at a fundraiser in Downtown Manhattan. Although she made no logical connection between the two events, the shared nature of the tragedies weighed on her heart like tandem shipmasters of a doomed enterprise and she suppressed the meaning of neither until the bitter end when a rare form of cervical cancer finally took her some decades later.

But I'm digressing, if only slightly.

Upon marrying, Edward and Deborah were deadset on starting a family. In every biography, essay and news article related to the Rueben family, they were hungry for and unselfish towards the other without exception and the world might be a very different place if they had more children than Nathan. Alas, poor Deborah suffered two miscarriages with unparalleled devastation prior to Nathan's birth and one following and the 29-year-old mother gave up all hope of future pregnancies and sought to cherish every moment with him that time allowed.

Thanks in part to Edward's successful dentistry and some gamely investments in the Lockheed/Martin and Haliburton Corporations, Mrs. Rueben was free to retire professionally and give undisputed priority to young Nathan.

He was somewhat shy before puberty. He was painfully demure by age 16. However,he never devolved into an abuser of animals or consumed addictive narcotics or showed interest in self-harm. He performed honorably in all of his classes and made friends within his peer group that he maintains to this very day. Through familial connections, he received a partial scholarship to study Business Finance at New York University and graduated without controversy in 1982. Without controversy, with two noteworthy exceptions. One is Patricia "Patty" Eisenstein, who for the immodest sum of $30,000 was Rueben's girlfriend during her last and his penultimate year at college. She revealed to an unknown source, following Mr. Rueben's recent bid for the presidency, that she had been approached "by a friend of the family" to casually relieve him of his status as a 20-year-old virgin and provide the hopeful-but-timid young man with some lasting sense of confidence that didn't require compromising drugs or dangerous fantasies. She took the offer, they dated for a year and separated when she completed her courses. She has neither damned him nor praised him in any outstanding fashion.

The other exception is considerably murky. In fact, there are two of them: Jerome Kirn and Alexander Bruhn. Both men had no known enemies when they disappeared (each for exactly a week) and both were discovered on hikingpaths in rural New York that Nathan Rueben frequented: Nathan Rueben was the one who found them; Kirn in January of '82, Bruhn in February. The graphic deformations of their corpses has seen no small amount of investigation & discussion in the media and elsewhere so I'll refrain from adding to them now, in this, our election year of 2004, suffice to plead to anyone who's willing to to consider the war-mongering former Congressman of Nebraska as a suspect in these cases. Stranger things have happened.

Ruben, of course, is entirely middle-aged at the time this is being written. And he will likely never see the inside of a jailcell except on television. He was married for all of a year in 1992 to a woman of unremarkable background named Jennifer Gretsky before her disappearance and rediscovery in Scrotchy, Nebraska where Rueben hoped to be re-elected to Congress and subsequently failed and subsequently attempted to launch the Ethical Preparation of Young People Nearing the Conquest of Maturity (TEPYPNCM) Program. His mother died from cancer the following year.

He lives with his elderly father in a workingclass neighborhood in Scrotchy. Edward no longer grants interviews and Nathan does only under the most agreeable circumstances. History is long and names are forgotten and new babies are born every day.

There is a strange-looking appletree on their lawn.

****

ReplyForward

11. You Are The Company You Keep

John Abbedro looked very severe with his hands in his lap, sitting with the sixty-seven other firemen and the one he only thought was a fireman., in the gathering hall of the Waffle Firehouse, brooding, with a posture and a countenance of a reptile with Caucasoid flesh; back row, right side of the room (the aisles dividing the 100 chairs currently empty) beside the fireman he only thought was a fireman; John Abbedro anxious, pulled in by fear and paranoia, tortured by his obligation to be present.

No one in the row in front of him paid this any attention, nor did those beside him, including the stranger to his immediate right, who had the look of somebody that'd drank hungrily the night before and was now of biological equanimity, his chin upright and dignified, curious to the state of things.

This was in March, before the American Intervention in the Civil War in Tequistan led to all the things that it led to. This is when people were still being informed.

The others besides Abbedro fiddled with their SuperPhones, or chattered, or sat quietly, save the stranger beside him, who was the only one who betrayed any sincere interest in being there. The only one with any calm at any rate.

And the cool, brisk air of the gathering hall, blessed with sunlight from the windows (clean glass) where they sat after the podium, small beeps and clicks, the men chattering, and God in there, too.

Perhaps some twenty-odd minutes had passed in waiting, and another five, just wanting this to be over with so they could get back to playing cards and waiting for calls, or to go back home, or to busy their hands with the inspection and maintenance of equipment. Stale minutes, only God paying this much attention.

When he finally arrived, Nathan Rueben could be heard at the entrance to the building. his deep-yet-nasal voice unmistakable to an even remotely competent ear. There was something tired about it, although it didn't suggest fatigue. And the twang-ish that skittered and danced over his words colored their rise and arch in such a way that the absolute meaning of his language would settle in a manner both ironic and confident. "I wanted to be here sooner," he said. "But, then again..." "No sense wasting more time with apologies," said the firehouse director.

Nathan Rueben nodded. "I am here."

The firehouse director asked him to wait, then entered the gathering hall, tacking down the porcelain, indifferent to what light glanced off his pupils, as he neared the podium and stood behind it, tapped the microphone to get their attention. "Here we are, then." A brave smugness lining his features.

"Amen," they responded, save for God. Then, God, "Oh. Amen."

The firehouse director, in case they'd forgotten in between rounds of Blast Poker! and/or text messages and/or banal small talk, or were nomadic transplants from the Great City, as God was, in case they'd forgotten, the firehouse director reminded them how they were here out of patriotism, so then they were here as patriots. "Amen," they said. "Oh. Amen." And the firehouse director thinly smiled. "So, then: gentlemen, brothers, patriots... Please let's all welcome Nathan Rueben.

They politely clapped, Rueben entered, the man beside God hitting one palm into the other with righteous hostility.

Nathan Rueben stood behind the podium. placed his hands upon it, leaned incrementally forward, "Good afternoon... Let me begin by saying, I am grateful to you and your firehouse for welcoming me. As I will make no pretense of not knowing, I am sure you gentlemen have some opinion about me, and my past. Whether that opinion is informed by my politics, my relationship to technological markets, or my family or anything else, let me say, I will not discourage you. Indeed, I cannot discourage you." He said, "Politics, you see, relies on the cooperation of a community, on neighbors, allies, and the indispensable glue of trust." He wiped one hand over the podium. "I said Trust." A few of them had to stop playing Blast Poker! The man sitting next to God was doubling-up in animosity. "This nation has never accomplished anything, not one single whit of progress or prosperity, without the trust of its citizens. We allied against Britain when they exploited us, we fought on the battlefields -- shoulder to shoulder -- struggling, sacrificing, and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, and through the adoption of these strategies and their inherently noble philosophy, we set farther and farther down the roads and rails that have brought -- indeed, brought and preserved -- America to its dignified position in the world today." He had their attention.

God misdirected a smile.

Nathan Rueben made some fleeting, casual eye-contact with every man in the room. When his eyes came to God's, he barely perceptibly flinched. "Now," he said, "that is being challenged... While on the surface the Civil War in Tequistan is not a danger to our American way of life, beneath its surface it has the roots of a poisonous tree. And poisonous trees bear poisonous fruit. In that case, perhaps America should stay as far away from Tequistan as geography and borders can allow. But, gentlemen, the notion of pursuing this line of thinking leaves a sour twist in my stomach. And in that displeasure, I hear calling." Now they were really listening. "You see, pain is an advisor. It is foolish to ignore its counsel when its counsel is only there to guide us. Without pain, we good Americans might wander from one accident to another, crashing into walls and getting lost on innumerable paths. Without pain, we would never have the impetus to heal ourselves.

Without pain, thought God, I might swallow this without thinking about it.

"This war," said Nathan Rueben. "This terrible war... If it is to be decided by the Tequistanis, it will carry over until the last group of savages kills the last of their enemies, then -- dear gentlemen, do not doubt this -- they will make the journey to developed nuclear weapons; And what then?"

Each man save God somberly bowed his head. God stood up into the room.

Nathan Rueben saw this, and through his perplexion said, "Sir, I have not finished. Please, let me continue my speech."

"Is that right," said God.

"Sir?"

"You call this a speech. Cuz it's rubbing me like propaganda." The firemen turned in their chairs, and John Abbedro tensely turned his head to God. "Go back to that part about the poisonous tree."

Insulted, "You won't tell me how to make my speech."

"Fuck you," said God. "You won't tell me how to listen to it."

A man stood up from the left side of the room, a little shaky, and he said, "Siddown, pal. No one's forcing you to be here."

God remained standing. He didn't look athletic or intimidating, but he had a calm, steady vigor, and no one was fucking with that.

The shaky man sat back down.

"Nuclear weapons, huh? These people training small children to load automatic weapons, these people who only got electricity in every house twenty years ago, these people all but totally consumed in manifest genocide or desperately seeking an escape from that? They're the ones to build the bombs to wipe out the planet?"

Nathan Rueben tried to stare him down, a hard rock in his chest, him nailed to his gravity with tensile hatred.

God smirked. "I don't think you're s'posed to be here, sir."

Some amazed form of energy carried across the room. The angry man beside God put one hand on God's left forearm.

"And whose name is on the marque outside," said Nathan Rueben.

Dreadful silence. Then just silence.

God generously bowed his head. "Well," he said, "you are the company you keep." He deftly turned from his chair, the aisle, John Abbedro's hand. Disconcerned with the eyes upon him he moved away from the room and the men inside and out through the front door of the firehouse while Nathan Rueben recomposed himself, returned the firehouse back to his original speech, expounding on the threat as he understood it and finally leading the men in the closing prayer, before sending them back to the world without the firehouse.

****

12. Like Cold Birds On A Lonely Morning

He sat with his hands on his knees and his skinny butt on the cool sidewalk of Columbus Street looking down the gray and fine-black particulars of delis, barbershops, convenience stores and the apartments above them, dark windows in all of them, the grayish-blue and white morning only beginning towards its regular self. Spook McEntyre on edge, and yet tickled with tranquil energy for being on edge.

His roommates and the job presumably sleeping at the motel, just under a mile away. With just a pause from their hyperenthusiasm for trivial, shallow facts and opinions, only contrasted with disquieting views concerned with violence and justice, with just ten minutes of walking and the friendliness of his icy butt on the sidewalk, and his hands on his knees, soothed by the reflexive meditation of quitting the job.

Three weeks earlier, he was still in Sitkaville. The money wasn't getting spent too fast but it was getting spent. He dropped from just over $300 in the beginning to just over $200. Food cost money. Magazines cost money. After the fourth day, weed and cigarettes would cost money. It wasn't that he had been possessed by some apocalyptic train of self-destructive energy, or any other biological impulse (thank God) but that rather the young man would simply get bored. Who could blame him?

And so, sitting at the counter at Avery's Diner one night, juicing a cup of coffee and a pen and his sketchbook for all they were worth, he thought to seek out more permanent solutions.

The waitress, a blackhaired girl near his own age, refilled his coffee more than was necessary. She had perky breasts and warm eyes and her voice carried through the air like the determined lovesong of crows. It was only small talk initially, and after asking him who he was and what he was drawing, she'd get oddly excited and leave him in his happy solitude.

This continued until after midnight, when it was only he and her and the cook/manager in the place, and she asked him for the umpteenth time what he was drawing, watching his face more than listening to his words, and when he'd stammered through his reply she asked if she could ask a favor and he said yes and they went into the back to presumably reach a very high shelf but then only one surprising the other when she put her mouth on his, her hands on him, everything within reach, everything soft, his hands crazily over her, mouth nourished with thick, dancing tongues and clumsy teeth. His heart gratefully pounding in his chest....

She sent him back into the night with some implied promise to see him the next day, but when he returned the next day she was gone. The same for the day after that. The same for the day after that.

The following afternoon, with about $150 in funds, he'd met a friend...of sorts.

This high-energy kid named Bill was something altogether new to Spook McEntyre. He knew all kinds of things about Sitkaville that people didn't always talk about: like chill spots to smoke weed, or where you could get a good view of the train across the big, fat Humphrey River, or insane things like government conspiracies and cover-ups and deathcults. Bill was interested in everything. And better yet, he knew where Spook could get stuff like free food and some kind of housing.

The Jeremiah Ward Men's Shelter wasn't much, but it converted some of Spook's negative numbers into neutral numbers, and, as we've already mentioned, frugality contains immeasurable wealth.

Sadly, their friendship didn't last the week -- Bill jumping from one thing and place to another, moving beyond eyeshot of sanity and reality: Spook was out one more friend, one more chance down in a tomorrow of narrowing chances.

From the second this guy Dan Jakes offered Spook a door-to-door sales job, Spook leapt at the opportunity to get out of the shelter, away from all those miserable drunks and junkies and entitled do-nothings all bitching and fighting with clowns and dunces with their short attention spans preserving meaningless, hopeless conversations for hours.

And then a week later, tonight, sitting on Columbus Street in Ohio, turning over the chronology in his mind, weighing and reweighing the nuances, before standing back up to go to the motel room.

****

13. Hot Stuff In Waffle, New York

Dark orange light comes in through the thick windows, strangled into the opaque pockets of nothingness where they cough momentary flashbursts of red Rorschach blotches, the thin trails wobbling erracticaly leaking out to every lonely, secret corner of the Shooting Range Bar & Grille.

She sits between two empty stools, sipping on a vodka martini, an attractive turquoise blouse and elegant ankle length skirt, her high heel shoes sitting footless on the porcelain beam beneath the length of the bar. She has that slightly immobile quality of being tipsy in the afternoon that is like having a beer after a recuperative period of sobriety. Her hands betray no clumsiness nor does any of this seem improvised, and she finishes with the second drink, then raises an index finger to signal the bartender.

He finishes wiping out a wineglass in a series of wineglasses then setting it with these and laying the towel to a side. He moves leisurely down the bar towards her with his blase and tolerable smile, then asking, "Yes, ma'am."

She slides the empty vodka glass towards him in a balanced gesture. "Have another," she says. She has made herself understood, and there is no one in the place who'd argue how she'd been spending the afternoon. Her eyes almost seem to change colors.

"Vodka martini, coming right up," he said. He goes down the bar, the base of the stem hanging it upside down between his fingers and the glass cracking tiny explosions of the fierce stale light moving from all those places in the bar, and he dips it through a metal sink filled with disinfectant before picking up a dry towel to wipe away what little residue of the viscous cleanser remains. It meets his standards upon inspection. He sets the glass on the bar, draws up a liter of William Slivovitz, unscrews the cap and pours...

She watches him return down the bar, "seeing" him fumble nearly crashing her drink and the glass all over the unforgiving floor. And she looks up at the bartender like he knows a thing or two about flying saucers, Dorothea McEntyre ready to be "abducted."

Some time passes.

The light that enters the bar from the windows that run the length of the ceiling doesn't change in description but a harsh white nothingness explodes from the front door when the silhouette/figure of a man opens it and he is by himself and he is nicely dressed in a flannel shirt, denim jeans, Baubax leather shoes moving with sly grandness across the floor to an empty stool, Dorothea McEntyre less than twenty feet down the bar.

He smiles.

She smiles back, something warm and moist beginning to foment inside her. 'Strangers are just...people you haven't met yet,' she thinks. This stranger, this man has an implacable vulnerability like he might be snatched up at any moment by some mythical bird with claws as long as pencils, curved like serial-killer knives, talons that could penetrate bone. He looks stupider than stupider can be ordering a pint of beer, raising it in salute to her, she raises her glass, they drink...and he stands up to move down the bar towards her, takes the seat next to hers.

"Fred Jakes," he says.

"Nice to meet you, Fred," she says.

He's at least twenty years too old to be her type, but he has an odor and sense of fashion that will suffice her needs. "I don't think I've ever seen you here before," she says.

"Oh, till just a week ago I wouldn't've had a minute for it. But my son..." he chuckles with minor embarrassment. "My son -- we used to spend every minute we weren't busy together -- he... He got this crazy job... And I got my afternoons back."

"HA HA!" she said triumphantly. "I know about getting things back..." Then she must've thought of Spook, because she became very sad and angry to an almost paralyzed extent, and Fred Jakes here watched her shoulderblades rise up like huge, leathery wings as she set her hands on the counter, then take the martini and throw its contents back in a single jagged flash of liquid before returning the glass to the bar, meeting Fred's eye and saying to some unseen depth, "Whaddaya do, Fred?"

"Well, look at me," he said, somewhat shaken but far from crestfallen, "I'm in construction. What else?"

"Oh, construction," Dorothea said. "You must be awfully good with your hands then? Must have real strong hands making all those buildings?"

"It ain't from squeezing stressballs," he said.

The guilty, horny emotion inside her grew to full-size when he said that. She considered fucking him somewhere inside the bar.

And he almost let her, just to see that woman perched atop his cock, the memories of so many dull conversations and greasy onion rings frozen feckless in the darkness where it'd surround her. "So why don't we go somewhere," he said.

"Take back the afternoon," she said.

He waved over the bartender and the bartender arrived and he paid his tab but not hers as sh took a ten dollar bill from her purse to cover for the drink and tip and when she secured her wallet back in her purse and gave him his casual signal he took both her hands in both of his and they went to the exit and exited, the bartender wiping out his glasses, her highheeled shoes under the bar.

****

14. November 11th, 2008

The Walter Bukowski Middle School stands there yet. It is deserted in the summer and only concerns students of "limited intellect" during the rest of the year, referred to by those (extremely few vocal) critics as a detention center for the future insane. Its deteriorated crimson facade seems to advertise a certain reminder of a journey that was not completed, some final item on a to-do list devalued and abandoned.

The haunted, lonely memory of November 11th, 2008 doesn' move from those borders, like a human sacrifice produced by mob-immolation reaching with anthropomorphic strength and dexterity to any soul who would dare or be unlucky enough to witness it.

And cars pass in the street, on their way to anywhere.

****

15. Sons, Nomads, Salesmen

Beer cans with various levels of unconsumed contents sit here and about the motel dresser, the t.v. weather report at low-volume, and cigarette butts and ashes and some bluntclips and various cellophane debris and religious pamphlets as the bedding of some peculiar animal-cage that houses something that can and does take its sustenance from whatever is most readily available.

Throughout the rest of the two-bed motel room one of its dormers lays passed out in intoxicated slumber, fully clothed, rolling about with restless dreams as his head/face turns on and off the pillow, mumbling the name Jenny, and other things.

In the bathroom, behind the wall that separates the sink and the tile and the tub from where Dan Jakes is sleeping, in the cool bathtub, Spook McEntyre dreams of a waitress he will never mention to them.

Mark Abbedro enters from the unlocked door, over six feet tall, with thick appendages attached to a thick torso and a handsome neck and darkblue eyes that look out from a bitterly humorous face, that morning shaved and lotioned. He releases the doorknob almost as soon as it has flipped back to its default position and he is standing in quiet observation of the mess and Dan Jakes asleep in all his clothes, the t.v. at low-volume, and Dan's roommate curled up in the tub out of sight.

He takes a step and another, towards the dresser, cocks his head at the weather lady, admiring her facial features and her tits. Then he appraises the dresser, the ash, debris, beer cans. He is smirking when Dan sits up in the bed and asks, "What, asshole."

"Grumpy this morning?" says Mark Abbedro.

"I'm grumpy every morning," says Dan. "Whaddaya want."

"Check-ins in half an hour. Thought you might want to see what all the fuss is about."

Dan Jakes turned to look at his SuperPhone, realizing Mark was right. "Alright," he said. "Let's go make that money."

"Wait," says Mark, "first things first." A grin deeply wedded in his face, "Where's your roommate?"

Dan knew the answer without a sliver of effortful thought. "Oh, God..."

"Little fucker's gone sailin' again, ain't he."

"Ughhh..." He reaches back over to the nightstand for his phone, glances through the tabs to messages of the previous night where he'd argued and cajoled with his soon-to-be or ex-girlfriend before giving up around one- or two in the morning and passing out where he was found...and he stands up from the bed, his husky frame proud as an elephant, puts the phone in a backpocket of his ultra-wide jeans, then says, not without humor, "Then I guess we should go wake him up."

From his low perch in the tub and the whispered reverberation of what enters the room, Spook McEntyre watches them enter, filling the doorway -- Dan first, Mark over his shoulder. Dan saying, "What's up, Sleeping Beauty."

Spook is not ashamed of being hungover, but he is hungover. The plaque of cheap beer sits in harsh, viscous pockets and pools in his stomach and his arteries and his blood. He says, "What time is it?"

"Time to go," says Dan. "Check-in's in thirty minutes."

"What're ya doin' in there, Spook?"

'This fucken asshole,' thought Spook. "Well I was up late jackin' off to videos of your mom's and I guess I just lost consciousness tryin' to hold it in."

Mark Abbedro lunges and Dan Jakes stops him with one arm.

"Nobody disturb my toothbrush," he says, climbing out of the tub and winning this moment of the scene.

Brushing his teeth in the sink outside the bathroom, happy in the way that doing healthy things makes you happy, he listens to Mark watching television and saying things to the room or Spook or the broadcasters or to no one at all while Dan takes a shower.

A few minutes later, the fourth and final member of their salesteam, Sean Cooly, enters the open doorway, dressed, cologned and manic, wondering if they know check-in's in less than five minutes... Dan exits the bathroom in clean clothes, glistening perspiration on his shaved head... Spook rinses and spits... Mark says, "Yeah. We know."

"Well, come on," says Sean. "I think I owe somebody twenty bucks from last night."

They close the door, the t.v. still on and the dim lights and empty mirror and invisible fog of last night's beer sour on everything.

Dan Jakes phone rings. It's the Pancross County Sheriff, relaying a message from Waffle. He's not supposed to give this kind of information over the phone, but Dan Jakes presses him, and he finally tells the young man his father has been murdered.

****

16. One Night Only At The Tom Brewer Memorial Center

They came from Waffle, and they came from cities without Waffle. Some by foot, most by car, others by the trains and busses that crisscross America on the steady flow of energy and trust and technology that our way of life would not exist in the absence of.

They were young, old, from every class of wealth -- typically in the middle -- and there were even a couple homeless from Sitkaville, showered, in clean clothes (chewing White Gum) (who knows where they found it) all at some point gathered on the sidewalk outside the Tom Brewer Memorial Center and Auditorium, checking their tickets at the ovalesque, plastic window booth, the orange-yellow light softly blanketing the tickettaker where she welcomed them inside.

Them following in like off-duty stormtroopers to the lobby area, passed or towards the tables set-up with religious pamphlets adorned/embellished with illustrations of Prophet reading 'Where Will You Be Tomorrow?' or with amateur photographs of workfarms and undernourished fruits and vegetables reading 'Who Do You Think Makes All This Great Stuff?' and posters in frames for films, documentaries concerning the World Wars, and the Depression in Europe, and other key events in American History that were subverted to hide the past from us, going all around the walls of the lobby like some twisted carousel permanently frozen there.

And some bought things from concession stands, and some went to the bathroom, and some stood making idle conversation with each other and those who were attending the tables, and some went straight to those crisply suited individuals at the entrance to the theater, ambling into the thousand-seat auditorium, the glistening stage below like a wooden lake, empty but for the yellowish and ivory light dancing stiffly to its surface.

They filed-in in groups and larger clusters -- the two homeless indistinguishable from the crowd until everyone without the theater had arrived and taken their seats, talking or busy with SuperPhones or talking about dull things on their SuperPhones while an eerie tension of some implacable lesson or moral was suffered then ignored.

Quite on time this evening, as he always was at these events, Nathan Rueben entered from the right side of the stage, his step quick and yet unhurried, his clothes hanging softly on him almost as robes, and his styled black hair combed back neatly leaving his pale face without interruption to the light that bathed the stage.

"Good evening," he said.

He paused while they responded, "Good evening."

"Such niceties," he said, a wry grin spreading at the corners of his mouth. "Civilization depends on such niceties. They give us a structure; no? They help us to meet strangers, new friends. I've learned, in fact, that simple niceties are what brought Prophet out of the jungle. When He was called by explorers from the North, these were miners, and seekers of herbs and spices... He was only a sacred child, perhaps just barely over the hill of puberty, living on plants and grubs, unable even to build a simple fire. For the explorers' politeness, Prophet was to eventually change the world."

In deep appreciation, they gasped.

Except for the two homeless people (and another) who only faked it or were playing along.

Continued Nathan Rueben: "So then we understand -- now all of us -- how these things might transcend mere formality: Without kindness to the unknown, we permit isolation. Without journey to strange lands, discovery collapses to the self.

"Lukas Buchner (they shuddered in tiny orgasm at the utterance of his actual name) (except for...) might've died in anonymity had it not been for the courtesy of the explorers. To raise a question politely, Where would we be then?"

No answer was expected, and none was given.

The two homeless people were starting to get visuals from their White Gum.

Kathleen Poirier, there with her husband Max, paid close attention, feeling lonely.

"In the jungles of ourselves is the answer. Desperately searching for a way out, unaware that such a route might even exist. We would only be animals in finer clothes....

"Ladies and gentlemen, I must turn the focus of our dialogue now. We must confront the Civil War in Tequistan... Such deplorable things are taking place: neighbor killing neighbor, one family against another, an entire country swallowed up in violence and hatred." He shook his head somberly. "Do you think that that will stay in Tequistan? Do you think that whomever emerges victorious will simply stop?" Nathan Rueben said, "We cannot be so naive. To do so would invite peril. The worst of them, Prophet forgive me, will eventually find their way out and they will --don't doubt my words -- reach for everything their filthy cravenous hands can reach."

The homeless people got a real bang out of that.

Kathleen Poirier was crestfallen.

"I don't mean to overwhelm you," he said. "I am here as a messenger, not to shout 'fire'. And yes, I am here as a politician. And I know what circumstances that carries. With regards to my personal history, including the current state of Massachusetts, and this travesty taking place across the Atlantic, let me say that I have never seen the face of absolute evil, but I have felt its presence. You are all quite aware I have lost a wife and a mother and a child. You have all, no doubt, seen my shame and my defeat televised. You know that I am only one man upon this Earth. (How humble.) I will not make excuses and apologies. I will not exhaust my hands with the effort of exculpating the past." He said, "True love has made me stronger." And those who were listening were really listening now. "It has shown me a castle inside. And that castle looks out over a beautiful, fragile world. Where disease spreads. Where violence spreads. Where hatred and utter cruelty, like the hands and teeth of a tremendous monster consuming every unlucky thing in its wake, spreads.

"And we cannot let it. To pretend it isn't there is to make a sacrifice unspeakable...."

Kathleen Poirier sat mutely. She felt cold in her chair and was glad no one in her aisle or the ones in front of or behind her took notice of her discomfort save her husband, Max, who was listening in rapt attention as if memorizing the bulletpoints of Rueben's speech for later regurgitation and argument....

The two homeless people did everything in their power to control their laughter.

About an hour later -- filled with all sorts of gruesome, bloody descriptions of things balanced mostly with asides to the "glory" of Prophet -- Nathan Rueben found his way to some fashion of a denouement.

He concluded his speech/performance, and led them in a closing prayer before exiting the stage to a hallway circumventing the lobby, opening to MacDowell Street, where he stood outside to shake hands. Basic responsibility for a man who wants to become President.

Bob and Violet Winston grinned like idiots when they had their chance to see that monster.

Kathleen tore Max away from the crowd, complaining she felt lightheaded.

And of course many other people had interactions with Rueben, but the best and the strangest of all was Dorothea McEntyre, who came and left that night with a new boyfriend, who'd been studying Rueben for some clue she couldn't find. And when she was shaking his hand, looking right in those deathly eyes, she asked, "Have I met you before?"

Genuinely, "I don't think so," he said.

****

1. The Good Heart of Kathleen Poirier

Once again, with effort....

She sleeps in that kingsize bed, wrapped in thick blankets, silk sheets, the impermanent heat of her body through her underwear, and while her mind is unconscious,her heart is sad, heavy weights tumble in her brain's magnetic electricity and the day outside on Appletree Avenue has scarcely opened its transparent accident-prone vessel of fortune & chaos before Kathleen senses that this day is going to be too damn long.

The furniture that lines the walls of the room and her jewelry box on the dresser and pictures of her family and Max's and everything that completes that category, including Max in the bed beside her, seems to feebly apologize for what it has done and what it has not done. Apologies and empty promises don't differ much, really: enough of them and you end up seeing the life squeezed out of your bones, leaving you emotionally overweight, tortured by whatever energy remains.

She got up out of the bed, the pale flesh on her legs hardly affected by the change in temperature as the natural heat fled into the room, as she didn't even have the strength to raise her arms upwards, bring glorious air into the lungs, instead clenching forearms and fists tightly with her eyes sealed in anguish, bringing the focus in like that.

She turns her head left, jaw strangely clenched for a woman of her privilege. All the other wives and so forth said so, any time, every time she uttered one word of her true feelings: that the house as a gift of Orwell Construction lacked a certain quality, a soul? or that she suspected Max had settled for her, not been consumed by the infatuation that she'd felt for him; and on and on down to the least agitation or grievance concerning the nightly patrols or the perverts you'd swear had some kind of radar for attractive women or why the television had only seven channels when invented technology could easily produce a hundred times as many. Nothing she said earned her sympathy. She always seemed too lucky for that.

She flushed and took her robe off its hook, coming somewhat alive as it hit her shoulders, then pulling the bathroom door closed behind her, then going down the winding stairs, palm and fingers on the polished oak rail until she lazily reached the bottom. She stood there. (She stands there.) Lost in a beautiful life of meaningless comfort. The kitchen and the coffeemachine and the morning reports about as inviting as a suicide cult.

Kathleen Poirier didn't really want this.

And she didn't know what else to do.

****

2. Diligence

He moved through the wireform gate, the overhead buzzer grinding out its moment, and the door clacking shut behind him. The dusty, milky atmosphere of unfinished clay walls, a combination of artificial and natural light wandering for what gave an impression of over a mile. The banal tedium of coworkers with coffee/doughnut breakfasts discussing the daily goals, the weather, the commute, or in certain isolation with tape measures, pencils, single pieces of lumber demarking a mental note in the purpose of organization. He kept walking. Half-awake and unbothered, like some somnambulistic drafter of bridges necessary to reach a new day. Walking the terra firma of smooth stone underfoot, transistor radios fizzing out the morning report -- news of Tequistan, news of America, big and small, or early-morning talkshows of Professors and Academics and Governors of the Economy -- on and on down the line, only differentiated from the months before by the accumulation of those efforts. Exposed beams and sawdust and this warm air and the morning light that fell on carpenters and electricians and the raw, capable hands of professionals of mortar and gravity and stone. The odor of sweat and aggressive pheromones puncturing and punctuating the air equally with the measured striking of steel instruments, he felt the low-dose of Tasziphedimines in his stomach melting away to its foamy, salty finish, while the earliest months of American intervention in Tequistan claimed arguably few lives, while Rueben went on campaigning, while this new addition to the Pelican Farm was estimated, nailed, hammered, drilled, screwed into place. And in all these men, an attraction to something higher. A certain relocation of the soul, perhaps cautionary, yet far more liberating, steps towards a divine equanimity, this was the middleclass not only absorbing the means of production, but becoming the means of production, every man in every stone, in every attachment, in every pencil mark, appraisal, satisfaction and continuation. This was the end of abject poverty, it seemed. There would be no more starving children, or foreclosures on homes, or curable diseases uncured. There would be no more crime except for the "necessary crime" of warful intervention in those few, ever more rare pockets of savagery on the Earth. This was the chance the majority decided they needed.

He went to work.

****

3. About An Onion

The octopus's name is Quagmire and the two exotic trout are Ricky & Lucy. She has placed one side of her head to the exterior of their aquarium and is letting the cold moisture reduce or increase something inside.

She is the daughter of Merrick Slivovitz, who himself is the secondborn and only surviving child of William Slivovitz, founder of the Slivovitz Vodka Company (bi-monthly anadeceased dividends of which pay for their mortgage and grocery bills and a few other things -- like Ricky & Lucy for example. To anyone who's shed an IQ point or two since graduating high school: that means a dead man famous for little more than getting people efficiently drunk is better off than any living, working family over two decades following his death. Better off financially, at any rate.) Her eyes move through the water, the One Hundred foot by One Hundred foot by One Hundred foot space of water where Quagmire corkscrews, then coils his tentacles before kicking them back out to propel to some other part of the tank. Ricky and Lucy are seldom, if ever, separated by more than ten feet, not unlike two neutrons sharing the same gravity and anti-covetous of any relationship save their own, except for never exploding on impact.

From the enormous wooden rack screwed into the wall beside the aquarium she removes a stout, 16 oz. container of Coelacanth flakes, unscrews the lid, then opens the trapdoor on the face of the tank to the one-way vacuum-portal, and flipping a discreet pearl switch for the vacuum with her left hand and casting in the Coelacanth flakes with the other, watching them move away and upwards through the tube and arriving at the their vertical climax to a pleasant explosion of nutritious debris. (This supposed "chore" of Lori's was never met with anything but gratitude and delight.)

Upstairs in the bedroom of that 3-story, 4-bedroom house (4-story if you count "the basement") her mother, Helena Slivovitz, is stoned on Tasziphedimines and Depakote, semi-conscious on the couch mostfacing the glass & mahogany lowtable and the television on its braidedwire stand. Stoned as she was on most Monday afternoons, this day her oral canal free of spittle. Helena is what has come to be known -- amongst sympathizers of the New Insurgence, at any rate -- as an emotional dependent of narcotics. She is, put bluntly, a well-to-do drug addict. And whether this compulsion is her fault or decided by something else, who can say her circumstance is enviable? She married young, into security and status, Merrick having advertised his desire for a wife during genesis of the technology boom taking place in the late-70s/early-80s, when male descendants of the wealthy and privileged were seeming to absorb larger and larger amounts of cash money, control of stocks & markets and just about everything that might go with them. She married young so that she wouldn't have to worry about when she got old. Helena and Lori never saw much of him. In the very-late 90s, before Lori was ten-years-old, he was offered a position as a kind of advisor/therapist to highpaying accounts, such as CEOs and troubled politicians.

Upstairs, in her own bedroom, Lori picked up her SmartPhone to see that Sean, her boyfriend, had called. His manic voice was trapped inside her messagebox and it always made her giddy to hear him split into a thousand directions. She often had as many as a dozen of these recordings, like audial pornography you could carry and play at any time. "Call me back, alright?" he said. "It's fucken crazy here. I don't know what's going on. I don't think they're gonna fire anybody -- they need us too bad -- but the whole deal is shitting the blankets and nobody's got any detergent," he said. "Call me! It's important!" Lori put her phone back on the bedside table then looked about her room. Posters featuring popstars and celebrities and the occasional diva or gangsta vocalist adorned her walls. And smaller pictures of family and friends on the edges of these like an accidental mosaic of the past enjoining with the future.

She opened up the email around eleven o'clock. She didn't recognize the sender though was unperturbed by this vagueness and she read the message with tranquile, animated delight: You don't know me, but you can. A lot of things are going to change this year. A lot of them are going to be really good. And we're going to need a lot of help. If you trust what I'm saying, please -- please, please, please -- go wherever it's convenient and purchase an onion. (I cannot promise to reimburse you for this onion.) Once it is in your possession, reply to this email, but not before.

There is so much work to be done.

There wasn't any signature.

She didn't have anything else to do. After taking a shower and putting on something casually flirty, she would drive out to the TramTown Superstore in Prairieville for an onion. She wanted to see if they had any new varieties of Coelacanth flakes, anyway.

And that's how she ended up meeting Kathleen Poirier.

****

4. A Separate Pilgrimage

Silence as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon swelled in the van while the five of them and the old woman drove to Atlantic City. Even while they asked her questions, easy questions, or when the driver turned in the cab to provide little details -- road conditions, amount of gas, estimated time of arrival -- this unsettling absence of sound could be felt on everything, on all of them.

She was 98-years-old. A convert to the Church of Prophet since nearly 60 years earlier, when the state of the world was particularly grim for anyone living in America...and always spoken-for and protected by her family, community, and at least most of the time, her government, she found her faith had always been acknowledged, and rewarded.

Now, the four of them who rode in the back of the vehicle -- Max the only one we might recognize -- feeling the disquiet conjure something from their bones, pretending the disquiet was something else. None of this was seen as suicide or murder. It was what she wanted. Sure, the request had been met with some incredulity, a polite sort of dirty look when she submitted the paperwork to Orwell Construction for approval. Yet there was an elusive, far more terrible thing lingering beneath its surface.

Outside the van, the landscape of Northern New Jersey was a landscape of dead tigers from failed zoos, failed casinos, failed convenience stores and everything else, the only real contrast being what entropy had yet to accomplish. Outside the van, the economy was technically still functioning. Money wasn't exactly pouring in, but usually at least once a month someone'd get a check or an inheritance or some kind of government loan to open a pill-dispensary or purchase a building for tenements or maybe a small factory to produce goods for labs or cosmetic companies or office-supply chains. Outside the van, the world was still half-alive, instead of half-dead.

Max removed a bottle of tasziphedimines from an interior-pocket of his workshirt, unscrewed the cap and offered the others -- driver included -- before taking just one of the 10 milligram white tablets, and swallowing it with spit, and screwing back on the cap, trying to screw down into something inside himself.

The three others in the back made polite attempts to ignore this, and they succeeded. The old woman asked, "Are those drugs?" She emanated stoicism when she said this, like somebody's grandmother. "Tell me the truth."

Max had to swallow a certain embarrassment. He didn't want to go into a lecture that elevated pharmaceutical aids above common street drugs that just got a person high or fucked-up, and he was right in thinking that said lecture wouldn't actually help the situation, but then the tiniest voice inside him told him not to confess to being some deplorable dopefiend. "Well," he said, "they're tasziphedimines."

"Tazza-what-did-you-say?"

Calmly, "tasziphedimines."

She listened.

"They help me to...stay in the moment."

"And where else would you be?"

"I mean, they help me concentrate. So I can get things done. Otherwise..."

"Otherwise what?" she said.

"I have a tendency to get distracted. With the drugs -- the pills, I can build a house by myself in a week flat, no question about it. Without them, sometimes I can't even get out of bed."

"Oh, that's terrible," she said. She leaned forward from her side of the van, putting a withered set of fingers, rolling bones onto Max's backhand that was folded upon the other. He did not flinch.

He raised his bowed head to return her attention, looking well into the old woman's eyes, her pale visage of kindness fused with adequate flesh. He said, "It is. But I've got to believe somehow tomorrow will be easier."

She looked right into him, into his sadness, then said. "It will. Prophet will make it easy for all of us."

"Coming into the city of Troy," said the driver. They were now only twenty minutes from their destination, approximately.

Max didn't say what he thought about the Church of Prophet, nor did any of the others. They simply nodded in silent agreement, let the old woman go on as she had been, and rode like that as the van kept along at the speed limit, turning when it had to turn, slowing when it had to slow, and reaching Glorious Atlantic City at two minutes after 1 P.M. (precisely the original estimate).

They turned off the main drag of skyhigh casinos and hotels and concomitant enterprises to lesser-known, lesser-well-to-do establishments, down past a couple of slightly antiquated shopping centers (what some refer to as Dirt Malls) and then out to the edge of Atlantic City.

The van rolled into a dirt lot that was mostly vacant. There were no other vehicles, no other people. There was a stationary, singlewide trailer that'd been used as an office during the construction of the old woman's request, which was the 150-foot tall wooden gallows with built-in square-spiral staircase that ran every edge of its double-reinforced beams, up, up, up with the majesty of something like an oil derricks, or intimidating like the Eiffel Tower in France.

It was fucking huge.

Two of the Orwell Construction employees got out of the van first, and Max assisted the old woman to her feet, and she took tiny steps forward to the waiting arms of the two employees where they stood in the dirt lot. The sun was high and bright and a couple of bored vultures coasted along in the intense heat. And the old woman gave each of her arms to the employees and they escorted her slowly, carefully to the entrance of the gallows, not unlike an undecorated haunted house in an amusement park thought Max while the driver waited in the van.

Inside the structure, it grew just slightly hotter. A smell like the bedding of animal-cages wafted off the crisscrossing beams, the scent more pervasive with every new level ascended. And they all began to sweat a bit. And they all began to get a little tired. Somewhere around the tenth story of the structure, while Max had paused in a certain liturgy of concerning the construction of the gallows, the old woman had to beg them to stop. "Just a moment, please," she said. "I just need to catch my breath."

This was anticipated. In the decades of accepting commissions from the public, the company had entertained and executed just about every strange and elaborate desire known to humans with absolute professionalism. The more surreal the client, the more enthusiasm and discipline they displayed. They let the old woman catch her breath.

"I just didn't know it'd be such a long walk," she said.

"Very few ever have," said Max. "But everybody makes it."

"Hoo-oo-oof," she said. "Okay." And they continued to climb the remaining five stories, on to the other side.

And, finally, at the top, where the noose was already set, braided, awaiting, one man pulled it towards him then placed it over her like a halo, sliding the braided part to tighten it about her sagging flesh. 'Ready then?" "Ready then."

There was no call for last words, no opportunities to change her mind. Nothing but the wind where it moved through the silence, the bright sun where it shone on all without distinction, the two vultures here and gone, and the trapdoor opening.

****

5. From the Lighthouse to the Firehouse

Severed from the walls and their concomitant entrapments, he set forth from some deep pit in the Gulf of Mexico, swimming, naked save for a pair of Pelican Farm-issue boxershorts, legs muscular from hours-days=weeks-months-years of prayer, meditation, exercise; and arms climbing and pulling through the heavy water, a strange new oxygen in his lungs, to his fingertips, from his fingertips, the bones and tissues of his hands reaching down through the arms, and so savagely, bravely determined against the oppressive gravity of the ocean above him, where only scared trails of moonlight endured in form from the surface, where Sapir Ferlinghetti swam from imprisonment, so inexplicably from those walls, and so utterly natural to be without them. And this strange new oxygen moving with a fierce grace, acidic, acerbic, and bubbling and reverberating through his very pulse, he who had never been a champion of anything before his abduction and rendition to the Pelican Farm; What use did some lowly accountant of a Tequistani brokerage (now-defunct) have for long-distance swimming, even to the Gulf of Mexico, let alone from it?

He made his way towards the surface. The black and blue environs hardly contrasted with bottomless shadows, wide as museums, tall as temples, vague as the night behind every night save its ineffable self -- predators: gangs of sharks, poisonous eels, deadly piranha hidden wherever light didn't reach, couldn't reach, hidden while Sapir Ferlinghetti swam forward....

And when he came to the surface, a full moon the largest light in those early a.m. hours, the two-hundred or so lonely and disparate stars, he felt his energy coalesce to his center, buoying him where he could breathe air normally again, his arms playing in the warmth around him, keeping him afloat. He could sense the Pelican Farm in the distance and felt gratitude to God for his chance to escape.

Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour, later, he returned North, continued swimming into the day, the chaotic, open vessel of the day, only sometimes pausing to regain his stamina, and swimming eagerly and gratefully to the shores of Florida....

....See Miami Beach, glittering sand and the red brilliance of the morning and here and there a few tourists and a few denizens of that city moving towards the water, but not towards him, or laying on towels or sitting in chairs or moving to the parking lot for cigarettes or drinks... See God, sitting on the beach, beard full, and his body about five pounds lighter since traveling from Waffle in the weeks before he'd arrived there. See him waiting for Sapir Ferlinghetti, a thin grin of personal satisfaction nestled beneath his beard.

Ferlinghetti pressed forward those last few feet from the Gulf of Mexico, and it must be said he experienced a mild fatigue at that point. The unsupportive clay of ocean-drenched sand rose up through the cracks of his toes and the pores in his skin, slipping, bending, leaving away as he ambled closer to the neutral/welcoming finishline of the shore, and he took a great inhalation during his last pause before crossing the threshold, feeling the warm sand cling to his feet, his feet having made the decision to walk toward God before he did.

"Can I help you with something?" said God.

Clearly dumbfounded, the ex-accountant couldn't think of anything he believed. Mind you, he didn't recognize this was God, nor did confuse the figure with anyone personally known to him, nor was he even particularly religious.

The figure was plainly that: a figure. God stood up from the sand, dusted the sand from himself, then extended his hand in greeting.

Sapir Ferlinghetti shook hands with God.

"How about some new clothes, a big-ass lunch, and somewhere we can sleep without any noise?"

Sapir Ferlinghetti nodded.

"You get drunk? Smoke weed, smoke cigarettes?"

Momentarily perplexed, Sapir Ferlinghetti nodded.

"Good," said God. "We'll do some of that, too. Just," he added, "if you wanna fuck anybody in the ass, not me, alright?"

Sapir Ferlinghetti, not wanting to fuck anyone whatever in the ass, wondered why that had even been an issue, then nodded.

"Alright, then," said God. "Let's get out of here before anyone distorts another fucking thing I just said."

And they moved off from the indifference of Miami Beach and the injustice of the Pelican Farm while the sun continued to shine without distinction.

****

6. Merrick & Nathan

Merrick polishes the smudges from the full-wall-window that overlooks downtown Ivory Hill (20 stories to the bottom) unbothered completely by the magisterial and magnanimous height. He wipes as though finishing a painting. And the glass almost seems alive and he turns back to his very large office, his feet only adorned with socks (he is otherwise fully dressed) taking the off-white plush carpeting with accustomed pleasure. He has the dramatically deliberate step common to psychologists of a certain type (of which there are many) and in the most repetitive, ubiquitous task he performs he leaves the impression of the sanctimonious. Where other citizens of Waffle saw life as perpetual drudgery and/or a series of great chances they would never have, Merrick Slivovitz indeed would put his hungry heart into anything his libido asked of him.

He crossed from the window to his desk, as long and wide as two metal caskets, nearly waist-high, to move the rolling/oscillating chair and open the main drawer of the desk with one motion, and retrieve from a curious assortment of items a two-foot long rubber cord that wrapped around his back hands one with the other flexing and pulling the cord as far as it or his hands could reach and letting his muscles become something more than previous.

He passed around his desk, and pulling on the cord, and then closer again to the middle of the room where you'd almost expect to see a lowtable for beverages and the like but where only a leather therapy couch and a stiff-looking leather chair sat obviously unoccupied, Merrick pacing, and pulling on the cord.

And in the final ten or so minutes before his next patient arrived, Merrick had a small chance to let his mind wander. He thought of his wife and daughter.

....Then a knock came at the door, at 2 p.m., precisely when it was scheduled.

Nathan Rueben, his black hair freshly trimmed and like a schoolboy's albeit disquietingly innocent. He looked angry. He'd been brooding over his confrontation with God at the Town of Waffle Firehouse. And for all the effort he applied suppressing this, for all of the other ways he tried to look at it, he knew just what and whom he had to thank for the miserable doubts and concomitant anguish that ate away at him internally now.

"Come inside," said Merrick Slivovitz. "You know, I've been expecting you."

Nathan Rueben entered and Merrick closed the door and Nathan stood appraising the office for a moment as though to divine some change from his months of visits before while Merrick went to the drawer in the desk to replace the cord and remove a lighter, a package of cigarettes. He went to where Rueben was standing, with the package of cigarettes open and the anterior papertab removed, and Nathan slid out one of the cigarettes, tapped its filter on his backhand, twice, thrice, before placing it in his lips and turning to Merrick to set it aflame.

"Don't you look handsome, Mr. Rueben," said Merrick Slivovitz.

Rueben looked through the smoke, took the cigarette from his lips, and ashed on the floor.

Merrick shook his head in amused, shy incredulity, as though pardoning the momentary act of defiance of a child, and not the deliberately rude behaviour of an adult. He took a cigarette from the pack for himself, tossing the others onto his desk, picking up two clean ashtrays, and going to where Nathan lay on the leather sofa, placing one ashtray on the lowtable, and carrying the other with him and his unlit cigarette to the stiff-looking leather chair.

After taking a "drag" of the unlit cigarette, he said, "So tell me friend, where do we begin today?"

Rueben drew deeply on the cigarette, the jack-o-lantern-orange coal more noticeable than it should have been at that hour. He was still angry, and now his anger went further, like an amalgam of a brutal emperor and vicious dictator. He blew smoke and through the smoke said, "I've been made to feel small, Dr. Slivovitz...." He said, "At an event in Waffle, New York." He said, "Perhaps you heard."

Merrick had. News, then rumors, then rumors presented as news had the seeming ability & attribute to leap from every radio, television and newspaper one passed discussing a stranger in the town of Waffle who'd supposedly berated the visiting politician without cause and ruined to shit the entire event.

After taking another "drag" of the unlit cigarette, Merrick said, "I'll tell you with a heavy heart, yes, Mr. Rueben. I must confess I have."

Rueben sat up in the sofa, swung his legs before the lowtable, and indelicately ground his cigarette into the ashtray, the cloud of smothered smoke and ash like the havoc of a tornado wrought upon insects. He said, "Then you know. You know what's happening."

"What's happening, Mr. Rueben?"

"This country is in grave trouble," he said. "I have suspected it for a very long time, sometimes even thinking the Great Disaster could be avoided. But it cannot. A terrible judgment for America is at hand."

"Oh, I hope not," said Dr. Merrick Slivovitz. "I surely hope not."

Rueben had his hands on his knees and he leaned forward into the room, the smoke just clearing up, and he said with a hostile vulnerability, "Do you believe in a Creator, Merrick?"

"Why," he responded, "of course I do. I think everyone must. How else do we earthly creatures make it from one year to the next? If not for the guidance of a Creator, Men would surely by their own whims and the whims of others."

Nathan Rueben smiled. "Can I show you something, Merrick?"

"Of course, of course."

Rueben stood up from his chair and Merrick stood up from his and Rueben went to him and escorted him to the full-wall-window, twenty stories to the bottom. "If the Creator has guided us," he said, "then he was guiding me the other day when I was disgraced in the firehouse. And perhaps he has guided me here as well.

"But look, Merrick. Look at the city below us."

"No place like Ivory Hill," said Dr. Slivovitz.

"God keeps me bound up with my shame, Merrick."

He looks at the politician with some wonder, a little tipsy on it, with no time to react as Nathan Rueben took him in fistfulls by the front of his shirt, sidestepping them into a circle, two circles, three circles before casting the doctor's shoeless body through the glass about two feet away from the building to go down, down, down with enough time to sober up with little particles of flawless glass moving with him or away from him, away from him in the terrifying rush where the street came into view and enough time to see one person's horrified reaction before he crashed into the sidewalk.

"...I won't let him."

Then he turned from the window, where an unlit cigarette sat on the floor. He moved free of distraction through the office to the door, closing it behind him.

****

7. Commercial

She had never seen anything like she'd seen those onions. Like a teenage boy might respond to his first real-life glimpse of bare breasts, or maybe the way some young girls fantasize about riding horses: that slow, heavy ticking of pleasure that hypnotizes the heart, resists easy explanations left Lori standing in astonishment in the produce-section of the TramTown Superstore, as if trying to swallow a world that would let her if only she could figure out how.

There were only four different types of onions -- white, yellow, sweet, and something called Vidalia -- but in that moment the four types became multiplied as thousands when she stood there observing the least minor differences in their features. All within an ounce or two of weight to each other. The supermarket light fell on them, glowing the shades of their skins, some more papery, some more rubbery, spread across the big wooden island made to look like a farmer's wagon like a paradox subtending itself, the occasional fly or worker moving around her.

The email had asked her to consider none of these things. It simply asked her to get an onion, and reply when she did. But to doubt a young person's curiosity is to undermine it by underappreciating it, and therefore make the entire world a little harder to live in.

"Excuse me, miss," said a rather fat woman with ugly hair, who apparently needed some onions of her own. "There's other people gotta do shopping here," she added.

Lori's feet moved by their own volition. She was only half-looking at the fat woman, her heart and focus solidly with those onions, and everything else somewhere in the hierarchy of their relationship with those onions.

"Thank you," said the fat woman, taking a bag and throwing it in her basket before insouciantly moving to the tasks ahead of her.

When Lori turned back, something was slightly broke. Or perhaps just interrupted. Her head swam like a bulb of music was opened in there, as big as the purring of a Giant Squid. And it frightened her somewhat as well. Anyone who's ever had a nervous breakdown, even witnessed one, knows that logic can be an elusively temperamental thing. It will tell you all the ways you can go mad or crazy or insane, then carefully give you a guided tour. Logic can be an utter bastard.

Outside the store, locking her car, Kathleen Poirier knew something about nervous breakdowns. She wasn't going to write a book or teach a class; she never did have that sort of faith in people. The amorphous suggestion of the masses teemed around her since before she was younger than Lori, all through college and her father's sudden demise from a heart-attack the year of her graduation, and even the general atmosphere of the Great City in the late-90s brimming, swarming with the emotionally indifferent and bitterly hostile. She was picked up on a sidewalk after collapsing there and briefly saw a therapist before terminating treatment the second winter of its course. It'd been the year she met Max, and everything began to change again.

She took the keys from the lock and put them in her purse. As on most days, there were young people and people Kathleen's age from one youth group or charity or another proselytizing at the entrance of the TramTown.

"Are you ready for goodness beyond anything you've ever imagined?" asked a woman thrusting a brochure detailing something like a timeshare in a parallel universe. "Are you ready for the change?"

Kathleen wasn't ready or interested in the change. "Not today, honey," she said. "Maybe some other time."

"But there's no time like the present," yelled the woman with the pamphlet struck up in the air, Kathleen walking into the TramTown.

A small crowd had begun to draw around Lori. They were talking more to each other than they were to her but you could see it was about the onions.

"I mean, what the heck, ya know?" said a short man with black hair. "There must be some sort of store policy or something, right?"

"I bet she's even done something like this before," said another man. "They've probably told her, the store, I mean."

"Young people are so rude," said an old woman. "They just don't consider what the world must be like for other people."

Kathleen got closer to the mob. The new earrings she was thinking of buying for herself could wait. When she was just about two feet away from any of them, she said, "So what's the secret item on this episode of Supermarket Sweep?" She was such a badass. She felt like such a badass.

"Ain't no--" said the short man with black hair, cut off by nothing except he didn't have the second half of a sentence.

"This lady's hurting other peoples' shopping," said the other man. "We're just trying to figure out what her issue is."

"Oh," said Kathleen. "I didn't realize." She took a step towards Lori. "Miss," she said, "could you tell me what's going on?"

Lori said, "I need to get an onion."

"I see," said Kathleen. Then turning to the two men and the old woman (the others had begged off at the beginning of the conversation): "The young lady here's trying to get an onion."

"But--"

"'But' need not apply here. The young lady's trying to pick out the right onion."

Lori felt understood. She said, "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Ehhheh," said one of the men, "who gives a shit," waving them off and walking away.

"Yeah: Save the Children," said the other.

"You oughtn't encourage this sort of behavior," said the old woman. "No wonder there's no respect in this world," and finally, she was gone, too.

"My name's Kathleen," said Kathleen.

"I'm Lori," said Lori.

"What else are you doing today, Lori? Are you busy?"

"Not really," she said. "I just gotta get this onion and write an email. I can do half of that on my phone."

"That's good. Would you like to have lunch with me?"

No one had ever asked her a question like this in this context. It was very strange but when she thought about her boyfriend Sean and her mother half-dead on the couch (the news of Merrick hadn't gone further than Ivory Hill, at that point) spending Saturday afternoon eating lunch with a stranger might be just the answer to all her prayers. "Okay."

"Okay," responded Kathleen. "Let's go pay for your onion."

She grabbed a sack at random and they started towards the registers. The new pair of earrings Kathleen had been nebulously considering purchasing for herself could wait, along with any irresistible brands of Coelacanth flakes. They'd sit untouched on the shelves.

****

8. Employee of the Month

He woke with a head full of pain. Pain perfectly alien to any notion of surrender. Loud as a diesel truck in the street outside. He felt it like greasy black oil moving through his skull. Behind Spook's cringing eyes where he rolled in semi-consciousness in the motel bed.

He sat up in the dark room, Dan Jakes in the other bed and the towns of Barry, Sitkaville and Waffle somewhere, respectively, outside.

He'd only been drawing about two months, then, but he'd developed quickly and he could sketch nearly anything, evidently, if he could find some emotional connection to the subject he was trying to illustrate. He was mostly just responding to his anger and personal contempt for people, their pathetic and dull self-importance. Faces tortured with paranoid greed and yearning for the hopelessly implausible, unintelligible, abnormal.

The meaningless, insufferable pain echoed inside his skull.

He turned his feet over the side of the bed, hopped to a standing position, then walked over the ultrasoft carpeting that he relished as life itself, towards the bathroom, the nuclear-bright light when he flipped on the switch and it dominated everything.

He turned the light back off. He tried to breathe slower. Maybe some of the light was trapped in his optic nerve, or maybe his hyperactive imagination was inventing without him again, but he felt a sophistication of his reflection in the dark motel room. Just the outlines, mostly, mind you, yet he saw a face that was his face and no other.

He went back into the room, turned on the television, the endlessly-repeating news now repeating this story of some bearded stranger who'd insulted the congressman from Michigan who was visiting the local firehouse in Waffle. He turned the television off. 'Too early for these fucking golf clowns', he thought. He felt extremely dizzy of a sudden. All the chambers in his brain opened, opening and laying a susurrous chorus of suggestions and static agony and he just stood there like that, waiting, waiting for the agony to ebb into something manageable.

Maybe he'd smoked too much pot the night before. The Oklahoma Soap Company, by whom he was employed, had departed Ohio three days earlier, and upon their entrance to Barry, New York, a member of his salesteam had located a dealer and it seemed the kids just couldn't get enough....

When he thought about his problems, he had a tendency to think about others'. He tried to not compare himself to them but sometimes he'd think about the spot that poor Dan was in: Dan was supposed to pay a visit to the Pancross County Sheriff's Department to identify his father's body for some weeks at that point; they'd informed him, several times, that there was only a small window of time when they "could entertain his presence" in the department's interim morgue, and the widowed Mrs. Jakes had positively refused for reasons she would not disclose.

Grinning with bashful modesty at the television, Spook figured he at least had some time to decompress before the start of another arduous day. There'd be a check-in in the motel parking lot where he and Mark Abbedro and Dan Jakes and Sean Cooly and the deeply-tan fellow who drove them to one neighborhood or another whose name Spook could never remember would get their morning briefing pep talk and everyone announced how much they planned on doing in sales. They were forever going in and out of doors. Day after day. The only break in the routine when you caught a good song on the radio or stopped to appreciate some fleeting, tactile sensation. How could anyone live like this permanently? Some did.

The whole ride to Waffle brimmed with anxiety. Mark asking stupid questions, insisting on serious answers. Sean was perfectly baffled searching for meaning in what Mark said. Spook cut some of the pressure by being snarky. By the time they made it to Quaid Street -- which incidentally was less than ten miles from the Waffle Firehouse -- Spook never wanted to get anywhere like he wanted to get out of that van.

Mark exited behind him. The others would pick them up in a couple hours. "Well then, little buddy, ready to make some Big Bucks?"

He personally didn't give a shit if he made enough for a pack of cigarettes all day. "Which way are you going?"

"With you, of course."

"No, you're not. Pick a direction."

"Aww, whatsamatta, Spook feelin' kinda testy?"

He was at least half a foot shorter than Mark, but when he stepped towards him the two were nearly equals. "Pick. A. Direction."

Mark put a hand on Spook's shoulder and was starting to say something that didn't get to be said because Spook took a step backwards and gave the indelicate schmuck a look like he was ready to stab him to death with one of his own ribs. "Pick. A. Direction."

"Alright, alright," said Mark, " just meet me back here in a couple hours, okay, tough guy?"

"Don't be late..."

The day started to calm down a little then. The summer air was gentle and generous with everything it landed on. Some birds in the trees, telephone wires stoic and useful, and the handsome houses, and the sweeping and scratching of gravel underfoot. He might've walked like that forever if he was able.

He would knock on exactly three doors before he knocked on Helena Slivovitz's door: a middle-aged man wearing a polo shirt with a thick blue stripe across the chestline informed the curious-looking salesman he wasn't interested in wasting either of their time and excusing him as swiftly as manners would allow; a girl about fourteen-years-old who smelled pretty good and made Spook feel guilty told him that she didn't have any money; and another man who wasn't buying anything that day either.

She answered the door in her bathrobe. Her dark red hair tied up in bobbypins, a delicious aroma of strawberry-scented shampoo complimenting the eager and hungry sex of her just-washed body. "What do you want."

"Uh," he said. "So, uh..." he said. "I'm here as a representative of the Oklahoma Soap Company."

"Yeah?"

"We, uh-- We sell soap. You wanna buy any?"

"Some sales pitch you got there, kid. You must be employee of the friggin' month."

He hung his head.

"Well, shit," she said, tilting her head to one side. "Why don't you keep me company for a little while. I'll see if I can hustle up a dollar from somewhere. Merrick's bound to have left something in this godforsaken house. Come on."

She turned from the door knowing full well he'd follow her inside.

He delicately closed the door.

She was pouring two cups of coffee when he entered the kitchen, asking him if he took cream or sugar, which he did, and she got and they stirred their coffee with a great deal of eye-contact and she said, "So tell me about this soap, then. I'm dying to hear about it."

"Well," he said, sipping the coffee, felt a giggle come on, suppressed it. "It's, uh... It's something else. You know, it...it can clean almost anything. Brass, porcelain. And you don't need a lot, they tell me... Unless it's the harder stuff. Like oil stains in your driveway?"

Genuinely impressed, "It can clean oil stains in a driveway?"

He nodded quite seriously.

"Okay. How much does this miracle oil-remover cost?"

The numbers were effortlessly known to him. He was amazed by his own ability to recall the exact prices for a pint, half gallon, full gallon, the larger jugs and even some of the price-breaks that came with purchasing multiple containers. And she just let him and he went at it like an animal. The words flew out of his mouth like impossible butterflies, filling up the coffee-scented kitchen and packing them in there in that heavenly verbose cocoon.

She didn't ask him anything else. She walked around from her side of the kitchen-island, took his hands and put them on her rear, put her mouth on his, and did what she could to eat Spook McEntyre.

And he let her. He wanted to let her so badly. Let her inside like another bone in his ribcage.

They fucked on the kitchen floor. She was on top for most of it, never removed her robe entirely, her sizable breasts peeking in and out of the fabric, grinding herself on his skinny, happy, semi-paralyzed cock. And about fifteen minutes later, she bent herself, her lips towards his ear, said, "I came. You'd better get lost before the cops get here."

****

9. A Moment of Cessation

Begin with a length of rope, the longer the better. Consider the material, the quality of the thread. How does its endurance compare with the endurance of other ropes?

God sat on the motel bed that was closer to the t.v. (Channel 4) calmly smoking a cigarette and ashing in the ashtray that he held in the other hand. He didn't like what he saw. This thing with the firehouse had everyone coming to Rueben's aid (or else making two-dimensional pleas to be excused from having an opinion) and it was making it rather hard for God to rekindle his faith in the cause of humanity as he had since leaving the Great City. Oh what an eviction can bring.

Sapir Ferlinghetti just ignored it, although on occasion he'd laugh with a positive certainty at the supposed man of God whose public reputation and dependence had been paralyzed by the same figure in the course of a single afternoon.

Remember the rope.

The once-upon-a-time Tequistani accountant could remember far worse things happening. His abduction in a New York airport by men at least dressed like police officers sporting kevlar vests with two-inch thick pads punctuating the front and the more-breathable aluminiumfoil-thin material that made up the back, for instance.

The rope.

And he could remember being "questioned" at Pelican Farm. Knowing nothing he could tell them to stop the torture. The bright lights, the loud noise, the stress positions, the razor treatment. He sometimes imagined he was being counseled to lie, invent names and stories and fabricated acts of terrorism that might very well have some real-life coralary. But he would not lie. And this promise weakly nurtured him. He sometimes dreamed about a rope.

God remembered walking to Florida, remembered every step of it, every voice, nothing escaped his awareness, nothing would allow his mind to wander, and he often gave over to the desire for the species to end, or have never existed, and since his mind couldn't leave from anywhere (towns always looked best when he was leaving them) he kept his feet going, and with a nebulous foreknowledge he was certain that Sapr Ferlinghetti would be there when he got there.

Make appointments and keep them. There will come a day when there is no more racing ahead to complete things. All of that time and obligation will vanish. You will be the wise old person at the end of your story. You will come out of the ocean of suffered experience, free of all sin & defilement. Thinking, there are just so many things you can do with a rope besides hang yourself.

****

10. Honor

In their perpetually underwhelmed faces Kathleen saw where harbingers of vanity consumed the person. The nasally voices decrying children and husbands without shame. Kathleen let her eyes search their eyes while they gossiped about themselves and all throughout their presence was the memory or suggestion of a lie. She'd foolishly believed, in the beginning, their frustrations and struggles to be sincere. How one boy put mirrors on his shoes to sneak a glimpse at little girls' panties. How in a friendly arm-wrestling match some high school football player had broken his father's arm after they'd procured some Tasziphedimines from who-knows-where. The strangest and arguably most perverse of these tales was the one Alicia Vaughn revisited every four or five months after one national tragedy and another: that a friend of hers in the twelfth grade had been raped, and become pregnant as a result, and that she and her "perpetrator" had reconciled their differences and were married in a Church of Prophet, remaining steadfastly devoted to one another to the end of their days. Alicia told this story with nothing less than the zeal of a nun who'd taken a vow of celibacy, time and again and again, while the other women (standing around a punchbowl or gathered on someone's couch) would occupy themselves playing with jewelry or plastic cups. No one challenged Alicia's lie. They all exchanged demure looks of pity and did penance to some nameless ishvara that would be preserved in their darkness without fail.

Kathleen missed (or skipped?) a birthday party, a baby shower, a wedding. She withdrew in contemplating a life of semi-isolation with Max. Sometimes she wanted children. A little boy or girl to hold in her arms and relieve the elusive burden of the numb and sterile days. To carry that very heavy light in her viscera, her blood, the wind in her chest and her thoughts. She had gravely accurate misgivings about notions toward divine creation and the promise of an afterlife but all hope of salvation through God and Purpose wasn't consumed in the unnatural squander of their mendacity and superstition. When she thought about a child, she thought about cartoon monkeys eating cake and little boys who reeked of french fries and little girls winning bicycle races and how they might grow old into the austerity of retired life, one more firefly or glow worm blinking out in the canvas of night itself fated to run cold in the meaningless indifference of space/time... And Kathleen wept for how swiftly the thoughts arrived. And how unlikely they were to be delivered into waking.

When the mindless chatter of her neighbors finally became too much, when American intervention raised its defiant & nationalistic head and pledged that amorphous identity to the resolution of some unspecified conflict and Max was sent by Orwell to the island of Loto, separated by a thousand miles of continent and the Sub-Atlantic Sea, Kathleen began to ruminate about suicide when her interior clock prompted her to do so, which was approximately once or twice every two weeks. The dread could be initiated by the least thing at that point: the greedy, dirty flies on breakfast's leftovers; the way light traveled in the vacant day; the dull ache of remembered madness. The world's pettiness seized upon her like a bloodthirsty virus and she became fiercely possessed with the desire to sever the pain, drain the blood with her mortal insanity.

Not yet, though. There were still rainy afternoons alive with stray dogs and the accommodating serenity bestowed those whom endure their trials of grief with the lesson intact from its counter-options.

And so she and Lori Slivovitz would bury their onions in the Slivovitz's backyard, consummate the conspiracy, and become antivisans to a world that is yet to begin properly dawning. They'd be each other's guide and comfort from the sorry-sorry-sorry sisters of Waffle and elsewhere content to swimming laps in the misery and shit of their own hopeless oceans. Lori and Kathleen with no charge of devotion beyond life itself, looking up to a shelf of the new world where at last honor could be known, kept.

****

11. Sisyphus

They were holding him for something like 48 hours before I got there. Strung out, greasy hair, oily skin like a taught clay structure like some metal skeleton clinging to the memory of flesh.

The officer who'd let me in was behind the steel door now. "Mr. McEntyre?" I said. He looked at me with scared intensity. "My name is Roberto Mancini. I'll be representing you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

And we sat there for a moment. I'd been trying to get serious work assignments for a couple of years by then: most of my clients were bullies who went off their medication and went berserk on some hapless, unsuspecting bystander; a couple low-level drug dealers who wouldn't betray their higher-ups; and just about no one older than 25 would have anything to do with me if they could afford better than a public defender. A man accused of rape was something very new.

"Can I offer you a cigarette?" I said.

He was in handcuffs. "And a lighter, too."

I was momentarily dumbfounded. The thought emerged. "So they're still pulling that one... Yes, Mr. McEntyre, you can have a lighter, too." I took the pack from a pocket on my coat, pulled the tab on the cellophane, put the withered plastic in a side pocket, then took out a cigarette and held it in front of him.

He slightly jangled like a tambourine when he reached across the table for the cigarette.

He leaned forward and I lit it.

I took a glass ashtray out of one of my other pockets. The authorities won't provide them anymore on account they get tired of replacing all the ones the visitors keep stealing, and they will berate you like a dog who's urinated on the carpet if you defile their precious concrete floors.

It rattled on the table.

From yet another pocket I took the stapled packet of the file they had on him that I'd printed at the library. "I'm not telling you anything new when I tell you there's quite a case in front of you."

"I know," he said. "A real-life trial."

"I won't ask if you did it or not." She had his semen. "But you should know going into this that our chances are pretty slim."

Maybe thinking of sales, he said, "Not on a big streak, are ya?"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. McEntyre. We might get you into a mental hospital instead of jail, but that's only if they really like you."

He was bemused, almost like it was happening to someone else.

"And that means they have to like you more than Helena Slivovitz."

The name refreshed his anger.

"Did you know her before the incident?"

"I didn't rape her!"

I calmly shook my head.

A sense of failure shuddered through his nerves and arteries like the hazy bluish-gray of smoke in the concrete room.

"Okay," I said. "I was thinking as much."

"She's lying. She's fucking lying and they believe every word..."

"Mr. McEntyre?"

"Yeah?"

"Take a drag."

He took one.

"Good, bad, or ugly, we'll get through this. There's an end here. It very likely won't be a happy ending, but there will be an end here. You have to remember that."

Shaking, he took another drag.

He was ashing the cigarette when I said, "How long have you been in sales?"

He had to laugh a bit then. "Two or three months, I think."

"And has there ever been another incident like this before?"

"Yeah, sure. I've --" He said, "No, there hasn't been an incident like this before. I'm not--"

"A rapist. I never said you were. I personally believe your innocence. I'm on your side... But I've seen enough of these types of things to know that if the victim says you're guilty, it's a matter of how guilty, not if. You see where this is going?" He nodded. "We're gonna need some character witnesses. Coworkers, friends, family, anyone like that. People who can make you look like a decent person."

"The good guys," he said, somewhere between despondent and grateful.

Putting my feelings aside, I said, "There's got to be someone."

I think that he remembered his father for a minute, or that he remembered something that had to do with his father. "Yeah, mom's a real swell lady."

"Mom?"

The cigarette had burnt down to the filter and he flipped it into the ashtray and I got him another one and I lit it.

He ashed, jangling. "Mom is... Forget it, man. She works at the senior center. Everybody loves her."

"Which senior center?"

"Waffle," he said. "She's the activities director... Why?"

"I don't know. But that place has always kinda given me the creeps."

"And you can't explain it, right? It's right there screaming in your face and you can't get away from it and you can't find where it's coming from. Right?"

"Yes."

"I knew it wasn't fucking just me. The same thing used to happen in the van."

"The van?"

"When we were going to work. When I--" He took a drag, blew it out. "When I was doing sales."

I suppressed my laughter. "Mr. McEntyre, we need to be a little serious here. That is, someone, anyone, has to speak in your defense. Not necessarily to prove you innocent. Only we need to show something to the jury, almost like collateral, that they won't be eating out of your hand but they at least won't want to sever them like a shoplifter in Tequistan."

He thought. He said, "Dan Jakes."

I wrote down the name.

"He was a coworker. I haven't seen him for a little while but I think I made an alright impression on him where he might be able to do what you said."

"The Oklahoma Soap Company can tell me where to find him I assume?"

"They should."

"Okay, that's a start," I said. "But they're probably not gonna give me much more time in here, so here's the plan: after I leave, you need to rack your brain, think of anyone like Dan. Remember, decent, not innocent."

"There's an end of this."

"Right. I'll be back to see you in a week or so. There are some items that require my attention. But you're not being ignored in here, understand?"

"Understood."

I put the packet back in my coat. I put the ashtray, butts and all, back in my pocket. "You can have the pack. Doubt they'll let you hold the lighter. Maybe find a friendly face, though."

The steel door opened.

"Do you happen to know the story of Sisyphus, Mr. McEntyre?"

He had to think for a minute, but he said, "Maybe? The guy with the big rock, right?"

"Close enough. Yes, the guy with the big rock."

Standing in the doorway, relieved for having something to do, I said, "Give it some thought. You might find yourself relating to the material."

****

12. Animosity

They didn't bolt the doors at the Ward House, exactly, but that's how it was meant to feel, I think. As soon as one entered the building the presence began to swell with every footstep forward, the air that smelled like stale moisture and withering dendritic spines, the ringing din of people on their way to undermining socialist enterprises in foreign countries, labor unions in America, busy as vengeful saboteurs concerned with the doings of other vengeful saboteurs.

The Ward House (of Publishing & Modern Education, in certain listings) is where I was assigned after my high school graduation. This was during the late 1990s when there was something refered to as The Government Intervention for Bright Students whose major focus was "rescuing" precocious individuals with otherwise compromised backgrounds (poor people) from such unfortunate paths as recreational drug-use or being indoctrinated by the enemy or even joining the armed forces of America. My kind's intelligence was a taste too rich for that, and our elders, our superiors, deemed editing & reinterpretating previous texts and studies as the most valuable, rewarding goals of our young, eager and noble minds. (This brand of opportunizing or monetizing the future has never entirely vanished from the marketplace, the culture, society: it only adopts new titles by supposedly new, supposedly refreshing leaders whose winning-strategies seem to be little more than temporarily lifting public morale with rallying-cries for the underprivileged and developmentally challenged and crippled veterans before the majority of their uncooperative colleagues soon overtakes their aspirations and they fall into the expired time of dumb entropy.

The Ward House thinks they will schedule every last detail (or at least all the significant ones) of an individual's life. This is not meant as satire or some cruel psychological experiment. It is meant in plain, hubris-charged earnest. They are serious as any dictator stoned on amphetamines, or cult leader sharing his visions of God, or the fearful and hypnotized masses that pledge allegiance to their doomed enterprises.

I began rehearsing my fantasy of escape the first week I was through the frontdoor. Society is made from something infinitely greater than their basements and subbasements of catalogues of text noting frequency of doctor's appointments, voting records, the cost of deodorant, the cost of shoes, the rise & fall of political/historical literature, the meaningless shapes cut by borders that only a psychopath would divine lasting credibility from. Society is the mantra written in flesh & bone long before commercials and designer-drugs and even rifles, bombs, roads. You can hear it in the common industry of ants and likewise insects, you can feel it in your stomach where your chakras join with your education.

No wonder everything looked like a weapon in that place. The air tasted of blood whether blood was present or absent. This man, whose name is not worth repeating now, had a severe, intimidating aura as he stalked his prey at the Xenox machine. He looked as if there were invisible hooks sewn through him and cajoling and bullying him like some fallen angel bodhisatava or sadistic marionette on its way to commemorating the violence that'd yet to transpire or with steadfast confidence to author its dreadful consequence.

Our coworker wasn't paying attention. He'd done nothing to provoke his attacker nor had he done anything to inspire ill-fame any more than the average employee of Ward. Just another numbered drone in the database the company had to feed and open the door for... Of course, the senselessness of an act doesn't prevent it from occurring.

The hatefully violent man was on him with the blue ballpoint pen before he could fully exclaim the word 'no' and you could feel the thing as distinctly as if a white flash from a UFO had been projected through the office windows.

I didn't actually see any of the blood. I can't really describe any of that. It was my last day. I called security, kept my head down, and did ten quiet minutes of prayer for the loneliness of the human condition.

I joined the ranks of the public defenders about a year later. It takes virtually nothing to get your license.

****

13. Vacancy

The house was emptier than usual. Not that she'd expected her husband home nor was there any evidence of an invasion or theft, but Kathleen sensed an elusive abnormality as she withdrew her key from the door, closed it shut behind her. The blue painted walls adorned high and low with white polished moldings framed some facsimile of domestic ambition not unlike the uncertainty of a glutton or remorse of the arrogant. Quaint in its banality, oppressive in its thirst for greater things.

She remarked on the lack of groceries to be sorted into cupboards and whatnot, the stolid resilience of the crossbeams & wires that proferred the house a strange identity. She walked across the floor as if she was early for something. She noted the time from a clock on the wall and listened to some wandering, carefree memory of her and her husband in younger years. When she looked at the photos of him now now there was only this well-groomed demimonde taught to shake hands and do as it was told. Their marriage had become a humorless charade capable of little more than assuaging considerations of the lonely maturity it did its pithy best thing conceal.

She was plainly uncertain about the future. (She still is.) She was only aware of some vacant corridor she was dumb to condemn or praise. She touched the furniture, the refrigerator, the countertops. The angle of the world that sits parallel to its substance, the lethargic ringing of time that never ceases, never diminishes. Kathleen the adult woman mourning the loss of a little girl's dreams. Of a sudden, this naked feeling pushed through her. She felt the blood moving through her stomach and her breasts, through her arms, her hands where she turned her wrists to study them or pressed her fingertips against her thumbs. She has this body, or something concomitant to that body, that screamed beyond the mundanity of death and chores and feeble declarations of superstitious idolaters who just wanted your complacency to nurture their own.

Oh, no. No, no, no: Kathleen Poirier had more love & respect than that.

And the house would become emptier still.

14. Once Again, With New Support

God sat on the steps of the Waffle Post Office, in dirty clothes, a short beard. His eyes flitted about, sometimes at the foot traffic of pedestrians, sometimes at his own shoes. His shoes were dirty. And he was extremely angry. Or sometimes just anxious. But his breath wouldn't come back to him. He had never lost his breath for this long before, and he felt pathetic, stupid, but mostly angry. He would say things to the people who were walking around, like, "Vote for Rueben," or, "I was here when this was all just cosmic dust," or, "I was here before you, Jack, and I'll remember what it's like when you're gone."

No one paid this any attention, or if they did happen to notice they would quickly start talking to people who were with them, something very important, usually, and when the person agreed with what they were saying, the person who brought it up would realize that it wasn't very important at all. Sometimes God would smile. Sometimes God would cringe. Sitting on the Post Office steps where anyone could find him if they really had something to say.

I haven't been here since this was all just cosmic dust (although I can appreciate how long that is). When I think about how long this has all gone on for, I invariably think of children in orphanages. I think of the glassy/foggy quality of their eyes, whether they self-censored themselves or expressed their hostility at fate. I remember how anxiety penetrated everything. It was almost exactly how God looked on the steps of the Waffle Post Office.

He grabbed my arm. He looked very scared, and yet bold. "Do you see me?" he said.

"Well, of course," I said. "I'm not sure we've met before though. Can I have my arm back?"

He let go. He was shaking a little. "Then I'm not invisible."

"Well, of course not."

"I thought sometimes that I'm invisible. I didn't necessarily believe it, mind you, but it was an easier answer than some of the other shit running through my brain."

I felt a peculiar electricity running through myself, like sex, or when you really enjoy music. It wasn't sex, mind you, only that sense of euphoria and deepbrain-knowing.

"I don't believe in people anymore," said God, "I just don't fucking believe in them."

I wanted to listen.

"They've committed themselves to this wretched state, and yet I'm meant to intervene on their behalf. Preposterous! Damn them...."

"Why?"

Sincere as a high school graduate taking his first job, "I'm God." And the look in his eyes was a lot calmer, then. His breath came back to him, it appeared. His bones emanated something proud. He stood up from the Post Office steps in a way I'd never seen anybody stand up before. It was like dogs, it was like wild dogs, a veritable army of them, bright and clear and heroic like a summer day. He was very lean and capable in that moment. He was extremely visible. His dirty clothes had workingclass grace and his severe posture was academic. He was back to his old self. "Has Dan Jakes identified his father yet?"

I was confused, initially, but the tingly musical sensation passed through me again and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

"It's important that he does that."

"Fred was murdered."

"And no one will believe by whom. Nevertheless, the young man must identify his father."

For no obvious reason, I thought about the onion. "He has to have some kind of an end."

Calmly, seriously, "Yes."

"Can I ask a favor?"

"What?"

"Is there any hope for the McEntyre boy?"

He pondered this. He saw Helena Slivovitz and Dorothea McEntyre, I think. "The law is against him. Any salvation will have to come from within."

I feared as much. "Okay," I said. "I suspected you would say that." I wanted to keep talking but couldn't think of anything to say.

God looked through himself, through all kinds of memories, his and others, and he said, "Kathleen Poirier. If you can find her, this will all be easier."

I carefully studied his face. "Not enough to resolve the legal issue, though."

He smirked. "I don't work in miracles that big," he said.

"But then... Escape?"

"If he doesn't want to spend the next twenty years in prison for raping Helena Slivovitz."

"Yeah, they've probably got people in there, even."

"I wouldn't doubt it." He said, after thinking for a moment, "I wouldn't doubt it."

****

Long & Fleeting

The jury listened to his case with dreadful civility. The trial lasted a few weeks and testimony was considered from witnesses young & old while the courtroom filled with the slow current of dramatically flourescent stoicism throughout. They wore plain suits and simple dresses and like most juries I've plead to over the years they betrayed neither anxiety nor a sense of tedium at being addressed without replying for hours and days and longer. It were as if the weight of accusation were beyond all capacity to measure it: the young age of the perpetrator and his ignoble upbringing and demeanor; the abyss of shame and paralyzing terror he'd set within Helena Slivovitz; the infamy now wedded to Pancross County and felt without remiss in every newspaper, broadcast, reiteration, down to dogs on leashes barking at the mention of the criminal's name.

My rueful premonitions were not overturned by experience. They seemed to be choreographed by a mute script and diligently minding their postures as if selecting the right color betting chip in a game of poker. Those pursed lips, the way they'd scribble notes no longer than a couple inches and you'd wonder what was scribbled.

There was no one to speak on his behalf. Dorothea McEntyre herself cried for her own burden of trauma at the son who'd slipped away from her like an unguarded canary. She said she'd counsel her soul and Prophet for guidance and, apparently, the Heavenly Father cautioned against furthering her grief. She left him to his teenage solitude and Helena Slivovitz's accusation.

Helena Slivovtiz never set foot in the courtroom. Her husband of 19-plus years, a(n affluent, if undercredited) psychiatrist retained by the larger beauracracy of the State, had recently commited "suicide" by leaping through the window in his highrise-office in Ivory Hill. Soonafter, her daughter fled New York without exception and Helena would never fix her narcotic gaze on the young woman again. Over the hump of middle age and perimenopausal, it seemed no disgrace or misfortune was too accrimonious for the poor lady's soul barring resurection of her deceased parentage in order they be made to suffer beyond the sunset of mortality.

Her lawyer's assymetry to his phantom client went unremarked in print and all other commentaries focused on the subject. In the courtroom and elsewhere, he expounded on the simple life Mrs. Slivovitz had hoped, had tried to lead, how this parasitic street urchin had violated hers and the public's trust by advertising soap and commendable salesmanship and delivering tragedy in its stead. He bit his tongue before the suggestion to excommunicate the vile individual to the frontlines of Tequistan or supplant him to the whims of classified scientific research, but the enmity was heavy as iron in the blunt, liquid expression of his eyes.

There was nothing to persuade them of his innocence. His youth and all natural sense of individualistic promise were as absent as the personal testimony of Helena Slivovitz.

For the pithy sake of stenographic posterity, I detailed the fugitive chronology, his indiscretion to abandon home & schooling for the want of thrills & fast independence. The jury were listless, unmoved. They all seemed distracted by some invisible gaslight declaring a toxic presence.

The judge spoke after they rendered their verdict to him: "Mr. McEntyre, please stand." He stood. He wore a distressed suit from a thriftstore. His auburn-crimson hair had been trimmed the second week of the trial so that his visage was something between professional and utterly recalcitrant to professionalism. "You are accused of first-degree sexual assault. This charge includes all trauma and the financial consequences of that trauma wrought in contingency in the wake of said crime. Do you understand?" "Yessir, your honor." "Mr. McEntyre," said the judge, "I've seen countless cases like yours. They're about as rare as vitamins in a pharmacy. But I must say, this trial has given me new pause. To be quite frank about it, I am appalled by the behaviour that has been detailed in this courtroom in the past few weeks. I used to hold myself above such turns of speech as "enough to break one's heart" and so forth. I say no more to that now. Is there anything you'd like to add in your defense before I render my sentence?"

He stood in the dramatic fluorescence, dumb to all possibilities. He shook his head 'no'.

"Young man," said the judge, "your apathy is perfectly disquieting. Every day I'm haunted by tales of prescription-drug addicts, the innumerable petty debaucheries you generation and the one that preceded it, and my mind reels with a near-unbearable yearning for a class of citizen that has all but completely departed to the grave and whatever realms thereafter. I see this kind you represent and I surrender in futile contempt. That it is all authority can deliver to restrict you to your own dark fate is truly a sad day for justice in the United States of America. Mr. McEntyre, I call down the maximum sentence of 20 years for your crime. May God provide mercy to your soul."

His gavel punctuated the end.

The young boy thought of the arduous years ahead.

****

II.

The body of Fred Jakes was discovered behind the Shooting Range Bar & Grille on March 17th, 2008. His face and forearms displayed several defensive wounds, cuts, bruises, multiple contortions within both upper & lower extremities, as though he wasn't simply overpowered by his attacker, but that whoever brought about his demise remained with the corpse for a period, bending the arms and legs like an arts & crafts project. The sight, to say the least, was unpleasant. The smell of garbage from the dumpster he was discovered in lingered until his autopsy was completed, almost a month later.

He got to be known as Playboy Oscar (named after the popular young-adult program character) among who-knows-how-many police officers in Pancross County.

A suspect has yet to be identified.

When Dan Jakes finally showed up in May everyone in the Sheriff's Department was familiar with the situation: Fred Jakes was a minor celebrity, his name would be said or heard by virtually every soul within 300 miles of his home by the end of the year.

Dan Jakes really didn't want to be there. He stood wearing his clean white polo shirt with the blue stripe about the torso and grayish-black ultrawide denim shorts in the doorway, with a veritable sea of distrustful cop eyes awaiting his arrival. He was sweating from the weather, tilting not unlike a drunk hippopotamus, and he could barely get out the words: "I'm here to identify somebody." They observed him with timid enmity, as though a tree had begun psychically communicating with the men, and they were psychically communicating amongst themselves deliberating the appropriate way to respond. They were basic patrol/scout officers or detectives dressed in plain clothes. A man at the desk waved him closer. He approached. The man at the desk said, "Name?" "Dan Jakes." His eye and brow lifted. "The son." His stomach clenched painfully and he forgot who he was for a second. "We been waiting a while, you know." The man could've been an uncle. "Yeah, I know," he said. "Practically two months, young man." "Yeah, I been busy." Trying to look knowledgeable, "Selling soap. The bigshot salesman." "Look," said Dan Jakes, "I'm here now. You wanna tell me what's next?" The man had apparently been writing something, and in a very deliberate manner he set the pen down on some notepad, then switched his focus to his computer to type in Fred Jakes' name. It took him an eternal 90 seconds to accomplish this task while Dan made the necessary effort to endure. The man seemed arrogant. He navigated whatever menus and texts to secure the information, then told Dan, "Pretty sure we've got your father. Can't promise a lot of other good news, though."

Dan had caught vague mentions of what was either the subconsciously inferred conglomeration of his own misunderstood fear, or were in fact references to Fred Jakes: there'd been a running-joke about a middleclass carpenter possibly screwing around with a widow and with horrific irony taking a life of its own. They didn't say Fred's name, but Dan sensed his father's face in the rumors. "Well, I didn't exactly come here to party then, did I?"

The man at the desk was offended. "Don't even think about it, sonny. You need a room? We get a budget-raise if we go over our quota, same as depreciation if we don't." Dan Jakes didn't respond. "Alright then." He picked up the receiver and punched a few buttons on the keypad. "Lou...? Yeah, front desk. The Jakes kid is here... Yeah. Ready to prove us right I suppose." He heard what he was expecting to, ended the call, told Dan, "Sheriff Cook'll be down in a minute. Sorry I can't offer you a place to sit." People were always sorry for what they couldn't do. "I'll manage." He stood around two more anxious minutes before a door leading to a hallway that led to the department basement opened with Lou Cook exiting in a crisp uniform, neatly manicured mustache, and the eyes of a priest. "G'd'afternoon," he said. "Hello, Sheriff." "Daniel, I presume?" "Just Dan if that's alright." "Dan." The Sheriff said, "Come with me, Dan." Pressure fell off the young Jakes' shoulders as he went to his escort and the others fell into small talk.

"Been taking your time about this," said the sheriff after the door was closed and they were a distance down the hallway. "Not that it's altogether strange, mind you." He made eye-contact. "A young man not wanting to see his dead father. Well, what might be his dead father." Dan swallowed. "Elaine isn't crippled, you know." The sheriff smiled some. "Dan, I wouldn't trust your mother to recognize herself with a spirit guide, a lecture and Morgan Freeman doing voiceover nar'ration. You know, this is sort of a formal occasion." Dan didn't smile. "Can we just get this over with quickly please." "Of course, of course. No sense putting off until tomorrow..." letting the phrase go incomplete.

The Pancross County Sheriff's Department isn't unique in that its basement contains an interim morgue. Beginning in 1998, when the rate of homicide & missing persons cases rose over ten percent from the previous year, legislation was passed by Mayor James MacDougal that officers of the law be furnished with additional resources; these included an increase in the federal budget allowance for an inundation of new surveillance equipment as well as a major elevation in the number of basic patrol units and all but a few modestly-staffed departments were provided their own personal interim morgue.

"Ready then?" said Sheriff Cook when they were just outside the door.

"Not like I could say no," said Dan.

"Come on."

The place was well lit and its antiseptic nature made Dan feel as if he'd wandered onto a spacecraft. The lockers, as they call them, went three high and there were 12 at the back of the room and 24 on either side of him. He muscled against how terribly cold he felt. It was like a walk-in filing-cabinet. "This way," said Cook.

They went to one of the lockers about halfway into the room, one in the middle, and without further cautioning the sheriff grabbed its handle, hit a switch with his thumb, pulled out the drawer with little effort.

There was a sheet on the corpse, and the sheriff drew it away to the sternum, the dead face seemingly acclimated to its state.

It was him. Dan knew it was him. The certainty knifed like a diver from the bridge and he stood in painless defeat.

'Guess they'll have to do without you at the job tomorrow', Dan thought. 'Better start planning a good hustle.'

"You okay, son?"

"Yeah," he said. He said, "I'm fine."

****

III.

In school, they taught us to withhold our opinions, to listen, and to keep listening.

Mark Abbedro stood in the living room by himself while this elderly woman went into her bedroom to get her purse and he was in a certain way admiring her possessions, the furniture and her television and the entertainment center, the pictures of her family old and young, and various ornamental figurines in the forms of animals and Prophet.

They taught us everything has something you can take.

And he enjoyed a kind of smugness, akin, perhaps, to pride or self-worth. He was thinking of smoking a cigarette for the good job he'd done.

They taught us that if you don't take it, somebody else will.

The old woman came back out of her bedroom with a personal cheque for her order.

He took the cheque, smiling. "Thank you for your business then."

"Oh, you're most welcome, young man," she said. "Will you be here when it arrives?"

Everything was handled by an independent party after the initial sale and Mark said, "Well I should hope so," placing the folded cheque in his shirt pocket. "I like to think I care about my customers."

They told us we were indispensible. We were a critical hub for the wisdom and strength of the past to reach its tentative height of legacy in the future. We were precious and incalculably fragile.

"Well, that's a very admirable trait, I must say," pointing a friendly finger in his direction. "I think you must do very good for your employers."

He thought of himself as a pimp. He thought he sold soap the way he told people he had intercourse: a champion without equal.

The elderly woman wished him well and he thanked her for her time.

In school they taught us, you can never get far enough ahead.

****

IV.

The world spun away from John Abbedro like a runaway train towards a destination he could neither fathom nor speak any coherent words in response to. His bruh with God had ruptured some circuit of logic while repurposing its gravitational energy into an overpowering demand for conquest, realization. Some aspect of his psyche ceased being human and became a vessel of psychopathy and rage and harm. It would be with him until his last breath later that year.

Congressman Rueben finished speaking to the men at the firehouse and when they all stood up to leave John Abbedro discovered that his legs were somewhat alien and unresponsive to his concerns and demands for them. A rubberish quality. Light shot through his brain, his being, for an instant. A miniature flash of lightning consumed by its own volition. He could feel his toes in his boots, he could feel his fingers. As he exited the firehouse, went to his car, started the engine, a lucidly tipsy thought emerged, as gentle as grass or clouds, that he was a vehicle for some extraordinary statement, some wonderfully remarkable event, and that the words of it swam and conjoined in his blood.

But the struggle devours without prejudice. We are consumed willingly by the promises we keep and the beliefs we carry, and eventually we are fated to consume ourselves.

He drove home. One more maniac in a landscape of dispossession.

****

She spoke in a way that was at once vengeful and paralyzed, this glimmer of satanic fire caught on the face of water blinking off her eye. The words almost rose into the air as if formed by themselves or as if they were being drawn back to a source that was not Helena Slivovitz.

Her daughter sat on the stairs that led down to the living room, equally curious, equally perplexed.

The officer that sat in a chair at a right angle from the couch made records of nearly everything she said in a small pad that he balanced on his thigh. Boris Truant, the other officer, moved in a one-man fight against his own impatience from one area of non-interest to another while his partner, Ronnie Wilhelm, did what he could to make this go smoothly.

"Are you sure I can't offer you a cup of coffee?" she asked. "It really wouldn't be any sort of trouble to make."

Suppressing his frustration for what felt like the fifth time in fifteen minutes, the officer said, "Really ma'am, we're just fine. We ought to be getting your account of what happened."

She leaned forward from the couch to the lowtable where her own mug sat steaming freshly into the room. After taking a sip, she made herself upright and put the mug in her lap, said, "Well, I suppose you're right."

"Thank you, ma'am," he said. "Can you tell us what happened first?"

She took another sip. "Well, I had just gotten out of the shower, and I heard the doorbell ring -- I don't know who I thought was done there -- so I put on my robe and I went to answer it." Even now her hair smelled of strawberry-scented shampoo. The house was never without a fragrance. "And of course it was the young man, I told you, and..." She made a sound I can only describe as embarrassed laughter. "He had such a time of things, what with that salespitch of his," shaking away the thought. "I think I know better what was going on than he did." Officer Truant continued pacing. "At any rate, I'm here by myself a lot, and I do get a little bored just watching television. So despite the *fact* that we didn't need anything he was selling, I thought I'd invite the boy in for some company and purchase whatever I could without stressing our finances."

Standing by a bookcase at the rear of the living room, Officer Truant said, "If you don't mind my saying so, it doesn't look like they're easily stressed."

"Oh, we're not, we're not. I can thank my husband for that. He really does provide for me and Lori very adequately."

Lori made a sort of grimace from the top of the stairs.

"And so you invited him inside," said Officer Wilhelm. "What happened after that?"

"Well," she said. She lifted the mug to take another sip of her coffee. "Are you sure I can't get you anything?"

"Mrs. Slivovitz, let's please try to stay on track here."

"Yes," she said. "Of course."

Truant looked like he was about to change his mind but abandoned the thought.

"So I invited him into the kitchen, and he continued with little sales talk. It really was nice to have someone in the house. Besides myself, you know. My husband..." She shook her head, ignoring her own interjection. "At any rate, we were standing at the counter in there and he was telling me the various prices and so forth, getting very excited all the while... And, well, I'm not quite sure what either of us did, but soon enough he had his hands on me, and I was on the floor with--" She stopped herself... "With him *on top* of me..." She only held the cup with one hand on her lap, the other covering face in a pantomime of shame. "I can't...I can't really describe it."

Truant rethought the offer, again.

"Mrs. Slivovitz?"

She was crying a little.

"Mrs. Slivovitz, it's okay. You're safe now."

It didn't seem to help. She was shaking and a little bit of the coffee spilled in her lap.

"You're safe now." He swiftly wrote something in the pad. Then he turned. "Boris?"

"Ronnie."

"You got any ideas here?"

"Looks pretty clear to me."

"What I was thinking." He said, "Mrs. Slivovitz? Can you look at me?"

She had a large dark-yellow stain where the liquid meshed with her beige sweatpants, and some of the coffee also splashed into her blue sweatshirt. She made the effort to look at him.

"Mrs. Slivovitz. We've got pretty much what we need here. Do you understand?"

"I really don't want anything bad to happen to him," she said. "I don't mean for him to be punished," she said.

"That's okay," said Officer Wilhelm. "That's neither of our jobs." It wasn't clear if he meant his and his partner's or his and Mrs. Slivovitz'. "Like I said, we just need your account." Tapping the pen on the pad, "And we've got it. You understand? You've done the right thing here." Her face dimly glistened with tears. "You know, sometimes with these things, the victim thinks maybe they did something wrong. I'm telling you, you didn't do anything wrong here."

"He came inside me!"

Embarrassed, "Well, let's hope the di-- Let's just hope for now, alright?"

"By the grace of Prophet," she said.

"By the grace of Prophet," he said.

Having never heard her mother say those words in her life, Lori made a face of astounding incredulity.

"Is there anything else we can do for you?"

Officer Truant nearly asked for the coffee.

"No," she said. "No, I guess you should leave now. And thank you for your time."

Closing the pad and standing up and putting the pad away, he said, "I'm gonna give you my card, Mrs. Slivovitz. If you need anything, day or night, you call me, understand?"

"I understand."

He gave her the card and she took it. "Why don't you just get yourself cleaned up, alright? You're safe now."

She weakly smiled. "Thank you, officer."

"And Mrs. Slivovitz," he said as they both were exiting. "Yes?" "Your husband's a lucky man."

****

VI.

She felt an intimate gravity align with the warm, liquid structures of her nerves, her skeleton, the very sight of the Slivovitz household. She stood up as the policemen were exiting and her mother closed the door behind them. Lori sensed an unspoken pain. It moved within like a traitor. She tasted sugary fruit when she bit her lip, the peculiar balance between the fever of joy and the cold blue hollow that shines without peer and prevents itself from entropic dematerialization, is entropic dematerialization itself. Whatever person or persona had attended the young lady's growth seemed to be peeling away by the moment as she stepped down the hallway to her bedroom, its privacy.

The room was in fact large enough to accomodate two daughters. The furniture and her belongings and the soft carpeting and the magenta-colored walls seemed to lift & dance like characters in a storybook and yet Lori perceived a corruption in its facade. Even at a perfunctory scan everything from the knobs on the dressers to the metalbacks of earrings to stale impression reflected on the warped lifelessness of the television screen was spliced with natural human disfavor.

She hated the policemen. She hated her mother. She hated Merrick and the fathers and lineage before him. Their false charity and casual arrogance towards all things in life inspired a terrific loathing in her mind's most private chambers. Somewhere among all the memories of ice cream and brusque vacation laughter and ribbons and trophies for the breeding & nurturing of aquaforms there'd been the discreet and devout hand of mutiny turning pages in the least of her splintered and resilient innereye. Here and there were fragments of an education, an identity, representations and guesses of the future. They weaved in & out of the unconscious nothingness cast in the gray matter of her cerebral cortex and what else. They were like puzzle-pieces or components to build some nebulous, unidentifiable device: Merrick's lonely offer of friendship; classmates obsessed with gossip and curiosity; her mother's harsh recalcitrance towards spontaneous or genuine glee; dispirited afternoons driving past old buildings where nostalgia contended with a force less tolerant to ambiguity.

Lori sensed herself at the center of a grand, half-knowable matrix. Her thoughts leapt beyond the borders of Pancross County and Ivory Hill and further yet. She began subtracting all kinds of people like her salesman boyfriend Sean from the schedule of her life's comings & goings. She imagined a gorgeously remarkable life of sincerity and discovery with Kathleen as she dialed a brief message into her phone. While it isn't pervasive by any measure, the tendency, indeed: urge, for young people to adopt one another as compensation for undelivered siblings and plainly undercooked parents is certainly a distant cry from the rarity of self-impregnating flamingoes and dinosaurs surviving past the Mesozoic Era. Children are all born alike with secret motives, their materials and foundations sketched out with the fattening of marrow and the double-stitched pockets of our emotional frontal lobes. An apothegm is drafted at one juncture, mercy and detachment at another. The heart is deprived of fortitude and stamina, nursed weakly by the fragile prayer of its own telepathic biology. Babies become toddlers. Toddlers become children. Children become teenagers. Teenagers stare unabashedly and study the pleroma of city-shaped mountains and valleys and each other and wait for pointed questions to emerge in the morass of decline and hope.

The slow dawn of autotrophic organisms and animal/executive creation surely sufficed with fewer resources and advantages. In the hunger of every being is the outline of its deliverance and enlightenment.

Lori tasted the balm on her mouth just once more, and then she hit 'send'.

****

VII.

Something dangerously confident awoke him. The two-thousand threadcount sheets didn't tickle his skin and he was not warm nor comfortable but merely adjusted, acclimated to some understood reality or dimension of death. He looked into the night of the bedroom with the calm severity of an iceberg. He felt invincible.

The election was coming, scarcely a month away. The polls said he was favored 2:1 versus the incumbent.

Nathan Rueben never let go of what God said to him, though. It seemed he would never be free of what transpired of what happened at the Waffle Firehouse, then nearly 20 months in the past.

He thought about his dead wife sometimes. Excommunicated mornings like cities defeated in war where the aroused observer gives pause to the identities and titles devoured by entropy and the passage of time. See the politician's hands, where he inspects the cuticles, the pink tones beneath the surface fading to purple and gray. Nathan Rueben felt himself cheated by circumstance, like an invaluable vase dashed against a stone wall. He felt his humanity extinguished while some sociopathic ishvara ascended from the wreckage and debris. He vividly remembered every feature of her body, the sound of her voice, the proportions of her face, the belief she would never be taken from him. Anger traded places with remorse, remorse traded places with anger, on and on like the red/black pattern of a roulette wheel tricking the choices without consideration of the player nor with preferences of its own yet inarguably determined to see relief from the trial, be done with the judging of its conditions, going, going, going.

He rolled naked out of the bed and then he pulled on a pair of underwear, slipped into an evening-robe, and put his feet into closed-toe slippers, a kind of freedom from freedom as he moved into the living room, downstairs.

Edward Rueben was asleep on the couch. A grandscreen high-definition television featured the Green Productions produced film...The Squid Who Loved Too Much. (If you haven't been subjected to it, count yourself lucky.) And Nathan Rueben did something that, technically, could be inferred as smiling. Although, I hasten to add, we should note he has experienced joy in his life as often as religious wars have produced victories.

Crypticity often obscures embarrassment.

He sat down beside his father. He folded his legs. His eyes took in the contents of the screen. He watched it as a beginner might make their First Confession. It was enough to be enough.

He began to speak.

"I've seen this one before. The Squid Who Loved Too Much," tasting the words in his mouth like rich caviar. "I can't recall the name of the squid, though." He turned to Edward asleep beside him. "Do you remember the name of the squid, father?" The old man continued sleeping. "Oh well," now forcing stoicism, "it is still an excellent film. I believe it won some awards."

To be fair, the special effects of the film are quite superior to anything they might be compared to. Nearly everything else about it, to my mind, is a positive insult to any creature with four cerebral cortices functioning concomitantly, and perhaps to anything with less.

"Of course, that's not enough for some people," his virtually post-mortem eyes frozen in their direction.

"But time will tell. Time will tell." Then a kind of jerk, or pulse, moved in his shoulderblade.

He seemed warm in his numbness.

****

VIII.

She'd swept every corner of the other three rooms, waxed what needed waxing, mopping, turning, altering. And she found herself in the masterbedroom-bathroom, on her hands and knees, brillo-pad-sponge fiercely gripped in the bones of the palm and fingers of her hand scrubbing into a place that was distinct and yet conjoined with the rest of the room. Her eyes squinted at the corner, the tile, the soft knife of perception unblemished by distraction or stutter.

None of this was a matter of imminent concern. She cleaned the house about once a week, and that was about all it needed. What she was doing now, in the masterbedroom-bathroom, was an act of unguarded compulsion. And a kind of memory discovered itself in the process. Something elusive and yet indelible bloomed in her cells, in the fabric of existence of all that is encountered.

A radio broadcasted news/updates of the war downstairs. It was always far away like that, always happening somewhere else. No matter how many bombs went off, no matter how many shots were fired, no matter how many American soldiers were captured or missing or delivered home in temporary-coffins, no matter how many arms or legs were severed or destroyed, no matter how many eyes would never see again, ears would never hear again, or skin had to be grafted from one place and another, the American intervention to the Civil War in Tequistan maintained an astounding and almost majestic quality to envelope the fact of itself. The radio was hardly more than a box of noise.

And her husband was at the Pelican Farm, building another detention center. And in the beginning she missed him, but not now.

She was thinking of becoming a nurse again. She was definitely smart enough. The trepidation in her heart was easily outweighed by the excitement.

The women she encountered in Waffle were only rarely more than amicable. She had brief encounters with them on the sidewalk, at the supermarket, at the beauty parlor. Their small talk made her feel smaller. If she attempted larger topics than body issues or the tedium of growing older, they "agreed" with her by reintroducing topics like body issues and the tedium of growing older. She felt defeated, then insouciant.

When she finished scrubbing, she stood up into the room, went to the sink, tossing in the sponge and turning on the hot and cold water and running her hands underneath the stream, almost delicately holding the water and then pumping a dispenser for soap, washing her hands, admiring the reflected face admiring itself.

She finished and went downstairs, turned off the radio, noticed her phone had a message. "...and I thought you and me could spend some time together."

Kathleen agreed.

****

IX.

The Springfield Motel's facade wavered in the ambrosial haze of the landscape. Inglorious. Uncompromised. The deteriorating beauty of a nomadic tiger, ready to starve out to its neighboring environs.

Sapir wandered from the property carrying a suitcase, some clothes, a tie, his memory. Invulnerable to the August heat like so much loose gravel washed off the lanes of the interstates. He appears to levitate with every moment forward. Rude men smoke cigarettes in alleyways outside of cafes & bars and Sapir catches fragments of their speech like something behind a wall of formless silence. Safe in a word paid entry to be included in. Paid for with the names of each one's souls.

The furious, cacophonous rush of midday-traffic devoured everything as mercilessly as a collapsing star and rendered the least chance of tranquility hopeless and static. Like a shivaree protesting the calm indifference of an unknown world, the American cars speared ahead to a fate bitterly aggressive and loud. They are a war unto themselves.

Sapir admired everything. This sky seems taller than the Gods he studied in ancient texts. Little clouds, and slices of clouds, and modest, hungry birds paint a visage that has never belonged to Man. No rain, nothing marginally foreboding. The heavens oscillate by some tenebrous connection to the planet rolling on its own axis beneath it. It is our ceiling but perhaps the floor of a world that yearns to join us.

Sapir clapped his doubts to a condition of pure helplessness. He felt the learned chemistry of his bones and his organs gathering to an ineffable cause. He felt life manifesting from a recycled decay. His brown flesh seemed to shine and his feet and his hands and every measured length of muscle throughout his living body returned to something agile put there by the kiss of the universe's technology.

No Prophet can touch him. He cannot be suppressed, cannot be forgiven or redeemed by their scripture. He walks to the land God has shown him.

****

16. The Walter Bukowski Middle School Dance

We're driving Lori's car somewhere in western Illinois three months before the election, praising God Helena hasn't reported it stolen. (It seems even the most cruel-hearted might draw a line when it comes to being vindictive and spiteful.) And the weather seems to be good everywhere we travel, and whenever we stop for gas or something to eat, the other customers and proprietors give us a certain berth; even if they do continue talking about us while making a big pretense to not be talking about us.

Kathleen's looking better every day. She's always volunteering to drive and routinely confronts the rudest people we encounter while me and Lori (Lori and I? I've never really understood this rule) keep a step behind her virtuous presence.

Sometimes I think Lori has a crush on me.

She talks very fast about all kinds of things and I hardly ever care that she doesn't ask me any questions because I like listening to her voice and she smells like butterscotch and flowers.

I never forget about Spook. He's maybe the only client I've had that I ever gave a -- forgive my language -- gave a fuck about. Him locked away in a detention center, locked away in a zoo of the untouchable/insane. As the ebb & flow of life gives and takes (and mostly takes) and our collective-wherewithal chips away with strategic white lies and blase philosophies of the crowd and the futile attempts to gladden it...I never forget about Spook McEntyre.

There were a cluster of parents playing cards on the hood of a Dyson Chieftain, none of them really taking it very seriously, when John Abbedro came strolling along, pulled by a voice none of us could hear. He had the bat with him, of course (I don't think I'm telling anyone anything too new here?) and I might be mis-remembering some of this but I think he was dragging his weapon, I have this strong impression of wood clopping on blacktop in my mind, and the card players looked up from their cards laying passively as bagels on the Chieftain's hood, and I think one of them approached him before he swung the bat, connected with his target's skull, and then one of the others had an idea in his head he was starting to say when Abbedro made an insouciant smile before swinging the bat on him, and the two others, not wanting to be left out of this, began to approach the very clearly hostile man paralyzing strangers for no obvious reason whatsoever, reflexively condemning his actions before he swung left and right and laid them flat on the ground. He scanned the others in the parking lot, all parents and school faculty. (I think I even saw Dorothea McEntyre hanging around, although troubling to say why considering Spook was already incarcerated at that point.) A woman I don't wish to ridicule or demean who was rather heavy and poorly dressed and had ugly skin and smelled faintly of pee...went to Abbedro to explain to him why this behaviour was unacceptable, and of course the weapon swung hard on her head and then another man about five and a half feet tall brusquely went to John and Abbedro laid him flat on the ground.

His carnage was near its end.

The last man came forward from a group of adults smoking cigarettes outside the school's entrance, improvising a lecture on the nature of right & wrong, with all the faux nobility of a deodorant commercial before the bat drove into his world and folded, displaced the engine of his intention and he was reduced to dispassionate unconsciousness. John Abbedro stood over him in his paralyzed wonder. And that's when it got even worse. He stiffly held his weapon in both hands, his focus trained and deliberate, the drooling countenance of the imbecile no more worrisome than an ant. Then he brought the bat down with a powerful determination. ...The sound was awful. And it was awful the second time, too. And he swung it several times after that.

Everyone else at the Walter Bukowski Middle School stayed back. Someone called the police.

Before they arrived, however, a tall dark figure stepped out from the darkness with a gun and they got within a foot of Abbedro and aimed the pistol at the maniac's head. He turned to his executioner. He tasted fear, gripped the bloody lumber with crestfallen bravery. The figure executed him and the onlookers gasped and tragedy claimed the night and the figure moved back to the anonymity they'd emerged from and some short minutes later the authorities arrived.

There are no identified suspects in the manslaughter of John Abbedro.

****

1. Dear, Max...

On January 7th, 2009, Max Poirier came home to New York. Before boarding his flight from Segarra Airport on that small island in the Gulf of Mexico, he stood looking out the fifty foot tall and half a mile wide window of the airport where it framed an ocean and a sky unlike any he had ever seen and any he'd imagined he would. It was breathtaking, and inspiring, and yet it made him feel smaller than a lady's compact mirror. It made his clothes feel like the clothes of a stranger.

The foot traffic of many hundreds of others moves in the airport behind, around him, people of both homogenous and eclectic description, people arriving and departing from Segarra Airport, the world in the limbo of itself. He wasn't sure what his day was supposed to be. From his pocket he removed the familiar bottle, unscrewed the cap, then deposited precisely one tasziphedimine in his palm. He stood looking at it, staring almost, as though its 10 milligram form might speak to him. The pills had been prescribed some years previous, shortly after he and Kathleen moved from Sitkaville to Waffle, by a company doctor of Orwell Construction, a man named Leland Grauerholz. And Max was initially adverse to taking the medication, for a variety of reasons that seemed to contradict themselves, and came at such a rate and of such a number he couldn't possibly wade through the morass of their logic. And on more than one occasion he suspected himself of some prejudice against Germans, although he knew of no other feelings or inclinations in himself.

It was true the pills helped him feel alleviation of the stress he encountered at work as well as other social settings. They delivered a small pow of comfort and ease that trickled through the fabric of his bloodstream. And while they didn't result in heightened sociability as Dr. Grauerholz indicated they might, they did in fact build in him a world of secured equanimity.

He boarded his flight and arrived in the Great City _ hours later.

From the airport he took a subway to Major Railways, and from Major Railways in Coke, New York, he took a cab to his house in Waffle.

He tipped the driver generously.

Her car in the driveway had a peculiar aura. Like something on the soundstage of a Hollywood film. Something of a color that would never exist in Nature.

When he put his key in the lock of the front door, he imagined it sticking, although it did not stick, and the bolt went sideways, and the knob turned without effort.

Absence greeted him. It exhaled itself through the house as though with arms of an indeterminate size, a grayish blue light seeming to touch through everything. And he closed the door behind him with a certain humiliation. He rolled his suitcase along, pulling it by the handle and went into the kitchen. The absence somehow spread wider.

When he looked on the kitchen table, he saw the note immediately.

The clean white paper of the envelope seemed almost too clean contrasted against the ink that spelled his name. He hesitated to pick it up, but then he picked it up.

Dear, Max, it read, I am leaving. Her handwriting was delicate and yet firm. I think every day since we've been in this house, I've died a little more. And I've died a million deaths in but a fraction of those days. My heart is like a withered pump, and until very recently it has been an enormous difficulty to get out of bed and face the day. No person should ever live like this.

I thought to call you in _ a couple of times, but then I felt that this somehow would be smoother. I truly hope it is.

I am not telling you where I'm going. I am not coming ~~home~~ back there. I will tell you this in the hope that you understand my decision, and please don't think I'm trying to hurt you: I've met someone. They are not a lover. She is a young girl I met quite by accident, and her excitement for things is a treasure greater than the world itself. She has a heart that inspires my own and I pray we will know each other forever. Again, I will not tell you where I've gone. Do yourself a favor and believe that I will never see you again. (I have left a file for divorce in the microwave.)

I hate that city we moved to. It's where my dreams died. Those people are something ugly beyond description. I don't know what to ever expect of them.

Know this: I loved you once, deeply, and truly and through all of my soul. But the young girl you knew was cursed into extinction. And she is dead.

Please don't try to find me, and please sign the papers as soon as you can. (The house and the car are yours. You paid for them, anyway.)

Take care of yourself, Max.

Goodbye.

Kathleen.

He folded the letter and let the world drop out of him. It were as though he stepped on a landmine, heard its lever click beneath his foot. The radio wasn't playing, and yet he heard radio sounds, unseen voices that traversed the fabric of time. The world of America outside, without the walls of this house, a barren world of dead things and unfulfilled promises. A world drier than any desert that seems to remember everything and say nothing. And Max Poirier wondered who he was.

****

2. First & Last Names

Kathleen and I stand admiring Lori admiring a wide expanse of the Southwestern New Sea and its tranquil undulation of soft water, the water almost susurrus, whispering a gentle presence to all who might lay their focus upon it. And she and I smoke Savage Hippie cigarettes (the medium-tar variety) taking strong-yet-measured drags, blowing our individual streams of vaporous dust into the day and the sky before us.

We keep one disposable super-phone between us in case of emergencies and for when Lori wants to ask random questions of this strange country, this miraculous world, or heaven forbid if Kathleen and I need to remember a word from time to time and Lori has to renounce the device, eager to see what one of her old classmates is doing at that precise moment.

I've left millions of unanswered messages on other phones, in other lives. And at night I sometimes dream of a place I've never witnessed, yet is so vividly real I find myself awakening in a warm, sudden pull to consciousness struck by the soundless world that surrounds me.

It has occurred to me that none of us would be here hadn't William Slivovitz, Lori's paternal grandfather, not produced what remains the world's most consumed, longest-standing vodka empires and distilleries. Had all of those people not given their money to drink his brand, not gone down the various channels of their lives decadent and docile and depraved over the course of what is now nearly a century, there would've been nothing to afford our escape. And I do not feel we owe him anything, not one whit of gratitude or praise, not the least pebble of veneration on his lonely, salt-swept grave. A single rock on his tomb would be uxorious.

Clouds begin to gather, and the pale-azure of the distance is quickly shaded into a metal blue frontier. Lori leans over the railing that safeguards visitors to the site, and she spits into the water.

Behind us, and to the north and east and south and west, parents of a million families have begun to ready their children to intervene in the Civil War in Tequistan. We are past the midpoint of the year, and the election grows closer every day; every day Nathan W. Rueben seems more likely to become the next president. And our history is only too ready to let him. A synecdochal convergence of ego and militarism and old if not ancient grudges swells closer and closer in its making, setting the stages of more and more Americans and Tequistanis and anyone unlucky enough to be anywhere between them to die in a war that seems too well orchestrated to've not been planned.

And the sky grows just slightly darker.

And Orwell Construction keeps building.

Lori turns from the railing and she asks, "How many types of fish in the world are there?"

Kathleen and I blow out our collected smoke.

"You care to field this one, Robert?"

I have to mentally flick away my desire to kiss her on the mouth. I say, "I should imagine a great many, my dear."

"Like more than a million?"

I consider the figure. "Quite possibly." Then I say, "I suppose it all depends on what counts as a fish."

"Squids and octopuses are fish, right?"

"Yes, they are. They certainly are."

I can see into the depths of her that she sometimes misses Quagmire and Ricky & Lucy. "And dolphins too?"

"And whales as well," Kathleen offers.

"Then those are some big fucken fish," exclaims Lori.

"They certainly are," says Kathleen.

"What would you say is the biggest one?"

I know this. "It's a whale. It's the Southasian Silverback Whale; it weighs many tons."

"Fucking shit," says Lori. "Just fucking shit."

Kathleen takes a drag of her cigarette. "I've seen ones on the land, too."

Lori is momentarily perplexed. "Like beached ones?"

"Like slime that walks on two legs," says Kathleen, then drops her cigarette and mashes it out with her shoe. "And they all have first and last names."

"Now, Kathleen."

"Now, Robert."

Lori makes a face as if to say What are you guys talking about?

Kathleen keeps her eye-contact on me.

"I suppose you've got a point then."

And the sky turns yet a shade darker. And the clouds seem as big as continents. And we're all standing here in front of the New Southwestern Sea, when the clouds can't resist anymore, and it begins to rain. Sheets of it tear away from the ceiling of the world with a conservative fury and the wind gasps with an exotic kind of horror as if knowing the terror of fate of every infinitesimal being upon and within the Earth and being so uncensored and unrestricted by the natural laws gestured with reckless and proud gravity and form and sacrificed its elusive sentience upon the altar of the living and the timeless... We got drenched. I remember it like it was yesterday.

****

3. Patriotism & Bereavement

Abandon the thought patriotism is decided by groups. It is decided by their individual members. Their numbers are a coincidence of education and proximity.

So, then a nation might be born from any place that welcomes a group as surely as an adequate building can house delinquents, or stray dogs, or men in white labcoats, or men in green uniforms.

It was sometime in January 2009 that Dan Jakes had exhausted his faith in what the Oklahoma Soap Company could give him. His father's death and the subsequent identification of the body might've played a role. Dan never spoke a word about to Sean or Mark, and certainly not to this new boy, Richard, who'd replaced Spook the previous autumn. He never protested, he never cried, he never missed a day of work until he absolutely left the job of a sudden. Two-weeks notice given, and every hour of every day satisfied to its final moment. Dan Jakes was nothing if not thorough to his promises. He valued his promises the way good chefs value their knives.

So, then home to Waffle. Home to the now-fatherless house, and an estranged mother in all likelihood drinking and raving among the ne'er-do-wells of Pancross County at their fringe of the modern world. The property seemed like a diorama of his own memory. He felt ambivalent, if not plainly unmoved, by the familiar walls, the unvacuumed carpeting, scattered candywrappers and barely-considered magazines and fugitive insects scouting for food and the homely entertainment center like the dull tomb of an unworshipped, defamed god.

A brisk and stoic resolution was called for. Death wasn't strictly out of the question. Any of the shotguns or pistols throughout the house would suit nicely. He was old enough to be spared a tragically young demise and young enough he'd yet avoid a profound deal of the tedium and hollow misery of growing into old age in the place where he was born. No more jobs, no more lunches, no more phoney apologies. Just insert and position the barrel like a strange piece of lead candy and snap-off the audio/visual with skull & cerebral confetti smacking the surface of the room. Out with a bang to silence every whimper.

In February, he began his fantasy of enlisting. Once a week, give or take, some nearly-forgotten high school friend would drop by the house to see if Dan felt like drinking or chasing girls or even just copping some tasziphedimines in Sitkaville and going to see a movie. Dan occasionally took their offers. More often he'd surf one of the multitudes of dating-sites for some passable demimonde to waste a few hours in sticky, mindless rapture. More often still he'd opt to drink by himself and ruminate on the daily grief and trials portrayed on the dull tomb of the screen. He held no racial enmity (besides that of whites who aggressively imitated urban blacks -- which is a storied discussion unto itself) nor any above-average pride for his own race. Nor was he any more inspired by the cause of freedom & democracy than he was by cleaning & trimming his toenails. The war embodied a mindset of freedom within anonymity, a barter for warm silence paid for with the future of one's pulse. Reading brochures, watching televised interviews with recent veterans, a conversation or two with men at the Shooting Range, Dan Jakes sensed life in a dirty, violent atmosphere was precisely the readjustment to undo the stagnation of his neighbors and the mortifyingly cheap lives they clung to.

He stayed in Waffle through the season, shoveling the driveways to the last with others like him or not much different and adding his fees to the savings accumulated while knocking on doors and selling soap.

He put his father's house on the market and turned the responsibility of selling it over to a realtor for a significant portion of the sale before putting his own few things of importance -- clothes, a room's worth of furniture, a t.v. and a stereo-system he rarely used -- into storage. (Anything else he could find to purchase when he came home.)

He put out word through people at the Shooting Range and on the internet to his mother, stoned in one random living room or another, that if "the crazy old bitch" wanted anything she could "damn well" come by and "collect it her fucking self." Everything that wasn't put into storage was eventually carried off by strangers (day and night) or cast into a dumpster and excommunicated from the cycles of usefulness and uselessness. The pale reach of the universe is punctuated merely by the involuntary emergence of living organisms and their concomitant habitats where those creatures are aroused and fated to certain demise in the guileless and unmistakable expansion of their surroundings....

He'd set the last folded shirts with other clothes and items in the suitcase and he seemed to confer with them as if there were some anima in their threads. Something was watching him. Ignoble breath penetrated the room. The answer popped in his thoughts.

He went into the living room where a poster of the Elvis Presley sensation 'Afterschool Debacle' hung flawlessly on the wall, undisturbed by time, and Dan Jakes ripped it down and mashed and compressed it to garbage and carried it into the kitchen to stuff into the ugly metal can, his thoughts quite focused on the desert.

****

4. Do What You Gotta Do

He turned on both hot & cold water and the splash of them was not unlike the splash of coins into the deposit dish of a bill-conversion machine, and the sound of it went through the entirety of the public bathroom, and God put his simple hands beneath the fountain where the water ran over them as it would any set of hands and he washed with soap and he didn't need to sing any songs to measure the appropriate length of time.

The face that came back from the mirror didn't seem to be the same as the one that resided in the Great City: It was not altogether physically different with the exception of some new wrinkles, little creases of stress about the eyes, on the cheeks; they almost looked like shadows of his beard. And the eyes themselves contained a dimension of sorrow he wasn't totally accustomed to. He hadn't celebrated nor withdrawn from celebration of his age in many, many years, but as the water ran and he brought handfuls of water onto his face, God couldn't help but wonder if his origins meant anything at all.

When his face and his beard were clean, he bent down to the travel-case at his feet, unzipped it, then brought up a small pair of scissors, disposable razor, and shaving cream. He held the scissors neatly in his left hand and he firmly pinched patches of his beard and he began to cut them away, running the fingers of the hand underneath the stream of the water just until the remains became cumbersome to the task. And a mild exhilaration entered his body when he did this, as he did this, as the beard came away in sections, then in sides, then finally was a uniformly short stubble of brown hair, and he rinsed off the razor and applied the shaving cream.

The menthol scent reminded him of nothing in himself and yet the potency of its fragrance had the echo of a world he never wanted to live without.

A man entered the bathroom as God was shaving, making eye-contact with God in the mirror, saying "Hey, Chief," as though the two of them had prior arrangements to meet there. (They did not have prior arrangements to meet there.) And without interruption or response the man went to one of the urinals in the bathroom about twenty feet away to patronize its function.

God went about the business of shaving, the sideburns and the cheeks and the area between the chin and the throat, and he was nearly to his mouth as the man made various exclamations of relief and satisfaction while he urinated twenty feet away. God made every attempt he could think of to ignore him.

He was just beginning with the remaining hair upon his lips and chin when the man finished urinating, flushed, and ambled over to the side of the room where God was studying his progress in the mirror.

"Lookin' pretty sharp there if I say so myself," said the man.

God looked at him, but didn't say a word.

He was just about to start working the razor around his chin, when the man said, "Yeah, you look like you know what you're doing."

Again, God looked at the man but did not express the fact that he felt belittled, condescended to, and unimpressed with the man's remarks.

"I guess you're in some kind of a rush," said the man. "I mean, you don't look like you're homeless -- which would be my first guess -- so I guess you're traveling for a wedding or something. Am I right?"

So God paused in what he was doing, and with the cream still about his mouth and little flecks of foam about the sides of his face and on one of his earlobes, he turned to the man to say, "Would you please give me a moment to finish this?"

"Whoa," said the man. "Sure thing. Do what you gotta do."

God went back to the business of shaving. While he did the man glared at him and his reflection, discreetly and not so discreetly shifting from one foot to the other in a gesture that seemed in equal parts sincere and ironic.

When God finished with the razor he set it on the basin and he rinsed away the hygenic aftermath, and without anything but his natural adornments and the residue of water, he turned his focus to the stranger.

"So what can I do for you?" said God.

Obviously taken aback, "Whoa... Who said anything about doing me a favor? What the... I was just trying to say hello to a guy."

"So, hello."

"Whatever man. Don't let me take up too much of your time."

God took his razor from the basin and then the shaving cream with one hand, then bent down to the travel-case to bring it up to the sink and he put the things inside and zipped it shut, and he was just about to leave when the stranger put his right hand on God's left shoulder to suggest he had something more to say. "Where are you from, buddy?"

He hadn't been asked this question in hundreds of years, and perhaps less than a dozen times in a thousand years before that, and it amused him to hear it now. "Why, I'm from that place that was before the recognition of Good and Evil."

This gave the man some pause. "Quit bein' such a smart-ass. Come on. Where you from?"

"But I just told you. I wasn't being a... What'd you call it, a smart-ass? What is that, anyway?"

The man's displeasure clearly grew. He shook his head in dismissal of this agitation. "You got some kind of a problem with me?"

God considered this for a moment. "I wouldn't say so."

"Alright," said the man, "so just tell me where you're from like the name of a state or something. You from New York?" And before God could answer, "Or you from some kind of foreign country or something?"

It would be a lie to say he didn't entertain the notion of saying his origins were Tequistani, although this is not what he said. "I don't remember," he said.

"You...You don't remember where you were born? What the... What is it you're some kind of orphan or something?"

The briefest sketches of particles and nothingness flitted through his mind and he said, "One has to have parents to be an orphan."

And in that instant the man recognized something, not only that God hadn't told him a single lie during their conversation, but that he owned a self-confidence the man had never interacted with. The man didn't ask another question.

"Okay, then," said God. "I guess I can be on my way, then." Just as he reached the exit, the man said, "Are you the Prophet?"

"No," said God. "I exist."

****

5. Something Consequential

Camus was brave, or at least worthy of some of the veneration that comes with bravery, when he pointed out the meaninglessness of death, the meaninglessness that devours all of us in time. And he went first: he renounced his every right to any claim of Eternal Salvation in Prophet; he said, "I'm here," he said, "That's not me." And like only the fewest others I've come across, he has secured my heart in principle, persuaded me to a strange bravery.

She awoke in the Merrick-less bed, warm, indifferent; his murder, listed by the Pancross County Sherriff's Department as a suicide, was months or over a year in the past. No one seemed particularly interested in a alternate theories whose solution would assign blame beyond Merrick. Her husband was dead, and all of his house and property were hers. They never really had a discussion how these things should be managed if and when Helena survived him. It was more or less assumed, and Merrick had a natural inclination to generosity just as soon as the means were available: the aquarium, for instance: Lori asked all of once for the squid and the two Coelacanths after having learned of their existence in a catalogue of aquatic species and concomitant supplies, and Merrick was just so delighted his only child showed curiosity in a species so different from her own... His wife's perpetual intake of pharmaceutical narcotics and her routine consumption of alcohol was less inspiring...although it cannot be said with a straight face that he made an effort to discourage this behavior...

And perhaps therein lies the solution to his unsolved murder: the wife moving through a somnambulistic trance in an increasingly monotonous routine; a daughter raised by creatures in a tank; and, of course, and, not to mention, there was Merrick's own careful arrogance getting him into trouble with colleagues and clients even before his supposedly professional relationship with Rueben. Indeed, if we regard these things as threads in a noose, the noose is strong and will snap any neck within its halo.

Her body was manipulated from its comfort. It was scarcely more than a twitch of hunger, initially, and she could dispel it with a cough or a small piece of food or sometimes late at night with a drink from the liquor cabinet. But then as months wore on, as each of those days became divided and multiplied by one season, then two, these twitches became a sort of pain.

She began to realize the absence of Lori.

It seemed unfair to Helena, inconsiderate, a well-crafted insult to her status as a mother. It was like the child had stolen itself. It was like someone had stolen her most-prized possession.

Every room harbored a deficit at its periphery. Every sound was an exaggeration. And surely the girl was to blame, first. Surely Lori Slivovitz's guilt was the most important in this crime....

So, she awoke in the Merrick-less bed, warm, indifferent. And perhaps the indifference was spawning into something larger, something consequential. She removed herself from the blankets, and went through the bedroom to her private-bath, and when she was finished went downstairs, feeling herself inexplicably curious to the state of things, then drawn outside to the backyard.

The spring weather was bright and robust and happy. It made the sky inordinately large, like something out of a movie. And Helena felt the twitching-hungry-presence in her belly again. And she would not sleep in their bedroom a single night more after that day. Instead, she would take up residence on the leather couch in the living room. She would fondle with deep admiration the growing wealth inside of her.

Already, she was beginning to think of names.

****

6. Happily Ever After

Crazy, vicious energy swirls in the air between the bartender and the raccoon's teeth killing and carving the stick between its teeth, struggling against the bartender, entitled to something in the Shooting Range Bar & Grille. The bartender has definite purchase on the weapon, and there is a transistor-sized stun gun on the counter of the bar, and the chubby animal kicks about on the floor, it razor-thin claws scratching and skipping on the floor. A deadly enmity in the raccoon's black eyes and a very non-subtle odor of angst and confusion and fear wafting up from the animal's black and gray coat.

Dorothea McEntyre sips a vodka martini from her usual seat at the bar. She looks poised, her glamour severely out of place and yet decidedly unperturbed by the ongoing debacle.

The bartender tries wrenching the stick away from the animal's mouth -- perhaps in the wish to connect with a swift blow to daze the raccoon -- his other hand remembering and mentally reaching for the stun gun on the counter.

They have been fighting for something unseen and invaluable in the Shooting Range Bar & Grille for nearly twenty minutes, both parties clearly growing more exhausted and aggravated. Dorothea just wants a refill, and if maybe the bartender would turn on the television, the news channel, that would be appreciated. The animal redoubles its efforts. Feet that have found uncommon purchase on the tile floor connect into stout, gravity-supported legs and hindquarters, and the raccoon straightens its back and it neatly whips the gnarled and saliva-soaked instrument from the bartender's hands before tumbling back to the floor, briefly reassessing its status in this test of wills, judging its plan of action wise then scurrying from behind the bar, across through the restaurant, out the open door to the day outside.

He exits through the trappanel and walks across the restaurant to the door, pushing it incrementally further open before sweeping a brick away from the base with his foot and then letting the door close on the Shooting Range Bar & Grille. "Well, at least that's taken care of."

He goes back underneath the trappanel and moves to a sink to wash his hands, and he wipes them on a towel that he open to its ful lsize before laying it on the front edge of the sink and walking down the bar to Dorothea McEntyre.

"Have I seen him here before?" she says.

"They usually just show up on two-for-one night," he says. "This is out of the ordinary."

She slides her glass forward. "Vodka martini, if you will."

"One vodka martini, coming right up."

A laundry-list of of grievances and personal issues are forming and sorting themselves in Dorothea McEntyre's mind, an eclectic tableau of senior citizens, men with coarse, engine-dirty hands who routinely misidentify her brand of perfume, the son taken away from her by Helena Slivovitz.

When the bartender returns with her martini, she looks seriously into his patient face, and she says, "Could I ask you to turn on the television for me? The news channel?"

He takes a step backward, reaches under the bar for the remote, then aims it down the bar to the t.v. suspended by screws and brackets from the ceiling, and the news channel flips on to a weather report of a model-rate woman detailing the daily forecast.

"Do you think she's...natural?"

"Patricia Harding?" He angles his head, remarks the woman on the television as though he were making a paleontological study of her breasts and make-up. "She looks real enough."

She adjusts her glass on the counter. "Well, it seems very shallow to me," she says. "The way some women will do anything to impress a man. It just seems desperate." She sips her drink.

"Guess you've got a point there," says the bartender. "I guess men just don't appreciate it, what women put themselves through."

"How do you mean?"

"Well...men...the average man...doesn't really concern himself with his appearance. I mean, we get our hair cut, buy new clothes, things like that, but... It's just not the same."

"How do you mean?"

"A man," says the bartender, "has other things he can fall back on. He has...assets. Men are really just expected to earn a living, support a family, and anything that comes after is just...let's say, supplementary."

"Supplementary."

"Right. So if you don't like his tie -- his shoes, his car, whatever -- he still knows he's got his job and there's a million other women in the world he can get what he wants from."

"You all want the same thing."

He considers this. He seems just vaguely angelic in his concentration. "Possibly... I think you think it's something more malicious than it is, though."

"I said nothing of the sort."

"But you think it pretty often," says the bartender. "I can tell."

"All this because I had to open my big mouth," she says. "Thanks a lot, Patricia Harding!"

"I can turn it off if you want."

"Just leave it. Let her..." She shakes her head loose from something. Some memory of Andrew McEntyre in there. Some pleasant detail or thing he said. He is a long time in the past and it only seems more likely as the years add to their number that his disappearance from the eyes of the earth will remain a disappearance and nothing else. She takes a sip of the martini. And the bastard son he left her with. The stupid child, the runaway child, the rapist child. Little more than an ugly bird in a cage on an island in a tropical wasteland.

It's been said that justice is working, and it's everywhere.... And I sometimes fear that that word contains an endless multitude of redefinitions. I fear the sense of justice we all trade on, the promises we give and the intentions that we harbor, uniquely define the past and a corrupt future of false gods and greedy politicians. I fear for the soul of Spook McEntyre.

"Do you go to confession, bartender?"

"You mean...? No, not in several years, I haven't."

"When was the last time? Do you remember what it was about?"

He knew exactly what it was about, or something in his countenance understood it that way. "Personal business. I'd say personal business."

Catching his implication... "Okay. I see..." She said, "My mother used to make me go -- every week, no matter what, if you can believe that."

He picked up a pencil and a book of crossword puzzles from under the bar, and he made a small show of dividing his attention. "Tell me about it."

"Well, there's not a whole lot to tell. Typical Church of Prophet balderdash. You know: God gives up the son, the son gives up his life, everyone else is a greedy, self-absorbed asshole."

Pen to puzzle, "That sounds about right."

"And every week, there's little old me, on my knees and talking through that funny-looking window, racking my brain for all the trespasses and withins and withouts of, you know, just an utterly scandalous life."

"Uh huh."

"By the time I was fifteen, though... Hghhhh. Well, I just started making things up. You know, to keep it interesting?"

"I'm interested."

"So, I think the first ones were kinda timid: you know, just to test the waters a little. So I said something about flashing a boy -- and I got my tits early, so it made a lot of sense. And then I told the priest all the things I wanted to tell my teachers, and adults and everybody, I guess. I told him how I called them all cocksuckers and animals and faggots and things."

"Uh huh."

"And that poor bastard really ate it up, dickless virgin, whatever..."

"Dickless virgin."

"Oh! I haven't thought about this in forever! Thank you, bartender. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"

"Uh huh."

"I should go to the church right now. Give whatever poor bastard's in there right now a piece of Dorothea McEntyre's mind. What do you think of that bartender?"

He lay his pencil on the book of crossword puzzles. "Just make sure you pay your tab."

She opened up her purse and the wallet inside, and she took out a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. "I'll let you know how it goes."

"I'll be here all ready to hear it."

She made some final appraisal of the setting on the bar, the napkin and the martini glass that sat on top of it. She plucked up the glass and returned it upside-down on the napkin. "There'll be more time for that later," she said, lascivious death in her eyes.

"Always," he said. "Always, ma'am."

And she was soon out the door, on her way to mercy.

***

7. The End of Secrecy

There is a strange mix of worry and wonder at play on the old man's exhausted visage as he meanders about in the house on Acanthus Street, in Brookford, Massachusetts, in the kitchen of the home he and his only son share. Edward has not been sleeping well lately. He routinely wakes up to discover his pajamas damp with elderly semen, or sometimes urine, in the middle of the night and when he wakes up dry it is almost unfailingly due to insomnia. He has woken up dry. It is sometime in the very-late evening/very early-morning. He moves not unlike someone repairing from a hangover -- his fingers, arms wandering somnambulistically over the counter in his confused/compromised amygdalofugal state, everything hurried through its place and/or position, everything blurred between past and the emphasis and degree of those facts.

Edward Rueben senses an end coming. His final hours, his remaining time, spreads into the day as clear as light glows on a plastic-encased menu. His breathing is very slow, the overhead lights in the kitchen are as bright as they are indifferent, but when he closes his eyes the eternal shadow is more than he can withstand. His legs fumble for purchase, his arms press down on the counter with the strength of something twisted and unlikely.

The man who benefited so greatly, so tremendously in the technological booms of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s... the man who saw Nathan Rueben grow into adulthood, the man who looked over his shoulder during the beginning of TEPYPNCM... this widow, this transplanted senior in a workingclass neighborhood... lost and physically bewildered, a stranger in his very own home.

Outside the house, on the eternal canvas of the without, Massachusetts and America and the rest of the world carries on: The war carries on, the election grows closer, nightmares and dreams are born, are dissolved, plans are made and procrastinated, ten million tiny invisible gods may watch over us, and they may not.

So much happens when you're just watering your lawn.

Nathan W. Rueben discovered his father on the floor of their kitchen. He wasn't breathing, and there was a stale, fungus-like odor in the air. He guessed it'd been a week since his father'd shaved.

Nathan W. Rueben saw this coming. He knew in his bones the old man was at the end of his time.

He didn't check for a pulse. He didn't say a word.

Still in his own pajamas, he knelt down to his father where his father lay on the floor, took his legs and his back in his arms, and lifted him up, and carefully, competently made his way outside.

The sun was clear and white in the sky, and there were other people on the street busy with their morning routines, and some of these, including a man in a forest-green t-shirt and khaki pants, noticed Rueben, and he acknowledged what he was doing, then calmly and humbly brought his father to the backyard of the house.

He lay him upon the grass.

He went to the toolshed and turned the key waiting in the lock and popped it open to remove its lock and open the plate and replace the lock to the hook and search within for the decomposition shroud and the shovel.

Who can say what went on in his thoughts as he went about digging the plot for Edward Rueben? Only that he must've had thoughts. The worlds before him, the worlds after. He had some taste of glory in mind, I suppose.

We should be kind to remember our losses.

****

8. In Memory of John Abbedro

On a sunny, Labor Day afternoon, in the Saint Albert Winston Cemetery, on a section of graves closer to Addison Road than to Main Street, Mark Abbedro stands above his father's place of eternal rest. Unlike Jakes, unlike Slivovitz, he has not procrastinated this encounter. Called away from his sales, he left Richard and the other new boys to learn it on their own or learn it from other salesmen. Mark was braced for the head under the sheet. The blood was washed away, and the scarred flesh was patched with glue and was neither intimidating nor repulsive; it was merely a fact of skin, like sunburn or freckles. The light passed down through the interim-morgue, through the basement and through the man's face that contained a disjointed brand of serenity, a grace that transcended his obvious and terrible disfigurement. Light passed down through the sky onto Saint Albert Winston Cemetery.

Mark Abbedro hated his old man, hated him for leaving Mark in the world alone like that, lost, with nothing to encourage him forward. With a pill-hungry mother obscured in the distance of some hidden slum of America. Mark considers spitting on the tombstone right there where the family name has been carved into the marble. Mark's throat is thick with almost every emotion he's ever had. Almost. A thousand million words and portions of words swirl in his consciousness and his mean heart and his body. Within him is a man that is not entirely observable. Like shadows or ripples across a pond, suggestions of shapes or human features but nothing an accurate copy of its representation. It behaves in a way Mark won't overtly recognize; it speaks a language he refuses any and all audience.

His anger withers to a small, non-distinct subtraction, falls away to a small gutterchannel residing in the shadows of his anatomy.

He doesn't spit.

He reads the name once more, then runs his tongue over respectably manicured teeth flavored with an unspoken animosity, while the cemetery, the town, and everything else move into perpetuity and move into an immeasurable past.

****

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