IGNIOGRAPH

A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Degree3(,

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

by

Matthew Scott Carney

San Francisco, California

January 2016

Copyright by Matthew Scott Carney

2016

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Igniograph by Matthew Scott Carney, and that in my opinion

this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts: Creative Writing at San Francisco State

University.

Maxine Chemoff,Professor of Creative Writing

Nona Caspers, 'Professor of Creative Writing

IGNIOGRAPH

Matthew Scott Carney San Francisco, California

2016

Igniograph is a satirical novel set in 2020. Two friends drift apart after one witnesses the

killing of a classmate and love interest by a new, randomly distributed terrorist weapon:

An exploding book. Igniograph follows its dual protagonists, exploring post-traumatic

stress disorder, addiction, and the construction of racial and class identities in the context

of nationalism, technology, and the juxtaposition of the popular and philosophical

concepts of nihilism.

How do environment and substance influence our identities, and the chemistries of our

relationships within them and without them? What is feeling and knowing in a world

which exists through the lenses of constructionism?

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

Date

ACKNOWLEGEMENT

The faculty mentors of San Francisco State University, and their guidance and exercise

through which I produced half of the material for this novel: Camille Roy, Dodie

Bellamy, Junse Kim, Matthew Davison, Maxine Chernoff, Nona Caspers; Peter Orner,

who convinced me to transform Igniograph the short story into Igniograph the novel;

Marguerite Munoz and Jeff Von Ward, for inviting me to read excerpts.

Song lyrics which are referenced by the work: The Mamas & The Papas - Twelve Thirty,

Fleetwood Mac - Dreams, Soft Cell - Chips on my Shoulder, David Bowie - Golden

Years, Patti Smith - Rock N Roll Nigger, MGMT - The Youth, David Bowie - Stay,

ABBA - Knowing Me Knowing You, Kan ye West - Niggas in Paris.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACT 1..........................................................................................................................................1

ACT II...................................................................................................................................... 76

ACT III................................................................................................................................... 123

ACT IV .................................................................................................................................. 172

v

1

I

March 2020

3

Something about the picture of Olivia brought him enough clarity to tune out the

soothing, mourning hum of the cathedral, enough clarity to center his spinning head for more

moments than before, but not enough clarity to understand how she drew him there.

Distance and time. What was it to be drawn to somebody? Tim wondered about why they

called them laws of attraction, though they followed no hardened, principled procedures like real

science. It should be repeatable to be believed. One could replicate nothing of this, of this

attraction, of eyes drifting together or apart. What brought their eyes together, him and others?

The shimmering, definite but delicate fiber woven by id between their first moments. It spanned

one moment, pulling all the distance as mimed desire.

But the fiber id had woven between them, Tim and Olivia— what was it, and how— she

held on him—he didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t shake the feeling, like

electromagnetic snakes forever intercoiling, slithering against an ebb and flow. It was in his skin

even when they’d never touched, where they’d never touch. A something.

His skin and the muscles in his hands and the outlines of his ribs and kidneys and the

stinging in his eyes were all throbbing with this sense as he studied her photograph on the

memorial table. It stood among the other artifacts: a worn pair of oxblood combat boots, the

lovely and foul scribbled messages of her final high school yearbook, her battered gold top

Gibson Les Paul, photos from concerts, ticket stubs, photos of strange shapes in the concrete, a

collection of both worn and unused Zippos, blue tinted aviators worn in and out of doors, and a

broken cup, and a cracked but empty picture frame, and an unfinished disposable camera, and a

broken mirror with lipstick kisses—these were the things which carried context only between

Olivia and the ones who shared the moment of the artifact with her, sometimes the many of them,

sometimes one person.

4

But there was one photograph at which Tim couldn’t stop staring. It was the one which

reminded him of why he’d been drawn to her in the first. It was the biggest photo, now framed in

a black edge, in the center of the table before the guitar.

He’d been standing for untold minutes, and he’d studied it before, but lifted the photo

again. He held the photo against the newspaper clipping of Olivia, a portrait, her last profile

picture, he’d held in his hand. It was her, the fire in her radiating from her eyes and smile. She

stood with tilted head and titled lips, her black eyes bright with zeal and a gleam in her long dark

hair, the black falls. She held tight a weathered bronze dagger, a perfect accompaniment to the

Venetian canals behind her, the winding turquoise water drifting, Saint Mark’s tower rising.

Holding the photo with both hands, sinking into it—Tim couldn’t help but grin.

Uncontrollably. She knew the world! The power— why, she was so sardonic! A firebrand. A

firecracker. Fool me and I’ll fuck your face with this dagger, Tim said the photo said she said.

Alliterative curses were her signature. He knew that. He’d heard them himself once, the

trigger to a critical moment.

Olivia frequented a cafe near the university, a place all armchairs and tall windows. Tim

discovered by chance that she took most her lunches there. He recognizing her from class: She

stood that first day wearing a My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult t-shirt, waiting for a coffee, with

her hands on her hips. And she was there the next day too, as he’d hoped, when he returned.

Sometimes she walked in right at 11:00am, focused, quick steps, her leather heeled boots

tap, tap, tap, tapping on the hardwood floor, Tim nearly seeing himself in the reflection of her

black, black hair. She'd order her ginger latte, her West Coast scramble, flirt with her phone, and

leave in a hurry. Her notice of him was debatable; sometimes she noticed, yes, a glance. And

once she smiled at him, enough to pinch his chest and make him fail his phone dialogue,

stuttering, um, um, um, yes. But the rest of the time Tim seemed a ghost to her.

Other times, she drifted in. 11:45, 1:06, 3:33, whenever. Drifting. It was gorgeous:

coming in slowly, setting dark eyes downward, skin aglow. She smiled, she laughed, and she

carried on a miles long conversation through the ether with her slender fingers. She ordered her

ginger latte, and her West Coast scramble, and, men and women, all the baristas flirted with her

as she lingered. She always chose the seat right before the copper espresso machine, facing

toward the open door and the sunlit windows. She’d watch for misunderstandings in the street—

Tim would watch her shake her face, eyes narrow as her full lips curled in amusement, sometimes

5

mouthing something back to herself, sometimes laughing out loud and writing the somethings in

a tiny blue book.

He’d wonder about her thoughts on the miscommunications she reacted to, the honking

motorists furious about waiting and silence, or the plaid-clad passer-by angry about a dog flirting

with someone else. Someone arguing about their botched latte, a stamping foot. Tim could see on

in her face: She would laugh, and show. But what did it feel like to think like her? Inside? The

narrowing of her focus, the parts of the world she tuned out when she lavished the others? Did

she write about the drifting and decay that seemed to fascinate her, her music and her clothes and

boots and everything else?

Tim knew she was a writer. The tiny blue notebook, sure. But it was more about her

demeanor. Once, she stayed in the cafe to work, and he watched her watch the street for an hour,

running her hand absently around her chin like she had an Egyptian beard, her eyes touching the

body of each pedestrian, face, hands, clothes, motion. She sat for an hour just watching before

suddenly she sat up straight, her brow furrowing, and she took up her pencil and wrote non-stop

for 15 or 20 minutes. The lead broke, and she studied the broken pencil. Then she got up and

walked out.

And the time with the alliterative curses: This was the day of the moment.

Tim remembered it all. He’d come to the cafe late, the streaming sun setting— he’d

expected not to see Olivia then. He had just wanted a coffee and a place to read.

But she was there, sitting opposite a man— not a man, Tim could tell, but a young man. A

young white man. A bland and white young man, sweater, curly brown hair and a long nose and

silly long lips that were, at this time, down twisted.

Tim took the nearest seat, and scowled as he watched them at their tiny table for two.

Scowled at this man he would never, ever be anything like.

The young man was talking, explaining, on and on and on, on, on, on, soft tones and

touching his hand to his chest occasionally, or shaking his head— Tim could understand nothing

of what he said because his words were so fucking soft. And all the while, Olivia was staring

dead into him, arms crossed over her red leather jacket—

“On and on and on and on and fucking on and fucking on and fucking on— you keep

talking and not saying anything.”

And then the young man looked over his shoulder—

6

“No, no, no, don’t worry, she’s not here—that’s really it, right? It was her. I know it,”

and she jabbed a finger hard into his chest as he shook his head and put his hands up. “What a

way to make us all ugly, Alex. Want to fuck with me? Yeah? You spineless shitting simp. Then

be tough: be honest.” And she laughed. “You don’t even have to be honest because it’s in my gut.

I don’t even care about my money you spent on her. I don’t even care about me. I care about

Lilith, though, and I care about your shit taste in women, and that Lilith and I touched this bitch

indirectly through your dick. So let’s get ugly: She’s a candy cunt country whore with crap

politics and a lazy eye. You idiot! She’s a rube! She supported that Proposition 17, and wore an

American flag onesie all week, and went to an Exceptionalist rally on her birthday! And then, see,

there you go; she’s on her knees a week later, and you’re weak enough to walk right into a mouth

like hers. Know what’s exceptional? How she could suck brass off—wait, I even know when you

did it to her!”

The whole cafe had turned its attention to them, and Alex the young man looked around

everywhere, spouting nervous laughter.

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Olivia said. She smiled smugly, the smile from the photo. “I’ll

laugh too: ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Alex the young man leaned forward, putting a hand on Olivia’s wrist—

She twirled her hand, grabbing him firmly by the elbow. “Want to see a magic trick? I’ll

make you disappear!” One motion: She pulled him in and crushed his long nose with her free

fist—crack!— and Alex fell to the floor, the coffee cup dumping, Alex gasping with all the cafe as

Tim stood reflexively, and the young man pushed himself up, bubbling blood on the sweater,

touched his silly lips twisting up to meet his dumb watering eyes, and he jumped up and pushed

himself outside and trotted away past the wide windows, somewhere away.

Olivia stood. Her chair scraped with harsh resonance in the silent room. She took a step,

straightened her jacket, and then stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the young man’s

empty seat with a frown.

After a few moments, she turned toward the baristas and approached the register. “You

know, Jim, I just want another coffee. To go.” She pushed the $10 bill forward for the coffee and

tip. While Jim the barista turned to oblige her, Olivia turned to face, one by one, the patrons

gawking at her— see, there it was again, that death smirk from the photo, half smiling and self-

assured like the cast copper gaze of an ancient, but black inside— and one by one they turned

7

away so as not to meet her eyes. But Tim noticed she did not look at him. Finally, she took her

coffee and walked across the cafe, slowly, drifting, heavy steps, distant eyes and walked out the

door into the setting sun.

Tim was finally compelled— a something, an impulse, jolted through his neck and into

his legs. He ran out into the setting sunlight onto the sidewalk.

“Hey. Olivia.” Tim said.

Olivia turned. Tim could tell, her lips, it was recognition. “Hi.” And she took three steps

toward him.

Tim laughed. He could feel the pulsing of his blood through his neck, his trembling

hands— he shoved them into the back pockets of his jeans. And then her scent, God, like secret,

very warm secret vanilla cinnamon. He felt shitfaced on her scent and his pounding heart. “Yeah.

So. That was great, back there— in there. That was great. What you did to that guy.”

She shrugged, rolled her eyes. “Him? Who knows. I just did what I felt, and what seemed

needed at the moment.” She laughed. “But he probably wasn’t worth any of that, losing my

temper.”

“People— yeah, they’re pretty bad. Yeah. People are horrible.”

She was smiling again, but she shook her head. “Nah. I think people are genuinely good

deep down. There are some who sour the world because they don’t think at all about what they do

or feel before they act and have no investment. Or because they’re afraid of who they are.”

“I know, right? Yeah. So. Oh, by the way, I’m— ”

“You’re Tim and I’m Olivia,” she said. “I know who you are.”

“Yeah?”

“You practically live here, Tim. You’re here always.” She laughed.

And, finally, here it was. This was the moment. This was the moment. This was the

moment even clearer than the alliterative curses in the cafe, clearer than making the young man

disappear, even more remembered than suffocation in her scent, more than a sway or a toss of her

hair or anything anytime else except her demise in the chemical fire of an exploding book.

“You practically live here, Tim. You’re here always.” She laughed. But the way she

laughed— suddenly she covered her mouth, for a moment only, and looked aside with a smile she

could hardly contain, forcing it away. She looked to the ground, a second, then back up to Tim,

8

into his eyes, the whole setting sun gleaming in her eyes, and pushed a hair from her face, which

he saw had flushed. She said: “Don’t worry, Tim. I know who you are.”

And there, the moment became a water moment, a long one, ten seconds like ever,

everything flowing along, the world to its own, the sun, her hair, all of her glowing backlit, all of

her alive with the tiny breeze, Tim’s head swimming with the vacant sound of the city at rest, the

intersection waiting, the birds, murmurs of people, and her face, and her eyes. She knew him. But

he knew what she really meant. Her face looking right into his. Sharing it all. Connection. Trust.

Don’t worry. She knew him. He could feel her knowing how he felt for those seconds. He knew

in his heart that she knew he wasn’t one of them, the young men, the bland men, the comfortable

ones with long noses and sexfocus hard gazes. He was not one of them. Trust. And she just

smiled at Tim, and he studied her eyes, her hazelnut eyes and the gleam that seemed within while

she must have studied his.

“Anyway,” she finally said. And she looked down, then over her shoulder.

The air left Tim’s lungs. He laughed— all the weight in him was gone. His blood blasted

through his veins like warm water. It could have been weird, to know he’d been a watcher, that

he’d practically studied her. But she didn’t care. He laughed and laughed, rubbing his neck, and

then rubbing his knees and staring at the filthy ground while he caught his breath.

Finally he thought of something to say; he thought he would just tell her the truth. He

would give her just one fact about his feelings for her; he knew he didn’t know her at all, he

admitted that, but he knew also that he admired her so, and he knew too he felt something like

magnetism in his lungs when she was near, that he saw something so strong, so powerfully

beautiful in her, so forward and outside the tensions of their world and their time, that he just

wanted to get to know her better. He would tell her the truth then and then always tell her the

truth thereafter. Connection.

“Do you know what I’d like to tell you?” he asked, and he stood up straight again—

Olivia was gone.

Tim whirled around, looking down the street toward the set sun, up the street toward the

dark. She was gone. She’d walked away.

But he smiled. And he laughed some more. “Tomorrow,” he said aloud. “Tomorrow I’ll

talk to her. I’ll just go and talk. I’m just gonna talk to her.” He turned and saw an impression of

himself in the reflection against the orange buildings and the traffic and city: So tall, so broad

9

shouldered and broad smiled, such blue eyes and golden hair— he did feel like a fool, a grinning

fool, glimpsing his reflection. Was it sentimental? He didn’t care what it was because it was

good, and it was true. He hadn’t felt so breathless in years. He had purpose. He held in him the

memory he could repeat as mantra to himself, something to belong within. Something to belong

to. He walked, then ran toward the subway. He would make eggs for dinner, shower, stare

smiling at the ceiling and think and finally sleep. “Nothing will stop me tomorrow from talking to

Olivia. Nothing.”

And back to Tim at Olivia’s funeral, his standing alone, dumb standing and silly blonde

smiling at the photograph of Olivia in Venice. He ran his fingers around the cold black picture

frame, clenched his jaw, his smile fading to something else. He looked around the pews; nobody

there. To him. He didn’t know any o f them.

He wondered if he should steal the photo— Olivia would have approved of theft, no?

What Tim could never know was that the photo was entirely posed. The only people

present for the shot were Olivia, deceased, and two men she met the night the shot was taken—

not at the funeral. They would have never been invited because they were shit. Olivia’s friend,

Lilith, should have been there, but she had left with another man sometime after the bar but

before the cocaine. After the night of the photo, Olivia remembered the name of one guy—

Antonio, the hairy one— but not the other one, the fat one, the one who was the kind of person

who dies sleeping or doing unknown things on railroad tracks with a skull popped like a bursting

cherry. The picture was taken in San Francisco somewhere, in the Mission somewhere, not in

Venice, Italy. Prop dagger from the gift shop. The lighting was perfect. The photo was taken

when Olivia was still only flirting with Antonio. But the night got worse— it was not the worst

night of Olivia’s life. She just couldn’t remember it, if she’d been drugged or drugged herself into

amnesia. She struggled with the truth that she hoped she’d been drugged. But the feeling of

waking up alone face down in her own frigid room, without memory, without even the security of

knowing the worst had happened, was a disgusting feeling. What had her choices been? Even if

she’d ever known Tim at all, even if they’d gotten closer, he wouldn’t have been able to

empathize if she’d described the feeling. He’d have said, I know what you mean, I’m sorry, he’d

want to kiss her, and he could, but he wouldn’t. He would probably only been able to set his hand

on her shoulder. And if she told him more details of her life, of the void, of the strangers and

10

strangers she saw to fill it, the tens of them she let fuck her, the bland men who cared nothing for

her but for her body, that she made it that way on purpose because she was terrified of opening up

to anyone, terrified of making love, terrified of love, he would probably only be able to say the

same thing. I know. I’m so so so so so so sorry. She’d think, and probably say, that it’s not about

being sorry. And he wouldn’t ‘know.’ It would have been the end of them both had she tried to

make him the first man she really trusted.

But back to the photograph. The lighting was perfect. Nobody, especially not Tim, could

tell Olivia was standing in front of an advertisement.

“It’s a nice picture,” a woman whispered to him, her voice tom by smoke.

Tim looked up; she was standing before him, this black haired lady in a black dress and

leather jacket, a tiny lady, and he felt the tinge of familiarity tickle him behind his ears. “I know,

right?” he replied, smiling again.

“She had so much. There was so much adventure.” She reached and took the picture from

Tim, looking at it. “So much there to give o r ...” And she set the picture down, the sound of the

table cloth and table thudding and the feeling of heads watching for a moment. “But you know.”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“You know.” The woman tilted her head up and closed her eyes, deep shadows in her

face and how thin her skin seemed in contrast. He could count bones in her neck and chest. She

was motionless. Her hair was unwashed. Then she nodded slowly and looked at Tim again. He

felt his own eyes glaze and sting seeing the red lines and the darkening of her whites. “I’m glad

you came. Because these people don’t fucking know.”

“Yeah.”

“They don’t fucking know her. Any favorites or—they don’t know who she was to do—

to do, but you do, you were her classmate. I read her diary. You were her friend. And you were

there. You know.”

“Yeah. I do.” He told her.

“You were there and none of these fucking shits— these people were there— none of

them.”

Tim looked away, then, and stopped smiling because he’d shivered.

“I wasn’t even there. But now everyone believes they were there. But you were there

really, you know, before TV.”

11

“I was,” Tim whispered. “I saw everything. It was— I don’t know, I can’t even tell you. I

mean I could tell you, I could describe the details— I remember the whole thing, every bit, like

every pixel— but I can’t say that, right, you know, because that’s TV— but I could analyze it, I

mean. Scientifically. I could understand her body, how the fire was— ” and he stopped once he

could see the image of her death again, the book erupting and time slowing, chemical flames in

her eyes, the fire bursting into a ball, making her disappear, each bit, every inch, just fire— stop.

He stood shaking his head and searching through the maze in the floor.

“You should tell me what it was like.” She was intent, the lines in her face focusing her

eyes into him.

“What? But I can’t describe that.”

“But you should try to describe it to me.”

“I was there— it was an experience and I felt everything. I could feel the heat from— but I

can’t describe it out loud. I just can’t.”

“But yes. Exactly. Exactly. It’s all they want to talk about. But you were there and, before

these people, all of this shit— ” she waved her hands indiscriminately. “This is the shit that

made— do you want numbers or pictures—and they didn’t even ask me for her pictures— pictures

of something so beautiful— ” And the woman stopped abruptly with the sound of the smoke

bubbling through her nose, and she seemed to laugh.

Tim saw her tightened, laughing face in the mermaid mirror on the memory table— his

mouth opened as he saw Olivia in the mirror, looking aside, her round face and black hair in—

wait, but then looking aside he recognized the woman finally, and understood the sound was not

laughing but sobbing. “Oh my god.”

“They didn’t even ask me for her goddamn pictures,” Olivia’s mother slurred, deeper and

deeper, “and I saw her on the news, on every station. The first one to be killed by a book bomb. I

had to fight afterwards just for fucking money.” She stepped close to him, her hand tightening

around his arm, and he could smell liquor and cigarettes. “Because they already had everything—

they had her pictures. They had her face. The story of her life is theirs, I couldn’t take her back

from these people. Nobody can unsee it. There was nothing I could take from them except their

filthy fucking money just to take it, and it means— ” and she pulled her hand away to swipe at the

wind, her eyes wide with zeal, her hands falling back to her sides as white knuckled fists

12

buttressed by violent, tensed arms and shoulders. “But I did it. I took it anyway. Now I have more

fucking money than I know what to do with, and it makes me sick. It’s sick. It’s toxic.”

Tim stood facing her, his knees trembling and his mouth still open. He could sense others

stirring to her anger.

A tall man in a grey suit moved from the shadows behind Olivia’s mother, though he

didn’t look at them, only toward the collared priest ahead who presumably was still eulogizing,

the speech was inaudible to Tim. The man didn’t look at them, but listened.

“Goddamn it, Tim. None of them understand. None of them have to bury their kid. They

will only describe it, report it, buy them off to replay everything so that others can think they

understand when they understand nothing until it’s their kid.” And her face twisted. “Or better

yet, them. Or us. It should have just been us.” And then Olivia’s mother stopped and just shook

her head.

They both looked away and Tim closed his eyes. The eulogy of the collar began its ascent

into his ears once more, though the words were still inaccessible, for Tim’s head was filled with

images. Flame and people: The quad and blue Berkeley day, the green grass but the greener

flame, the ball of fire engulfing— and the others, the other the people running away. He could

only stand aghast feet before her as if cowering before an offering. He looked away from the

memory and back to Oliva’s mother, who was facing the front of the church, but could have been

looking into static or into a desert or into space from a tiny window, unfocused. The grey suited

man had walked away, joining the standing-room crowd behind the pews.

Olivia’s mother turned, rested her hand on Tim’s chest, and he flinched— her hand was

cold in the first moments, but it warmed with him. He closed his eyes, closed his hands. He

allowed her to move near him.

“I know, Tim,” she said. “I know how it must feel to be trapped in that memory. But

goddamn it. You would give anything to never feel that moment again, and I would give even

more just to have stood beside my daughter in her hardest moment.”

Tim opened his eyes, and for just a moment, in the dampened gray light, he felt himself

unstuck and in forward time: Her hazelnut eyes, her black hair, her round and soft features still

there in the weather of age and wisdom and pain. So much of this woman was Olivia too. Olivia’s

origin, but her future too. And there, in that intimacy, her feeling his heartbeat, Tim thought this

13

moment could have been his future, his purpose in this moment of connection with this woman

had the world, the world, not taken it up and cast it far away from him.

Tim could feel an itch somewhere in his throat and in the bottom of his lungs. But he

could also feel that weight in his jacket pocket again; He guided Olivia’s mother by her shoulder

and walked forward, slowly, pushing his feet down to dampen his footsteps, guiding her to the

darkness beside the cathedral doorway. And there he reached into his pocket and produced six

baby blue pills, and Olivia’s mother took three after glancing to Tim, then reflexively around

them to be safe. They both put them into their mouths. Tim also looked reflexively around before

taking the flask from his jacket and washing the pills down with the upward pop people use to

swallow pills in movies, handing the flask to Oliva’s mother so she could pop her pills in turn

before pushing the flask back into his coat.

Tim relaxed: he felt relieved and on the edge of rising inner warmth, the warmth he knew

would soon flood through both their veins into their minds.

So they stood for awhile. Time and things passed before them. They stood in silence until

his mind relaxed and wandered at a distance around the pews and the people and the priest and

the panels of wood, the lime lit instrument of Christ’s torture, pipe organs rising up to touch the

fortified stained glass windows. It wandered, and he listened to the priest finish, then watched

some family members each come up to grieve, share a story, explain a picture, detail a tiny

memory, be sarcastic, and all end in weeping, and these stories Tim followed favorably as his

sense of the room exponentially narrowed in right on each of them like an impressionistic

spotlight as the world around warmed into a rising and then stable and then persistent

hmmmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmm, and the downward spirals of everyone in the cathedral were

easy to steady, or put behind him.

Tim’s face felt lighter, then, and he knew he was so fucking high, and so warm, and his

eyes rested again on Olivia’s mother, and he could see she was staring ahead— oh, she was facing

ahead, her eyes closed, chin up, and he could feel the warmth in her too.

It was a hum, a buzz, the world to him now, a flat point somewhere in a warm sea. But

Tim suddenly spoke.

“Hey. Do you wonder who did this?” He asked her.

She turned. “What?”

“Do you wonder who did this?”

14

“You mean— ” She stared at him a few moments, something moving behind her

flattening eyes. And then her eyes and nose writhed in a way that Tim thought she’d spit on him,

or through him. “Someone marked for death,” she said. But then she seemed all right because her

face went flat again, and she took off her jacket and sat down into the shadow, her back against

the wall.

Someone like anyone had been talking, and, quite suddenly, two two-dimensional figures

swooped down past Tim’s spotlighting of the front, lifting Olivia’s mother away from Tim by

either arm. They pulled her up from the darkness, and slowly they began to walk down the aisle,

all the heads in the cathedral turning to face them, hands drawn to mouths, people as cutouts. Tim

walked forward to watch them move, and they continued further and further in, up to the front,

and Olivia’s mother stepped in front of the microphone looking completely different, so small

and distant from him, another place, but she was looking at him, and she cleared her throat like

wanting to say something, still, to say something to him, and she waited, and waited, and waited,

and waited.

Something, a something, compelled him to move. Tim turned away, separating from her

eyes because he must, the something pulling, his moving through the shadow and over the

threshold of the church, shuttering as he passed the suited muscled men at the entrance, their eyes

made black by the glasses like they were the eyes of insects. The cold and the rain pressed on his

face outside, and he pulled his jacket closed around his neck and head to hold the warmth in, and

he worked through the crowd and the camera wielding media and their grinding video machines

and trucks, their wired antenna, their on and on and on and on voices he was too high to hear, so

fucking high, hear it all but listen to nothing, so much distance in him from all, so high as not to

hear except for their on and on abuse of her name, Poor Olivia, Young Olivia, Olivia the Dead,

Olivia the Damned, and he held the jacket tight to keep the warmth inside and away from the dark

clouds. Something compelled him down. He turned toward the south, past the riot police and past

the white-wearing Exceptionalists throwing books into a mound in the street, the reactionaries

and the sensationalists and the concerned throwing insults over the fire, the others huddled on

corners with wide eyes in the rain rubbing their hands and wondering whatever happened, more

of them waiting for more gasoline, searching for more helicopters or the drones they’d seen

watching the ground from the skies earlier. He kept walking downhill in the rain against the

15

protesters walking up to meet the fire and the riot awaiting, kept walking with the pull through the

mile, the mile, the mile, the world pulling him toward the southward something thing.

There, slowing, stopping, stopped, he could hear it, something in a song, something so

familiar but so much from an ancient time sounding as warm as his veins. He could tell, the

drums, everything— it was a song lifetimes away, anther world, another star. He stopped in the

middle of an intersection and scanned: Vehicles, yes, the sound of engines and anger and

pattering rain and panting people and the wandering of exhaust fumes, a yellow shop with laugher

and wine and food, the soaking trees swishing around him. But the warmth had saturated him

inside, and he used it to bum away everything but the music, and to warm the water around

him—there, above— he looked up past the trees, and he could see a window open with light and

the drapes parting to the breeze, and there, focus, focus, focus, love: He could hear it drifting

around him perfectly, drifting, this forward moving song of absolute luminance and harmony

shining with driving piano and flowing strings and a voice of one as many together aglow in a

loving sun. It sang, cloudy waters cast no reflection. Images o f beauty lie there stagnant.

Vibrations bounce in no direction. But lie there shattered into fragments. Young girls are coming

to the canyon, and in the morning I can see them walking. I can no longer keep my blinds drawn,

and I can’t keep myself from talking...

But then the song faded away. And Tim was left standing in his time again in the street

with the traffic swerving around him. He could hear the hissing of rubber on rain. Finally, Tim

felt the cold creeping through his skin again.

He looked around the streets— across, there, something he recognized, the bright red

coffee shop. Recognized, but could not read the sign, or did not want to read the sign, or did not

need to read the sign, willpower consigned to the sea of his filthy-warm high. So he kept his heart

wrapped. He trotted through the rest of intersection, past the cars and the staring people, and

entered— nearly empty— and found an armchair in the rear to sink into, to hold onto the warmth,

and to ride through what remained of the codeine in his blood.

Tim awoke—

He jumped— so many people around him then, the tables all full. Where was this? What

time? His muscles ached. Everyone was plugged in to something.

16

Tim knew where he was, then, and he sat up and stretched and yawned away what he

could. He was in a coffee shop. His old one, the one before Olivia’s coffee shop— he’d never go

back to that one. Here—this was Coffee Call.

Images flashed for him then, scenes of years prior. Coffee Call was something else

entirely before. No— not entirely, he admitted. But with a different owner and a different era, the

place now catered to cyborgs.

Well. That probably wasn't true. Cyborg was a strong word. Tim couldn’t judge for sure

from his position in the darkened comer of the cream-colored cafe that any of those people were

indeed authentic cyborgs. But they were around. He continued sinking defensively into the

leather armchair to displace his aching head, eyes darting.

When Tim was only a child, what was his name— Jens? Jens something. Jens Something

had artificial vision, one of the first authentic cyborgs. Two separate accidents removed him of

his vision, each eye destroyed in a different year. This artificial vision— low tech, of course. Not

even 32-bit, or even 16-bit, or even 8-bit, if it could be believed. His restored vision was only

eight by eight pixels. If it could be believed.

But it brought Jens Something back. It reconnected him to the world, to see something in

all the things under the sun. He could see all his loves again: His piano, his wife. And in the talk

show, Tim remembered seeing Jens Something sitting there with folded hands, smiling that

forever smile, the one that casts the glow of fulfillment, that invisible force pouring forth, obvious

even through the vast layered distance of the electronic ether. The man himself as seen through

camera as seen through digital compression as seen through satellites as seen through television

as seen through Tim’s eyes as seen through Tim’s mind. But it was obvious. And Tim could feel

it. Tim was in awe of him as a boy: Jens Something ascended from partial oblivion, sightless

darkness, cheating sense death by yielding to the push of the future, of humanity to change itself

and to change things. For the better.

But Tim knew it would be some time before cybernetics was a fashion statement ironic or

self-destructive enough to appear in Coffee Call. That’s how these people would abuse it. Now

these people were all only wired to glowing Apples, sucked silently into screens, every face at

every table aglow in blue white, mostly silent with their contorting faces, some laughing at their

strange electronic friends, a mile away or maybe a hundred or maybe a thousand. But Tim was

confident no friends were there with them, actually, really. Connected or disconnected, then?

17

Irony and self-destruction. Yeah. Tim knew that was probably more nostalgia again.

When he was younger, Coffee Call was the cafe for the ironic and the self-destructive, half of

them young hipsters sitting to smoke and kiss awkwardly among the other half, dreadlocked

refugees drifting in from abandoned ambitions of all kinds. The outside and inside of the place

was coated in chipped red paint, the darkness within illuminated by street lamp and cigarette

cherry glows through black draped windows. Tim always wound up there after school in the

evening, or afternoon when he abandoned his own obligations. As dark and dim was it was

inside, the cafe was inversely loud, the arguing and laugher and bellowing taking him away,

deafening him to problems.

Back then, at its worst, the ironic, self-destructing Coffee Call was a sideshow, living

entertainment, a place for Tim to secretly feel better about himself at other people’s expense. At

its worst, it was a haven for straights and blands and whites coated in black, everyone shouting.

At its best, the drift became, in a small way, some sort of intellectual role-model, maintaining its

dim crystaled ethos: be well-read, know enough to argue, know enough to define a bias, but be

apathetic enough to remain uninvested, free, transient. Give a fuck while not giving a fuck.

Overhearing conversations on either side of that spectrum drew Tim into the place and made him

feel a part of something from a distance. They were together, even if they argued or debated or

disagreed. They were connected, accepting one another, face-to-face, warm. Had he misread it,

misseen it? He felt sure he had not. A scene? He felt sure it was not.

The place was so different now. Its black insides disappeared into the earth via a coat of

cream colored paint, white accents, bright lights. Constant music. The people had changed. No

drift. Instead, everyone there was silent unless shouting at LCD, plugged in, defended and

grounded by the logos—the cafe itself was defended by a hanging edifice of an enormous, frothy

coffee cup with an anthropomorphic mouse crawling out to shout the titual coffee call, its arm

raised to its tiny face, eyes-closed shouting. It was so different.

But really, Tim admitted, his image of the place was five years old. Five. A number that

meant nothing now. Ten hardly meant a backward glance. Five was what most people could

afford to throw away, even five years, years, the most precious thing.

Years later, now, Tim finally has a vision of another atmosphere, another cafe. Oliva’s

cafe. The tall windows, the silence, the light, the life of people who take no notice of themselves

in the eyes of others, but seemed rather to notice others directly. Here, then, five years before—

18

maybe it was total artifice, Tim considered. The drift. No. No drift— it wasn’t them. It wasn’t

them at all. They thought they were, of course. Drifting seemed to mean something else since

he’d come to know Olivia, he thought. It was some sort o f letting go, some sort o f surrender to

the emotional flow of things, between people, some sort o f trust, some sort o f naturalism. He’d

felt it for that moment. Tim remembered, and he shook his head.

He scanned the room and wondered if the place was wired with transmitters or gas vents,

something to subdue people into the cozy numbness they seemed to be enjoying. Or not enjoying,

but inhabiting some way or another. Was it conscious? Did they notice they were so numb? Did

they know they were so alone living this way? Wasn’t everyone alone, living this way?

Tim scanned their faces from his corner. They were twisted up, or with silent writhing

laughter, or with brows knitting contemplation. But judging by the screens he could see, all these

people ever looked at were little blurbs of texts, burps or shits worth of paragraphs on monster

websites that sucked everyone into folds. What were they doing but using? Consuming the

concept of connecting to another person?

Tim felt his face, or tried to— he was numb, too. But his numbness was different. It was

self-meditative, huh? The pot and whiskey and opiate milkshakes he made for himself. Every day

a high day for every low moment he had to remember.

Yeah yeah yeah. It was so so so different. Watching bodies burn— none of those whining

little fucks had seen anything like it. They thought they did because it was on TV and shared

across mass social media, the entirety of so many people, so much pain, so much fear, so many

sleepless nights, and death all condensed into a viral video. A virus. And they thought they

understood and felt it, getting so upset, talking and talking and talking. On and on and on. But

real life, horror was different than on TV: TV shocked you once then made everything predictable

pixel by pixel. In real life, horror slowed down, defied time, defied space, transformed and

wormed into the brain until you cried for it to let go.

Tim rose. He didn’t feel numb anymore. He was burning.

He stood over them all— “Pigs,” He whispered. “Pigs, all o f you,” he said louder. And the

faces didn’t change. What did it matter? Nobody could hear—earbuds burrowed into every head.

“Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!” Nobody even looked up while he shouted it.

He balled his fists. Had the terrorists won now that they were destroying literacy with one

auto-combusting book at a time? Or were they playing a game nobody was invested in because

19

without paper or ink, Coffee Call would look exactly the same. New Coffee Call post-exploding

books was just the same as new Coffee Call post-books. Maybe he should slap someone across

their worm-infested head— wake up bitch, he could shout, and feel something! If I have to, you

have to! Make it change! Make it stop!

But Tim couldn’t do it. He shook his head. He knew he didn’t have the guts to do

something like that. He never had. He never would.

“Excuse me?” someone asked, the voice behind Tim. He whirled around and a thin,

bearded man was staring at him, standing right before him. He had incredulous but unwavering

eyes and his headphones in one hand. The other rested on his belt. “What did you just say?”

“What?”

“What’s the problem?”

“What— ” Tim hesitated. “What problem?” But he could only shiver, smolder, shake his

head, bite the inside of his cheeks, and push past the man with the beard, storming out of Coffee

Call into the darkness of the street.

Yeah, he knew it. Slap the bearded man across the head and call him a bitch? He knew he

didn’t have the guts, and never had, and never would. So outside, he kicked a parking meter

outside—he kicked hard the first time, the screen rattling, no change rattling like in the old days,

and he kicked harder still the second and third time, and then he punched it, and punched it again

and then again and again, again until he felt nothing and needed to shake his hand and wipe the

blood across his jeans.

Tim observed the street as he let his hand throb, throb, throb. The rain had stopped, but

the clouds remained illuminated with an orange pink night city glow. He could hear his own steps

echoing in the shiny street above the stagger of shitfaced couples and laughing, hollering men in

tight button ups and tom and bleached jeans. Some of them gathered in a bunch at the comer,

laughing, swearing, and one readied a bottle of Yoohoo to throw into the street.

Tim trust his fist into his pants pocket, his back pocket, his jacket pocket— there it was—

and he pulled the phone out, its nearly transparent slate glowing to life with numbers and flowing

symbols. He mouthed a name to the phone: Robin.

It rang, and it rang, and it— he could head the sound of the outside compressed. “Tim.”

Robin’s voice was a happy rasp.

“Robin,” Tim said.

20

“How— ”

“I’m fucking p i s s e d he heard himself say. “I don’t even know—”

Robin laughed. “Christ. Calm down.”

“I’m trying. I ’m trying. I’m fucking pissed. I’m freaking out.”

“Did you go?”

“Yeah, for awhile, yeah. And I left. I fell asleep at— in the cafe— I need to get out of

here, I’m freaking out." And he cleared his throat and stopped walking. “I’m— I’m trying to stop

thinking of this shit, man. Going to the funeral didn’t help.”

“What happened?” Robin asked. “Did you talk to anyone?”

Tim paused— something shattered in the street. The group of men on the street comer

bellowed and began moving up the street, crawling vaguely toward more alcohol. “I talked to her

mom— Robin, where can I meet you, we’ll talk later.”

“Yeah, of course. We’re on Ocean Avenue. Come down here, we’ll get your mind off

this shit, okay?

Tim walked toward the subway. “We. Who are you with?”

“I’m with Carina. Tim. Stop asking questions now."

“With her. Okay.”

“Come.”

Tim followed Robin and Carina into the psychic’s living room, all shadowed velvets, the

place dimly pinked by the neon crystal ball mounted outside. Tim noticed Carina had taken to

leaning on Robin’s narrow leathered shoulders. She slurred whispers through her white blonde

into his ear with a cocked head, and he rubbed his hands together as she rubbed his more and

more matted black hair. Both of them giggled with hoarsy incoherence.

Tim had been holding a smile so long that his cheeks were quivering. But his lips finally

slipped, his eyebrows rising; he noticed the dim image above the couch, an impressionistic oil

painting of two Indian funeral pyres at the edge of a river, blackness rising and draped arms

raised. And he became less absorbed with drunkenness and more focused once more on the smell

o f char and burnt hair he couldn’t stop remembering.

“Your future ,” Robin whispered with mistaken loudness, hands on both Tim’s shoulders.

He eased Tim down onto the couch beneath the painting, Tim shrinking as they sat beside him.

21

“This is fun, Tim. There’s a time for everything under the sun, Tim, and this is a time for

absurd relaxation.”

“Okay.”

“This is way better than, um, who was it.”

“Paul the Octopus!” Carina laughed.

“Paul the Octopus. Remember him? Childhood!” And Robin turned to laugh with Carina

again, her coy, tickling staccato.

“Cool.”

“But you—you keep a straight face to get the most. Got it?” And he rubbed Tim’s

shoulders again. “Don’t think so much. Don’t talk. Just be. You just have to just be.”

“I’m being. Okay. I’m relaxed,” Tim said over Robin, “I’ve been drinking with you.” He

threw his hands out, back on his knees again. “I’m just here. I’ve been having a good time, so I

don’t know what else you want me to— ”

“But you haven’t been,” Carina said. She laughed—Tim caught that laugh right from the

comer of his eye. Right from the bottom of his gut. Her laugh, something like concern and

something like judgment. “It’s like you have pins in your face from holding your breath for so

long. You’ve got an air, Tim. It’s so obvious you are upset.”

Tim shook his head and frowned at her. But this was the sort o f thing he’d come to

expect since Robin began bringing her around— what? A year ago? Two years? Five years? Who

knows. Who knows which hideous time he’d met her, which vile hideout wherein he’d picked her

up. The time before Olivia was a blur. Carina’s perception was as piercing as her baby blue eyes

and white hair. Any weakness, any emotional thread inside someone, she would find and

unravel— no effort at all like she were a kitten. Anything he said had a lose end, and she'd taken

and run with it before he knew he'd lost a word.

What frustrated Tim most was that she was usually right. She was unbelievable, this

Carina. And her hair—he wondered if it were real. Could someone really go so white so young?

How old was she? Wasn’t she just 17? Wasn’t she just out of high school, emancipated? Or was

that a lie, too? The world was lying to Tim, he knew. This Carina was a lie too, somehow, a lie to

disguise the fact that Robin was a cretin of the vilest kind.

That was a tinderbox of Robin’s Tim would never ignite, though. Yes, Tim distrusted

Carina, and he wondered about Robin’s dangerous fascination with tiny girls. But he could never

22

punish him like that, no matter how righteous Tim thought she was. At the very least, this girl

was much more advanced than most 17-year-olds.

Tim frowned. He accepted he had over 10 years on Carina and nothing to show for it all

because he was just another white bread privileged suburban idiot.

“You know,” Carina added, “It’s better to talk about it. How can you hold that much

anger in and expect to forget? And sadness? It's okay. Talking is the real way to forget, and we’re

both your friends, Tim, and here to listen to you if you want to talk about anything.” She frowned.

"And your hand— you're bleeding."

He flushed. But he wouldn’t look at his hand. “Goddamn it, Carina. What are you, 15?

Just leave me alone.”

She drew back from his outburst.

“I don’t know! I don’t—what am I supposed to say?” And he huffed and he puffed—

Robin put a finger to Tim’s lips, silencing him, and then pulled back toward Carina. His

slippery eyes. “My friend. My brother. You must be.”

A moment later, a layer of velvet parted, revealing a long dark hallway with islands of

light cast from naked, hanging bulbs.

Carina stood, pulling Robin up beside her, and after a second of Robin’s wide-eyed

grinning, they faded into the black, the velvet closing once more.

Tim was alone again. For a few moments he tried listening in, his head cocked; just

sporadic shards of sharp whispers.

He sank into the sofa. And again, alone then, he felt himself loosen, his fists unclenching,

as he allowed the memories to flood back: Olivia’s death, her burning, the screaming of everyone

around as she sank into the grass, and the chaos all filled his veins and gave him substance,

reliving the the moment of hesitation where nobody was able to decide if they should touch her or

not.

Tim rose. He paced the dim room, circling. But it was a legitimate question—can you

touch a burning body? In an emergency, of course. Nobody who’d been there was really prepared

for anything like that. Smother her and the fire with their books? Ineffective, ridiculous, but also

dangerous enough in this new world of terror, her book having ignited her in the first place.

23

The gated door snapped closed behind him, and Tim stood against the brick wall outside

the psychic’s house, a neon sun and neon moon in the window flanking the house’s famously

misspelled neon sign: Plam Reading.

Tim remembered that someone had run screaming toward the library for a fire

extinguisher. They didn’t return. Maybe they’d collapsed before they made it. Maybe they had

not found an extinguisher in a library so grand that nobody expected a fire. They never returned,

and so Tim watched Olivia bum and sink into the grass.

But can you fire-extinguish a person? Things would change. The world would be

completely different in a year. Everyone would likely learn such precautions now. No doubt that,

economically, socially, culturally— in what order would it change? Or was it always symbiotic?

But now the information age would really mature, wouldn’t it, now that the hallmark technology

of the classical age was finally being burnt away. E-books, PDFx, MMS, NFC—could exploding

books be conspiracy? Tim knew conspiracy was a possibility. He squinted, searched the street for

people watching him. A conspiracy, a violent gamut by crass, had-been powers cornering a new

media mind-control market? Or powers to be doing something of the same? Somebody,

somewhere— forces beyond their control— it was out to rend—

“Tim,” Carina said. And he turned, tightened up.

“What— I was just here thinking.”

Carina closed the gate. She walked out, turning to face Tim, fishing for a cigarette in her

cream colored jacket— she rubbed her arms. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“I’m not cold.”

“Good. Do you want one?”

He shook his head.

“Why did you come out—do you not want a reading?” She exhaled, a cloud of smoke on

her chilly breath. “She’s really good, actually.”

He could only glare at her.

“You know,” and she laughed a little, stepping toward him. “It’s obviously all a joke. It’s

just for fun, Tim. But it’s whatever you want. Lead her into telling you your future, you know?

Whatever you want. I know shit’s been hard for you. It’s been hard for everyone. But you were

there, actually there, you know? I understand it. So make this whatever you want. The future

24

doesn’t always have to be Children of Men shit, Tim. It doesn’t have to be gloom and darkness

every day. Make it what you want, even here with something small. A tiny little realization.”

He looked up, then, looking Carina in her eyes; her eyes were clear and intent on him, her

soft face serious. Then she began to squint as if counting and took a long drag from her cigarette.

“I’ll tell you a story, Tim. I saw someone almost die once.”

“Really?”

“He didn’t die. But it was really fucking close. We moved to the suburbs when I was a

kid because my parents thought the city was too dangerous. That was probably true but you’ll see

why it made no difference.

“So I had a little boyfriend when I was eleven. His name was Sean. Sean lived on another

street, but we met because we rode bikes, and day after day I noticed him riding and decided to

race him. So after that we always raced. That was, like, our thing, racing each other and

competing. He was kind of a big kid, you know, but I thought it made him look tough.

“Sean asked me for ice cream finally, one day, and we raced there. We went in and got

the ice cream. It was the first conversation we had outside our game stuff. I admitted to him I was

tired of all the arguing— my parents were about to divorce, you know. And it was nice because he

just listened.

“But then outside there was this black guy and someone else— ”

“Does that matter, his skin color?” Tim interjected, crossing his arms.

“Oh, calm down. I’m just explaining the way he looked, Mr. PC. So these guys were

doing that mouth puckering jaw thing like they were on drugs, and the two were arguing— they

started grabbing each other’s collars. And all o f a sudden Sean started yelling at them, ‘stop

yelling, stop fighting, stop yelling.’ They weren’t listening, so he shoved them, and the second

guy whirled around, and his knife slashed Sean across the neck.” And Carina looked away and

sighed here, then took a drag, lowered her eyebrows. “The guys ran off, and Sean was down just

staring up at me like he was a puppy or something, and I was frozen with blood all over my shirt.

I wanted to help him or hold him, but I didn’t. Some ladies were screaming and holding their

sweater to his throat, and one of them pushed me away, and then the paramedics were there and

Sean’s parents, and he was gone before I knew it, blood all over the place. I felt like I stood there

for hours.”

25

She had froze, as well, couldn’t do anything to help the dying boy. Tim could feel the

shiver of the connection for a moment. For a moment. Then he realized the boy hadn’t actually

died. “But you said he almost died. So he lived through this?” Tim asked.

“He did, yeah. But I never saw him again.”

“Did you try to contact him?”

“I didn’t, no.” She took a final drag, tossing and crushing the butt beneath her boot.

Tim couldn’t react, then. That’s when the shiver faded and Carina was just another other

again.

“You know what, Tim? I thought about that for a while, you know. That could have been

a traumatic memory for me had I done all that, like, coh, I should have done this, I should have

done that, I’m so weak,’ all that shit. But I did what I could. Sean did what he could. Those men

did what they could. Everyone did what they could. Everyone is doing what they can.”

Tim shook his head. “That’s bleak. What kind of shit agency is that?”

Carina laughed. “The only shit agency we have.” She looked him in the eye. “What

happened, you could make it something positive, Tim, and something liberating. There’s not

much pressure if you realize you’re just a little speck of dust and you just encountered something

that was all chance.” She raised her eyebrows with a soft smile. Tim knew it as the knowing,

undeniable look only a woman, her innate wisdom, could give a man to break his casual

blindness. “You know like I do that being drunk and high constantly will not make anything go

away, Tim.” Then she squinted. “Wait— were you in love— but you weren’t in love, though.”

Tim paused for a while. He ran his finger along the stitching in his jeans but couldn’t

imagine their labor, the process.

“But she’s got a hold on you. Maybe it was love. I’m just trying to figure you out. How

did you feel? How do you feel?”

Suddenly, he flashed into another hypothetical, as he was want to do. What if he’d been a

different man? And he could do what he could? What if he’d been the man who was bold, who

was forward, unafraid. The man who imposed his will, such confidence, such ease, setting his

whiskey down silently before making a decision with weight in his voice— nobody could say no.

Nobody could say no, and it worked, but he was fair with his power rather than dark-sided. The

man who was a knight. The knight who’d have stood up to defend that connection he had with

someone else, with a lady, against anybody. The knight who would have stood up in the cafe,

26

approached the table with this weak-lipped curly-haired Alex, whoever the fuck he was, and

shouted firmly, listen son: You know nothing of how to treat this girl, you know nothing of how

she feels, but I’ll know how you’ll feel when I lay you out. And Tim would then become the

knight who'd have pulled weak-lip Alex up by the collar and smashed his long nose into a

bloodpulp with a sudden head butt, and then become the knight who'd crack Alex’s jaw with his

fist, and then the knight who'd stand on the back o f Alex’s legs and demand that he say uncle!

Say uncle! Say uncle! He might be a knight who'd laugh at such a sight, or at least smile beneath

the mask.

Tim shook his head. He recognized being a knight would be tough. In those frequent

hypothetical spirals he found his mind sliding along, he always wound up somewhere dark,

bruised, grinning, intoxicated, and there was blood.

Whether or not Tim knew it then, or if he knew it whether or not he could admit it, or if

he only knew it after everything, the best he would ever do in any case would be to rise as a black

joker, a frolicking anarchist in someone else’s court, or the worst he would ever do was scour as

an empty loser driven by brooding vengeance without any title at all.

But he felt Carina waiting for him, and he blew off his imagination with a long sigh. “I

don’t know how I feel,” he told her. “She just— it seemed she understood me. It seemed— I felt a

connection with her on some level that was more fundamental than...” He shrugged.

Carina nodded slowly. “I see. I understand that, you know. But Tim, how will it help you

to harden your heart to everyone else in the world? And wait for someone to change you?

Because that’s what you’re doing.”

“Come on. You’re young. But I’ve been cruising for awhile even before this happened.

Before I saw her die. What if all I can do is stay? Or re-imagine what I saw over and over?”

“That’s not what it means, Tim. It could mean that if you can do what you can, and you

can imagine something greater, then the past can’t hold you back. Right? It’s all the future, or it

could be. Right? It’s what this fortune teller is. She’s just reading what you see in yourself. She’s

reading the things you want for yourself. Your desires. Know what I mean? So think about it.

What do you want to make for your own future, Tim?”

He looked away. Then he shrugged. “I don’t care.”

27

What Tim discovered over late-night-breakfast with Robin was that he was most afraid of

becoming anything the likes of Sly Melson.

Nobody is really named Sly, nor is anyone really sumamed Melson. But Sly Melson went

by this name— this was the first thing that infuriated Tim about Melson when he met him, the

fakest name of all.

Tim and Robin met Melson at the diner after the psychic— Tim assumed Carina must

have gone home to sleep for school the next morning. Tim and Robin were both drunk, and

Melson knew Robin from whichever nefarious locale they’d met at before.

Melson joined them at the table. His hellish thinness was accentuated by his tailored

purple suede jacket and slim grey slacks, his grey button up unbuttoned to reveal a swinging

silver apple pendant. His brunet hair was cut to make him look like a member of the Clash before

the blond accents, and Tim speculated his hair was the secret of his success with women.

“Sly Melson!” Robin cried, clapping his hands as Sly sat beside him. “Melson, the sexiest

sexist man in town.”

“Slow down, tits,” Sly laughed. “That’s all a little much, ya think?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s a little much,” Robin slurred, and they traded mock blows.

“Guess what?” Melson asked Robin.

“What?”

“Yay!” And Melson slipped, almost imperceptibly, a small zip baggie from his jacket

pocket into Robin’s hand.

“Yay.” Robin smiled. “By god, yay indeed.”

The second thing that Tim couldn’t stand, watching this stupid banter in front of the

entire diner, was Melson’s easy demeanor. He was everybody’s best friend. Hadn’t he heard that

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old saying? A friend to all is a friend to none. And it was embodied in Mel son, always rubbing

against and trading with a hundred people in a room.

When people like Melson didn’t know anybody, they instantly made friends— they were

not friends, Tim thought with a frown, people you picked up anywhere in five seconds. It was not

possible they were actually friends, nor that this man was actually friends with anybody.

But how could Melson do it? Make them believe it? In which soul whoring black magic

did he participate to make it so? Tim knew it was just that: Soul whoring. A man like Melson

could never be a real person, never real to himself nor real with his emotions with other people.

After Robin and Melson took a break together in the restroom to huff the cocaine from

the baggie through presumably a trimmed straw or rolled bill, Robin introduced Sly to Tim— he’d

met him another time, but neither of them could remember. Sly didn’t remember Tim. Sly met

Tim again, and Tim tried his best to remain polite.

But then, two women walked in who seemed to be tourists from their strange beige

outfits and red eyes, signaling the beginning of the third thing Tim hated about Sly Melson.

“See those girls?” Melson asked.

“See them.” Said Robin.

“It’s easy— easiest thing ever.”

“No way.”

“Easy. Easiest ever.”

“You prove it.” Robin dipped his fingers into his glass of water and snorted water

droplets into each nostril. “Proof pudding.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Proof pudding. How about you prove it, pudding? Oh.” Robin said suddenly. He put his

fingers to his temples. “Wait. Oh, wait—you did it before. Yeah. Saw it. No, I know. I know.”

“Then prove it to me,” Tim said suddenly, smiling and sitting up, crossing his arms. “I

want to see because I don’t believe you can pick up both those girls at once right now. Especially

not in the state you’re in, so compromised and so full.” So full of himself, Tim had been thinking,

saying only half of it.

“You just have to talk to them, mans.” Melson smiled at Tim. Then Melson whirled to

the table behind him, and Tim could hear the general bits of his pick up: Do you have the time?

Oh you’re from Ireland—you don’t have my time. Could I borrow yours anyway? On and on and

29

on. He worked borrowing the time into borrowing a bottle of ketchup. And within thirty seconds,

the two girls had joined them for late-late pancakes.

After Melson left the diner to walk the women out, Tim told Robin how he felt.

“Can you fucking believe that guy?”

“Believe what?”

“Come on, Robin. He’s a dog and a slime who treats women like objects, like things. It’s

easy, it’s easy. That is terrible, don’t you think? And you hang around guys like him?”

Robin leaned forward. “Tim, calm down. Calm down. It could be much worse you

know.”

“Well,” Tim began, “you really should think about it. Guys like Sly Melson— I mean,

come on. He’s a symptom of a bigger problem. He’s another symptom of white privilege and of

cysnormative values. He’s an abuser— ”

“Tim. Really calm down,” Robin countered.

Tim couldn’t read his face. Was it the cocaine? It was as if his job were to act as the

numb-faced foil of ethical disagreements. “What?”

“Guys like Sly Melson—calm down. Really calm down. The man is a cheese ball sleaze

ball grease ball. Didn’t you know that the moment you met him— oh, you did. Tychonaut, you

did— that look, and all your big sighing. You did. And so do they, these women— he’s made no

secret about anything he is to anybody. He tells these girls— two girls from China, and he tells

these girls straight to their gorgeous ass faces that he’s dying of yellow fever— he’s laughing and

laughing— he tells the single red head in the room that he’s got more than enough soul for her

soulless ass—he’s laughing and laughing, and they all laugh back. They all laugh back. Tim, you

gotta accept how it is here— he’s laughing and he’s fixing their lapels and smoothing them down

at the same time, smiling. And that’s how he wins, Tim. They know what to expect from him, so

he’s safe, even if the expectation is shit. It’s still dead on. He’s honest. Don’t be jealous— ”

“I’m not jealous— ”

“Tim, really calm down. Really calm down. Cause you’re jealous. Calm down and tell

the truth, cause you’re jealous. Tell it.” He stood, reaching for Tim’s collar.

“Okay,” Tim conceded. “Fine. I feel a little jealous of Sly Melson.”

“See!” Robin slapped the table top.

30

“Pm jealous! Okay. Pm a little bit jealous because a guy like him is a dog who treats

women like shit, but he uses whatever magic he’s got up his sleeve, or where ever, and still wins

them over, and I can’t even make a normal conversation. How!”

“You’re not listening. There isn’t a magic trick. It’s what he said: He just talks to them.

He doesn’t give a fuck. He’s safe because they know right away he’s a sleeze ball greese ball

cheese ball— whatever I said before. They already know. No surprises. Honesty. And— now listen

to me,” and Robin leaned into Tim now— he stood, moved to Tim’s side of the table, his arm

around him, hushed voice. “So think he’s a sleeze if you want. Think this, that, and think the

other one, too. But his disrespect of women goes only so far as being quite sleezy, quite sub par,

and cheating on them— and he tells them so. He tells them so! They know it, everyone knows it.

Cheat cheaty. But he just talks to them, and flirts, and plays the guitar, and writes poems on a

typewriter, and gives them kisses, and tells the shitty truth. And they follow up if they feel like it.

“But a guy like Sly Melson doesn’t guilt trip women into doing things they don’t want to

do. Right?” Robin’s face was still numb and flat as ever. But Tim saw the cruel mien in his eyes.

Tim saw how his eyes cut through the walls. “He doesn’t prey on girls who are used to being

treated like dirt. Right? He doesn’t beg for sex. He’s not mad when he gets rejected. He doesn’t

bring friends over for threesomes and try to guilt trip them into that either— I’m talking from

experience, Tim, because I know some Swedish shits like that— motherfuckers—just last week,

with my friend, the shit he pulled— and I swear to motherfucking god, goddamn it— ” Robin

slammed the table. He slammed it four and five times with a white knuckled fist.

The diner quieted, and they both looked around as people looked away.

Robin held his hands up, closed his eyes, took a breath. “He’s already gonna die, Robin.

He’s already gonna die— I can tell myself, see. He’s already gonna die before both of us, before

you and before me, because of his shitty European diet of mouth tobacco and whole milk. But

Tim, you.” He waved a finger at Tim. “You. You. And Sly Melson. Just know there are far worse

men than Sly Melson. That’s all Pm saying.” Then Robin dug back into his basket of French

fries. He wiped the grease through his hair.

Tim shook his head slowly and took a sip of his milkshake. And he thought some more.

He didn’t know what Robin was talking about. Tim knew he had missed the point. But it was

obvious there were worse men in the world, and Robin had met them. Tim realized he should

trust Robin. “It could be worse than Sly Melson,” Tim repeated to Robin.

31

Tim knew Robin was right because he could imagine what he could not know. San

Francisco was crawling with people like Sly Melson. The whole fucking world was. But also it

was crawling with men who were worse, from goading bros all the way up to violent rapists—

truly abusive men. People with total disregard to the feelings of another human being. People

who couldn’t imagine the suffering of another human being, or could, but suppressed empathy

with anything that numbed them from feeling. With dope. With money. It was sick.

Tim’s lips tightened. The things he would do to them, these people, if he could get his

hands on one. The tortures he would inflict in retaliation. How long it would last and how he’d

force them to feel it, force them to stay awake with the drugs he’d inject into them before he

peeled the skin back slowly from sensitive key regions with blunt tools— this line of imagination

went on and on and on with Tim. Yeah, he knew he could do it. He knew he could— God, what if

Olivia had experienced men like that? He was confident she hadn’t because of her limitless

strength and poise. Nobody could have taken advantage of her because she’d never, ever let them,

he knew. But what of others?

He nodded, took another sip of his milkshake. Tim’s sense of justice was well defined. It

was sick: Tim knew that they knew, these fucking people, how they were cogs in a self-sustaining

cycle of sexual depreciation. These fucking people treated women the same way, all like dirt, and

so women were used to it, and so when the shittier, drunker friends of Sly Melson came over and

insisted they sleep in the girl’s room, she might almost say okay if she didn’t trust him, or maybe

even say yes if she trusted him barely. And then the shittier friend would believe anything was

fair game. Tim knew the shittier friend should suffer for a decision like that. But if not, if there

wasn’t time for suffering, death was fine too: Tim knew he could simply shoot the shittier friend

in the stomach, one time, two times, and leave him in a piss pooled alleyway to suffer the burning

lead, leave him pleading with a trashcan or a stray cat to make the suffering end.

Yet was it not the Sly Melson who introduced the Swedish shit or the goading bro or the

violent rapist to the girl in the first place? So what of the world’s Sly Melsons? Guilt through

consequence. Guilt through the association in the geometric expansion of consequence from key,

belligerent decisions. Tim knew. He knew. Nobody was innocent.

Sly returned from outside back to their table, to his seat beside Robin, the two of them

dumbfaced like geese. Tim decided right then as he finished his milkshake with a self-satisfied,

smug smile, smug like the one in Olvia’s memorial photo, that should he ever happen on the

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opportunity to maim or kill a violent rapist or a goading bro or a Swedish shit or even an

introducing Sly Melson, he would do his best to take the opportunity without hesitation.

Spinning and spinning, still missing, missing, missing. It was 4 AM, but the dancing and

swilling and huffing continued. Sodom by the sea. The house overlooked the bay, somewhere, all

the people shoulder-to-shoulder in the dim light except for glowing places where people danced,

the vinyl playing much slower than normal. Uppity post-punk tunes from the 1980s gone to dancy

trudge. All of the people were writhing in time, eyes slinking across bodies. The house was a

slopped crock pot of desire of all kinds. Kissing on couches, sitting in sinks, shooting up in the

hallway— Tim had passed that scene quickly as the three of them entered, not looking again, the

needle pressing in, the thinnest boy in the world in stitches as his friend injected himself.

From the doorway he leaned against, Tim had already given up watching Sly Melson,

two hours into a closed conversation on one end of a cigarette-burned couch, hissing into the ear

of the thinnest girl in the roam. For a time. The conversation ended with his tongue slither

slathering sexforce nonsense into her mouth. Tim knew not how swiftly it would take for one to

tow the other away elsewhere. Tim couldn’t read Melson: Sucked into the girl and the moment,

his face was a void as they walked past Tim to the elsewhere.

Robin. Between bathroom breaks to snort cocaine, presumably, and backyard breaks to

smoke cigarettes, certainly, Robin seemed in his element among the drift— Tim was sure he could

call these people the drift. Their cheap beer and collars and torn leather, the chokers, the dye and

odd haircuts and strange hem trims let him know. Fried hair and tired eyes and frayed lapels.

Counter culture uniformity. The new drift. Not like the drift he’d admired in high school. Robin

played to these crowds, his crass jokes, his vicious sight. He jumped and slapped and swooped,

and they laughed and laughed and laughed in circles around him. Robin’s face never changed.

Maybe it really was the cocaine— Tim heard it numbed one’s face as much as it numbed one’s

heart, but he refused to try it, sticking with what he knew in codeine, vicodin, valium, alcohol,

and milkshakes. Robin bellowed and even grinned. But his eyes never changed. He didn’t act like

someone so numb. Tim wondered how Robin’s feelings changed as he flirted with the drift.

Where was Tim’s own place in the drift? Maybe they were the people with whom he

could belong.

33

Maybe they were people who would understand his divestment, wondering as he

wondered whether it was a lack of equity of his soul and roots or if it was lack of placement in

something he did possess but could not recognize. He did not appear as they did, nor talk as they

did. He didn’t understand the musical artifacts and moments of rejection he heard them trade.

They traded these conceits formed as questions but inflected as statements. Haven’t you heard of

Swag Suicide, one asked another. Haven’t you heard of Bush Tetras, one asked another. Haven’t

you heard of Venusian Sex Pirates, one asked another. Haven’t you heard of Sons of Sound— oh,

of course you have, so very mainstream, right? My principal asked me to leave my high school,

one admitted to another. My mom asked me to leave my town, one admitted to another. My

boyfriend asked me to leave my girlfriend, one admitted to another. Tim knew they were shaping

moments together and how they were seen— scene? But something about them still made him

wonder if he could belong.

“You like to watch,” she said— Tim flinched. She was standing there beside him against

the doorway, a short girl with a septum piercing, dark and curious eyes, swarthy, curly hair in a

beanie. She held a Pabst in one hand and her cell phone in the other.

“I know, right?” He told her, laughing. But it was only a tell since he had no idea what to

say to people at this sort of party. It was so awkward. He never had any idea what to say to

anyone unless he were drunk enough to drivel. He’d hardly maintained a buzz since they’d left

psychic’s house.

“I never know what to say to people at this sort o f party,” she laughed. “It’s hella

awkward,” she laughed again. She made eye contact in spare bursts.

Tim’s face flushed. She’d read his fucking mind. He looked at her with an open mouth, a

feeling of panic.

“I just try to tell the truth,” she continued. “And I can tell you like to watch.”

There was nothing Tim could say. Could tell he liked to watch. What did it mean? Was it

single speak or dual speak? How could he respond?

In the single speak layer, it was true: He’d just been standing on the outskirts of the party

staring in, trying to make sense of human interaction, the gestures and the words. He didn’t want

to say that Holden-fucking-Caulfield thing. It made sense in high school. It sort of made sense

now. He wanted to belong. But what was the cost of belonging? So yes, he very much was a

watcher on the outskirts like he’d been a watcher of Olivia before too, before he saw her bum to

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death in the park by an exploding book, and he knew it was insane that this girl knew this, that

she lifted it from his mind through his eyes.

And what o f the dual speak layer? Could tell he liked to watch. Did this g irl... want him?

He felt so embarrassed. Who knows what happened at parties like this one with people like the

drift? Maybe she wanted him to want to watch her with others, and that’s really what she was

asking, and this was an invitation to engage in something sexually depraved. Maybe she wanted

him to want to watch her in another room, on another couch, riding completely bare except for

her white socks on another cock in short, slapping bursts. Tim really had no idea. But then— yes,

he remembered. Yes. How she wouldn’t look him in the eye. How she had been drinking. How

wild this party had been with this drift, these people from fuck forsaken Oakland neighborhoods.

A place where dreams go to die. She couldn’t look him in the eye. O f course.

Tim’s face was on fire. How she’d drank and couldn’t look him in the eye, and her friend.

How shameful and how lurid. This girl was nothing like Olivia. But, conversely, Robin had been

telling him to push past his discomfort and, in fact, to specifically do the things that made him

uncomfortable. So maybe, though this girl could be nothing like Olivia, just maybe he should

indulge in her invitation. Indulge and give over to his id and whichever fucked up desires came to

either of them, or anyone, as they penetrated each other on another couch in another room and he

fulfilled her lust in wanting him to want to watch these sick things.

Tim recalled the film Caligula, the old one. He’d never seen it. But he’d heard all about

it. He knew damn well what happened at parties in this city full of sin and bodily destruction in

the name of orgasm.

His mind was made up. “All right,” he finally said, raising his eyes to her silhouette and

the dancers beyond. He laughed. He rubbed his hands together. The girl had retreated to her

phone. He came closer. “Oh my god. So. Listen. About what you wanted.”

“Huh?” She lifted her face to his.

And she was not the girl from before. This girl— but who was this? This girl was a

blonde, not in a beanie at all. Not with a Pabst at all. This was a blonde in a black tank top

smoking an electronic cigarette. Tim looked past her and around the crowded room, and the

beanie girl was nowhere at all, only dim lit shadow people. She’d left. He’d never see her again.

It was so so so embarrassing. Hell was in his face. “Excuse me,” he told the blonde, and

pushed his way through the crowd toward the outside.

35

How ludicrous, what he’d thought, he thought. How depraved and how irrational. Tim

knew he was the sickest person in the entire world. Tim wondered if he should die for the things

he thought— no, no, he thought. No. His thought that his thoughts alone were not enough to

warrant his death.

Regardless, Tim knew the drift had deceived him completely: It had baited him with false

expectations, led him to imagine disgusting tableaus through its antics and a giving-a-fuck-while-

not-giving-a-fuck ethos. He’d even considered wanting to belong to them. Well. Fuck you.

Maybe the drift were phonies, after all— there it was— he’d said it, though he’d been holding

back— and they could never understand him.

Tim stood motionless for a while in the writing house party. There was nothing he could

do to stop these people, either. He longed for more alcohol and more opiates in a new milkshake.

He longed to be with Olivia as much as he longed to be without Olivia. No more fires.

Outside, Tim found Robin smoking, watching the sunrise over the hills. “Are you ready,

Tychonaut?” Robin asked Tim, throwing an arm around him.

As they walked away, Tim vowed never to belong to the drift.

Hours later, Tim and Robin were on Market Street. They’d been staring red-eyed out

from the cafe into the rush hour blitz, different kinds of people singing in different cars or on

scooters or on foot, when one of them broke their silence.

“You really can’t stop thinking about this.” Robin finally said.

Tim stopped staring at the melting ice in his glass and noticed, then, Robin and his pained

gaze. “Yeah,” Tim said. “I guess I can’t.”

“Did you know this girl, Olivia? Urn,” Robin smirked, “um, or, um, had you known her?”

He laughed, pointing to someone invisible beside himself.

Tim forgave Robin’s insensitive delirium. He liked being lost in Robin’s haze, the thin,

grinning exhaustion. He liked that Robin was free. He said what he believed, did what he felt.

Robin trusted himself.

In reality, Robin had thought as close to nothing as one of his ability could manage since

the psychic’s house. He’d watched himself talk for even longer. He said first and thought later—

thought never, if he could have helped it, as an ambition. He intended, as an ambition, to watch

himself in action so as to not hear himself in thought.

36

Tim sighed. “But I’d planned on talking to her.”

Robin sniffed, dry and focused, rubbed his nose, lit a new cigarette. “The cosmic

misadventures of a sentient babe. The salmon are born to fight upstream only to mate and die,

Sisyphus had his boulder. You work upstream against your nerve to have your dreams combust

before you.” He waved his cigarette around. “Look: I’m sorry. And yes, yes, yes, yes, I

understand it. Man. People— fuck, it’s hard— someone to understand. You, I mean. How do you

find it? Chemistry? That thing— call it whatever. Sexforce. Force stuff. But meeting someone

who has it— you know it right away, oh, fifteen— five or three seconds, you know it. Hard to find.

I’m sorry.”

“I’m not like you, Robin. It took me fifteen or sixteen weeks, or however long the

semester is because I really don’t know how to open up to women, but I was ready. And then— ”

“Forces beyond your control. Pieces falling like they do— the fucking world, yeah?” He

nodded. “You know, you’re shell shocked. They don’t call it that now. They call it something

else— everyone calls the same thing something else and the game is changed. But I call it shell

shocked. Shell shocked. Shell shocked, man. I mean, nobody expects a terrorist event.

“Listen,” he puffed, leaned toward Tim. “Two years ago— I was backpacking in

Varanasi— I saw bodies being burned on the river bank. Everyone talks about that. But I stood

there and experienced it. And frankly, man— and I’m not insensitive— ”

“Right? You’re really more empathetic than most. And a better listener.” Tim told him.

“Sure. But real honesty: I had no reaction watching those bodies bum. Nothing. It was

like the flat nothing in the monk’s eyes who was handling all the bodies— he was so tan, black

clothes with an ashen sheen— like, his eyes were gazing through you in four dimensions, from my

birth to my death, inside me.” He repeated it: “Nothing. I saw some lady, once her wrappings and

all that had burned off—the oils and fat in her skin made this sizzling, boiling sound. Ssszzzzzzzz.

I saw a little kid burn too. But it was the context, Tim—there was no shock because I expected

it.” He waved his hands, sniffing again, but settled with another anecdote. “Seeing a chicken that

still had a muscle spasm in its thigh after being butchered for lunch in a rural market took more

guts to watch. Context is everything.”

Tim needn’t try hard to grasp the image, eccrine sweat glands and subcutaneous fat all

sizzling— 4boiling’ was the stronger word Robin used. Boiling. Robin’s anecdote. A mother and

37

child. Tim remembered her again, her on the grass, her in the sun, her with the book— he

swallowed the lump in his throat, gulped it down with his cocktail.

Robin noticed the gulp. “Okay, okay, okay-I’m sorry. Listen: I’m sorry.” He straightened

out for a second try; he was determined to help Tim. “Okay. Okay, forget that whole thing. Forget

it—listen: Really calm down and listen. You can’t do much about death or terrorists or money.

But there will be other people, Tim. There are other girls, I swear, more time— ”

“No,” Tim said, crossing his arms.

“— always be more chances— ”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

“What do you mean, ‘no?’ Why are you so distressed by the prospect of moving on,

Tim?”

“I mean—yes, obviously there are other females in the world, Robin. But no. ‘Other

fishes,”’ Tim scare quoted. “That’s not why I’m talking to you about this. It’s bullshit, it’s

irrelevant.”

“Why do you feel that’s bullshit, Tim?” Robin had the high, melodic quality of a specs

and moustache wearing psychotherapist, a cocaine addled Freud.

“You want to analyze me, doctor?” Tim snapped. He was shaking his head then. “And

you know something else...”

They fell into a layered spat stoked on the heat of strong morning liquor, blinded with

closed eyes by one or two sleepless nights behind them both, the dulling of drugs, Robin’s

narcotic blur and Tim’s lingering shell shock and yesterday’s opiate milkshake. But it passed. It

all passed with time.

Minutes later, they fell again into more quiet staring at Market Street. Tim noticed an

androgynous hulk of soiled jackets and scarves pushing a cart past them, the cart brimming with

survivalist dos and OCD management don’ts, and also, timed to the turning o f the traffic lights,

waves of workers in slacks and jackets. Tim watched Robin watch, in his pallored dishevelry, the

‘close-cut-urban-work zombies’ he always detested. Robin watched the flow of people as distant

things passing through temporal waves of some worldly ocean upon which he could float, but

within which he could not swim.

“Robin,” Tim said. “Are we nothing people?”

He shook his head. “What do you mean?”

38

“I mean, well— I don’t know. Nothing people. Are we nothing people? Are we so

disconnected from— whatever— that we are nothing people?”

Robin winced and kept shaking his head. Nothing people? A nothing person? The void?

But then again, Robin did feel that big empty, that clawing, gnawing nag in the sagging parts of

his guts that there was always something more to do or somewhere else to be or somebody new.

Drugs, drugs, and drugs. But Tim was so different from Robin. Yet Robin did feel that

hollowness.

The moment had nearly passed, and Robin knew he should answer something to this

issue of nothingness between him and Tim, and answer something to the nothingness within

himself. All he could say was, “maybe.”

A couple of well-dressed tourists with a shoulder-burrowing nine-year-old took seats at

the table beside them. They opened their guidebook and continued their argument about where to

get Neapolitan ice cream at 8:30am— the little burrower would have her day after all. The man

thick in a beige sweater, chuckling, the woman thin in enormous black glasses, chuckling. This

husband and wife smiled as they argued, laughing when they shook their heads, always holding

hands.

“Tim,” Robin finally said. “Everything is about to change. You know— I’m sorry, man,

okay. I know. I just want you to understand— well, didn’t they make you read that book, Old Man

and the Sea? I know you’ve hooked the best fish, the biggest one. That’s a motherfucker of a fish,

a beauty fish. But remember— all eaten. Sharks got it first. They always do. That’s all. Maybe

fate, or the universe, whateverthefuck— maybe whatever it is did you a favor cutting that line now

not later, see? See, man?”

Tim crossed his arms, shook his head. Sharks get it first. They always do.

“But listen— listen listen, here. You’re going to study abroad in Athens! Living on the

other side of the world changes you. You’re going to be new! You’re going to find the purpose

you need, man. Leave this rut.” Robin stubbed out his cigarette. “Did you finally apply?”

Tim looked Robin in the eye, but could only put his hands behind his head.

‘ Wo.”

“I don’t know. I just missed it. It’s not safe there now anyway since the revolution.” Tim

noticed Robin writhe in his seat. “I mean, it’s a powder keg there. Nobody wants to stop revolting

it seems like. I mean, being truthful, okay, I’m thinking of dropping from Cal altogether.”

39

Robin could only shake, the dumb and open shake. It was the look and the feeling— he

was feeling again now— of watching his airborne science project plow into the trees on its maiden

flight. The time. The effort. The love. All gone. “Unbelievable.”

“You dropped. What do you care?”

“But you have a chance! And I had an opportunity to record music with— so why would I

pass that up?”

“Like you say, everybody’s dying already. Do we really need another doctor?”

“You don’t even know why.” He laughed. “Hell, man. I think you’re afraid because of

what happened. Do you really have that little conviction?” He sniffed, rubbed his face. “Hell.

Hell, hell, hell. What the can you do? The world is on fire. It happens everywhere. It happened

here. You have to do what you need to do. You can’t be afraid all the time. You have to face it—

fear— aggressively, always.”

And then the sweater-clad tourist from the table beside them finally found a place to

chime in. “I couldn’t help but overhearing. Your friend is right. We can’t sit and worry or be

afraid. And the big picture: We’re all in this together, son. We live in a world and a country of

wonderful opportunity.” he said. “No reason to be afraid o f Paki fundamentalists and their

terrorism or anything else. We’ve been though a lot as a society, and I think we’ll make it through

this as well.”

Tim looked to Robin apprehensively. Robin was grinning at these people, grinning at the

beige sweatered man and his withered wife and whining daughter. Robin’s hands were folded

neatly on the table. He was about to release the grandest of secrets, Tim could see in his wrinkled

cheeks and brow.

“Pakis? Are you sure? What if I told you,” Robin leaned in, “it was the niggers again?”

The man’s eyes scrunched up as his wife brought a hand to her mouth, then to her child’s

ears. “Excuse me?”

“They hate America too. And they kill people all the time. Right Tim?” And Robin

grinned madly at Tim, who was frozen and open-mouthed with terror.

And again with the slurring. Tim had seen this confrontation before—that time it was at

Denny’s and about Roger’s marriage to Chuck— and knew what was coming next. “Robin. Let’s

g o ”

40

The man’s face twisted. “Um. This has nothing to do with race. What I mean is that these

guys are indoctrinated. The political situation and their upbringing— I mean, it’s not exactly the

best place to foster liberal thinking and an acceptance of a fellow people, right?”

“Exactly,” his wife added. “It’s about ignorance and a lack of opportunity and that feeling

of needing to belong, or have a future or a stake in something. And how dare you, sir? To say this

in front of our daughter. We raised her to never hear such words. It’s not about race. It’s about the

fact that these people have been disenfranchised.”

“Robin, let’s get the bill now.”

“We paid the bill up front,” Robin reminded Tim. “Well I’m so so sorry for slurring.

Pakis!” He shouted, laughing and rising to his feet, chair scraping, zipping his leather jacket. He

snorted and rubbed his face violently. He was finally feeling again and not thinking at all and so

he continued. “Who you even talking about? You could be talking about anybody. You might be

talking about yourself.”

“I’m talking about the Islamic State— ”

“But how do you know they were Pakis fo r sure] Huh? For sure!” Then Robin suggested

an answer. “I know, I know: You read it somewhere. Yeah! You read it on the internet— the

internets\ The Facebooksl”

“Ro-bin,” Tim was straining, hoarsely whispering, shading his eyes. To sink. To sink into

the deepest seat in the cafe.

“Obviously I read it somewhere,” the man answered, flashing and pulling at his sweater.

“We all have the same information, buddy. It’s been on every station on television and in all print

for a week.” He went a step further. “I know all you Frisco liberals enjoy conspiracy theories— ”

“And Miller Jeffs told you to say that on the television too, right? And Paki

fundamentalists, too? You and your—Exceptionalists!” Robin pointed at the couple, waving at

people around the cafe. “Everyone! Look! Here! Exceptionalists!”

“We are not Exceptionalists,” the wife insisted.

“You Exceptionalists, and your talking heads, pissing their pants and you wouldn’t even

know it. Barf this 6Paki’ shit up all over me— it’s not even your slur to slur you idiot regurgitater,

you cocksucking nincompoop.” Robin gestured roughly at them with his empty highball glass.

“Miller Jeffs for Fox News is a fuckface. But was your daddy buried too deep in his sissy when

41

you came around to know even which side of motherfucking Mason-Dixon you and your little

bitches are on, yeah?”

And that’s when the man’s daughter cried “mommy” and whined into the withering

wife’s shoulder, the wife screaming curses once the punches were unloaded and Robin’s glass

flew and they all realized Robin caused the blood babbling from the man’s temple or nose as he

sank to the floor covering his eyes.

Tim and Robin—they ran, hurtling over the fence, chair tossing and stumbles, a

stumbling woman and flying attache and cars screeching as they split off in opposite directions.

One moment of eye contact, Robin shouting, “stay in school, Tim!” and “Athens!

Athens! Athens! Athens!” and he was blasting away through traffic into concealing alleyway

blight.

42

It was another date in— they all were now, the safety of the basement, the dark, the cold,

the dral'ty vault. Robin’s basement apartment, a compartment for clothes, instruments, cobwebs

and now wine and candle lit dinners with Carina.

Carina—he still stared, an undeniable beauty— the softest skin he’d seen, the shine in her

blond-white hair. She laughed all the time, her lips flushed like lily petals. She hit him on the arm,

leaned in when she talked to him, moved her lips silently when she arranged pens and papers. But

lately, he found himself trying not to stare anymore.

“It’s really good.” She said.

“What’s really good?”

She glanced down. “I’m talking about your spaghetti.”

“Oh. Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She took a sip, then another bite. “What’s wrong with you?” She asked him.

“Nothing.”

“‘Nothing.’ You’re tense. Do you feel okay?” And she pushed a bare foot up against the

pit o f his knee, smiling, winding more spaghetti. “Poor boy feels like nothing. Do you need

help?”

Robin remembered the first time they’d had sex— it was the night they met, only minutes

after they’d met, a loss in utter lust and wonder. Pure id. Amazing.

They’d met at a house party in Oakland. Who knows who’d thrown it, Robin following a

friend’s friend to the friend’s friend’s place after meeting them at the bar beside the recording

studio. It was a typical Victorian house, but it was overflowing this night with two hundred

people dripping alcoholic sweat, dancing in huddled frenzies, jackets and shirts and shoes off.

Robin had been working hard to goad others into drinking the rest of the bottle of Jose

he’d half finished. No takers: He finished the bottle, thus only slightly upsetting the three-part-

43

harmony of cocaine, marijuana, and tequila that had fueled his impetuous, shirtless romp through

the city, the glass juggling and street singing and joints raining down on begging strangers.

But then, in the backyard, she appeared to him beside the barrel fire: She was slender,

white hair, tied white sleeveless blouse, tattoos up her arms, blue pants and boots, all of her

looking like a sailor. She, like Robin, wasn’t cold in the night. Their eyes were already locked in

the first moment he’d seen her. And in his heat, he approached her right away, pale blue piercing

eyes and white hair— she seemed glowing ivory, otherworldly, in the red fire light and pink city

reflection from the clouds. And her tattoos, their vivid color coming through even in the night: on

her left arm was a magnificently detailed Saraswati, eyes intent; on her right arm was a ruffled

peacock, eyes intent, and all its high rising feathers had eyes intent as well.

“Wow,” Robin remembered saying, “look at you, lady. You’re full o f eyes. You must see

everything.”

Carina struck a pose like Rosie-the-Riveter-cum-wrestler, showing off her arms. “All

eyes are on you. I have ten pairs of eyes here. Can you see them?”

He smiled. “I’m Robin. Who are you?”

“Carina.” And she offered her hand, leaning in, a scent of lavender and sweat.

“Are you sure there are ten?” Robin’s fingers passed from her hand up her arm, and he

used his finger tips to count all the eyes, slowly, two-by-two, softly, his finger prints pressing in.

And she did indeed have ten pairs of eyes. Then he looked her in the face, her then hooded eyes

hooking into his, and he ran his fingers across her eyelids. “These were the ones I noticed first.”

There it was, in an instant, the first kind of heat: All kissing, squeezing, holding, running,

rushing up the stairs not fast enough into an unknown— he threw his arm around the man on the

phone, sorry comrade, and pushed him out—the door slamming, the untying, the grips and pulls,

the push down and the dive, Robin losing his face between her legs, the deepening and rolling,

the motion across wet skins hot enough to bum the block down as they frenzy fucked their way to

slopped laughing in arms and ankled pants, laughing, laughing, and finally asking with dumb

glee, “did that just happen, did that just happen,” answered to more open mouthed laughing, and

finally, calm, fingers winding around nipples and tiny hairs, finally time to see, to open eyes, to

all eyes intent.

44

These people were beautiful in their addled id. Carina was beautiful, Robin thought, with

so much artless hope and free spirit in her eyes. She had made him feel connected in such a hot

moment way, the heat of a time and place as much as of bodies.

They spent the rest of the night together, and the next day they ate together, and the next

day, and the next day. He made spaghetti on all those days for her.

But something changed as time had passed. One thing cooled while another thing

warmed. The wandering eyes.

Was it sex? Their sex had changed from transcendence to love-making to fucking to

principle rape...Robin stopped himself. That wasn’t true at all. Manic. That sort of talk was

exaggeration and aggrandizement. But it was how he felt.

Because what was happening now— his forced smile, his forever staring at their twirling

of spaghetti any and every night— was embarrassment. Was that the word? Probably not. He

couldn’t look Carina in the eyes.

Shit, Robin, he chided himself, you were above this. A pariah, yes. Anarchist. Feminist.

Outrage. Yes. But now a pervertl

Conscience? Really. He wasn’t sure he could admit that— the word! Pervert. Listen to it,

pervert. It was like the word “abuse.” Even thinking it to himself, not even hearing it, he’d shake

his head, tug on his jacket or cigarette. He’d get defensive against himself for thinking it about

himself—now wait, listen: taboos, man. It’s 2020 and you’re still concerned with statutory rape?

You’d let a seventeen year old drive a one-ton Lexus to her campus at eighty miles-per-hour at 8

AM, but not let her drive it to her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend’s place at 8 PM? Or be driven

by him? Their first moment had been entirely mutual. He hadn’t preyed on her— maybe they’d

preyed on each other, the kind of zeal and puckering sex had in the first weeks. Come on.

But come on, Robin thought to himself. Objectification. He was embarrassed for what he

desired— what he had desired. He had what he desired, and didn’t know what he desired after

he’d had it—had her. Yeah, see? Robin was completely self-aware— now. He knew he’d made

the girl an object. And deep down he knew that was it from day one, no better than some mouth-

breathing troll slouching around streets, cruising around campuses or Starbuckses until he found

his way to the right party, and there she was. Was that how it had been? It’s like he’d been

dancing with abandon at the duchess’s party with a plastic party mask and Champagne spilt

across his shirt, but realized eventually he was dancing with his pants down all along.

45

It was bad, he knew, because the more time he gave Carina, the more he watched as she

inquired about the world, the more he loved her company and knew he could not leave her. The

more time he gave Carina, the more he knew he would fight to balance the weight of their past

with the floating desires of present.

He loved that Carina had been emancipated. He loved that she didn’t know everything,

but thought she did. He loved that she couldn’t be cynical. He loved that she wrote letters with

ink drawings. She made him want to give more and hate less— Carina hated only as a figure of

speech, tossed around with a stamp of her boot and feisty boasting. He wanted less to have sex

and more to just talk and lose himself in the playground of her hypotheticals and mazey

questions. Wonder what had happened to blue-iced glaciers. Wonder who the first ape to cook

dik-dik for dinner. Wonder what makes cells die. Wonder how space could curve. Wonder what

they’d say to handcuffed Hitler over spatzle and meatballs, if they’d had the fucking chance.

Wonder where all the time went. She saw the world differently, heard different music, admired

different people, believed in something beyond nothing. To him, Carina was a person who

wondered and felt everything, adrift but focused, all feels but articulate. And, relatively, Robin

felt and wondered about nothing at all. Sometimes he wondered if that were true, if he felt

nothing at all.

He glanced up to Carina, watching her change through the wine glass as he brought it to

his face. Maybe it wasn’t true. But why was there such distance among the trifected points of

what he thought, how he felt, and what he did? He stared back at the back of his hand. He

wondered if these newly wandered eyes were true or merely a way out.

She’d been staring at him. She’d kept staring when he couldn’t.

She sat up, tossed her napkin down. “Enough with the non-talking.” She wet her fingers

and snuffed the candle out on the table.

“Carina,” Robin began. “Look, I’m just tired. It’s nothing.”

She frowned and raised an eyebrow.

“Kind of a weird day. I had to deal with some shitty people I didn’t want to talk to.”

She shook her head. “It’s not the first weird day you’ve had then. It seems like something

has changed to me— with us, I mean. With you really. When was the last time you slept?”

“Whatever,” Robin said under his breath, the word slipping on sighing. “Forget it. Let’s

just let it go. Let’s just be and not analyze this.”

46

She played with her food.

Robin looked down to his own plate, twirling the last bit of spaghetti, each noodle

tangled on the others all slathered in sauce, steam rising. He took a bite, swallowed, and could

feel it slipping into his gut, the cold weight of the last bite. “Listen,” he said. “I mean— so you

think something has changed. To you. I don’t know what to tell you. I wish you wouldn’t think

that. Why do you think that?”

“Robin, you’re becoming distant, you know? You’re on another planet all the time. We

sit here having dinner, and then you’re— ” and she stared with goggle eyed, mouth breathing

exaggeration toward the dim lit, paint peeling wall.

Then it was a spark of the second kind of heat. “So?” he said. “So what? So what? That

doesn’t have to mean something.”

“Are you thinking about someone else?”

“No,” he told her. “Maybe distance just means distance.”

“Maybe we don’t have as much to talk about— why are we analyzing this?” She laughed.

“I thought you said we weren’t going to talk about it. And here you are bringing it up anyway. So

fucking typical, digging around just to stir it all up again.” She stood. He knew she stood to leave.

The second kind of heat burning: Robin rose too, the chair loud in the basement, and

tossed his fork down. “So fucking typical— I don’t need this.”

“You’re freaking out!”

“You're freaking out!” A moment of clarity, the juvenile repetition. “I don’t need this.”

And he made for his jacket.

Carina sat down, crossed her arms, and watched him put on and zip up his leather jacket,

his tight face and his eyes somewhere miles away.

A long walk miles away, and a long look through miles of passing car reflections in street

lamp illumination was not enough for him to find it. Did he still love Carina? Was honing the

endless ability to endure all the jagged facets of another person what love was? Had the years

been good, or had the years only been an exercise of endurance? How many years— no. No.

He lit a cigarette, crossed the street, and neither passage told him a thing. So he began the

walk toward Uptown, the greatest dive in the city. Maybe Jim Beam would lend him guidance or,

better, lend him amnesia.

47

Maybe he was distant. But how distant? No, no— not how distant as in how wide the

volume of space between them, but how was in whether or not the distance was even between

Robin and Carina. The street passed, the cigarette passed, the door passed, the ID passed and

passed back, the credit card passed and passed back, the brandied words passed and passed back,

and then finally entire bottle of Jim Beam passed back.

Robin sat and watched punks and dirt bag couples playing pool, hording and macking

over the jukebox, crowding around candle lit tables, crowding around the dim bar. Everywhere in

the world seemed so dim, every gathering place.

But of the past Robin shared with Carina— he couldn’t remember it for its vast stretches.

He bought the bottle. It felt like... a couple of years. Even before the second and third and fourth

Jim Beam and the Jim Jims glancing from corners of eyes at his head shaking and flustered

whispering and self-asides. He couldn’t remember it during or before the argument. All their

years had become a blur.

“Listen, friend: Relationship stuff,” Robin said to the bartender.

She was muddling right before him, glanced up for a fraction only.

“Fuck. Hell. Twist it up— all I’m saying is that it’s a big blend. It’s a big blend. Have so

many moons of your life with someone become more muddled than that shit, whatever that is—

hey, what is that?— and, anyway, yes. Has is happened to you? Only the best of times and the

worst of times, and the rest of the times saying, hey, it’s gonna change, everyone changes, she’s

gonna change, I’m gonna change, and it changes because you say different things about the same

problems? Anyone? Anyone?”

The bartender had moved on, conversations were interwoven, and Robin was only talking

to himself.

“Well shit, Jim,” he said to his bottle of Jim Beam, half finished.

But then somebody slid up to the bar beside him. And immediately, he knew who she

was. Whichever extraspoken senses they were, they were nonetheless at play, and his adrenaline

cut through the alcohol in an instant.

“Lady,” he said to Lilith.

Every move she made— her sudden turn, the black tussle of her bobbed hair with the turn,

the flow of her black blouse, texture of her jeans. “Robin!” And she laughed. “It’s so surprising to

see you here.”

48

And there it was. Robin just laughed. It was just eye contact and scent then, and his firm

nodding. He was firmly in the present again.

“Wait a minute,” she said. She raised her eyebrows at him. “You don’t live near here.”

Robin smiled. He patted his bottle. “This is the cheapest dive in town, Lilith. Where else

could I have a chat with Jim all night?”

“And that’s the only reason you came here?”

He only smiled. They both withheld it. He knew she knew they both withheld it. His skin

was buzzing, and her scent, like blueberry tart, was lingering everywhere.

But then he changed his mind. “So you want to come talk to Jim and me? Are you alone

here?”

Then she broke eye contact—just a tilt of her chin, and, who knows why, his eyes jumped

to the rough hewn corner of the bar, the shuttered windows open, to a table with a single candle

and a single young man, a bland and young man in a beige sweater and a button up, who was just

waiting without looking at his phone or someone else or anything at all with some dumb plastered

smile. Robin didn’t loiter on that scene because he knew what it meant. He knew. At least it

wasn’t the slowly dying Swede again. “I see. I see.”

When their eyes met again, he once more sensed that she knew he knew. He sensed that

she must have sensed it from the rise of his eyebrows and his smile as knowing.

Yet she only said, “I’m with a friend.” And she shrugged. The glint in her eyes made him

know too that she knew he knew she was an outright liar.

He laughed. He saw her limit. Her restraint. He even nodded with raised brows, and he

almost said, ah, yes. A friend. A friend. But he knew he didn’t need to state because he knew they

both knew. It was a wicked, circular game of slipped tells so constrained that it must have amazed

them both knowing it was not rehearsed.

So he only poured the next round of Jim for himself, and raised the glass to Lilith.

“W e’re glad I ran into you tonight.” And he took a sip.

This time, no hug, no kiss. She turned for the table, and he turned for the bar.

He refused to allow himself to watch her walk back— Robin, for fuckssake, he had to tell

himself. Don’t be so entitled. Lilith is free to live and Lilith is free to love. Someone else is in

your life and she knows it. And you know it. And it doesn’t matter how progressive you are. It

49

doesn’t matter how open and non-traditional you are— It doesn’t matter how open and non-

traditional you say you are.

But why was it that this one person had him by his lungs every single time? Why was it

that even with the distance of her constant restraint, he was still saturated by his attraction to her?

Where was the distance, then?

Robin refused to look at their table. He refused to remember how he met Lilith, how his

lust for her body and her heart burned him. He refused to consider how Lilith made him forget—

no, no. No, no.

Robin refused himself entirely, downing his glass of Jim Beam in one gulp, whispered,

“fuck you, Jim,” and grabbed the bottle by the neck and took a mighty gulp, and another, and

another, and slipped through the punks and dirt bags and mackers, leaving through the back door

to clench his jaw at every step through the din of the drunks dying of laughter outside.

Robin could say he only truly hated one person more than as a figure of speech in the

city, or in the bay, or in the world, and that person was Paisley Smith.

Robin believed Paisley Smith looked like a walking dildo. He told everyone so. He told

them all that Paisley Smith was the balded, toothy grinned, awkward chic, thick rimmed, anally

conceived stain of Andy Warhol. Paisley was the right age, at least, to have been the anal bastard

of Andy. Paisley’s blase slathering of Andy’s all self-designed-neurosis-cum-art-school ethos

sheened with 21st century internet alt-nihilism was equally descended. Robin knew Paisley Smith

was holier than thou in his giving-a-fuck-while-not-giving-a-fuck, apparently caring so little as to

inspire others to care nothing for themselves or their own names as a way of life and as a central

element of Paisley’s branded presentation. Paisley convinced people that humiliating his audience

was art that hadn’t been done before. He convinced people to record off-kilter sex tapes and

released them as collaboration with him, but refused to retract the tapes when people asked. He

convinced people to record their addled antics, sexcapades and other depravity as some holy

congressional statement of the present age rather than just typical, timeless self-pleasure.

That was the heart of it. Robin knew that Paisley relished his assumed status of outsider

as a cover for some hideous personal inadequacy—that much Paisley insinuated about himself.

Robin knew, in truth, that Paisley Smith actually compensated for something far more typical:

Being typical. Being typically inadequate. He was a garden variety creep with garden variety

50

fetishes concerning basic male domination, the ability to humiliate basic women with impunity

and unwavering penis envy. Paisley Smith was not even Paisley Smith’s real name, but rather

what he called himself because it was what he called a female character he once wrote to

moderate success with whom he empathized so so so so so so much.

So Paisley Smith was typical. For this reason, Robin knew he hated Paisley Smith.

Paisley Smith knew Robin hated Paisley Smith— Robin and his friends collected this because

Paisley had blocked Robin on all social media outlets. Robin made sure everyone else knew he

hated Paisley Smith for so long, but Robin knew this night was the night he would finally do

something about it.

Paisley Smith’s real address was 518 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94114. This was

common knowledge because Paisley Smith originated a literary reading series called 518, held in

the apartment abandoned above his. 518 was not “hosted” by Paisley Smith because such

leadership was inauthentic. 518 was not a “reading series” because such events were inauthentic.

518 was only advertised from one rotting mouth to another because social media was inauthentic.

518 maintained no lists, no record, and no order because expectations were inauthentic. Most

importantly, 518 maintained an open door policy because security was inauthentic.

Robin stumbled into up the stairwell, pulling himself up on each festering loser who’d

oozed from the 518 reading—the police had broken up the last three events, and so 518 was now

the most infamous and popular literary reading series in the city. The overflow had taken to the

stairwell and hallways to smoke, to kiss, to fuck— a couple Robin slid past was one slithering into

the other, one man’s cock slipping again and again and again somewhere into the kilt of the other

man against the wall. All the onlookers watched peripherally through the guise of ignoring them

completely because perverted interest was inauthentic.

Though some very thin and soft-faced boy was reading something to the audience from

his mobile phone, nobody watched him directly in the candle and phone lit apartment. All stood

awkwardly and scanned their own phones rather than watch, listening-while-not-listening,

readying their drugs of choice, the dank joint or the tin of pills or one of the two baggies of

heroin— Robin noticed that none of them readied baggies of cocaine because cocaine was

inauthentic. Gladly, Robin had already finished his.

51

He pushed past one dark shape, and another, and another, smug through all of their deep

sighing. He finally reached the break in the throng, the seven empty feet surrounding the reader

and Paisley beside him.

Paisley stared at the floor, his arms crossed, as if noticing anyone at all would kill him.

Robin sat cross legged in the empty space. He swilled his bottle of Jim Beam and

watched the reading.

“No, she said.” the reader continued. “The sky is not red now, she said. I can’t make

sense of it now, she said. I don’t understand you, she said. Okay, he said. I hope you know I don’t

care, she said. Okay, he said, but then he changed his mind. He decided to ask. What, he asked. I

said, the sky is not red now, she said. I said, I can’t make sense of it now, she said. I said, I don’t

understand you, she said. I said, 1 hope you know I don’t care, she said. Okay, he said. But do you

understand me, she said. I do, he said. I think I do, he said.” The reader waved a hand across his

phone, the screen dimming. But Robin could still make out the twinkle of emotion welling in his

eyes. “Thank you very much.”

The apartment applauded in smatterings, in awes and in dismals sighs, as the reader sat

and Paisley walked forward to take his place. And Paisley hesitated a moment because he’d seen

him—he had, Robin knew it, he had seen him, and yet Paisley continued as if he were not there.

“Thank you, Buster Raisin, for such a minimalist reaction to Tao Lin’s classic— ”

“Hell yeah!” Robin slammed the bottle, clapped with gusto, looking about the room.

“So. Well maybe— ha, ha,” Paisley laughed, “I could read some more of the cook book I

found outside beside my neighbor’s trash, or I could read some more childhood notes from his

discarded coloring book also found in the trash. 1 won’t read those now but I could, or I will. Next

is Joel Simmons. Joel.”

Robin turned to the girl standing behind him. “Hey you. Wow.”

Her eyes quivered. She did not look at Robin.

He jerked his thumb back to Paisley. “Isn’t this cocksucker a cocksucking genius?”

Her face tightened. Still, she would not look at him.

“Paisley Smith. Wow.” Robin could feel the heat rising in the room, but could not see her

eyes or anyone else’s since they refused to look at him even while looking at him.

“Thank you,” said Joel Simmons. “This is something I wrote just this morning. I will

probably throw this away. This is called Peppermint Dream Boat.

52

“Ignoring me, she knows nothing, about the nothing I don’t know. The nothing I can’t

know. Without my peppermint dream boat, nothing floats before nothing else. I am empty. I am

the sea polluted by the Sprite of 1990. It is Friday. I am not at work. Now it is any Friday in 2020.

Now I sit outside a drought shop. Nobody steps inside. I go home. I sit. I sit while thinking about

ways to drink milk without sitting and drinking milk. Thank you.” Joel Simmons waved his

phone off, and he walked away, and the smattered and the sighing rose again to congratulate him.

“Oh. My. God. W ow ” Robin stood. He finished the Jim Beam, dropped the bottle, and

clapped as loudly as he could. “Just— hey. Wow. ” He clapped and clapped and clapped. “W ow ”

Paisley Smith still would not make eye contact with Robin, though Robin noticed the tiny

tremble in his hand, his damp palm, even in the darkness of the apartment. “Ha, ha. Okay. Ha.

Well how about a joke. Everyone likes jokes. Even Burroughs liked a good joke. You ever see an

ass that talks by itself? Anybody? Anybody?”

Chuckles and the dismal sighing.

“What do you call a white clam? Anybody? Anybody?” Finally, then, finally Paisley

looked right to Robin, his hands open. Did he know the answer? Anybody? Anybody?

Robin only smiled, unmoving.

“What do you call a white clam? A Klu Klux Klam. Ha, ha.”

Again with the dismal sighing. Again with the inspired slurring and the low whistles and

hollow clicks of tounges and the distraction.

Robin slow clapped. And he stepped forward to close the empty space between him and

Paisley.

“You want to read, Robin?” Paisley Smith asked him. Now they couldn’t break eye

contact, Paisley looking at him with those shrunken eyes through his black rimmed glasses.

“O f course I don’t want to read.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Because reading is inauthentic.”

“Yeah? Then what do you want?”

Did Robin even know what he wanted? Could he say it? He wanted to feel more and

think less, always. He wanted to feel more and think less always to forget this thing weighing his

tendons down, stretching him so thin, all those black stones in his lungs, the pieces of heart

shaped granite for every promise he swallowed without chewing, the pieces of razor shaped

53

obsidian for every sentence of hate he swallowed without spitting. He wanted nobody on Earth to

follow anybody, but he especially wanted none of these people to follow this person— he wanted,

first, to understand why they felt they needed to follow in the first place. Why anyone felt they

needed to follow in the first place. Then he wanted them all to stop following. He wanted them to

stop belonging. Not that Robin felt anything like Paisley did about anything, but Robin truly did

feel that belonging was inauthentic.

Paisley’s question made him so angry. He wanted to destroy Paisley’s face with the Jim

Beam bottle in that second. But he wanted moreso to expose Paisley as a sham. He wanted

something that stung his heart.

Robin had nothing to read. But he would not back down from this challenge. “Well, I

want to be a performer, making shit up. Like you.”

Paisley silently gestured to the open space and stepped aside.

“Hell yea h ” He was not slurring anymore— the adrenaline had masked the effects of the

alcohol and cocaine. He could see in the dark and rotting apartment that more eyes than none

were on him, unlike before— he could sense all of them listening even if they were not watching.

“Hell yeah. Making shit up, motherfucker. So. Yeah, pals. Guess what? Reading is inauthentic.

This is inauthentic. You are inauthentic. Fuck you. I made this up just now and I’ll never write it

down and never even remember this shit because I’m so fucked up and care even less than you

ever could.

“This is about you people. This is called,” and here Robin was truly reaching— he had

never written a poem in his life, though he read them widely. He had conversely written much

fiction which he’d never shared, just like the songs he’d written and recorded which he’d never

shared— “This is called, Candyflipped at the Neu Disco.

“I candyflipped at the neu disco, pulled an alt lit yolo, I did it in front of everybody. I did

it and I was like, this is so crazy, I’m candyflipping at the neu disco, and you were like, I’m

sober, I don’t know how you feel, and I was like, you’re right. So I shot myself in the mouth and

taped it, and all my best friends wrote poems about it and they read them while they candyflipped

in a new disco.” He pointed into some random place in the audience, grinning.

A pause. Then the dismal sighing, the smattering—

“Stop that!” Robin slurred, waving his hands. He was slurring again, the adrenaline

already fading. “No, no, no, stop that inauthentic bullsh— You see what I did there— new disco?

54

See that? See? Hmm? So. You saw it. You saw it. Inauthentic. Fuck you. Can’t you people all

just move to Yolo County and take this walking dildo and plant him and cultivate a field of dicks

and choke on them all and get out of my life forever and ever?

“This is called, um.” Robin ignored the roaring crowd, their cheering and hissing, and

pointed straight to Paisley, right between his eyes, as if his pointing were the pistol he’d cleaned

and oiled and loaded and cocked and, finally, that moment, the cocked finger like a pistol, “Um,

this is called— this is for Paisley— wait, wait, wait,” waving his hands, “no, no— quiet you, and

you— it’s about a fictional character. It’s about a fictional character, see— Janey Smith is his

name. This is about Janey Smith, a fictional character that has nothing to do with Paisley Smith.”

The audience whoaed, and Robin grinned at Paisley Smith. Then he held up one thinking finger

as if he were a philosopher or great teacher, closing his eyes. “This is called— this is called—this

is called... The Abysmal Collapse of Awkward Chic. For Janey Smith.

“All that’s left is hashtag DIACF, TL; DR. Nobody will remember and nobody will care.

Translated: All that’s left is die in a chemical fire, die in a chemical fire with rays glorious of blue

and green and gold, die in a fire more beautiful than lawful or healthful, but do it slowly, slowly,

so slowly, so slowly, too long that I don’t read into it. Nobody will remember and nobody will

care.” Robin grinned at Paisley.

Whoooa, the audience roared. Wow. Wow. This time they applauded loudly as they

laughed—

Robin was burning. “No! No! You’re not listening! Stop cheering you inauthentic fucks!

You germinating hacks! You— ! You— !” Robin shouted and shouted. A friendfilm, a friendzine.

Kill the rude, eat the vain. But they only cheered more loudly with each insult.

He was aghast. He stood there and smoldered, and for once in so very many years he had

nothing to say at all.

Nobody could tell the truth from the act: Robin was so acerbic and erratic that nobody at

518 could tell if he, himself, he as a person, was authentic or inauthentic. He had mocked them all

right to their faces with biting satirical wit. But because Paisley Smith, that son of a bitch Paisley

Smith, had so trained the palate of the 518 scene to taste only the bitter but well-worn intersection

of disambiguated abandon and commonplace esoterica as art, they’d misinterpreted Robin’s

unexpectedly genuine but idiosyncratic rage as resounding genius. Cognitive dissonance. They

loved him. They loved him, Robin was gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, and Paisley was

55

grinning and clapping with mad satisfaction alongside the crowd because he alone knew the truth

since he alone knew the context for Robin’s rage. Even before Robin knew it.

“Thank you so much Robin Wield. Ha. Ha, ha. Next month we’ll have Robin back with

his partner Carina Cantcant to debut her new movie made in collaboration with me and all the

perverts of Craigslist that we could find.”

And that comment triggered more feeling and more thinking at once than Robin could

handle.

In one motion, Robin grabbed Paisley by the arm, outstretched, pulling and rolling and

body slamming him against the floor to land with a forearm into his throat. In another motion,

atop Paisley— crack, crack, crack—thrice Robin smashed his fist into the still grinning face.

Shouting, cries, laugher—nobody knew what was authentic and what was not. Did the act

continue? Had it become something else? What was happening? Nothing made sense.

The surging against the stilted. Half of the audience rushed to seize Robin, and the other

half laughed, some taking up phones to liveTweet and Vine and Pokolobo and Boosh the chaos,

and the friction of the mob against itself caused the eruption. People pushed and shoved back

against the people pushing past toward Robin, and the apartment degenerated into old-fashioned,

authentic brawling.

Robin thrashed his way through the brawl— it was easy because these people were

starving on purpose, all very thin. Nobody knew what was happening or what was supposed to be

happening and not supposed to be happening. None of them were used to violence. They could

talk mean, but could not be mean. It was a throbbing mass of arms and pointing fingers and

shoving and weak punches. It was an outrage of bodies with no unity. Robin thrashed and

punched and kicked jaws and chests and stomped hearts to break out and roll over bodies out the

apartment, across the hall, and down the stairwell.

A few of them gave chase as Robin ran down the black street, past the silent shops and

overflowing bars, back to the subway station. He never looked back. He was thinking much more

than he was feeling as he ran and it made him so sad and made him run faster with all the dark

trees hissing above him.

Finally, his scarred lungs burning with running, he admitted it to himself. He admitted it.

Despite everything, his fear was something so typical: Robin admitted he knew that Carina would

leave him within six months despite his carrying a decade’s worth of stoned promises.

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Soon enough, Tim was gliding up from the florescent subway through small town

avenues and over Berkeley grass into the college’s memorial glade. The sun was blazing behind

the ashen stone of the bell tower, Slather Tower, and all the pseudo-classicism thereabouts,

randoms milling in pants and dresses. Someone was standing up somewhere singing, or maybe in

a tree, high or low, maybe a Lennon tune from the psychedelic face of the Beatles. And nobody

walking walked with books.

Empty handed as empty headed? Tim asked himself. But then he looked to his own

hands, and he hadn’t brought his books either.

So he sat in the grass picking blades and his skin now and then, and he could see the little

white insects swarming beneath the layers of green and yellow. He looked up, shaded his eyes

with his hand from the sun’s fusion—

She was sitting there, barefoot on a mound of books, literally a mound. Her earthy

sundress was torn open down to the waist. The white glow from the sun and buildings illuminated

the whips of her black hair tucked away into a Phrygian cap, rising backlighting.

Tim rose and approached, sliding his hands into his pockets. Hi Olivia.

She smiled tiredly. It’s Tim, right?

He looked at her again. Her breasts had always seemed so full and inviting to him. But

like this, she seemed so ... diffuse? It was hard to describe the haziness her skin took, like she was

a living oil painting.

Tim had a rousing feeling of deja vu. This is a dream.

Olivia crossed her arms, raised her eyebrows indulgently as the ambient light faded away.

You’re right. I’m dead, Tim.

Tim sighed. He lucidly wished for a bench to slip back into, and it became as he folded

into it, preparing himself for what always came next.

57

The sun began to focus, focus, focus, a thinning and brightening beam spotlighting

Oliva’s back while all faded to black around them. At least you can talk to me now. She laughed

wryly. I’ll be better laid out in your dreams than in life!

You’re you, sardonic beauty. Maybe why I was always too nervous to talk to you.

The sunbeam had thinned to a hair’s width. You blew it. All you needed to do was talk.

Say anything. The rest, el lenguaje corporal, no? Olivia laughed. Instead you only watched and

obsessed. You could not act for any reason at all, not even for a good reason. Her hands swished

around in the mound beneath her, and from the swirling oils of book cover inks she pulled one: a

singed white cover with an ethereal fuzz of red letters and red numbers. Olivia held it out so Tim

could see the cover: A burning paper man weeping. She looked to him with seductive bent.

Tim tried to speak, but the blood in his face was congealing, weighing like pounds of wet

dough, the dissuasion in his arms equally yielding to weight.

Ahora, she began, opening the book—

The sunlight finally burned through her chest, the hair width beam on the book for a

second, and the book huffed open, a fireball emerging between cover and cover, dropping into a

shroud of flame spreading, enveloping them all in Hell, Olivia burning.

Yo no soy nadie. Yo soy el que tu quieres que sea, que quieren que yo sea. She opened

her arms and all burned, hair and clothes, blackening and peeling back, and beneath she was a

blinding, bald-headed personification of flame. Prius ac posterius, nunc et postera: ego sum

respondebit.

Tim’s limbs pushed forward as uselessly as a drunken infant’s in an ocean of goo,

weighed by a burning ache to push, push, push toward Olivia’s pyre— she was then naked

glowing ivory overspread with gold-green fire— and his thrashing whirled the air around him like

boiling oil paint, and he swam through one scene to the next: Venice drowning, Slather Tower f i t

Saint Mark’s Campanile, rolling grass field f i t turquoise flood f i t igneous oil olivum, pseudo-

Grecian homage fit immeuble vrai, but even submerged, nothing could stop Olivia’s burning, the

world parting for his thrashing arms, the scene shaking him, red room— his room, his living

room, the weight still there on his chest, crying out and pushing out—

Tim broke through his sleep paralysis. His arms thrashed out as he jerked into the air. He

lurched from his couch to the apartment floor, drenched in sweat, panting, shaking himself back

to gravity.

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Soon enough, Tim was gliding up from the florescent subway into town. Deja vu festered

in him like plague boils. But the dream was over. The dream was over, and he decided he should

attend his fourth class of the semester now that it was ending.

Tim rose up the escalator into that hateful new age heat of the Bay’s late spring, a

terrifying absence of afternoon traffic, and Robin standing on the comer. Grinning. Putting out a

cigarette on a metal stairwell. He was in the same grimy outfit with the same matted hair as when

Tim had seen him last, two days prior, fleeing from the cafe.

The deja vu was erupting, then, as some cinder cone abscess in his chest. “How did you

know I’d be here?” Tim demanded. He flushed with panic. “Is this a dream?”

“The calm before the storm. Well hello to you too, dollface,” Robin said. He pulled Tim

close—Tim recoiled, but Robin held fast, the stink of leather and well-burnt sweat and morning

whiskey. “Happy to see me? Hmm? Hmm? You happy?”

“How did you know I’d be here?” Tim pulled away. “And how are you not in jail?”

“Oh, goodness gracious.”

“And why are you not at work?”

Robin smiled, took Tim into the crook of his arm. “I suppose I sold enough drugs to the

kids this week to not have to tutor the kids, or record shitty tunes for them, or anything else. Tim,

we’re on different dates at the same restaurant today, doll. I’m going to the protest.”

Tim nodded. He reached for his phone. “Which protest?”

“Lugnut Tychonaut, can’t you remember anything? Aren’t we here for the same reason?

The protest, comrade. The protest— well, I mean the one for you— one o f the ones for you.” Tim

made to object. But Robin reminded him. “The Phil Johnston protest is at 5 and yours is at 4:30—

well, the one I assumed you’d be going to. Assuming.”

Tim was confused. “For me? My protest?”

“I assumed— you know. Your girl, man. Your girl— why am I telling you this— ” Robin

slapped his cheeks, huffed.

“I know, but which protest fo r her? ”

“This— the—that— doctor’s protest for, you know, for Olivia.”

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It was Robin’s pouting lips, but moreso the arch of his eyebrows that made it seem real,

that Robin did feel it for a moment. And his brown eyes, the sun making them these bowls of

hazy marble.

But it was so awkward. To talk about it. To say it aloud— the names. To say the names

aloud. Tim could not mention her name, let alone the name of the hashtag that this experience

had become as a protest— the number of hashtags were as staggering as the single minded

prospect of walking in to even one of any protest scheduled in memoriam of, her, the suffragette,

Olivia Banderas, and understanding what it meant. One was for Olivia by the Exceptionalists, one

was for Olivia by the med students, and another was for Phil Johnston, not Olivia, who’d been

shot by cops at a different Olivia protest the week before, and yet another was for The Twenty

One— all the people who’d been killed by book bombs in the days before everyone completely

ceased opening books.

“But what if I’m recognized? I’ve been on hiatus from the program for so long.”

Robin laughed. “These guys are so careful with their words. Do you really think they’d

confront you even if they did recognize you? And it’s been so long that these are not the same

people. Same river, different water, right? Right? But— and you know— you know. Hell. There

are other reasons to go.” He gave him the look again, the same one as before.

What could Tim say? He was there. He had to be there because he had nowhere else to

be. “Okay.” Tim said. “Let’s go.”

Gliding again, together, they moved through the space in the burning hell of the

afternoon, the hot dry stone of the old buildings radiating heat around them. A crowd had

gathered on the grass of this memorial glade with the bell tower in the background and the

scorched earth beneath them— they all stood around it at a distance. They were three hundred

strong, four hundred strong, as many people as the funeral and stronger, as many people as the

reading and stronger, now smattered in natural and colored hair, new and tattered tops, new and

worn shoes. They were not in the cold blanket black of death as they’d been at the funeral. They

were ambitious in their feeling unlike the scene Robin had attended. This was the drift and the

academics and the others and straights of the Bay, everyone, all washed in together to stand in

solidarity with the suffragette, the feminist and bum victim of Western civilization’s most

cherished technology— Tim could no longer separate the media’s descriptions of her from his

own. She was something like that.

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And now, the strong, the drift, the bitter colored— they carried books. Tim’s eyes

snapped from here to there, and they all carried books.

“It’s weird, but w e’re going to be fine, Tim,” Robin whispered to him. He’d noticed how

tight Tim’s grip on his arm had been.

“I know, right?”

“Stop.” Robin knew what it meant when Tim fell back to using colloquialisms and

banter. But he knew too, seeing the flicker in Tim’s eyes though he continued to smile as if the

nothing did not haunt him— Robin could relate to it. He could relate to it exactly. The danger of

the trauma needed to be faced. He put an arm around Tim and held his hand. “Stop. It’s okay. It’s

gonna be hard. It’s gonna be weird. Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

Something about how each was certain to clutch books under one arm was revolting to

Tim, how they’d made a large circle around the scorch mark in the grass, how the white coated

doctors and medical students stood in a ring at the fore— it made him sick to his stomach, but he

had not the words to express why. He pulled on Robin’s arm because he needed to stop walking.

Something about how they stood so stoic with concerned chiseled into their faces. Something of

how they stared chiseled with hardened faces and chests at some distant and invisible monstrosity

beyond the present, the devil itself, scores of unknown demons drunk on rhetoric and amazement

and shock. Something about how they felt so strong staring together at the ethereal face of the

legion enemy who had brought them together. Something about it was disgusting in its insincerity

and its nobility because nobility was another form of arrogance, and none of these people— oh my

god. My god. Again. These people. None of these people seemed to know it because their faces

never changed.

“I don’t know if I like this,” Tim told Robin.

“You have to face the trauma.”

“That’s not what I mean. I want to face it, but this protest isn’t the same thing.”

“But they— these people are here for you— I mean, these people are here for you.”

Tim cringed. He’d said it. He’d said it too. “But these people are here for her.”

“So are you.”

“I know. But.”

Robin waited for him.

“I know, but. I know, but they don’t feel what I feel.”

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“Okay, sure. Okay, sure, but they’re here because they think they do feel what you feel at

least—they’re here because they feel something.”

“Everyone alive feels something. Why does it matter what they feel if they weren’t there?

And didn’t feel what she felt?”

“But, man. Tim. You didn’t feel what she felt either.”

Tim’s faced hardened. His heart hardened, too. He remembered what Olivia’s mother had

told him. “Well maybe so. But I was there. I was there, and they weren’t even there." Then he

turned away from Robin and stared into the ring around the scorched Earth and through it into the

distance and started to walk forward again.

Robin, for the second time within a week, couldn’t say anything. It was different because

this time, he knew exactly what to say. He just couldn’t bring himself to say that so many of these

people there for any reason did not matter: To feel is not to know, and even to know does not

justify anything beyond what one believes it justifies. Like every other happening, this was a

ritual to bind them. It was a show to guide their experience as a group. Inherently, in essence, it

meant nothing, and it didn’t have to, but Tim seemed to be dying slowly because he thought it

needed to yet could not find his place in it. It was, again, the flawed human instinct needing to

belong working against the world.

There was nothing much else Robin could say. He instead, with a shrug, with a

concessional smile, fished inside of his rotting leather jacket for his flask full of whiskey and

codeine, swilled a quarter of the flask at once, and handed it to Tim.

So they said nothing more and watched the protest in silence during their uptake.

The protest was first the large huddled mass of people talking. It was people gathered and

attempting to broach the subject of the hour with the most careful academic language possible,

then giving up and hesitating to talk and sometimes laugh with stifled honesty about other things

from aspects of life better connected that had nothing to do with Olivia or terrorism. The

collection of people was as much people who recognized one another as nodding acquaintances in

the real or in the ether as it was people who were veteran stewards of the drama in one another’s

lives— but that was only half the people there, Tim recognized.

The other half was those people who barely knew everyone. It was those people who

rallied as if this were their three meals a day on social media— Tim knew this because he could

see right over their shoulders the liveTweeting, BillyBlogging, Vining, even Facebooking. He

62

could even read some of their posts: Casual impatience juxtaposed with smatterings on privilege;

Blase blame games against the whole white race in contest with disgust at the lack of urgency and

planning since all were still waiting for the microphone and the PA. Where was the promised

open mic? The protest was not motivated enough. The protest was not inclusive enough. The

protest was not exclusive enough.

That’s when Tim started to feel it—yes, he felt it like hot pin pricks all over his skin. It

was inescapable. He felt it and so he knew it. He knew people were sneaking dart tossed glances

at him because there were too many whites in the group. There were too many straights in the

group. There was too much of him in the group—the group didn’t just distrust those whites and

cysnorms of at every station which restricted the blood of their entire generation—how adept

they’d all become at judging in a glance tossed heartbeat who were the whites, this generation.

But the group distrusted him. The group had pegged him as one o f them the second he’d walked

in, his strange gate, his soft mouthed and blue eyed gaze, his golden waves and pallor. They knew

him for what he was. It made Tim ashamed. It was a shame he felt for years. It was a shame that

he could not escape what he was born as, what he’d inherited, and a sadness in knowing he could

never be connected with their struggle as much as he agreed with it, that he was forever

precluded.

Their connection— but there was no connection. Tim shook his head. He crossed his

arms. Look at them. Look at them. Fuck them. The bitches, the sons of bitches, the bastards.

There was no connection at all beyond worn out fibers, worn out sense of imagination in identity.

These people distrusted each other as much as they distrusted the undesirable scaffolds of the

inside and the whole of the outside and the unknown other which brought them here within the

context of everything else wrong, some dry-faced and utterly disenfranchised enemy from a land

as parched as this one who saw these people— these people— as deserving the punishment for all

the West. It was inescapable. Every single sigh was one immolation’s token and another

transgressor’s treasure in a world where all air was poison. In one moment Tim regretted that he

could not be these people, and in the next he relished that he hated these people.

That’s when Tim and Robin both started to feel it— a warm wash, a centering weight, the

rolling of Earth into a focus. They both turned to look at each other at just the same time. This

was the drugs. Like a hot honey slug finally vibrating through every artery. But they were

63

surrounded by the black bears of outrage, out there on the lawn. It was a good high in the wrong

place.

Finally, it began, the protest: a haggard looking man in many flannel layers, despite the

heat, and a lanyard, pushed a cart through the audience with the microphone and PA, the wire

feeding out endlessly to the library. A thin and noble looking young woman in a white coat, all

high cheek bones and narrowed eyes in the sunlight rays approached the microphone, and the

entire crowd quieted to listen. Tim held fast to Robin’s arm because he was genuinely terrified of

the people and their books and white coats.

“Thank you.” She paused. The look in her face was difficult to explain. She had the eye

narrowing zeal of someone with an ambition for vindication, but the hesitation and crowd

searching of someone who was truly concerned about the gaze of other.

“I struggled to settle on committing anything to writing about this event because of the

nature of this atrocity— ” She lifted her paper and waved it— “and how it would have me afraid of

the things I write. It was as if the authors of this atrocity wanted me to fear for the very medium

of how I convey my thoughts, or as if they wanted me to fear that my own thoughts could

consume me with fire.

“Like many of us here, I was born before 9/11, but too young to remember it.”

Tim and Robin looked to each other then, the time placement. Some awareness of another

generation.

“What I do remember is the reactions of the people around me reflecting in hindsight. My

teachers spoke of a time when nations made more sense, when there was a certain cohesion and

comfort in being American. My parents spoke of a time when they were unafraid o f..

She paused again, a moment too long, to search the crowd. She folded the paper and just

started talking unrehearsed. “They say hindsight is 2020. But now it is 2020 and nothing is any

clearer. None of this makes sense in words. I know this happens everywhere. Now it’s happened

here— now it’s happened here in a way that is more personal than 9/11 because it is ever present.

It could be right in our hands at any time. It won’t go away. It is everywhere. It happened first to

someone many of us knew, a member of our community, an individual who was brave enough to

accept her privileges and try to change them, someone who wanted to be a more inclusive

member of our society.” She just stood shaking her head. “I don’t know. It was her first. I don’t

64

know. It could have been any of us. Despite everything, death chose her. She did not have the

privilege to choose what burned or what would destroy her.

“But she is a victim of privilege anyway. She and all of them, all of them are victims of

privilege anyway. They target us because we bare the mark of the privileges that have upset the

balance of the world.”

She scanned the crowd again but then she was no longer searching. She knew. It was

clear. Her eyes were wild with zeal and wet. “We are to blame. We are to blame and we must

accept, every one of us, that we likewise should not have the privilege to choose what death will

take on our behalf. And so here, we will symbolically relinquish the things we that matter most to

us. The literatures that define us.”

Upon this, they made do: A man in the central ring poured from an urn a pungent liquid

onto the grass—

“No,” Tim recoiled, breathless. “No no no no no no,” the scene playing out again— Robin

held him fast, but he too now was reacting, gritting his teeth, shaking his head— gasoline poured

from the golden urn onto the scorched grass.

He stopped pouring and the speaker returned. She held up a book, a faded and worn

brown paperback. It trembled in her hands. “This was a book my mother read to me. This was a

book...” She trailed off. Then she threw the book down onto the scorched earth, and she and the

inner ring removed their white coats together— some of them started to weep like others in the

audience—tossing them into a pile atop the fuel soaked scorch, others throwing their own books.

The man poured more fuel.

“No no no no no no— ” Tim was breathless, reaching, listless. Retching. He was terrified

knowing that the fire wanted to return to him, but could not bring himself to move from where

they stood.

“No way, man. No way.” Robin, likewise, could not stop muttering. It had become

bizarre. It had become unwarranted. Did they not care in their zeal to make a stand if they harmed

the people who’d already been scarred by the real? “Isn’t it— not— ” The words that he thought

were not the words that he said. But it had surpassed a point with him, and so he knew he must

try to articulate. He turned to the spectators beside him, a college age boy and girl, both holding

on to each other and their books with open mouths. “Is this not— this— but how do you feel about

this, guy?”

65

The couple, likewise, only shook their heads, the open mouth feeling— but were they not

also shocked? Clearly they were. Tim and Robin looked around, and everyone was similarly

panicked. Did they not know if they liked this either?

And then there it was. A matchbook, only a moment’s hesitation, but then open flame—

the flame huffed up around the coats, the wind twisting it up as a funnel. A funnel, but the

transmogrification of the drugs helped them also see a wanting life form, a fury spirit huffing into

the world, hungry and warmth giving. But wanting. Needing. The orange texture of the flame was

augmented with chemical green as the white coats succumbed to the gasoline.

Just a few people at first threw their artifacts into the flames. But as the vanguard stepped

back, more at a time began to feed it their artifacts. Even the young couple—Tim could not

believe what he saw, and neither could Robin, who was, for the first time in many years, now

beyond the tipping point of shock for the spectacle playing out— even the young couple walked

forward and threw their books into the fire.

“We must sacrifice our privilege of choice to the fire,” the speaker reiterated. More and

more people cast their artifacts into the flame until people needed to wait for others to clear a

space, and all of them needed to step back as the elemental grew taller and wider and hotter.

But there is no point, Tim and Robin were thinking. This hypocrisy of choosing to

symbolize a lack of choice. This is the romantic expression of the problem that expresses nothing

of the solution. This symbolic gesture resolves nothing.

They were both terrified of this flame funneling up before them, throwing up the helixed

ashes of the books and the jackets into a vestige not anything of Olivia, but rather an ether of

some skeletal jackal bending with crackling laughter to its own cause. They both were equally as

terrified of that demon as they were of the solemn and noble people feeding it their books and

coats in the guise of slaying it. Yet neither of them said anything because they were both also

terrified for different reasons. Where the two differed in being triggered by the demon was that

Tim was afraid he could never truly belong among others anywhere, and Robin was afraid he

could never truly stand alone as one from any.

Robin was the first of them strong enough to break away. He pulled Tim by the crook,

turning away from the thing— “you’re still gonna be doctors,” he kept saying, “you’re all still

gonna be doctors”— walking purposefully away from the glade and the library and the tower

behind. “Don’t look back,” he told Tim. “Don’t look back.”

66

Just go to the class and forget about it, Robin had told Tim. Maybe something there,

something in the unexpected, will bring you some answers. So they finished the whiskey and

codeine flask quickly, purchased and swilled another half pint, and Tim obliged him.

Tim thought the hollow classroom auditorium was something like the cathedral, but

aglow with golden rays of light shining through tall windows onto seats and across a podium like

an altar at the front. This auditorium, unlike the cathedral, was nearly empty save for three

people: One on the left, one on the right, and one in the middle.

The one on the left was a perpetual student, hair dark and coarse, the complexion of an

everyperson whose ancestors hailed from everywhere at different junctures. He wore a blazer

emboldened with this patch and that patch: bands, a triangle, a telescope, a rainbow flag. He wore

a nice purple button up shirt and seemed very angry.

The one on the right was another perpetual student, also in a blazer, a nice red button up.

He was someone who looked a lot like Tim did, but did not speak like Tim. This was a man who

spoke like a man, deep, declarative sentences like cold stream rollers. He was smiling, his eyes

always squinting. He sat back in his chair. His blazer had no adornment but one: A lapel pin

depicting three intersecting flags of the United States tied together at their poles. Tim recognized

the pin, his mouth continuing to water, and he steadied himself on an aisle seat, as the familiar

symbol of the American Exceptionalist Party.

And presiding over them at the podium, of course, was the infamous Les Frank, the

mutton chopped professor of History 499b (“The Beginning and End of War: The West and The

Rest of the World”). His orange and gray shock of hair, his tweed suit, were backlit by the

streaming sunlight. He leaned on the podium, his face slack stem but slipping on one side into

agitated boredom. Until he saw Tim in the aisle.

“Well well we//,” Les Frank bellowed, grinning with teeth like coffee stained daggers.

“The third person brave enough to defy the threat of autobiblioruption in an institution brimming

with biblii!”

Tim smiled with numb recognition. He meant to sit— he stumbled into an aisle seat a few

rows behind the man on the left and the Exceptionalist. He didn’t know either of these

classmate’s names.

67

Frank smiled at Tim, though the others did not acknowledge him. “Indeed” Frank

intoned, “I am so glad for you to join our interesting discussion which has veered from my

ironically well timed lesson plan on the SS litricide of the 1933 Sauberung purge to an attempt to

unravel this new situation we are all doubtlessly preoccupied with, the discussion of the year,”

and these he punctuated even more loudly than the other words he’d punctuated, “book bombing

terrorists/”

Tim really was only focused on stabilizing the room. He knew if he could stay focused on

horizontal lines, the window sills and the imaginary horizon, he might stop spinning.

Les Frank stopped grinning. Slowly. He shrugged and returned his attention to the two

seated at the left and right of the aisle. “Though we’ve veered somewhat on a tangent.”

“It is not a tangent,” the man on the left insisted.

“Oh, it is absolutely a tangent,” countered the man on the right.

“It is not a tangent because we have to discuss the responsibility of your social position in

relation to this act. Your ontological position has been constructed from a history of cysnormative

privilege which has enabled you to marginalize the ways in which POCs unduly suffer as targets

of this weapon, and thereafter will be unduly targeted in the subsequent but necessary

demonstrations against their lack of equal security, which will only lead to more demonstration

and rights abuses by white people.”

The man on the right laughed heartily. He threw his hands up. “Professor Frank, what the

hell is this guy even saying? ‘White people’ is the only thing I understood that he said.” He

laughed again.

Frank was weary, resting his chin on a hand on the podium. “Shall I humor you and

translate, then?”

“Well, what am I paying you for?”

“Not to be a translator,” Frank shot back with a grin. “Brother, oh brother. What Ron is

saying, Sam, is that what you believe about yourself makes you careless and wholly insensitive to

the plight o f the lower classes!”

Sam nodded, but Ron was less enthused with the translation. “I don’t think you get it

exactly. That’s not exactly what I said.”

“So what you’re saying is that only poor people read?” Sam said.

“You’re being basic—”

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“Cause I read. My whole family reads. So I’m just as much a target as anyone.”

“You’re being basic. You don’t get it.” Ron leaned in, talking with his hands. “You are

not aware or will not accept the ways in which your ontological position has reified your class

privilege such that the degree to which white people are more likely, and has thus far proven to be

more likely— because remember that eleven of The Twenty One have been POCs from

underprivileged backgrounds, which, again, does not reflect the overall demographic of North

America—that white people are more likely to escape even random events of insurgent action

perpetrated by disenfranchised individuals of low-income authoritarian and or theocratic

governments to a degree which is unjustly inverse to their inherited responsibility for policies

which lead to the creation of those very governments and disenfranchised individuals. I have no

idea how I can articulate my case any more specifically within the lexicon.”

Sam tossed his hands up. “I literally can’t understand what this guy is talking about.”

Ron buckled with incredulous, sarcastic laughter, and the professor rolled his eyes again.

“Ron is still trying to make you understand your inability to recognize or address the results of

the class privilege you have inheritedr

“That’s not— ” Ron scoffed. “Okay. Sure. Exactly what I said.” He crossed his arms.

Frank gestured to Sam. “Is there truth to these accusations?”

“Yes.” And Sam just kept on smiling.

“Well. Yes? Elaboration? Please?”

Sam sat up, straightening his jacket, ever smiling. “All those things are true— ”

“And you’re completely okay with that? You’re completely okay with being a blase

inheritor of all those years of inequity— come on, running with the wind on your back?” Ron

shook his head.

“Yes. All that you say about our privilege is true— your privilege, too, because now you

are able to sit calmly in here or anywhere you want and say whatever you want. Yes. I am okay

with that. Your problem is you won’t accept that there is nothing wrong with being exceptional,

and exceptionalism is what you too have inherited.”

He smoothed his lapels, his fingers pausing on the tri flag pin, and could barely contain a

smile. “It’s not about white. It’s not even about freedom. It’s about American. America rose from

the failure of European history. It rose on the backs of slaves and machines— don’t you keeping

shaking your head like that. Your ancestors, yes. But not you. My ancestors, yes. But not me. But

69

even if it were us, those were the choices that made us what we are today, right here. America

tore land away from people too weak to keep it. America gave work to people too docile to resist

it. America made itself the very best it could be in this way. There is all this negativity from you

and other people about what America did wrong, though you always have been an American and

inherit more than you accept you do.

“Despite all of that, America is the most exceptional nation ever to exist on this planet.

America has dominated an entire continent and influenced all others. Americans are the ones to

go to space. Americans are the ones going to Mars, the great American men. Americans are

exceptional in the world, and so we should not look on what we did to make it here with shame,

but with pride.” He pointed to Ron. “You, and people like you, are afraid of it. But I embrace it. I

am proud of being exceptional, I am proud to use any means necessary to maintain our

exceptionalism, and so I have no reason to talk big when I am big.”

Ron steadied himself as if he’d been splashed or taken a toxic whiff—he seemed even

drunker than Tim, then, ready to lose his entire lunch all at once.

Les Frank still seemed bored, but then began nodding deeply. “Bravo, Sam. The most

articulate you’ve been all season. Even if your rhetoric did borrow quite a bit from Sarah Palin’s

latest address. You both have points, if not rather short sighted ones.” He smiled, wagged a

finger. “Historical circumstance will of course put a damper on all your parades/”

He shuffled through the books on his podium, manila folders to the fore, shaking his head

with smiling concession, an exaggerated shrug. “How will the people of the 26th century quip

about the struggles of the inspired Ronald and determined Samuel! My thought is that, alas, my

dear students, as invested as you are, they will not quip about such matters at all.”

Then Professor Frank turned to Tim. “But what do you think, Tim?”

Until the spine-straightening mention of his name, Tim had only been sinking further into

his chair, pressing his brow into his palms, or sweating more while the conversation had

intensified around him. He had listened, but had not been present. “What?”

The professor smiled. “But - what - d o - you - think - T im T And he gave a wide gesture

worthy of Wagner to the room. “W e’d love to hear from you.”

Indeed, there were gazes trained on him then. Ron turned back in his seat, as did Sam,

and all were awaiting hopefully some response from him, maybe for some way to break from the

deadlock.

70

Tim squirmed, puffed. It was the worst thing that could happen, he thought. Having to

say anything. To respond to this in an articulate way to this Les Frank, among the most arrogant,

aggrandizing, aggressively narrow-minded professors he’d ever met. His grinning. That toothed

grinning. It was like he pulled students out of thought to eat them up.

And to respond to Ron or to Sam? They were both so invested. They were well-read.

They knew so much as to appear to defy their biases. They were the white knights of their seed.

What would Robin do? But he could not be there because he now belonged to the drift,

Tim was afraid, belonged to those people with whom Tim could never belong. He thought all this

as he faced these nationalists and racists to which he likewise could never belong. Though they

wanted him to. They wanted him to.

Tim had read enough about social injustice to argue a case against Sam; Tim had enough

experience with history, biology and happenstance to argue a case against Ron. But Tim knew it

made no difference what he said because he felt he was not invested in anything.

He did what Robin would do: He stopped thinking and started talking. “Ha. Well. What

the hell do I know,” He grinned.

But then the whiskey and codeine prodded him to slur further. “Actually, this is pretty

stupid.”

It was all glares on him, all arm crossing and staring at the floor.

“I read that guys were crucified still last decade for shoplifting or rebelling or whatever it

was— some kid in Saudi Arabia. Whatever— whoever his name. He was crucified for going to a

protest. You don’t even think about that, do you? This is stupid. You’re just talking. Republicans,

fascists, democrats, anarchists, Exceptionalists— you people— yeah you fucking people and your

ism this and ism that— you guys can do this academic, patriotic cock fighting and spread your

isms like jisms back and forth to Hell and precisely shit won’t change. Parties,” and he gave a

punctuating laugh. “None of them represent shit, too. You’re a mob. You’re all a mob. Separately

and one too. I stopped having this conversation when American Exceptionalists became an actual

party. What’s her name— oh Sarah. Oh, Sarah.” And he pressed a clammy, shaking palm to his

face. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. But what—that it was all true, whatever they said before? Andrew

Fucking Jackson? Make no secret of taking freedom everywhere, to every shit covered hut in the

world. Put in the constitution— in the constitution! You put an amendment in the constitution that

said take freedom to every shit covered hut in the world.

71

“But it’s not just you. It’s you too, and you. It’s all o f you. You think your time is the

most important time in history, and you think it’s the best time in history and the worst time in

history. Well, fuck you. Everyone ever said that. Julius Cesar said that. Madonna said that. It

means nothing. You will all die and remember nothing. But you believe this garbage and wear it

like a banner— you wave it like a banner in my faces, and we can’t get along cause, now, nuanced

discussion—fucked, it’s all just asses now. It’s a ll...” he waved his hands arhythmically. Then he

became aware of his own voice, it’s strained and wandering quality. He’d gone on for too long.

He sought to finish. “Look. Whatever. That's what I think. I want to— I don’t want to

know this anymore. I don’t want to be angry or upset. I want to be free. I just want to act. I don't

want this burden of this shit—knowledge. 1 want to unknow.”

Professor Frank bellowed. “Whoa! ‘Unknow?’” And he raised his eyebrows. “Apathy?”

Tim’s face soured. “No, not apathy. Unknow. I’m tried of all this. I wish I could unsee it,

you know.” When he said that, he was thinking about Olivia and the fire. Yet, in that moment, he

was not feeling Olivia and the fire as he had been, or seeing the tableau in his mind as he had for

weeks of waking trauma or nightmares, but he was saying it as if he were because he always had.

Maybe it was the drink and the drug. Could it have begun to fade, already?

He persisted anyway. “I just wish I could take it back. I want to be untouched again.

But.” There was a lingering silence. Tim had nothing more to say.

“Baffling, Tim. Baffling.” Frank studied his face, smiling.

Ron and Sam were both shaking their heads at him. “You’re just not paying attention,”

Ron said to him. “Look around you, buddy.”

“I guess we can agree on that,” Sam laughed. “I like people who win, or at least try to.”

“Apathy,” Frank stated. “You have no direction.” He moved back behind the podium

lifted the manila envelope. “Indifference, Tim, might be the thing that kills us all!” Professor

Frank opened the folder, removed the packet stuffed with stapled Xerox copies of history and

ideas, a heavy book on the world’s story, opened it—

And there it was. There it was. A tiny sizzle as the light streamed in from behind him

onto the paper— a sizzle and hiss. Tim saw it— he saw it— as Professor Les Frank’s mouth and

eyes opened wide at the suddenly crackling Xerox pages, sparks, the glow of a shocking gift, or a

radiant answer—Tim saw it, the shocking glow of a radiant answer— shining in Frank’s pupils,

and they saw it huff up as a green-white flash, and all of him and the podium were instantly a ball

72

of flame faded from green to red. His arms moved to and fro in slow motion as his clothes and

skin blackened and everyone screamed and he sank down into a heap of black death with the skin

boiling and his body was the twenty second body destroyed by a book bomb.

73

Robin found Tim sitting on the patchy half of Dolores Park beneath a grafittied palm tree,

his arms around his knees, overlooking the skyline. Tim’s eyes were darkened with the shadows

of sleepless weeks.

Robin sat beside him. He fished another cigarette from his jacket, the leather wrinkled in

the sun. The day was clear and razor crisp but the park was deserted except for one group near the

edge of the street. They were a tall man in tattered pants and an endless beard holding a six-pack

in one hand and walking staff in the other, and a tight group of seven stoned gutter punks, one girl

in a stripped dress gesturing to the tall man with her prosthetic leg. All the rest of the park was

open space.

Tim nodded to Robin, and then they looked once more over the deserted park and city

sky line. All the thousands were out there somewhere, hidden within the walls and walls of the

rising buildings.

“It’s not exactly what I would do,” Robin finally admitted. “But it’s half way between

what I would do and what you would do. Right?”

Silence.

Robin shook his head a little. “But I don’t know what you hope to find exactly, man.

What’s it gonna be? So you’ll be free to explore. Free to wander around Europe until it all dries

up. It seems like you’re searching for something. Is that what it is? Something you’ll know once

you find it? Or are you escaping? But you can’t run from yourself forever, man. You can for

awhile. But not forever.

“You’ll get tired one day. Or you’ll destroy everything else that matters to you before you

face it. Or maybe you’ll just spend all your money. Who knows what will happen first— can you

outlast yourself? Out bid yourself? Buy off your own unrequited desires? That’s what it’s really

about— I know you.” He laughed. “Do I know you, man. Sure, you saw death. Twice now. But

74

it’s something bigger. And it’s unstoppable, man— you have to believe me, because I know. The

things you want—you can’t run away or they’ll burn two holes in your chest eventually.”

And here, Robin put his arm around Tim who remained still, hugging his knees, his face

now pressed into them, his unwashed blond hair spiking out between them.

Robin continued. “You have to face it, straight on. You have to be terrified, succumb to

fighting it. And you can’t drink it away forever. Again, man, take it from me— I love drugs. I love

alcohol. But you can’t numb yourself away from yourself and pretend you don’t care because

you’re shitfaced. You can’t. It will always come back. And you’ll have to fight. You versus

you. ”

Tim remained motionless for a long time. The wind had started to blow, and Robin

noticed how the shadows changed, how the sun was a copper tint across the park.

Tim looked up, opening his eyes— the sun forced him to bring a hand to his brow. In the

long moments, the squinting eyes, Tim considered all o f Robin’s lines. Like Robin said, he could

feel the longing reaching out from his lungs like an always growing pair of arms, like slow

writhing vectors, ethereal but real nonetheless. Were they reaching for her again? Had they

always been, the past months? Or was it an image they reached for, or an image they reached out

to shape in someone else? An image based on another want somewhere else inside him?

Tim could admit, now and again, that Robin’s perspective had weight: He knew he was

obsessed with this Olivia, with everything surrounding her— had been obsessed with this Olivia.

Right? That’s what he cared about. Right? What was the worth of real connection?

Understanding? Feeling? The price? What was the price of the torture inside, the empty thing

always hungry?

Robin felt that empty, too. He projected that truth onto Tim as he considered his own

empty: Robin thought that the truth was that Tim longed, but needed, too. He needed to connect

with someone like he needed water, needed blood in veins, needed air in lungs, fat in his head. It

couldn’t be helped. You can quit baiting yourself with bourbon because you can quit buying

bourbon, Robin thought. But you can’t quit beautiful people because you can’t buy beautiful

people. There was no moderation of this need. It was not a weakness or an excess. It was an

unchangeable reality. And it was inside them. And it was an empty essence. And it hurt.

Finally, Tim sat up, squatting on the grass. He cracked his knuckles. “The truth is, Robin,

that I just want to go on an adventure.”

75

Robin smiled at Tim, raising his eyebrows.

“I’ve never been to Europe— maybe Scandinavia. I want something new. I’m tired of

school.”

Robin grinned then.

“I’m coming back. I’ll be back to finish my life here. It’s temporary.”

And Robin laughed. “Tim. You’re full o f shit.”

“What?”

“Stop lying. I know you. Stop lying to me. There’s more and you’re not telling me the

truth. For whatever reason.”

But to withhold suggested intent. To withhold was to know a truth and to resist its

expression with purpose. Tim did want something, but he did not know the truth about what he

wanted. “Okay,” Tim told him. He smiled.

Robin stopped smiling. He shook his head and stood abruptly, and Tim stood as well. “I

have no idea why you are suddenly withholding your real thoughts from me. What the fuck?

What the fuck? I've always been your friend. I hope you know what you’re doing, pal.” Robin

gave Tim a hug, patting him hard on the shoulders. “You won’t talk to me, so I’m leaving. I hope

you have a good trip.”

Tim pulled away. He looked Robin in the eyes. He held his hand out. “See you in Hell.”

They shook hands, laughed, and parted, leaving the empty park behind them.

That was the end of it.

76

II

77

The book which killed Olivia Banderas was not literature with a capital L, nor a

slashy page-turner, nor a classic classic, nor a modern classic.

The truth is that Olivia was not much of a reader—she was a writer, an artist of all

sorts, and a born performer. She had the eyes to see beauty and the manners to articulate

it. She was mindful of the world and had inhabited it thoroughly, taking risks and

opening herself to vulnerability. She loved often—she made love often, but loved men

and women both just as often, because she learned at some point that loving was easy but

wasn’t threatening if it was done freely. But she hardly read.

Unbeknownst to Olivia, or Tim, or Robin, or anybody in the media in few months

of the outbreak of book bombs, the bombers lacked the resources to print true book

bombs. Because of the expense and the logistics, printing books at home and bringing

them over was out of the question. They also had no foothold in the United States from

which to produce the bombs. Also, several members of expertise in the cell had records

and connections which would prevent them from attaining the required visas. So they

couldn’t, en masse, manufacture fakes of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 or something else

ubiquitously ironic to flood the decadent West and East with.

But they realized they didn’t need to: the activation of the photosensitive

combustibles in their ink would burn the victim as equally as the evidence, nothing left to

trace. Evidence was destroyed with the victim.

So the unknown bomber worried not once she succeeded in bringing her five-by-

three box of leaflets into the United States—she worried only how she’d get them

through customs without praying to god to make it work, though. But she succeeded—the

78

boxes were full of religious tracts, see—see, look, she said as she showed him the

unsealed, untreated ones on the top, the ones which really were just leaflets—see, an

orthodox church you’ve never heard of—my uncle at Cal, see, smiling at the TSA agent

like she’d brought a secret in all the way from Bratislava and held it in between her lips

to pass off to the agent at the airport in Oakland. And of course he would have accepted it

had he not been at work; he asked for her number. She commanded him to give her his in

her cool mien, and he agreed, and she kept smiling and left the airport smiling too,

crumpling the slip of paper in her free hand and letting it fall to the ground.

She checked in to her hotel in the city and put the box of sealed leaflets in the

closet. She sat on the edge of the bed and removed her luxurious black locks, her head

shaved beneath. She unzipped her dress, rubbed her scalp. All that was left for her in

Berkeley and San Francisco was to break into book stores at night, use her red hued flash

light to find target books, insert the leaflets, and go home on Tuesday.

She undertook the mission as a blonde in a red dress. The first book store was

simple, a bookstore in San Francisco. The kind store clerk was easy to distract because he

trusted her face. She told him she wanted the first edition of By Night in Chile, and she

was willing to wait while he helped her order it from the internet. When he was busy with

the computer, she unhooked his keys from his belt loop, placed them in her pocket. She

thanked him for searching for her, but that she’d decided not to purchase the book after

all—too expensive. Similar strategies worked for four other bookstores, unhooking keys

or lifting them from registers of the unsuspecting, kind-hearted San Franciscans.

But the sixth, one in Berkeley, became complicated. The attendant there, a bald

headed man with glasses who said he was named Paisley, thought she was hitting on him.

And he made his moves, and he took his stand propped on one arm in a doorway, forcing

her to talk to him about the avant garde into closing time, and he made it clear they

should do something else beside finger books—that’s what he actually said.

A small part of her, the unknown bomber, wanted to just walk away from him.

But a better part of her wanted to ruin him.

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So she told him she agreed to fuck him. But she wanted to drink first. He grinned

as he pulled the bottle of tequila from beneath the counter. Thank god she’d remembered

to pack the roofies.

This situation changed her time table dramatically. Originally, she’d planned on

planting all the leaflets at her leisure in the deep of the night, being meticulous, and

finishing an hour or two before sunrise, leaving in the afternoon. But now she needed to

plant the leaflets in this book store before the fresh bookseller woke up and unstuck the

duct tape and superglue sticking his penis to the cold tile floor. And that meant she had to

plant the leaflets everywhere at that moment. She would have to scramble.

She ran from the naked bookseller, locking the shop door behind her, and sprinted

back to her hotel.

But back to San Francisco six hours later, to the slow breeze on the Sunday

morning of March 15th, 2020 which carried Olivia away from Lilith’s house toward her

death, before Lilith or the boys they’d brought home from the bar had a chance to rouse

from the beds they all made for themselves together. The breeze blew through the

flowing black sleeves of her blouse, across the wide pant legs of her slacks.

Somehow, Olivia wasn’t hung over when she woke up with a start—she didn’t

know how it was possible. How many drinks had they had? They’d begun the night

licking lines of MDMA from a mirror, the wretched taste of citrus and cleaning

chemicals. The endless shots, the endless need, all the men craving them, the way they

schemed for Lilith to win a place in her bed, willing to cross and abandon their friends.

Nobody ended up sleeping with anybody, having sex, that is, and the girls slept together

while some of the boys left in a rage and others passed out on the floor.

The weight of all these things woke Olivia up early in the morning, and

something about the intensity of her thoughts pulled her from the alcohol and narcotic

haze of the night before into clarity: this was no longer what she needed, and it was not

what she wanted either. She was tired of drowning the hollow thing, tired of running

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from the hollow thing, and was ready to simply make peace with it and walk away with it

on a Sunday morning.

She smiled beneath the sheets, her face hidden from the dawn glow. She didn’t

want. It was over. She didn’t want it. She felt she could cry. And she was amazed. She

truly felt cleaner than she’d ever been. It was never a need, always a want, and even now

the lust for lust was extinguished. When the rain washes you clean you’ll know.

She wrote Lilith a note which quoted the lyric, sat for a moment to loving caress

her sleeping friend’s cheek. She put her clothes and her shoes on, and left the house

without waking anybody. And she walked away.

She walked with aimless drift at first—the sun was only beginning to rise over the

Mission, and it was Sunday morning. Most people stirring projected the friendly vigor of

morning people, a most distinct breeds from the clan of the night. The earliest of these,

those who lifted and tossed the stacked crates of vegetables in relay, were out sitting and

chatting and smoking and drinking coffee, all friendly hellos to Olivia, the nodding and

smiling faces.

She walked out to Dolores Park, and she walked up the hill, just some trudging

from her tired legs she’d used for dancing, and she sat atop it with her fingers in the

grass, and she watched the sun coming up over the bay, the rays through the city skyline,

and she felt a silence in her mind she’d not felt in years.

Who knows what had changed. Had it changed because she said it should? Was it

something outside herself? She asked only those questions in the hour she sat on the hill

listening to the breeze, the whir of quiet engines, the brush of trees, the chatting and

laughing and lingering polyphonic picnic voices, and focused on her breathing.

She walked down Valencia street toward Dog Eared Books. It had been a long

time since she read, she realized. The drugs and the sex and music was in her all the time.

But it was a new day. So why not read?

She walked into the store, and a beautifully soft-faced man greeted her, his grey

pompadour cascading before his forehead. All the titles seemed so foreign—it had been

81

years. She’d read texts and philosophy for class, and she’d written the lyrics to her songs.

But she hadn’t just sought out a book for years, drawn to it. Everything blending together,

the titles ran away from her, words, Molly God of Chronicles in Chile if Small Things

Catch Girl Can One Thousand Days Winding up... and so on, and they ran together. So

she wound up in the art section, and felt relieved and excited there.

She sought another park. Somewhere where the city and the Earth coalesced,

somewhere familiar.

Olivia walked away from the subway station toward her school’s quad, her new

Francisco Goya book under her arm. Something about the violence of the textures in his

work turned her on but also reminded her of what she didn’t want to be anymore:

visceral, fluid, furious and fueled by alcohol and her id, soul sweat always from every

pore like the oil paint. She’d left it open for so long. So she began to flip at random

through the pages, spending some moments on each one before letting fate guide her

fingers, letting them flow, Hobgoblins, Witches in the Air, Nude Maja, May 3 1808—

something brought her attention up toward the horizon as she prepared to turn the next

page, the blue sky, green grass, and a man walking toward her.

So the last thing she could see before the agony, before the green huff engulfed

her and tore every atom in her skin and asphyxiated her and she faded to red and to black

and to the numb null and released her to the cosmic wind again, eventually, was Tim

walking toward her with clean eyes, a half smile, and his hands in his pockets.

And by the time of this event, the unknown bomber was atop the sheets of a hotel

bed in San Francisco, eyes wide on the ceiling, wide with terrific zeal and the wind of

adrenaline, wide with the curses for the hateful passage of time, with the curses of the

slow moving sun and the inability to escape the silent, solid walls of the room. She cursed

and huffed and widened and stared. She cursed at the circumstances which had led her to

act this way, led her to this moment.

Nobody involved would know that the unknown bomber was Boyana Ignatova,

unless Boyana told somebody.

82

August 2020

83

In Greece, one evening, Boyana Ignatova sat waiting for Alexo in the red illumination of

the bar, neon and sunset. The band was setting up somewhere behind her— Americans, the

crooked-faced singer with a red-blonde pompadour and the tattooed woman arguing about

setlists, songs-of-choice and drugs-of-choice. Boyana realized they meant alcohol. Before her, the

leering barman in his arm garter and iridescent shirt poured her own cocktail, a traditional

absinthe.

She watched the water pour over the single sugar cube from a tortured pewter vessel; the

ice clinking, it passed like a crumpling ephemeral sheet over the sugar—there it was, the break

down. She watched the water envelope it, crystals weakening, positive negative interaction,

sucrose molecules breaking free and joining with oxygen one by one by one, so fast and minute it

was invisible magic. And below, more magicianship, the pale green neon of the absinthe clouding

into a white like ghouls blood. The water stopped; the barman had finished. He slid the drink

forward, turning to serve the tattooed woman from the band.

Oxygen— alcohol— well, ethanol, she recognized. Her head hissed with her hand sliding

over the thousands of stubbled follicles of her shaved head. She brought the drink to her lips,

lush, then full of licorice, bitter sweet. These days, though, it wasn’t the oxygen in ethanol for

her, but the oxygen in potassium nitrate. K N 03.

She’d been full of ethanol when she’d met Alexo, too. She’d been drunk and alone, angry

that her chemistry hadn’t helped make the world better— why, it hadn’t even helped make it

worse. Almost a decade of adult struggle. It had done nothing. Nothing. It was years of men

telling her no. She struggled for twenty five months to find work in and out of her field, beneath it

and far beneath it and further still beneath it, and there was nothing for her but opportunities for

her own biological exploitation. Nothing, or the chance to become nothing. So she resisted

nothing by merely standing on its block and never crossing its threshold, stumbling from

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Bratislava to Thessaloniki to Athens in a eyes-closed, dry-heaving haze of urgent vice, of

rebellion and hate and rage, of hopping trains and vans and stealing whatever she could carry in

her rucksack until the day she fell through the doorway of the bar in which she presently sat

ruminating. That day she fell straight into the seat besides Alexo— maybe it was Alexo’s lap—

into muscle, into cold-eyed forward stares and a grip toward something, into his cell. The right

year, the right place, and they were laying waste to the West together. They were giving it

something to be afraid of. They were tearing down walls, blowing open vaulted banks and

vaulted chests of the closed-off hearts of investment bankers. Alexo had offered her the

opportunity for her chemistry to do evil, and she took it.

She shook her head, another sip. That was silly. Amazed she had thought it. Evil. Boyana

sneered at ‘evil,’ this moot conceptual argument. What was evil but an accumulation of what

most people were afraid of? She glanced down at her glass and took a gulp.

She should admit she was afraid of what she’d made, she conceded.

But maybe she should take a lesson from Bradbury— was it not less important how things

happened, and more important why they happened? Yes.

Alexo was right, then, according to that interpretation of Bradbury, where people burned

books because they were afraid, and burned books until people forgot they were afraid enough to

burn books, and kept on burning them for a fire that would fill some cold void. No, see, but now

it was about control, a real enemy you could spot and take aim at. A million and a half

corporations seated on sedan chairs atop seven and a half billion heads. The whip was seminal

and ancient, he’d told her once. But it was finished. Yet slavery continued without it, Yes?

Something new, something exploiting expectations and worth and spirit. Yes? Nothing.

Boyana took another gulp, held out her hand and took a look. She opened and closed it.

But the feeling of setting something free in the world that was powerful enough to take lives—

Boyana shifted, hunkered down on the barstool.

Wait—just for the arguments sake of course— imagine the hands of someone else who

created a destroyer. Dare she call that someone a He—just for the sake of arguments— but

imagine the hands of the creator of man, the greatest destroyer of all— man, that is. That’s the

thing; man’s creator created man as a destroyer to destroy His worst enemy indirectly, to

overwhelm him by sheer numbers and centuries of complex moral disorientation.

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What would that creator’s hands look like? Soft compared to the destruction wrought by

His self-replicating golem? Would it matter if He was She? Boyana laughed. And she knew it

would not; she’d seen enough now to know that the dead were completely the same, especially

the burned.

So maybe that’s what her creation was; their new unknowing, indiscriminate destroyer, a

disconnecter to force their archfiend into tripping over itself. To terrorize it. She was afraid too.

But that was the point; could one single out a single crystal in dissolving sugar? Of course not.

One must melt what one could, and what will, will be.

Boyana finished her cocktail. Alexo could find her later. She nodded to the barman— he

knew she’d return later for another meeting— and strode out into the night to find the music she

could hear echoing in the street.

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“Hey Robin, this is Tim. Uh. What the hell—your phone has been off for more than a

month. Or two months. A long time. I don’t know. Anyway, I ’m at Mono— Mono— Monastriaki,

by the station, in Athens. It’s great, it’s great. But. You were right about a lot o f stuff. I’m facing

it all, like you said. Uh. It feels like I’m doing the opposite of what I want. Or something like that.

I don’t know. Uh— but the end is good most the time. It’s what you said. So. Is it morning? I

don’t know what time it is. Okay.”

Tim was settling the phone bill when the din in the street arrived.

He walked outside— he was pushed against cold bricks, a man pressing a wine bottle into

Tim’s hand, brushing past him, walking away. Tim’s eyes snapped to the twisting mass and the

burned out bank behind them, the subway plaza filled with the bonfires that had been burning for

six months before them, the night-lit Acropolis looming in the distance. People in ski masks, goat

masks, a woman in a jumpsuit veiled by the rubber face of Sarah Palin.

Tim wondered if he’d be in such a mask by dawn. Would he hurl the bottle through a

post office window, a well-lit coffee shop, maybe? He took a mighty swig of sour red wine.

Two nights prior, he’d been so drunk and amped on something that was maybe speed—

Tim had no idea what he’d taken having falling under the spell o f nodding and saying “yes” all

the time— what would Robin do?— t w o nights prior, he’d run or tripped over a balding and

babbling Greek in slacks and a polo shirt who’d been sprinting in the opposite direction. The ten

skinheads caught up to the man, fell into him, kicking into him. One of them shouted efcharisto at

Tim with happy, mad cap zeal. Thank you. He clapped Tim on both shoulders.

“Yes,” Tim said.

Then they put the beaten Greek’s face to the curb to stomp him— Tim thought he saw

that, but it was dark, and he was very drunk and very high with all the darkened curb and

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cobblestones and tom buildings shimmering in the dew like pink and red and white salt. Maybe

he hadn’t actually seen that at all.

It was some act of rebellion he’d literally stumbled into then. But he was recognizing the

distinct possibility of walking into something else with purpose now, or soon.

Within the crowd in the street, he heard the blast of bass, cheering, and the thudding of

dance. Multi-colored lights suddenly blew through the haze of a belching fog machine,

illuminating the peeling and burned buildings around them with rainbow. There, perched in the

fog, was a DJ, his face only speculation behind a homed mask of a wild-eyed goat. And the DJ

was indeed moving forward, a retinue of other dancing goat heads pushing his float through the

street, lights and turntables wired crudely to a stack of automobile batteries.

And from the din of cheering Greeks came a whooping, rising rollercoaster of shouts and

voices from the DJ’s vinyl, a fast electric beat ridden by a high, falling staccato synthesizer. It

was a cocaine-fueled sub-machinegun of a dance song— dance, it screamed and brandished itself,

dance! Dance! And the Greeks abided the threat, following the furious pace through their spines

and arms and heads and breasts. The vinyl sang, the theatrics of the man’s ornamented voice:

Misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice! Misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice! Chips on my

shoulder, chips on my shoulder!

Apolitical, acivil, benignly barbaric, pleasingly vulgar. It was masked Dionysus

regressing them with a mutating auditory infective, their panting bodies pushing traffic aside as

the party wound on through the streets. Tim gulped down all the wine from the bottle, shattering

it in the gutter after. He pulled his pleather bomber-jacket off, his shirt off, and the dance drew to

his skin sweat which the onlookers deluded with the wine they flung across his chest, face, and

back.

Then he saw her. An unforgettable moment, a slow motion water moment. He saw her—

everyone did as the music mutated further into a slower, deeper, older rhythm— Golden years,

goo-oold, wha wha wha. Come hither my baby.

Tim pushed his way through the people circling around her, clapping in time.

She was in the midst of a shimmy, tossing and twirling her hips and skinhead wherever

the song took her, a silver necklace gyrating, its scroll pendant swirling, swirling, swirling them

all in a sea of life in the Athenian night. Maybe she’d been living under the ocean for all her life

with the ease she moved on land, the ease and power.

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Tim had been weary of girls with shaved heads in the United States— what was the

statement? But in Athens, in 2020, it was not a statement but a declaration of independence and a

warrior’s helmet against the dead regimes. And this girl... maybe it was how little of her there

was— not at all about the size of anything. She was curvaceous. But little in that everything

seemed so artless. Tim wondered if maybe she’d been a Buddhist monk until minutes prior to the

appearance of rolling DJ Dionysus, tossing away her orange robes for simple fitting black jeans

and red v-shirt. Aside from the silver pendant, her black-as-black leather belt, she was

unornamented. Simplicity. Some other sort of nothing.

Her shimmy took her around to face Tim momentarily— her face— a hazy sort of ivory,

round, lips with that Eastern European smile— there was a secret, her secret, unique to her in its

very language, an unspeakable color. Her eyes touched his face for only a second before she was

taken further. There was a heat in him.

But then something happened. A man— he was truly a man, Tim observed, with his $700

blazer, tom pants, half buttoned shirt, curly hair everywhere— began to join her in dancing.

Tim watched carefully. He danced at her at first, holding his arms up above his head, and

swinging his hips. He was a good dancer, Tim thought. But what— what, was he showing her his

strength? That he knew how to fuck and apply pressure in the right strides? Such meat. It made

Tim angry. What a cunt, he thought, this man-man trying to testosterone drown this girl with his

perfectly swinging pendulum dick like his time on Earth depended on it. They were not even

from the same planet. Maybe he was from a gas giant, a planet of all hot air.

And then the man-man took a step forward. He danced in, danced around the girl’s

rolling motion— she never looked at him, always in her own time— and he finally moved his

hands in, toward her, onto her waist—

There— crack! with her elbow once, and crack! with a swinging knuckle twice— and

everyone was oooh!ing and uuug!ing and clapping as man-man fell on one knee, his hands on his

nose, face red, the blood, and the people cheered, and Tim covered his mouth, and he saw how

the girl looked to the man with the blackest eyes like his slow death would end in his being

devoured, her first human meal. A big cat. And then she turned away, the crowd still moving, the

man-man absorbed, and she fell back into her trance-like dance.

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Tim was afraid again. He was terrified. That image and the feeling, the day of the warm

water moment with Olivia, shot back through him as momentary hot fire in his spine, similar but

different.

When the goatpeople finally wheeled masked Dionysus into a narrow alleyway, a fish

market closed for the night or forever, the girl broke from the crowd, walking purposefully across

the inundated street into a glowing side street, feet swishing through a great pool of rain water

amix with swirling neon signage like oil paints drowning the street.

It was a sliver of a bar, a high pseudo-Victorian facade aglow with the flourish of a pink

neon over the archway: Nueva Trova. She slipped through the blue-pink illuminated mass

standing outside as effortlessly as she had danced.

A mountain man, bearded and close-eyed, stopped Tim from entering, gesturing and

babbling toward Tim’s pockets over the muffled live rock music inside.

“Yes,” Tim said. He retrieved his wallet, producing his ID card. “July 2nd 1994.” He tried

to pass.

The man held him back, shaking his head— he pointed to the wallet. “Monies.”

They sorted it with a fist-full of Tim’s dollars, and Tim finally entered the club to strange

looks from an overwhelming number of shaved heads.

He looked down at himself; he’d forgotten his shirtlessness, and though his jacket was in

his hand, his shirt was lost. He put the jacket back on, zipped it, and felt comfortably disheveled.

He imagined he might look like Sid Vicious at that moment if not for his violent blondness.

The crowd was moving in time with the band who played against the bar’s picture

covered black walls— pictures of old patrons and older world leaders, Che and others. The band

was a vaguely militant group of foreigners, presumably Americans, Tim judging from the

singer’s accent and crooked smile and fire-colored ragged pomp, the deeply inked and long­

haired brunette wielding her Les Paul, the perpetually wincing bass player in square glasses and

beard and slicked hair, the keg-chested drummer and fem hobo chic keyboardist all wired. Their

tune was cybernetic post-punk, seminal but finished, a vision of music from a future foreseen by

1977 Berlin expats. Was 2020 the year the future had actually come?

Tim finally came closer to the bar, and there she was. Tim’s heart was thudding through

his ears and eyes. And then she noticed him: She gazed, her eyebrows arched over flat green eyes.

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A gaze. Tim shivered, and he remembered the monk Robin told him about. A gaze— it was as if

she’d already seen his birth, death, and this was judgment.

Este mou meta, it sounded like she said.

“Yes.” Tim replied. Was it Spanish?

“You are following me,” she repeated in heavy English.

“Yes,” Tim laughed— he heard in his laugh that he was drunk from the bad wine. He

knew how he looked, shirtless, in too tight a cheap pleather jacket, and hopelessly stained with

pinot across his pasty skin and through his matted hair— he hadn’t much to lose. “Yes, I was

following you. 1 was following you. I’ve never seen anyone dance like that. Uh. And how you

punched that guy out. Uh. You.” He laughed again.

And she only gazed back at him.

More? Less? He couldn’t interpret her unmoving face, which held exactly the same secret

expression as when he’d seen her dance.

“Listen: I don’t know what the fuck to say to you.” He gestured grandly toward the bar

with shaking hands, “but I know I want you to stand here with me and have a drink I buy for you

and then tell me, you know, whatever you want to tell me, because I’m a good listener.”

Of course she bellowed. Christ. Tim thought she had the confidence to laugh at any dying

man, even a man dying of testicular cancer, right in his face.

But to Tim’s surprise, she grinned after she’d finished laughing, hailing the bartender in

Greek. She turned back to Tim. “You guess what is my favorite drink.”

The bartender leaned in, a classic magician bartender, goatee, tie, waistcoat and arm

garter, but updated for the future of 1977 by way of an iridescent yellow-blue shirt.

“Afterburner,” Tim said immediately.

The bartender nodded, turned to work. Alcohol is an international language.

The girl, too, nodded with recognition of Tim’s quick decision making.

Tim smiled. He could have kissed Robin then: An untold number of frenetic nights and

mornings of porcelain-worship at his behest taught Tim many gratuitous cocktails. He needed

only chose the right one for this girl, a cold fire of a girl.

The magician returned; through a series of hand gestures, Tim realized he was missing an

ingredient. It would be five minutes. Five minutes.

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After too many measures of only the band, Tim finally cleared his throat. “So,” he

ventured, “what’s your name, anyway? Is this your favorite place?”

She frowned.

“Okay, okay,” Tim said, raising his hands and his pitch. “It’s motherfucking pedestrian.”

His next thought was that he neglected to order himself a drink.

She muttered something unintelligible, turned toward the band.

They were a fine band, though on the verge of karaoke— the absinthe in the fire-haired

singer’s hand was surely not his first, and he had his other arm around a much drunker audience

member, backing her up with an off-time rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart. But it made no

difference. The band had already won the crowd over, and they passed tiny smirks and rising

eyebrows between each other. The masses plowed along with rowdy giddiness. They’d ridden the

set from the beginning to this presumably improvised end. Everything was molten gold.

But Tim was overwhelmed, still shaking, with this anonym, the most obscure and self-

secure person he’d ever seen. He barely knew what he wanted, where his goal was. He only knew

he wanted negative space. Adrift, but at least then adrift in a self-destructing foreign land with no

need for restraint. But, remember, Robin told him to do things that made him afraid. What would

Robin do?

He decided to commit to the most fearful cloud of all: The truth.

“So. I’ll tell you some things about me that are totally honest. How many do you want?”

“Three.” She said, eyes still on the band, smiling at them.

“So. Firstly, I don’t know how to talk to girls like you. I’ve never done it. I’ve had one

relationship before. Her name was Sophie. But I always fail otherwise. I am unlucky. I am a loser.

And last time I had a chance with somebody, it was foiled like Hell—tinfoiled like meatloaf in

Hell.

“Secondly, my name is Tim Andres Fleman, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi Tim,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was watching him, then.

“Third thing: I am adrift. Don’t know where my goal is. Not one own goal— for myself.

Just for others. Blank— ” he made a wiping gesture, like he’d laid out a road map of himself in

lines of flower, and then woosh. “And that is all because of that foiling in Hell I mentioned. It was

a girl. And an arrogant professor at Berkeley. But the girl, her name was Olivia Banderas— ”

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Her eyes opened wide with the name. “Yes, I know this name,” she whispered. “Olivia,

killed by a bookbomb, yes? The first one. In Berkeley? On the grass? You were there?”

“Yes.”

“You were there?”

“Yes. Yes— exactly. I was there doing pre-med. I dropped out afterward.”

The ice had melted. They started nodding, both yesing— they shared a common

preoccupation, two strangers recognizing at once they shared a cousin. But they were quickly

silent again and their faces still. They were two strangers recognizing they shared cousin who’d

been cremated by a terrifying text.

“You knew her?” She asked Tim.

“Yes. I did— I mean, I wanted to. She was a classmate. An interest. It’s hard to explain. I

knew her without knowing her.”

The girl stepped closer to Tim. He could see something new in her eyes, an illumination

in the blackest part as her face shuttered and she drew a hand to her cheek. “You saw it happen?”

“Yes. I was there. Twenty feet— seven meters, or whatever it is. And it happened.”

She put a hand on his arm— she withdrew it, palm down on the bar. She closed her eyes

for a moment and her jaw tightened. “No. Sometimes there is innocent death. There is a means—

like,” and then she gesticulated tersely, her English thickening, “don’t you know, this goddamn

superpowers? Sometimes there is no choice but to act, to find means. There’s— ” She sighed as if

interrupted. “Olivia—people, they will die—but I’ve seen lot of people die for nothing, Tim. Die

for lack of fucking work. Die for lack of fucking purpose. There are people to blame in this

world, and they are hard and far away from us. But not forever. Many people, like Berkeley

people, like New York people—they complain. They complain from armchairs. They complain

from internet. But they do not act. They are part of the problem. There is action we can take. To

move us forward. To give new purpose. To unshackle us from the technologies that makes us

dumb. To give us all purpose.”

Tim nodded slowly at first. His face opened, and then he nodded vigorously like a James

Watson or a Francis Crick suddenly realizing the components of life had a structure, beginnings

and consequences, all disseminating in one direction. The world. Forward. New purpose. “Yes.”

And just then, the bartender finally set the afterburner down before the girl; he cracked

his Zippo open with a one-handed flourish, whirled his hands around the drink, and it burst to life

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with flame, and the girl bubbled over with uncontrollable black laughter at seeing the ironic

flambe, nearly falling from her stool with that black laughter, and Tim quickly excused himself

for the bathroom to purge.

Tim finished vomiting, the bass humming on behind him while he pushed himself up

from his knees. His organs hurt, but otherwise he felt stronger than ever. A great, grave weight

had been lifted, hurled aside like an abandoned sedan run through by a freight train. As the

muffled singer’s voice began speaking, explaining something, Tim leaned down, cupping his face

with cold water. He stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes and their dark underscores were

features upon features. Microscopic pits were pricked into his cheeks, a golden beard struggling

through his dimpled chin and along his jaw.

Somehow, he saw something more defined. Someone defined. The atmosphere of the bar

itself was changing outside the bathroom; Tim could hear the singer demanding of the audience,

and their responding with yeahs! of increasing assertion. Finally, drying his face, Tim heard the

singer unleash an uncontrollable torrent, the crowd’s howl cresting, and the song exploding to

life.

Tim rushed out. Where was she? The mass had become violent, a shouting and throwing

mob, and he saw predatory gazes from the musicians. The music was easily three times louder

than earlier.

The singer wielded the microphone stand like a spear, singing hoarsely, Baby was a black

sheep, baby was a whore, you know she got big, well sh e ’s gonna get bigger! Baby got her hand,

got her finger on the trigger, baby baby baby is a rock-and-roll nigger! And then all shouted

together: Outside o f society, they're waiting fo r me! Outside o f society, tha t’s where I wanna be!

Tim searched the bar for her, but she wasn’t there. The bartender had no idea what Tim

was asking, returning quickly to save his bar from the surging throng by hollering and

brandishing an empty bottle of Grey Goose at them, gripping the bottle’s neck.

Tim pushed through the audience, wedging in between throbbing skinheads all in the

pink and blue neon. All were foreign; no face her face, no shoulders her shoulders.

Tim started to shout. But he had no name to call out. He just shouted obscenities, pushing

and shoving and diving, feeling the impetuous resistance of the crowd as he kept sinking into it.

Nobody gave him a dirty look or an angry punch. They only reciprocated Tim’s thrusts of

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helpless rage as it transferred through to everyone else, additive anger, the mosh pit more and

more vicious.

Until he pushed one person— she punched him sharply in the kidney. He folded— her

hands were on his cheeks suddenly. “It’s you! Sorry!” She shouted.

Tim coughed, but righted himself. “Listen!”

“O f course I am listen!” she yelled back. “How could I not, this music is too loud!”

“No, no, I’m only— !” and he grabbed her hands. “Listen! You don’t know how much

you’ve helped me!”

She grinned.

“Tell me your name!”

“Boyana Ignatova!” she shouted. And Boyana kept on grinning. “You’re Tim Andres!

Andres like the footballer!”

“Boyana!” And Tim took her face in both hands and kissed her.

The secret was gone from her lips, from her face then. He knew it and she knew it too in

her wide eyes.

He spoke into her ear. “I’ve never, ever done that to a stranger. I’ve never met someone

this intense. I am terrified of you. Take me to your house. Take me anywhere. I need you. Right

now.”

Boyana stared at Tim with bewilderment in her eyes and cheeks, but her lips had returned

to the cool mien. She pulled away. “No man has been so forward with me!”

“I know!” Tim shouted, and grinned.

Boyana began to walk away. She paused. “Brush your goddamn mouth!” She yelled at

him.

“I will!”

She pushed roughly against the pulsing horde, disappearing.

Tim closed his eyes, laughing and laughing. What could he do? He ceded to the multitude

surging without control to the band’s perilous invocation of the most evocative rock-and-roll song

ever written. Tim wasn’t disappointed. He was free. He was released by Boyana Ignatova, to

make direction, the future now his to— someone grabbed him by the collar.

“Why the fuck you’re still standing here!” Boyana shouted. And she hauled Tim through

the fray toward the exit.

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Then they began spending time together. They began spending time together so suddenly

Tim couldn’t remember how they’d started.

They spent time as a tangle of arms pressing into the wet brick wall outside Nueva Trova,

the blue pink neon in their eyes and gleaming in their sweat, pressing into the bricks, rolling

across them, rolling tongues and arms and legs and backs, a writhing, moaning, dripping sex

demon of Sodom— Boyana pressed Tim into the wall, grabbing him by the hair and cocking his

head back for a kiss and a suck on his neck— he winced, pulled her away— something like the

first heat, not the water moment, but fire in his chest, his veins engulfed, and he pushed her hard

into the wall and pulled the neck of her shirt, her breasts—

She pulled away, and in the middle of the street they spent time wordlessly pulling and

groping and pushing each other away in cycles, stumbling endless forward as bitches in the wind,

the heat of their bodies too much, the cold of the night too much, forth and back, no way to rest,

the masks slipping with the friction of what wants and what cannot haves, all walking toward a

somewhere else unknown, so much burning, can’t stop touching, can’t stop pulling and fawning

in restless urgency the need for both closer and further away.

They spent time sitting in the stairwell of his hotel, their hands wandering across muscle

and scar tissue and hair and sweat covered skin canvas— he found the place at the top of her

thigh, the smooth space and bone, and when he lingered there and pressed and it made her press

her face into his and run her fingers through his hair and across his chest, both of them sinking

into the stairs, everything sinking.

They spent time inside the room, against his door, so much pressure, unstickable from

one another, unable to feel it, the difference, from one or the other, and they spent time kissing

and feeling all, spent time fumbling with the clothes, spent time falling into bed, and spent time

making love, hands fingers legs intertwining in time to their push and pull into her, rolling and

slow writhing, whispers, inhaling, slow running over scalps, never taking their faces apart, never

breaking apart until finally they’d both come and he fell back and there was nothing left but rest.

They spent little time at rest— very little time. Because then Tim woke up. It was only a

few minutes later. Tim then remembered his name and remembered Boyana’s name.

But something else happened— Boyana saw Tim sit up, and the newly risen sun, but saw

it in his eyes. She saw the draw of the demon thing, the empty space, empty space empty eyes

staring flat at the sun. The way the sun made the dark in his pupils lighter, the film of his eyes as

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if he were already dead, or the revelation that they were the eyes of any other animal outside the

humanizing context of personhood. Something else about it.

It stirred her. She felt. And she hadn’t felt in that way in years. She knew what it was,

herself, to starve to death with years of longing and feel either secret agony or nothing only to

have the empty thing awakened again and want to die once more, or end the cycle early with a

pistol or an overdose of something once loved for its strong distance and finally embraced for

closing that distance.

Boyana showed Tim she knew the demon thing too, the endless need, taking him firmly

by the arm. Fuck me, she told him, however you want. Do anything you want. Hold back nothing.

Nothing. And then I’m going to fuck you.

Incredulous, he was, wide eyes and a fearful open mouth as he always had been. So she

slapped him hard across the face.

They spent time fucking each other. He spent time fucking her first as she’d prescribed.

He stopped pretending and stopped doing what he thought he should do to do what he wanted to

do. He pulled her up from the bed with a twist, his hands on her wrists, and he pushed her back

down face first, and then he started muttering urgent things like, now spread your pussy, now

suck my cock, now lick your tits, now spread your ass, yes, god, fuck, shit— he called every part

of her body by its vulgar name and muttered everything as hushed obscenities, pushing himself in

and out of her with slow, deliberate, mouth breathing and moaning control at first, but forgetting

later and then just fucking as hard as he could anywhere with abandon until he fell back and out

of his orgasm as if being punched out by a glacier cold seizure. If you were around in these

moments, for whatever reason, and you asked him who he was, or where he was, he’d have no

idea. He’d drool at you like a brain fried dog. If you likewise asked him which year it was, or

which empire it was, or which century it was, or which species he was, or which planet we’re on,

or which star system we survive in, he’d similarly only stare through you with an open mouth

eliciting some sunken moans before falling back slowly and staring up into the sky like a dying

but smiling fish, all mammalian aspects off, his arms out, the years of restraint and rage and

difference all pumped completely from him through his cock.

Now it’s my turn, Boyana said.

So then she spent time fucking him. She took her sweet fucking time fucking him,

fulfilling an old fantasy she’d had of enslaving a man and using him up in a fancy hotel room

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over the course of an afternoon—this one wasn’t the fanciest room. But it would do. She found

the champagne and chocolate the hotel left in the room and set them on the night stand. Say

nothing for the next three hours, she told him. Pour me a glass, she told him. Feed me a truffle,

she told him. Keep your hands behind your back and suck on my fingers, she told him, and suck

on my toes, she told him. Give me a sip. Keep your hands behind your back and lick me, she told

him, and she laid back as a spread eagle until he licked every single inch of her body. Feed me a

truffle. Give me a sip. Give me a sip. Keep your hands behind your back and eat me, she told

him, and sat up and shoved his head between her legs while he performed, controlling his motion

by pulling his hair, slapping him, and once choking him until he turned red and coughed. She

enjoyed the look of complete absence in his face, the acceptance he had that she was using him,

the now blissful emptiness, and it helped bring her to climax. Feed me a truffle. Give me a sip.

Keep your hands behind your back and open your mouth, she told him, and she poured half the

bottle of champagne in his mouth, him gulping for air, coughing, choking, champagne dribbling

out. Then she decided to please him. She pushed him to the floor, held his face down, sat behind

him and worked him to orgasm with such tight fisted slow motion that he moaned like a sobbing

child when he came.

And then, after all that, they did spend a little time at rest, a heap on the hotel floor,

drenched, breathless, finished. After all that, he sighed, and he could only say “Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.”

Tim and Boyana spent time resting until Boyana eventually stirred, rising and dressing in

the afternoon to go— he touched his hand on her thigh. But the look she gave him— he knew.

“See you later,” is all she said. But he knew. It was both a question and a statement.

Tim wasted time that afternoon until dinner time. He was hardly hungry, could barely

bring himself to eat the olives and cheese and peppers, the fish, could drink the wine but could

not feel anything but adrenaline and zeal and fire.

Tim wasted time and wasted his dinner until the sun had set, the Acropolis had been re­

illuminated by lights and bonfires again, and he could leave his room and wander the winding

streets again back to Nueva Trova. On that second night, like he’d felt, like he’d known, Boyana

was waiting there for him sipping her absinthe as the bartenders and staff continued to sweep the

previous night’s broken glass and scrub the dried mud and blood and beer from the floor.

“Hello, Boyana,” Tim said.

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She had been watching him since he’d walked through the door, her eyes as stoney green

discuses unchanging, her face unchanging, always holding the secret.

This is how they spent their time on the second night and the third night and fourth night

and untold others just like they’d spent their time on the first, always stumbling back to Tim’s

hotel room, always syphoning into the empty things, always fading into the sunrise, Boyana

always rising to leave, Tim always wasting time until dinner, and the two of them always finding

the time to meet each other at the same exact place every night until they could no longer count

the nights they’d spent time together. It was at least twenty or twenty five, and at most forty.

They spent their time together in this way until Tim had spent all his money— he could

not afford the hotel anymore. This surprised him, as he learned he’d spent all his money only

when the rotund innkeeper handed back his debit card to process his weekly payment.

“Decline,” the innkeeper said.

Tim didn’t flinch. But he realized he’d run out of money. “Yes.” He said. “Excuse me.”

He spent a minute or two shoving his clothes back into his backpack, the artifacts,

bracelets, a book—the things that would fit. He rolled everything else up into his wet bath towel,

and he dropped them out the window— the towel splayed opened just one story down, the clothes

fluttering into the evening breeze, the trinkets falling and shattering on the cobblestones. He

hesitated, but then dropped his backpack out the window as well.

The innkeeper was already staring at Tim as he rounded the comer from the stairwell. His

eyes sunk deep into dark pitted circles, leaning on the front desk with expectation.

“I’ve got to go to the bank, you see.”

“The bank is burned down.”

“Yes.” Tim started to walk, then halted. “The other bank.” He walked backwards toward

the door. “My bank is the other bank.”

He spent time gathering his strewn clothes from the street, bundling them up, carrying

them with his backpack to Nueva Trova, where Boyana was waiting for him as she had been all

those nights.

“Hello, Boyana,” Tim said. “Boyana. I spent all my money.”

Her look was no different than any other time. She swilled her drink, stood up from the

barstool, and took Tim’s towel bundled clothes under one arm. “Let’s go home.”

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They spent an hour after the subway walking up the hillside through winding streets

toward the outskirts of the city, the moon shining, toward Boyana’s apartment, their arms linked,

one stride, no words.

They spent time washing each other in a long, cool shower, soaping off all the sex,

soaping off everything from before. When they emerged, Tim felt softer than ever, like he’d just

been born.

In these ways, Tim and Boyana spent time together until all their strength had been

sapped, and until the unnamable inside felt satisfied for both of them for a while. And then they

lay in bed to sleep together.

Finally, the time stopped after so many forward days and restless nights, and Tim was

able to admire Boyana properly in the orange glow of her room; her body was so eloquently

curved, it was no wonder clothes looked so awkward clinging to her. He scanned her apartment;

there was a thick black curtain, heavy matte vinyl, separating them from the other half of the

place. And so many textbooks stacked on the floor and on the bench in the comer, jars of all

kinds.

“You know,” Boyana finally spoke, puffing her electronic cigarette— she’d seen him

studying her apartment— “something really is coming. The world is changing. Olivia will die for

a purpose.”

Tim exhaled. The sun was gilding down behind what silhouettes of mountains were

visible through the dusty window panes and thin drapes. He studied her, ran his fingertips over

her skin. Something about his exhaustion, the spinning, the sex, the smell of sweat and sulfur, of

roasted raisins and gunpowder, the warmth— he no longer existed. He felt close to not thinking

and only feeling. He was a tiny point in a womb of elation with zero Kelvin beyond the walls.

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Robin’s leather creaked with the arm chair as he sat forward, setting down his coffee cup.

“Nobody’s told you this to your face, but I am one hundred percent positive you’re full o f shit.”

And all the three others reacted with the opened mouth silent suck as he expected.

“I mean,” he continued, and turned toward Helenaya “come on, man. You’re full of shit.

Maybe Ukrainians don’t know how to protest.”

One of them stood, and Kim threw a protective arm over Helenaya. “No way, Robin,

hold on a minute— ”

“I’m holding on, don’t worry about that. But what I’m telling you is that it’s too obvious

that you love attention, and that you want to organize this protest like the last one. You want to

use it as your literary reading— hey, I actually went to the last one, and it was a great reading! It

really was!” He sat up. “Nobody is going to argue with that because it’s the motherfucking

truth?”

“Why are you saying this?” Kim said, taking Helenaya’s hand.

“Saying what, Kim— saying that your partner’s work is ‘great?’ Should I not be saying

it— is it not true?”

“Oh, come on!” Kim shouted. “The context— !”

“So you’re saying her work isn 7 great—you are implying now her work wasn’t great.”

“No— I mean, no I’m not saying that, Robin, or implying—that’s what you’re saying I’m

saying— you are being so passive aggressive— ”

“But why do you feel that way? Maybe I’m only being factual and complimentary. It was

a good reading. The speech was brilliant and everyone thought so— ‘brilliant, impassioned yet

poised,’ they said— they— they— the SF Weekly. Which is because it was written as prose and

you read it, read it, and it was not a protest— ”

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“Robin,” Helenaya started over him, “Fine— so what if I’ve written a speech. I believe in

freedom of speech deeply, and I believe in our obligation to defend it by whatever necessary, and

to inspire others to defend it. What’s been going on lately is atrocity after atrocity. Young people

are dying in the streets. You’re going to sit here sipping your coffee and smiling and telling me

the great speakers of the world prepared nothing in text? What is this,” she gestured widely,

“what is this, this purity, or whatever, you are trying so hard to defend? Writing isn 7 artifice?

You’re crazy.”

Robin sat back in his seat, and he frowned with the depth of a clown. “So it was a

reading,” he whispered.

“Robin!” Helenaya shouted at him, “you are being passive aggressive. All we’re— ”

“Passive aggressive? No!” And Robin slammed his fist on the table, their coffee cups

clinking, “active aggressive! Active aggressive!”

Kim shook her head. “These book bombings are the craziest thing that’s ever happened in

the Western world, and the reaction. And you’re saying this? You must stand for nothing, Robin,

or feel nothing.”

“Hey now— come on, man—•” and he laughed. “‘Nothing’ is a strong word.”

“It’s true!”

“It’s not. But listen, Helenaya. Sorry, but I’m not going to talk them into hosting this

stuff. I want to support political activism, not promote readings. Wanna barricade a senator in his

or her house? Wanna drag a congressperson to a drought shop? Then let’s do it, babes. But not

this symbolic garbage. And the same goes for my friends who own these venues— they are really

the ones I am speaking for.”

“‘Promote, ’” Kim repeated with a snort.

“You should do more if you want support is what I’m saying. Okay?”

The three others looked to each other, rising. Helenaya stood, tossing her napkin to the

table. “It’s true. You stand for nothing, Robin. If you aren’t willing to help us, better for us then.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“O f course I am! You’ve insulted me to my face!”

“Insulted? You know what,” and Robin shook his head, looked to the floor, smiled before

rejoining her eyes. “I’m sorry— can I just be honest with you?”

She crossed her arms. “What?”

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“I didn’t mean to be insulting. Honestly— actually, you’re gorgeous when you’re mad— ”

and he laughed at his own joke and gestured around the crowded room and back to her as he

grinned helplessly. “I know it’s crazy that I’m saying that. Like you said, I’m crazy. I’m a crazy

guy! I’m just a man— I’m just being honest.”

And Helenaya cooled some, her eye brows rising. “You’re serious?”

Robin froze. Then he crossed his legs and sat back, and his leading grin was replaced

with a smug smile. “No. See that? You’re typical with the attention thing. I was fucking with you.

You’re not my type.”

Then she spit— symbolically or actually, Robin hadn’t noticed— and turned to leave with

her colleagues and her blonde dreads whipping behind her.

“It’s nothing personal! You’re not my type because you’re typical— same old chauvinist

bullshit!” He stood and pointed. “And tha t’s insulting! To everybody! To you!”

“You know what? You need to check your privilege, asshole,” Kim hissed.

“I just checked it yesterday— I scored a 78 on the McIntosh-Gay scale.”

They stopped Helenaya glared incredulously at Robin. “How can that be possible?”

Robin grinned. “Quien sabe, chingadas.” And he held his arms out. “Huh? Huh?”

They seemed numb with it, confounded. They turned, left, and did not look back.

Robin sat and took up his coffee cup. “Fine. Actually maybe it is personal.” Alone again,

Robin was alone to oversee the coffee shop from the armchair once more.

Even in the late morning, the rows of wooden tables were shoulder-to-shoulder, readers,

writers, players, thinkers, talkers all sharing the space, most of them engaged in working on a

world of their making, the glint of screens in their eyes and on their teeth. They were connected

and didn’t even know it, Robin observed. The beauty of their technology connected them

unconsciously like parts of a massive central nervous system. They’d discover and encounter the

pieces of themselves as needed, and all were engaged symbiotically, but unaware. The beauty. He

shook his head and finished his coffee. What a way to work. What a life to live. The modem age

was something strange.

He could see Chuck, the cafe’s swarthy owner, heading toward him, shaking his head

with a crooked smile while he stroked his beard.

“Chuck, I still can’t smoke in here, right?”

“Robin— you have got to quit doing that shit, baby.”

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“Doing which shit?”

Chuck laughed, and gestured toward the exit. “Now, what was that? You shouted those

girls out of the place. That’s crazy. That’s crazy.” He swapped Robin’s empty cup out with a full

one. “What was crazy enough to get y ’all worked up like that?”

Robin shook his head and smiled. “Sorry about that Chuck. Those people are driving me

insane. They are ‘activists’— ” and he used his single quote fingers, “and they were pushing me to

convince all of you guys on the street to host a crawl of sorts. Some free speech stuff.”

Chuck knelt down beside Robin. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“No, believe me, Chuck; I respect you guys. But they are pretenders. She just wants to be

the center of attention. It’s typical, man— you know typical the worst kind of anything. She just

wants to do readings, not real activism.”

“Shit—I don’t care what it is, Robin. An event would be good for all our business, you

know that.”

“I do. That’s why I told them to take a very long piss, Chuck.” Robin took a sip of his

coffee. “They don’t draw anyone— not anyone who will buy anything.”

“Uh huh.”

“Last time it was just sunburned nudist junkies in tutus and cock rings and gutter punks

with rottweilers and people like that, or sycophants who want to nurse off Helenaya so they can

get a reading or a publication with her later in a friendzine or something— everyone out for

themselves, Chuck, everyone out for themselves. It was the most boring protest I’d ever been to.

They played ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ on a loop for fuckssake— come on now, come on, how

do you feel about that?”

“Uh huh.”

“How do you feel— and now she wants to bring that bald headed fuck Paisley Smith to

host the fucking thing— ” ssssfah, he hissed to the cafe.

“Who’s Paisley Smith?”

Robin shook his head. “It’s a long story. Nobody cares about him now. Everyone found

out he’s a pervert and a creep, you see. She’s behind the times.” Robin smiled.

“Uh huh. Hey, listen,” Chuck glanced around behind him, “speaking of business, I got a

favor to ask; you got any more of that rainbow shit from a couple weeks back?”

He leaned in. “Shit?”

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“Yeah. A hundred. I got the house to myself this weekend. Couple of my boys want to

come and host something, get some bucks over, get a little crazy, know what I’m saying?”

“Sure.” Robin took a final swig of coffee, zipping his jacket and closing his laptop—the

editing could wait. He pushed the laptop into his backpack. “For three of you? A hundred will

build you a crystal palace. I need to make a pit stop. Just give me a few hours and we’ll settle it.”

The two men rose, clasped hands, slapped shoulders, and Robin made to leave, both of

them walking among the tables with squinted smiles. Robin laughed. “Chuck, I still don’t know

why a mouse is on the logo. I know it’s always been there. Maybe it’s time to change it. Who

wants mice shitting around in their coffee?”

Evening came, the sun shining through blood orange clouds. Robin put out his cigarette

beneath a boot. He scanned: a cul-de-sac with three models of safe American homes, cold blue

beneath the setting atmospheres. The stark primacy of the colors made him aware of the silence.

Children left bicycles strewn over lawns without a second or even first thought to someone like

Robin strolling through their neighborhood, even after books had started and stopped erupting.

The crisis was over. Nobody was in the windows and never were and never would be for longer

than fifteen minutes.

Robin’s connection was Ronnie, a high school student he’d met as a tutor, a young man

who hardly needed help, whose astronomical amphetamine habit was obvious to Robin within

seconds in his ludicrous fitness and clear white eyes and overworked jaw. Ronnie caught Robin

smoking outside once, putting the flask away once, and so they had an honest talk. To Robin’s

surprise, Ronnie graciously refused a sip from his flask— he never mixed, he said. That’s when

Robin knew he could trust him and that he was a businessman, or would grow up to be a

businessman.

They came around to the business part at such a cigarette break, once. They

communicated exclusively through emoji thereafter. Robin knew both his parents worked sixty

five hours a week at a biotech company raping the gene pool and committing genocide on

microbial colonies and cats and chimpanzees to slow aging and improve erections, things of that

nature, and so it was usually safe for him to walk right up to their house before 11pm.

Robin looked about him as he walked to the house through the white gate. Nobody home.

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But she was sitting on the porch, her chin on her knees, when he approached the front

door. “Hi Robin.”

“Lise.” He said.

He strained to make her out in the darkness; tiny white shorts, white and grey stripes,

black hair. Everything else grey. She’d become a young, well camouflaged mannequin. She rose

to greet him, coming forward but stopping just before him, much closer than he expected.

It was this expectant look. It was this empty and waiting look. It was this scent from her

body. Robin hadn’t expected that. None of it. He questioned if he were reading this right because

he knew what it had been with others in the past.

“I was the one who messaged you back, actually.” She told him.

It was true. He could feel it and it was true.

Lise was much different at the student center. Robin had only actually worked with her

four times. They made progress and she left.

In the first session, Robin tried to introduce himself, but he was also so very tied— this

was likely the week of the infamy at the 518 reading, or perhaps it was the next week with the

anarchy of Robin’s date with Lilith— that date, where Lilith refused to rise to his advance, how

he’d introduced the topic of nasty things and been outgunned when she hadn’t bat an eyelash or

anything else, teasing him about rectal exams— how she’d laughed when he tried to trace an

invisible line up her bare thigh— he’d taken to anger drinking and lying for fun to others at the

bar, convincing a group of tech bros who approached their table that it was his 40th birthday only

to take it back once they believed him, then lie once more that Lilith was his adopted sister that he

only fucked sometimes, and take that back once they believed that as well— but they believed

him. Perhaps it was that week.

Robin was very tired. “Hello. You’re Elise? I’m Robin.”

She hardly looked up from her phone, continued scrolling with her flickering eyes—

Robin tore the phone from her hand and tossed it across the room into an empty cubical.

That look of total flabbergasted shock, the airless mouth and eyes and all that, was a look

Robin often relished in students, but he especially relished it with Lise. That time, Lise rose

quickly, snatched up her phone, and walked out. In the cubical across from him, Lilith— she’d

seen the whole interaction—just laughed and laughed. Then Robin walked out, too— I can’t do

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this shit today, he told the secretary— and went home to fight with Carina some more and storm

out and do drugs and wake up in the subway at ten the next morning.

Robin was surprised Lise returned for a second session. She wouldn’t talk to him. She

wouldn’t even look at him at first. For awhile. But she did as he instructed in working on her

assignments, and by the end of the session, she did look at him, a sort of curious and withdrawn

look that came in spare though unafraid bursts.

In the third session, she was late. She was grinding her teeth and fidgeting with the edge

of the desk.

“Did something happen?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Then they finished more test prep sections than anybody had that day with a

weighted increase, Robin recalled, of maybe 350 points.

In her final session, she would not stop smiling. He asked her so many questions, is it

this, is it that, who could it be, could it be you, whatever, whatever. He defaulted to that sex force

sort of slather without even thinking about it. But she only beamed at him. She really was very

good at keeping her secrets, especially because she never claimed to be a good secret keeper.

It was something about that beaming curious look, that withdrawn but fearless interest,

which made him act without thinking in a place where he strictly relegated his actions to talking

about thinking.

He reached for her hand— she swatted him away. He reached for her hand again, and she

let him the second time, never breaking eye contact. “I’m going to give you a palm reading,” he

told her.

“You read palms?”

“Oh totally. That’s my day job.” So he took his time running his finger across the plains

of her palm, the valleys and ridges, the sudden curves, the folds, all folds of circumstance and

billions of generations, and they shared the moment of contact while he slathered, very slowly,

soothing nonsense about the moment a tall strong and handsome would stroll through her valley,

the season the rains would sweep through a sudden curve, the sixteen kids and sexy secretary and

everything else. He stopped thinking in that moment, talking to her, contact with her. Robin had

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no idea what she was thinking, so tacit and difficult to read. She really did never stop beaming,

and so he assumed, then, that they enjoyed the moment together.

As the time drew, they stopped “What are your ambitions? I mean after college.”

“That’s easy,” Lise said. “I want to have sex on a pile of money.”

“Really? But it’s, you know, absolutely filthy.”

She only raised her eyebrows.

Slowly, slowly, he laughed. “All right. All right, touche, touche. But, now, wait a

minute— how about gold bars? Gold bars. Cool to the touch. Softer than other metals. Clean with

a decadent finish.”

She thought for a minute. Then shook her head. She had a different sort of look in her

eyes. “But how could 1 get pounded af on a pile of gold bars?”

It was Robin’s turn to laugh then. It truly had shocked him. He had been no less vulgar or

sex driven at her age, of course. But nobody had ever been so forward with him.

And suddenly, Robin looked across the room— he’d remembered the other feelings, and

saw Lilith look away from him in that second, back down to her notebooks.

What could he say? What did it mean? Whatever it was, it sort of satisfied him. It all sort

of satisfied him.

Ronnie came in after that, and Lise jumped up to greet him, giving him a kiss on the

cheek.

“Goodness,” Robin said. “Do you people— are you a couple?”

They laughed and laughed at him. “No,” Ronnie said. “I’m her brother.”

So there they were in the future, in 2020, standing hardly inches apart, much closer than

they’d ever been before or should ever have been, never someone so old, never someone so

young, and Robin then knew what it had all meant before. It was so so so unexpected and neither

knew how to begin. But Robin was positive he was reading it right. He felt it and knew it, and so

in that second, like everyone else, feeling was the new knowing, and he accepted she was inviting

him in despite everything.

Robin stopped jangling the change in his pocket. He could hear her breathing over his

own, all veins burning, but he asked her, “can I come inside?”

Lise pushed a hand through her dark bangs. She whispered something to herself.

“What?”

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She said nothing.

He was bolder still because it was impossible to stop now that it had begun, this scent, the

sweat in his hands, and the fact that he had seen what she wanted in one flick of her wrist through

her hair. “Can I come inside?” He asked again. And here his hand finally began to shake almost

imperceptibly as he gently set his hand on her side. But it was there. All aflame. His breathing.

His chest, a heat— the first kind again, the original kind. Or maybe before that. Heat like the heat

in zero, if it were true. The thrill of it all coming back. He was close enough to her to make out

her features in the setting sun dark: She looked up at him, and her dark eyes held his for a

moment as she moved past, the cotton of her shirt brushing against his hand as she turned to walk

inside.

Robin watched her walk through the doorway, slowly crossing the red carpet, the wild

illumination of the fireplace. Her skin came to life in the radiance of the fire.

Get color. Insist on slurping up the real. He closed the door and entered.

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Carina rolled slowly onto the street in the borrowed Mini. She continued to the end of the

cul-de-sac, only then stopping to watch. She’d learned from Robin, himself, not to look unless

ready to be seen. But she was ready then at the end of the street. She leaned, sizing up her

precautious self in her side mirror over her black wayfarers; her bleached white hair had vanished

beneath a veiling black scarf, as black as her blouse and jacket.

She puffed up for a moment. It was amazing. She could be a 90s superwoman with

shoulder pads like that. Or a dead 60s actress, the contrast of her pale skin with the black scarf.

But she looked past herself and surveilled. The street was deadly silent in the vacuum of

the Mini. A girl sat reading on the porch at one house, guarded by a set of ubiquitous white

pickets. Two boys argued about cards over a bicycle beside other white pickets. It was a street

which seemed to transport one out of the bay altogether to a special and exiled suburban hell.

Everything the same. So many of the same shapes. Christ. To be a teenager somewhere like here.

Carina shook her head. It wasn’t her.

There was a difference, she thought, between the people here with Christmas trees still in

the windows in springtime and those banished to somewhere unnamable in UT or PA or WI.

Those people further away had almost no chance. But the people here made a choice with the

invisible city only miles away. They chose bland safety over cultural challenge. It was pathetic.

Wasn’t it?

A shape walked up the street— oh, and finally, yes, it was him. She shifted in her car seat,

leaning on the steering wheel to reduce her profile. She’d thought about bringing binoculars in a

little kit, maybe along with a butterfly knife or a syringe full of too much bad smack to fake his

overdose if she caught him, if her suspicions were true. But she laughed coldly, and recognized

that at least she hadn’t needed the binoculars: Robin made no attempt to disguise himself,

strolling up in this fuck-forsaken neighborhood with as much bludgeon as he would stumble from

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the last call of a dive to the first play of a Suicide Commando hit in a goth club, still a leather-clad

post-punk dead boy in a suburb like this one. No effort on his part at all. None! And that

clumsiness wasn’t surprising. What was surprising, though, that someone hadn’t already called

the cops, him just walking down the street in a place like this.

Stalking. Stalking him stalking down the suburban sidewalk. She watched carefully. His

Russian roulette, right? Which house would he stop in front of? Who would it be? A housewife, a

businessman?

The girl on the porch— she jumped up at the sight of Robin— she came toward him,

stopped so close. Stopped so close they could have inhaled each other completely. They were

locked in some infinite repose because Carina was too far away to read their lips.

It was not what she’d expected to see, nor the feeling she’d expected to fight, to see him

meeting this girl— she was a girl. She was a girl. That’s what it was. Not what she’d expected at

all.

Something, there, something of a deep and dark thread long forgotten, tugged at her then.

The way he had to look down at this girl, craning his neck on this girl, this fucking child— “what

is this bullshit/” Carina shouted. “A younger girl— she’s a fucking child!” Carina looked more

closely. It could have been any girl from the south bay. Long black hair, rail thin— last name,

what did it matter, her family name, that piss poor excuse for whatever family she was driveled

from. Some high achieving high schooler.

Carina screamed and slammed the steering wheel until her palms felt like they’d be

bruised for days. She watched again, their obliviousness, still frozen as if he were unable to

commit to even this one base expression.

Then something deeper tuged at her. Memory fluttered. Mind fluttered. Those moments

so many years ago when Carina had met Robin for the first time, or noticed him for the first

time— he was the friend of her older brother, had wandered in from the cold, wandered in

through the crowd into the back yard of their party, and they’d seen one another’s face, and that

was it. It was a moment like any of the hundreds in a day where one sees someone laugh or smile

or wonder, and can imagine an entire lifetime flashing by beside that face, or others, as one

cycled through such faces. Instead of walking away from this one, she walked forward toward it.

Those memories fluttered until they’d hardened into metallic anecdotes, into some

emotional currency to keep Carina invested. Maybe back then she’d had a quarter in her pocket or

I l l

a dollar in her wallet as she did in this moment in the Mini spying on Robin, trying to understand

where he got all his money— she’d suspected he’d been slinging for so long. That dollar then had

found her, that quarter then had found her; Robin had found her; All things pass away as we

spend them with the time we are given without our consent in happenstance.

Carina grit her teeth until they hurt even more than her hands hurt. She hadn’t wanted to

see this. Carina rolled the window down, and spit at the asphalt.

Three years made a big difference, didn’t it? The difference of nineteen and twenty one—

from one sort of streak to another, to ruin. And ten years was a gulf, seventeen and twenty seven.

One hundred years was four eras dead. This girl, at seventeen, was a child. But Carina had always

been mature enough at any age to murder Robin.

What Would Sigourney Weaver Do? Sigourney as Ripley, of course. Her solution was

obvious: Ripley would duck-tape a pulse rifle and flamethrower together, be drenched in sweat,

be an unquenchable badass, storm in, kill them all. Get away from her you bitch! Shouted at him ,

the bitch now.

It wouldn’t take a flamethrower and a pulse rifle to handle this, Carina recognized. It

could be much easier. She had not expected the girl at all. As she watched them walk inside

together, she took up her cell phone from her purse. She knew what it could do for his life if she

called the cops. At least a year in county with years of probation afterwards, years of surveillance,

years of random searches, years of spit in his face, years of terror. He would be changed forever.

She stared at her phone. Would she do it?

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Tim dozed in and out and in again: he saw his bag beside the bed he’d made for himself

on the floor, and he thought about dressing. He couldn’t, his throbbing head.

The white shirt. Even Tim knew this was a typical shirt— it came from Express. Nobody

would be able to tell the difference between this white shirt and another white shirt unless Tim

told its story, something he would never do. Even Tim mixed this shirt up now and then with

other white button ups, ones he bought in Greece— he knew this one was the one with the story

because he’d impulsively cut the tag out long ago— he couldn’t remember why. But he’d

bothered to bring it to Greece, and it was, in fact, the shirt he wore on the ride there all those

months prior.

But the shirt was given to him by somebody else. It was from an Express far, far away.

This shirt was sent to him by a pen pal who lived in Ohio.

In high school sometime he’d come in contact with Sophie Auguste, as she called

herself—Tim would never know if it was her real name or not, though in fact it was not—through

the great ethereal equalizer, the internet. It was a random chat room conversation. What had they

talked about? He struggled to remember their first conversation— unlike conversations face to

face where two people might have ruthless chemistry and remember every inconsequential

moment together, it was impossible to remember the words from a screen without a scent or the

magic subtle tipping of lips.

But something about what she’d written to him captured him, and they talked together.

They interchanged stretching lines as easily as breathing, the introductory anecdotes and tall tales,

the ingrained preferences and novel situations, the real hopes, the real fear, all as an honest

exchange of ideas.

Once they began revealing real fears was when she wrote him on paper the first time— a

hand written letter on paper that carried the scents of the peach incense and vanilla in her room

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across the country—Tim, the first time especially, stood and inhaled from the trifolded letter

some subtleties of that distant place, the warmth and soft of Sophie’s room out in the somewhere,

maybe a tiny caress of her still present. It must, her leaning and breathing into the paper as she

wrote.

But her deepest fear was there, handed to Tim like a fast beating hummingbird heart. It

was just a tiny spot of truth, but the center of all her life. With her winding, curved, pink lettered

hand, she told Tim she was afraid of disconnection. Not somebody’s sudden exit from her life,

she clarified. Rather, she was afraid of somebody fading out slowly. She was afraid of the mass of

a bigger heart, of finding something so true and so simple a sense, so hot a feeling in the

chemistry rushing between her and someone, and then watching the slow cool of entropy blowing

across her heart, or cross a lover’s, or cross them both— that would be the worst fate of all, she

conceded, for both of their souls to drain out of them completely through their ever loving bodies,

nothing insulating the feeling, like all the hot slag in the core of a planet spilling itself through

years of eruptions, the ocean flooding in, leaving the core cold, the tensions within the celestial

body ceased, its force dissipated and its surface barren and irradiated from the endless howl of

solar wind.

Tim’s letter, too, revealed his deepest fear. It was similar but not identical. Tim’s fear,

too, had to do with connection. But it was not the slow cool. It was simpler— he offered her a

concise paragraph of this fear, only:

...I ’m ju st afraid o f being dropped completely after I love somebody. Left in a

ditch. I guess that's why they say <ditched ' ’ right? I think I ’11 one day fin d

somebody who I can love, and I ’ll love her and do everything I can. But sh e ll

ditch me in the end. I can fee l it. That’s the way it 7/ go with me because I am a

loser. Nothing has ever happened with my life so far. I have no idea what I ’d do

after losing something like that.

It was after the letters about fear, two years into their writing, that she finally sent him a

photo of herself—she’d teased him before with it in previous letters, and he’d gone as far as

sending a collection of photos of himself, portraits and pedestrian things: his house, the computer

he built, his college, his friends all clutching their books, backs arched with bags filled with ever

more texts. But she withheld it until he told her his deepest fear.

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It came to him one day in the typical white envelope which he’d picked up at the college

mail center—he opened it with a smile, setting his black glasses up on his head, standing in the

sunlight—

And there she was. Tim gasped when he saw the unexpected photo. He never thought

about seeing her, having long forgotten that urge he’d had years ago as a high school senior when

he longed to meet her in person and share her bed— he wrote letters to her by this time as a

catharsis. But there she was. Sophie. Sophie was alive. Sophie was here, in our time. Sophie had

dark, dark almond eyes and black hair to her bare shoulders, and a beautiful, incredibly round

face, and Sophie’s skin was adorned with tiny freckles— she hadn’t worn makeup for this

photo— and Sophie was smiling with her small mouth and puckering lips, and the sky was blue

behind her, and seemed to be shining with her radiance, and Sophie was gorgeous, and it was all

that simple.

Tim studied the picture, holding it up against his own sky. His chest was filled with all

manners of winged insects, indescribable ones. It wasn’t a happy feeling, nor a sour one, nor

anger nor longing nor lust nor nothing. He couldn’t place it, the name of the feeling. He was just

feeling something that welled his veins with a fluid hum and left his mind empty.

And then the mailman called after him, holding out another package, a rectangular box.

And when Tim opened it, he found that Sophie had sent something else. It was a fine, plain white

button-up shirt in an unopened box from Express. And a note fluttered to the ground:

I wondered i f you could use a shirt. I wonder i f someday I ’ll see you in it.

Your Friend, Sophie

Tim did not write Sophie again after that— oh, he did, just one letter. He thanked her for

the beautiful shirt, and for the photo, and he told her she was a beautiful girl. But he didn’t write a

substantial letter afterward.

Tim remembered the day she called him— unlike the internet messages, he could

remember it precisely. It was fall again. Tim sat at the desk in his dorm room with his text book

open. The window was open, and Tim was watching squirrels scurrying through the pine tree

outside his dorm when his cell phone rang. The number—not his area code.

“Hello?”

“It’s Sophie.” Her voice was lilting and accented, but seemed tired.

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“Oh wow. Sophie. Wow.” He stood and stared into space and could see her photo in his

mind. “Well, hello Sophie.”

“Hi Tim.”

He looked down to the textbook. The weight in his veins again, and the insects in his

chest. He kept his eyes down. “I was just reading.”

“Oh? Yes. It’s the new semester. How are you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.” He could hear the crackle of the distance between them, but

finally the compressed version of her breathing.

“I’ve been better.” She finally said. “A lot o f things have happened.”

“Oh?”

“My dad passed away, finally. I have to live somewhere else. They want to send me to a

place in the mountains— I might go to California— but,” And here she cleared he throat. “I

actually should let you go back to your reading. I can tell you all this another time when you are

free.”

“Okay Sophie,” Tim said.

There was silence. “I love you.”

“Okay Sophie,” Tim said.

And just like that the call was finished. It was finished. Tim set the phone down, and sat

down again, and he stared out the window into the sky, and he put a hand on his chest, and raised

the phone up— no, he thought. No. He set it back down. She’ll call again. She has to call again.

How could he call her back right then and there, just like that? After she said that? She’ll call

again later once it had all settled in to them both.

This was the last time Tim was ever in touch with Sophie.

All of this flashed through Tim’s aching mind as he’d lain on the floor in Boyana’s

apartment looking at the shirt. He had no idea why he’d thought of this story again, but it made

him shiver.

Though— and he could never know this— as a matter of maybe another insane

coincidence, Sophie was trying to call Tim again at that moment on the old cell number she had

for him. That could be why it suddenly mustered up in him, this old story which had nothing to

do with his life in that present except for the artifact: Maybe they’d remained connected over

distance and time, the connection they’d had in the past. It could also only have been a

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coincidence. She was calling him, and the number was still connected. But Tim had left his phone

in Orange County with his mother. It sits, undisturbed, at his childhood desk. Sophie was calling

this time in the manner of a different sort of call, one to catch up with an old friend that was once

a trusted friend, just to see how life was elsewhere under the sun, and to tell him she’d moved to

the bay a few years prior. She wondered if they had mutual friends. But Tim would never know.

He turned his head. Boyana was still unaware, sleeping with the light summer sheet

scarcely clinging to her and her mattress on the floor. So Tim sat up— the noontime light, the

gravity, it hit him across the face in an instant. He groaned, swore again, sank again, covered his

aching face with both arms and lay back in his night’s sweat for another two hours to doze away

some of the hangover.

Afternoon. Tim woke, glanced to Boyana again, still in deep sleep with the weight of a

conqueror, stretched out with her belly up like a slumbering lioness.

So again, an attempt. Tim sat up. This time, he succeeded, and though difficult he

managed to remain upright. The next thing he did was fish into the pocket of his crumpled jacket

beside the mattress, retrieve his flask and suck down hairs of his dog.

He studied her again. Boyana. Her name was all he really knew besides how her instincts

worked, he realized. He thought through the previous days were a beautiful blur of whirling

revelry, of rushing emotion and bourbon, his sex, her power, his realization at the bar— something

was there. The look always in her eyes.

Remember Robin’s story, the monk from Varanassi? It was the same. Comfort with

death. In her flat eyes, her restraint, her power; was she a killer? A killer who’d spared him?

Something that rushed into his stomach and the corners of his lungs told him it was true.

Tim’s attention turned to the room. He squinted and recognized painfully through his

throbbing brain some of the now sunlit details from long hours prior; the sunset rocky Athenian

foothills through thinly veiled windows, the random stacks of textbooks— chemistry— the jars of

powders, the black curtain dividing this half of the room from the other. As haphazardly as the

books and jars and other necessities were stacked, nothing was filthy, or hardly even dusty; as

worn and imprinted with the years as they were, the wood floors seemed swept. Even the deep

corners of the room were clear.

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But the black curtain. It was time to stand; Tim slowly pushed himself up from his knees,

his wobbling nakedness, and stood. His eyes were stuck on the black curtain, and he made his

way closer to it. With each step, the smell of the black powder became sweeter. He touched the

curtain, matte vinyl.

Tim paused a moment, there, bowing his head before the curtain to think. He was

confident that pulling it back and knowing would commit him. It would be a stroke of acceptance

to pull the curtain back. He looked to his trembling hand. What had Robin said? It was good to be

uncomfortable. It was good to experience what you were afraid of. It was good to delve into what

felt wrong. Right? The rush of hot blood through his arms and his thudding heart let him know he

was scared. So Tim pulled back the curtain.

Darkness. And the scents. It was the gunpowder and pungent chemicals, but also acids

and earths. Tim took a step forward, the curtain closing behind him. The floor was cold and

smooth.

A click, a whirl of the air—red light suddenly flooded the chamber. Lights overhead, and

vents subtly sucking through the entire room.

Another world. Everything was stained with the red light. Before him was a thick block

table topped with an untold number of glass beakers, stems, droppers, nameless things, a maze of

funneled liquids in curling tubes. He noticed one beaker, filled nearly to its brim with something

black. And beyond the table, there, too, was a repository of powders. But those were organized

into clearly labeled transparent drawers, hundreds lining the wall between an armory of

cupboards labeled with equal clarity. Clear, but as he walked close, Tim noticed that the script on

the labels was something he’d never seen from any language before. He felt the throb in his neck.

The room sucked him again—he whirled around. Boyana was standing at the curtain,

looking with expectance. Her nakedness was polished, a smooth red leather in the light— arrows

would never penetrate her.

She walked toward Tim— he backed away— and he pushed himself up against the

cupboards and covered his penis with both hands as she took up the black beaker and a second

glass.

“Calm down, Tim,” she said. She poured the blackness into the glass and held it out to

Tim. “Why don’t you have some coffee?” And she smiled.

He hesitated. “Coffee.” He looked down, then into her eyes again. “But what is this?”

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“A dark room.”

“You’re no fucking photographer.”

She shrugged and sipped the coffee.

“And you’re not a drug dealer either. Gunpowder. You’re making bombs?”

“In a sense, yes. But something new.”

“Wait.” There it was. Tim’s mouth and hands fell open.

She and the room seemed two dimensional for a moment, his incredulous staring. That

odd two dimensional high and terror came back to him, that awe, just like his staring at Olivia’s

picture at Oliva’s funeral.

A killer of sorts? Yes, of sorts. A creator? Yes. And a destroyer. But it was in his gut.

“So— wait. I’m thinking you’re— you are— are you who I think you are?”

Boyana took another sip of coffee, looked down to the light stained floor. “I am one of

many. There are many others. There are more than you know. But I think so, I am, yes.” She

locked his eyes again. “There is a reason we have Olivia in common, Tim.”

Tim stepped aside, his hands to his cheeks. In some strange, insane cosmic fold, he’d

been fished from his tearing world and tossed as a particle into Boyana’s, by Boyana, indirectly—

seemingly. Seemingly. The more he’d trusted his instincts, the more it had worked, and he knew

long ago that something about Greece had the something he needed to connect to, and he’d

followed it unknowingly.

But Tim realized that as much as this was a connection to her, it was equally a non­

connection between her and Olivia. It was a non-triangle. He’d unknowingly seen Boyana set two

people ablaze right in front of his eyes, gone in seconds. She’d chosen them just as unknowingly.

It was war, but the world really was blind.

But he was connected to this woman, now. The things they’d done together. The way

they spent time. Undeniably connected.

He kept studying her ivory face in the red light, and he couldn’t feel any of the hatred

he’d expected when he wondered if he’d ever meet Olivia’s killer. In all honestly, Tim had to

admit the only thing he only felt beside the unnamable in his chest was the hangover mingling

with the shots of whiskey from his flask and the fading buzz of the previous weeks’ endorphins,

all the physical excess focused into his forehead. He found himself imagining Boyana’s hazy face

as they made love again and again, and the way they slept in a heap together.

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But beyond all that, beyond her and the connection, it was something else. The glowing

answer had finally been satisfied. He felt relieved. It was what he expected to find in Greece, or,

daresay, what he hoped to find in Greece.

Finally, Tim cleared his throat. “I’m sort of happy, you know,” he told her. “Everyone

assumed again that it was Muslims from the Islamic State.” He thought some more, rubbed his

chin.

Boyana set the coffee down and crossed her arms then. “What? You’re not hateful? But

how?”

“I’m just not. I don’t know.”

“You must be. Or you will be. How could you not hate me?”

“I just don’t. I don’t know.” He looked around, shrugging. “Nothing is any different than

before I knew it was you, Boyana.”

She shook her head, moving toward him. “I am a murderer, Tim,” she said, “and you feel

nothing? And you say nothing is different for the world?”

He turned. “Different in the world? I don’t know. Maybe a little? But there has always

been violence and craziness. What you did, or what you and these people did— it’s just the next

thing. But it isn’t really new. There’s nothing new. Whatever. Who cares?”

She stepped even closer, her mouth falling open.

“It’s the same shit in a new century. Right?”

“What—but—what is this, you’re saying! It is new! And how could you not be angry—/

killed them all!” And she thrust her finger at him. “Fuck you, Tim! I killed Olivia!”

“I— I don’t know. You sort o f did?”

She her eyes tightened. "Sort o f did!”

“Actually, you hardly killed them because you’re as much a murderer as Winchester or

Ford were murderers.”

“How does that make sense at all— ”

“Same logic. Is Ford a mass murderer because he gave everyone cars and we all crashed

and burned and ran people over and fucked up the atmosphere?”

“That is cars.”

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“Okay, maybe Winchester—give someone a gun, and if he kills his pal or some guy, or

himself, then h e ’s the murderer, right? The shooter. Not Winchester. Otherwise any poor shit who

invented anything is a Hitler, and that’s just not true.”

“But this was designed to kill,” Boyana told him, backing away from him, her arms

crossed again. “It was designed to murder people, random kills. God. Don’t hate me? Not even

mad at me— ?” And here, though Tim did not notice, a gasp escaped her involuntarily, and she

brought a hand to her cheek. “God. You must not feel anything at all.”

Tim shook his head. “Wait, hey now. That’s not true. Just listen— ”

She stepped aside with defensive reflex as Tim jerked his hand out—it seemed as though

he’d hit her, but he only reached for the coffee cup.

Tim took a sip and began again. “Quit it. Just listen. Would you call Einstein a killer?

The atomic bomb? It vaporized tens-of-thousands in World War II. And there was the dirty bomb

in Amsterdam. But that’s the way shit fell into place for a million reasons, not the way Einstein

intended it to fall as his own doing. Not his fault.”

She shook her head. “What you’re saying, it’s non sense. I’m not Einstein. And it’s not

the same.”

He reached again— she glared at him, but he reached again and insisted he hold her on

the shoulder. “Fine— okay, fine. So you’re more of a Winchester or a Gatling, or whoever you

want Boyana. An inventor with your invention expanding outside your control. Understand?

That’s what happened: you’re not a real murderer. You didn’t kill anybody’s soul, one for one.

Understand? You didn’t kill Olivia’s soul one for one.”

Boyana stared at Tim.

“Quit it. Just listen to me, Boyana. You really aren’t a killer. You really aren’t. You just

did what you could like everyone else. That’s what everyone is doing. Everyone is doing what

they can. Somebody told me that— it’s true! Right? It’s the bottom line. Understand what I’m

telling you?”

She shook her head, slowly, and let her face drop, the gravity weighing some more.

“But why books? I like reading.”

There truly was something that disturbed her, even her, about what Tim was saying.

About his unmoving face. It’s like he felt good about it. But she’d been confused about Tim’s

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intentions since the very first day— though, as he said himself, he had no idea what his own goals

were. Perhaps that’s what she saw in his face then.

She collected herself, turned to pour another cup of coffee. “Technology. We’ve lost our

origin. Humans have forgotten we’re animals. Credit culture is new blindness, makes society and

government heavy and suck our lives and make us bitches.” She sipped, shook her head. “You

look around, Tim: Nobody has a job. Everything is made someplace else— ‘someplace else’ for

consumers. And us? We go to college— mostly,” she narrowed her eyes at him for a moment, “—

and we get nothing for what we know. But it is all currency. Every country, it is just believes, you

see? Nothing is worth anything except who’s believing, you see? Currency is our virus. And

literacy is the root of currency. Some people believe they are making change, they are literate and

aware and bringing justice to the society. But they are just as elite as the others because they do

not act. They hide behind their literacy forgetting it is a technology, too, and is used to control

them and others. So if humanity will survive, technology must be extinguished, one thing at a

time, or almost. We are meant to live naturally as animals.”

“Christ,” Tim whispered. He leaned against the counter, crossed his legs at the ankles.

“Well. That’s true. Writing is an ancient technology. But why not destroy currency itself? Money

itself?”

She shrugged. “Impossible.”

“Sure it’s possible!” He enthused. “Microbiology— shit, Boyana, think about it: how

many people push it around each day? Cash. How many politicians— how many metal briefcases

in secret deals? It’s made from a plant. There’s no reason why a virus couldn’t thrive on it. It’s

loaded with oils and everything, you know? Make it a real virus. Make it something actually

toxic.”

“That’s possible?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He came close to her again, brought an arm around her waist, and

began to whisper excitedly into her ear about his knowledge of plant loving viruses and

microbiology more generally.

February 2021

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The moonshine was hot enough to turn baby skin into orange rind. Hints of once-was

fruit, hints of Fanta, chemicals, plastic, things dying.

It was lights out, and all of them were laughing and slurred hissing, but all muffled with

silence, passing the plastic tumblers doled out of a plastic bag from another bunk bedded shadow

in the far comer of the room. Most the men were lying in their bunks.

Robin had nearly found his sea legs in the strong drink. He had nearly found them, then

lost them. He stood holding with two hands onto the railing of his bunk with the most elevation,

horizon shifting drunk he’d seen in the better part o f a decade. He grinned as he held fast from the

spinning gravity of the drink trying to face plant him into the floor.

Nobody was the captain here, it seemed to him. Nobody was even the first mate. No lives

mattered. This was the drudge of the drift sucked into a holding tank to ferment. This was the

branded rejection accumulated to ferment a more vicious poison than that which the boozeman

scraped from the bottom of the trash bag.

That’s when they suddenly all heard it, paused— and again it was the caterwauling of a

cat in heat through the air ducts.

The laughter was almost uncontrollable, but they had to remain silent, holding it all in,

and the man in the bunk beside Robin tried swallowing his laughter so hard that they heard him

choke on it, then heard the spew of his vomit on the concrete floor a moment later— they held the

laughs harder, some falling out of beds— another sound of spewing but, no, no, someone else, a

second person—they were all in tears then, Robin giving over to it, falling to the floor, tearing,

weeping for himself and these people and this scene, weeping in this dank, moist, concrete angled

grotto where he’d finally found himself at the bottom.

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The second day was like the first day in that Robin did not know where to sit. It was

unlike the first in that the hangover was so sharp that he no longer cared that he didn’t know

where to sit.

He’d spent the rest o f the night on the floor exactly where he’d fallen, and once pod

time began and the cells were opened, he walked only five feet through the doorway, then sat

beside it. He hung his head between bursts of eyes wandering the room with the grinding beat of

his hangover throbbing behind them.

It was a spacious room of all cold concrete and blue steel glowing with the stank warmth

of too many masculine bodies. There were 175 men in blue canvas huddled in groups at the

bottom of stairwells, around pay phones, with cards at table, some facing toward and some facing

from others. Forced casual organization, people standing in well-worn spots— the same faces in

the same spaces as the first day, Robin realized.

He’d walked through the crowd on the first day confidently with an angry, contemplative

gait— that was his honest demeanor. He was kicking himself harder than the headache and neck

ache from his come down, the drugs and booze, for making himself vulnerable to the law. But it

seemed nobody stood alone besides Robin. The room was thick with the sound of too loud

laughter and bellows and now-and-again whoops like, Robin imagined, the worst sort of

fraternity party, but filled with marked men uncomfortable with the eyes stuffed into the backs of

their heads.

He was all right to spend the first hours alone, projecting his isolation with brooding

posture. But the time wore on. He saw the groups, all the huddled masses. He knew it would be

impossible to stay away forever.

At first he did what he always did, which was to wander on the outskirts of the group. He

hovered. He let the blend of conversation wash around until he heard a lead he could connect

with, knowing that when he caught hold of something, he could face up with the group and throw

something startling with gusto into the conversation, wrangle a laugh or an awe, or even a taken-

aback tsk to begin the conversation. Robin knew that, by that point, his gift of wit and mirroring

people’s energy would bring him into the circle.

But these people conversed about things he did not understand: Sports, family, labor,

cars, guns, gangs, violence. Drugs. He could talk about drugs—everyone there could talk about

drugs as anyone anywhere could talk about air, the weather, sunlight. Robin not only wouldn’t

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stand out talking about drugs, but also was already preoccupied with coming down from not

doing them. The last thing he wanted to share while trying not to think about his shaking hands

and sweat and nausea were exploits about callous urgency from his top seven yeyo and tequila

benders.

He came across one group in the last minutes of their pod time break with a lead he knew

well. Five men, slicked back hair and dark eyes, the grease from pompadours all gone, had

apparently been talking about music.

“ ...Venusian Sex Pirates and Sons of Sound at Bottom of the Hill,” one of them had been

saying. “The best show I’d ever damn seen, homie.”

Robin clapped and laughed, “hell yeah, Venusian Sex Pirates— damn, guy, and I— I was

at that show, tried to get backstage, tried to hook up with Cammy. She took my coke but not my

cock, know what I’m saying?”

Most of them would not even look at him, and the one that did only held the tight lipped

smile and raised eyes of total indifference. “Hay un monton de buena m i e r d a the other

continued.

And the conversation progressed in Spanish— Robin could catch some phrases, but as

they became more rapid, he lost all the threads. He slunk away cursing his zealous grandparents

for slapping the Spanish from his mother’s lips, cursing her ex-husbands for slapping it from her

heart, cursing his awkward footing halfway from his mother’s 2nd generation while sloshed into

his father’s nth generation.

He gave up after that. He wasn’t embarrassed, exactly. He was just not used to needing

acceptance somewhere, especially not from some group, from any group, the impulse he’d

loathed for years in all those people out there.

So he didn’t even try on the second day, but rather just sat and pondered himself and his

place in the justice system.

Strangely, he’d never imagined himself in a cell. Despite everything, he’d never

imagined getting caught—he caught himself there, of course, and laughed. Nobody in that room

ever imagined they’d get caught, or, otherwise, hadn’t imagined anything one way or another.

His head pounded. His sweat had soaked through his t-shirt to the blue canvas detention

shirt. Robin had a sincere moment during intake that jail might actually help him. He had hardly

been able to stand for the exhaustion, the booze and cocaine and defeat, and certainly had been

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unable to remove his shoes and socks for the search without leaning against the long hallway. He

wondered if jail would rehabilitate him— in the sense that it would actually be more rehab than

jail.

How many days had it been since he hadn’t used something? Toxicity had become a way

of life and fulltime occupation to dodge the comedowns or the hangovers with more, to keep his

elevated bloodline a cliff face of existential living. And if it had not been the roll of a lowly

dispassionate opioid, the elation of a hot blooded high, it had been the adrenaline of facing off

with Elise. Of indulging in her body the things that had been forbidden to them both by the

fortress of decent living, but also of flouting the legal monolith of their time which said he could

not fulfill his lust with a girl of a certain age. There was a name for that, he laughed. There was a

name for that. And here he was in jail having taken the bait wholeheartedly.

A well-timed raid from DEA storm troopers in black helmets, black armor, night vision,

machine guns, and it was being there at the wrong time with Elise that undid him despite years of

believing he would die at 27 in the classic way, in some fiery but pathetic OD.

The raid had been too well-timed. He shook his head. It had been. Who had ratted? Who

was the tattle?

It hadn’t been Ronnie because it had all been faced and resolved. Ronnie had caught

Robin with Elise literally in the tableau Robin had only imagined figuratively for many years:

Smeared with champagne they’d stolen from the father’s liquor cabinet and dancing with his

pants down in some decadent afternoon while she laughed hysterically and grew abs. Once she’d

screamed and he’d dressed and met Ronnie in the hallway with those timeless lines— oh, Ronnie,

listen, I can explain, man, pal, guy— Ronnie slugged him in the stomach and crashed his knee into

Robin’s face.

He caught Robin by his shirt, his other fist raised. You can’t date my sister or I’ll fucking

kill you. Date her? But I’m not dating her. You can’t date my sister or I’ll fucking kill you,

Ronnie repeated. No no no no, man, Robin insisted. Relax, guy. Listen. Listen. W e’re not dating,

man. We’re just buddies. See? Buddies? See?

That was from universal language. Ronnie knew what ‘buddies’ meant. With the world as

it was, the time as it had progressed, Ronnie could accept that Robin and his sister were fuck

buddies long before he could accept that they were in love. Ronnie asked if that were the truth,

Robin insisted it was, and Ronnie turned away from it, and they never spoke of it again, though

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there would be no banter between them and their dealings. It was strictly business. So Robin

knew it had not been Ronnie who’d tipped off the authorities.

But what about Carina? It turned his stomach to consider she would betray him.

It had been an open relationship. It had been two years into that lechery and they’d never

had a problem. It was a never ask, never tell policy. It was a social media blackout. It was rarely a

matter of jealously, but rarely still; the playing field was level— seemingly. They both could sleep

with whomever they wanted so long as it wasn’t love. It was seemingly equal, though Robin

realized quickly into the experiment that it was not: On sex, it is a woman’s world and so too a

queer’s world in that these are the most objectified people of all, and thus the most in demand,

and thus— at the very least amid all the woe— given the reality of more good and bad options for

sex partners.

The rare streak of jealousy was thus Robin’s; It had never been hers. She’d even, in some

low points, been sympathetic to him— two times, only, for the rest of the time she was seemingly

focused on being even more acerbic and unforgiving than Robin projected he was. For all his

outrageousness and otherness— assumed and otherwise— Robin was still just Robin, perceived as

a roughly standard straight man; in Orange they had perceived him as a washed out Latin and

blamed him for the new reconquista, but in San Francisco they perceived him as another muddled

white and blamed him for retaining the power structure which kept slapping equal agency about

the eyes. This social partitioning was not Robin’s own design. It was partitioning through lenses

that he learned to analyze others only once he had lived in the city. He’d learned, as well, to

ignore the frustration of being so racially and socio-economically ambiguous as to be reduced to

simply being ‘white people’ for the sake of empowering the strength o f social justice, a

movement he agreed with. But it did reduce his social value in San Francisco and Oakland in

every way.

So out of this tinge of desperation, he made poor decisions— he laughed at himself,

rubbed his aching face. No shit he made poor decisions. For every lover Carina had taken, Robin

was rejected nearly as many times— it was all moot because, anyway, Robin had spent nearly half

the time they’d been in an open relationship chasing Lilith and being rejected by Lilith. Until

Elise. Lise had chosen him. Carina had had thirty fleeting lovers, and Robin had had three that he

relished as long as he could. He played them out as long as he could. The relationship with Elise

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persisted, and so Robin knew there was a mountain of texts and messages of all sorts that had all

gone undeleted.

Had Carina gotten too curious, read the entire line back to the treacherous first tell, made

the connection? Their relationship, he admitted then from his withdrawing body hating him in

that jail block, had been disintegrating. Did she want to find out why? Even though the playing

field was seemingly fair.

Robin frowned. He wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel test thinking like this.

He stared out over the break room, the men and their laughter and banter, the rapping, the

force of the stories and crossed arms and clapping pushups and hollering pull ups. Here he was.

Masculinity had never made sense to him; he suspected it was a principle reason many of

these men wound up in Santa Rita jail. Yet, on another hand, on the hand he closed into a tight

fist, were the tenants of masculinity, the lust and the rage and aggression, the same exact tenants

which brought Robin among them?

He wanted to smash his fists into anything, into the bars, into a face, with that sickening

twist of his gut torqued by the feeling, the knowing, that Carina could have been the only one to

know to sell him out.

Around the corner in an adjoining room separated by a doorway of plexiglas panels were

more tables and chairs and a television encased in stainless steel mounted on the wall— it looked

more of an industrial strength microwave than a proper television set. No wires, no exposed

hardware of any kind save for protruding rubber guard over the channel and volume buttons.

Robin sat at one of the chairs seated before the television. And immediately it was

apparent what was playing.

“No fucking way,” he said to himself. He laughed and laughed, slapped his knee. “And

they’re not even making them watch— ” He jumped up, pressed the buttons, and indeed, the

prisoners were allowed to change the channel. They’d elected to watch it.

He sat and watched the show. It was not an episode Robin recognized. Somewhere in the

south, an unpaved suburban road. A stiff-faced police officer in dark black glasses stood at back

door of his patrol cruiser, questioning a bewildered, wide eyed man in a maroon white basketball

jersey and gold chains.

“Ricky, I still don’t know why you were running from the police.”

“Because I was nervous, man.”

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“Because you were nervous? What made you nervous, man?”

“Because, you know— he comes zooming—the way he did it, with those red lights

blazing, the way he did it come zooming round like that made me nervous.”

“With red lights blazing? But that’s how the police normally do it. What did you expect

was gonna happen, man?”

“Well I dunno.”

“That house you were at? The officer suspects there’s some drug dealing going on at that

house, man. Were you there to buy dope?”

“No sir.”

“That’s why he was watching you man, because you pulled up in front of the house,

man.”

“No sir.” Ricky only continued his faraway stare.

“All right man, you’re being charged with a felony. When you run from the police in the

state of Texas, that’s a felony, man.”

“All right.”

“Well. Good luck to you, man.” He paused. “Hey man, what’s all that white stuff on your

face, man?”

What could he say? “My face hit the ground.”

“But, man, it’s like really white, man. Like white powder, man.”

“My face hit the ground. I got a brown face.”

The officer paused, then slowly closed the cruiser door. His fellows had recovered the

cocaine from the street where Ricky had presumably thrown it from the car and stood in a circle

to resolve the three felony charges: Resisting arrest, tampering with evidence, possession of

narcotics.

“Ricky is already a felon,” the lead officer reminded them. “H e’ll have a lot of hoops to

jump through if he ever wants to drive around the streets of Austin again.”

“Now that guy’s in a world of hurt.” Someone Robin had yet to see, a baggy sort of guy

in his late thirties— baggy then, though. Beneath the layers of tattoos, his arms carried the shape

of muscles once chiseled and then softened with ennui and snacks.

Robin nodded. “And they threw in that tampering with evidence hooy phooy— before

they even motherfucking had the motherfucking yey. Before they had it, as if the second it’s not

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tearing up his nasal it’s police property— and why they’d want to own it anyway, I don’t know. I

would have tried to snort the whole thing too before jelly bean Johnny Law got it.”

His conversation partner laughed softy. “Is this your first time in?”

Robin told him it was. Lou introduced himself, they shook hands. Lou was 41, in for his

third strike— a parole violation for booze and fighting in public. He wondered if he’d see his wife

as a free man before 2040. He wondered if he’d be present at his daughter’s wedding. He had

bright blue weepy eyes and a nervous tick of slapping his thighs, rubbing his hands together, and

glancing over his shoulder as if he were pulling out of a driveway again and again.

When Lou asked about charges, Robin told him it was a gram of methamphetamine in his

boot and a portable scale in his bag that brought them to meet— that was half a lie and one quarter

of the full truth. Robin would never mention the other heinous charge knowing that Lou, like

many of the men incarcerated, had daughters they would not see for years. They would try to

destroy Robin’s face as well as his testicles if they’d known the three other quarters of truth.

“The public defender told me— I think— well I think she told me— the public defender

told me maybe the intent to sell charge won’t stick.”

“Sure. But you think she told you?” Lou asked.

Robin rubbed his eyelids. “Well, hell. I was even more fucked up and hung over during

intake than now. It doesn’t matter. It’s all just happening.” He sighed. “Honestly, man, I thought

this place would be my chance to get clean— now, I’ve thought now and then for years that— but,

you know. Well.” He laughed. “You know.”

Lou nodded. “Sure. Take it from me. It’s gonna be up to you. I spent three years in San

Quentin. You got guys making pruno in there every night, just like here.” He rubbed his hands

together again, glanced over his shoulder. “You’ll have to nip that in the bud if you wanna get

better. In most ways prison is a better gig than this shit show, believe me. The food is better. You

get a real mattress. They pair you up with someone who wants to keep as much peace as you do.

I’m sorry you’ve got twelve months ahead of you in this horse shit.”

“Do you want to leave here for there?”

“If I can’t shake these charges, I absolutely have to.” He slapped and rubbed and glanced

again, this time with purpose, then leaned in close to Robin. “The thing is that I’m a drop out.

Shit ain’t safe for me here. Even if they put me in protective custody it ain’t gonna make shit for

difference. I realized what this shit was doing to my kid and my wife— I’m not gonna get those

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years back. I did fucked up shit and keep on doing it, and so I dropped out. So I gotta get out of

here, and if I get in one fight here or anywhere, it’s over, but I’d rather get to prison now if that’s

the case.”

“Nah. Nah, hell— it doesn’t mean a damn thing, dropping out,” Robin said. “To tell you

the truth, I dropped out too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hell, I tell you— I just knew I couldn’t get any more out of it, so I took off.”

Lou seemed intrigued. He whispered then. “Sure. Who were you running with?”

“UC Berkeley.”

It was a moment of recognition. He squinted like sunshine coming in, “right,” and all

sorts of hesitation and moving back. “Sure. Sure.”

Robin knew immediately. He’d missed something along the conversation, realized they

were talking honestly about two different things. It could well have been two different people.

They turned and watched more COPS.

It was a different world. Robin knew that for all his associations with the strung out

outrages of the bay, the kinked out sex workers, the rotting crust punks, none of it mattered in a

world where he truly was an alien of another face and another tongue. His social equity was even

more worthless here.

And then, very suddenly, Lou stood up and walked away with purpose from the

television set. He slipped through the doorway and back out into the main room, vanishing into

the population.

“Goodness.” Was it that awful of a thing to say? So he’d made a gaff. So he’d spoken

another language. It seemed like Lou could have been a friend. Now this connection was lost in

the crowed of strangers. Was it really enough to walk away from Robin like that?

But that’s not what it was because then Robin saw them coming: From the crowd in the

day room emerged four men, tall, deeply inked, all the bright blue weeping eyes again, all shaved

heads.

The leader was the tallest of a lot, a gaunt face with drooping eyes, and the most heavily

tattooed: His arms covered in images of gear works, of the muscled profiles of stahlhelmed men

clutching submachine guns and great hammers, of tall factory smoke stacks; in his neck was the

familiar skull and cross bones; on his face were the deep pock marks of removed piercings which

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had beaded his brow; rising from his temples and up his scalp were green and black ridged ram

horns.

All four of them sat in the seats before the television around Robin. One of them, the

stocky one with a soft, polite face, had been grinning at him the whole time. “I never thought I’d

see you here, Robin.” And he clapped Robin on the arm.

But who was this soft-spoken bonehead? Robin knew a bonehead? How could that be?

How could that have been in a thousand years?

He searched his mind, the babe blue eyes and soft face and dimples... then he recognized

him. “Well I’ll be double damned. Fuckin.”

They clasped hands, laughing. Robin had not recognized due to his shaved head one of

his most regular customers in the years since he’d been a free-agented, equal opportunity drug

slinger— this was the user who, indeed, helped Robin realize he could quit his copywriting job

and just sell meth and tutor high schoolers to get by— it had been many years since he’d seen

him, and he was much more defined and his skin much more worn than Robin remembered.

“How you doing, Robin?” he put an arm around Robin, turning to the bonehead leader

who sat with his arms crossed and eyebrows raised, a tight smile. “Fuckin, hell, this guy has sold

me the best, fuckin, the best fuckin shit I’ve had in my entire life.”

“And Fuckin was my very best customer of all time. Right, Fuckin?” He laughed.

“Right?”

The other boneheads looks shifted to curiosity. “Hold up,” the leader said. “Daniel, is this

guy really calling you Fuckin?”

Daniel’s steady eyes finally faltered, his face flushing.

Robin grinned. “You mean you guys haven’t noticed he only says ‘fuckin” instead of

saying ‘um?’ Hmm? Hmm?” He clapped, pointed.

The men all looked at each other, and then they burst out in short, hoarse laughter, claps.

They must have known he’d done that for years, the tearing up in their amusement.

“I never thought to actually call him Fuckin though,” the leader said. “Nice one, bud.

That’s cute.”

Robin grinned.

“James,” the leader offered, shaking Robin’s hand, a tight hand shake. “This is Steve and

Tanner,” all the men shaking hands, all tight handshakes.

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“Robin,” Robin said.

“What’s your full name, bud?”

“Robin Wield.”

“City?”

“West Oakland.”

“What’s your rap? Who’s representing you?”

“What?”

They exchanged glances. “Fuckin, like,” Fuckin began, “he means, fuckin, your charges.”

Robin told them the same quarter truth he’d told Lou, the gram of meth and the scale— it

was what they expected as Fuckin had already corroborated the fact that he was a drug dealer and

had no idea of the charges that he was a pervert.

What was unexpected to Robin, however, the thing that made his grinning fade, was how

Tanner had produced a tiny pencil from the waistband of his pants along with a worn, long and

thin scroll filled with nearly illegible writing. He felt the chill when the questions undisguisedly

became interview questions as probing as the intake interview the guards had asked him when he

was first admitted, though he couldn’t remember what he’d told them then. That scratching of the

pencil on paper, the steady gazes of blue eyes.

They watched COPS for the better part of two hours until the time in the day room was

over. Then, after a few hours of stalling for the guards to move on, the party began again.

PS Grape soda, Fanta, gummy worms, apples and apples and apples, the hue of a glow

stick and the stink of a chemistry set enema, and Robin was again the drunkest he’d been in the

better part o f a decade from the boozeman’s prime pruno. His face was buzzing with the heat in

his ears. The cell block was enamored with its abandon of memory to moonshine delusion.

It turned out Fuckin was on the block with Robin, and maybe one of his bonehead friends

was the boozeman, too. He could not tell for sure: There were many people, and the pruno was

the most totalizing drunk he’d ever experienced. He could hear the words and could speak them,

could continue to act, but was slurring madly. He acted as if he could see though he could hardly

see.

But he could see enough to recognize the tattoo of the man standing and drinking beside

the bunk Robin was perched on.

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“My friend— hey,” Robin slurred. “My friend— hello. Hello.”

“What’s up?” The man asked.

“I just— my friend. Hello. I just— I have to ask you now, nawhmsaying— I have to ask

about your tattoo.”

He was an ancient looking man not in his age—he seemed in his early 20s—but in his

large jaw and sloping face, and small forehead. His small forehead was, inexplicably to even

Robin, detailed with a professional tattoo of a minivan. Black and white, shaded, the chrome all

in realistic detail.

“I mean— ” Robin gestured toward the man’s forehead - “my friend—nawhmsaying?

You’ve got a tattoo minivan on your forehead.”

The man laughed. “Yeah, bro.”

“Why you— why do you want a tattoo minivan on your forehead?”

The man smiled. “Because I always wanted a minivan.” He just kept on smiling, then

turned to drink and converse with someone else.

That was all. It could have been that there was nothing else to the world, at that moment,

Robin wondered. This man had always wanted a minivan, and so he got one, and that was all.

Robin wanted badly to understand the implications of this revelation on his identity and

life direction. But only for a moment: Mostly, Robin was concerned with steadying himself on

the bunk, trying to keep the swell of the horizon at bay.

Aces and kings and rapping. People trying to hang inverted from the bunks. Still, the ever

present caterwauling through the vents. Still, the ever present rant from each person about not

belonging here, about only having a problem in being caught, about bad beds and bad food and

overcrowding. But mostly about not belonging here. Robin heard them all say it, and knew they

were wrong; these people belonged here. But he knew too that it was different for him. It was

different for him, absolutely. This was not his culture, not his society, not him. But there he was,

and there he would remain. They all said the same things while denying the same things.

So, whatever. Who cares? Fuck you. He drank pruno and tried to hang inverted from

bunks and played aces and kings and freestyled about Jesus and velociraptors and thus easily

found himself giving a fuck while not giving a fuck.

He’d fallen to the floor, pulled himself up, stood back up— suddenly, Robin was face-to-

face with someone talking to him but could not make out the face for the spinning of the room.

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...thought you’d wanted to stop, he was saying. Something about thinking he’d wanted to

stop though he had not. I said, I don’t understand you, he said, and repeated it, I said, I don’t

understand you.

Maybe something about the way he held him by the shoulders, the honest and forward

motion of his eyes, or the adrenaline, or a combination, but all the moment conspired, and Robin

found himself in the uncanny way of having a moment of clarity: Things were centering, the

nausea passing, and Lou was holding him by the shoulders, his blue eyes, his gentle smile.

“I said, remember how you said you’d wanted to stop? You can. Maybe this is the last

night you need to do this. Not everybody gets through it this way.”

The world had stopped spinning, the horizon lined anew in the faraway place outside the

cell. Robin realized, too, as in a lucid dream, that this was a moment of clarity as he’d always

read about them, defining itself and reiterating itself. It was a choice. It was an acceptance that

could be his if he were willing to face it. It could be a new life if he were willing to admit the way

he felt. Lou was right.

Robin laughed. The simplicity of what Lou had said, or maybe just the manner in which

he’d said it—Robin never thought it could be so simple. He could just start as simply as he

started. Those baby blue eyes.

Something about his eyes triggered a realization in Robin’s mind. The blue sky with the

polished clouds like they'd been chiseled, Robin was brought back across the years to someplace

even warmer. Yes; he was in Thailand with his wife and their Thai girlfriend, riding a

motorcycle. They were staying at the girlfriend’s mother's house in the north, the long straight

roads and the vines and water reaching, reclaiming the buildings bit by bit. They rode up on a

market flush against the left of the road, corrugated steel roofs and walls. On the right was a stone

walled clearing surrounded by palms and a one-room house with a thin chimney and a massive

metal door.

He opened his eyes— it happened fast— barreling from bunks across the room, the men

moving aside, Fuckin and Steve came plowing into Lou— had him by the arms, then Steve and

Tanner, cracking fists again and again and again into Lou’s kidneys, “fuck you, you fucking Jew,

fuck you, you fucking Jew,” all between the hits.

They had Lou with his arms behind his back. Seconds, and they had him with his face

into the floor. Tanner wrenched Lou’s arm from its socket.

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Steve faced Robin then— Robin couldn’t stop thinking about how thick the man’s neck

was, how the unknown tattoos crept up around the sweat stained band of his t-shirt beneath the

blue canvas. “You want to friend up with this dropout Jew fink, buddy?”

“Maybe just to teach myself about rat poison, nawhmsayin?” Robin told him in a

heartbeat. His old habit, to talk from feeling without thinking, was the easiest thing in the world.

“Nawhmsayin?”

The lights came up, the siren blaring, as the guards stormed in to subdue them all. Steve

smiled, pleased with Robin, and kicked Lou in the neck again and again until the guards tackled

him to the floor.

The bile rose up in his throat and his head, coming up into his nose. Whatever he would

call it. The feeling wasn’t recognition that Robin had finally learned humility, or that he learned

that he did fear, or that he did shame. Those things were not new to him in their own junctures.

As the guards tossed him and the others to the floor to bind them with zip ties, the feeling was

Robin’s recognition and acceptance that he acceded to humiliation and fear and shame, felt safer

in the mob, like any typical person did. He was sick with himself, and his body was just sick. He

laughed, and he cried.

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They dehooded Tim and the other—Tim stood sweating like a pig in the sweltering hot

warehouse beside the other candidates, no windows, or boarded up windows, bare light bulbs

above casting an island of light across the dark concrete floor. It was a burning hot room with that

single light which could have been floating somewhere in the black of space with so few things to

see. He considered what he would need to do to make himself a more attractive candidate than the

other as he fanned himself against the heat.

Would he need to make the case for anarchism, for nihilism? That was easy. Would he

have to face them in combat? That would be tougher, but could be done— he outclassed him in

height, as he could see from his peripheral vision, and could see in his posture that he wanted to

act tough, which meant he likely was not really tough. Would he need to crush seminal vesicles,

crush a larynx? Who knew? This trial had just begun and it was very hot.

Those who’d dehooded them stepped forward to face the candidates now around the edge

of the island of light— Boyana was there, of course, and looking hot in more ways than one. Her

white tank top clung to the curves of her body, Tim noticed, her fit jungle pants. She stood

looking stoney at the candidates with an unchanging face, ignoring Tim as if she’d never met

him— Tim could only smile because he knew her really.

He kept smiling, and almost wanted to laugh, when he saw her comrades. It was all just

as he’d imagined having heard all about Anarcho-Primitivist activism: four people with shaved

heads, except for the one with the dreadlock stack, his freckled and cratered skin and hazel North

African eyes; a grizzled man in camouflage, his swarthy face scarred and bearded and a ruined

looking lazy eye; a blonde browed woman with porcelain perfect skin and green tattoos in her

neck and face, a pentagram in her neck and an anarchist’s A in her temple and bone flowers

everywhere else; a furious looking Asian woman who was then glaring right at Tim.

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What had Tim expected? He couldn’t even remember. He tried not to laugh. Life had

become so blurry that his desires and motivations were lost among the logistics of times and

places, the sea of feelings, all with a hot glaze of high after high and two hundred hangovers since

he’d arrived in Europe.

He remembered the first conversation when Boyana had finally come around to his

constant insistence that he should join them, that he didn’t care what they did and it didn’t matter

anyway, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, even though he hardly knew what he was saying or he was

doing— He was so drunk most the time, always saying yes, always saying and doing things

without thinking even if they were wrong, as Robin had taught him to do, that he was watching

himself make these cases half the time and remembering the other half days later.

But Boyana conceded, eventually, at dinner on some Athenian rooftop. “Should I be

nervous? When should I be nervous?” Tim asked Boyana; his tapping foot had begun to shake the

table, and he stopped.

Boyana turned away from the setting Athenian skyline. She hailed the waiter, offering a

snap and glance at their comer table. “You will be nervous when you shouldn’t be and not

nervous when you should be. But I don’t know where it leaves you, Tim.”

A neat whiskey and a traditional absinthe appeared before them— Tim took the whiskey

and drank it in one gulp.

She gave him that look, something he knew as sick and condescending.

“Okay okay okay, quit it, Boyana. All I know is— now, come on— I know what I’ll tell

him. And that’s the truth, Boyana. Now, come on. Really though, I was involved the moment I

saw Olivia Banderas annihilated by your weapon. It drew me in— not my design. It’s a war.” He

laughed. “I’ve spent my life doing nothing. 1 have nothing at stake. It’s time for something to

happen.” He laughed some more.

She was glaring at him. Finally, she shook her head. “Tim, it’s very hard to know you.

Half the time you seem honest, and you sit there and agree with me, and you tell me you want me

and you seem to make love to me instead of fuck me. The other half of the time you seem like a

black hole, and you just talk and say things and seem disgusted with every single thing, including

me and including you.”

The truth started to prick Tim around his skin, and he winced, but kept smiling.

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There was a lot she didn’t know about him. There were some things nobody knew about

him.

One thing Tim would never tell anyone and especially not Boyana was that he was a

virgin until he was 24.

This wasn’t because girls were disinterested— lack of interest never happened. Interest

happened all the time to Tim. He could have been an Aryan superman in another era, in another

country, but being a tall, broad-shouldered blonde in Orange County was good enough. Whether

he noticed the interest or not was another thing entirely, his endless teenage hours lost in library

study, face in a textbook and ass in a chair. His hand ached perpetually from classes and labs,

always trying to shake it off.

The first girl to notice him that he ignored completely was called Diana. Tim had known

Diana since middle school, then a thin, arm-clinging wallflower with long red hair and full

breasts. She was so far developed for her age, no boy knew what to do with themselves, least of

all Tim. So Tim likewise did nothing.

Diana tagged along with their adolescent crew, accompanying them on all their

adventures: The time they took revenge on Nelson Vargas for scratching Tim’s Muse CD,

stealing Nelson’s backpack inside In-N-Out, borrowing enough change from laughing girls at

Nelson’s table to buy a newspaper from a vending machine, then locking his backpack inside,

forcing Nelson to borrow change to buy it back; the time they followed Chris’s lead in using the

rolling bleachers as a battering ram against one of the tennis nets, all nine of them running with it,

jumping on, and rolling through the net, its metal cables sheering off to whip the court ground. In

all cases, the boys kept her along because she was a girl, but ridiculed her because she was a girl.

She came around Tim’s circle now and then in high school, too, though by then she spent

her time with the goths, and Tim spent his time with nerds who obsessed over cell structures and

taxonomies and pulsar orbit speeds.

He remembered one morning before class, she’d come by and insisted that Tim dance

with her— dance with me, she demanded, putting his hands on her waist. Come on. Do it. Dance

with me.

He really didn’t want to do it. She set his cold hands on her waist.

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They drifted through the foggy air, step step move, step step move, step step move, faster

faster and faster, faster— a false move—they slammed their heads together. And it really hurt. But

they were laughing.

It may have been the same day that she confessed to him.

She propositioned him on Facebook; it was 2011, after all. Was the shock of the

proposition itself, not its medium or the sudden flurry of messages: Where are you tonight? Tim, I

like you. I’ve always liked you. I want you. I’ve wanted you for so long. I want you to fuck me,

just once. Please, just once. I’ll suck your dick. I’ll do whatever you want.

Tim needed to sit back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. Sixteen years old— he

was too young to know the weight. He was too young to imagine somebody else suffering on the

other side of a confession, to imagine somebody else suffocating on the other side of a question,

softly clutching their neck, absently rubbing their chest. He’d never reached out. What was it to

need someone? It was a something. Somethings only came and came to pass, and he reacted to

things, but never did things which touched his heart in such a way as to make him need to relearn

somebody’s face after they’d confessed something, or after someone confessed something to

them. Need to relearn their face by real, fundamental necessity: They’d changed, or the other had

changed, the you, and there was a new feeling of clarity and inner light between two individuals

who were renewed in their understanding of one another and their appreciation.

So Tim only held his hands behind his head for a while, and thought about sex with

Diana. Where would they meet to have sex? At the park? In a parking lot? Would he have to wear

a condom? She said, ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’ But what does that mean? But what does that

mean in terms of his position as a man?

Wasn’t he supposed to feel hard and on by this? But the feeling was just hesitation and a

drowning in unnamable social milieu. He closed his laptop and went to bed, but didn’t sleep,

imagining sex with Diana in the park, on swing sets, in tunnels, on slides, and he masturbated.

They didn’t speak much after that.

The second girl to notice Tim that he ignored completely was named Leila. Leila was

friends with Tim’s first girlfriend, Katie— he hadn’t had sex with Katie, either. Katie was more

interested in half-hearted hand jobs and Jerry Springer reruns and drinking Tim’s mother’s malt

liquor than sex. Their relationship lasted one month. Tim did learn how to please Katie orally,

though she never pleased him, but he hadn’t told her what he needed, but blamed her for not

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pleasing him anyway. He broke up with her because of the fallout from Tim’s mom about

drinking all the Smirnoff.

Tim remembered only ever talking to Leila in passing around school hallways or waiting

for busses. Once, she’d run into him on campus, and they’d talked on the mile walk to her house

as he wandered alongside, things about her life. But honestly Tim couldn’t remember the contents

of the conversation: It was the summer he’d discovered marijuana as a rising senior, and he’d

been so high running into her that five minutes passed before remembering her name, and he

followed her without question to her bus stop before realizing he’d gone to campus to attend a

class, and so he wasted the rest of the day walking the next two miles home, smoking the rest of

his joint and playing Civilization V until the next morning— when he finally looked at his watch

it said 9:25. He concerned himself with beating the game on its hardest difficulty level, diety, and

achieved an outstanding scientific victory as King Nebuchadnezzar II of the Babylonians,

finishing and launching the spaceship to Alpha Centauri in the year 259 AD— unprecedented by

the standards of the game— his two-city empire defended with vigor on mountain passes by

springed marines and in smoldering craters from shallow continental seas by hulking battleships

cast eons before their time. He went to sleep that morning smiling.

It was sometime that week when Leila, too, sent flurried messages. Flurried but measured

and subtextual, sexual subtones: Tim didn’t understand at first that she was propositioning him.

He thought they’d just been talking about anime, Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll and Elfen

Lied— oh, the viciousness and beauty of perpetually nude, telekinetic murderous teenage girls.

But suddenly she said something crazy like, you know, I’m looking for a guy who won’t

fall asleep while I’m riding his cock like my last boyfriend. Then she said something even crazier

like, you know, I’m looking and I’m ready for everything except vaginal sex. That shocked

Tim—what was the sum of the riding of the last boyfriend and this crazier statement? What?

He muttered something aloud and covered his mouth when he read it. What did that

mean? Everything but...? What? Did that mean anal sex? What was she saying?

Then he finally assumed it was a proposition, and he excused himself from the chat, and

again, the girl vanished from his sphere like the event itself. He busied himself with more

computer games and reading about the amazing speeds probes attained by gravity slingshots

around Jupiter—fuck me— New Horizons attained the fastest escape speed of a human made

object— 36,373 miles per hour is faster than the spinning of the planet.

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There were other girls, other moments, all of their names forgotten with the years— once

when he worked at the coffee shop, a girl he’d always been friendly with and joked with suddenly

came up behind him, pressing him slowly but firmly, with purpose, into the boxes of paper

cups— he could feel all of her against his back as she reached for the sleeve of cups above him,

drawing them out slowly from the box, hiss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss, the lip of

each cup catching the edge of the box. Then she walked away. They never even mentioned the

event.

It wasn’t until college that Tim stopped ignoring girls and finally gave in to the potential

in the confused ecstatic moments of connection and attainment in his id.

During his orientation at Cal, he met a girl called Megan Chambers— she’d dropped her

earring waiting in line in the sun on the grass in the quad—this memory would be replaced years

later with the catastrophic image of death in the quad, Olivia’s burning— but then, standing up to

hand her the earring, he noticed Megan as this beautiful girl, a tiny girl with big wavy auburn hair

and close set green eyes. They noticed the same thing about each other, the amazing snap motion

of the id connecting with someone else, feeling someone else through the molecules around them,

and both took to stuttering, um, um, and hands to the backs of necks. But he managed to talk

through it, however briefly. Why, yeah, my name is Tim Fleman, yeah, orientation, yeah,

Facebook.

Their meetings were only happenstance: he saw her again, months later, at a lacrosse

players party, and they watched each other in the eyes as they passed in the hall, their beers

clinking, their arms brushing against one another— he could feel all the little hairs. But somehow

neither of them stopped though they wanted to, and he couldn’t find her again after that. He

similarly saw her once at an In-n-Out, her eating with a group of friends, him drinking a

strawberry milkshake alone. And every time he looked up at her she was staring at him. He knew

she lived somewhere in his dorm building, but that was all.

Sometime in the spring something incredible happened: he awoke suddenly one night to

find Megan sitting above him in his bed, naked in the darkness.

How the fuck did this happen? How did she get in? He hadn’t been drunk— it was

Sunday night. He went to bed at nine!

Eventually he worked up the courage to say something to her. “Hi Megan.”

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Even in the dark he could see her smiling. She ran her hands up his stomach, his chest,

across his face, through his hair, and she slipped into the sheets with him, and slipped him inside.

And so passed Tim’s virginity to Megan.

It was over quickly the first time, as he expected. But the second time that night, and the

third time, and the fourth— it was something they couldn’t stop. It was becoming one organism,

one writhing thing— he watched her twist and moan atop him, deep movements, every bone in

oscillation, and they were drenched, and eventually Tim couldn’t stop grinning and gasping like

he was dying on land after years of drowning alone, and he knew it was a feeling he needed,

absolutely needed, this thirst, rolling atop her, holding her down, giving it to take it, endless,

endless. And it became something he couldn’t stop.

His roommate woke up, finally, sometime long into the tryst. “Dude. Man. What are you

doing?”

“Shut the fuck up and do your own fucking thing,” Tim snapped. Like an icy fire bolt.

There was no more talk from the roommate. It was a sentiment that made Tim harder, and

it made him rash, made him hold her down by her wrists and exert himself into her like he never

had.

When he woke up the next morning, naked and uncovered in his bed, spread, she was

gone. Nothing remained of her there. He had no idea.

He realized, searching through the hallways, that he had no idea which room was hers.

He realized he didn’t know anything now except dumb headed bliss. He couldn’t come down.

Nothing was inside him but an emptiness needing to be filled, or exerted with this new sensation

and to take hold of it again. And after breakfast he told her so through a Facebook message: I

don’t know why you did that. But I don’t care. That was one of the most incredible experiences of

my life. I can’t explain. It was amazing. I never knew it could be so easy to connect like that, to

feel it really. I need to see you again, now.

She’d seen the message immediately. But there was no reply. He couldn’t sleep all week

because there was no reply. He wandered the halls and libraries and knolls with these roving eyes.

Two weeks later, Tim noticed Megan had changed something on her profile: she now

lived in Paris. Then he noticed she had removed him as a friend.

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He spent the remainder of the year drinking tea with psilocybin and topping the nights

with thick joints. Megan was the last woman Tim noticed before he noticed Olivia two years

later. Olivia was the last woman Tim noticed before he noticed Boyana six months later.

Tim had never told these stories to Boyana, and never would.

“I will give you what you say you want.” Boyana sipped her drink at the rooftop

restaurant. She’d known Tim was a nothing person since the first night they’d met— the same sort

of person she was. Had they not arrived to the service of this ruinous emptiness in a similar way?

Had they not come to fulfill it with anarchy in a similar way? Had they not both showed up

dazed, confused, wandering in to the event already started? Were they not both subsumed by

something with a larger, more obvious movement of purpose and finality than the years of failed

ambitions? It was the same for him, maybe. Should he not have a chance to see it for what it was?

At the very least, he would be scared away by the realization of what they’d have to do,

of where it was all going: Nowhere. There was nothing to be done. He could meet Alexo the

Greek, see someone suffer, finally, and convince himself to wake up and walk away from her, to

leave her alone— what she wanted and did not at once. To die alone.

Boyana was partly right about Tim’s character. She was more largely wrong about him.

So here Tim was back in the warehouse standing next to some loser, finally, face-to-face

with the rag tag purveyors of violence, and he was just having trouble taking them seriously. He

was having trouble taking seriously because their appearance fit too closely with the image in his

imagination of disenfranchised Information Age twenty-somethings, or thirty-somethings. The

cock and hen house of the millennials finally turned up to caw and brood.

This furious tattooed woman seemed to want to tear his lungs out. Could she read his

mind? That he couldn’t take it seriously yet? He trusted she could not. Tim knew these people

were like the token students of diversity from college catalogues in the 2000s, or from for dental

office brochures from the 1990s— it’s how they looked all standing together, anyway. Or, closer

still, the Power Rangers returned hell bent on revenge against the very millennials who’d loved

them so all those years ago— Tim couldn’t help but grin, too. He cleared his throat and

straightened up, his shaking hands together, letting it go.

All of them had been glaring at him by that point, even Boyana— it was obvious to her

that he thought her colleagues were silly, or whatever half-baked judgment he had on them. But

they moved on. It was very hot.

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From the darkness, Tim could hear the scrape of wood on concrete, the drag of metal on

concrete, and then the thudding of boots on concrete: Alexo strode forward with weight into the

light. The man was a real master; his black buckled boots clocked and creaked as he walked, their

tops cuffed by dark jeans which strained to contain the obvious musculature of his legs, his shirt

and black blazer also barely containing his barrel chest and Gatling arms— the man was built like

a gorilla. His wide face and light eyes, olive skin and curly close cut— ambiguous origins.

Greece? Italy? Central Asia? New Jeresy? It was impossible to know in this age.

He began by slow clapping. Then he paced. “So you make it here. Good for you. These

people, my colleagues. Maybe my friends. You can’t know these days. Hmm?”

He walked right past Tim and the person beside him as if they were not even there and

faced the others in the ring of light— all o f them looked to the floor, looked away. Tim’s hands

shook even more.

Alexo paced around the circle. He stopped before the grizzled North African and looked

him right in the face; the grizzled man looked back, and they locked eyes, but the grizzled man

nodded as if to say, yes, I’m going down when you say I’m going down and I know it’s my part.

And, similarly, he stopped before the Asian woman, and her unwavering eyes did not challenge

Alexo’s.

And, similarly, he stopped before Boyana. But this time, he put his hand on her neck,

softly, patting her. Patting her.

This made Tim more than nervous. His hand shook so much he tried to steady it on his

belt, into his pocket, clasped behind his back— nothing really worked. He was not scared of

Alexo, then. But there was an unnamable in the feeling, an anger, a rage, a loss, and hate. He kept

shifting with his hands.

Alexo must have heard it. He turned and faced Tim and walked right up to him.

At first he hesitated to meet his eyes. But he raised them, looked right to Alexo. He had

these focused eyes, this open mouth, all of it tinged with the slight upturn of considering a funny

joke— it was like Tim was a plaything and all the world was a plaything to this man. What

savagery he— and the way he touched Boyana. Barbarism. He was much worse than the Sly

Melsons or the goaders or the sex manipulating bros Tim had always hated. Alexo, he must be the

violent type. He must break women for his pleasure and chuckle, literally fuck them raw until

they were broken and chuckle, or not even chuckle. Tim hated him, instantly, in that moment, his

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savage looking fat fucking nose and tiny fuck forsaken eyes and dumb fuck open mouth. Tim

thought of the animal world, of gorillas and other aggressive animals. They always said, oh, never

look them in the eye, oh, never beat your chest to them. But most of human experience, as it

seemed to Tim, was about who could stare the hardest, who could beat the hardest. So he stared

on.

Alexo suddenly lifted his phone. It was an expensive new one, all glass—Tim could see

Alexo’s distorted dumb face and dumb eyes and dumb lips through the device as he read the

single-sided screen. He started to text, read something— he laughed. He laughed and laughed. He

texted back.

There was no explanation for it— it was a mixed sort of feeling of outrage, panic, and

absolute fear. Was he phoning in Tim’s death? Or what?

Alexo put his phone away. Then he clapped his hands, rubbed them together. He began to

talk in Greek to the comrades— quickly, a shout, very quickly, and everyone flinched as he

shouted at them, two or three points. He gestured roughly into the darkness, and Boyana and the

woman with the bone flower tattoos walked quickly from the circle of light into the darkness.

“You watch now,” Alexo turned to tell Tim and the other initiate— it was a drunken sort

of tinged slur, a single drink too many. He pointed right into Tim’s face. “You watch, huh. This is

what happens to your friend when your friend makes mistake and take you on ride.”

Boyana and their comrade pushed a chair forward— a man in a blue suit soiled with

blood, a man just like the one the skinheads had curbed during Tim ’s first weeks in Greece, was

duct taped to the chair. Blood caked his face. His head hung with exhaustion.

“Okay baby?” Alexo asked. He inflected his voice as if it were a question. He stood on

the other side of the chair, the hostage between Alexo and the initiates— he lifted his face and

began to slap him trying to wake him up. “Let’s go. Wake up, okay baby? Let’s go.”

The man spit— blood and something else, Tim couldn’t make out the glob and the glint...

then he saw the kitchen knife in Alexo’s belt. A long kitchen knife, a Ginsu knife. “Oh my god,”

Tim whispered.

“I didn’t—” the man began, wheezing, “I didn’t— I was your business— we were— I

didn’t . . Nothing made sense.

But the glint of the blade kept shining so sharply in Tim’s eyes— “oh my god, oh my

god,” he heard himself saying again. He remembered where to apply the force.

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One moment: Stepped forward, hand on the blade, and Tim swung it from Alexo’s belt

across the banker’s neck and fell into the swing like a suicidal batsman with enough force to

sever the three jugulars— a gash, the blood gurgling— Alexo jumped back— he’d done it, for he

withdrew the blade and the blood sprayed from the widening cleft in the banker’s neck in pulsing

mists just like he’d seen in anime movies— “holy fucking shit,” Tim cried— he’d done it, and the

banker’s eyes rolled and sallowed and their light faded with the cosmic wind.

“What the fuck, Tim!” Boyana shouted, moved to reach him—

The five all moved to seize him—they stepped aside, Alexo pulling a snub revolver on

Tim—all babbling in Greek—

“Hey now,” Tim laughed, hands up, “quit it— quit it— !”

And the initiate on Tim’s right started to whimper, to cry out—abracadabra, it sounded

like, but nobody could be sure— and he turned to run from these mad villains—

More doing without thinking—Tim bolted after him— the man slipped, Tim fell atop him,

and Tim plowed the blade into his kidneys again and again and again— “ooooh—ooooh—

ooooh—ooooh—/” he shouted with every strike as if each had topped the last as an even worse

pun. Then he took him by the forehead and cut his jugulars, as well.

Tim was up, finally, panting— blood was all around and he tried desperately not to slip

and fall on the concrete, one hand out for balance, the other holding the bloody knife high in the

air— “wait guys, don’t shoot now, listen listen listen listen—•” dropped the knife—

Alexo held the revolver steadily at Tim. “You fool motherfucker! You kill my hostage!

And this fucking guy!” Alexo’s purposeful steps were heavy enough to hold him fast to the floor

even in the pooling blood. He took Tim by the throat— Tim’s feet slipped everywhere beneath

them, then— and held the revolver to one of Tim’s wincing eyes.

“Wait wait wait wait wait, man” Tim choked, “— listen now man, come on man— but— ”

“But what?”

“But— but—but— but— man— ”

Alexo cocked the hammer back. “Let’s go, shit, and say it— ”

“But haven’t you got a pig farm, man? Know someone with a pig farm?”

Alexo cocked his head, and Tim could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises, but

the cocked revolver remained against Tim’s eye.

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“Listen now, a pig farm— I saw it in a—a pig farm, man— you slather those bodies in

butter and sweet chili sauce and the pigs go hog wild— they will, they will, and they will eat them

up like there’s no tomorrow and digest everything and not a trace left of them but pig shit.”

Alexo hadn’t even blinked. But Tim could see all o f them were staring not just wide

eyed, but curious with whether it was true or not.

“This work, really?” Alexo asked.

“Yes,” Tim told him.

He waited. But Alexo indeed lowered the revolver.

Seven hours later, four the next morning, Tim had finished emptying the last trash bag of

human chuck slathered in the butter and chili sauce marinade into the trough for the pigs owned

by an old Greek with no soft-spot for investment bankers. And, as Tim wiped the sticky detritus

from his face and neck with his jacket sleeve, saw the rising dawn, he laughed with relief as the

family of twenty pigs really did feast on the cubes of flesh and bone with total abandon.

Alexo and the others had been standing behind Tim. Alexo started to laugh.

Tim laughed too. “I know, right? Right? And they’ll just turn to shit.”

“Turn to shit,” Alexo repeated. He clapped with heavy hands. “You make a bad thing

turn to shit, Tim. You know what? I like you. I like you very much— Boyana, maybe your boy do

us good, huh?”

Tim flinched hard as Alexo clapped him on the shoulder. But he laughed anyway.

“Right?”

“Look this man. This man gives no fucks, huh?” He roughed up Tim’s collar, slapped the

back of his head.

Maybe it had been in the warehouse over night when Alexo had seen the potential in

Tim. Tim’s hands could not stop shaking— I haven’t had a drink, he told them, though they shook

anyway after he had one. They thought they’d have to force Tim to carve up the bodies as an

atonement for his erratic violence. But Tim enthusiastically prepared the space, sought after

plastic sheeting and tools. He even explained the things he recalled from class and study as he cut

and sawed the bodies apart— this is the rectus abdomius layer, this is the abdominal aorta, this is

subcut fat, this is lumbar vertebrae.

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Tim felt afraid of Alexo and Boyana and the others watching him, but not of the bodies,

as, again, he recalled the three cadavers he’d gotten to know from anatomy class years prior.

It was the first time Tim had seen her in such a way. But Boyana had none of the secret in

her face anymore. She had none of the lustrous cool in her eyes. It was a tightlipped and wide

faced look, a longer face. The same look through the trial in the warehouse, the butchery in the

warehouse, and here, the feeding at the hog farm and the validation of Tim from Alexo

afterwards.

“Come on, Tim, Boyana, all o f us. Let’s go. We have work to do. I want to hear your new

idea, Tim.”

“Yes,” Tim said. Tim thought only of how, finally, he had committed to something and

had triumphed in it. He had driven headlong into the fear feeling and the chilly feelings of terror

only to conquer them: He now felt as much a killer as he thought Boyana. He saw in her new face

the look of amazement at someone who had left home a boy and risen up a man, a blood knight,

as he had always hoped to be.

It was that casual blindness his desire which made him misread her as he did: She was

amazed, yes, but amazed at how the first man she’d ever really trusted had proven to be a

psychopath.

Neither of them would mention anything of these revelations, for, still, as the sun rose on

a new day, Boyana and Tim both felt the other was still the only they’d connected with beyond

the pretenses of investment, who’d accepted the void in the other.

Was it love? Neither knew, and neither would wrestle further with it. Both wanted more

to remain fastened by the bond of their void as they sat arm in arm in the back seat of the truck,

both holding too tightly but unable to release.

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Tim and Boyana and the others began spending time devising ways to accrue and spend

money.

Alexo was convinced Tim’s plan was sensible: Certain strains, streptococcus,

staphylococcus, vibrio vulnificus, very slight genetic modification, certain labs, a certain amount

of money, and it could all be done somewhere dark in Eastern Europe and released to the light of

the world on millions of greenbacks. Alexo grinned and laughed like a gorilla child.

The most surprised that Tim had been about anything since he’d been in Europe was that

Alexo, himself, was an investment banker. Securities, insurance, etcetera, etcetera— worlds well

beyond Tim and Boyana and any of them. But who better to destroy this credit culture than

someone who’d begun immersed within it? Alexo had turned on his own. The man whose throat

Tim had cut had been a treacherous associate. He knew they could raise the millions and millions

through the arson of key properties, the kidnapping of key investors, interceptions and

interceptions.

Tim was fairly reasonable, as was the plan, and so he set his surprise aside to follow

Alexo. He learned ATM hacks; learned to pose as a taxi driver; engaged in money fraud;

laundered money, an experience which taught Tim that laundering had nothing to do with the

laundry, Tim the last to know once again; robbed a hotel quietly; robbed a hotel at gunpoint;

robbed a banker at gunpoint; stacked stolen money neatly again and again.

Athens, Bari, Naples, Montpellier, Paris. The properties were listed, the passages booked

on ferries full of truckers in cash. Tim and Boyana strolled arm-in-arm in the from one city’s dead

of night to another, incognito in black wigs, their payloads placed with ginger and innocuous

nonchalance inside or outside the key properties. Hollowed out apples full of C4, an old clothes

donation full of C4, wine bottles full of C4, a cello full of C4. It didn’t matter if the explosion

looked like an accident because unrest in Europe was at an all-time high. Islamic State jihadists

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blew things up so often it was impossible to manage other than being a responsible individual

who paid insurance dues sold now by insurance agents who pitched clauses relating to destruction

by insurgent agents. The grizzled others, the silly and angry millennials Tim had mocked,

appeared as night phantoms from chloroform hazes with instructions and warnings for the key

investors who woke up terrified on deserted roadsides, behind bars and strip clubs; Tim and

Boyana strolled arm-in-arm away from the key properties as they exploded many yards behind

them in glorious cascades of shattered glass and stucco and steel.

This all worked out for the cell until the mission in Paris where Tim finally hesitated for

the first time in many months.

Tim suddenly flashed on a moment he had before he left California; he’d been sitting in

the hills above Berkeley on a day where the sun warmed his eyes through his eyelids, overlooking

the bay’s skylines and bridges. And he was bitching—this was before the book bombing terror—

he was bitching about how his life had always been the same, how nothing ever changed, how

nobody represented him without exploiting him, how he felt paralyzed, how he was so bored,

how he was so lonely, how on and how on and how on and on and on.

What brought Tim to the moment was the lunchbox he was presently carrying; it was a

plastic yellow California Raisins lunchbox stuffed with enough C4 to blow the guts through the

mouth of a corporate building. Boyana was arm-in-arm with him and had him by the nerve

endings, smiling beneath her black banged wig, the wig she’d kept on that afternoon for fun when

they had sex in their hotel room after brunch, strolling with him down one of the beautifully non­

descript avenues of Paris with that triumphant archway he’d seen so many times glowing in

moonlight.

“There,” Boyana said, tightening her grip on his arm.

They slowed their walk down the narrow avenue; the building on the access street looked

like so many from the art deco, a wall of white concrete and windows. Beyond the dark lines of

trees was the entrance, a charcoal steel archway with square hollows running upward toward a

bright purple logo, glass doors beyond.

“Vivendi,” Tim whispered. “Vivendi Universal.”

They resumed strolling, Boyana sliding her arm around Tim’s lower back, guiding him

toward the building.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

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Boyana faced Tim, still smiling, but narrowing her eyes at him. “How?”

“I don’t know if I can— but they publish music I like— Sons of Sound, don’t you know

them— everyone does, so mainstream, right? Right? And video games.”

She pulled her arm away from his, finally. Finally. “How could this be? You stab a man

fifty times in his guts, and you blow up four other buildings— ”

“Listen— now that was different.” Tim was waving his free hand now. “I had to do that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I sort o f did— hey, remember, Alexo with a gun to my head?”

“After you butcher them!”

“And why are we talking about this now— hey, all that stuff happened, you didn’t say a

damn thing until now— I had to do that.”

“No, you didn’t— ”

“And this is different. They publish music I like. Sons of Sound is my favorite band of all

time! And what about video games!”

Boyana was at a total loss, and Tim could easily read it in her face.

He persisted. “And someone could get hurt.”

“At 3:30? And you care about somebody getting hurt? You didn’t care about it last time

and before when you chopped those guys!”

“Don’t they record music here?”

“No.”

Tim pulled away from her. “Okay.” His back was turned to the entrance. “Look, I just

don’t know. Let’s just wait four minutes. Then I’ll be ready.”

“Then give it to me— ”

“No, no, wait, hold on though— ” Tim said.

“We can’t wait, psycho.” She grabbed on to the lunch box handle.

“No!” Tim shouted, trying to push Boyana back— he pushed her into the door.

There, the bright white LED lights flashing— the alarm. They’d triggered the alarm.

She pushed him back, furious— again, he pushed back— push, pull— the beep. The other

one.

They froze. They looked at each other—Tim could tell she heard it too.

Hands released. Lunchbox on the ground.

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And they walked, forward, walking forward, stiff legs— could he look back— a twist of

her hand, his wrist— straight ahead— keep walking forward— his heart was in his face, heart

every moment in his eyes— he walked toward it, toward the arch— pushing out breath— she was

cursing, cursing him— why! Just tourists walking to the arch! What was it called, what was it

called, the name, the name, the name— he’s just a tourist! Just tourists— no camera, no notepad,

pen phone pockets empty— a tourist with no contact or contacts or— but he was, he was! Just

toward the arch! The arch, moonlit arch, spotlights, concave, nude youths, De Gaulle—

resistance! Resistance! Triumph! Yes! The cars, taxis in moonlight, another couple—just another

couple, and one more— she’s laughing so, laughing so much, hands on his collar, they’re smiling,

looking—

Bang!

Car alarms! The couple diving! Tim turned— glass falling like twinkling snake scales—

Boyana swearing, pulling, pulling, walking feeling like dragging, stiff legs a thrusting walk, still

walking— his mouth can’t stop moving, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my

god, oh my god,” big motion whisper—Boyana backhanded him, “it’s time to go/” The shouting!

Tim jerked his head back— three men running, people pointing at them— “Boyana— !” She’d

seen it! And he let go, no time to tighten, jacket falling, running, the bus, the taxi— honking,

running, the arch way, triumph, triumph, across going forward inward around and over, over— he

slipped on concrete, caught a crack, back up and running, world hurtling, air passing like piston

engines, howling ear tinge— there it was, the subway— and he jumped, thirty or forty stairs—

falling, the woman falling, papers, French, French—no way— rising, running, running— the

train’s still open— and he threw himself through the open subway car door into the nearest seat.

He watched the door slide closed, clumsy oil lubed doorway. And it was finished.

Breathing. Breathing. Breathing. Breathing—Tim looked around the subway car. But

where was Boyana?

The sun had long risen, but Boyana had not returned to the hotel room. And, further, Tim

knew it might be dangerous for her to return there, or that she would feel it was dangerous to

return there, to have the bombing traced back to them. So he found a rental on AirBnB,

somewhere in the La Rive Gauche and sent an image to Boyana’s local cell with the address

written in her script.

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The apartment was a spacious one bedroom, a cozy space filled with the trappings of

young, happy, rich people in love; Soft creme, shaggy throw rugs on pale hardwood floors;

framed prints of famed mountain tops, of Indian rivers, of misty city skylines and Paris and Paris

and Paris; creme colored everything in the bedroom; creme colored everything in the fully

stocked kitchen, the hanging pots and pans and rudiments illuminated by soft light from the sky

light overhead.

Tim was sure to remove his boots at the entryway before he had a look around. He could

understand nothing of these people because they’d left nothing of personal note lying about, did

not have an office, left almost nothing in the bedroom drawers, left almost nothing in bathroom

drawers, did not have a junk drawer. But the refrigerator and pantry, conversely, were fully

stocked. It seemed a valuable use of the time to cook breakfast to serve to Boyana once she

arrived and begin earning back her trust.

Tim had donned the white apron, warmed the oven, cut ten star shaped cookies out of the

dough on a baking sheet, was whisking the eggs when the knock on the door came. Indeed,

though the peep hole, he saw the tiny distorted image of Boyana; her black wig was gone, her

torso shrouded in a black hoodie.

He opened the door, the chain still holding it cracked— dark circles beneath her eyes, a

flat look, and a sorry look—

And the door burst open with a kick— his head ringing, Tim knocked back across the

coffee table— he tripped and thudded onto the hard wood.

They entered, slammed the door behind them. “Parisians almost found Boyana, Shit,”

Alexo bellowed. He pulled his hood off, mouth breathing and bushy browed as though he were

ready to eat Tim. “How could you fuck up this simple thing so bad, huh?”

His hands were shaking again. He sat up on one knee and laughed.

“She had to strangle cop because of you, Shit!”

Boyana was standing there beside the door. Staring at the floor.

Who knows. But Tim just laughed. “What did you say? They almost found her shit?”

Alexo kicked him in the head— again, he fell back, and now the blood spilling from his

nose onto his shirt. He kicked him and kicked him. “You almost ruin everything, Shit, and no

pigs to save you here, huh? No pigs for you!”

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And who knows, but Tim just laughed and laughed and laughed. His ever shaking hands.

Still nervous? Still outraged?

He spit blood onto the floor. “And all I wanted was to make breakfast for you, Boyana.”

“God damn you, Tim,” she yelled—Tim was shocked, then, because for the first time he

saw her yell and cry. “Why couldn’t you have left me in Athens?”

Alexo walked with his heavy steps toward the kitchen—Tim jumped up as fast he could

to reach the knives first— a swing, and the rolling pin cracked across Tim’s jaw.

The last thing Tim remembered was the ever thickening twunk, twunk, twunk of that

rolling pin, and Boyana’s hoarse sobs.

157

The narrow cement walkways led Carina into a concrete maze, doors and metal stairwells

and windowless angles, the florescent lights lending her skin too much truth, and finally she came

to the open but heavy door to the ubiquitous plexiglas-divided cold chamber, six empty corridors

with telephone receivers. The guards at the registration counter informed her Robin would be in

booth #3.

She sat. From Carina’s perspective, she could see some of the interior of jail. It was

exactly like she imagined it would be; well-lit in anemic blue, hard, lunch tables, men in blue

canvas all waiting in someplace with the bland vulgarity of a bus stop though inescapable and

clean, all of it overseen from a cube of one-way mirrors above. Metal pipes mazed away along

the ceiling and the walls. She knew it wasn’t prison, but the hardness of the cell and the

narrowness of the time spent there could still calcify anybody.

A uniformed guard walked up the concrete steps beyond the glass, stopping at the top of

the stairs, and walking beside him was one of the blue suited men, thin with a black beard and

combed, slicked hair, striding forward with heavy, well-placed steps. Carina watched him with a

tightened face.

He looked to Carina, stopped walking for a moment in contemplation, then walked

forward and took his seat in the booth before her.

“Oh my god,” she said. They lifted the receivers in unison. “I didn’t recognize you.”

Robin’s lips twisted down. He shook his head, and he laughed softly. “You’ve got a lot of

nerve to come in here.”

Carina shook her head, and her eyebrows pinched.

Robin read the expression. “Wait— it wasn ’t you?”

“I thought about it. I even followed you to her place— for a different reason— I caught

you. I almost did it, but no, it wasn’t me.”

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Robin’s mouth fell open, and he looked to his open palm for an answer, but then could

only close it and offer a tired shrug. “I can’t believe that.”

“Does it matter who, Robin? Really?”

“I’d kind of like to know why I’m—”

“You know why,” she interrupted him. “Even if someone hadn’t turned you in, your

desires wouldn’t be any different. Right? And it would have caught up.”

He paused, and nodded. “Fine.”

“I need to clarify, Robin, that I still think you’re a scum bag and a shithead. But.” Then

she couldn’t meet his eyes. “But I feel the need to talk to you still. I feel like I need to be there for

you. Who knows. I think you’re a fuck, and a liar, but I don’t want to see you trapped in a cell,

and I don’t want to see your life get worse.” Then she met his eyes.

He gazed at her, and his sigh came through as a crackle in the receiver. He shrugged

slowly. “I think I’d like some help now.”

“You need it.”

“I do. I do.” He sighed. “I plead guilty. There’s nothing to fight. They raided the house—

they’d been building a case against these people for months. They hadn’t mentioned it to me, but

they’d been raided before.” He glanced over his shoulder, then began to whisper. “So during this

last raid, nobody was home except Elise. I happened to be there— I was, you know, I was with her

at the moment they came in, o f fucking course. But I’d already gotten the shit— it was in my

backpack. They were charging me with four things; possession, intent to sell, sale to a minor, and

statutory rape. So we told them I’d plead guilty to one since I know a lot o f people and there was

a chance my family’s lawyer could wrangle away the drug stuff since I wasn’t actually wearing

the backpack. And that was that.”

He sat up suddenly. “But come on. Everything is consenting. The sales were

consenting— I didn’t force anybody to buy drugs from me. I didn’t force Elise to become my

hook up.

“It’s bullshit, Carina. The system is here to fund itself; they make money off us being

here. It creates jobs. They spend more money punishing people here than educating you guys out

there. The drugs— come on, man-—how many times have we gone to Dolores Park together in the

city? People do whatever they want with drugs. I’ve seen people smoke so much pot, try and sell

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me mushrooms and ecstasy and edibles and acid and shit, too, in broad daylight, and people mind

their own business and nothing fucking happens. So why is this a problem?”

“Robin,” Carina interjected. “You are rambling. Do you believe that consent alone makes

something okay?”

“It’s not coerced or forced, so it does. It’s self-responsibility. I thought the

Exceptionalists would run things differently, yet it’s all the— and it helps wear all of this down,

these jail cells,” he gestured to the concrete behind and around him. “Think about those terrorists,

man. Maybe they’ve got it right trying to wear all this shit away by any means necessary.”

“The Islamic State? Really? Robin you’re reaching— ”

“No, no. Those book bombers. Remember them?”

“Robin, you’re not thinking all this through. You barely use the drugs you were selling

for a reason. I don’t even have to say it. You are in a better place to know better than the people

buying it. So, wait, you are telling me that consent is okay with that stuff even though you know

it will kill you or screw you or your life up— and it has, obviously, because you’re here and your

suppliers are probably here too, or will be, or whatever. Consent means nothing then, huh? And

the girl— she’s a fucking child, Robin. I can see it in her stupid, watering eyes.”

“Hey!”

“I’ve read the case files; she probably didn’t even know what her brother did. She’s not

mature enough for this, and you’ve screwed her life up now, too, because you’re here in jail and

she saw something in you. You’ve screwed my life up too for some of the same reasons because I

still care about you for some asinine reason.”

Robin bowed his head, then, staring off into some distant place, and Carina similarly

broke away for a moment to wipe her eyes.

She continued. “Your transgressions did nothing but get everyone in jail and make you

all feel hopeless and angry, huh? And— well you asked for my advice, so I’ll tell you. I don’t give

a shit if you think it’s ideal or trite or sentimental or whatever else because it’s what I have to say,

and you’ve got me all the way in here to talk to you.

“Here’s reality and the big picture, Robin, the biggest picture of all; this universe is going

to end in just one of a few different ways.”

“What?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “That’s true. But I’m not sure where you’re

going with this.”

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“Just listen for a minute and you’ll get it. The universe is going to end in one of a few

different ways—we don’t know for sure yet, our generation, and maybe we won’t ever know. But

given enough time one of three things will happen, Robin.

“There’s heat death; the universe is going to expand until it’s so spread out that

everything gets cold and there’s nowhere left for anything to live. There’s the big crunch; there

could be so much matter that it falls back in and everything starts over. There’s the big rip; there

is so much dark matter that eventually, everything undoes and pops like a giant bubble in the park

and scatters off. Time will tell which is true.”

Robin stared, searching Carina’s face for the rest.

“Think about this, though.” And she leaned in, her face as close as it could be, her

smoothest skin and whitest hair and bluest eyes all drawing and in bloom. “The result is the same

for you and me and every other living thing, aware or not. It’s zero, Robin. Zero.”

Robin frowned. “1 know. And that’s terrible.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“How isn’t that terrible? What’s the point?”

“It gives you the chance to do something good just for the sake of doing something good,

not for some big reward. You know? To do something to make somebody better than they were

before. Their life. Their soul. Why fill the world with transgression or something negative and

feel frustrated and achieve nothing when you can fill the world with newness or something

creative and feel better and achieve the same thing? Nothing you make or commit or do will ever

last, Robin. But who cares? Stop trying for that. Stop trying to define yourself with petty and

generalized identities. If what you do in a moment makes the world better for some people while

they are alive to feel it, even a little, and you did it for the sake of doing right, then maybe it was

worth something to your soul as much as it is to theirs. Because it can make them feel better.

Because it will make you feel better. Because it’s the only way to feel whole with others, and not

separate and locked away in these bodies. It’s all we have.”

Robin lowered his eyes a moment, a sting touching him everywhere. “Yeah.” He looked

away. “Yeah. I don’t know if I buy it yet, Carina. But I guess I have time to think about it now.”

He looked her in the eyes again, then set the receiver and his head down, resting in his folded

arms. Then he sat up, took the receiver up. “You know,” he began. He stopped but began again.

“You know that I.”

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But he finished the sentence there. The feeling was there, topped up at his heart, in the

tops of his lungs and in the middle of his throat, a need to move. But he held it. And just repeated

the incomplete sentence to her: “You know that I.”

He dropped the receiver and his head again. Though she said nothing, and he could do

nothing to reach her through the glass, he could feel her there, all her eyes watching over him,

present.

162

Though they'd left him in Paris, Boyana and Alxeo, Tim had left himself in Paris. They'd

shaken him out, shouted him down, broken him into bits, tried to. He stumbled from the

apartment into a Parisian gutter; Tim let himself linger, fester as human litter in the street until the

night came and he started to shiver in his own sweat.

They'd left him his jacket, though they'd taken everything else. He rose, pulled it on over

his swollen arms and tight chest, the bruises hardening with the minutes, it seemed. He touched

his face, his neck, his jacket—they'd left his flask, and he took a moment to drink in its entirety,

tossing it away once he finished.

Forward. He staggered forward into the night, hugging himself, the air stinging and the

road rolling beneath him, all the avenues with their trees reaching above the couples walking—

He noticed the scarved couple approaching, the black haired girl and bald-headed boyfriend.

They watched him as their conversation paused.

And, suddenly, he remembered her. He remembered because this woman looked just like

Olivia, Olivia the torch martyr. But here, she was whole, her dark, dark eyes and black flowing

hair and— all of it was her.

"Hello," he said. And he held out his hand. "Hello. Wait," he said. Because wasn't it her

he should ask? Wouldn't she know how to make her finally disappear, to make the replay stop?

"What do I have to do?" He asked her. "Because nothing works for me."

She shook her head, and questioned him in French. The man touched a hand to Tim’s

shoulder, a concerned look at Tim’s face and a gesture to his soiled jacket.

Tim asked it again. "What do I have to do? I've confronted. I prayed. I've killed, I swear I

have. And nothing changed. What do I have to do?" And as they pushed past him, again, again,

he asked, "What do I have to do? What do I have to do? What? What? What?"

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His mantra carried him, or pushed him with its spine through the lamp-lit avenues and

endless tree-lined streets...until, there. Something caused him to slow, to stop his chant; there was

a club, seemingly a typical music club, people clustered around the chairs outside, the red neon

sign— le Baiser Sale—but everyone was standing silent enough for the music to ring clearly

through to the street.

And here, the music pulled him in, its rolling sound, a rolling sort of modal unity. He felt

himself being pulled through the horde of people, all standing forward toward the red light, their

breaths held tight.

Tim could see the band on stage as he entered, a jazz quartet of men illuminated by more

red neon. He could see they all had their eyes closed as he was drawn ever nearer, being pulled.

He could see everyone had their eyes closed as he was drawn past, arriving finally close enough

to feel the heat, stopping just before the stage. Stopping just before the sound.

And the sound— he could hear it now, recognize Coltrane reciting to him through the

living—the blending of those tympanis and piano, meandering bass, all meandering, all moving

up, or moving in, but moving together as one, moving in waves toward something grand, moving

the listeners to their feet around Tim, toward something swaying among them, toward the

something they answered to the what, toward the saxophone's poem, the saxophone guiding all

toward a conclusion, an elation, an exultation, an amen. An end. The end. Nothing.

It was the end. The cymbals faded away, nothing, and then all exploded into applause,

their eyes opening, the lights returning. Their mouths opened and released all the breath they'd

been holding at once, and everyone seemed so free.

He wished it wasn't so, but Tim felt the same tug inside his chest now that the music was

gone. Just a constant tug, a little pull, always down, down, down.

Tim smiled with bloodless-delirium when the receptionist recognized him— she was,

contrary to all those pithy American anecdotes about the French, shocked at his appearance, his

split temples and broken nose and bloodied face and shirt. He told her he’d been mugged and

beaten by strange men with dark beards. She clutched her tie and throat, crossed herself, was

nearly in tears, and she mobilized the porters to bring water and towels, and they brought him to

the concrete staff hallway to wipe the blood from his face and give him a cigarette. They all sat

atop matching red luggage and discussed and ranted about men with beards.

164

Tim had hardly ever smoked cigarettes before this moment. But smoking this one felt

hard and awesome. The porters babbled in French, and the receptionist translated after discussion:

What was the man like who did this to you?

Tim thought. Then he used Olivia’s favorite device: “A fat fucking flyshit of a man.”

They all knew that much English, and laughed together, repeating the alliterative curse.

One of the porters left and returned with a loaf of bread and a forgotten suit and shirt for Tim to

borrow while he waited for a money wire to replace his clothes.

So he sat for a few hours back in his hotel room, nursing his face with ice in a rag and

clutching his chest, staring at the popcorned hotel ceiling.

Part of him wanted to weigh the options; he was in it now with them, this cell. He was a

collaborator. They’d destroyed buildings together, or at least their facades. Perhaps more so than

his physical involvement in these specific activities, Tim lent them an idea and then developed

it—the microbiology. Alexo had become keen on it, and whether or not it came to bear its tainted

fruit, he’d nourished the seeds enough for someone else to sew them. This danger he’d been bio­

architect to put the shiver in Tim more than the sum of the other events, equally for its lack of

resolution and for its scope, the sheer virility. Tim was marked. Nobody could ever trust him if he

left, not even Boyana, now that he knew as much as he did and was as close as he was.

Connection. But this connection meant they would kill him.

But the other part of him, the larger one which was bloated in his chest and pulsing with

horrendous, bruised ache, was the feeling which he then realized he could call love. It was love.

He even laughed— it hurt against his ribs which he knew must have been broken, but he laughed

anyway. He even said it aloud: “I love Boyana. I love Boyana. I love Boyana.” He felt it some

more, then told it to himself aloud another way: “You love Boyana. You love Boyana. You love

Boyana. You love Boyana.” The play of the vowels and her up-and-down name.

Suddenly then— he remembered. He remembered. And he laughed more than before, and

it hurt even more.

Tim retold himself the story. They’d laughed so much in the previous morning that it hurt

even before Alexo had probably broken his ribs. They were putting their appearances together for

bombing the Vivendi building, and Tim saw it, then, while they stood stoic, side-by-side, fixing

themselves in the mirror in review, that he looked like James Dean. I look like James Dean! Tim

said. You don’t, Boyana said. I’m so angry I almost am James Dean! Tim said. If you look like

165

James Dean then I look like Pier Angeli— it’s silly how blonde you are, and this is a black wig.

Tim didn’t know who Pier Angeli was. Tim hadn’t even seen Rebel Without a Cause but had seen

pictures of Dean’s hair and the car he crashed, and all o f that. He didn’t think about how both

these people died young and on the edge, but neither did Boyana in the moment. So he only

grinned, and he insisted he was James Dean, and he bushed his hair up with his hands, and kept

saying it, I’m James Dean, I’m James Dean, I’m gonna take you to Rome on the train, I ’m gonna

take you to Athens on the train, I’m gonna take you from Paris to Rome to Athens on the train—

that’s when she slapped him and told him to shut up, and he snapped and grabbed her by the

elbows and said, fuck me, I’m James Dean, and she slapped him again, and they had sex on the

counter while she kept the wig on.

But a small detail. Tim laughed now because he knew would be leaving Paris with

Boyana after all: He’d slipped the train ticket in the bath robe pocket while they were making-

believe before they started making love. And there were still four hours before departure.

He prepared himself.

Boyana stood staring down the railroad tracks, the train breaking the horizon. Alexo sent

texts on his old phone. Both of them stood, smoking, their backs to each other, and they waited

for the train.

But it was Boyana who saw him first, though she saw somebody else at first sight: A man

materializing from the heat haze of the platform concrete in the distance, sharp, with one hand

pushed into a pocket of his charcoal grey pants, the white shirt half buttoned beneath the

matching grey blazer. His other hand periodically managed a cigarette which he smoked pinched

between two fingers like a spliff. His eyes were hidden by black sunglasses, his blond hair cut

perhaps 2 millimeters from his scalp. As the distance closed, she saw that his face was badly

bruised and cut about the temples, and his nose was bandaged.

Finally, the cigarette fell from her mouth as she cursed in English, “oh my, my, my

fucking god.”

And Tim was close enough to smile then, and he grinned at Boyana as he took the final

drag from his cigarette. “Hi Boyana.”

Alexo hurled his sunglasses across the railroad tracks, bellowing in Greek. He rushed

toward Tim. “You have no way to explain this, Shit!”

166

“How are you?” Then Tim turned to Alexo. “How are you, Alexo? So. I’m alive and

returning to Athens with Boyana.”

Alexo grabbed Tim by the collar, a ragged growl in his throat, and his eyes burned with

yellow zeal, and he lifted a fist—

“No,” Boyana cried, and grabbed Alexo by the elbow.

Tim pulled away from the tangle, shoving Alexo forward with an explosion of energy. He

coughed, and laughed. “I am alive. I’m here. And I’m returning to Athens with Boyana unless

you kill me now on the platform.”

Alexo was incredulous. He only stood shaking his head. Maybe he’d been so certain that

Tim was too weak to rise again, that his strength was a ruse belied by acts of sweeping impulse—

that was the measure of Boyana’s thoughts as she stood, equally incredulous, at this reappearance

of Tim as a skinheaded apparition returned to her unbroken.

It was true: Tim could no longer be broken but by death now that he had found his true

purpose. This was a person forged in the delusions of 21st century social liberal American

progress to be fueled by self-loathing and shame, to be rightfully but unduly ashamed of his

cultural inheritance, to be embarrassed by asserting agency because of how, where, and why he

was born. This was a person whose actions were contextualized as the good against the dumb

fuck casuistry of 21st century social conservative American posturing: Stupidity, rigidity,

irrationality; intellectual laziness worn as trifected, discount lapel pins. And now, finally, this was

a person impassioned by a masochistic love for a woman so lost to her sense of peace as to be a

husk of radiant violence— to herself and to the world.

Finding faith in nihilism made him more than a blood knight: he was a living god in the

faith of nihilism. Knowing, feeing, while unfeeling, unknowing; unstoppable.

Tim straightened his jacket and laughed breathlessly. “I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck at

all— you kill me here in public if you want me to stay away. Otherwise I’m going back with her

to take some more banker’s money and produce the new weapon.” And he looked to Boyana who

could only stare on with wide, liquid eyes, all language or barrier failing until she finally turned

away and refused to look at him.

And Alexo— he too could not muster the words to articulate his hatred for the man of

excrement who’d reformed before him in the guise of someone else, someone who now seemed

fearless and driven by something that only death or distance and time could quell.

167

The train finally whistled and rolled up to meet the scene, and so neither Alexo nor nor

Boyana could do anything but say goodbye as Boyana boarded the train after huffing another

breath and straightening their jackets. Tim laughed and laughed and laughed like he’d been a

winner of the crusader lottery, victory raining on him in gold and pyrite.

And as the days passed on the train, all the time centered Tim’s face on Boyana’s, though

she stared out the window and met his eyes only once or twice a per day, she searching for

horizon and meditating on it each time she found it, he waiting expectantly for her to say anything

or do anything or move any muscle like an owned puppy crawling back for a kiss, however

battered.

Boyana said nothing to Tim over the thirteen hours from Paris to Venice, the thirty two

hour ferry ride from Venice to Petras, the three hour bus ride from Petras to Athens, the thirty

minute walk back to the outskirts, to her apartment— She’d looked at him five or six times since

the scene at the train platform. She walked with brisk steps always just ahead of him. When they

finally arrived, she checked the mail, sifting through the letters as they entered, and finally she

had something to say to Tim: “What the fuck.”

“Yes.”

“You gave your friend my address?” She dropped the others and held a letter up.

Tim took the letter from her, read the envelope— he laughed, slapped his knee, slapped

the envelope. “Look at that— it’s a message from Robin! From ja il!”

“You gave your friend my address— to a jail?”

“Wait wait wait,” Tim corrected, “I only gave my mom your address, actually. She must

have passed the letter on.” He sat at the edge of the mattress on the floor, tearing at the envelope.

“You dumb motherfucker!” Boyana shouted at him— she snatched up a soiled plate from

her desk, hurled it at Tim.

He moved, very slightly, and it shattered behind him— He held his hand up to her. “Shh,

Boyana. Wait, stop that now. Listen.” He stretched his legs out. “I’ll read i t . . .”

Dear Tim,

The fermented apples so-and-so collected turned out super strong, man. It was

good because I ’m dying bored. I am hung over. I t ’s been one week. I ’m going to try and

write you a letter anyway despite feeling that my face is tearing o ff atom by atom.

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I just came back from day room. What what what—you know what's great? The

irony is that everyone here watches COPS during almost every dayroom we have. And

really man, I think a lot o f them are in on why tha t’s hilarious, but it's sort o f an

unspoken thing. We ’re ju st watching COPS, enjoying some daytime drama in dayroom.

But on COPS, one o f the episodes they ran was that one about the guy and his

girlfriend getting rolled in Nevada, and he has just a teeny-weeny little bit o f bud in the

car—bam, tha t’s a felony cause i t ’s COPS in the motherfucking 90s, and they see sh e ’s

barely underage and h e ’s nineteen, so they’re both double screwed. There was a

handgun. But they were screwed before that, right? They were so in love. The boy pecked

the girl on the lips with them both in handcuffs, led away to separate cruisers, those

fucking blase cock-centrist cops, man.

I ’m ju st thinking about our society, Tim, and how i t ’s organized and how i t ’s

organized me into an overcrowded concrete hole here where the only productive thing I

can do is watch COPS with degenerates, drink fermented apples, piss and moan, and eat

brown spaghetti that tastes like snake cardboard. I f we were in prison we could at least

learn how body armor is made, right? I ’d honestly rather be slave labor than watch

COPS and be high as fuck all the time, Tim, because this is boring.

The guy and girl on COPS, you know— they had a consent thing going. They

loved each other. I can relate because consent is what put me in here. Everybody just did

what they wanted. Who knows, in their case, maybe they even bought the weed and the

handgun together, maybe on a date, maybe after sex at the circus and before sex on a

robbery—oh, they wouldn’t do that. I ’m kidding. And that’s beside the point, Tim; that

guy is in a world o f hurt, especially, because he got a two or three felonies in Nevada and

they might try and make him a sex offender and put him on probation fo r three years, or

not and put him on probation fo r five years instead, and that way he'll just be screwed

over and over again like I probably will be fo r the same insane bullshit— can you

possibly go twenty four hours without being in the presence o f a minor? Because tha t’s

all it ’11 take to break my probation, let alone something serious like owning a video game

or a beer. And they were in love. Then I ’ll be back in here fo r another twelve months o f

TV and moonshine. And i f I do it one more time, I ’ll be drunk in here forever, or in prison

making body armor.

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I ’ll illuminate all o f this with an example or two. I obviously, really d o n ’t belong

here; l ’m ju st pretending so I can survive. These people strive to watch COPS all day and

get high; I want to get high and finish reading the Dune series, then discuss it in my book

club, go gardening and finish the night with sex and ice cream or maybe just some

dancing. And I already did finish the series—I finished everything my mom could afford

to send me months ago. I think some people might be catching on, so I grew a beard and

told people I ’m here because I joy-rode a car over a low bridge with some minors when I

was coming down from meth, which I also sold them and sold most their neo-Nazi

friends, and everyone believed me, so I'm okay fo r now. The sentence fo r doing those

things is comparable to the sentence fo r my real offense anyway.

Not to digress, but honestly Fm still trying to figure out what happened. Not in a

pity pissy party kind o f way. But logistically I'm not sure what went wrong. Her parents

weren ’t out fo r me and neither was she. Nobody really knew what was going on. I really

d o n ’t understand how it came to this.

But le t’s not drive the conversation elsewhere, Tim. I wanted to tell you examples

o f some people in this jail so you understand that I do not belong here. Right now,

actually, great example: A guy is making noises in the air ducts like h e ’s two cats in heat.

And this guy has tattoos o f cats all over him, too. I can’t say his name because o f the

censor. But so-and-so is a good guy. So-and-so is hilarious, always doing random, insane

things like that to make us all laugh. But understand that so-and-so shot a cop in the neck

and he ’s getting o ff for it, basically, because they think he's insane. H e ’s getting out when

I am. Will he be a more consenting, responsible individual than I am?

Another guy is here who I ’ll call by his actual nickname, Fuckin. Fuckin is a

tweaker—most people are here fo r drugs, you know, because coming down makes you do

stupid shit like steal mail, smash toll booths with baseball bats, or drive o ff low bridges

with minors, like in my case, LOL, ROFLcopter. But anyway. Back to Fuckin— Fuckin is

a tweaker. But Fuckin is all right. Honestly I can ’t remember his real name, but we call

him Fuckin because tha t’s what he says instead o f ‘um ’ when he can 7 think straight,

which is always— Fuckin and so-and-so were actually the ones who figured out how to

ferm ent the apples we drink. Honestly, Tim—and at this point I don 7 even give i f the

censor sees this or not because they already know— but I ’ve been more drunk and stoned

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here than I ever was outside. Seriously. I ’m so drunk and stoned here that I even want to

be sober. That’s a problem. I t ’s a revolving door, and a lot o f these guys are

professionals as fa r as I can tell.

But back to Fuckin. Fuckin is a tweaker. Fuckin is here fo r a few reasons. The

main thing is that Fuckin set the wrong guy ’s car on fire; Fuckin’s girl was in love with

another guy— the girl, she 11 be Kendra, the guy, he 11 be Frank. So Fuckin loved Kendra,

and Kendra loved Fuckin but also loved Frank. Kendra had been going behind Fuckin’s

back with Frank fo r at least five months because she loved them both equally. So finally,

Frank convinced Kendra that she needed to tell Fuckin that it was over. And actually

Kendra and Frank confessed to Fuckin together and asked fo r his forgiveness. But

Fuckin was so mad, he stormed out o f the house. He ripped his shirt off, grabbed the

bottle o f Jack from his trunk, stuffed the shirt in, and readied his lighter. They weren 7

watching, so then he smashed in Frank's car window and laid on the horn until they came

outside. And then, finally, he Molotov cocktailed the car, which burned with crazy green

and purple flames from all the melting plastic. And as the three watched it burn, someone

else came from inside the house, and really calmly told Fuckin, hey man, listen; that car

you set on fire? That car is actually mine. This guy was Frank’s brother, Buck. So Fuckin

burned B uck’s car all because ofjealousy. And that’s why Fuckin is here.

Fuckin is also getting out when I am. H e ’s not sorry, either, and plans on

stabbing Frank in the liver when he gets out. Will he be a more consenting, responsible

individual than I am?

Think about it Tim; Elise was a consenting teenager who, as you now can tell, is

way smarter than me, and way, way smarter than anyone in here, especially so-and-so,

and especially Fuckin.

Anyway. This letter is too long now. Who knows i f y o u ’ll even get it, and I might

be out before you reply, so hurry i f you will. And please send me something to read.

Love,

Robin

Tim set the letter down. “Wow,” he said. “Boyana, isn’t that— ”

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He looked around the apartment, stood and looked in the lab. He hadn’t noticed that

Boyana had already left him alone.

Six days later, Tim stumbled back to Boyana’s apartment from Nueva Trova and saw

their grizzled, North African comrade waiting with a smile at the stoop. Tim had never actually

learned this person’s name, only ever nodding, or saying ‘you’ to him, or saying nothing at all.

The comrade held a newspaper out to Tim. “From Alexo. Sorry for your loss.”

“What? My loss?” Tim could not read the Greek paper, but the images were enough to

make him feel that hideous pulse in his neck again: a photo of the bank they burned that week

juxtaposed with Tim’s most recent Facebook profile picture.

“ ‘Tim Andres Fleman,’ ” the comrade translated, smiling, “ ‘American tourist burned to

death in student protests.’ ” He shook his head and told Tim, “Everyone must know at home by

now too, so don’t bother asking.”

When Tim rushed upstairs and searched and searched, tore the very sheets apart,

sweating through his white shirt, cursing all his days in Europe, cursing his carelessness, cursing

his being a bitch in the wind to alcohol, he confirmed that he indeed no longer possessed his

passport. It truly had been half-burned in the charred ruin of the bank amid cremated,

unidentifiable human remains.

172

IV

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In the media firestorm after Olivia’s firestorm, pundits argued over which fuck forsaken

Islamic State sponsor had produced the book bombers, the internet railed against the mainstream

about which people suffered more, President Trump bellowed that barrels be oiled for invasion,

and nobody ever knew how Olivia Banderas really died: Olivia had survived the exploding book.

Olivia remembered every second of the event: It was a hiss, a sparkle. She could see the

green sleeve inside the book smolder as the sunlight touched it, sparks, and then a green flash, a

white flash, a fetid chemical stink, and she was suddenly blind as if snow blind. Her skin was hot

as if cut with knives everywhere in perpetual motion. She knew it then, knew she was on fire, not

why, but knew she was on fire, knew she had to drop and roll, and she did, and yet the feeling of

slicing hot did not dissipate. The fire would not dissipate. She screamed, breathing out, breathing

in— inhaling it, her lungs burning just as much, choking on the smoke, and could not withstand it

so long before she and the pain faded into a blank, satiated quiet, unconscious.

Olivia remembered, fading back into being some time later, that the paramedics were

stripping her from what remained of her clothes. Their voices were dull at first, like 8-bit, like 16-

bit, 32 and 64-bit and then, could make it out, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be

okay. She was naked, melted. She tried to sit up, and it was still the feeling of daggers slicing

every inch of her body. She started to sob knowing her body was ruined, but the sharp inhalation

only made her heave with the pain in her esophagus— she tried to ball her fists, to rage, to tear the

eyes out of the people who’d stripped her and seen her body this way— she was so weak that her

rage was a tremble and she could not stop heaving. She could not see with her eyes open. The

technicians knew they must check her vitals, but could not find unmelted skin on which the

electrodes could stick. So they resorted to driving staples into her to attach them. Olivia still could

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not rage any more than a heave and a tremble. This was the last thing she remembered before

they injected her with propofol and began intubating her.

Olivia remembered next being wheeled from the ICU, the IVs in her arm, to the

hydrotherapy room. A heavy presence moved behind her, beside her, and she tried to talk, but the

tube in her throat prevented her from making a sound. Still very difficult to see— her corneas had

been scorched from heat pulse of the exploding book. Voices told her it would be all right, it

would be all right— she could hardly see and could hardly attend their sentences because now her

body ached like very far away paper cuts which radiated as sparklers all through her flesh. This

was the feeling of most the nerve cells in her skin dying— she had sustained third and fourth

degree burns throughout 90% of her body.

Nobody would tell Olivia of the mortality rates— her thoughts were not clear, though

Olivia remembered that they needn’t tell her. She first began to ponder her death while being

wheeled into the hydrotherapy room and recognized it was a distinct possibility. She recognized,

too, that death was likely that heavy presence appearing beside her or behind her always, and its

lingering made the question louder in her head, in her heart: Will I die? When will I die? May I

die?

Olivia remembered, distinctly, distinctly— distinctly, as she would come to dread this

hydrotherapy room for the rest of her life—that this thought of death was interrupted when she

made out the stark grey tub surrounded by trays set with the glints of what she’d know as many

tweezers and blades of every shape.

Olivia remembered trying to push herself up from the gurney, to run from these

butchers— her body interpreted this rebellion as another injury, and she seized up as it felt as if

the fire returned over again—the nurses interpreted her seizing body as Olivia’s genuine attempt

to move into the tub, so they told her, you’re doing so good, you’re doing so good— Olivia

interpreted the casual despondency and worn urgency as insincerity. The drugs and the ache was

so strong that Olivia could only concede.

They brought her into the reclined chair in the tub, the water pulsing— again she seized

and heaved, for the water was a hell like the fire itself had been, regardless of the temperature—

all feeling was a mix of dull and of paper cut and sudden rushes of fire again on the insides of

limbs, torso, and head.

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Olivia remembered, then, distinctly, the first debridement. Debridement was a horror sick

enough to almost shock her back into her old body— her breathing raced, though she could only

feel it in random moments, and she could not look away or close her eyes though she could

hardly see.

The nurses held her arm out and began slicing long strips of her burned flesh off, strips of

it, as if slicing charred steak like it was a pound at a time of butter, and they kept slicing the flesh

from her and dropped the strips into the tub to bunch up at the drain as her blood rushed to wash

it down, and she focused on the void until she could perceive it no more.

The next thing Olivia remembered was raising her arm close to her face to see what

they’d done to her— she realized she was in another room, in another time, and her arm, her entire

body, all but her eyes barely and mouth barely were wrapped in gauze which reeked of

petroleum. There was nothing to see then. There was an unnamable pressure all through her, a

heat, minor, but a bad heat. The presence of death was with her, but out of sight, always, because

she could not turn her head.

With her eyes closed, the presence of death was blinding and heavier and more

comforting at her bedside as time passed.

There was nothing for her to do but press the black button on the hand held remote for

more morphine, to use the maximum dose of morphine, until she was closer to feeling nothing,

which was impossible— she felt the pain everywhere even being unable to feel pain with all her

nerves dead— until she was closer to feeling nothing, and focus on the death presence until the

she could give in to the void and sleep.

Olivia remembered that she was able to begin measuring time by how many times she

returned to consciousness to revisit the hydrotherapy chamber: Her memories were becoming

more linear, the pain better defined, with the twice a day visits. Things were becoming better

defined as her perception was becoming more faint with the unnamable pressure constantly rose.

They had finally removed her breathing tube at a point Olivia could not remember. But she had

nothing to say. She had nothing to say at all. She visited hydrotherapy twice a day where they

unwrapped the reeking gauze bandages to do more debridement, to slice and pick the necrotized

flesh from her body again and again— it seemed to hurt more every time now that she knew what

to expect, now that she was no longer in shock. It hurt acutely in some places and was completely

numb in others. The feeling of water washing over her felt as if her body was being dragged over

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the rocks of the cliff face. The feeling of physical therapy, of their flexing her arms, her legs, her

neck, each finger, each toe, was like cracking coals open inside her joints.

The sixth time they brought her from hydrotherapy room for debridement, she finally

turned—finally could turn, though the unnamable pressure made it difficult to bear—to look at

the presence which had lingered beside her bed. That presence of death. That soothing promise of

the void that she focused on to sleep.

Olivia’s mother sat beside a table covered with flowers— bouquets were all about the

room—it was still so blurry, but Olivia could still make out the colors, and knew they were

flowers littered about the room. But it was her mother. It had always been her mother. A feeling

of shock and mostly amazement.

Her mother eased forward, her outline clearer, her face and long black hair and dark eyes

clearer—through the strange, callused lenses of Olivia’s new body, the presence of her mother

which she’d interpreted as death looked a lot like herself in some washed out ethenogenic

mermaid mirror.

It was such a rasp, at first, that she could only make sounds like a parched scrape. She

needed to attempt the sentence many times. Finally, Olivia whispered, “How long have you been

here?”

“You already asked me that four times,” her mother said gently. “Can you remember?”

“I can’t.”

“You’ve been here seven days. I’ve been here the whole time.” Olivia could hear her

holding it in.

“I felt you there. But it felt like something else, like...”

After a while, Olivia’s mother asked, “Do you want to know what your prognosis is

again?”

“I don’t.”

They sat in the whir of the hospital ventilation, the faraway hum of traffic far below.

“I think I know,” Olivia said. “I know I don’t know, but I can feel it, and I think I know.”

“Do you want to see yourself?”

“I don’t.”

“Is there anything you want?”

“No.” But she reconsidered. “What will happen next?”

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She could hear her mother settle back into the chair. “They’ve grown skin grafts for you

from a cell harvest from your own skin. But you must feel the pressure from the swelling of your

muscles. It’s getting worse. They can’t perform the skin graft yet. They must perform a

fasciotomy first to relieve the swelling.”

Olivia knew, but didn’t know how to say it. “Is it worse than the trimming?”

“Yes. It is worse than debridement.”

“Is this worth it?”

“I don’t want to lose you.” She was crying then but still trying to hide it. “Nobody wants

to lose you.”

I’ve already lost myself, she thought to say. My body is a ruin and I’ve lost myself.

But then, a renewed clarity, and her mind drifted: Olivia remembered her time in the park

before the burning, remembered how she left Lilith and the vow to herself to start anew. She’d

found herself by relinquishing her body’s control on her mind— relinquishing the power of her id

for the power of her ego. She’d lost her body in one sense before losing it in another. There was

another way. Is pain not better than no feeling at all?

“Okay,” Oliva said.

“I will be with you the whole time.”

“Okay.”

Olivia remembered the next day, the day of the fasciotomy. They had given her so much

morphine and other drugs that she could hardly feel herself or thus hardly know herself, her eyes

awater, and she was very very distant and she felt like singing. The youth is starting to change,

are you starting to change, are you together together together together together together together

together?

She just kept singing as they lifted her limbs, forearms first, then arms, then legs, then

thighs, and cut long and deep fissures into each down through what remained of skin all the way

to the muscle, spreading the wounds, pinning them apart with long pins, and she was flayed on

the table looking as though she were being dissected alive.

And she just kept singing that icy chorus from childhood: The youth is starting to change,

are you starting to change, are you together together together together together together together

together together together together together together together together together?

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The recovery from the fasciotomy took longer than they thought it would. She was so

weak and had lost so much blood, had so many transfusions which she could not remember, that

dialysis had to stand in for her weakened kidneys. It was nearly two weeks of the strongest drugs

constantly and in and out constantly. Olivia remembered almost nothing of this week except

becoming colder and colder.

Olivia did remember too that she began recognizing how the flowers were always

different. That is, they were nearly the same flowers in the same tableau of the room littered with

bouquets but different bouquets every day. Staff took the flowers from the previous day away and

brought new flowers each day.

“But who keeps sending them? Where do they come from?”

She could sense her mother fuming.

“Do I want to know?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

Olivia remembered that this shocked her: Her mother had always been so open with her.

Her mother was her authority, but also like a sister; her mother was a single mom. In advice, they

talked about everything as pure equals. They’d talked openly about sex since Olivia was eleven;

they’d talked openly about death since Olivia was seven.

This shock was the first moment she’d wondered who had done this to her. What had

happened? Where had the explosion come from? She remembered back through all the moments

at the hospital back to the moment of the bomb, out on the field, having seen the images in the

book, having turned the page, and then being blinded by hell and fire from an unexpected green

page. What else was there? A small detail. A presence she chould not remember. She could not

remember.

But why? Not why her— she did not mean to ponder the question out of a sense of self-

effacing pathos— but why her as in why anyone?

It didn’t make any more sense remembering the events. She thought to ask her mother

what people knew. But the excess of the endless flowers gave her the impression that, in fact,

everyone must have known. It was an event so much larger than her life that everyone knew

about it. Think about it. What was the point of her knowing how and why, then?

“Okay. I don’t want to know.”

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Olivia remembered the moments she woke up hotter than hell and so cold she was

shivering from the first skin grafting operations. She woke up, already staring at her own hand,

the first time of seeing and the first time of seeing a new self, her hand coated in a new skin that

was her own skin and not her own skin, stitched, pale white and translucent and never exposed to

the sun or to life or to error of any kind, though bom of the worst kind of error in the hottest light

of all: Happenstance. Her hand and forearm were locked in mannequin repose, the joints held fast

with long pins.

“They’ve finished just one hand and one arm and one side of your chest, and your face.”

Her mother said. “Tomorrow will be one leg. The next day will be another. The next will be some

more and the next will be your back.”

“I don’t feel well.” Olivia finally admitted.

She couldn’t feel her mother touching her unfinished hand, could only see and hear her

near.

“I feel it. It’s a fever. It’s so cold now.”

The rush of air even colder as the nurses came. Changing the IV, changing needles,

changing the strategy. They argued with the attending physician who appeared to her for the first

time because Olivia couldn’t remember the other times he’d appeared. Tense conversations and

head butting and her mother with her head in her hand.

Olivia remembered knowing. It was just something again. It was something in the way

the heat had become less of flowing forward and more of ebbing downward, ebbing in.

Something in the way she was becoming clearer and fainter at the same time. Something in the

way time was no longer linear. Something in the way she could see while not seeing— she could

see while also seeing times before, times in her life, like cooking cookies in class and girls and

boys from many grades earlier, kissing a girl in the bushes in 2nd grade, playing house with her

and getting a hug when Laura playing daddy came home only to say, that’s not what they do

when they come home, then getting a peck on the cheek only to say, that’s not what they do, then

getting a kiss on the lips only to say, I love you; a best friend, Chaise, a certain moment, making

the stop motion movie with four sorts of Lego sets only to feel the something, the pull, the need,

to want to touch him, to be afraid of the things she wanted. Do not embrace those fears which you

may let go, and shake hands firmly with those you cannot. These things and more flowing

through her and into the room while people and her mother also spoke right to her face.

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“May I die?” She asked.

The nurses were becoming more frantic, and her mother was staring at her with a stony

face and seemingly no feeling.

But Olivia knew what it was. She knew it. “May I die?”

“Olivia. Olivia. What can I do for you? Please tell me what I can do for you. Please tell

me what I can do for you.”

“Tell me. What will I miss?”

“You will miss me. You will miss your home, and your friends, your life, your art, your

music— ”

“Mom. Tell me. What will I miss? Tell me about you. Tell me what I will miss.”

Olivia remembered the hours of her mother’s tears. But she remembered what her mother

confessed she would miss. Her mother confessed she would miss growing into a woman: She

would first miss the things she missed now, the fever, the drifting, the searching for something

and trying and failing, the fumbling with strangers and with occupation, the fighting to be heard,

the pulling up and going out, the wandering. She would miss finding home. She would miss the

love of her life, whatever it was, something, something, and finding something unnamable and

unquenchable and alive, miss the thrill of finally finding the love of her life by mistake by making

mistakes as a very young person, the beauty and amazement of watching something grow, and

she would miss nurturing something that found her so alone and raw and drifting before only to

stand still, finally, and embrace the something, and hold against it, and feel the warmth, and feel

the need, and she would miss learning to lie with it and live with it and fight with it and flow with

it and become one and many with it and learning to lie to it to build it up and hide it and take it

with you to fifty thousand elsewheres, to Paris, to Athens, to Rome, to Berlin, to twenty countries,

to learn to linger with its own anger, their own grappling with that emptiness that they will share

but can’t share because they love you but are not you, and you will miss learning to accept when

the end comes, when the thing you love is taken for granted by itself and by you— when you

accept it, when you learn to know you took it for granted— when you accept it, and you can tell

yourself and the world, yes, I took it for granted, yes, I took my love for granted— you will miss

the years— you will miss the years you hate yourself for what you could not do, and you will miss

the months before then when you curl up alone and you cry every night for what is lost and you

rise feeling pathetic and broken but rise and walk into the sun light and see yourself in an other

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and see yourself in others and see yourself in the Earth and finally see you in yourself, to see

yourself illuminated by the sunlight in some dark mirror in the shadow, and you will miss finding

yourself years later that way, in that second, finding yourself as someone beautiful, finding

yourself as someone worthy, finding yourself as someone deserving to be happy, finding yourself

as someone deserving to be loved, finding yourself as someone present, as someone reaching out

to the others and being reached to, as forgiving yourself for all that passed. You will miss

accepting yourself by accepting that you did what you could and accepting there is no control.

Olivia Banderas was pronounced dead at 4:00 PST, March 8th, 2020. She was 22 years

old.

August 2021

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Robin had been lying on the floor, stroking his beard and staring at the ceiling, when the

guards started to call them all to attention, and someone said, “We’ve got lottery winners! W e’ve

got lottery winners!”

The men rose, flooded the day room and listened intently, a tense silence. They were

silent not because the guards, then standing abreast with batons ready, had told them to stand in

silence—they had of course—but of their own volition, all wondering if the rumors they’d heard

had been true.

One of the guards, his face obscured by a plexiglas riot mask, produced a green Xerox

sheet and read name after name after name after name until ‘Robin Weild’ blew up in his guts and

he felt a hot shiver and sweat all through him.

And once the guards had pulled Robin and the other twenty to safety in the hallway from

the angry mass of men left behind, the warden approached them. “Trump card for you, fellahs,”

he laughed.

“What’s happening?” Robin asked.

The warden’s frown sank into his chin, and, “all right,” he shouted, “send this one back!”

Robin flinched when the guards grabbed him by the arms, but all started to laugh in

staccato bursts.

“Just kidding, just kidding. Nothing will change you losers from shaking free. The

Exceptionalists passed a law— hell, what was it,” the warden snapped softly, “— you got a

Christmas tree bill in there— ” he waved his hands, “anyway, the Exceptionalists passed a law to

get a bunch of non-violent offenders out. And you people are one of them.”

All the twenty stopped holding their breaths then. The rumors were true. Robin felt his

hands shaking and he had no idea where to place them. He put them on his head and sighed and

laughed.

184

Other guards came forward with the boxes of personal items they’d confiscated at intake;

a guard pushed a box into Robin’s arms.

“So.” The warden clapped. “Follow those two and get the hell out.”

185

The truth is that common people are swayed by the way things are spoken far more than

the things spoken; That is romance in a world concerned with disguising reality’s malleable grit

as some glory not relentless and unbeatable.

He was a soft spoken taximan. He was bumbling, foreign, but undeniably a taximan. He

picked up the investment banker from Glyfada, the posh homes gated and guarded by

machinegun wielding sentinels— the taximan mumbled and bumbled and laughed his way past

them. A smile, a shrug. His executive passenger was curious, but the taximan spoke English too

dialectic and millennial for him to understand entirely.

Weave and flow, in one street and up an alleyway, weave and flow, and he’s dodging

through the drunks and the burning trash, and he’s side swiping the effigies and roving DJs and

parties. Time is slow because he drives so fast, but time is fast because he drives so well. By god,

he’s one of the best, he’s man built into the city though not from the city. How could it be? The

executive asked the taxi man; the taxi man laughed softly, said something in English— I know,

right?— and handed the executive a drink from his flask.

It’s something like falling asleep staring at a brick wall, or staring into the face of

somebody who doesn’t stop talking, or staring into an ever moving festival from which one is

always on the outskirts, excluded, and falling asleep. There’s a blank time only remembered upon

waking where all the immersive motion has been replaced with emptiness.

The executive realized he’d been waking up slowly. But he could hardly see though he

opened his eyes— he moved to rub them and found his hands were tied behind his back— he

lurched and tossed his head to find it was covered by a burlap sack.

The sack yanked from his head, the taxi man— that fucking taxi man— the kidnapper. The

kidnapper stepped back and stood at attention, legs spread, hands clasped behind his back, smug,

186

stark blue eyes, stiff blue jeans, his chest and arms tight beneath his white button up shirt, his

scalp and face freshly shaved, the shadows beneath his eyes dark from accumulated devotion and

lack of sleep.

The executive mumbled and bumbled— his mouth had been duct taped.

“It’s uncomfortable, right? Trying hard and being unable to say what you want. Right?”

It had to be presumptive, for which statement ever isn’t? So the kidnapper said: “For a

long time I was like you. I thought I was doing some good for the world with the hand I was

dealt. I thought that I could use my privilege for good—I thought I could stay privileged to help

the unprivileged. I thought I could do right by talking right, inform people by being informed. I

thought I could care for the world by being careful. I thought you could drift around and be

detached while being attached to it all. It just wasn’t true. It’s just not true. The actions you take

will have to be as extreme as the changes you want. You can’t go reshape society by calling

people other things and then going home. Does that make sense?”

The others, standing in the dark behind the banker with their faces in ski masks, began to

shuffle. One cleared her throat.

“Anyway. I guess we don’t have time to talk about whys and how the way you’ve reified

your socioeconomic privilege such that you have only re-distributed that privilege to the wrong

people. Just know that I could tell you about it, if I wanted to. Maybe I will later.”

The kidnapper approached the executive then— the executive breathed hard through his

nose, turned away but kept his eyes dead-set through the sweat in his face— and set his hand

gently on his neck.

“There are some things we need from you. See, w e’re helping re-distribute the privilege

in a way that will work in the long view, right? Remember Robin Hood? We are undoing all this

injustice and— well, you’ll see. It’ll be great. The world can be great again. W e’re going back to

absolute zero. But there are some things we need for you.”

He knelt, set his hands on the executive’s knees. “Hilariously, we’ll actually need your

money— for now, for now, for now. We’ve got to pay Robin Hood. W e’re not Robin Hoods. I

don’t think that would be authentic. But someone else is, so we’ve got to pay him. Sort of. Right?

And we need to save the rest for other ventures. Either way: You’ll divest from the Ormoni

district housing revitalization project. You and Spectrum Limited. 20 million Euro. That money is

going to come back here, in cash, on August 30th. Right? So ...”

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The kidnapper trailed off, stood. Then he gestured to the darkness toward the comrades.

The comrades wheeled out another chair, another person splattered, more duct tape, more

burlap over the victim’s head. The kidnapper walked to her, lifted the burlap sack gingerly— a

girl hardly conscious with a slack mouth, a shaved head splattered with what seemed like blood

and mud and grime and sweat—the executive cried out and struggled against the duct tape.

“She is your girlfriend,” the kidnapper told him. “She is your girlfriend. So just know— I

know her,” he said, in truth, laughing. “1 know her well.”

The executive was beside himself, then, losing faculties and whining and seeming like

he’d cry.

The kidnapper stood beside him, kneeling again. “So you’ll bring that money? Right?”

He held a hand to his ear. “Anybody? Anybody?” Then he peeled the duct tape back—

“Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, please— ”

And the kidnapper replaced the duct tape and stood. “I’m glad you understand. I’m glad

we can agree on something.” The comrades came back to hold a rag to the executive’s face—

something of a struggle, but resigned quickly, and he was unconscious in a few seconds.

A comrade confirmed it. The charade was finished. They all worked to undo the tape

binding the executive to the chair, lift his limp body, drag him from the warehouse.

Meanwhile, the woman in the chair opened her eyes— they were clear, calm. She stood,

took a hand towel from her back pocket to wipe the grime from her face and arms.

“I love you, Boyana.”

She held eye contact with Tim. But all the secrets were gone from her face, then, as they

had been for so many months. She turned and walked into the darkness.

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Robin had enough favors stored to make his transition back in easy but not sensible.

Robin tried to return to his apartment. Carina had continued to maintain their apartment

during Robin’s incarceration and had paid the rent herself—they hadn’t even spoken about it.

They gave him money for the subway on the day of his release. But something. Always a

something. He could not bring himself to return to their apartment.

He walked to it, walked past it, looked right past beneath the trees and through the long

street toward the Oakland high rises and kept walking.

Robin charged his phone at the library and used it to call his old work, the tutoring center.

W e’re glad your mother has recovered they said— Robin told them he was pleased too, he was

pleased too. They didn’t bother to look into it. They didn’t bother to look into him. The parents

had not said anything? Elise, Ronnie had said nothing? Had they avoided the shameful truth of

their meth addled boy child and sex fueled girl child that they simply disappeared from sight?

Come tomorrow, we will have students for you, they said to Robin. He didn’t even have to try to

get his old job back.

He wanted to ask them if she— but he didn’t. He hung up the phone.

Robin used his phone to call Chuck and asked to crash at his house for a few days—

Chuck was no stranger to people transitioning back and no stranger underbellies. He gave Robin a

hug, helped him set up the couch of his two bedroom in Castro, new sheets, gave him a razor—

you gonna cut that beard or what, he asked Robin. Because it makes you look more Irish and

more angry.

Robin used the clippers to trim it nearly all the way down, used the razor to shave as

closely as he could, and gave himself a decent haircut. A methodical cut. He’d finished four hours

later. He studied himself in the mirror: His hair black and slicked back, his eyes dark circled and

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tired, his frame fuller that it had been from the months of constant exercise with neo-Nazis and

bad protein meals.

Robin tried to find a new place to be so he could avoid thinking about going home and

thinking about going to work, thinking about her. He wandered through San Francisco, the

Mission. It had been hardly more than six months. It felt different. He knew it was different.

There was a gaping hole boarded by a long, canvased chain link fence, cranes and wiry

skeletal pillars where the Moorish revival castle that had been Armory. Had it not been revitalized

for more than a decade from its entrepreneur, porn producing owners? The Kink.com flag had

fallen, or had been taken down. Who knows. Something about the atmosphere, about how new

sorts of people, wandering eyes like tourists but the confidence of residents, people in shorts and

t-shirts with beards always stared at him and everything else as alien structures in a world they

had acquired but definitely owned. Some of them were the shorts and t-shirts with beards, some

of them were the Hitler haircuts with v-necks and expensive cigarettes and glassy phones

strapped to their shoulders, slender girlfriends in floppy hats or feathers or geisha-esque pseudo­

silks looking with absolute disgust at every square foot of the world around them— something

about how he felt it— Robin knew it had been taken down and then tom to bits. These people, the

new people with new rulers. The thick laminated sign affixed to the end of the fence let Robin

know that Trump Gardens would be 2.2 acres of mixed zoning posh apartments, posh office

spaces, posh restaurants, a posh church, and a posh lounge all coming to revitalize his life.

So many new buildings, so many streetside restaurants and chilled champagne and

laughter on sidewalk cafe tables where bookstores used to be. Where gas stations and bookstores

used to be were tall apartment buildings, tilted boxy windows in glass and primary colored steel

that harshly reflected the setting sun into Robin’s eyes.

Around the 16th street station was the throng Robin had always known of believers, of

charlatan preachers and perpetually concerned lechers of faith. They rallied and ranted in Spanish

through mega horns, bullhorns, on boxes. He had seen this for all the years he’d lived in the bay,

in all the years he’d been a tourist as a child visiting his stringent grandparents.

But a new edition: A larger throng. A louder throng. Some sick batch of middle aged

mellenials who’d risen, apparently, from the woodwork of some hideous wagon for the band, as

we know are want to in times of extreme leaders. They had new sleek new bullhorns. They wore

stark white shirts and pants. They had their white draped children with them. And all of them

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wore armbands with red and white stripes and trisected American flags. Their bullhorns were

decked in bars of red and white, stars. And they weren’t even saying anything. The din was

hideous— not only from this band of Exceptionalists because they were surrounded with what

looked like protestors, rag tag everypeople, scattered around them but unconfederated, shouting

them down— the Exceptionalists were just cheering. They were not cheering any certain words as

their adversaries around the street were: They were calling them jingoists, bigots, idiots, white

washed, white bred, white privileged, gentrifiers, and what they were, of course, Exceptionalists.

You’re sending us to die in Korea. You’re sending us to die in Russia. You’re sending us to die in

Arabia. And these people in white were just wordlessly cheering like winners of the game of life.

Robin was completely astonished, as were other onlookers, who had that soft faced glint

of admiration— Robin was more shocked seeing in their eyes that Exceptionalists appeared

victorious and no longer fought with words at all, and it was quite something to behold.

Long strings of cops in black riot gear began to trot up the escalators from the subway—

the sight of the very first black helmet gave Robin a shiver. He’d had enough of the law. He

quickly turned to walk away from the intersection and the hundreds of people who belonged to it.

Robin tried to keep walking without allowing these images, this noise, to affect him, to

withstand the dissonance of what he’d expected to see walking and what the reality was in

walking as similar scenes passed through each intersection, all the music gone from the windows

above, only the noise of talk and yelling.

He stopped at a bookstore somewhere around 24th and Folsom, a part of the

neighborhood with more trees and quieter from the chaos outside.

A reading was underway: the library was packed with listeners, a younger crowd, their

typical inky androgenic crowd of anti-hipser hipsters and punks and awkward chic writers, all the

scenes— Robin had been to this one before. But there were never this many people shoulder to

shoulder. Nobody had ever looked so tired as they did here. Alert, but worn.

Robin, in another tinge of astonishment, saw this group, perhaps more than half of the

hundred and fifty standing around and crowded into the rows of seats in the art gallery in the rear

of the shop, were wearing white bands around their arms: black ink on white, a closed fist,

unknown hashtags, #united, #antileaders, #bbnlm.

Robin slipped in through the crowd who were all looking very tired, staring at the floor,

to an opening by the wine— all bottles already empty— and sat on the floor to watch.

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The reader was very thin and very angry but restrained, looking like mad Lennon in his

round glasses, but with a much rosier face and a shaggy heroin chic haircut. Robin came into his

voice which was clear but evenly pitched, “ ...archy has now gone too far. Nobody could imagine

we would be in this place even five years ago. And, I mean, there was already so much work to

be done in terms of re-reifying privilege and literary form reclamation and inverting cysnomative

white privilege from systems of logic and linguistic syntax and the conversation in terms of that

and the— ” here, the audience began snapping, but still fixing eyes firmly to the ground, “thank

you, yeah, and let alone the progress we had already made, though. But with the Exceptionalists.

It’s hard to know. I don’t know. Who knows.

“So, I’ve been working on this collection for a long time dealing with the hierarchy of

privilege and everything and operating on the boundary of the lexicon and forming the pieces as

reclaimed sonnets. I revisited these with the recent reelection.”

He raised the journal— quickly, he set it down again. “So, trigger warning privilege,

trigger warning white privilege, trigger warning objectification, trigger warning wage

exploitation, trigger warning exploitation in the context of an office setting, trigger warning

misogyny, um.” He rubbed his temple. He sighed deeply. He covered his mouth for a moment as

if he would yawn, but did not. “That should be all. So, I apologize immediately for any

discomfort about the work. I think it is extremely disturbing and heavy at times and was

extremely difficult for me. So, feel free to just, you know, if there is anything wrong or a

problem.” He nodded but didn’t finish the sentence.

“So, yeah. So, okay. So, this is the first sonnet. So, this is called, In The Country.”

He raised the journal and read: “I started working at Pilson Ergonom Limited in the late

spring of 2019 in a temporary data entry position which was contractual to several of the white

male heads of the company, whose operations ranged from collating data mined from social

media, specifically Twitter, Pokolobo and Boosh, and the others...”

Robin glanced subtly around the room. Nobody would make eye contact with him. Not

that they were trying to avoid eye contact—this was not 518. But they must have known this was

not a sonnet. Everyone must have known this was not a sonnet.

It hadn’t even been a year, or even eight months. But nothing about the world felt

familiar—it had changed, and so had he.

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How would he be shocked? How should he prepare to be shocked? The reader continued

on and Robin tried again to listen:

“ ...were four others. One was likely a half African-American half white cysnormative

male likely in his mid to late 30s, one was a cysnormative white female in her early 30s, one was

distinctly an African American male who most likely was projecting outside of the paradigm in

terms of gender...”

Or, really, it was that his sense of static identity had been shattered forever. His sense that

he was anything other than fluid, and that life and all things in the world were anything other than

in constant motion, was shattered forever. The sense that there was a place to land, or a way to

make sense and detangle the threads, to be objective, to be motivated to fight or change anything,

was shattered forever.

“ ...before the meeting, I had been thinking through a strictly decolonized process that if

the meeting were even thirty five to forty five percent POCs, the hegemonic language of

computer programming— for example, C++ or C#, as the reified ode to cysynormative white male

European culture of deified classical composers...”

All that was left, Robin recognized, was feeling. Things from the head made no sense—

though, he could see it, plainly, in their worn faces and the tangled rhetoric, that the ambitions of

this group had become more ambitions of another these people: the message had been garbled,

distorted, and was being projected so strongly as to be blinding. There was a hypocrisy in their

judgment that was self-defeating. Robin scanned the room openly, and all held their gazes firmly

to the floor. It’s not that the message had decayed from what Robin knew before. It had evolved

into its own species so byzantine that it was beyond access. They were lost in words. They were

so concerned in expressing the significance of knowing that they were distant from expressing the

significance of feeling; they were senseless.

Robin shook his head. Come on. He knew it. He was a hypocrite.

He was the same as they were—could not stop judging them. Could not stop judging

them. Every thought of his was an inescapable judgment. They expressed the something, that dark

thing that everyone felt, in a way he did not. But who was he to say their expression was not

relevant? Even if he could not understand it. Even if he could understand it, and it was senseless.

Did it matter either way?

Robin tried to stand and leave quietly.

193

Robin tried taking a new way back to Chuck’s house, away from the major intersections.

He walked past the orange lit emptiness of Dolores Park’s rolling fields, nobody huddled there in

the night time. Or did they huddle at all now? Did people only stand up? Did people only fight?

Did people always never huddle and only stand up and fight? Perhaps he had been delirious all

along, and it was a delusion to believe in himself and who he thought he was.

But near the park, a building— a church, the beige and inoffensive green of a modem,

urban, responsible church— was still aglow. Many people stood outside, distinctly adult people—

he had to laugh at himself for thinking that. People middle-aged and wearing anything, wearing

flat jackets and jeans and all talking and smoking together, styrofoam cups.

The smoking and the styrofoam cups. Robin knew exactly the sort of huddled mass this

was.

Robin tried to be as unassuming as possible, standing around on the outskirts of the

crowd. But people here couldn’t help but notice him. It was different. It was so different. They

just looked him in the eyes and nodded and smiled.

He entered when they reentered, found himself his own cup of coffee. He stood there

with the drinks, alone, away from the pews and the people in the front rows, and watched on.

The conversation and laughter began to die down. A short, stout sort of guy, close cut

hair, tiny glasses, full o f ink came to the fore, laughing off a joke with a friend. “All right guys,

we’re going to start again. It’s an open mic again.” Then he looked right to Robin. “I know we

have some newcomers tonight, so I’m going to shut the fuck up,” they laughed, “and sit the fuck

down and let this thing go.”

Whispers from the group. But Robin knew— he wasn’t pressured, of course. But he

knew.

The next thing he knew, he stood before the podium rubbing his hands together, grinning,

muttering things like “well, well, well,” and “here we are” and “about time, huh? Huh?” But he

finally began, leaning into the microphone. “Hi. My name is Robin, and I am an alcoholic.”

The chorus: “hi, Robin.”

He laughed. He smiled back at the whole group, perhaps the hundred and fifty of them.

“Yeah. Wow, saying that out loud. I don’t know how I feel about that. I just don’t know. So—

well, o f course I’ve never done this before. Hi. Oh, wait— years ago, actually, I did accompany

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somebody to their first and second AA meetings. Or NA. They’re like elements. Aa, Na, Ar, Fe.

Anyway. I do think it was NA. The format’s the same, anyhow. W hat’s different? The coffee?

You guys are fine with coffee. Maybe it was weaker at NA.

“So, anyway. I was there. And I was there for moral support. Moral support— isn’t that a

cop out?” Robin was unsure of how to gage these people— it was so different. They just listened.

They just smiled and nodded. It was as if they really weren’t judging him— they were not

analyzing what he said. They were just with what he said. It was astonishing.

Robin tried, then, finally, to tell the truth.

“I remember showing up in there with my arms crossed and— in a trench coat, of course,

in the summer time in Orange County. I was like that. All the girls outside in their bathing suits

and roller-skates— and my slicked back hair, red shirt black tie, banging around in shit stompers,

all that. And my friend— you know how it is— you know he was there because they told him he

had to be. I was there because sobriety seemed like a brilliant idea for four seconds. Not that I

would do it. But it did seem quite good to me, like it seems now. Jail didn’t work, I was drunk

every day in there. Booze and alcohol are ruining a lot of shit for me— can’t write, can’t do

music.

“Anyway. It went to shit, of course, because Duffy the Tweaker was at the meeting. What

a small world. And afterward, Duffy the Tweaker told us he was there because they told him to

be, and his skinhead friends were there for moral support too. So we went and did four or five

lines of meth in a white van and got kicked out of Guitar Center— oh, Duffy the Tweaker: he was

a Mexican, but his moral support were a bunch of peckerwood Riverside boneheads. So, there

you go. 1 don’t have to explain how that works to you people, probably. It’s where one is.” He

shook his head. “That was me too, in jail. I feel like such a fool. I don’t know if I could forgive

myself, or if you could either.

“Anyway. That meth business was ten years ago for me— haven’t looked back to

amphetamines. Thanks. Well— okay, wait, wait, hold on— take it back. Take it back. Sorry. Hi.

Um, I did have some flirtation with cocaine, for several months. Several moons. So maybe it was

a love affair.” They laughed along with him. “But an affair that’s over— so there you go, six

months, haven’t looked back—thank you. Don’t, man.

“Anyway. This is incredibly digressive—

195

“Wait. No. No, it isn’t digressive. I know why that came up: I am preoccupied with

something. Well. With someone. I keep trying to forget it. But—

“I was in some red-lit bar in Berkeley— you know how they are— maybe they want the

hipster’s beards to disappear in that red light—but I was rejected. I liked her a lot. Let’s call her

Sophie Auguste. That’s not her real name: Sophie Auguste is the name she calls herself to people

she wants to wear a mask for. But. Okay— ”

And then Robin whispered something aside to himself, covering the microphone with a

post-trembling but still sweaty hand, suddenly seeing the clear eyes of the crowd all on him, their

slight listening smiles. They were still with him.

“It’s complicated, my life. It’s not rational. I’m married. It’s an open marriage. I was

rejected by Sophie who isn’t my wife. Sophie is beautiful—beautiful in a thousand lights,

stronger than she knows. A sensual girl whose body is her amazing art. A girl like that. But I’m

not her type; it was too complicated. And I got angry. And four fucking bros found out it was my

birthday somehow. My first day being 30, and I’m already drinking when I said I didn’t want to,

and I’m in another red-lit fucking bar I don’t want to be in, and I’m already being rejected by

somebody I shouldn’t even be—

“So I’ve got this bro talking me up, and a guy’s got a shot for me and one for her, and—

but I know they want to just want to talk to her. They got one bro covering me just so the other

three can talk to Sophie, and one of them can hope to flop his dick out. See what they did, there? I

saw monkeys do that in India once, but it was for cookies in a snack stall. I see it in the corner of

my eyes, these monkey bros stroking their fucking beards and playing with the brims of their

dumb fucking caps with the sticker on the edge.

“So I get angry, and I turn to her, and I say, imitating her, ‘oh, gee— what happened?

Why are they doing thisT And I get angrier, and there I am: ‘fuck this— I don’t want your shot.’

And I set it down hard. And then I start yelling, ‘cool story, bro! Where’s the weed!’ They think I

am joking, and I am.

“Then I get serious with them. ‘Bros: it’s cocaine time.’ 1 say to them, looking at them

over my nose and all that shit. ‘The champagne of drugs! Toast me for 30! So how about a bump

or two? Bring me two grams,’ and I clap my hands like I’m the fucking maharaja of India. But

they don’t know me, and they still think I’m joking, so now they think I’m absolutely hilarious,

and now I’ve got three free shots, and I drink them all.

196

“And I start telling them bold faced lies right in front of her: actually, I’ve just turned 44,

but I wash my skin in chamomile-nicotine bark. Actually, Sophie’s just my sister, but we do fuck

sometimes because I’m the only one she trusts enough to sodomize her. Actually, I’m really part

owner o f this bar, but it’s embarrassing to talk about how often we roll around masturbating and

sodomizing in beds of money. Me and sister Sophie.

“And, amazingly, they believed every single one of these lies until I said I was lying to

them— they did! They really did! And I laughed every time I told them I was lying. But I was real

in that moment, let me tell you, holy hell, when I wanted that yeyo. I felt it in every cell in my

body, like the longing had transferred wants. I was so angry. And outside I was even angrier, and

of course she wasn’t happy, but she knew why I felt this way, even before I did, I realize. I asked

a bum for a cigarette, and gave him money by tossing the bills in the air, and then I threw the

burning butt in a dumpster and hoped it started a fire. You know.

“Something I really, really didn’t expect happened. So we went for a burrito. She did

understand: it’s much easier for women than it is for men, she told me, especially so when

they’ve been married for years. I understand. It will be harder for you than for her. I dropped my

head. And there it was: She reached across and slid all her fingers through my hair. She did it so

slowly. Man. It was like she was feeling every inch of my scalp. Then we were moving in unison.

Everything in time— I looked up at her, all so slow, and she pulled her hands back exactly with

me, and the sounds of the Spanish orders in the kitchen were fading, the footsteps, the drunk

couples, everything fading, and we were looking at each other in the eyes. There was so much

electricity in me. The alcohol was gone completely, this moment of clarity. And I couldn’t think.

I just dropped my head again. And she did it again, so slowly, across every inch, across my

forehead, across my cheek, and then I was holding her hand, kissing her wrist, kissing her palm,

kissing her fingers, kissing her fingertips, and something I can’t name exploded in my blood like

I’d never had a heartbeat before, and we were looking at each other in the eyes for minutes I

couldn’t count. I was stirring— you know how I mean. I just smiled a bit and told her, ‘eat your

burrito.’ And I watched her eat.

“We were walking back to her house then, arm-in-arm, and I felt incredibly drunk again.

It came on strong. But then there’s a blank spot— I honestly can’t remember what happened.

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“Now I’m realizing, telling you this insane story, that it was all because of the alcohol.

Everything that happened. This was the first time ever I really couldn’t remember something

because of alcohol.

“All I remember is we were suddenly on a dark street, very dark, alone. I was against a

brick wall, and we were having a heated talk about what happened in the restaurant. She said it

meant nothing. Nothing. I wasn’t angry like before, then, like with the bros. I have no word for

the feeling, man, I really don’t. But I was utterly— ‘how could that have meant nothing,’ I kept

demanding. And I tried to explain how it all felt and what this all was. But she said it meant

nothing to her. Then I was sitting on the ground and she was walking away saying, I don’t need

this shit, I don’t need this shit.

“I did go to her house. She let me in, and we talked—two hours? Time leaves me with

her. Her stupid painting of this dumb and sad kid always staring at me. They’d never bothered to

hang it. Then she realized before me what my feelings were. She asked me if I loved her. I’d

never thought of that at all. I couldn’t answer her question, only repeat it.

“Then I truly gave up: I told her not to do the hair thing to anyone else ever again. Ever. I

took out my phone— here, and I just handed it to her. I let her read something I’d written about

her— she said nobody had ever written about her. It was a confessional about her, a little like

what I’ve been telling you only the names were changed and it was in another city. Then I went

home. She really was sorry, putting her face in her hands and covering her mouth, and all that

shit. The cocaine thing got crazy after that night until the night I went to jail.”

Robin shook his head, and he held a wry smile for several moments too many. “Anyway.

I’ve gone on too long. It’s not gonna be interesting any more. When I started telling this story, I

wasn’t sure why I was telling it. I still don’t know why I told it. I’m stuck in this memory

somewhere. But it’s clearly related to alcohol and drugs— To addiction. See? I see you nodding.

You knew before I did. You people think alike, then, you and her. You people and the beautiful,

dangerous Sophie Auguste.”

But Robin stopped smiling, hanging, his eyes entering the deepest point. He felt a tinge of

the something. And then he decided to be honest and name it. Robin decided to stop trying to tell

the truth and to just tell it. To tell what it was all about, his entire journey.

“I think I should tell about when I first discovered I was an addict. You’ve got all the

background, and all the foreground. This won’t take as long. I’m ready to say it now.

198

“It was in the speed days. It was with skinhead girlfriends and a different girl, one I

realized later was never beautiful. Not then. We’d been awake for five or six days. It’s like that

Lou Reed song,” And then he indulged them his tenor, singing, “Hunting around always, cause

y o u ’re afraid o f sleeping. How do you think it feels? To fee l like a w olf and foxy? How do you

think it feels? To always make love by proxy?” Robin sighed.

And then he finally was ready. He said it in one, slow, unwavering forward voice: “We

hunted for two days, so tired, so empty, phone calls, house calls, down her black book. Finally, in

the middle of the night, all of us stinking and blank, she hung up the phone. She’d made a

connection. The four of us started cheering, hugging each other. I decided to take a shower, and I

looked at myself naked in the bathroom mirror. What was I? 110 pounds? So pale, black circles,

my skin pitted, my hair a twisted mop of red and black. What had I become? But I will never

forget what I said to myself in the mirror: If I could keep feeling that feeling again for a while, to

fill that something, that void, with electricity, drugs, sharing it with someone, getting closer,

feeling, maybe the price wasn’t so bad. Maybe death wasn’t so bad.”

Robin stopped. Silence. He let his air leave him to join it all, and then the silence wasn’t

rising in his ears, but warm around his chest. He wandered through the eyes of the room: all set in

bright faces.

“So.” Robin straightened his leather jacket. “I’ve told you everything.” He looked to the

podium for a moment, the grains in the wood— they all ran in one direction. They flowed away

from him.

He laughed softly. “But I know what to do now. I’m glad I met you people. Thanks.”

They applauded as he walked away from the podium. But he didn’t take his seat— he kept

walking, through the aisle, hands brushing his shoulders, to exit, out of the church, outside.

He walked through the enormous doors into the dark. Then he remembered looking to the

ground, noticing the stripped and pitted effect of the texture in the ground, how it looked like

skin.

He accepted suddenly, in that second, that he was addicted to Lilith, the way she made

him feel, the way she smelt, the way she felt. He was addicted to how open she was to other

people, how she wanted to share her sensual beauty with them. He was addicted to her soft skin

that he wanted to melt in his hands. He was addicted to her lilting voice, her odd emotional

reticence which mattered not to him because of how easy it was for him to read her face. He was

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addicted to her habits; he once saw her pluck all the tiny stray hairs from her eyebrows, lining

them up in a row on her hand before blowing them away. He was addicted to chasing her. He was

addicted to trying to help her see the beautiful things about herself that she could not. He was in

love with her. He tried to control his own mind and ignore it, tried to do anything else. But for all

Robin tried, he was in love with her, and he was addicted to her as an experience akin to drugs.

It’s why, at AA, he had to tell the story of loving her at the same time he had to tell the story of

accepting death through addiction.

And the worst thing— the very worst thing—the very worst thing that made him unable to

face himself or home or— every second he felt this way was another knife Carina had to swallow.

Every second Robin had thought of Lilith this way had been a knife in her throat, another slice at

that fiber woven by id, and some time, at some point, it would be severed if it was not already.

There was one thing left to say which he could not say, though now it was inevitable. He

could feel it but did not know it yet because the words were missing still.

The breeze came through the street from the ocean, and Robin felt himself carried with it

toward Lilith’s house.

She was as surprised to see him as he was surprised to find himself at the gate of the

house. She stood before the gate, a mad grinning and sparkling eyes in her bathrobe, her hair now

long and black and cascading around her shoulders, covering her mouth, “oh my god, oh my god,

oh my god.”

He hardly knew what to say. But it was the same. An electricity. A warmth everywhere.

He stared at her and couldn’t stop laughing.

“Well.” Her look changed, that glint in her eyes, a hurt sort of anger. “Well where the

fuck were you, Robin?”

“It’s... a long story.” He admitted. And he laughed. “But I’m so glad to see you— ”

She shoved him away. “Fuck you,” And she stepped down from the doorstep to shove

him again. “You didn’t even tell me!”

“Hey now— now there’s a reason for everything— there are reasons—•”

She turned to leave. But the gate had snapped shut. She yanked and pushed at it. “God

damn it.”

“See, look,” Robin cried, “Don’t damn God— God wants you to listen to my excuses!”

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She glared, crossed her arms. “Nobody is home so I’m going to have to wait. So thanks a

lot.”

“Listen to my excuses now,” he began again. “The real thing is that it happened fast and

outta nowhere, and how— now I couldn’t jeopardize my job with the truth, okay.”

“Because fucking a teenager wasn’t going to jeopardize anything.”

“Getting caught fucking a teenager and fucking a teenager are two different things,”

Robin reminded Lilith. “I’m going to start up again tomorrow and nobody knows what

happened.”

She rolled her eyes. Then she grabbed him by the jacket, moved close to him— they could

feel each other’s warmth, smell each other’s scent, hers of sweat and vanilla and cinnamon-she

was trembling— she was shivering— she fished around into his jacket pocket.

She withdrew his cell phone. “I’m texting my roommate.” She kept her eyes locked to the

phone. “I don’t work at the center anymore.”

“I see.”

“I am moving away. Back to Ohio for pharmacy school.” She met his eyes then. “So this

is my last week in San Francisco.” She handed his phone back.

It was sharp. “I see.” He felt and knew, in that moment, those unnamable things about the

fiber of id. How sharp it could be. “I see.”

“So.” But that’s all she said.

He sighed. He had no idea what to say. She was shivering more and more, so he took his

jacket to put around her shoulders, didn’t let her refuse it.

“But you’ll be cold, you’re in a tank top.”

“Listen.” He only kept sighing again and again. Partly because he was frustrated he felt

this way and was so treacherous— in some way that treachery was irrelevant with her leaving

now. With everyone and everything likely to leave. But he knew he couldn’t leave it like this.

“Listen. Did you eat?”

It was a soft look, a sort of defeated look.

Twenty minutes later he returned with a burger and a strawberry milkshake. She was

chatting with her roommate on the stoop— the roommate returned to the house as Robin

approached, and Lilith returned his jacket to him.

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“Robin, I have to go back now, but thank you— ”

“I’ve got it,” he said. “I have to be honest. I mean. You know how it’s been with us. I’m

so— that you’re gonna leave. I mean, you’re gonna leave. I’m never gonna see you again.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah it is. Come on. I’ll never see you again. It didn’t all go the way I wished it had.

And that’s okay. But there’s something I want to do with you.” He took her hand and laughed.

“You won’t sleep with me, and you won’t date me. So drop acid with me.”

She almost doubled over with laughter.

“But I’m serious. I’ve never tried it. I just want to, you know— I want to share it with

you. I want to share something with you and connect with you and feel connected— before you

go, I mean. It could be a big deal. I hear it changes people’s outlook sometimes. Let’s give it a

shot.”

She finished laughing. “Okay,” she said.

“ ...are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’d love to.” She smiled.

And it was his turn to laugh and laugh. He clapped, jumped, shook her hands. “Okay,

okay, okay. Tomorrow. Eleven in the morning, I’ll be here.”

“What about work?”

“What? Oh. I’ll just not show up. I’ll quit. I’ll quit everything. Who cares?” He turned to

run, clapped his hands, spun around and pointed at her, “tomorrow morning!” he shouted, and

sprinted back toward Chuck’s.

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“What if we just kill him?”

Boyana pulled away— she was disgusted.

“Listen,” he said. She scooted closer to her— she only continued to pick at her fish fillet,

the glint of candle light— and whispered. “We already have the money. We don’t even have to go

through with this at all. Maybe it was a bad idea. Now I know, believe me, I understand why all

this primitivism is important, believe me. I know what’s at stake.”

She chewed the fish, took another bite. She scratched the plate with her fork.

“But I know something else that’s at stake, Boyana. Your heart. Your heart is at stake.

Maybe you’ve never really been happy before.”

She set her fork down, then, and looked at Tim in the eyes.

“Maybe you’ve never been happy before all the things about primitivism are true— it’s

true. Technology has made us weak and distant from our instinct. Corporations have made it so

we cannot have a life together without money. I know— I know all that— yes, I could see, yes, I

could see that maybe it’s,” he laughed, “but what is it gonna change? Have you really thought

about that? What will it change? We could kill everybody and— most of them just do what they

think they must. They don’t think about why. They wouldn’t even know how to explain the

feelings they had about this, let alone if they recognized they had them.”

She picked her fork up again—he, gently, firmly, pushed it back down to the table.

“Do we really need another anarchist? They call us terrorists. I know that’s just a name.

But do we really need another warrior for social justice, now? Because— and I know it might

seem hypocritical. But we could just,” he whispered so very low, dimmer than the restaurant’s

fine dining lighting, “take the money, and run. Cut and run. You’ve heard that before?” He set his

hand on the briefcase at their feet.

She pulled the napkin up from her lap, wiping her mouth, tossing it down on her plate.

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“Take the money, and run. We go on foot— we leave tomorrow morning. We go through

Turkey through Aleppo into Kurdistan and then through Iran into Pakistan and finally India—

fake Russian passports— it will be easy, I looked into— they’ll think nothing about it, look at us, I

could pass easily and you could pass easily— ”

“If you tell someone this plan,” Boyana hissed, “it might be you. Not him. Stop talking

about it.”

“Boyana.”

“Stop talking about it.” She tended to her glass of absinthe.

It had nothing to do with the philosophy. It had nothing to do with Tim as—now he had

lost control— but that’s not what it was. He had to do the things he did. All that he did, he had to

do. All that he did was the force of happenstance pushing him to become a new person, a man of

agency, an agent of change and destruction.

It didn’t matter if he really believed it. He believed it half the time. He believed it was

love the other half o f the time. And at the same time, paradoxically, he didn’t believe much at all.

It had nothing to do with the philosophy, though, and everything to do with Alexo. The

rapist. The pig of the Mediterranean. It was unbelievable. Tim also snatched up his napkin,

rubbed his face, threw it across the table.

It had all stopped being sensible a long time ago. Maybe every thought was a gram. But

grams crammed and pulled through the capillaries in his brain by his heart were a weight. Each

and every thing pulled through, named and scraping, his head clenching with the pressure: Alexo,

Boyana, money, home, terror, sex, futility, alcohol, the city, the country, countries, his country—

no, countries, no countries, futility, sex, sex, anger, loyalty— no.

Why couldn’t he just leave now? She wouldn’t do it. She did not take him seriously. She

thought he was a fool. She thought he was weak. Well. Fuck it. Why couldn’t he leave without

her? Stand, straighten his jacket, take up the suitcase, walk away, ride and drive and fly away and

return to fear and loathing in his home city, or maybe even the suburbs where he could have less

to think about and more space and money to drink and play and ride it out, or follow through, and

walk to India like any Russian would. But it would be easier just to go home now.

He shook his head. See? They did have a point. Were those the only things that were for

them?

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He looked to Boyana, her eyes still lost in the glass. That was the other thing. Either way,

as it was now, Tim felt she would never leave Athens. What was it— the mix of things. What

weighed in her mind? How many grams? What could her heart take? The mix of things— but

Alexo was heavy, Tim knew, the heaviest weight of all. He had a grip like a titan on her. An

unshakable grip. Wasn’t it? He had to convince her.

A sudden spark in his chest, twitching of his heart— Tim stood up, buttoned his blazer.

Alexo came into the restaurant. It was one of the first times they’d seen each other since

Paris— all their operations had continued, though they shared the same space just one other time.

He took a seat at the end of the table. He glared at Tim as though his eyes were a brown star, as

though he could radiate Tim to death and pop his lung or his brain stem through a hole in his back

with a single microwave.

Tim grinned. He sat. “Can I buy you dinner? It’s on me.”

Alexo pointed to Tim. “You believe you can control situation, huh? Well, Shit. You

cannot control it. You think you can take yourself away, take Boyana away. But whole situation

is taking you along for its own ride, huh? You see? Not even who you are is in your control. You

were meant to be here from day one. You were meant to die here. I own you now because you are

dead to the world. There is nothing you can do but be an agent. There is no control.”

“Tell me something I already know,” Tim said. “And if that’s true, why are you trying to

change society in the first place?”

“You think that because you cannot control means you will not try? Just like you will try

to take my money— I have recorder and tracker. Just like you will try to kill me— I have already

killed you. Just like you will try to take Boyana—” And he grabbed her hard by the wrist.

She pulled it away, a sudden burst, her composure remaining. She turned and looked at

Alexo with rounded eyes, and her words slipped from her lips as snake’s venom in the wind.

And Alexo began to gesture, and the two blunted and slithered in Greek as Tim crossed

his arms and began to smile.

And then Alexo stopped, looking past Tim— all of them turned.

A man in a gray peacoat and gray peaked cap stepped forward into the red dark of the

table, setting down the box in a bag he carried. A thud—jingle of their high ball and wine glasses

and silverware. And everything was still.

Alexo whispered, something so slight. A name?

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And the man smiled slowly, ice on his face. He muttered something to them. He noted

Tim, turned stiffly to face him. His eyes were small and red like they’d never, ever seen sleep,

vacant and surrounded by the frosted dark. And his paper thin, pale lips moved, and Tim kept his

eyes on this gray currier’s face long enough to read them: It is yours. He took the briefcase with a

ginger, gray skinned hand. Then he passed through the crowd, making his way to the door

without resistance, and pushed out into the dark.

They turned back to the bag on the table, none of them moving.

Finally, Alexo sat back, crossing his arms, and he smiled. “You open that, Tim.”

“What?”

He gestured toward it. “It is yours. It was your idea, yes? We will thank you.”

“What?” Tim hesitated. “No we don’t.”

“Yes we do Tim.”

“We don’t.” He felt that old fear. That old panic. That dead agency. It is yours.

And Alexo pushed the bag forward, grinning. “You should open.” He waited. Then he

frowned. “Open the bag.”

Tim found his legs. He moved forward, his hands trembling with his open mouth as he

reached into the bag.

Boyana set her hands on the comers of the bag— their eyes met for a second, and he saw

that her composure had been lost. He’d never seen it from her before. But there was no mistaking

what it read, what her trembling lips and hollowness read. She was absolutely terrified.

Tim pulled the box from the bag, Boyana setting the bag aside, and they leaned forward

to see it.

It was a spice rack. The image on the box’s side was a stock photo of a young couple

laughing with the spice rack, an image of Venice superimposed crudely behind them, the lighting

wrong, the perspective wrong, their smiles paid and everything new.

Tim had a rising feeling of deja vu looking at the photo on the box. From when? From

where? Venice again. Venice again, but then noticed with the others the tag taped on the side of

the box. Tim reached for it first. It was something in Greek.

To alatonmepo rtjg £corjg...

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Boyana took the tag from him, opened it, and Alexo leaned in to see as she read. “In

English it means, ‘spice all life.’ ” She squinted, then nodded and repeated, “ ‘spice of life,’ ‘spice

all life,’ something like that.” And she sat back and stared into the invisible horizon.

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The LSD rose from being just a twinkle or a tickle in the lining of their lungs to being a

means to see things clearly at a distance. It was the feeling of eyes sitting outside a head, or

seeing from the absence of the head, hot and cold, feeling while not feeling and knowing nothing

but being awash in air as on an ethereal train passing through the experience of life.

It came into them with a curious crow landing before them— my god, Robin said— it’s

like it knows it. It’s like it knows us. The crow tilted his head one way and another. And then

picked at Lilith’s boot lace. They broke down in laughter, the crow jumping back and cawing and

jumping forward and picking and cawing.

The turned around and around and noticed they were the only ones in Dolores park on a

Monday, the hills rolled in all directions away from them like living green seas, and so they lay

back to roll and swim and let the millions of blades hold them up to the sky.

They wandered downtown arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand, carrying a curiosity of aliens

wandering amongst aliens. Stinking men and women in neglected beards and jackets and glasses

approached to solicit—they backed away seeing the black well of madness and nihilistic majesty

in their dilated pupils where all things were interesting and insignificant at once; all things carried

happenstance across the world through meaning and meaningless at once.

They watched water spray and ebb from the hard concrete and jagged angles of the Civic

Center fountain, now that the city had turned the water back on, water like sea foam hissing out

from a mine in the earth—

And then, with a rush, a woosh, a man with hardened muscles and long hair and thick

canvas pants rose out of the water all aspray around him— whooa, whooa, whooa they both cried,

holding on tight to one another—his chest bare but for the long wet beard and hair sticking to it,

his angry demeanor, a long staff in both hands— the Poseidon of San Francisco.

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They wandered another direction, and there, on a street corner, a once tall building was

being smashed again and again and again by a gargantuan steel pear swung from a tall crane— the

pear and it’s weathered American flag plowed through concrete floors, water pouring down in

falls from the top to the bottom of the building, and, finally, an Exceptionalist party ad screened

on the side of the building, a woman laughing with her husband and family, shattered with a well-

placed pear shot. And they laughed and jumped like children in summer rain.

They wound up at the entrance to the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art.

Robin held up a finger. “Now, shh, shh, we can do this.”

“We can,” she said.

“We can do this, I swear.”

“Get your shit together glasses on,” she said.

She put her sunglasses on, and so did he, and they calmly bought the tickets from a

grinning teenage sales clerk, and nobody was the wiser that they saw the hollow interior of the

building as a tomb for living art and living people with all things swirling in cosmic radiation.

There was a room which wanted to suck them in to static and noise and white light in a

flashing cloud; They gathered around a painting of a man sprouting a thousand dicks and

ruminated aloud on the virile agency of 100 trillion cells in the human body—the other guests

were intrigued with these two sunglassed aliens’ analysis; They found an entire and deserted floor

illuminating, in gray light, ten thousand journal pages of math and strange scripts more alien and

more dead than they, some aliens tooth pick factories and long houses, and felt and thus knew the

words without knowing the words.

But in another hallway they walked to something that would change everything— it was

the piece, they knew without saying, removing their glasses, that they had been led to all through

the LSD, all through day, the year they’d known each other. They to each other with undisguised

astonishment, sat close beside each other. It was astonishing.

The enormous painting, enormous, painting of a heart, a typical heart, slathered with

layer upon layer of passionate color, blue, purple, red, yellow, green splatter, a C-clamp solidly in

its middle, and Robin felt moved to either tears or frustration or awe, but couldn’t make it out, the

LSD having opened him and her in unexpected and lucid ways to the art— shivering, sublime

shock when he stared at the painting of solid rainbow stripes, the sheer terror of the piece in pure,

matte black with embossed black letters, the giddy joy of the man with a hundred penises and

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mind exploding butterflies, all those specific, unnamable feelings and reactions repeating exactly

each time they turned away and looked at the pieces once more, their consciousnesses and

reactions feeling somehow as linked then as they’d been all day.

They studied it and searched for the words. Neither of them could say anything about it.

Instead, they turned to study the look in one another. They both knew the other was thinking just

the same things, that the LSD was making synergistic and conjoined their memory and context.

Robin searched Lilith’s face in the art gallery, and they remembered their first night out

together. Here, no summary; he could remember it exactly, for the LSD had fully opened his

heart in his moment of all presents. He remembered every single word as he mouthed them again

there while Lilith was lost in the giant painting of the heart. All those months ago, where they’d

been on the subway together, blurting out with unexpected urgency, “fuck all of this— let’s go

have a drink. Right now.” And he turned and watched her stare straight ahead as she was want to

do out of her traditional etiquette, her rare moments of eye contact, and she said quickly, “yeah,

okay.”

Lilith took Robin that night to some place in the city he’d never been, a dim and lively

bar playing Iggy Pop and Joy Division, paintings of topless women on each wall, some hilarious,

some sexy, some natural. They commented on each of them, and Robin pointed out the ones he

liked and ones that turned him off. They told each other stories, his stories of notorious antics

from the past and present ambitions, her stories of treks abroad and the people around her who

mattered, and her feats, riding her bike across California. He started to notice how she threw her

entire head back when she laughed, and how she twirled her hair so compulsively that parts

would keep themselves wound. “You should make dreadlocks so you can always twist them,” he

said, “and feel accomplished.”

She said nothing. But she met his eyes and gave him this look, the look being the main

thing— he’d seen it before, a few times.

He could not explain the look in any mental state, no matter his clarity or erosion— this

soft stare, her round face and knowing eyes. The first time he remembered it was when we were

on the train one night leaving work, and she said she thought you met most people for a reason,

and he finished her thought by saying that you never knew how but everyone changes you, and

she gave Robin the look.

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And so, in this moment at the bar with the topless paintings, everything red and the place

lost in loudness, he suddenly was struck with knowing that Lilith was amazing. Lilith was

shockingly gorgeous. He wondered, as young people are wont to do, if he had met the one.

And so Robin vowed that he should do something he normally never did, something he’d

never done in the past and wouldn’t do in the future with anybody else: he was completely

honest.

Robin told Lilith fears— he stopped embellishing and guarding for the first time in years.

His thoughts. His feelings. His situation. Carina. Everything. He confessed everything— it had

never happened, and his confidence had never failed him, nor had his guard ever fallen, but it did

then, finding himself pouring forth naturally the same way the lucid poet’s drug would open him

as a deliberate psychic key a year later on their trip together, the trip which enabled to live again

in these memories— he confessed that he lived a life either unshackled from high process or

shackled to violent id, that among his tales were the moments of horror and bad biled karma

common to drug addicts: that he and a friend had once used a kid sister as a drug mule to score

meth; that, coming down, he’d cut his arms and wrists to shreds with a pair o f scissors, feeling

and thus knowing his best friend had died, though she’d only been in the other room; that, jealous

in a cocaine haze, he’d shouted at his unrequited love and her lover that it “served him right” to

have contracted HIV before throwing his high ball glass at them; that he’d woken up in a ditch

before; that he’d lied to people he loved. And she only sat on covering her mouth and nodding,

taking it all in, everything he poured out. But no look in her round face beside sadness or

curiosity or amused shock or gallows humor. Never the look of judgment, eyes shooting into his

or through them, or through him. There was a peace with her.

By the third place, they were submerged. They started flipping the pages of the book

she’d been carrying running their fingers through the lines, laughing, misunderstanding. He had

the urge to kiss her. He didn’t.

She said they should leave. He was honest again; he told her they should be alone. She

should come to his apartment. Reaction— what was it? He had no idea what it was. She looked

down and around and to Robin and told Robin she couldn’t. Marriage. Co-worker. He shook his

head, and smiled, and told the truth: “It’s unknown territory. But it’s a compliment: You’re an

amazing woman. You’re shockingly gorgeous.” And she gave Robin that look. And he told

himself it was okay. But inside was the thread twisting around his organs.

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At her house, sour red wine, spinning faster than the Earth and telling her so, and so she

drank the sour wine to catch up until she too was spinning faster than the Earth and could tell him

so, and finally, he told her he had to go home; it was three miles and four in the morning.

But then she did something nobody would expect, not Robin, not Lilith herself, not

Olivia had Olivia still been alive to witness this meeting.

Lilith asked Robin to stay. That wasn’t extraordinary because she’d asked many men to

stay. But it was cutting this time because she begged him, and she’d never done that before.

Lilith begged Robin to stay. She came up close to him, so close that he began to inhale

her sweat, no precedent, and he made no secret of inhaling her as he did again in the art gallery,

and she sustained eye contact with him that was so rare: “Stay— I mean, I don’t really care. I

don’t care what you do. I don’t care about you at all. But stay. Don’t walk. I’ll make a bed up for

you. Don’t walk. Please stay, please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.” And each became a

more whispered whisper over and over until the silence was roaring and they were going deaf

together searching each other’s faces.

Something compelled Robin to go, even though he didn’t want to, even though it was

dishonest to himself to go. And she repeated she didn’t care at all, shaking her head, taking back

the pillow she’d pulled out for him, throwing it aside, crossing her arms. And, stumbling home,

he sang Bowie’s addled longing so many times he lost count and lost his voice: Stay—that's what

I meant to say or do something, but what I never say is stay this time, I really meant to so badly

this time because you can never really tell when someone wants something you want too.

When he’d been walking along the sidewalk, he ran into something— dangling before

him was a heavy gauge fishing line, and a plastic hook and sinker, and a plastic lizard on the end.

He looked up to find it was dangling from the third story of a Victorian, pink light emanating

from the windows. It was four in the morning. So he tugged the line. He tugged the line again. He

tugged the line again. But nobody came. The fisher must have been asleep, Robin concluded.

Was everyone in the city not fishing?

He regretted for the rest of his life that he had not stayed when she asked, let alone when

she begged.

Robin searched Lilith’s face again in the gallery, and they remembered that first time the

id fiber nearly broke. They’d been getting closer and closer, always winding up at her house in

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the dead of night laughing and singing and drinking together. One night— who knows how it

started, or where it started— he’d wound up at her house again, both of them drunk, the dumb kid

in the painting by the fireplace staring, and his arm was fully around her then, and he was

caressing her sides, inhaling her, and whispering things, “I’m watching myself with you right

now, I can’t stop doing this, I can’t stop feeling this, feel my heart— my heart is beating like a

hummingbird— ” he took her hand, placed it on his chest, and she could feel the heat and the

speed of its beat. “You know I want something more than sex with you,” he confessed.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she told him, looking him in the eyes. “I’m not the kind of

girl you think I am.”

“Who do you think you are?” Then he slurred another question. “Who do you think 1

think you are?”

“You hold me on a pedestal. You think I’m so pure and kind. And I’m not.”

And in that moment, it tightened, the fiber. Because he understood then that she had the

void too, one that craved, though it was a lust for another kind of living. “You think I’d be this

attracted to you if you were an angel? I know who you are, Lilith.”

“You know who I am.”

“And it changes nothing about how I feel for you.”

“You don’t know the things I’ve done, Robin.”

“I don’t care about the things you’ve done. That’s not what love is.”

“That’s too much, Robin.”

“Do you feel ashamed?”

She closed her eyes.

“Do you know that I accept who you are?”

She paused. Then she admitted, “I once slept with five men in a day. I don’t know why.

Maybe because I could. But I did. I felt ashamed. I loved it. So what do you think of that?”

Robin laughed. “Who cares? That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

She shook her head, frustrated.

“I’d have slept with five women in a day if I could manage it. I’d have slept with fifteen

in four hours if I could manage it. I can’t because I’m just some guy. But w e’re the same in this,

Lilith. I just indulge in another type of excess— do you have any idea how much drugs I’ve done

in a day? And stayed awake for a week? Because I could? It was the lust of my heart to have done

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it. But it’s no reason to feel ashamed. It’s what we did.” He lowered his eyes. “It has a name. It’s

the void, you know.”

Lilith only bowed her head, and Robin sighed. She rarely shared her thoughts, her

feelings.

“I’ve never met a man like you before,” she whispered suddenly. “Maybe I should only

date artists.” But then, just as suddenly, “what you’re doing is okay, touching me on the couch.

Because I don’t think you can actually do anything.”

“Can I show you something?” Then Robin leaned in to kiss her—

Lilith pulled away, and that’s when they both abruptly straightened up, and she said he

should go, and he downed the remaining whiskey from the half pint bottle, though she protested,

and he dropped it on the floor, Lilith flinching violently with the thud of glass on hardwood, and

he walked away with a manic grin, and he went out into the street and smashed a bus stop

advertisement with his bare hands until all the LCD was broken and his knuckles were bleeding,

and he went home to fight with Carina again who left to spend the night at someone else’s

apartment.

The fiber had tightened nearly to breaking. He’d never felt such taut longing around his

organs partly because no woman had ever been so evasive with him, but also partly because he

had never exhibited so little control.

Robin searched Lilith’s face again in the gallery, and they remembered the day he gave

her a gift. Robin slid the little silk bag across the table at the red coffee shop to Lilith, the bag

with the necklace and the letter explaining why, that she was changing him for the better, that she

was worth the world and that men would cross the ocean for her if she let them, and his

acknowledgment that the bag was so stereotypically Chinese and that he knew she’d laugh at it,

and to forgive him.

She laughed. “Red silk bag—that’s racist. Now I’m offended, Robin!”

He only smiled, and insisted she open it later and read the letter later. She made no

comment of the necklace—he asked her if she liked it days after that on the train, and she looked

to the floor and glowed and said yes, and they spoke nothing more of it. But he noticed that she

wore it nearly every day. He could see the necklace even in her photos with other people many

years later, a silver leaf inlaid with burning green and blue opal.

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Robin sat alone at a pub in the suburbs that night— the Irishwoman slid him his fourth

pint of Guinness with softly wincing, sympathetic eyes.

He stared past the beer to his hand, opening, closing, wondering. What was love but the

intoxicating mix of feelings and loyalty to enriching the life of another being? What was love but

a devotion to raising up another being’s soul in hopes it will sing? To want this being to feel

thrilled at its being? To want this being to forget wrongs and feel peace and the best sort of

emptiness? He felt these things for Lilith. There was no control. It was wrong. There was no

control. And he knew in his heart, in his gut, that because she was as restless a spirit as he was

that one day she would ultimately leave him and there would be no more nearness to her and no

more tension between them and no more anything, only nothing, and he’d never see her again. He

would be overcome with the nothing then, and the nothing would rule his life.

Robin searched her face again in the gallery, and he remembered the lead up to that

moment he could never forget, that lead up to this moment at the gallery with the heart, some hot

night in the street. Out of nowhere, when Robin was consumed by the old three-part-harmony of

whiskey, marijuana, and cocaine, preoccupied with throwing playing cards at his friends whose

heads were either face down or face up with drunkness at the table in the back of some bar, Lilith

sent him a message. Come to Uptown fo r a drink with Lynn and me? But he ignored her message.

And yet, as they migrated, hollering in the street, throwing bottles, she sent a second

message. W e’re leaving now fo r Casanova i f you still want a drink. He replied this time, telling

her maybe, telling her everyone was drunk. He forgot about it, he told himself, instead sweating

and arm wrestling his friends and somehow losing to Sly Melson, though Robin visibly had more

muscle and was ten miles higher than Sly.

Yet again still, the third message, which he saw once the shirts were unbuttoned and he’d

climbed down from a flagstone wall and the fire escape he hung and kicked the air from above

the others: Lynn and I are being hit on by three black men. It would be much easier to get rid o f

them if you came here.

Finally the thread became a knot. His organs burst and filled him with fire. Control was

finished.

“Motherfucker!” he shouted to nobody.

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His friends turned to ask, and he ignored them. It was unacceptable. He, too, was aware

that Lilith was baiting him with something purposely offensive.

“Hey! She’s chumming me like a great fucking white!” Robin shouted.

Melson snatched the phone, read the message. “I’ll be double damned.”

Robin texted back. Accept nothing from them. Nothing. I ’m ten blocks away. Wait there.

So Robin towed all the friends ten blocks across town. He told them not why. He told

them not where. He’d lost his jacket, but who needed it? He felt he was on fire. All o f him was

burning, this fever inside him. He walked impetuously the ten blocks to Casanova, stopping for

nothing. Not men, not women, not cars, not his friends he ran into on the sidewalk, not for

explanations for his wasted retinue about where and why and who, not for a cigarette, not to give

a dollar, not to tear down propaganda, not to piss in an alley, not for a fucking thing until he’d

finally pushed past the bouncer of Casanova into the red light, pushed through the masses at the

bar, the giggling people staring at the paintings of the topless women, pushed through everybody

until he found Lilith sitting with Mary and another girl, two mountains of men on either side of

her, and he held his hands out to her and shouted, “now I’m here, Lilith!”

And she jumped up from the couch and into his arms, and he lifted her, and they held

each other tight. And he ran his hands down her arms as they smiled wordlessly at each other, and

he took her by the hands and pulled her behind him to the bar holding hands by the fingertips

until he pulled her in with his arm around her waist—

“Wait, wait, wait— stop. We can’t do this.” She pulled away.

Robin took a step back. “What do you mean we can’t do this?” Then he took a step

forward, close to her, and he felt a shot of rage inside him. “Why did you call me over here?” But

then he interrupted her. “Lilith—you baited me.”

“What?”

“ ‘Three black men are hitting on me.’ What an asinine thing to say. You baited me and

you know it. Don’t act so naive.”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “But they’re right over there— ”

He snatched the drink just served onto the bar—yeah yeah yeah, threw down a twenty

dollar bill— the patron knew better than to interrupt someone so inflamed and hot headed— and he

took Lilith by the arm, sat back down at her table.

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“Sit down. A whiskey sour for you being such a fucking sour puss,” he slurred. And

downed the drink.

“Come on, Robin—why are you doing this?” She raised her voice.

He sat spinning and spinning his empty glass again and again. He could feel Lilith

watching him as he spun the glass. Missing her. Missing her while she was there in front of him

staring at him, thinking of him.

Minutes passed, the chaos thick, her eyes flickering back on him while he was watching

her and not watching her.

He finally looked up— shock, amazement, wonder in her face. “Lilith— ”

“What?”

Robin reached down, grabbing her chair by one of its legs, and pulled her close to him—

she did not flinch but her face opened wildly— he had never been so forward.

“Listen to me now. Enough bullshit, Lilith. We need to talk.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Enough. You are a liar. You lie when you’re uncomfortable— I know you very well,

now. I can read you like a book. I know I’m right.”

She looked at him directly in his eyes.

“You cannot deny that there’s something between us. It’s as clear as the summer sky.

From you, too. I am not insane. Is it true, or am I insane?” He shook his head. “I know I’m crazy,

but I am not insane.”

She maintained eye contact. And she nodded again. “It’s true.”

“It is true. It’s always been true. So— Lilith, what are we waiting for?” And he held his

hands out and laughed, smiling. “It’s wonderful. Don’t you think so? We could learn so much

from each other! Why not give it a shot?” He touched her hands. “What’s the worst that could

happen? So, it won’t work, and someone will get sore— ”

“Or someone will leave.”

Robin nodded. “Yes. I already know it will be you who will leave. And I don’t care.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you’re young, and you’re excited about the world. You will leave. But I don’t

care. I want you to hurt me. It’s worth it to me. I’ve even risked my life for far stupider things,

217

Lilith.” He laid his hands down on the table, then, and smiled. “But I know this one is worth it.

What do you think?”

She shifted in her seat, crossed her legs. She started to pull her hair back, down again,

compulsive with her thinking. “Well,” she began. Then she cleared her throat. “Well, I know the

sex would be good.”

And here, Robin bellowed with laughter, slapped his knee. “I’ve known that for a while.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head then. “But how long could we last? A year at the most? I

know it would be a good time, Robin. But the long term— and your lifestyle, these open

relationships. And you’re married! A little Bohemian, okay. But it’s too much. I respect that but I

can’t do it. I don’t want to be the other woman— ”

“You wouldn’t be,” he interrupted her, “the other woman. That’s not the way it is.” Then

he took an enormous risk that, once he looked back at it sometime after the art gallery, was not a

worthwhile risk, and told her this: “Lilith, the way things stand from my perspective, you might

be the first woman. I don’t know the future. I have no idea where the fuck I’m going now.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know. I can’t.”

“But do you want to?”

She shook her head. “Robin, I can’t”

“But that’s not what I’m asking you. Do you want to? Do you want to?”

Something happened— Robin couldn’t remember, not remembered in the moment then,

but not remembered from the present in the art gallery either: Something happened, and they were

outside, the bar closed, the drunks laughing and singing and smoking storms. But then he looked

down to see himself embracing Lilith, and her warmth and scent filled his chest and his head. She

clung to him, and he held her face as he looked down into her eyes and muttered happy things

nobody could remember.

“I can’t,” she said suddenly, and pulled away from him, walking away.

And here is when he chased her around the block, and the back and forth became so hot,

the thread so tight, neither of them knew what to do with it. Melson and Lynn trailed behind—

Robin suddenly heard Melson, “what they’ve got there is either really good or really bad”— as

Robin followed Lilith closely, her stride wide with dramatically swishing arms as if she were

marching off stage left in sleeves, pulling each other in only to push each other away, push and

pull, push and pull, push and pull, and pointless word brandy, and her always repeating the same

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answer to his questions, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” Lilith not stopping for anything, not

traffic, not lights, not cigarettes, just like before, nothing. Nothing.

And dinner, Melson and Lynn were all laughs until— “My tacos broken,” Melson kept

shouting, “my tacos broken! These people gave me broken tacos! This is fucking outrageous

slamming the table, throwing the food to the floor, the chaos of an entire city drunk and laughing

and lustrous—while Robin and Lilith said nothing, kept slapping chips from each other’s hands,

and Lilith force fed Robin a burrito bite too big to chew.

And the time was getting lost again, and suddenly they were in the apartment with the sad

faced kid painting once again, and Robin was on the couch pulling Lilith’s socks off while she

played the ukulele violently, ignoring him, and then they watched Melson serenade Lynn on the

guitar as she fell asleep, and she shoved him off when he tried to kiss her, and they both slept

where they lay.

“We talked about this, Robin,” Lilith suddenly blurted. “Don’t you think we should stay

friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to be friends?”

“I don’t know.”

Robin remembered stopping her in her hallway, his taking her hands, her shaking them

off, his taking her hands, and he heard himself slurring, “you know, listen— nawmsaying, I could

walk away from this, nawmsaying. I could walk away from all this. But how about this, I’ll make

you a deal— here’s the deal: Just let me kiss you once. Okay? Just let me kiss you just once, and

then that’s it. It’s over. Okay? It’s over.”

“Robin,” she cried. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

They looked into each other’s eyes, and the way she winced— he could see the struggle

was true, the way it added lines to her face. Then she walked off into the bathroom, and he heard

the faucet running on and off.

Robin followed her in. Lilith was washing her face. He sat on the floor behind her, his

back to the bathtub.

She turned. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not.”

“Robin.” She sank to the floor opposite him, holding her knees with her arms.

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Robin shook his head. “Goddamn it Lilith. I just don’t know. All I know is I accept you.

I’ve not felt this way in so long about anybody. The way it is with her— it’s different. It’s not the

same. It was never like this. It is easy to accept you. I just want to be with you. I don’t know what

to call it. I don’t care what it means. It fuels this thing we both have. You make me feel real. You

make me feel light. There is no control at all. I think we could have something, and I wish you— ”

then he noticed her face uncovered for the first time: all her tiny spots of imperfection, and how

she was looking at him then as if for the first time, and how he could tell he was looking at her

anew as well. “I accept you.”

She shook her head. She kept shaking her head. “Robin. I can’t. I can’t. But I’m so

flattered. But I can’t. But you’ve made me feel so good.” And she shook her head with a sick, sad

look, then. “God. What have I done, Robin? I’ve seen all these boys who don’t even like me, and

here you are, right in front of me, this boy who likes me so much.”

“There’s a boy right in front of you who loves you, Lilith.”

“That’s too much.”

“It isn’t.” And then, the most lucid moment of any, more than the LSD or the art gallery

or any other time: Robin cupped her shoulders and then her face, and they stared each other in the

eyes. “It isn’t too much because you deserve to be loved. Lilith, I accept you. I accept everything

you are and everything you’ve done. You are so beautiful I can’t— it drives me crazy— I hurt

myself—I hurt myself all the time like you do for a different reason—but all I’ve wanted for you,

ever, is to be happy. All I’ve ever wanted for you is to accept yourself. Because I know you

haven’t. But you are worth everything.”

She shook her head and looked as if she was going to cry.

But he continued. “And if you won’t let me treat you right, you have to treat yourself

right. But goddamn it, I wish you’d let me treat you right. Because you and I both know I would.”

Then, here it was, their own hot water moment: She came in close. She pressed her hand

to his chest. She kissed him on the neck again and again, and they held each other for a while.

Their egos vanished. It was a haze. It was only feeling. The knowing was dead. The thing was

wrapped and did not want. They held each other as if nobody had ever felt the working lungs of

another person before or beating hearts together.

She pulled away, finally. But Robin came close to her again, reaching for her hand. And

she hesitated.

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He kissed her on the forehead first. He kissed one eye and then the other, and kissed her

cheek. She looked away, pushed her hair back, and looked to him again with tired eyes. And he

moved in slowly to kiss her lips, tenderly, like he’d thought of doing every day since he’d met

her—

And that’s when she pulled away again. She pushed her hair back behind her ears, stood,

and went to her room to sleep.

And in the art gallery again with the LSD taking them across the energy of memory and

time, the synaptic curves of life, the moments they shared, they both saw these visions again in

the eyes of the other.

She was the first to look away because the moments would never stop flooding into them

if one of them had not the courage to look away. She gazed again at the many layered heart.

“It’s terrifying,” she said. “It has so many layers. So much color. So much texture. So

much tension. It changes every time I look at it. It changes how I feel every time I look at it. How

could I commit to understanding it? And to keep moving with it? If it is so difficult. If it is so

intense. If it is somebody else’s.”

“That’s exactly what love is. It is to see this thing is flawed. To know all the world is

flawed, all people are flawed, because there is no final state that is not death. But to love is to

struggle along in understanding the thing.” He wanted to touch her face again so badly. To kiss

her face again so badly. “To love is to accept.”

She turned to look at him. But she said nothing more of the heart.

They stood in the subway, and just as the train came, she slipped a folded yellow paper

into his hand. “Read it later.”

“Take care of yourself. Really take care of yourself. Okay?”

She only stared him in the eyes, the same angry and hurt look she’d given him on the

stoop when he came back. “Robin,” she said.

He touched her on the shoulder.

“Robin. Just get your shit together.”

The train came, the doors opened, he gave her a hug, and she left him.

And the second after he watched the train pull away, he opened the letter:

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Robin,

I am writing to tell you thank you. Over the past year I have learned

much more about myself because o f my experience with you. I have started to

understand myself and to love myself. Also, I think I was very mean to you. I took

your appreciation and your friendship fo r granted.

D on’t be so hard on yourself. Be nice to yourself. One day you will meet

the one who appreciates you as much as you appreciate her.

Best,

Lilith

All of this— all of this—all of this was something so heinous. Something so vile.

Something so cruel. Robin recognized the final revelation in the LSD: Never once in these

moments of intoxication in Lilith had Robin ever thought of Carina. Even when Lilith told him to.

He had been so seduced by his own feelings that he had let something else die.

He held the letter to his chest and tried not to cry. The years. The years he would hate

himself from that moment for all he had taken for granted. That someone had already accepted

him, and he let her go for the sake of chasing an unquenchable something.

222

Boyana and Tim returned to the warehouse, in the guise of returning to torture the

executive, to discuss privately what it meant now that they’d received the virus.

The executive was asleep with his head covered in burlap tied and duct taped to a chair in

the island of light.

Boyana and Tim stood in the dark beside a work benches, the lockers, supplies of all

sorts, an old stereo, dirt, dust, and grime unlike the pristine organized presence of her lab.

The other half of the executive’s cash remained in bundles in a suitcase on the work

bench.

“Listen,” he whispered again holding her by the shoulders. “Listen. I’m saying that it can

work. You’ve never been in over your head before— ?”

“I’ve not lost my head, I’m in control— ”

“It’s a figure of speech— ”

“I’ve know exactly what we do the whole time— ”

“It’s a figure of speech— in over our heads, it means we’ve gone to a point we can’t

control— ”

“You’ve only ever been the one out of control.”

They stopped crouching, stood, pacing— he walked back to her. “Just listen. Just listen to

me. We can make something. We can be other people together. This whole thing— I have no idea

how we made it here. I have no idea we’d ever be here, or why this has happened. Boyana, life is

so strange. But what I know,” and he pulled her close, held her, a tender moment, and he could

see the ice melting even in the dark, her eyes watering and her trying to hide it, to push her face

into his chest, “there is something here, there is something we have, and we don’t have to do this,

and we can get away from this if we try and if we have a plan. But you have to say you want it.”

223

She was crying openly then. “I’ve never felt like this before— I don’t know, I don’t know,

I don’t know— ”

“Nobody does. Nobody knows. But, come on, Boyana, we can— ” He shook her

shoulders gently. “I know how you feel,” he told her. “And I’m so sorry it didn’t work out. I’m so

so so so sorry.” He walked with her toward the light. “And— you know— hey, I know this

matters. The people of this world have been abused. And we can still fight that. We can still

change it. But we have to go.”

She wasn’t crying, then, but glaring at him. “Oh. Tell me more about it.”

“I know— the heteropatriarchy of this world has restricted and controlled our interests

such that anarcho-primitivism and insurgency seems like the only way to undo the abuse of

capitalism. I know. And I know— But it’s a crutch— But I know Alexo represents that, and you

have got to get away from him. I know... I know that...”

She had been tying her bootlaces and wiping her face. She stood up. “I am going back to

my apartment. I want you to be somewhere else.”

“What?”

“I want you to be somewhere else.”

“I have nowhere else to be.” He grabbed her by the arm—

She shook him off—she shoved him hard back into the darkness. “Don’t touch me like

that.”

“Because I need you to stay here and listen to what I ’m saying,” and he grabbed her

again—

She had to punch this time— he caught her fist and hit her in the jaw, hit her again, and

again.

“M aria...”

They both froze, grappled in repose. They’d heard it distinctly from the island of light.

“M aria...”

It was the delirious voice of the executive. He stirred, rolling his head, testing the

bindings.

Boyana shoved Tim away from her— he moved toward her— she grabbed his wrist, dug

her nails in, and it was the most vile look in her face he’d ever seen. Her eyes were white all

around as she bit her lip.

224

Finally, he retracted from her. Sick. He couldn’t look her in the face.

“You deal with him.” She took the suitcase up from the bench, made her way to the door,

the wooden scrape, and left him.

“M aria...”

It had been their one chance at being someone else. It had been his once chance at being

somebody else. Think about it. What could ten million Euro not buy? In terms of a new human

life. Human life wasn’t worth so much. What was it worth? $15,000 a year? $30,000 a year?

Some were worth $150,000 a year. Some were worth $400,000 a year, $2,000,000 a year. So

maybe a human life was worth ten million Euro after all. Maybe it was worth even more. But it

would be enough to be somebody else worth less, or worth more than Tim’s ever was, a person

whose identity at birth had been judged, decided, and turned against. He was nobody. He never

had been anybody. His life was never worth much. But ten million Euro would certainly be worth

more than Tim’s life was now because now Tim didn’t exist.

“Maria... Maria... M aria...”

“Won’t you shut the fuck up, god fucking motherfucking god, man.” Tim turned and

shouted at him. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut shut up!”

The executive started to moan in Greek, and, “Maria... Maria... M aria...”

Tim turned to the stereo, a cassette tape deck— he slammed the deck closed, hit the

buttons— the music began. It was something he recognized, a strong beat and bass from the 70s,

the forceful guitar, the doubled voices of the women. Walking through an empty house, tears in

my eyes. Here is where the story ends, this is goodbye. Knowing me, knowing you. There is

nothing we can do. Knowing me, knowing you. We just have to face it, this time we're through.

And then Tim just screaming at the executive. Screaming and screaming. He rushed over and

tore the canvas sack from his head and threw it away.

It was just a man. It was a man like anybody, his face dirty, tired, feverish. Shocked.

Confused. He had no control at all. He had no understanding or context of this world he inhabited

at all, this island of white light, this man who he knew as the taxi man that had baited him and

won. Breaking up is never easy, I know. But I have to go. Knowing me, knowing you. It's the best

I can do.

“Her name is not Maria!” Tim yelled at him.

“Okay.”

225

He rested his arms on the chair back and shouted. “You understand? She was not your

girlfriend! You never mattered that much to her. She fucking used you for your money like you

were nothing.”

Something about it made the man wince, even more confused. Maybe his English wasn’t

great. But he knew enough to understand. He hung his head.

“What.”

The man started to sob but was holding it back.

“Oh my fucking god.”

Tim turned away he walked back toward the bench, fished around the drawers. He found

something that could work for him.

Now there's only emptiness, nothing to say. Knowing me, knowing you. There is nothing

we can do. Knowing me, knowing you. We just have to face it, this time we're through. Breaking

up is never easy, I know. But I have to go. Knowing me, knowing you. It's the best / can do.

Tim returned to the man with the knife. He waved it at him. “She is not called Maria. She

is called Boyana.”

“Okay”

He held the knife closer. “Say it.”

“What?”

“Boyana.” He leaned on the man’s chest, held the knife to his mouth. “Say it—”

“No no no no no no no— ”

“No, you won’t say it? You won’t say it? You won’t say it? Then you won’t say a

fucking thing.”

Tim started to work on his tongue first, had him swallow it like Tim had always

swallowed his pride, and then found other ways to make the man remember before he worked

him to death.

226

Robin was surprised to find himself returning to AA. Surprised, somehow giddy,

somehow excited. He did feel somewhat a hypocrite: He could still feel the glow of the LSD. And

he’d drank a beer. But still, still, he felt excited.

Hello Robin. Nice to see you again Robin. People smiled and greeted him. He found his

way to the coffee, found a place to stand once again as they all gathered in the church.

It was an easy place to be. It was a community that had relinquished judgment as so many

communities had not. Even the ones doing right.

Was that what drew Robin to this place? He wasn’t sure. He did hope to hear more

stories, other people’s stories, and understand what to do with his own life a little more. Is that

what it was?

“Robin,” someone said.

Robin turned. He seemed oddly familiar: Not so tall, but with distinct blonde and red hair

standing like fire, a crooked smile, piercing brown Latin eyes but pale skin, full lips. He wore a

jarring purple and black 70s patterned polyester shirt tucked into black jeans, a thick buckled

black belt, polished black boots. He was, altogether, an outstanding and mad looking person.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

Something made Robin afraid. Very afraid. Did he know about the acid? Or the beer?

“No, no. Don’t worry.” He laughed staccato laughter. “Don’t worry. My name is,” he

extended his hand, “Chris Kandmin.”

They shook. Robin had an enraging sense of deja vu. “Your name sounds familiar for

some reason.”

“I’m a writer here in the bay, you see.”

“Hell,” Robin said. He laughed. “And you never were put out o f work with those

bombings?”

227

Chris shook his head, confused. “Are you talking about the Islamic State?”

“No no, those book bombers. Remember that?”

Chris seemed to glare at him— he nodded, shook his hands, “oh, right, right. No, people

still buy books. Don’t worry about me.

“Now, Robin, here’s the thing. What you said last time struck a chord with me. I’m

thinking more about you.” He stood closer, a hand on Robin’s shoulder. “It stuck a chord because

a big part of it—I saw myself in your story. It was like my own story. And, well. Hell.” He shook

his head and looked somewhere though Robin. “I feel like I want to offer you an opportunity—

fuck man, I don’t know you— I don’t know you at all, really— you could be a titanic god damned

weirdo for all I know— now you can’t know anybody in this town really, really, you know what I

mean? But I want to offer you an opportunity.”

Robin sensed Chris was genuine about what he said, the way he was so forward, the way

he’d beelined to him. “So what’s this about?”

Chris looked over his shoulder.

“It’s not, uh, drug sales, right, because I’ve just—”

“Stop, stop, goodness gracious. Guys like us are too old for that shit.”

Robin laughed. He shook his head. “Well, o f course they are.”

Chris began to whisper. “I have an influential friend. A musician friend. You said you are

a musician?”

“A recording engineer. Well. Sometimes.”

Chris smile and nodded, “Yes, yes. I knew you were the type. My friend— well, she has

peculiar reasons and specific tastes. She’s a very private person. She is looking for a new

engineer. She is about to leave her band and work alone.” He lowered his voice still. “Do you

know the Sons of Sound?”

Complete shock. “No fucking way. No fucking way. What— no— hell holy hell, do you

mean— ”

Chris took Robin by the arm and they turned away from the church pews. “Hey. Would

you relax, dude? Yes. Mellony Pomene.” He waved his hands. “I’ve just got a good feeling about

you. You’re the type of guy she likes to work with. There’s something... I think it could be a

good fit. Let’s get out of here and talk about it. Here’s my card— thafs my office. My secretary

will give you a drink.”

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Robin raised his eyebrows.

And Chris laughed. “You think I’ll ever be totally sober? And I know you’re not either, I

can smell that beer, daytripper. I just don’t want to huff lines anymore on Monday afternoons.

And I knew you’d meet me here. So. Meet me there.”

Robin rose from the white sofa. Chris Kandmin’s secretary had told Robin to make

himself at home in his copper cast drawing room. Chris would return from Mellony’s hotel

shortly. But the hour had crawled away. So he stood.

Robin already finished the cocktail she’d given him while he waited, and likewise, he’d

exhausted running his finger around the edge of the tulip glass. He bent, his leather creaking, to

set the glass down on the copper table— oh— there, a tablet faded in to life. He set the glass aside,

lifting the tablet.

He heard himself sigh, awe. The tablet was the lightest object for its size he’d ever held,

the surface smooth but paradoxically it made his fingers itch, the color like faint frozen smoke—

in its inactivity it had been invisible against the beaten copper work table. The image, which now

seemed to float as a two-dimensional sheet on its own, presented an icy shard vista of Erebus in

Antarctica—Robin recognized it immediately because volcanoes had fascinated him as a child.

He turned the tablet over; yes, and there, he could see straight through as if looking through a

clouded window pane into the copper room. Even the chips and connections, the boards inside

were forged in the same smoke, just faded razors edge outlines. And he turned it over once

more— the screen was still on. A one way screen.

Robin recognized, heart pumping as he glanced toward the archway and the secretary,

that this was the most advanced piece of human technology he’d ever interacted with.

His hands found two grooves in the back of the tablet, molds for two fingers on each

hand as if he were taking its pulse— and then, indeed, he felt its faint throbbing buzz in his finger

tips.

The vista of Erebus faded out to the transparency of the device’s interior until faint points

of light faded in, all connected like dew on a web— Robin recognized, to his delight, that the

screen became magnified wherever his eyes focused, the connected dew drops becoming clusters

of cascading file icons.

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His eyes caught one, the brightest one, and inside was a newly time-stamped file from

only hours prior: “untitled.” As he focused, the file opened— a text document. He glanced toward

the doorway again, and he could faintly hear the secretary locked in a phone conversation, some

recitation of numbers. Robin looked down and began to read:

Still having a tough time with the next chapter. I sat here all morning just

watching shit happen in the park, watching the sand pour through my hour glass—/

bought it as a motivator, and, you know how it is, now it's ju st a typical desk ornament

along with all the Buddhas I used to follow and not just look at.

I think i t ’s the starting it tha t’s tough. Talking about now, tha t’s easy; i t ’s ju st

observation. Observe, record, catalogue, rearrange fellow people into contradictory

pseudo-people, then add a few paragraphs o f ones unadulterated self to the mix—save fo r

a new name and new hair cut—induce some very small mouth-open awe moments with

these people, and you ’ve got it. It always worked fo r me, right Chris?

But the future is different, isn ’t it? Inventing a world that hasn’t happened?

Seeing the unforeseen, the complications o f our condition unraveling in new ways?

I realized, though, today, that i t ’s bullshit, friends. Newness. The human race

only repeats.

I realized this because o f the specter o f the past, always pulling us, pulling me.

So, listen, because maybe I have proof: after I didn 7 write fo r an hour or so, I found

myself going through an old filing cabinet. Inside I found a collection o f SD cards, one

which said (iold writing. ” I had a look at that, and there I found a text document with

something very old, indeed; my journal from high school. I read through it, and one entry

stuck with me. I ’d like to re-immortalize it now:

October 17th, 2001

45 minutes o f sleep... the morning is beautiful, there are whisps

o f cloud that become thicker and thicker as they make contact with the

horizon in the distance. I wish it didn't have to be so hot and I didn't have

to be so exhausted, because I would like to have enjoyed it.

The day is an uncanny resemblance to August 16th, 1999.

Identical. The clouds, hot light breeze... strangely euphoric remainder.

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I think I can’t look forward. I can look at now... last night, we

stopped doing lines and I stood in the back yard alone to smoke a clove. I

watched the moon and realized that this now was special because it will

never come back, these crazy lust fo r experience, this way we re like

sharks always moving and doing. So I can fee l now.

But I am stuck in the past... it's like I'm looking at a picture o f the

world dated 1999, or 1997, or 1984, and it's really in the distant future,

but I refuse to open my eyes and see that the buildings whose tops tore

into the sky are now hallowed out and crumbling, and all the people o f

all the countries from the old world hide deep underground, as close to

the warmth inside the earth as they can get, fearing the icy grip o f death,

fearing disease, fearing famine, fearing the god that abandoned them. I

still can't see it.

“How do you like it?” Chris asked Robin.

Robin’s eyes jerked up to Chris, standing in the doorway, unshaven beaming and deep

smile lines. Robin’s mouth fell open, his words caught.

“How do you like it?” He repeated, and he grinned. “Do your hands itch yet?”

Robin wondered how his visit with Chris would be different after reading the journal

entry early in the day. He was happy Chris hadn’t been mad— maybe he hadn’t even noticed at

all. After they finished talking about the business with Mellony, Robin was, like he’d expected,

psychoanalyzing Chris without meaning to. But the further into the bourbon he drank, the less he

was able to prod and the more he only listened without meaning to. Finally, as night fell around

the tall white room, Robin was enjoying the photogenic fidgeting and random philosophizing of a

man from another generation whose successful life as an artist made sense to him.

“I used to see something beautiful in decay,” Chris said, “Because there was something

fatalistic about it. Something about full, unconsenting mortal commitment. Something gothic

about feeling things leaving me. You could watch snow melt in the morning sun, or water dry up

and mist away from the asphalt, or whatever, and it was that kind of beauty, the slow molecular

dismissal of things— it’s the creation of negative space, Robin.”

“What changed?” Robin asked.

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“I saw it happen to a person I cared about.” Chris tilted his head and shrugged. “Years

ago I’d never have shared this story because I told myself I was through dwelling on the past.

Now I share this story freely because I feel almost nothing for it.

“See, there— the photo on the corkboard— ” The leather sofa creaked as Chris gestured

with his beer across the room to the wall of framed photos, the corkboard of black-and-white

photos— “see that one, the top right? It’s a picture of the corkboard of pictures I had as a younger

man, if you can believe that. A corkboard I had long before this one.”

Robin strained, but in the dim light and through the haze of the alcohol, the photo seemed

merely a grainy, vaguely grid-like picture of pictures washed out by gloss and reflection. “Yes, I

can see it, Chris.”

“The photo in the center of that photo of the old corkboard—that was of the night I fell in

love for the first time.”

“I can see it,” Robin told Chris. “Who was it?”

Chris set his beer down and began to rub one of his thumbnails. “Yeah. That was twenty

years ago. Her name was Verita. It was a fucking burning summer night in 2001. That night she

brought me gallivanting alone with her. The only payphone in town was at a gas station they were

renovating. I held her hand and led her around the enormous crater where the gas pumps used to

be, and she called some asshat on the payphone which was spotlighted by a big florescent parking

lot light with summer bugs flying around, and Verita was making fun of the guy silently by

making faces. And I took out my disposable camera, and in that one moment I snapped her

rolling her eyes at him but smiling at me. She wore a black velvet dress in the humid summer heat

like it was nothing.

“She was beautiful. Her angry face wasn’t funny to me; it made me sad. She was the first

person to do that. I lost count of the number of times she called me as I touched the phone to call

her. She mocked people to their faces in a way that made me laugh but also feel irrationally tough

because all they could ever do was smile and admit she was right.”

Robin laughed. “I know a girl just like that.”

“I don’t know why,” Chris continued, “but we never had sex. Sex was almost something

beneath the feeling we had, you know? Something so physical.”

Here, Robin bowed his head, admitting to himself that his recent and current relationships

were founded for different purposes.

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“She made chained dolly cutouts from cigarette cartons. She introduced me to genres of

music I never knew had names, and she could draw ink portraits of anybody. She wrote letters,

real ones, long ones. Her room was always dim.”

“So she embodied this beauty in decay,” Robin reiterated. “But what changed?”

It was Chris’s turn to bow his head, then, his eyes focusing on a distant point in the floor.

“She changed. Or I did. But it was an instant. The truth is, I guess— Verita didn’t embody decay

when I thought she did; it was make-believe. But when she actually did , and I realized it, it

terrified me to my core. It was the most terrifying, horrible thing I’ve seen in a person. I know

some see people die and watch them blown into zero— I haven’t seen that, someone being shot up

with a machinegun or burned to death. I have seen corpses. But I saw her shot up with syringes. I

saw her scrap herself out with crystal— not like I’m any better because I’ve huffed mountains,

Robin— but she shot herself to death, scraped herself out, picked her skin away bleeding bit by

bit, pricked into an 80 pound hollow.

“A summer later after that picture in the picture, it was just as hot, but it was disgusting.

We were ten miles high as far as I remember, been awake for days surrounded by those asshats

she made fun of before, a bunch of skinhead girlfriends. But Verita came down hard in an instant.

No warning. It was like a rose wilting in four seconds. She passed out in slow motion, laid down

on my floor, and she was twitching everywhere like a dying fish, but doing it softly. I said, ‘guys,

what do we do, what do we do.’ And they said to me, ‘what are you talking about? Nothing’s

happening. Verita’s just sleeping.’ And I said, ‘well, we should watch her sleep then.’ And they

said, ‘no, you shouldn’t. You’re not her boyfriend. You don’t mean that much to her you know.’”

“She died that way?” Robin asked.

Chris looked up, then, after a time. He held his dark beer before him, and, sudden flash,

the curling of his nose, Robin saw the same poison Chris did in the alcohol. And Chris took a

long swig, finishing the bottle. “She didn’t die a mortal death, no. But it was dead.”

“Maybe it’s the same for all o f us,” Robin said, glancing toward his own glass. “Wilting

away. Scraping ourselves out with one thing or another. But it’s slow enough to be invisible when

you saw it in an instant.”

“I think you’re right, Robin.” Chris stood, walked carefully, and tossed the bottle into the

trash beside the picture window— the bottle clinked with the others. He overlooked the park in its

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blackness. “But that’s not why I told the story. I hope you listened.” He turned away from the

dark and looked Robin in the eyes. “Because I don’t think I want to tell that story anymore.”

It was after midnight when Robin left. Robin told Chris he was excited. He would take

the offer and work with Mellony— when does someone get a chance like that? To work alongside

a muse. But he had to leave.

He was ready. Determined, now, to go home.

The room was frigid and dark, a dampness, his underground apartment with Carina. With

the light on— it was amazing. It was nearly as it was the night he’d left. A few more strewn

jackets. A dish in the sink. A layer of dust on every surface.

He sat. He was still for some moments. Then he sent Carina a text message. Meet me at

Chow tomorrow at eleven. In the back. We need to talk.

They smiled, but they did not embrace. She was right on time. She looked so different,

even from when she’d visited him in jail— her eyes clearer, so blue. She wore more makeup. She

seemed thinner. She’d dyed her hair back to its natural color, to a dusky brown. She had a

concerned look as if Robin were hurt.

“So. We need to talk,” he said.

“I need to leave the marriage.” She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I need to move out. I’ve

already found a new place. But I need to leave the marriage.”

She met his eyes after a long while, and they searched each other’s faces. But there was

nothing that came to mind. Nothing that came to heart for Robin but a profound sense of shame,

of loss, of wonder. He never thought he’d hear these words out loud.

“Well.” He finally thought of something to say. “We had a pretty good run, you know, I

guess. Eleven years is nothing to be ashamed of, I guess.” He was watching the scene without

him.

She laughed. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“We’ve known each other since we were kids. We made it here together. It’s amazing, I

guess. I never thought we’d make it here from the suburbs, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

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“I... don’ know what to say.” It felt silly. All he could think to say to her were things

they both already knew. Things about their own history, their own life together, when they

coexisted before the long steady decay that wore the fiber away, that weakened it so that they felt

they could cut by running.

He borrowed of something else that he hadn’t thought of. “Thank you for teaching me so

much about myself. For teaching me to love myself.”

Carina took his hands then. She smiled. “Thank you for teaching me the same things.”

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Boyana finally awoke. She stood, steadying herself on the walls, and walked into the

frigid bathroom to wash her face with icy water, the dried blood liquefying and swirling around

down the drain.

The sun was setting, so she turned and watched it, the star sliding down behind the rocky

Athenian foothills, colors shifting, settling, and then the dark falling with the cold settling into her

skin and muscles.

The sun set, she turned toward her desk. She waited for a while in silence—there was

only a digital clock that couldn’t tick.

Suddenly she was filled with the urge to write, and fished for a pencil among the debris

inside the desk. She tore the dedication page from the nearest book on the floor— she glanced at

it, a work of fiction, but it was in Greek and she was still illiterate in Greek.

She set the page on the desk and began writing in English:

I just finished watching the sunset. But even with the sun on my face it is crazy cold in

this apartment and I don 7 know why. Things are getting really hard and I don 7 know what to do.

I don’t fee l angry any more. When I think about all the kinds o f people who wrote this kind o f

note I only think o f rock and roll stars, even though not all o f them had a chance to write a note.

For them it was drugs or alcohol and they didn ’t have a chance but maybe the reasons were the

same.

Boyana flipped the pencil to erase— there was only the scratching noise of metal on

paper, the eraser long chewed away. So she continued without editing:

I guess I can ’t go back. What kind o f universe would it be i f I could go back? The guy I

keep thinking o f is Kurt Cobain fo r some reason. I remember that he said that he wished he could

have enjoyed his fam e and fortune like Freddy Mercury but it was impossible no matter how hard

he tried. Even though he knew he was influencing the world positively fo r a lot o f people he fe lt

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like a faker and couldn't stand it anymore. Empathy—/ get that now. This is totally different in a

big way though. He could face up to the people he was influencing, even i f he couldn’t fee l it or

didn 't care. I ’ve killed so many people and I don't know any o f them—I know just one and I met

her on television, but got to know her from you, and you d idn’t even know her either. They only

talked about her. Everyone else was a number. They couldn ’t martyr everybody, or we couldn't.

Who makes them martyrs? I d o n ’t know. She had to be a martyr and everyone else had to be a

number. I just opened a door way to a change, a big change, but I have no control at all. I have

control over myself and that’s it. I do n ’t even have control over the weapons I helped make to kill

and terrorize everyone. Everything works on its own now. Exploding ink. Who the fuck would

have thought books would burn themselves some day? But what did Winchester feel like? Or

Gatling? Or Smith? Or Wessen? Or Einstein? Did they have a vision with their weapons? Better

weapons fo r less death? I know Einstein fe lt bad. I don ’t know anything about anybody else. I ju st

know what I have in common with them: maybe we had a new weapon and a new vision o f the

world. And we have in common the same world. But i t ’s true. Nothing is any different. There are

just more people, more people with less and less people with more and some people in the middle

like us who never really gave a fuck but pretended we did. The world would only change i f I was

able to burn everybody. I have to ask, why the fuck did you do that? Why did you start this? You

were a little girl once who loved everybody and trusted a few and kissed people. But now I say

she }s killed one person face-to-face because he was going to kill me and I d idn’t think twice

about it and no I don’t fee l bad about it because it 's what I had to do. I don ’t fee l angry anymore

after killing him, some cop who wanted to kill me. But there’s everyone else. I wish I ’d ju st stayed

in the middle now and lived and ate and slept well and let it all go on and wash over me and you

and be a cog and a bit o f cinder carbon. We could have had a life, you and me, and I could have

loved you I think. It could have ju st been biology. You know what? W e’d never have met because

what we had in common was the death and fear o f other people, people we didn't know. Maybe

you 11 fin d this letter Tim. I should tell you now that I don ’t know what to believe. I don't know i f

you should know what to believe either. You can go ahead with what w e ’ve been doing or not, but

know you will end up with the same world unless you manage to kill everyone even if you ended

currency and literacy and everything else. I wish I could end this with love or empathy but I

really can ’t because all I've hadfor so long is anger, and now that I'm not angry I ju s t fee l afraid

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and I regret my decisions and I feel ashamed and I wish I had not given myself away to strangers

and my body aches and I am alone.

Boyana set down the pencil and picked up the pistol.

238

Alexo pushed, and the wooden door scraped open against the concrete. And in the island

of light beside Tim, he could see that their hostage, indeed, was dead; his neck and shirt and the

floor were coated in thick blood, his face hidden by his back's disgusting arch over the chair he

was tied to.

And there was Tim, standing beside the chair with his eyes wide and, plain to both of

them, his knees shaking through his jeans.

“What the fuck— you kill our hostage?” Alexo asked him, his gruff voice. He walked

forward with echoing footsteps and the clink of his glock's safety being removed.

Tim held out his hands. “Alexo, please— give me a chance to explain—■“

“Where's Boyana!”

“She’s looking for you!” Tim told him. “She was here when it happened— it was an

accident!”

Alexo spit. “Accident—•” he stepped forward and looked at the dead man's face, then

stepped back. “You accidently shoot through man's nose? How is this accident!”

Tim looked to the floor, his hand holding the back of his neck. “My gun accidently went

off.” He looked to Alexo. The shadows of the hanging bulb deepened his brow even more, and

made cliffs of his wide chin and shoulders. “Jesus Alexo. The last thing I want to do is piss you

off. We’ve had a tough time, I know, I know. But I swear to god it was an accident— you ask

Boyana. The honest truth, okay,” and he looked to the floor again. “We were interrogating him

for hours and hours and hours, since ten last night, and we got tired, and the guy passed out, and

finally Boyana told me this joke to let off—to relax, you know, and she told me this joke, and

honestly I laughed and the gun just went off in my hand.”

Alexo crossed his arms. “Boyana tell you joke?”

“Alexo, I know it's— please, just give me a chance to—•”

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“You tell me joke,” Alexo said. He put his hands on his hips, and again, Tim's eyes were

drawn to his pistol. “I want the joke now , Shit.”

Tim sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck, the sweat on his face. He glanced at the dead

man, only a glance, then back at the floor, and then to Alexo's stone face. Then he took a deep

breath.

“Okay. So there’s— on a farm in the Midwest, in— okay, on a farm in Ohio, there's this

couple lying in bed. He's a farmer, and the woman is stunning and really voluptuous.

“So the farmer is there staring at his wife in bed one morning, and he starts squeezing her

gorgeous breasts, and he says, ‘you know, if we could just milk you, I could get rid of our cow!’

And she frowns. And then the farmer caresses her beautiful pussy and her belly and he says, ‘you

know, if we could just use your eggs, I could get rid of our chickens!’ And she frowns again.

“But this time, she reaches over and grabs his cock and shakes it, and she says to him,

‘and if we could just get this up, I could get rid of your brother!’ ”

But Alexo did not laugh. His face was unchanged.

Tim listened to his own breathing and stared at the floor again.

Finally, with the beats passing and the ticking of Alexo's watch getting louder, Alexo

suddenly erupted in violent laughter.

“Yes! Yes, that is good one. A very funny joke, Boyana's joke. Get rid of your brother.

Ha ha ha ha ha.” He suddenly reached out and slapped Tim on the arm, and Tim flinched and

joined in with Alexo's bellowing laughter. “Very funny joke, Tim. Now I see accident. But you

need to get better with the gun.”

“So everything's okay?”

“Yes Tim. All of this, it will mean nothing soon, huh? This was a useless man. We have

cash now. We send out your toxic cash tomorrow and wait. Let's have drink. Things will change

between us, see. Someone will pick up mess.” And Alexo waved away the corpse and turned

toward the door still laughing to himself.

Tim quietly reached back and pulled the revolver from his waistband, aiming it at Alexo's

back.

240

Robin stood at the highest point of Dolores Park, his last day in San Francisco, his last

day on the West Coast.

He scanned: look how they are, these tiny tribes, huddles of pairs or bunches being

washed by the sun. What— five to ten feet apart? We’re all feeling together, see. They seem five

to ten feet. But it is a lie. See the talking, hear the voices, and here and there people tossing balls

to dogs running, and notice everyone watching the same things. So much laughing at exactly the

same time. Strangers doing yoga or hula hoops or wind cries—there, all eyes, a man standing in

the middle, two poles, creating from a plastic bin the largest bubbles Robin or anyone has ever

seen, at least mansize. One by one, they drift up past the green and gray and into the blue, all the

park oohing together at exactly the same time, even the Hitler haircuts Robin judged so harshly

before. Together.

There were people he would miss. But he had to get out, just as Tim had gotten out—

Robin wondered about Tim. He was standing there, their last meeting place before his great

adventure. Where was he now? It’s not as if Robin were a stranger to leaving for stretches

without sending word home. He hoped for the best. He wished him the best.

Something about it, the scene, the connection, and the LSD returned to him again as a

magic sparkle somewhere in his lungs. As green as the grass was, and the blue sky with the

polished clouds like they'd been chiseled, Robin was brought back across the years to someplace

warmer and began to see while not seeing.

Yes; he was in Thailand with his wife and their Thai girlfriend, riding a motorcycle. They

were staying at the girlfriend’s mother's house in the north, the long straight roads and the vines

and water reaching, reclaiming the buildings bit by bit. They rode up on a market flush against

the left of the road, corrugated steel roofs and walls. On the right was a stone walled clearing

241

surrounded by palms and a one-room house with a thin chimney and a massive metal door. And

Robin slowed, noting everywhere were the running and laughing of scores of cousins and aunts

and uncles, the two musicians singing and playing the acoustic and makeshift drums, pounds of

food on a stone table; a family party. He stopped, and an old man leaning on the wall, one of

many outside the event, beckoned for them to come. So the three of them walked to the wall, and

they leaned and enjoyed thirty minutes of the party in silence, though Robin finally noticed one

woman was weeping.

But then an older brother or a young father guided a child with a hand on his back, and

the party all looked on. The boy had a string of poppers in his hands. They knelt together, lighting

them— bang bang bang!— a chain reaction rushing toward the little house, into it, and then

pinwheels on either side of the door erupted into sparkling light, and inside the little house was a

huff. Smoke billowed out the thin chimney, and around the gaps of the metal door. All were

utterly silent. And then they all turned and left the clearing, away, home. Just like that.

Robin knew— it pressed him on his chest. They’d witnessed somebody’s end. A

cremation. Released by fire.

He covered his mouth: it had been years since he last wept. He realized it was the second

time in his life that death had stared him in the eyes, and the second time that he’d accepted it.

But this time it meant life. It meant acceptance of being a drop of energy in a restless vessel.

He stared at San Francisco for the last time, the patchy grass and the mini tribes all stoned

and laughing. The void was not something manageable. One could only reach blindly into the

void and hope to shake its hand; on good days, it would shake back; on strange days, it would

offer a high five, and one will beg oneself for a stronger drink. There is no control.

It didn’t matter if his mission to record music with Mellony Pomene in New York City

panned out. He would persist. He would move forward. Maybe he would end up in Ontario with a

beard, or Alaska with a hunting rifle. It didn’t matter anymore in a sense that was real.

Robin worked his fingers around the pendant around his neck: a quarter-sized copper

Buddha in a glass shell. Nothingness meant something new now that he’d started casting away

this last desire. He was making good on that realization about death in the jungle all those years

ago. How could he hold on to life with both hands as if it were a terrified minnow? He had to let

go. Everything. Drift.

242

Tim didn’t turn Boyana around where he found on the floor of the apartment. He saw the

pistol, the chair overturned and her slumped into the pool of blood, and he knew enough. He

didn’t want to see the perfectly bored hole in her forehead, the back of her head blown into

layered wastes like a wilted rose. He’d studied the headshot already in the head of the captive

banker he’d shot earlier, and studied it in Alexo’s head too once he shot him the second time

hours prior. Why would he want to study it in Boyana?

He righted the chair without looking at her, facing away from her and the thin-shrouded

window and the Athenian foothills and the midday sun, facing the wall. Then he read her note. He

read it three times.

Was there really no control? Was there really so much of the void in her that this was the

only choice left for her to make? His palms and his scalp started to sweat. But what choice did he

have? What choice had he had? He knew her well, the way she made him feel— how could she

have been a nothing person? But from day one, that look in her eyes. Maybe she’d been a nothing

person all along. But him? He knew he wasn’t. No way. He cared a lot.

He wouldn’t cry because there was so much to do. He was everywhere in that apartment

and in the lab. Both of them. It was a practical necessity to hide everything they’d done, who they

were in Athens. He was relieved there was enough black powder and alcohol and nitromethane to

raze the entire building, not just the apartment and the lab, not a trace of them. Hardly a trace of

her. He’d seen the shows, read the books, and knew not to bumble at the gas station for gas cans

to lug back up the cobblestone hill, smiling like an idiot at the attendant who’d try to help him fill

the cans, grinning like a fool at the women trying to help him carry the cans. How could he refuse

them when he still didn’t know Greek? And they’d all remember that blue-eyed bumbler in a

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blazer with the red gas cans once the place went up in stunning, multi-color chemical flame. He

couldn’t help but laugh aloud at how ridiculous a sight that would be.

Was it relief? Who knows what it was. He thought about the sharp feeling as he first

poured the Bacardi all over the room, and all over her, and then pushed the vinyl curtains back

and poured the nitromethane all over the lab— it reeked, and he covered his face and turned the

air vents on. He was careful not to pour any on the bankers briefcase with all the cash— he

couldn’t help it, and stopped pouring flammables long enough to snap the case open, lift two

bundles of Eruos, flip through them, the stale smell. By the time he’d fashioned the wall timer

and lamp plug into the stripped-wire detonator he’d seen on TV and set it for thirty minutes, he

still didn’t know what the feeling was. He found the black powder and poured it over the lab

bench and the box with the herb shakers, the vials of that wretched virus hidden inside.

Tim Flemen had been dead for six months. His mother, father, Robin, his friends, Sophie,

all of them surely thought he was as dead and burned as Olivia had been. But with the money, he

needn’t go through with their plan, after all, this anarchistic terror and world revisionism. He

could return and make a new life in America again, or buy himself back into the old one.

Wouldn’t even five million Eruo enough to buy him a way in, or a way out, or any way at all?

And he had ten.

There was nothing left to do. He looked out through the shrouded window one last time.

Past her. He wouldn’t look at her body. Everything he’d been in Europe would die in Europe.

And so he went to the lab to switch off the ventilation and take the suitcase so he could leave.

And that’s when he saw it— who knows why. His eyes snapped to that box with the

hidden vials. But the box was open. Not open, exactly, but unsealed.

Hadn’t they received it sealed? And hadn’t the suitcase been locked? He never got a good

look at either one. But his blood curdled. She could have— he couldn’t look. He couldn’t open the

box.

And he’d touched the money. With both hands. The scent. That much he remembered.

Tim scrubbed his hands in the sink with soap until they were red. But when did she have

time? Maybe she’d not done it. Had it been Alexo?

He found the leather gloves in the alcohol soaked dresser, snatched up the suitcase, ran

through the hall, the window, the fire escape, outside, away.

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He sat on the curbside and he started to cry. Hours would pass, and he’d have no idea for

sure. In the night or the next day, the infection would begin, the heat, burning everywhere,

spreading, blisters, the fire inside erupting as the necrotizing fasciitis popped all the cells in his

flesh one by one with toxic gas. And meanwhile, Boyana’s body would already be burnt to ashes,

maybe beyond recognition. Just like Olivia’s had been right before his eyes. The trauma that had

sent him here to do these crazy things in the name of ideals and confusion.

He stopped crying and, again, there he was laughing. He was laughing and laughing.

And three teenaged Greeks, two bare-midriffed girls and a shirtless boy in only shorts

stopped pointing to approach him and laugh too. The boy spoke Greek, and they laughed more.

“Hey. You think that’s pretty funny, huh?” Tim asked them.

“Hey. Yes, you think pretty funny, huh,” the boy imitated as they kept laughing. Nobody

could stop laughing, not even Tim, who wanted to flay them alive for misunderstanding his grief.

So Tim did the next best thing: He opened the suitcase, took hold of a few bundles of

bills, wadded them and threw them at the teens like snowballs—they were silent with

astonishment. “It’s pretty funny!” Tim shouted. “Come on— ” he threw another Eruo snowball at

each of them, cash fluttering. “It’s pretty funny! It’s pretty funny!”

Finally, they began to laugh again, this time with miraculous zeal. It was amazing! A mad

and sobbing American businessman threw thousands of Euros at them just for making fun of him!

It was absolutely hilarious. “Yeah, buy yourself some hand sanitizer,” Tim shouted at them.

Athens, Venice, Paris. He knew he would have to spend the money because he had

nothing else left to commit to the world. Chartered the small aircraft, made the small exception—

Nobody yet knew Alexo was also burnt to ashes in the warehouse and that his jet time share and

credit were no good, and so Tim used them— and he was on his way toward spending money for

the rest of his life.

Minutes after he touched down in Italy, he gave the annoyed jet crew ten thousand Euro a

piece to keep their mouths shut and the engines warm.

Tim spent money on the church. Saint Mark’s was flooded. But he went in ankle deep,

not even bothering with the planks, not even bothering with the line of tourists—pushing through,

why, there’s a line pal, there’s a line buddy, these goddamn Americans, these goddamn business

men, hissed at him in scores of languages. He made it to the first priest he could find and he took

hold the young priest’s arm, ignoring the young priest’s dismay and gestures toward the guards.

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“No, listen listen listen listen,” Tim said, the guards splashing through the water toward

them. “I have a donation. No, no, donation. Donation. Donation.” Then he remembered that

money talks and bullshit walks and just shoved three bundles of bills into the priest’s hands.

Incredulous looks. “Donation,” he repeated. And he shoved three more bundles of bills into the

priest’s hands— he nearly dropped them, the guards catching the falling bundles, the loose

hundreds. And they all laughed with relief of recognizing he was just another fat American

businessman in the midst of an existential crisis. The laughing, the back patting. The grinning

priests motioned for him to come, for the paperwork.

But Tim couldn’t hear them. He was splashing away already. Running. People cheered as

he splashed through the flooded church. The church hadn’t saved him when he was a lonely

teenager, just lied to him. The church hadn’t saved him as a lonely adult, just lied to him. He

imagined as he ran that firefighters had finally put out the blaze that cremated Boyana in Athens.

He spent money on the beggar at the airport because she really needed it: her three kids

were there, and the boy had backward bending legs, and one of her eyes was all red, nearly

bursting from the socket, caked with untouched puss, and he still was looking through her

because he was looking through everybody. But the kid with the backwards legs. Tim really did

see him. So he gave her three bundles of money— he knew she’d spend it for them and never let

them touch it— and continued running into the airport. The white shirt ran gray with sweat,

through and through.

He spent money on two grams of cocaine because he was still used to just saying yes. He

left Charles De Gaulle, rode in the taxi— he paid that in cash, but the cabbie wore gloves since he

knew how filthy money was. In seconds, someone rose up from the subway, the steam swirling

up from the sewer and the Arc de Triumph behind them and all that shit, and he took Tim by the

arm, took him by the throat using the broad Turkish voice. “Come on, man. Do you want some

powders?”

And of course Tim said yes because Tim knew that his money would get nowhere unless

he just said yes all the time. “Yes,” he said, smiling.

He spent money opening a bank account. The sun was setting, and the banker was

locking up for the night when Tim took him by the arm and locked eyes— chagrin of the guards

reaching for MP5s— shooting, “I need to open an account with $150,000 and I need to do it now.”

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Everyone froze. The banker never broke eye contact. But he removed his glasses. “It is

highly unusual. But I think I can help.” And the banker opened the door for Tim.

He spent money opening another bank account. The sun had set, and the banker was

locking up for the night when Tim took her by the arm and locked eyes— chagrin of the guards

reaching for MP5s— and said quickly, “I need to open an account with $150,000 and I need to do

it now.”

Everyone froze. The banker never broke eye contact. But she removed Tim’s hand and

set hers on his shoulder. “It’s quite atypical, I should say. But maybe we should talk.” And the

banker opened the door for Tim.

Around this time, Tim finally accepted that his hands more than itched. They were

burning. He took one of his gloves off, and there he saw the blisters, the white and yellow spots

surrounded by crimson, black spots that he knew would grow to consume him as the flesh rotted

from bone and he lost himself in some perverted fever other sorts of delirious madness. So he

immediately spent money in the nearest liquor store on three half pint bottles of tequila, one for

each jacket pocket. He set a one hundred Euro bill on the counter and took the first drink he’d had

in over a year: it warmed his insides like hot cactus water, unfurled through his nose, and gave

him a sense of relief. He swilled the entire bottle.

“Come on,” the attendant said, head bob and swarthy mustache. “I shan’t break your

hundred, man.”

“Fuck you,” Tim replied. And he threw down two more hundreds before leaving.

Tim spent money in one club on one side of town, a pink lit sort of place surrounded by

dead warehouses. Swilled a half pint of tequila. There was a line of Parisians with two people on

each arm that he pushed through— he spent money on the bouncer roughing up his collar. He

shoved a triplet away from the bar and spent money on more tequila— “Hey everyone,” he

suddenly laughed, “drinks on me.” Only a few chuckled, snorted, gossiped about him. So he

threw money in the air. The bouncers kicked him out as the Parisians kept hanging on and talking

over each other and the classic Kanye West song they all grew up with.

He spent money in another club on another side of town, a white lit sort of place

surrounded by other places to spend money. Swilled a half pint of tequila. There was a line of

tourists that he pushed through— he spent money on the bouncer roughing up his collar. He

shoved a tourist away from the bar and spent money on more tequila— “Hey everyone,” he

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suddenly laughed, “drinks on me,” and the whole bar cheered. And he threw money in the air, and

they kept on cheering and dancing to the Kanye West song they all grew up with— but it was the

same song as in the last place. “Hey,” he said to somebody next to him— he had only seen one

person all day, but definitely could see no one now that he was hammered— “it’s the same song

as in the last place.” He laughed, and they laughed. “Well, we are in Paris, right? Right?” He

laughed again, and they laughed again. It was the radio edit, the awkward sound of boozy drivel

from two hundred guzzling, vacationing Sodomites, strangers, in place of the word “niggas.” Tim

longed for the time of awkward silences in his life then, everything so loud. His eyes stung and

his lips stung and his hands were burning and burning and burning.

He spent the rest of the money at the hotel suite. They’d followed him back, the score of

them all.

“You fucking people,” Tim slurred right to their faces.

And they laughed. He sat down, handed somebody the cocaine and a bill to snort it with.

Then he spent the rest of the money: he opened the suitcase, and, bundle by bundle, began

throwing loose bills out onto the king bed until he had spent all the money. Everyone was

cheering. “You fucking people know what to do,” he told them.

That was the moment, then. He watched the men and the women and others take turns

stripping their clothes and rolling on the bed— it really did shock him.

Finally. Finally. Finally, He finally felt something happen, some sort of connection, to the

world through this moment of lurid madness. It shot through him, pints of adrenaline and pathos

and everything else, through the haze of the booze and the bum in his hands and everything else,

until all those feelings began to fade.

They stopped taking turns, rolling and caressing and kissing together with the bills

sticking to them here and there. He finally saw them and counted them: Six bodies wrapped

together, thirteen observers of the spectacle, and maybe a million and a quarter Euro beneath

them.

He counted, and his head and heart cleared, and he remained connected, but the feelings

faded away. That awful feeling. Counting all those dying people was the last thought he had

before the first moment in his entire life that his mind and his heart cleared completely. At last, in

honest truth, he thought and felt absolutely nothing.