The beginning of the trip, with the streamers and the champagne and the leis and the smiling staff – that was wonderful, like I was in a movie. Everybody was so happy. Maybe my mistake was watching the land disappear behind us, or following cruise ship disasters on the Internet.

In the expanse of charcoal blue water, under the blue sky, with only a thin horizon line to separate the two tones, all I could feel was an impending sense of doom. Bilbo Baggins could commiserate, I’m sure, and I suppose if I had an all powerful wizard helping me along, I would have felt a bit better, but instead I just had a smiling cruise ship attendee who moved my room away from windows and made sure I sat in the middle of the room at meals, away from that ruddy blue ocean.

Getting away from windows meant gambling, movie watching, and a ridiculous amount of alcohol, because even though I wasn’t looking at the ocean, I felt like it was lurking behind every door, waiting to slosh menacingly after me, full of spiny, fluorescent things from the deep.

After I had lost all my money, seen the six movies they had on board three times each, and gone through my allotted alcohol tickets, I took to wandering around the ship armed with Diet Coke and a small mirror that I used to look around corners. I knew the ocean was just waiting for me to let my guard down, so I kept vigilant.

It would cost me about 800 dollars to fly home from our first stop, and since I had spent my savings on the cruise and the gambling, I knew I was stuck for the duration of the two weeks to Acapulco and back. I had 2 days to fill until our first stop at an uninhabited island.

Below deck seemed vast, and I couldn’t help feeling that I was traversing a skyscraper laid on its side. The crew got to know me, chastised me for missing the sunny weather up on deck, encouraged me to use the pools, or, barring that, the video game room. I would just tip an imaginary cowboy hat and continue on, arm outstretched, mirror in hand.

I only had 8 hours to kill before we hit that first island that I couldn’t pronounce, but it seemed to stretch on into infinity. I had gained access to the crew quarters, and I passed kitchens belching seafood smells and a never ending supply of steam as lobsters met their end. I went deeper.

“Sir.” Someone behind me wanted my attention, wanted to put me back on the top decks, in view of the water. I didn’t want to be forced back up to the place where I didn’t belong. I turned a corner, and then another.

“Sir! Please stop!”

Up above, there were hundreds of signs that pointed reassuringly to a blue, person-shaped sticker in the middle of a cartoon cross-section of the ship. You Are Here! The sign merrily shouted in reassuring green type. Those signs were few and far between down here. I could hear the man yelling after me, but it was fainter with every door I went through, every turn I took.

Eventually, I turned around and stopped hearing anything all together. I looked at the door I had just come through and only noticed then that it didn’t look like other doors on board. I turned back to look at the hallway and saw it was lit in bright, primary colors. There were people, but they were silent. I took a step but I couldn’t hear my sneakers. The carpet here was a deep, dark, luxurious blue.

A man came to greet me in a sharp, shiny blue suit with a skinny tie adorned with boats.

He tapped my shoulder and I followed him wordlessly. There were bottles every so often, placed at regular intervals along the corridor. They were labeled in a language I couldn’t understand.

We left the corridor via a mahogany door that seemed too large for the wall, and he closed the door behind me. We were in a library.

“Sir. We are glad you could join us.”

“Where are we? Are we still on the ship?”

“Of course. Take it easy.”

It was quiet down here. I felt my shoulders slump like whatever had knitted them up in a permanent shrug had been cut. I realized that for the first time in four days, I had let myself relax.

“Where am I?”

“You are on a cruise ship bound for Acapulco. And we are happy to have you on board.”

“But where am I now?”

“Some people can’t relax on board a ship. They never get their ’sea legs.’ I call people of your type ’landlubbers.’”

“I miss land.”

“We know.” The man stood up, straightened his tie, went to a shelf where a bottle was. He handed it to me. It looked like water, but it was dark blue and roiling. “What do you think that is?”

“It looks like the ocean.”

“Do you have any idea where we are on the ship right now?

“No.”

“Good. Drink.”

“Salt water?”

“All the bottles out there, they are the answer to fears. Fears are just unanswered questions, aren’t they? And aren’t you worried that you’ll drown out here, so far away from land?”

“Yes.”

“Then uncork the bottle and drink the ocean before it drinks you.”

The liquid looked menacing, just like I imagined. The water line was choppy with tiny white caps. I opened it, I drank, and felt my question answered.

This is what it felt like to die by drowning. When I couldn’t breathe, I watched the man fade away, and the amber lit library was replaced with light green, then light blue, then dark blue, then charcoal.

Two words followed me through the water when I felt the burst of calm from before settle on me like a blanket.

“Man overboard!”

I really, really liked having money. Past tense.

It alienated me from a lot of the people that I love, and it made everything so, so easy.

When you have to spread your money over dozens of bank accounts, and talk to investors and accountants and philanthropy experts and charity cases and hangers-on and family members that are suddenly in dire straits, it’s easy to feel very well-liked and wanted.

Your phone rings constantly and there are people around, constantly.

It dawns on you that what they want is your money, not you. And then you change your phone number and you stop giving out your money because it suddenly is very clear that everyone needs money, and they will always need money.

I bought the place on the beach, and suddenly became very unreachable. I wandered around the many rooms, and I kept them spare. There will always be furniture, and it felt good to have space. I needed space.

And then I didn’t need space, I needed people again. Life is full of cycles, and they are usually dictated by the need for money and then the need for people, or both at once. I used to work those little jobs where, paycheck to paycheck, all that matters is the time where you aren’t earning money, when you need to remember what life is all about, and it feels like what life is all about is spending money.

But when you have money, it’s obvious that what you needed all along were people to spend that money on, and once you don’t need money for yourself… It’s cyclical. You need people and money in equal amounts, and I tipped the scales.

The place on the beach was a stark white mansion with lots of rooms and hardly any furniture. I looked out at the sea and felt small and unimportant and it was exactly what I needed.

I threw a party when the need for people became like the need for water in a sea of sand dunes and dehydration.

Hundreds of people came to that party. I had a band play, with 3 girls singing songs in perfect harmony. Lots of sha la las and doo wa dos. The words that didn’t mean anything drifted around the party, amplified. The three girls were beautiful and people were transfixed by them as much as they were transfixed by the opulence of the place they were in. Champagne corks popped and fizzed, adding a discordant percussion to the music that everyone agreed was celebratory and inviting.

I wandered around the party in a white linen suit, enjoying a tiny bit of anonymity. No one asked for money while the party was happening, and most everyone there didn’t know I was the person that owned the house, and the yard, and that view of the cliff.

I flitted around the party in the background, content. And then I saw you. You were lit by the fire and you were laughing in a light blue simple summer dress. Your eyes, in particular, caught firelight – you were surrounded by people and you hung on everyone’s conversation like delicates on a clothesline. You stood up and danced sometimes, subtly twisting and turning to the music. Everyone followed suit.

I talked to you about lots of things, when I finally got the nerve. You were a very willing audience. You loved the music, you knew one of the girls in the band. I listened to you tell stories about the people in the group, and every silence in our conversation felt orchestrated so that you could hear the music and listen to the ocean and drink from your champagne glass that I filled and refilled.

After the party ended, and everyone left, you stayed. I put you in one of the rooms that had a bed, and I gave you everything you needed. I bought you clothes and I convinced you to take a vacation from work. You invited friends over, we cooked for them. I was so obviously in love with you that it felt painful – I remembered what I was in high school and college and after college and you never took advantage. I showered you with gifts and affection and you seemed content to take what I gave you without needing any of it.

“It’s too bad you have the fence,” you said one morning. There was a fence that divided the house from the sea, it marked the edge of the cliff. It was low and made of cement and had small windows cut into it. I always pretended it was for archers, if I ever had to defend my castle.

“It keeps people from falling over the edge,” I answered. You were nuzzled into the crook of my arm, we were lounging in a chair, watching the clouds change color from the sunset.

“We can’t see the sun set, we can only see the clouds.”

The next morning I rented a wrecking ball. The man destroyed the fence that divided my property from the cliff and the beach and ocean below.

“Much better,” you said.

You helped me fill the house with furniture. We always drank champagne. You told me you felt like you were on a long vacation from life, and I told you that this was all you had to know for the rest of your life. Your life could be a vacation.

We stood on the cliff a lot at night, watching the sun disappear. I worried about holding parties or letting anyone onto my property, because the cliff was tall and the beach was treacherous. The fall could kill you.

“Stop worrying, I won’t fall,” you told me. I worried anyway.

I stopped having parties and kept you instead. It felt treacherous, but you told me not to worry. One morning, I woke up and you had put a sign at the edge.

“Everyone should know,” you said. “Even on vacation, life can be dangerous.”

You have to stand very still.

Try it.

Be still, where you are. Don’t move. Don’t think about moving. Don’t think about your hands, because those always want to move. Have you ever held hands with a girl in a movie on a first date, and you’re trying very hard to never move your hand because you don’t want that moment to end?

It’s uncomfortable. But you do it anyway. You have your hand in hers and you are willing it not to sweat. My advice is to never see a movie that you really want to see with a girl that you haven’t held hands with yet, because you won’t be thinking about the movie, you’ll be thinking about your hand in hers and trying to make it never move.

So, it’s like that, but it’s your whole body. Hold your hands above your head, like you are about to make an amazing dive, and then hold your arms there and then never move them.

If you hold one position long enough, all of your body will start to feel like it is bubbling and roiling. It feels like there is molten lava replacing your blood, and the pins and needles turn to agony, like the pins and needles are actually being pressed into you, very slowly.

And then, if you can, cast yourself in bronze.

It won’t be so hard after you have cast yourself in bronze.

When the bronze cools and you are stuck in that position for the rest of time, it starts to feel exactly right. That’s how you were always most comfortable, you’ll think, with arms held aloft like that.

I’m a statue in a memorial. Many, many people have seen me 95 percent nude. I love clothes, though. Sometimes, people come up and press my feet, like a kind of benediction, and the wool of their suit will touch my bronze form and I’ll think, “I need a suit, I need a suit like that.”

I never get cold. Can you imagine?

This is your other surprise: this is what will really shock you.

I get up, and I move around sometimes. Not often. Not once a week, or a month, or a year. I don’t really know how often I get up and move around, because I don’t think about it much. If I did, I’d have to move around all the time. Not thinking, that’s the key. Monks get it. A monk sat next to me once, he was a veteran from a world war, and he sat next to me and whispered his life as he sat very still. Then he thanked me.

He’s the one who told me about seeing movies with girls, which is something I never got to do.

Instead, there is one thing that I do. It’s only on rainy days, when I can feel that no one is going to come to the garden, no one is going to look at my naked body, and feel sad. No one is going to take my picture.

When I am sure, I get down. I walk down towards the reflecting pool and past the grass and try to be very nonchalant, even though I am roughly nine feet tall and made of bronze and, for all intents and purposes, a statue.

I walk across the grass there, which no one ever walks on, even though I’m pretty sure it’s allowed. I walk over to the grave stones.

And before you judge me, you need to know – anything that won’t decompose on the grave, a maintenance worker picks it up and throws it away. People leave lots of things. Ribbons and letters and favorite candy bars… I think you can tell where this is going.

At one grave, it never fails, there is a full, unopened glass bottle of Coca-Cola. I go to it and open it with the little bit of webbing between my thumb and forefinger, and then I drink it.

I try to savor it, but I never can. It’s so sweet, and so full. It burns the back of my throat and it tastes like drinking sugar, and life. It’s molten, but not hot, and it fizzes. Sometimes I spit the first sip back out, it’s so intense. It’s like drinking a little bit of myself – that copper and bronze and life-force taste of something that was absolutely meant to be here. The world came forth and created something that is supposed to last for all of eternity. Like me. Like Coca-Cola.

And then, I set the empty bottle back on the grave and walk back. I take my time. I feel the grass between my toes, I dip my hand in the water. I look around, nervous because I would never want to be seen away from my perch. People come to this graveyard and see and feel all of these ghosts, I don’t need to be a living reminder of that. I am not a spook.

Those first moments back on the perch, before I hold my arms aloft, that’s always the hardest. I wonder what the world is like outside of the snapshot of sadness and longing and melancholy I see every day. There is this great big beautiful world full of people, the people that drink Coca-Cola and eat candy bars and live and then die and mourn the loss of those that die.

I don’t envy them, not really, because they are hustling and bustling and they are looking for some place out there in the darkness. They are the maintenance workers picking up ephemera left behind to feed a memory, or they are the well-dressed, camera-wielding public who take pictures and look at a view and walk away.

Because, honestly, I have all of them beat. I have won. I don’t have anything to worry about, because I have my place in this large unyielding universe, and it’s up here, on this perch, with my arms held aloft.

I feel bad for all the people born pretty. You come into the world, and people expect everything from you. Maybe you have big beautiful blue eyes, or a speckle of freckles across your nose, so light they’re almost pink. Those poor souls born with perfect symmetry and piano-playing fingers and blessed with preternatural thinness – those folks were born with winning lottery tickets, and now fate wants to know what you would do with the money.

The world really belongs to the ugly ducklings. Born with a blank check and bad credit. A bum leg, a squashed face, a lop-sided skull. Poor you, the world says. You can be a janitor and everyone would expect it – how could they expect more? You could spend your days on minimum wage, enjoying a tiny house with a little lawn to drink tallboys on, and everyone would talk about how sweet you were, once they got to know you.

Me, I was born with a head twice as large as my body, a crooked nose, and a full set of teeth that always made the playpen mothers a little uneasy. “Look at that girl,” they would say in hushed whispers, a yard away from my own poor mother, born lovely but liveliness fading. I was big. Chunky. I beat up all the little boys in Kindergarten, and I had to wear braces all the way through junior high and high school. I tried not to stick out – straight C student. I sat in the back and pretended like I was one of the boys. I laughed at their burps, their farts, their second hand dirty jokes they learned from their older siblings.

“Aw, Sadie, you’re one of the guys,” they would say at dances, where we tried so hard to be part of the wall in our plaid and stripes that we might as well have been wallpaper. Then they all got girlfriends, and I was left alone.

Beauty hit me way after high school, way after community college, my final year of my bachelor’s degree in accounting. My teeth had straightened and I finally started to care about my stringy hair. I had started running track for the school and lost all the Cheeto and SaraLee weight.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still hidden. I never bought new clothes in college. I still wore striped button-ups and beat up baggy jeans and glasses that fell down my face if I didn’t push them back up my nose constantly. I had learned that people didn’t expect anything from me if I sat in the back row and kept my nose a little snotty. My freckles could pass for dirt. I never understood those women’s magazines that told all the women to dress to show off their figure, and go down on a guy the first chance they got. I just didn’t care. I wanted to have my little house, I wanted to have my savings, I wanted to sit at home and watch television and maybe, once in a while, run around a track to get my heart racing.

After college, I woke up one day in my studio apartment without a single person to call. I didn’t have work, I didn’t have graduate school, yet. It was that negative space between goals, and I looked at myself in the mirror after my shower. My face was clear, symmetrical. I took off my towel and looked at my breasts, my hips, my muscular, sculpted legs.

“When did I get like this?” I asked myself, in the mirror. I barely recognized who I was. I put my hair up, out of my face, put on jeans and an oversized t-shirt, and walked to a department store.

I couldn’t believe the amount of people in the store who were trying to change who they were. I sat down in the shoe section and a well-dressed older gentleman slightly put down the running shoes I was wearing, and suggested a pair of 200 dollar flats that weren’t comfortable. In a daze, I bought them.

I bought a dress that another woman told me to try on, praising how it fit my figure, admonishing me for not showing off my legs. I bought bras that fixed my body’s shape into an hourglass, and a perfume that would “finally drive men wild,” as the salesperson put it. Two women from the make-up department put foundation and bronzer on my face, plucked my eyebrows while talking to each other, sprayed something I didn’t hear the name of into my hair. I bought everything. The 15-year-old who rang me up told me I could change into my new clothes in the store, and she sold me a bracelet that would match the dress and the shoes perfectly.

I walked out into the mall and felt new and strange, like a filet of steak that had been pounded and tenderized and shaped and then shrink-wrapped. Men and women looked me up and down, gave me double takes. I found a smoothie place and had the kids make me a protein shake, and I sat down in the food court, drinking and feeling out of sorts.

A science shop stood close to the food court, and I sipped at the last, unblended fruit pieces while I browsed the puzzles. Two pasty, fat looking preteens oohed and ahhed at a telescope. A 5-year-old tried to drag his mother into a small booth for a demonstration of a starlight projector.

I went in. There was only room for me and my bag. The projector was on the floor and the curtains closed to form perfect darkness, and then I pressed a red button and watched while galaxies projected all over my new body. My legs, my arms, my shiny new dress, my funny flat shoes. I didn’t know what I looked forward to, I didn’t know all the promise that the universe had in store, but it seemed like the scales were tipping.

I met Nina at her work. She worked in one of those cafes where the baristas are allowed to be mean, and wear whatever they wanted as long as they had one of those half aprons on.

I googled what she had on her t-shirts. Sometimes it was a band that (of course) I had never heard of. I downloaded their discography and listened to it through headphones on my couch, trying to imagine her listening to the music. The picture I had of her was romantic and probably incorrect – I imagined she played records on her inherited record player in a sparse apartment, sashaying in skirts to these sad bands that played with dark synthesizers and jangly, disjointed guitars.

When I talked to her, I tried to be offhand. “I’m James,” I said.

“This is your espresso, then,” she answered. She worked methodically. She cared about what she did. Sometimes she would talk about the coca-cola notes in the single origin fair trade organic coffee beans that were roasted in house. When I decided to court her, I stopped drinking their drip coffee.

“What’s your name?”

She pointed to her nametag. She was the only one of the workers that wore one. She served the dark espresso in a tiny biodegradable paper cup. I sipped it and said, “What are you doing tonight?”

“James,” she said. She said my name slowly, like it was a foreign language that she was just learning to speak. She looked me in the eyes. “I think you’re going to invite me somewhere, James. And I’ll say yes.”

Forward girl. Whatever metaphorical vehicle we were getting into, she floored it. I took her to my places. Restaurants and secret parks. I tried to impress her with out of the way bookstores and al fresco, twinkle light dining. She took my hand when I offered it to help her out of taxis. We laughed and drank champagne and, even if maybe we weren’t, we did a very passable impression of a couple falling in love.

“Have you always wanted to be a barista?” I was flirting, or trying to.

“I have always wanted to be Serge Gainsbourg’s girlfriend. But I can’t, and I’m not as pretty as Jane Birkin. So.”

I knew I was only getting first level Nina. She was giving me the frosting on her cake, and it was as sweet as I imagined it would be. I wanted to taste the rest of her layers, unravel the rest of her mystery, even if I was mixing my metaphors.

One night, six months after I had stopped going into her café to drink her expensive coffee, she told me that she wanted to show me something. We were three bottles of Shiraz in, and the room was spinning pleasantly. I was laying on the couch where I originally used to only imagine her.

She stood up.

“Are you going to tap dance?”

She shook her head. She did something fast with her fingers, and threw her head back. Her knees knocked together, and held there, like they had become magnets. And then suddenly she started to shoot long trails of light from her fingers. They started like a Fourth of July sparkler, but became something like tendrils of bright white fiber optics. She pointed them at me and they covered me from head to toe. I started floating above my couch.

Then she unlocked her knees and I fell back with a satisfying whump. I felt like my limbs were all waking up from being a sleep, all those little pins and needles.

“I’m a spellcaster, James, but I need a partner.”

From there, my life dissolved. Whatever idea I had of myself as a mildly talented designer at an advertising agency became effervescent bubbles of antacids in a glass of water.

Spellcasting was like a runner’s high. I wasn’t far off when I asked if she was going to tap dance. Our fingers were our tap shoes. She taught me all the routines she knew, slowly, holding my hands, and we filled my two bedroom apartment with what can only be described as power.

“There are consequences,” she told me, laying with me one morning, drinking a Bloody Mary and handing me the celery stick. “Every spell takes something from you.”

“I know. I feel tired.”

“No, it’s like smoking cigarettes. It’s cancer. You cast a spell and some part of you hardens. You use up whatever power your mitochondria has in your cells and then they die.”

She let that hang for a moment, and then she buried her face in my shoulder. “Healing spells don’t take much, though. We can keep each other alive.”

I kissed her. “I’ll keep you alive.”

“Thank you,” she kissed me back, hard. “I’ll keep you alive too.”

We made trees dance and walked underneath oceans. We made private fireworks shows after we slept together. She made magic chocolate, and it spoke beautiful, private words while I ate it.

We were counterfeiters very quickly, and masters of the neighborhood weather. We traveled via radio waves and spent a weekend on the moon. When I was alone, sometimes I would cast a spell to feel it bounce away and bring her love back to me, like a boomerang.

It was so very easy to forget anything that wasn’t Nina and magic. Our hair went gray quickly, and we dyed it together, shocking colors. We made water into wine and felt biblical and all powerful and all encompassing in our love.

When she left, I wasn’t surprised. I told myself she was part sprite, part fairy, part demon. I cast spell after spell, alone, after she left. I didn’t know where she’d gone. I went down to our beach and sent searching spells, but nothing worked.

There was nothing left from before her, and I didn’t know what I had after. I cast everlasting colors over the ocean and hoped they would take residence in the sky.

Like this story and picture? It’s available as a notebook on Blurb. 

My father is spooked. He has crazy eyes. He woke me up, and he looked at me with crazy eyes, and they haven’t gone away. He is sitting on the edge of my bed, looking at my bookcase on the other side of the room. I feel his weight on the bed, because it is a small bed and he is a big man, a bigger man than I am. I am not even a man at all, I am only 12. I think I am a guy, at least. Not a boy. I’m not just a “boy” anymore.

He gets up. “The emergency bag, do you still have it?”

I nod, but he is not looking at me, so he doesn’t see me nod. “Yes,” I croak. My voice hasn’t been used since I went to sleep so it is not yet a voice, just a crack in pavement. I say it again. “Yes.” There it is, there’s my voice.

“Good. Get it and then wake up your brother.” He gets up and goes to my door. “Meet me in the car. Your clothes right now are fine. Just put on slippers and meet me in the car.”

I wake up my brother. “Get your duffel.” He nods, which I see, because my eyes are adjusting to the night. I look at my watch. It’s 3 in the morning.

I packed the emergency duffel when I was 10. I unzip it to look at what’s in it and see I hid Halloween candy in there. It’s 2 year old Halloween candy, in a Ziploc bag. It might still be good. My brother finds his duffel, and I carry both downstairs with me, and out into the garage.

We get into the car, in the backseat. Dad hasn’t turned it on yet. I feel scared, because I do not understand what is happening, but Dad is quiet and he is projecting his quiet all over the car. I think, this is going to be a weird story to tell my friends. I wonder what the ending of the story is.

“Where are we going, Dad?” My brother, who is 9, doesn’t know that the silence is supposed to stay unbroken. The car is cold. He is shivering – he curls up into himself like he does on long car rides when is going to go to sleep.

Dad doesn’t answer.

“Dad?” He asks again experimentally. His voice sounds sleepy.

“I don’t want to wake up your mother.”

“She isn’t coming?” I ask, like a reflex. I don’t know where we are going. I can ask about Mom, but I can’t ask where we are going.

“If I open up the garage door, she might wake up.”

He doesn’t turn on the car either. Mom didn’t wake up when he left their bed? I almost ask the question aloud, but I don’t. I don’t want to talk to my Dad or my brother. Maybe I’m dreaming. It doesn’t feel like any dream I’ve ever had, because it isn’t a dream at all. There are too many details for it to be a dream.

“Is there going to be an earthquake?” My brother asks. He is scared of earthquakes. We packed the bags specifically to prepare for earthquakes, so his logic is pretty sound for how sleepy he is. The clothes in my duffel aren’t going to fit me. I have grown a lot in the two years between packing it and this moment.

“Why would Dad leave Mom behind if there were an earthquake?” I whisper to him.

“There is no earthquake. I just want to leave and I want you both to come with me.” He turns on the car and it sounds like an animal rumbling to life, like a lion roaring maybe. “That probably woke her up.”

He presses his finger to the garage door opener, but the garage doesn’t open. He is not actually pressing the button. The door back into the house opens instead. My mom is a shadow with light behind her. I can see she’s wearing a robe. Also she has her arms crossed. My Dad presses the garage door opener and it rumbles so loudly I think it is going to wake up the neighbors. My brother gasps, because he is probably hearing all the loud sounds as an earthquake.

My Dad backs the car out of the garage slowly, experimentally. We are in the driveway. My mother has walked out into the space the car has vacated and she looks small and her mouth is taut. A thin straight line. Her arms are still crossed, and she is bathed in the headlights of the car.

My Dad pulls up the emergency brake and gets out of the car and goes to her. They talk for a moment and I do not hear a word. They go back inside the house, leaving me and my brother in the car.

“What is happening?” My brother asks me.

“We are in a car while Mom and Dad are fighting,” I say.

I know that they used to fight out in the car, because I saw them once, their voices muffled, their gestures erratic. My Dad hit the steering wheel that time I saw them, and the horn beeped and I ran back inside. I was 9, just like my brother is now. They need the whole house now, I guess. All my guesswork doesn’t matter, because they are not acting like people I have known all my life. This is all scary. And new. They’re acting like strangers instead of family.

We wait. My brother goes to sleep, lulled by the engine that my Dad left running. I lay my head on the window, which is cold. I know for sure that nothing good is happening, and nobody is going to talk about it with me, even if they try. We stay in the car and I know I will never tell anyone this story.

You are alone in an apartment that isn’t yours.

You are taking care of a dog. The dog is active, and follows you around the apartment robotically, like a sentry, like it’s making sure you don’t mess anything up. It nudges your leg with its nose while you drink water from a glass, then wash the glass, dry it, and put it back in the cupboard, exactly where it was before.

Two days ago, you moved everything you owned into a storage container. All of what makes you a physical person that lives in the world – your things – are in a box that is now, for all intents and purposes, owned by the company. For three days, until it drops the box on the lawn of the new apartment, your new home, which is not empty right now. Someone else is there, moving all of their things into a box, presumably. Also, presumably, not one box. Many boxes.

You lost your cell phone. Well, not lost, just misplaced – it will be in the office tomorrow, because that is where you left it, but there was a terrible, fleeting moment where your cell phone was maybe packed into the storage container. Or maybe it was on the street, and someone else picked it up and put it into their pocket, to sell online. But no. It’s in the office, on the desk. Not your desk. A shared desk.

Every now and then you pat your empty pocket, something you do to check for your cell phone. Once in a while, you feel a phantom of the vibration mode. You could swear it was your phone, telling you that you received a text message, but there is no phone in your pocket. You think to yourself, again, for the umpteenth, uncountable time; you think to yourself that your cell phone is in your office and will be there for you in the morning.

It will not have any battery left, so you will have to wake up early to grab your cell phone charger from your overnight bag and go to the office and charge your phone. You need your phone.

The dog licks your knuckles. It feels reassuring. Your knuckles are not something that tastes good. Maybe they’re salty. Dogs seem to be on a constant quest for salt, which is why all dogs try to lick your lips if you put your face close enough. Lips are salty.

This isn’t fact, this is scientific conjecture. You think to yourself, I will look this up on the internet, when I have my computer and an internet connection. You do not have either of those things.

There are magazines in the apartment, but your eyes are drawn away from the text and onto advertisements for cologne and cigarettes and clothes and cars. You can not afford to buy anything advertised, but your mind can’t seem to afford the concentration a 300 word article on “What’s New” demands.

You turn on the television, and turn it back off. You mentally log the channel the television was on, in case you do decide to change the channel to something else. For some reason, you are worried the owner of the dog and the apartment will mind his channels changed. He is away on business and probably does not mentally log the channel he left his television on, but you are worried about it anyway. “Leave everything as you found it,” is the motto.

You wonder what it would be like, if you had a dog, and someone that you were paying to take care of that dog. If a vase was broken when you got back, would you mind? Would you believe the caretaker that the dog broke the vase? Would you try to have that dog caretaker pay for the broken vase?

Would you report him to his supervisor if he messed with the order of your DVDs?

You decide to go to bed, because everything else is too difficult to concentrate on, or think about. You worry about the storage container, and the company who is in charge of it. You worry they will deliver the wrong storage container with the wrong physical life inside. How will you react? In your head, you resort to violence. You would go to the office and break some heads, is your thought.

But you wouldn’t.

You go into your overnight bag and find your toiletries and go to the bathroom. There is a towel hung on the towel rack and you wonder if it is a clean towel or not. Probably not. You open a cupboard that miraculously is the towel cupboard, and you take one out. You wash your face, dry it on the clean towel. You take out your toothbrush.

You forgot toothpaste.

There is a tube of toothpaste, the apartment owner’s toothpaste. It’s out on the counter. You try not think of repercussions and you steal a dab of toothpaste. You brush your teeth, you try to smooth any new indentation marks on the tube that you made, and then-you realize.

You are trying, very hard, not to exist. The dog is watching you in the doorway. You do not, as far as the world is concerned, exist. No one can call you because your phone is lost. Your things are in a void very disconnected to your current reality. The dog is your only reminder of your existence. He needs you. For water, for food, for walks.

You exist because the dog exists and vice versa.

It does not take long for you to resolve to keep the dog awake all night, until you can leave in the morning to charge your phone. You get a ball, and throw it, very softly, across the floor. The dog goes to fetch the ball, and brings it back to you, eyes bright and tail wagging.

Good dog, you say, to remind yourself you have a voice. You throw the ball again.

Good dog.

I met her right before.

My band was playing in a kitschy 50’s diner, dressed to the nines in bowties and matching grey wool pinstripe suits. We were playing Buddy Holly covers and I had on false, thick-rimmed ray bans. No glass, just plastic. The black frames around my vision made everything look like it was on TV.

In the back corner, she sat with a malt glass and a frosted silver tumbler, texting on an anachronistic cell phone. The place was empty, just like every Wednesday night. We were supposed to bring the family diners, but no one wanted to come this far outside of town.

When we finished playing, I unplugged my guitar and crooned “Peggy Sue” while I walked to her, strumming my de-electrified Fender and exaggerating an Elvis swagger. She giggled. She wore simple, shiny, white high heels.

“You should save all that for the stage,” she said. I slumped into the red vinyl booth. I took out a switchblade comb from my inside jacket pocket and combed my hair once through.

“You’re the genuine article, aren’t you?” She said. She wore a red dress with tiny white polka dots, a white bow in her hair. She sipped at her milkshake.

“I like to think so,” I said. I pulled a straw from the dispenser at the table and wordlessly asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing. She took the straw from me and took off the wrapper.

We talked the rest of the night, drank 3 malts between us. Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla. When the restaurant closed, they gave us a sack of fries to go and we went to her car, which was vintage. Blue. An old Chevy boat, complete with fins and white-rimmed wheels.

“It’s my Dad’s,” she said.

We threw the fries onto the white leather in the backseat, and I pulled her close to kiss her, but her phone vibrated in her purse.

“Aw, darn,” she said laughing. “It’s Dad. I gotta run.” She turned to get into her car, but I grabbed her elbow.

“When can I see you again?”

“Tomorrow night, here. Eight o’clock.”

“I’ll be here.”

And I so wanted to be. In all my wildest dreams I never thought I would meet a girl like her, my own Peggy Sue. I drove home that night in my old yellow Datsun and thought about everything I ever wanted to say to a girl like that. I fell asleep that night imagining taking her to a sock hop joint I knew, putting the Everly Brothers on the radio and dancing together, slowly, like in a dream.

When I woke up the next morning, everything felt wrong. The air felt still and strange, like when a box fan suddenly stops. I got up from bed and took a deep breath, remembering my Peggy Sue and ignoring how awkward it felt to move.

The first moments of that inability to move passed quickly, and I went downstairs to open my refrigerator and look for something to eat, but the television was on. My parents were home, which was even weirder than the feeling in the air.

“What are you two doing here?”

“Our… cars. Gone.” My Dad answered, slowly and without any surprise. On television, an anchorwoman walked down a street in San Francisco, and a cameraman followed.

“All cars… disappeared over night… no explanation.”

She repeated similar sentiments after that and tried to interview stragglers, people that seemed to act like they’d never been on their legs before. An interview with a man on the street went nowhere.

Cars were gone. No cars anywhere. National emergency, a nation immobile, et cetera.

All I could think of was my Peggy Sue. The old 50’s diner was about 20 miles outside of town, so I got onto one of our old bikes from the garage, and started pedaling.

It was desolation. The suburban streets of our town looked far wider without any cars congesting the street. Hardly anyone was out and about. I assumed that the news channels had everyone struck dumb, waiting for an update. I passed into the outer limits of the city and watched a mechanic lay down on the cement outside of his business and look at the sky.

But other than that, hardly anything. A lone photographer, a homeless man. I biked slowly, trying to remember the way to the diner without using the highway. It would be safe, maybe, but I didn’t want to risk it.

It’s peculiar, the sort of focus a girl can bring. I had little to no worry about the loss of my yellow Datsun, although I did think about Peggy’s beautiful Chevy. Where had that gone?

It wasn’t an immediate concern. Her real name, which seemed quaint and magical to not know yet, became incredibly important to me. I started to think laterally, trying to move like a detective.

I got to the diner around 6pm, after getting lost a couple of times and stopping at a fast food place to get food. Only the manager was there, but that was because he lived right across the street.

At the diner, which didn’t have a name, just a neon sign that said “Eat” in pink letters at night, the doors were locked. Questioning the staff on Peggy’s real name, real life, became out of the question.

I waited the restless two hours until eight. I did figure eights in the parking lot on my bike until one of my tires went flat. At nine, I started crooning every Buddy Holly song I knew, which took about an hour.

Buddy Holly songs are short.

The air still felt strange. Thick, but not humid. I walked to the edge of the parking lot, listening. It was the most quiet I’d ever heard the world. I could hear televisions that must have been miles off, but no wind.

I heard footsteps approaching. The clack of heels on pavement. Then singing.

I ran down the road.

A memory. We are at the ice cream shop as a team. Coach is buying, because we won. Kelly and I both get Bubble Gum ice cream, which is her favorite flavor. I don’t have a favorite flavor like everyone else. I just choose what Kelly chooses. We sit side by side, eating and spitting the mini gumballs out onto a napkin between us. All the girls on the team are laughing and joking and squabbling. One girl, Lisa, who used to be team captain, has strawberry syrup all over her face and licks her spoon.

“You two are already finished?” she asks, incredulous and mean. Kelly is team captain now, not Lisa.
“Me and Tilly aren’t finished! We still have gumballs!”

Kelly and I eat gumballs for the rest of the night. My sweatshirt pocket is sticky when I get home, and I put two gumballs in my memory box, reverently. They feel important for some reason. It’s the last happy memory I have from home.

*

There’s a bowling team eating ice cream in the cafeteria at the De Young museum. They all have little bags from the Museum Store, which is where I saw them. They were wearing matching shirts at first, but the museum got cold and now they put on mismatched jackets.

I know where all their wallets are.

I can tell, just by looking, that Phil (I read his embroidered name) is the leader. Everyone looked to him in the gift shop to see if he was buying something. When they went to buy food, the other three saw Phil get ice cream and followed suit.

The Phils and Kellys make the world go round, and the rest of us are all content to enjoy the ride.

*

It’s hard to tell you exactly when everything began to change, but when I ran away to San Francisco, it wasn’t because I wanted more chaos. I wanted to get away and find a routine all my own. I thought it was foolish while I packed my backpack, and I cried for most of it, especially when I realized I couldn’t keep my memory box.

Lots of stories have little kids running off to scare their parents, but I knew my parents wouldn’t get scared about me. It was in their dark, sunken eyes. They didn’t even register who I was anymore, I was a cog in their broken machine.

*

When I got to San Francisco I was pleasantly surprised that my planning was mildly worthwhile. Part of that was E.L. Konigsburg’s guide to running away, From the Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I also like to think a good deal of it was my hardscrabble Oliver Twist nature.

I hid in museums. There were groups of kids for camouflage, and families to pretend to be part of. There was my fort in the linen closet in the Cafeteria where they kept their special occasion tablecloths. I had to be there by 7pm, but after midnight, I could roam.

Pickpocketing turned out to be a necessity. I discovered the hard way that since Konigsburg had written, the fountains, with all their glittering quarters, had alarms installed. Some guards recognized me sometimes, so I had to start switching museums more often, with different clothes, at different times of the day. There were new versions of Tilly hidden all over.

Life would have been perfect if it weren’t for my memory, reminding me of everything normal I had thrown away when I ran. I missed my books and school more than any normal 14-year-old should.

*

Phil and his bowling team finish their ice cream and start to move, and I follow behind, stop-starting my walk like a kid caught up in wonder. They go back to the Picasso exhibit and I stop in front of the littler guy, Chet. Phil bumps into Chet, and I fake stumble, grab for Chet’s leather wallet out of his front right pocket and slip Phil’s moneyclip out of the inner pocket of his coat and apologize.

“I love the blue period,” I say nonchalantly. Phil and Chet regain their balance and smooth themselves over.
Phil and Chet’s wallets are the perfect sort of wallet. Older folks don’t trust banks and credit cards like people in their thirities, so they are bursting with twenties. I pocket the cash and then dump their wallets on the museum floor. Someone will return them.

I spend the rest of the afternoon happy. I eat chicken salad in the cafeteria and buy myself a memory box in the Museum store, a little wooden one with gold filigree and a mosaic design.

I fondle the box back inside the museum when someone says my name in half recognition and half surprise.
“Tilly?” I know the voice. The coach of my team, the dad of Lisa, former team captain. Lisa doesn’t turn.
I run.

The museum is sort of built for hasty retreats. There are so many exhibits, switchbacks and twists and turns, but Coach is a lot faster than I give him credit for and I burst out the museum doors followed closely by startled yells of jostled patrons and the squeal of Coach’s tennis shoes on the buffed tile floor.

I duck into bushes on the other side of the sidewalk and he comes through the door shortly after me, running left, calling my name.

I go back into the museum, and spin when I see Phil and his bowling team come out of the museum, mumbling about lost money and the blessing of returned wallets. I don’t want them to see me, recognize me. I want to run, but I’m scared to inadvertently find coach.

I keep my side towards Phil and look left the way Coach ran, and realize how steely my resolve truly is.

I don’t want to be found.

There’s a discount stock room for the Museum Store, dusty from misuse. I head there to wait for night.

So you would like to Party! Many people are “Partying” incorrectly, leading to injury and public humilmiation. It is important to know exactly how to play, so that the Party can go exactly right. Follow these rules to decide the Party’s winner!

Set up!

Step 1: Set your iTunes to “shuffle” function, which is the button with the intersecting arrows. Spend no time bickering about whether or not that is a proper insignia for “shuffle,” as it is pointless to fight with Apple Inc.

Step 2: If it is a Sad song, like “The Sound of Silence,” by Simon and Garfunkle, please abandon shuffle and make a “Party Mix.” Find “Rap” music, “Electronica” music or “Katy Perry.” If your music collection is incomplete, go to Pandora and type in “Lady Gaga.” Beware: many people will try to connect their iPods to your speakers. Do not let this occur, because it will almost always be Tool.

Step 3: Drinking at a Party is said to have its own set of rules, but those rules are actually arcane, esoteric, or wrong. There is no such thing as a “Party Foul.” There is no such thing as “Fumblerooski.” The only rule is at a proper Party, there is alcohol, and those drinks are to be consumed from red cups, re-used jam jars, or misused red wine glasses. Never pour red wine into a red wine glass at a Party. That is a “Party Foul.” Hard alcohol, consumed in a way that leads to dancing and premarital sex, is to be used. A pre-mixed drink like a “Margarita” or “Jungle Juice” hides hard alcohol well.

Party!

Step 4: Now that all your guests have arrived and started to drink too much for their bodies to metabolize properly, it is time to play the main game. Find yourself in a group of four to seven people. Direct the “Conversation” in the way that you, the Partygoer find most interesting. If someone has a “Story” that corroborates with your topic of Conversation, you both get a “Point.” If you happen to have an even better Story than the story just told, you get 4 points. If another Partygoer changes the “Topic” and everyone can contribute but you, go back and find another jam jar of alcohol. Perhaps try “Lying.”*

*Lying at a Party is a time-honored tradition, but no one can know you are lying, lest your title be changed from “Partygoer” to “Liar.” Lie only in new, unexpected ways. Perhaps practice lying to strangers and coworkers before attempting a lie at a “Party.”

Step 5: Physical exertion! There are many forms of Physical Exertion to try at a Party. Some people enjoy “Dance.” If you are a good dancer, you can be labeled as “Sexy” which is worth 400 points and bonus tickets. If you are a funny dancer, you can be labeled as “Goofy” which is worth 250 points, but it does not come with bonuses. Smoking cigarettes outside is a great way to earn steady amounts of 10 points per cigarette. Smoking tricks, like a “French Curl” can be worth fifty. Finally, don’t forget the “Drinking Personality Card” you drew at the beginning of College. Do you remember it? You are either an “Angry” Drunk, a “Touchy-Feely” Drunk, a “Crying” Drunk, a “Messy Drunk or a “Fun” Drunk.

Step 6: Now it’s time to find someone to “Like.” Tally up your points and their points. If those points are matching you are ready to be a “Pair.” It is unwise to pursue a “Pair” if you have less points than the person you have decided to “Like.” This will not go well, and you might have to return to the “Group,” starting over at zero points.

Trying to Win!

Step 7: This part of the Party is difficult to understand. If you are in a Pair, try to find a place to either continue conversing (if you have more points than your partner, this is a great way to even the field) or have “Sex.” Sex is worth more points than can be counted. However, being caught while having sex, trying to have sex and failing due to alcohol, or falling asleep all can lead to losing your points and partner. However, having sex is not the only goal! Perhaps you are just trying to prove you are “Smarter” than the partner in your pair.** Perhaps you just want to “Make Fun” of the groups that are still struggling to gain points. Maybe you both just want to “Eat.” Determining your goal and achieving it is a great way to earn points.

**Note: Party smart is not related to actual intelligence.

Step 8: Sleeping over and How to Leave. Sleeping over at a Party without shoes on is neutral. Sleeping at the Party with shoes on leads to forfeiture of points and personal right to not be drawn on. If you leave in the morning first, you are not subject to the same point deduction as leaving the Party first before everyone went to sleep. If you are, however, the last person to leave the Party (not counting the host) and you have to be asked to leave, you are not allowed to Party again for at least a month. Reexamine your life.

Determining a Winner: Winning a Party is all about points, and more than one person can win! Add up your conversation and physical exertion points. If you left the Party wearing all of your clothes, not vomiting, and more than 500 points from conversation and physical exertion, you probably won! It is important to know who tried to have sex, who “tried too hard” and who thought they were better than everyone else. Discovering a Party’s Winner is difficult, and each Party has to be discussed at length.
Final Note: It could be years before you discover who exactly won the Party, and the rules at each party change indiscriminately. That does not mean it is not important to play.

There are monsters on the other side of the door so I know I can’t open it. I can hear their little fingers scrabbling on the wood, I can see the shadows and light play as they shift their weight, as they try to find sure footing on their many-footed selves. I know they are going to get in eventually, but I can enjoy another twenty minutes, maybe. I have another thirty at the most.

What do you do with thirty minutes?

The room is stocked with a mini-bar. I marvel at the prices that I won’t have to pay, being dead and all. I look at the clock and then look in the fridge and drink two nips of Stoli vodka, one raspberry and one vanilla. I drink a coke to wash the sharp burn out of my mouth, and then open a can of mixed nuts and eat them all, watching minutes pass. I wish I had a cup to mix a drink in, but I can’t find any.

Seven minutes are gone. I hear screams outside. No one is prepared. It’s daytime, but you wouldn’t know it from my room. If you log on to one of those cut rate hotel room websites, you’ll find out that there are a lot of rooms for very cheap if you don’t mind getting rid of modern conveniences like windows. Daytime is apparent, though, from the daytime soap on one channel to the daytime talk show on another. Plus it’s 3 in the afternoon. Who would expect monsters now?

After I finish the nuts, I use hotel water and wash out the can, and then mix myself a raspberry vanilla vodka and coke drink, and it’s delicious. A little salty, like rim salt, like a margarita. I pretend I did it on purpose. I feel the first twinge of my body working to metabolize the alcohol and think about ice.

A monster throws itself at my door and an otherworldly screech follows. Thousands of razor sharp nails dig into the cheap wood and I wonder what sort of creature can’t get through a bad hotel door. Maybe I can fight? I look around the room and try to find a weapon. Everything is bolted down. Even the floor lamp has a chain welded to it. The television is fused with rubber to the shelf that its on. The coffee maker has a thin bicycle lock wrapped around its handle. I set some water to boil anyway. For tea.

I sip at my drink and try not to think about ice. There is a feeble attempt at beauty in the room in the form of two sailboat paintings. Lots of folks probably don’t look at the paintings in a hotel room, or if they do, they see two sailboats. It’s like a game of spot the difference. I realize that these are two different sailboats – they have different names and are laying differently on two different beaches. I think about the painter. How is he dealing with his monster problem? Six minutes have passed.

Another squeal is coupled with the sound of nails running down chalkboard. It stops suddenly, and is replaced with another sound, much worse. It’s nostalgic and horrible all at once, culled from large family Thanksgivings. A group of the monsters with silverware drag the tines of forks against plates from room service. I try not to listen, the sound makes my skin crawl. I suddenly realize that room service is a strange thing for a hotel this size and quality (I had to ask for new blankets twice, due to previous stains) and look around for a menu. It’s room service catered by the T.G.I. Fridays next door.

Could I order something?

I go back to my mixed nuts can and see that I did have cups for water, but they were in the bathroom. I would never have known that a raspberry vanilla coke is good with a bit of salt on the rim, though, and decide that my last 30 minutes on earth have been okay.

I’ve had a good time overall. I’ve known a few women, in the biblical way. That reminds me – I look for a bible, and see someone replaced the bible with a journal. It’s blank inside, other than a flipbook drawing of ice melting. It’s the least imaginative flip book drawing I’ve ever seen.

My door sags under a great weight and I see a yellow eye when the wood splinters. It disappears when it sees me. I rush to the minibar and down four more Stoli nips in quick succession. Cherry, orange, citrus, and then plain. I regret the last one almost immediately. Plain vodka is awful. I drink the last of my salty coke cocktail and let the alcohol numb the rest of me.

A strange percolating sound makes me jump, and I look around the room. The water in my coffee maker is boiling.

I fill two cups with boiling water , wait at my door. The hairy feeler of a monster stretches through the tiny hole they’ve made and I place the boiling water right in its path. A strange squeal of hurt and surprise follows and the monster hastily retreats. I smile to myself. I drunkenly stagger up from the door and spill the other two cups of boiling water.

I start to sing to myself, or at least hum a tune. It’s been a good life. I’m glad I never had to get old, or feel guilty about missing a kid’s soccer game. It would have been nice to be successful at something, but it turns out that it didn’t really matter. You can look death in the eye, know that it’s coming and put the water on to boil, but I suppose death expects tea. I’d like to surprise death instead, offer a cold cocktail, risk seeing death in the hallway. I grab a bucket and decide to head for the ice machine.

I’ve run with a lot of different groups over the course of things. In my 16 years on this earth, I’ve been with the punks, the skids, the jocks, the nerds, the burnouts… and a lot of other ones that no one cared to name. Have you ever picked up a guitar and felt that warmth, that tingle in your fingertips that attracts your hands to the strings like magnets? I get that with musical instruments, but I get that with groups, too. I see a group like the burnouts and my body is just drawn to them, warm like Christmas morning, ready to be easy and smile and spend a week transitioning from whatever I was before to the requisite holey t-shirts and flannel, or whatever the uniform of the group is.

My parents were never very cool with how I am, not from the first ultra-sound onward. Things went really awry when the Weekly World News got a hold of some pictures of my medical marvel ankles and spread the story to all the cranks and conspiracy theorists. I was dumped unceremoniously on child services and started holding the hand of whoever was taller than me, bringing my caretakers over the threshold from normalcy to the weirdness that surrounds me.

It wasn’t until I turned eleven and puberty hit that I started to really feel the pull to be somewhere else. That’s when my dreams started feeling lucid, like I could control something that happened in the landscape, and I could here messages coming from an entity larger than myself.

A morning news show did a story with me once. My foster Dad had set it up, trying to earn a quick dime, even though I had just helped him fix a couple of horse races in his favor. The network showed the wings on my feet, they showed me hover, the two hosts asked if people ever bullied me for being different. I didn’t have much to give them, except for the messages I would get in my lucid dreams. I told them that they were dreams and I told them that I wasn’t positive that anything I was saying or what people said about me was true.

“You get messages?” the fresh faced host asked. “Like text messages?” They both laugh.

“No, like a voice in a dream.” They sober up quickly. I can tell they think I’m crazy. When people think you’re crazy, their voice gets an edge to it, and they try to remain three inches away from your personal space.

“And what do they say?” the girl anchor asks.

“The usual sort of doom and gloom. We’re ruining the earth. We need to stop breeding. The gods are angry we’ve forgotten them.”

“What gods?” They want me to say it, I can tell. They may have said it in the promos and the lead-in, but they are all innocent and wide-eyed now that we’re really into it.

“The gods. The Roman Gods – or Greek. Same set, different names.”

“And are you a God?”

“My Dad would say different.”

“But what do you think?”

“I think I’m a guy with wings on his feet likes to help people and feel special.”

“Do you think you’re…” He trails off, scared.

“Do I think I’m what?” We’re both dancing around it now. One of us will say it, definitely not me.

“Do you think you’re Hermes?”

“Well. That’s my name isn’t it?”

For effect, I flew off, and threw the handful of flour I had been holding, just because I thought it would be funny. The audience and co-hosts gasped and everyone looked up to the ceiling. I floated down the fire escape and then dashed away.

Here’s the funny thing about life after that interview – it didn’t change at all. People don’t like to be challenged, their world view held in question, so I think they wrote me off as a stupid street magician and called it a day.

I hopped schools a lot more often after that. Foster families didn’t usually keep me for more than a month or two – I attracted too many thieves and thugs and other unsavory sorts. For some reason, they come to me for guidance. I criss-crossed the country at least four times, waiting for the country to declare me independent.

When I turned 17, I started asking questions in the lucid dreams – I’d be floating, unable to move, and a voice would tell me things to do. Find so-and-so and tell him he shouldn’t do whatever, or else he’d die. That sort of thing. The gods still like to meddle, but they’ve kept it to a minimum since we discovered electricity and harnessing soundwaves.

18 rolled around and I felt free of invisible shackles. I could fly, too, thanks to a helmet I found in the center of a glacier due to a little lucid dream guidance. All of the weirdness of my life was going to be behind me – I had complete control of my existence.

I thought.

It was during a joyride from LA to San Francisco that I felt it – sort of like the familiar pull to a guitar, or a group of skids, only all-encompassing. I was like Pooh Bear stuck in the window – pulled both directions by two conflicting parties. Hades and the Heavens both wanted my attention.

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised this day finally came, but I wasn’t excited about it. I didn’t have any desire to meet anyone else like me, nor did I want to fulfill my duty of ascending to the heavens to bring messages earthward, or accompanying souls to their doom in Hades. I had seen the signs even before I could talk – who I needed to bring where, and how long they had left.

I saw a cloud bank over the golden gate bridge and engulfed myself in it, unhappy with the sodden thoughts of new responsibility. At least I’d hear the good news first.

The entire point of amusement park rides is to simulate something life-harrowing without actually being dangerous. Going to Disneyland and riding a dark ride even simulates danger, even if it is just a “wild” car ride. You don’t think you can die at Disneyland.

Not all amusement parks are Disneyland, though. Some are like my Boardwalk, near the beach. The point of a place like the boardwalk is to allow the paint to chip just enough, and the wheels to squeak, and allow a couple kinks in the rails to add extra “bump,” to let you feel like maybe, just maybe, this ride isn’t very safe. It looks, from the top of a rollercoaster or the far throw of the scrambler, like the safety net might not be very strong. It might even be on fire.

In the morning, when they turn on the rides, that test ride is almost like a ride without a safety net. For about a minute and a half a day, I’d escape through the high of the heart in your throat, butterflies in your stomach, tingles on your feet feeling. That morning ride is perfect. It’s grey and no one else is around, and all you can hear is the clacking and the whoosh of pistons instead of classic rock. That’s the feeling I chase. That’s why I kept my job at the boardwalk.

But when I fell asleep on the Comet, our old wooden rollercoaster, I knew I had to chase something else.

At about 2:00 every afternoon in our town, everybody hunkers down to get through the rest of the day. Everyone is at their desks with their last or next-to-last cup of coffee, all the restaurants are restocking from the lunch rush, and the only people driving around are mothers getting groceries and the unemployed finding something to do with their free afternoon.

That’s the time of day I found myself in at the end of my halved morning shift, wandering with a cup of coffee from the employee lounge and wondering what to do about my will to continue.

I walked by a little hamburger joint and decided it was as good a time as any to try to eat four of their king sized hamburgers in 20 minutes, and get them all for free, like they said on their sign. The manager wore a nametag with his name scribbled unintelligibly on it and stood at the register, wiping the counter while watching the Discovery channel on the television in the corner.

“I’ll take the challenge.”

“It’s 32 bucks if you don’t finish.”

“That’s okay.”

“Just show me you have 32 bucks and then I’ll do it.”

I ended up having to just charge the burgers to my credit card and he promised to refund the money, which wasn’t very fun, but I sat there in the dingy diner and had four giant hamburgers. They were good – I got them without cheese or lettuce or sauce, nothing to fill my stomach but the meat and the bun, and I finished and felt like I accomplished something, like I had woken up just a little bit.

The man said, “Congratulations, need to throw up?”

I shook my head and looked down at all the crumbs while I wiped my face on two napkins.

“I gotta take a picture of you for the wall.”

He took the picture with a polaroid camera. I made a dumb face where I pretended like I was looking at something on the ceiling and my undeveloped square joined the morbidly obese and bottomless stomached folks on the wall. There weren’t any girls.

I walked out and immediately had an awful stomach ache. So awful that I had to have a taxi home. I got onto my bed and looked up at the ceiling and noticed that the same bland, spiky stucco that covered the ceiling in the restaurant covered my ceiling too.

When I woke up, the feeling that I might die was gone and all I wanted was pitted Kalamata olives. It was specific and strange – I’d never really wanted anything before in the same way. I could feel the taut skin of the olive breaking between my teeth, the saltiness and supreme otherness of the flavor playing across my tongue.

In the shared refrigerator in the house, someone had a jar of green olives and I almost threw up at the sight, they were so close to being what I wanted but so far away. I couldn’t even bring myself to try one.

I walked down to the convenience store and opened up the tiny jar they had right in the aisle, dipping my fingers in and pulling them out one by one, olive by olive, eating them quickly after I tried to savor the first one. It didn’t satisfy me like I wanted them to. I still craved them, the same thing, just olives, so I grabbed every jar they had on the shelf and brought them to the register. I had three bags, double bagged, of olives when I walked out. I saw the confused look of the cashier as a look of envy. I felt like I had drive.

I went back to the house and grabbed a backpack to stuff all the olives in and then set back out in the last hour of full daylight left on that Wednesday with an open jar in my hand. I felt compelled to be out, and away from everything, far away from the boardwalk and my little house and what I’d seen. There was a new voice in my head that spoke only in definite directions. Eat Olives. Walk.

There weren’t any cars on the road while I walked and ate my black olives, both more slowly than when I started. I walked along the road and let something else guide me away from where I was, because I was still asleep, and at least that new voice felt awake.

Me and Winny are finishing our drinks at the shoreside bar and talking about Formula One Racing with a couple that insist racing is an aphrodisiac.

“It’s very exciting,” the man says.

Winny nods. “I bet!” She’s drunk. We’re drinking something that’s made of a pint of different alcohols swirled with fresh strawberries and ice. She’s going to be hungover tomorrow, and so am I.

Winny and I have drunken sex in our beach hut and she makes vroom sounds, and I keep laughing. There are a plethora of “riding” and “driving” jokes to be made, and we pretend we are the Formula One couple for the night.

The next morning, we melt away our headaches in the ocean. Winny insists she knows the scientific names for the fish, using the latin she learned in undergrad to describe the fish by color and size. I only know she’s lying later, back at the bar, when I try to impress the bartender by naming the fish we saw.

I apologize, but the bartender just thinks it’s funny. He isn’t from the islands, but he sounds like he is. He says, “No worries,” as often as anyone else. He has a funny island lilt to his voice – it sounds like he’s strolling to the end of his sentence, not totally aware of how he’ll get there.

We watch the sunset from our bamboo stools, me and Winny and the bartender.

“You newlyweds?” he finally asks.

We take each other’s hands like a reflex, and look into each other’s eyes, involuntarily. “Yes,” we say in unison.

“You’d think I’d get tired of that around here,” the bartender says, blending up another round of Strawberry Sunset, even though we didn’t ask for it. “I like seeing people in love, though. I never have to see the other, ugly side of it.”

Winny and I almost start to think about the ugly side of it.

The bartender laughs. “Hey, what are your names?”

“He’s Rory, I’m Winny.” She extends her hand, to be kissed.

“I’m Mike.” He obliged.

We drink until he closes the bar, and then we stick three fluorescent colored straws into a blender full of Strawberry Sunset and stumble onto the beach to look at the stars.

“What are you all up to… tomorrow?” Mike’s meandering pause made the sentence seem sinister.

Winny and I look at each other meaningfully. I put my hand over hers and said, “Nothing.”

“You all want to come to the Lost City of Atlantis?”

Winny and I both took a sip from the dwindling cocktail blender. “Is that a bar?” I asked.

“No, it’s a place. You have to scuba there. It’s Atlantis.”

Winny and I are drunk, so we fall back into the cool sand and ask questions that he doesn’ answer, like, “How far away is it?” and “Why doesn’t anybody else know about it?” And eventually we placidly agree before dozing off on our beach towels. We wake up once, to have outdoor public night beach sex.

We meet Mike at the pier the next day, nursing our headaches, laden with the Scuba gear that we had bought for the trip. We hadn’t gone out together yet.

“Ready for an adventure?” Mike asks. We nod. He hands us some lightly alcoholic bloody marys that we drink while we helped each other suit up, and then we rented a little three-man motorboat.

Along the way, we tell Mike how we met, trading lines like we had seen our grandparents do. It was the first time we had told the story as a married couple, and it felt like a time lapse video of a flower blossoming in my chest. I smile at Winny and she kisses my sea salted cheek.

Mike listens intently and then shushes us so he can count when we leave harbor. Apparently, his map to Atlantis is counting based. That morning, Winny and I decided that Mike has a couple of screws loose, and was perhaps permanently drunk, but that didn’t mean that we couldn’t dive with him. We were strong swimmers. A new couple. Our rings were too tight on our fingers, but they united us, made us invincible.

It was too loud to talk very much, with the wind whipping through us and the loud outboard motor, so we were left alone with our thoughts and our doubts for a while before Mike announced, “We’re here!” He flashed a smile that heaped trust on the expedition. Maybe we’d find Atlantis today. Have sriracha coated chicken wings and giant margaritas when we got back.

We fit our masks over our faces, and start breathing with our regulators before diving after Mike, who had started already. We follow his bubbles through the warm tropic water, looking at curious schools of fishes and wondering what was in store. Winny keeps looking at me, her eyes magnified by her mask, searching for our complicit agreement to be together no matter what. I take her hand and we kick together, our legs synchronized.

Mike leads us past a shipwreck, which he points out and gives a thumbs up to. He speeds towards a luminous orange glow in the distance, and my heart beats faster. What’s glowing? What’s orange?

A luminous collection of brightly colored fish are all lit by the same orange, and we follow Mike deeper, down into a trench. My hand and Winny’s clasp tighter. What are we doing, following our bartender into a deep sea trench to Atlantis? The fish disperse when we get closer, revealing some sort of beacon, a red-orange herring, a false trail, a piece of aircraft garbage still lit from an internal mechanism.

Winny and I kick upwards, and Mike follows.

“Atlantis must have moved,” Mike says with a shrug, his voice nasally and muted through his mask. “Let’s go back to that shipwreck, I saw a fish I want to check out.”

Winny and I kiss, shrug, put our masks back on, and follow.

“How many houses have you been in?” Little Wilhelm looks up at me with his big blue eyes. He sticks his finger up his nose and I knock it away. “I’ve been in three and I’m going to David’s house this weekend.” I hand him a tissue.

It’s non sequiturs like this that make me happy to teach Kindergarten. For one, I have not mentioned houses at all. I’m teaching the kids about airplanes in preparation for today’s field trip. And two, Wilhelm has already given up on waiting for my answer; everyone else at the table is bragging about how they have been to SIX houses, or TEN houses, or that their Dad owns FIFTEEN houses because he’s a “really state” agent.

I get their attention by showing them the multicolored paper we are going to use to make airplanes. I want to explain the miracle of flight, and connect it to birds and maybe counting. I lead five of them in folding their paper airplanes – they are the five who I’m sure will start their college applications before the advisors ask them to in High School.

The other 13 are either folding fans, which we made last week when our air conditioning broke, or crumpling. I take the six crumplers and give them new paper and teach them one by one how to make their planes. Two of the Room Dads take the rest of the kids and either read to them or show them the miracle of paper airplane flight.

One Dad, Kyle Weathers, brought a balsa wood plane to throw on the field trip. He’s only 19, and volunteers three or four times a week because he doesn’t have anything else to do. He fits in well, sort of like a giant kindergartner. Last week I had to tell him to allow Lettie (his daughter) and Ronald play with the train by themselves, since he was insisting on reenacting Armageddon.

When everyone has a pastel airplane that looks like it might fly, I get our walking ropes and line up each kid behind a Dad and attach them to one another by the rope. Everyone has a walking buddy. If one of them, for whatever reason, forgets to hold the rope and wander off, someone else will catch them and bring them back, like an ADHD insured trust fall.

The field trip is honestly just an excuse to go outside. I like being out in the world with the kids. They have questions, I can answer them. If I can’t, I’ll try to teach them about it in the coming weeks. Trips outside make the kids smile, and gets them to sit quietly for about an hour when we get back. And we always bring our snacks along, which I have in my hiking backpack.

I have to slow Kyle down a couple times. His six kids, including Lettie, are sprinting behind him and keep raising dust on the path. He slows and passes me a chocolate chip cookie he had in his pocket.

“My girlfriend baked these, I think you’ll get a kick out of ‘em.” Kyle’s is 18 and works at a bakery to support them. I want to ask Kyle why he doesn’t work, but I can’t think of a way to word the question that doesn’t imply he’s lazy and irresponsible.

We get to a nice little lookout point and Marcie, one of the crumplers, asks, “Where do all the clouds go when the sky’s clear?” And I don’t know so I just let the question hang. I’m worried that another kid will ask why the sky is blue, which is a cliché for a reason. I forgot the answer a long time ago, and I don’t want to be zero for two.

The class eats snacks on the ledge, and I eat Kyle’s girlfriend’s cookie. It’s straightforward chocolate chip, a little bit crumbly. Underneath is a napkin, and I wipe the edges of my mouth before wiping Gary’s chin, which has banana on it, even though he wasn’t eating banana.

The napkin has writing on it, and through the banana and chocolate smears, I see Kyle’s girlfriend wrote, “Have a nice day, honey. Enjoy the trip down the rabbit hole.” And my heart skips a beat because I’m worried what that might mean. I tell the kids to stay put and I scramble up to the higher ledge where Kyle’s kids are all chewing and fighting one another, and ask him.

“What does your girlfriend’s message mean?”

“Oh. Mimi baked those special. Marijuana in the butter. Should make the field trip just a little bit more interesting.”

I try to remember that Kyle means well, in his giant old man glasses without lenses in the frames. I want to push him for putting me and the kids in danger, but I hold myself back.

“You haven’t eaten any, right?”

“No way, man. I only had one, and I gave it to you. Mimi gave me the cookie to have as a treat after I dropped Lettie off at her grandmother’s.”

“Well, thanks for thinking of the children.”

I tell Rick, the other Room Dad, to watch my group because I feel sick, and I wander off. His kids are all bored to tears, listening to him wax nostalgic on software programming.

I run around thinking that if I just keep my heart rate up, I can help the THC complete its stoner course through my body. But then I lie down, because I’m worried I’ll fall of the ledge. I sit down cross-legged.

I watch a dozen paper airplanes float through my line of sight, and pretend like there are a dozen more, on an endless loop. Hundreds of simple pieces of paper experiencing lift and low level air pressure.

I wonder what I’m going to do when we have to go back inside, and then I wonder, for what seems like a long time, how many houses I’ve been in.

There is this whole world of people that are all trying to do something with themselves, to quite simply tire themselves out so that they can go to bed again satisfied. I number among them. I have black hair and brown eyes, I am nearly six feet tall.

I don’t have a face that a lot of people see as friendly – I’ve looked at myself in the mirror and although I think happy thoughts, I’m scowling. When I get on the bus, people move for me. On the street, people instinctively clear the path, like I have an evil penumbra that they don’t want to touch.

It’s possible that I’m evil. I watched violence and didn’t stop it. I found a wallet and took the money out before returning it, telling myself I needed it. I punched people on different occassions because they insulted me. I never thought all of this was evil, though. I thought they were garden variety misdeeds. But I’ve never thought about what they might add up to.

When I moved to a big city, I found an apartment listing for a roommate and answered. We met over a cup of coffee to see if we could live together, and all he could talk about were money complaints from the last roommate. The last roommate didn’t pay for milk, even though he used it in his coffee. The last roommate wouldn’t pay for cable, even though he sat down to watch when it was on.

The last roommate paid rent for a year and took advantage, it sounded like. I tried to tell him I was different, that I don’t drink milk, even in coffee. It was a joke – he didn’t laugh. He didn’t look me in the eye while we conversed, and I was convinced it wasn’t going well, but we shook hands afterwards and I moved in a day later. He didn’t have furniture in our living room, just a folding chair in front of a television. He didn’t want to buy any either. “I bought pots and pans. So.”

So I buy a couch.

I’ve never met anyone so self-absorbed, someone less interested in the world around him. He would spend almost the entire day away from the apartment, then come back and he would go on his computer. He never said “Hello.” He wrote notes for me on a little white board on our refrigerator. He ordered new clothes and new appliances online. I didn’t know what he did for work, because whenever I asked him a question, I got a long, winding response that never fully answered what I asked.

When I went places, and walked down the street or went on busses or subways. I spent the ride wondering how many of these people were like my roommate. Is that why no one met my gaze? Is that why no one wanted to talk? I knew from movies and high school and books and pop songs that we were all supposed to find someone, and yet here everyone was surrounded by someones, even living with someones, and we weren’t even making an effort. I would open my mouth and people would turn away. I convinced myself it was me, until I thought maybe it wasn’t.

I read travelogues about American tourists who were surprised at the friendliness of the inhabitants of foreign countries, who greeted such friendliness with suspicious glares. Surely, to them, all of this nicety was a prelude to violence. Or at least pick pocketing. I don’t know why these Americans go to different places only to reinforce what they do at home.

I’m not an openly friendly person, but when people are friendly to me, I latch onto it. I’m friendly back. I’m all smiles. When I smile in the mirror at myself I feel like a crazy person.

About six months into the lease, our very unpleasant landlord asks when I’m moving out of the apartment.

“At the end of the year.”

“So you’re not staying any longer than that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Jesus, Adam, you can’t keep a roommate!” Our landlord says. My roommate isn’t named Adam. He doesn’t look up from his screen.

Even though it explicitly states I’m not allowed to in the rent agreement, I sublet my room for a couple of months. I ask the roommate, he nods and asks if he can email the new occupant a list of rules. I tell him sure, and tell the girl I met at a bar who is taking my room to ignore any email he sends her.

When I go to Cancun, I skip the hotel checking in and throw my duffel behind a fern. No one talked to me on the bus to the airport, or on the plane, or on the bus to the hotel. I feel like I reek of desperation – no one wants to talk to me, and all I want to do is talk to them. I remember hearing somewhere that when cells die, they smell of ozone, and I wonder if that’s what everyone can sense when they get near me. Dying of loneliness seems hormonally morose, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

I don’t know where I’m going, and I’m mordantly aware that looking out into the ocean while I contemplate where to go or what I’ve done is a modernist cliche. All I can think about is my roommate and his failure at being a human being, and the constant reinforcement of the idea that maybe everyone is a failure, and then if everyone is a failure, then I am the failure.

The waves crash and leave. I can hear laughter from above and I think about flopping down in the sand just to make an imprint, but I don’t. I’ll do what everyone else does and drink and watch the ocean until it’s time for my flight home, and I hope someone will change my mind about everything.

Desperation makes a high school heart what it is, which is my only reasoning for pretending my car was out of gas so that Eva would help me. I like to think it was sort of a sensical madness. I wanted to spend time with her, but I already was – in class, in the play, with our friends. But asking for time for just the two of us was a labyrinth of “Who Would Tell Who”s and “Would She Think The Worst”s. An emergency made more sense.

She drove me to the gas station and I filled a plastic jug with two gallons, and then we drove around instead of going straight back to my car, because she had things on her mind, and I wanted to listen. That was the most wondrous thing about her; My thoughts cleared away. I could actually hear her speak rather than skim the conversation and think about careful rejoinders or a witticism. It was a new feeling, being a really good listener instead of faking it.

Have you ever had a headache, and instead of two liquid gel Tylenols , your Mother tells you to imagine a cool stream emptying into your poor throbbing head? It felt exactly like that was supposed to feel like, only it was heartache, not headache.

She told me she wanted to go to prom, but didn’t want to wait to be asked. She knew everyone expected Shawn to ask her, but she was tired of their Ross and Rachel drama.

“I’ll go with you,” I said, and immediately regretted it. This is what happens when you have a head empty of thoughts – you’re stupid.

“Perfect, John!” I don’t know if my eyes widened cartoonishly, but there has to be a reason why that exaggeration exists.

“Yeah, it’s better if it’s just a friends thing,” I said. And my mind spun into itself, thinking movies and television clichés could be right, and we could fall in love while wearing fancy, expensive clothes.

You can fast forward to prom. I couldn’t. I still had homework to contend with, and lines to learn for the play, and every afternoon I had to pretend like my character was falling in love with Eva, and she had to pretend that her character was falling in love with me, and I liked to think that maybe all the pretending was just practice for the real thing.

We had to coordinate her dress, my tie. I ended up convincing my parents to buy my tux, pretending like I might wear it again someday. I just wanted the clothes I wore to what seemed like it might be the most important night of my life to be mine. I got my haircut at the same place she got her hair done, but our appointments were at different times. I worried my haircut would be bad, and made a morning appointment to allow a day’s worth of awkwardness to grow out.

The night of prom, I put tissues in all of my pockets, practicing discreetly wiping nervous sweat away. I wore my dad’s cologne, my cousin’s hand-me-down dress shoes. Eva and her parents came over to my family’s house, because we had a rose arch. We took our pictures and then I borrowed my Mom’s car to drive us.

I got lost. I felt like my nervousness was a disease, a brain cancer. Her conversation fell on deaf ears – the butterflies in my stomach had taken residence in my ears, and I had to ask her to repeat everything.

“You nervous?” She finally asked.

“Kind of.”

“It’s just me, John.” Her dress was black. At a red light, I looked over and she smiled, the curls of her perfect hair framing her face. I don’t remember what her dress looked like, I can only remember her hair, her face, the corsage on her wrist.

How is anyone supposed to fall in love in High School, when you drive your Mom’s car, listen to your sister’s corsage advice, try valiantly to forgot the talk your Dad gave you on safe sex the night before? I felt like only half of a realized person in front of Eva, the other half a mix of familial influences that threatened to anchor me to the bottom of the ocean, or crash land me on awkward island.

The dance was a dance. Too many things sparkled, too many camera flashes flashed. Eva and I danced half our dances together, or at least next to each other. I spun her during a slow number, she put her cheek on my chest, and I alternated between two channels, like a person watching two different edited-for-television movies, trying to avoid commercials. On one channel was a boy winning a girl’s heart at prom. The other was a train wreck waiting to happen, with a boy holding his heart out to a girl that might look on in scorn, or worse, indifference.

After prom, we went out with our friends, ties undone, painful shoes tucked safely into purses. I was pretty quiet – I sat next to Eva and tried to only look at her as much as anyone else. We had malts somewhere, pretended we were from an earlier generation, faked earnestness and mixed our decade-shaded jargon. We were groovy, we were the bee’s knees. We were made in the shade. Far out.

I didn’t take Eva straight home. Her dad had skipped the “home by midnight” speech, traded for “Stay out of trouble.” He might have called me “Chief.” We went to a park I knew, and we watched the sky announce its intention to become morning. It felt odd to watch morning approach. I usually only saw it surrender to the afternoon.

I turned to Eva and put my hand on hers and told her I loved her. She met my eyes, dropped them to the grass next to her, and said she had nothing to say.

She had me take her home.

Lounge music may be the best music. Bongos set a beat to sin to while trombones leer, and cheeky singers make references to sex when they could be describing their vinyl furniture or that nameless island where all of this is supposed to unfold. I love tiki culture.

Has anyone ever told you that they had a magical evening? Maybe you read it in a book once, and you thought to yourself – I’ll have one of those someday. I have news, neither good nor bad: magical evenings are attainable. The type of evening where your foot pops when the boy kisses you, or your heart literally skips a beat, the sort of night where you get to make an entrance to staccato snare and crashing cymbals – all you have to do is have a drink.

Or ten.

I think I might have been about seven deep when I met Ellie and the whole world went sideways. I was having one of those evenings where my tie matched the dress of every girl in the joint. That was my line, anyway. The vibraphone matched my fingers as I drummed them on the bar, waiting for my next salubrious concoction – this one was called the Zombie, and I planned to stumble-step my way over to the pretty blonde bombshell that had set herself down near the authentic, genuine, 1/8th scale replica of a Hawaiian waterfall. But Ellie sat next to me just as the keyboardist launched into a squelchy electric solo and I couldn’t tell which had sent my spine tingling.

My drink arrived, complete with two cocktail umbrellas, and I stuck one in her hair before I offered her my hand and introduced myself.

“The name’s Fast Eddie,” I said. I gestured lazily towards the fake granite rocks and the plastic blowfish lights, the bamboo covered walls and the palm fronds on the bar. “I help run this joint.” I get delusions of grandeur after drink four.

Her response was lost in the crack of thunder and the beginning of a fake rainstorm, but then she smiled, and I was temporarily deaf. I could only hear the pumping of my own blood through my own veins. She finally whispered her name in my ear while four beautiful woman harmonized and crooned their way through “oohs” and “ahhs” that sent everybody swooning. I brought her onto the dance floor and we samba’ed and rumba’ed and pressed our foreheads together just like the kids in the movies.

When we ordered another round, she requested Sex on the Beach, and each of the little umbrellas ended up stuck in my the swell of my black pomade hairdo. She made like she was about to touch it, but I knocked her fingers down to my sides. “You’re dangerous,” I told her.

“You have no idea, Ed.” She kissed my neck. I had some idea.

We sipped our way down into the depths, two deep sea divers trying to get away from all that business on the surface. We had Mai Tais like Trader Vic used to make, a couple Fantasy Islands, a Mango Tango, and a pair of pink-tinted Tropical Storms that almost brough us to our knees. That’s the one thing about going about a magical evening, of drinking with a black-haired vixen who can dance her way through string swells and rumbling timpani and pizzicato piano – you never know just when the magic will end.

Our voodoo spell snapped when the band took their well-earned break and a particular seven foot tall saxophonist lumbered toward us. We had ourselves well entangled in a dark corner of the room where our rum-soaked lips could find each other for company, so I didn’t even see the creature coming. He had lips the size of German sausages and hands that could crush golf balls. He picked Ellie up and put her beside him like she was his porcelain plaything.

“You kissing my girl?”

I wasn’t aware the evening’s magic had run out, so I took the trouble to undo his tie before I answered.

“No sir, I was just trying to prove a point about how long my tongue is. Want me to experiment on you first?”

He was less than amused. My Mom has a saying about saxophonists: She says never trust a man who can play sex through an over-glorified golden tube (did I mention Dad played too?). And I never did trust this overgrown tree of a man, except to trust he would cause me grievous bodily harm.
When he grabbed my arm I screamed bloody murder and my night lost its smoky coolness and traded it for cloak and dagger mustiness. He pulled me close and I could smell the brass on his breath. “Stay away from her, you hear?” The implied violence only gained momentum when that fake rain started again, announced by the rumble of fake thunder.

The saxophonist was called back on stage, and he shoved me to the floor. Ellie helped me up and I was lost in her eyes again, while the drummer brushed his cymbals like an old widower polishing her wedding silverware. A saxophone solo ripped through me before I could get lost in Ellie’s eyes, and I was called to attention. I ditched her and went back to the bar, where I stopped with the froo froo fruit cocktails and ended up shooting single rounds of rum that tore my stomach apart to match my broken heart.

I mean, it doesn’t matter how much you love a girl if you know you’ll be destroyed for a little cha-cha.
The bartender felt my pain and stopped charging me once I promised a three-digit tip. I watched Ellie shrink away the same way a drink eventually disappears, and only the ice remains. When I finally fell to the floor (my favorite signal for I’ve had enough) I watched my cocktail umbrellas fall after me, and I wondered when it would rain again.

While the power was out, Mary and I still had 4 hours of juice left on our computers, so we turned down our screen brightness and watched a movie on her computer, about a man who thought he might be dead, even though he wasn’t. It wasn’t a spooky movie, but it felt scary anyway, in our little apartment lit by candles. I got chills, and we held hands while the storm raged outside and the thunder vibrated the dirty plates in our sink. Our gas stove still worked, so we cooked when the movie ended, from a recipe Mary had downloaded. Lightning lit up the kitchen and our faces like a strobe light at a dance party, but we both looked a little bit too frightened to be at a club.

When we finished eating and adding dishes to the growing pile in our sink, we went back to the couch and watched some television on Mary’s computer before it finally powered off. We played a board game by candlelight, and then read stories to each other from our favorite books via flashlight. It was 6pm, but it looked light the dead of night – we pressed our faces against the cold glass of our apartment window and looked at the dark black clouds. I’ve heard the phrase “angry black clouds” before, but I’d never seen the phenomenon until now.

Another clap of thunder rumbled for what seemed like whole minutes, followed by a startling amount of lightning. The tree next to our building groaned under the strain of its poor branches battered by the wind. Mary held my hand again, and we turned on my computer to watch a children’s movie to calm down. Just when the little boy got reunited with his golden retriever and solved the mystery, our power came back. Our lights flashed on. And then just as quickly as it had come, a flash of lightning brought everything back to darkness.

My computer shut off even though I had just checked to see how much power it had, and the little bubble showed 60%. I pressed the power button and typed my name across the keyboard, but the clack of the keys was silenced by another jolt of thunder, so Mary and I decided to just go to bed.

“I’m scared,” Mary said, pushing her body into mine while I pulled her closer. Our bodies fit together perfectly.

“It’s okay,” I answered, holding her hand in mine. We let the storm finish our conversation and waited for sleep.

In the morning, we walked around our apartment without a clear idea of what time it was, since all of our clocks either blinked 12:00 or showed a time that didn’t make any sense for how dark it still was outside. Flicking a light switch and having a light turn on suddenly had novelty, so we turned all of our lights on, even our fan. It smelled like someone had cooked tin foil in the microwave.

Mary went to work, even though it was a weekend, because she had some work to finish that she wasn’t able to do yesterday because of the power outage. The tree had fallen across the pathway in the night, something I thought I should have heard. Trash that had long resided in our gutters and next to dumpsters was thrown into the street to mingle with leaves.

I tried to turn on my computer, but it wouldn’t turn on. I switched to different power outlets, but it didn’t work. I finally switched my battery with Mary’s and turned on my computer, but when it loaded, it showed me the welcome video that I hadn’t seen since I bought the computer three years ago.

“Damnit,” I said aloud to the apartment. “Damn.”

I set up my user account and changed the background to the island tableau I had before, and searched online for a hard drive restore program – I hadn’t deleted anything, I hadn’t told the computer to delete anything, so it had to be somewhere. I paid 80 dollars for a program that promised to put everything to rights, ran it, and took a walk.

Our neighborhood looked like – well, it looked like a storm had hit it. Ours wasn’t the only tree that had cracked under pressure. A couple trees had taken cars with them – I walked past a Volvo that had bisected by a huge elm. One family had started to put the garbage back in the garbage can from around the house. I waved to them and helped another couple of kids get their big wheel out of a tree, then went back home to my computer.
I had all my files back, but they were all on my desktop. I set up my old file system and spent the morning putting everything back where it came from, like the family putting garbage back into its can, only instead of garbage, it was my photos and songs.

One file, “The three of us,” wasn’t something I recognized. It was filled with at least 200 jpegs, none of which had the microscopic preview image, so I opened them into a slideshow, and suddenly lost my breath.

It was me and Mary – with a baby girl. She grew up through the slideshow – a crying red tiny thing in Mary’s arms, a smiling, pink-overalled one-year-old holding my hands and taking steps. The pictures stopped when the girl was about two – she had a bow in her hair, a blue polka-dotted sweatshirt, tangled brown hair that went to her shoulders. She was in a swing.

When Mary came home, I had the computer on the coffee table and was looking at the picture from a distance. I wordlessly pointed to the child on the screen and explained, and she sat down next to me, suddenly and silently crying.

“Who is that?” I asked. She took in a long halting breath.

“You- You forgot her?” Mary paused. “I tried. I can’t.”

Unemployment was having a strange effect on Chase. He couldn’t remember, exactly, what being employed was like. He vaguely recalled better food, more time in an office, the park by his building where he could get really good chili from an illegal vendor on Wednesdays. He remembered the chili better than anything actually – it had quinoa in it, and peanut butter, and tasted so strange that whenever he read sci-fi novels afterwards, he couldn’t help but imagine whatever strange food the book was describing was Mars Attacks! Vegan Chili.

Another strange thing that unemployment was doing: he self-diagnosed himself with light agorophobia. Going out of his apartment (that he was rapidly moving towards being unable to afford) started as a mild annoyance, something that interrupted his marathons of the sci-fi parallel adventure show Sliders on DVD. Then, he stopped liking to take the train down to Chinatown to buy pirated copies of new movies, and he started ordering food from an online service that made it possible to purchase things without talking to anyone.

Without going outside or eating food he made himself, he familiarized himself with the lives of television show characters. Episode after episode of television could slosh over him like a warm tropical wave, and he never felt like anything bad could happen. He never lost his job, he had chosen this life. It was his chosen lot to add, via Amazon and other online big box retailers, huge swaths of television on DVD to his startlingly vast collection. When he finished with the top reviewed television of the most recent decade, he went backwards, starting with comedies and following with drama. He took more comfort from episodes he had seen before, and when he stopped being able to afford new DVDs, he rewatched episodes.

The shows went from warm waves to warm blankets. His stomach grew and seemed to flatten from the plates he rested there. He could watch episodes on mute, saying the lines for the characters, and then he would continue unfinished conversations while the television flickered towards the inevitable credits and production logos.

When he stopped affording outside food, he ordered freeze-dried vegetables and bags of rice and gallons of Kikkoman soy sauce. He turned on a camera to record the episodes to tapes so that he could sell his DVDs, and when he ran out of tapes, he used his old tape recorder to at least preserve the sound. He was finally forced to move, but he sold everything but his tapes and his rice cooker. He moved to a single bedroom in the worst part of town, installed two extra locks, found a television and some lawn furniture in the street and turned his life back on.

While he moved, he was outside for the first time, and he could hardly connect to the scenery around him. There were some great episodes of Scrubs when Dr. Elliot moved, and that classic episode of Friends when Ross was trying to get the sofa up the stairs into his apartment – but it always showed boxes in their old apartment, and then boxes in the new apartment – it seemed like television shows didn’t concern themselves with outside.

The Camdens never moved, and neither did the Brady Bunch. Lucy and Ricky moved and it killed the show. But Lily and Marshall from How I Met Your Mother, Dexter on Dexter, Ryan on the O.C. – they moved. In Ryan’s case, more than once. New shows depended on moving episodes, and old shows devoted themselves to the places they started. He thought he might be able to afford the Leave it to Beaver boxed set, now that he was paying less every month. He could see if the Beaver family ever moved.

One night, his building’s power went out in the middle of the day. His apartment was plunged into icy silence, his warm blanket of television reruns was ripped from him. Suddenly, he realized how thin his walls were, and he listened to the couple across the hall fight about whose turn it was to clean the sink. His next door neighbor was humming to himself, cooking something unappetizing, its fragrance seepingd through the wall, and the person he lived above was crying about something.

Chase turned on his tape recorder and listened to an episode of Frasier, finding solace for his jangled nerves with Dr. Crane’s smooth-as-velvet voice drowning out the horror of this building infested with people. Liz Lemon never heard her building residents in her apartment. Charlie Day only heard cats, which Chase would have liked – he liked Charlie, and always thought he had a folksy charm. Why couldn’t the world be more like television?

When he did finally take walks to make sure his legs didn’t atrophy, he was struck by how ugly everyone was, how plain their language, how unfunny and undramatic. People walked with their heads down, hardly talking to each other on trains, never discussing their private lives in public parks or in stage whispers in the library. Chase walked with his tape recordings of The Office pressed to his ear, picturing Jim’s “ain’t-this-wacky” smile and Creed’s withheld zaniness instead of looking at the world that passed him by.

Chase couldn’t afford his smaller place, so he moved from the apartment to a shelter, stopped qualifying for unemployment and started qualifying for food stamps. He didn’t have to watch the tapes or listen to them anymore, he could just close his eyes and start watching whole seasons worth of Cheers or MASH or Lost. He wondered what it would be like to have a job again. Could he ineffectively sell paper? Work in a lackadaiscal bar? Become a head-in-the-clouds doctor? Run a bowling alley and a law practice? He laughed. He didn’t know, and cared only remotely; he forgot as soon as he closed his eyes.

Why did he need a job? He didn’t want anything. He only needed the backs of his eyelids, his memory. He only needed to watch television.

When Gestalt McKenzie crossed the threshold of the Music Camp bungalow, I dropped and shattered my Mickey Mouse mug.

“I will have top bunk, dear friend Richard, if you don’t mind. I like to be closer to the stars.”

He wore John Lennon glasses with clear holograms of lightning stuck onto the lenses, and walked with a cane that had a tennis ball stuck on the bottom, despite having two working legs. His white shirt was stained with either blood or pasta sauce, and read “Kansas isn’t believable.” He came without bags, without a musical instrument, without restraint.

“I like bottom bunk anyway, Gestalt,” I answered after a long pause, mispronouncing his name. He corrected me and then fell asleep, snoring heavily.

Living with Gestalt at Music Camp was interesting, to say the least. It turned out he had brought a musical instrument; he was a maestro on his full-sized harpsichord that had to be brought in on a special truck. I was right in thinking he didn’t have bags – someone had stolen them. Gestalt thought it was the bus driver, but he couldn’t prove it. He borrowed my clothes until his uncle sent him new ones, which were hand-me-downs from his fat cousin.

His uncle also sent him his chemistry kit, which he used to mix “Good Humour Potions” for himself. Gestalt explained them at length as tinctures and medicines to increase his appreciation of his fingers and tie his primal brain more securely to his higher musical brain. A couple of the guys drank it when Gestalt wasn’t around and said it was just like weak herbal tea.

We were an all boy camp, but once each month, we would play a concert for the girl’s camp across the lake, and then they would play for us. The year before, most of us hated girls, but something had happened since then. Now we were nervous, and had equipped our bags with vats of gel to slick back our hair, and deodorant, to mask our smell.

The night of the concert, Gestalt disappeared, even though it had been him that chose Rhapsody in Blue, to showcase himself and impress the girls’ camp. I thought he got cold feet and had decided to spend the evening back in our room, playing Super Mario Bros. But just when our jitters and nervousness were about to coalesce into adolescent rage, he appeared. He wore what looked like a low rent magician’s outfit. His coat had long black tails, and he wore white gloves to keep his fingers warm and unharmed.

After we played, he cornered me in our bungalow, still in his tuxedo pants and bowtie, and demanded to know the first chair violinist’s name. They had kissed, he said, in the archery field that both camps shared.

“That’s why I was late,” he said, flopping onto my bed. “I was kissing a violinist. She told me I was dashing.”

“You are the most dashing penguin I have ever seen, G. But I have no idea who that violinist was.”

He became obsessed. He asked everybody. No one knew the girl’s name, or believed his story, and he always looked so angry when they accused him of lying. His lightning holograms would flash over his eyes, and I could tell his storm was brewing.

It was the morning of the second performance for the girl’s camp that Gestalt noticed his iPod was stuck. He would put it on whenever conversations got boring to him, which was often, and he would hit shuffle so that orchestral movements would mash together incongruously. But today, every time he hit the next button, Pachelbel’s Canon in D would just start over.

“Well, mathematicians say that randomness dictates that if you shuffle a card deck enough times, eventually it will go back into suited order,” I told Gestalt, who was on his third restart.

This gave him pause.

“So this could signify something? The randomness in the universe could be off-balance today, rendering this meaningless life full of meaning, suddenly?”

“I don’t know if your shuffle reshuffling to the same song means that, but it doesn’t mean it can’t mean that,” I conceded, which was my way of agreeing without sounding like a yes man.

He smiled and threw his iPod on his bed, grabbing his tennis ball-softened cane. “I have to take advantage!” he said. “We both do, come on!” I followed, bewildered, as he marched through our camp, right around the lake, and into the girl’s camp, shouting for the violinist.

A couple girls came forward as violinists, but Gestalt shook his head.

“First chair! I demand First chair!”

“She was sent home a long time ago,” a girl told him, shaking her head.

“Why?”

“She was too homesick.”

Gestalt was crushed. I was too, to tell the truth. I had wanted a girl to appear from nowhere, right all the wrongs in the universe, balance the scales, and tip everything our way. I figured a win for Gestalt was a win for me.

He played horribly in our concert that night, and threw his iPod away the next morning. I started finding playing cards hidden in the pockets of all my clothes and stuffed into my pillowcase, which I took as my comeuppance for making him dream of something better. I would wake to a 3 of clubs in my pillow and the sound of Gestalt crying some nights.

Gestalt ended up leaving 2 weeks before camp was over and stealing almost half of my clothes. He had left a phone number that called a Hooters restaurant in the area and his tincture making set, but other than that, it was like I never had a roommate. I drank both blue beakers the morning he left, and tried to feel the appreciation for my fingers, but all I could think about was randomness, and how I would never be as in touch with who I was as a boy who didn’t believe in Kansas.

Greg put the game together, so the boys look to him for the call, but he looks at Toby, who is holding the bat that got them in the situation. Horace is running his fingers up and down his mitt, like he’s checking it for holes. His mitt is too small by half, his fingers feel crooked after each game from how hard he crams them into the supposedly outsized fingers.

“It felt pretty good,” Toby eventually says, just to break the silence. He hits the bat on the asphalt a couple times, and the aluminum ‘ding’ echoes down the street like one of those Space Sound slinkies you can buy at the science store in the mall. “I mean, it, like, connected. You know how Coach always says you can’t just kick the ball, you have to kick through the ball if you wanna send it down field?”

“That’s soccer, T,” Donald corrects him. “This is baseball.”

“I know what sport we’re playing, Don. I’m just saying, it felt like I swung through the ball.”

“What’s the call, Greg?” Horace asks. His team is down by four runs, and he’s hoping that this sort of infraction, hitting a ball so hard it breaks The Businessman’s Mercedes’ side window, is worth docking points over.

“I… don’t know.” It’s the end of the season. Summer break is almost over, five of the seven boys have already gone back-to-school shopping, secretly wearing the brand new school shoes their mothers bought for them (that promise more spring to their step) and then taking a toothbrush to them when they get home. The teams have been neck and neck for the two month sesason, sometimes getting two games in a day. It’s going to come down to either this game or maybe Sunday’s, if Lyle’s parents let him come out after church. It’s a lot of pressure to make a call like this. Greg hates making anyone sad. It’s his call, though, as all-time pitcher, and de facto referee.

And honestly, Greg’s tired. His sister stayed on the phone with her boyfriend until 3 or 4 in the morning, crying and begging him not to leave her, and he stayed up listening to the one side of the conversation, hoping whatever the boy was saying would make his sister stop crying. The ball breaking the window woke him up; it was surprisingly less violent than something like that ought to be. Bits of glass still fall as the seven boys gather around the car and look at the ball in the passenger seat.

“Is it just me, or does it seem like the ball is waiting to be buckled up and taken somewhere?” Tom says. No one answers. “Just me, then.”

The beginning of Summer found them all in Greg’s parents’ basement rec room, the only place that was cool enough to spend a decent amount of time, and even then, it was only eight or nine degrees cooler than outside. The Summer was going to be board games and scratchy albums from Greg’s dad’s collection until Tom’s parents bought an air conditioner. Then, the world of outside play opened up, with the promise of 70 degree recirculated air and fresh lemonade courtesy of Tom’s mom to look forward to.

The Businessman owns the Mercedes, and it was the nicest car on the street by far. It would have been recognized as poetic justice that it was this car that got hit, if any of the boys studied poetic justice yet. Instead, they just stand there, mouths open, while Greg kicks around the aquamarine shards of glass.

“If you want to know what I think-”

“No one cares what you think, Lyle.”

“I mean, it shouldn’t be a run, since-”

“Shut up, Horace.”

“And if you’re being fair-”

“Nothing’s fair, Don.”

“Well, I’m just saying.”

The teams’ voices blend into one question mark. Greg sighs. The cars mark the boundaries, but the Businessman’s house is the homerun line, and since the car is parked at that boundary… he reaches in the car to grab the ball.

“Ah, goddamnit.” A voice deeper than anyone else’s silences the debate. Greg looks up and sees the Businessman come out of his house. The two teams of boys suddenly make like statues, which is odd, considering the choice to run was equally viable. Greg picks the ball out of the car and walks up to the man.

“Sorry, Sir, we hit this ball into your car.”

“You all did?”

“I did, actually.” Toby says, half-proudly.

“That’s a good hit, son. Where’s home plate?” Greg points to the white jersey, folded into the approximate pentagon shape. “Well, a broken window is covered by insurance, so you boys won’t have to pay for it. But how have you gotten all Summer without breaking a window? Dinging a car?”

The boys look at their feet until Greg takes the Businessman on a tour of the dings and scratches they’ve caused, explaining how they happened and how some of them were covered up with detail paint from Phillip’s Dad’s auto body shop.

“I can’t believe they still won’t let anyone in that park while that stupid court case is going on,” The Businessman says to himself. Lyle almost takes credit for it – it’s his parent’s case after all, and it’s his sister who got a concussion on the monkey bars, but he thinks better of it.

“Well, I’m glad it was my car, since I can afford it, but maybe you guys should stop playing in this neighborhood. Whoever’s got the high score now wins.” The Businessman gets into his car to drive it to the dealership.

Horace’s team groans, but Greg smiles. He didn’t have to decide. He picks up a piece of the broken glass and puts it in his pocket.

“We’re just going to let that guy decide?” Horace asks. The boys take off their gloves, wipe sweat from their brows, and head over to Tom’s house. “Guys?”

My parents’ house had been on the market for a long time – any time I started to think about it too long, I imagined it like a fish at those markets in Chinatown, where they are laid out on newspaper and at the end of the day, their scales are imprinted with the ink from the page, and the shopkeepers hose them out into the sewers.

My parents’ house reminded me of a rotting piece of fish, but it made sense for me to go and stay there.

My parents had moved out about three years before, into my Dad’s parents’ old house in Florida. I had helped them pack everything away, making the tough decisions on cocktail sets they hadn’t used since the last of their friends had moved out of the neighborhood, the Philco television set my Dad swore still worked, the Alpine hiking gear my grandparent’s gave them to help realize my Mom’s dream of hiking in the Alps. I hired a junk removal company to take everything away. I asked the driver what he thought of the stuff, and he just took a look at the mishmash of possessions and said, “I’ve seen weirder.”

Being back in the neighborhood was strange, in an awful and disconcerting sort of way. My entire street had changed since I had gone off to college. And my two best friends, who lived in the house across the street and the house two down and on the left, respectively, had died.

They had gotten married five years before, but no one had been invited and I only recently forgave them for leaving me out – we were the type of trio that you read young adult books about, or make bad romantic comedies about. Paulina and Paul and me; we held hands when we walked places. People speculated whether or not we were kissing one another behind the third grade bungalow, which was where we hung out during elementary school and played Crazy Eights (until third grade, and then we moved on to Poker and secret cigarettes). For a brief period, when we all went to community college together, we shared a bed and I thought I was in love with Paulina, and then Paul, and then I was in love with neither of them and they weren’t in love with me, and I fell in love with Caroline and that’s when we grew apart.

But like a rubber band, after we stretched, we snapped back together. For a while we were a foursome with Caroline, and then a foursome with Nadia, and then, slowly, they were a twosome and I was just a me-some and we only came together once or twice a year. It was very sudden, when I think about it now, sprawled on the floor of my room, wishing I hadn’t made my parents give away the rug I used to keep here. Paulina had made it for me, from carpet swatch samples. They started to cook for one another, and I couldn’t cook. I tried to pick up baking, but the charred muffins and blackened pie discs were not something to bring to them. I started to make myself unavailable, and then I didn’t have to try very hard. And then they got married, and then got themselves killed, and now here I am.

I started to pack after their funeral, put my clothes back in my duffel and my suit back in its suit bag, knowing full well that it was no longer just a suit, it was a funeral suit. I couldn’t bury my two best friends wearing a suit and then wear that same suit to pick up girls or ace an interview. I’d probably find pebbles from the cemetary in the lining of my coat and flub my answer on why I’d be a good addition to the company, or the bedroom.

When I sat down on my bed to contemplate how to spend the six hours from now until my flight back home, I saw movement in the backyard and felt my stomach clench and my feet get tingly, like I was on top of a building and thought about jumping off the ledge. The hairs on my neck stuck up and I walked out into the yard carrying my half full coffee mug, ready to splash intruders.

Two deer stared at me from their spot on the grass. Neither of them chewed anything, neither gave me that look associated with headlights. Instead, they both just stared as I sipped my lukewarm coffee and then sat down to cry. I wondered what the deer were doing there, and I wondered if they had anything to do with how clipped my parents’ lawn had stayed after years and years of neglect.

The bigger of the two deer licked my face while I cried, which I thought was incredibly odd behavior. He smelled like a mix of grass and an attic that you’ve just opened up to air out and I suddenly wondered if he was thinking about eating me, which was stupid. And then the other deer flopped down on its side sort of like a dog and then curled its legs underneath her, like a deer, and I pretended with every fiber of my being that this was Paul and Paulina.

“Hello, you gentle creatures,” I said, still not daring to lay a hand on them. I tried to stay as still as I could. “I’m glad you had each other in the end, but I wish I had gone out with you two.” The one I called Paul licked my middle finger reassuringly. Paulina stayed in her weird, very essence-of-deer sitting position. “Should I stay here for a while, you two?” They cocked their heads in response.

I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t care. Even if they were only deer, I had my friends back. I went back inside and poured coffee into mugs for everyone.

The Billionaire had weighed his options carefully, and then decided that he had too many options to weigh carefully, so he went with his gut instinct and motorcycled out to the countryside with a bag of spare clothes. There were philanthropic meetings that he was missing, a date with his ex-girlfriend who wanted to be reconsidered as a girlfriend, and the looming task of adding another wing to his house because Frank Gehry offered, but he declined to tell any of his obligations anything, and loved his heart beating his chest as he escaped everything. It felt like a dramatic timpani, signaling the end of whatever he was doing and the beginning of something else.

The girl with electricity that coursed through her body sat underneath a tree with a book that she had gotten from the library. It was all about how to make a dugout home, and she thought that this hill and this tree would be perfect. She already had dirt under her fingers from her job as grave-digger, and she longed to not only set the dead underneath the earth, but herself as well. Why did corpses get all the fun of constant cool and natural shelter? The book had dirt stains on its pages and seemed to hold an endless amount of fine sand. She alternated between learning and daydreaming about Bilbo Baggins.

The Billionaire stopped at a diner for breakfast, and he wore his sunglasses inside so that he wouldn’t be recognized. He felt pretty sure that no one in this hamlet would recognize him, due to a lack of subscriptions to Forbes magazine, a fact he had checked with the Forbes editor-in-chief two months before.

He had been on the cover of Forbes magazine twice – once as the youngest billionaire, and again when he bought all that ocean from the UN to make a giant, man-made island. Both times, he had been photographed by Annie Leibovitz, and both times, he felt like he looked too fat.

The electric girl was on a hill half a mile away from the hill she had come to think of as Her Hill. She was sketching and doing a survey of the land; the topsoil and the undersoil – it all seemed ideal. Her dugout home was going to be perfect, and she was going to spend her life on it. A labyrinth all her own. She felt giddy at the thought of it and her pencil lines were more erratic the more she thought about it. She set down her pad and her pencil and stared up at the sky instead, listening to the sounds of the earth and wondering what silence sounded like. Death, probably.

The Billionaire traded his custom-built motorcycle for a dirtbike so that he could ride around the countryside without roads. He felt good, being a participant in the Now, rather than the Far Off Future. So many of the things that beared his name were projects in Development Hell, including his island that was mostly built from the concept drawings for the now abandoned EPCOT dream of Walt Disney. He biked off road and felt peaceful, if a bit more deafened than he liked.

The ground rumbled for a full hour under Electric Girl’s feet, steadily growing in volume until she felt like she might scream along with the tremor. When she saw, in the distance, a man driving a dirtbike straight for her tree, she stood out in front of it and felt angry, which was bad news for the electric system of the bike. It shorted, and then the engine died, and the man coasted down one hill and came halfway up hers before he jumped off the bike to look at the machine quizzically.

“Get away from here!” She shouted, running towards the man and then shoving him. The man took off his sunglasses for the first time in days and blinked in the un-shaded daylight.

“Is this your land?” he asked, confused for two reasons now. Here was a bike that stopped working and a girl who was shoving him. The Billionaire was too mild-mannered to be mad or shove back. Instead, he absorbed the shove and fell down.

“No, it’s no one’s land, but it’s my home!” the electric girl said. She was ferocious at the beginning of the sentence, but confused and annoyed at the end.
“Oh,” The Billionaire said. “My name’s David.”

“I’m Claire. Your bike won’t work again. I broke it.” The air crackled between them, which David took to mean that he was falling in love. He didn’t think this a lot, but he had never felt electricity between himself and a girl before.

“How did you break it, Claire?”

The electric girl was going to explain, but when she opened her mouth to do so, she cried instead, and then ran away to the tree. Her illusion of escape was shattered.

“Don’t worry, I’m not mad, I’m just confused,” David said, following. He saw the mud house book propped up on tree roots and put two and two together quickly. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“Wait, David. What are you doing here? I’m sorry about your bike. I promised myself never to break anything again, and yet here I am, breaking your things.”

“I don’t mind, I can always buy new things,” David answered. “I was just trying to escape,” he added.

Claire looked at David and saw in him a kindred spirit. “I’m making a house out of mud so that I can be away from electricity.”

“Why not just join an Amish community?”

“You’re not the first person to suggest that.”

David rolled up his sleeves, happy to be only David, and not David the Billionaire. “Well, can I help?”

Claire looked at his nails, which were pristine, and grabbed his hands, which were soft. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said.

“Good thing I’m not looking for easy,” he answered.

And they both began to dig.

I realized after Season 1 of The Tunnel that I was going to want to participate, even if I was the creator and even if I knew it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. We were going to raise the stakes, and the finale of Season 2 was going to be out of this world. Perhaps a bloodbath, perhaps a meditation on human frailty, but we were paying two separate orchestras a lot of money to create bombastic scores for the last and next-to-last episode of Season 2.

I originally had this idea for a television show where a secret society had perfected time travel and a tourism agency had stolen it, allowing people to go back in time to major historical events. The plot of virtually every episode was going to be the same – tourists go back in time and do something that messes up our eternal timeline, the government agency goes back and cleans up the mess. A librarian leading a double life was the main protagonist, and he was in love with Marie Antoinette. High concept? Yeah. But it was essentially Back to the Future, every week, and I thought that the American public would eventually bite for the historical set pieces alone. The pilot took place on the Titanic. It was going to be gold.

But then that tanked because the production company pulled out and the librarian lead got his wife pregnant and eschewed acting all together, and then the network pulled the plug and I was left with a half-shot pilot and a lot of extra time on my hands to pitch new stories. I was also pretty poor because in an amphetamine haze I decided to pour a lot of my own money into that pilot and I learned what James Cameron learned a decade and a half before me – the Titanic is an expensive boat.

I kept having this dream where a beautiful woman in a gold bikini covered me in honey poured from a golden goblet and then I was ushered into a subway tunnel full of money whipping around me, and I grabbed at it and stuck it to myself. I would wake up with my bedsheets stripped, but then I would get a cup of coffee and waste time looking out the window and thinking about ways to make a wind tunnel full of money a reality. I was pretty sure I’d seen it somewhere before – maybe on a stunt show or something, but I started asking “what if?” questions and I knew I was coming up with a pilot for a reality game show.

I pitched The Tunnel like this: It’s Survivor meets American Idol by way of Fear Factor. People explain their ideas of the crazy thing they were going to do to a panel of former State Supreme Court judges, and those judges tell them how long they get to spend in the wind tunnel full of money. Each episode will start at an American Idol-style pitch meeting, then transition to someone doing their stunt, and then last week’s contestant in the tunnel full of money, wildly grabbing in front of a studio audience.

Vouchers for free cars, fabulous vacations, new houses and shopping sprees whipped around in the eponymous Tunnel. The smallest dollar bill denomination was 100 dollars.

The catch? We devised no safety net. If the stunt was dangerous, it was the contestant’s danger. The entire world would hold their breath.

The network that pulled funding from my time travel television show (called Paradox, by the way) ponied up the cash for the first season of The Tunnel and it was far and away the most highly rated show on all of television. It pulled Superbowl-esque ratings every week. Other networks stopped programming anything against it, instead, they bought syndication rights for the previous weeks’ episode – by the episode.

I watched a man try to fight a California Black Bear (eight minutes in the tunnel). A woman played a grandiose game of chicken in her Ford Taurus against a Ford Prius (Ford was our sponsor) (four minutes). A twin brother duo deep sea dove into the Mariana Trench and then fought a robotic shark (twelve minutes). Another man spent a hellish 15 days at the bottom of a well – climbing out on the 15th day to a cheering viewing public (fifteen minutes).

And I kept having my dream. I helped edit the live broadcast of the stunts and did the legwork getting sponsors to give away wild prizes in the tunnel, but every night, I’d fall asleep and dream of the woman in the gold bikini pouring honey on me, and then I would get into the tunnel. The idea entranced me as much as it caught the imagination of any of our crackpots on the show.

When Season 1 finished, the executive producers of the show said that Season 2 had to be bigger. Bigger stunts, bigger cash rewards, bigger boobs on the bikini girl. And I told them fine, do whatever they wanted, the idea was never my baby. When they came back at me with the idea for a Battle Royale at the end of Season 2 between all the stunt survivors for 10 million dollars, tax free, I told them sure, without really thinking about it.

Instead, I was covering legal pads with ideas of how I could get onto the show and stay in the tunnel for the longest time yet. Some self-styled experts started valuing a minute in the tunnel at 25,000 dollars, but that wasn’t why I wanted to do it. I had enough money. I just wanted to feel what it was like to be in the tunnel that I created, to live the dream that I had dreamt so many nights, to get through a nightmare and be rewarded handsomely.

Every evening I’d pour a glass of wine and write down ideas. Hang-gliding. Parachuting. Lava. Fire. What scared me? What was I afraid of?

I thought it’d be a good idea to get the kid out of the city for a bit, but he fidgeted in my car and looked at me with pain in his eyes, like the further I took him from the city’s grime, the further he was away from fuel. More than once, I worried that his lungs were blackened from his proximity to the grime on the floor of the city, but it seemed like he might gain his power from it. He has this effortless cool that pours out of him like molten stainless steel carefully coaxed into ice cube molds; but his veneer shook loose as we stretched miles from the city.

“What are you worried about?” I ask.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the beach, as I’ve said.”

“Why?”

“To be away from where we are, just for one day.”

Getting the permit to take the kid to the beach was a farce of neverending paperwork – it took seventeen forms with seventeen of my signatures at the bottom of them to get him out of his foster house, and it was going to take a further five pages of reports and signatures to put him back in his house. I want pictures and memories to show for it – a sunny day where, maybe, he rides on the back of a turtle or an aging surfer teaches him the ways of the surf and the board. The kid fidgets and plays with the fray of his seatbelt.

“Let’s play twenty questions,” I say.

“How do you play?”

“I think of something, or you think of something, and then I try to figure out what you’re thinking by asking you questions.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to think about something, or should I?”

“I’m always thinking about something,” he says, looking out his window.

“Like what?”

“Are you cheating at your own game?”

We had been paired by a computer after I was sitting in a cafe with an internet connection and I was tired of clicking through the websites I usually clicked through when I sat in cafes with an internet connection with little to do. I clicked on an ad from a blog I like that promised a feeling of good in what was essentially the San Diego area’s answer to Big Brothers Big Sisters, which they called, “Your New Mentor.” I felt a surfeit of time on my hands with few good deeds to show for it.

I signed up and went through a process that was obviously set up to weed out the weirdos and the computer put me with Noel, the quiet kid who kept getting bored with my line of questioning and telling me exactly what he was thinking. We would usually hang out on Saturday afternoons, sometimes Wednesday evenings too. I would take him to the park and would buy him ice cream (against Your New Mentor rules) and then I would watch from a bench while he dug himself sand perches with other kids his age. He would sit on the top of the perch and then he would look down at me on my bench and he would wave, and usually that was about time to go home.

That was Saturday afternoons. Wednesday evenings we would go to a bookstore with a table and I would watch him do his homework. The first thing I noticed about Noel was he wore his younger brother’s jeans (his foster brother, not his real brother) who was a big enough little kid that the pants fit Noel around the waist, but his socks would always show. Even after eight months, or 45 hangouts, I do not feel like I am at a place in my relationship with Noel that I can ask why he wears his little brother’s pants.

When we get to the beach it’s a cold day and the tide is out and the surf is bad, so we have the beach to ourselves and I don’t really know what to do. The car smells sickeningly of the coconut suntan lotion I slatehered on our exposed arms and necks and noses, and I can tell that he wishes I hadn’t done any of this.

We get out and sit on the hood of the car and I try to think of a way to apologize, but then he lies back and breathes in and licks his lips. “I can taste the salt here,” he says.

I lick my lips. “Yeah.”

“Can I play in the sand here?”

“Of course.”

He goes to the sand and immediately starts pushing the sand with his hands, and eventually I get down and help him.

“Do you ever think there will be robot dogs?” he asks suddenly.

“There were, once, but they weren’t very good.”

“Will there ever be good ones? Like, one you could take to the beach but it wouldn’t make a mess and I wouldn’t have to feed him?”

“Probably. I’d want one.”

“Me too.”

We take all day to make a perch that makes Noel happy and I go back to the car to get my camera when a girl comes by and waves to me and talks to Noel up on his perch. The wind carries her voice away from me, and she jogs away before I can talk to her. He’s all smiles.

“What’d the lady say?”

“She liked my perch.”

“She should, it’s a nice one.”

“You’re a really good guy, Blake.”

“She said that?”

He doesn’t answer, he just gets back in the car.

“I like the beach,” he says, pulling on his seatbelt.

“Me too. Next time, we should get swimsuits though. You’re going to have sand in your pants forever.”

“These aren’t my pants. I don’t wear my pants outside. I don’t want to get them dirty.”

It’s the most he’s ever said to me. I wonder what my Dad felt like when I said things to him that he wanted to know.

Someone told me when I was a little kid that we don’t see ourselves when we think about ourselves, we see a big cartoon version instead. Ever since I started thinking about it, I have started to see myself as a deep sea diver instead. My eyes are big and magnified from my face mask but my mouth is covered.  When confronted with the world and all of its unknowns, I have the same thought playing through my head: keep breathing, the most important thing is to regulate your breathing.

My Mom used to wear this outfit when she went out late at night, it was black and skin tight and she moved silently through the house when she had it on. She would leave without saying a word, and I wouldn’t hear the door close. When I woke up, she would be back, in her bed, her outfit on its hooks in her closet. I told my Kindergarten class that she was a superhero, and then (when my imagination got a little better) I pretended the suit to be a lot of other things until I settled on seeing her the same way I saw myself – clad in wetsuits, swimming underwater, trying to understand the world around us without saying anything.

My room was always sparse, is always sparse. A bed, a dresser, a side table, my closet with clothes, a computer from when I was ten onwards. The apartment is just as spare. You can float through it, you can touch anything, but none of it has any dust, everything is museum quality, silent, vacuum packed and clean. And I miss her. If you can accumulate enough things it’s like having her, like a video game and fetch quests.

For a long time underwater, I felt like she and I shared an oxygen tank. I felt like she would let me be everything to her for as long as she possibly could, and while I had air she danced and made funny faces and smiled and laughed – that tinny, underwater, bubbly laugh that sounds like glass rubbed with rubber gloves. That’s how I can remember her laugh. Everything else is receding because I can’t remember her as she really was, I can only remember the moving parts, like having a watch that has been taken apart and trying to put it together without knowing exactly how it looked.

Someone told me when I was a kid that I needed a father to know how to be a man, but I knew right away, without a mustachioed man with a wallet-shaped bulge in his back right pocket. That’s how I always saw fathers. Sometimes I would be drawn up in Mom’s arms and she would ask me if I had everything I needed, and I would tell her yes, of course, I have everything, we have everything, and I could feel her vertebrae too close together when she had me there in that hug. Mom was a cat, high strung, ready to pounce at all times. She only relaxed in the afternoon, on the couch, with sunlight streaming in. When I was small enough, I could sit on her stomach and she would have me read my books to her. She liked the series about kids who could become their favorite animals the best. Of course.

What’s it like now that she’s gone is the question I can’t answer, and it’s the only one that people want to ask, but they veil it in a lot of other questions about how I’m getting along and if I need anything but I was emancipated years ago and I still have a bank account that has a number that grows somehow. I never needed Mom like other people need their parents. I always needed her to be exactly who she was and she always wanted to be everything but, and we met in the middle, sharing our life support with one another, and I never asked where it came from and maybe I should have – but I didn’t. I never asked what she did at night or in the day time because she had different, more important things to tell me.

She liked to tell me about what she’d been reading, about language and the invention of the naming of things, she would spend my days in school going down the rabbit’s hole of etymology, explaining where everything comes from and eventually derailing into existentialist dogma about inherent lack of meaning.

It was her who told me about the cartoon version of ourselves, and I asked if she saw anything other than herself as a cartoon. She said she saw an emoticon, usually, the one that’s a colon and a capital “I” and I told her it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. She said it was only now that I was older and I started smiling for other things than seeing her eyes again during games of peek-a-boo, and I told her she should be an end parentheses now, all the time, seeing me grown up and well-adjusted, just like she would want her son to be.

It all rained down not long after that conversation between the two of us. The arrests, the seizure of property, the proof and the cameras, the interviews and the secrets that spilled out of her like drunks peeling peanuts in a bar. I never answered any questions, I hardly ever opened the door to the world outside. Because the only suit I ever want to wear is my wetsuit, and I only ever feel like I’m deep sea diving, and it’s getting dangerous, because I don’t feel like I have much left in my oxygen tank, I can’t go on just taking care of myself, and when I start to wonder what I should say to someone else I can only think of the air I’d lose and how every breath is precious. Regulate your breathing, just try and regulate your breathing.

The magician decided not to do any of his tricks that night – he wanted everything to be real, and visceral, and he was tired of two hours of lies every night, of faking a twinkle in his eye when people asked him to dinner parties and then spent the evening demanding to know how he did his tricks. A magician never reveals his secrets, a magician never reveals his secrets. Once, he stopped at a mall kiosk with shirts that you could program to display a marquee, and he was very close to purchasing one, just so that his shirt could flash annoyingly what he was so tired of saying.

I’m not going to do any illusions tonight, the magician said. I’m just going to show you what happens. His body was shaking from nervousness and excitement, a feeling he hadn’t felt since he first mastered the rubber balls trick and went to go perform in front of his father. His legs were trembling even now, even though that part of his patter had always been there. He had always said, I’m not going to do any illusions tonight. People always laughed, and tonight was no different.

He started small, as usual, but he did not commit his usual flourishes. Instead of a single white scarf becoming a long string of increasingly garish scarves, the magician just let all the scarves fall from his sleeves. Then, quickly, he pulled another ten feet of connected scarves from his collar, a trick that usually appeared to be scarves appearing from his throat.

The crowd still applauded.

Two doves flew from his jacket, four rabbits came out of their hidden area in his hat, sixteen red foam balls fell from his pockets, seven trick coins clanked to the floor from a cufflink gadget. The levitation device he invented flew off with his fake toupee and then, with a final shake of his body, and with a tiny bit of added theatrics, he pulled his skull cap from the secret pocket in in the back seam of his coat and threw it to the floor. His first thirty minutes of his act were compressed into about 45 seconds.

His assistant came out then, and he didn’t smile at her like he usually did. He hated her. He divorced her years ago when she slept with his lighting technician, but she leveraged her knowledge of his tricks into a permanent position on his staff and then spent her life making his existence hell. She stayed because she loved him, and tried to tell him so, but he never listened to her after she had gotten so drunk that fateful night. The magician was so ready to accept everything as sleight of hand, even when it wasn’t sleight of hand at all.

I hate this woman, he said to the crowd, so I think I’ll saw her in half. The crowd smiled and laughed and clapped. I get to live out every man’s fantasy! I get to cut my ex-wife in half! More laughter. More applause. This was also no different from the usual patter. His assisstant smiled broadly and got into the coffin, which was not a trick coffin this time. He pulled out a chainsaw and started it with a malevolent glint.

Do not try this at home. Your own wife might not live to tell the tale. The roar of the chainsaw did not overpower his microphone, but it came close. He cut the coffin lengthwise, starting from the top, so that the audience would not hear his wife scream. He finished severing the coffin in two and did not pop the top to show she was still alive. Instead, he pushed the gurney offstage, listening to the liquid inside.

Next, he took out a gun and did some trick shooting, which did not have any tricks involved at all. He was just an excellent shot. He missed his first bullseye, which was a plate that shattered into gold glitter – an invention of his own design – because he was shaking so much from the real vibrations of the real chainsaw that he just used to really murder his ex-wife. But he steadied himself, and breathed in-between shots, and soon the stage was washed in gold glitter, and he had another assistant come over and shoot him, which was his usual act one finale.

The assistant usually did some sleight of hand, replacing the real gun with a fake gun, but the magician had changed the fake gun for another real gun, so the assistant did his bit of “magic” for nothing. Six shots into the stomach was what the trick called for, but when the magician stumbled after the first shot and then bled profusely from his chest after the second, the assistant stopped shooting. The curtain came down, and the magician died with a smile on his face, happy that he would never have to keep secrets again.

The crowd leaned forward in shocked and titillated silence. Eyes were wide, no one was breathing, no one was looking at their watch. What a trick! What a show! It looked like real blood that came spurting from the wound. And maybe they didn’t get to see the sawed-in-half-woman wiggle her feet, but this was miles better. It looked so real! 83 of the 6,000 men in the audience thought they knew how the trick was done. 46 women thought they knew the same thing.

No one, but no one, thought the magician was really shot. Four friends with balcony seats stayed seated, like their pants had been glued there by some prankster. They all wanted to know what happened next, after the death scene. They all wanted to know how he died, or how he didn’t die. They turned to each other for comfort. What’s the secret? they asked each other. How does he do it? They all felt very mortal just then, and held hands, waiting for whatever happened next.

My Katie had an adorable trait that I discovered the first January we spent sharing an apartment – she picked up old Christmas trees to decorate her place. I came home to a graveyard of a dozen dead trees propped up in various fashions, some with tinsel still on the branches. Katie came out of the kitchen bright-eyed and smiling, holding egg nog which was topped with freshly ground nutmeg. “Can you believe it? Egg-Nog is 75% off this time of year!” And maybe it was the amount of brandy in the Egg-Nog, but it seemed endearing and lovable and I supported the quirk by bringing home any trees I saw on the street, dragging little brown-ended needles behind me and receiving weird looks from people who clearly thought I was crazy. Our apartment smelled like pine and Christmas for a while and then sort of musty, neither of which was disagreeable to me. The people below us smoked openly, and I was always happy to have something quell the smell.

Sometime in April, only a month after the trees disappeared without comment, I was laid off from my job and someone re-gifted me a box set of an old sitcom that they loved when they were a teenager. I watched every episode with the fervor that some people devote to re-reading psalms from the Bible, and came across a side plot where one of the characters brings home Christmas trees to appease the more eccentric character of the group.

The show was a pop culture phenomenon that I had missed, sometime between watching Star Trek the original series with my Dad and reading my Mom’s dime novel collection, and there were sayings and gestures that people had used over the years that were obvious homages to the show. But seeing the set of that fake apartment filled with blank, ornament-less Christmas trees was strange and too mirror-like for my fuzzy, directionless mind. Without much to occupy me, I puzzled for days what came first – Katie’s appreciation for the smell of pine and bits of life that are thought of as trash, or this television show, which she decided to steal a quirk from?

It shook me more than it probably should have, maybe because in my head, bits of ad copy for “the reason I love Katie” printed like ticker tape, and one of the most popular phrases was: “She’s the type of girl who picks up Christmas trees after Christmas, just because she likes the way it smells.” And I realized, of course, that Katie actually liked Christmas trees after Christmas, while the character in the show wanted Christmas trees while Christmas was still seasonable, so the facts were different. But still. It made me wonder how much of Katie was a facsimile of the things she saw on television – did I want to date a girl who got her best characteristics from fictional characters? Did it matter? I boiled a hot dog and ate it without a bun the first time I watched the episode, I did it again the seond and third time, dipping the hot dog into dijon mustard that I hadn’t paid for.

I asked her in a nonchalant way, “Katie, what’s your favorite sitcom?” She said she didn’t have one, that she hadn’t watched sitcoms since was in junior high. Unfortunately, this didn’t prove anything. The particular episode that she might have copied had aired when she was in junior high. I tried a different tactic: “When did you get the idea to start picking up Christmas trees after they had been left to be thrown away?” I asked. She had been drinking a glass of water and she didn’t stop to answer. She kept drinking until the glass was empty and then she set it in the sink. She said, “I don’t remember, I just did it. Didn’t you like it?” I said I did. I told her it covered the smoke smell from the people downstairs. “You could do that with a bit of caulking,” she said. “The smoke only comes up in a few places. I kind of like it, it reminds me of my grandfather.”

I ate a lot of boiled hot dogs that Summer and Fall, never getting a job, living off my parents’ charity and some old bonds that my own grandparents, non-smokers, had given me. Katie seemed less magical than that post-Christmas, and when Egg-Nog showed up on the shelves again, I finally brought it out. I told her my suspicion, that her quirk wasn’t her quirk at all. I think I said it like that, pointing at her, accusing her. She looked distraught and told me it didn’t matter, but I maintained it did. “What are we, if we aren’t an accumulation of everything we’ve seen or heard?” She asked me. I didn’t know how to answer that, so after some more deliberation, I moved out. She subletted the room we didn’t use and I moved back in with my parents. I got sort of depressed after that, and didn’t do much, other than what little was asked of me from my folks.

When I was at my parents’ house, I watched some old tapes they had made of television shows I liked. My Mom used to tape shows for me for when I was sick. One tape, a game show, had a female assistant who displayed everything attractiveley. The female assistant wiggled her hand underneath the game piece like it was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I realized something – I do that. I do that same thing. I didn’t know it had come from someplace other than me.

I spent a happy holiday at my parents’ house, imagining what it would be like to be on my own again. When it came on January, and I saw dead trees on sidewalks, I thought about bringing them into my parents’ house. But I knew what my Dad would say.

Hey Dan – Sweet hair! You should’ve won “Best Hair.” Oh well, next year. Keep in touch this summer, we can cruise – Ron Lawson

Ellie. Stay sweet, cuteness. Maybe you should call me this Summer and you can teach me how to put that game on my calculator, but maybe not! I wanna pass calc (unlike you)! Ha! Lisa Warner

(Ron and Lisa both have criminal records. Ron had a shoplifting streak when he was in junior high school, Lisa has been apprehended on three different occasions for indecent exposure, all of which she chalked up to games of “Truth or Dare” – PM)

Hey ElSA – This is the big year. Think people will call me “Daniel” and you “Elsa”? I sort of doubt it. That’s why we should move – new cities mean you can be whoever you want. You and I could run a midwestern school, like the mafia. I could be the Don and you could be the femme fatale. And maybe I’m mixing genres but… I. Don’t. Care. See you in English.

DanIEL- Your hair looks lovely today. Did you know that I live in a continual state of fear that you’ll cut it? I love that it’s longer than mine, and I love that you let me brush it. It’s softer than mine, and that’s a fact (and that fact is only true because of me). Your sister looks like the type who would wield scissors against you in your sleep. Please be careful of her. Perhaps we should install a lock on your door tonight.

(Daniel and Elsa both had clean criminal records, although Daniel was implicated as the catalyst of more than his fair share of schoolyard brawls. – PM)

Danlie – No man, I didn’t spell your name wrong. It’s what everyone calls you and Ellie. I’m sure you know. Had fun with you this year in English, especially that one time where you finally called out Mr. Smith, but we should hang out sometime. If you ever aren’t with Ellie, give me a call – Luke Walden

Ellie – Your outfits this year were outta this world! Love it, girl, never change. See you next year and I bet Danny Boy too. Might as well put him on a leash! Wish I had your feminine wilds. – Paulina “Polly”

(Polly and Luke ended up having a baby together, although not in wedlock. and Paulina probably means “feminine wiles.” She was never known for her quick wit. – PM)

My Dearest E – You’re beautiful today, and you should know it. I’m so glad that we decided to make the leap – we’re one of those couples that make history, I can feel it. We may never get out of this town, but maybe they can make a monument to us in the town square, complete with rust-hued hickies and all.

Danny Dearest – Those hickies aren’t as winning as you think they are. My Mom, for one, is not the biggest fan! Thank you for the flowers during History. Maybe we are Napoleon and Josephine, just with hair lengths switched. You are channeling Legolas today.

(Legolas is a Lord of the Rings character, a long-haired elf, played by “heartthrob” Orlando Bloom. – PM)

D-Money! Really great you joined football. Never thought you would have an arm. And the haircut is an improvement. I can now tell, from afar, that you’re a guy. Glad to have you on the team, especially when you throw passes like the one at the end of the Homecoming Game! – Paul Eisenberg

Ellie – You’ve got the voice of an angel. You’re going places. Hope you try out for choir next year, because your talent show song was beautiful. Glad we finally started hanging out! – Melissa Essex

(Paul died in a motorcycle accident not long after he wrote this yearbook entry. Many people have a eulogy and picture of Paul taped in their yearbooks from this time. Melissa got married to a boy she met online in Kentucky and has not been an active alumnus. – PM)

Elsa – I miss you. You know it. Please, meet me at our beach so we can talk. We have to talk. This not talking is painful, I feel like I’m filling up with words and they don’t know where to go and when I try to sleep, my mind spins with words I need to say. I know this can’t all be because of the hair. Or the football. I don’t know what I did but we need to talk about it.

Dan – No we don’t.

(The beach in question is a long stretch only accessible by people who are game to either swim lengthwise past a group of dangerous rocks, or climb a treacherous wall of especially brittle sandstone. – PM)

D to the Max: You da man! Champions forev! That arm needs to be in the Smithsonian! Good luck at San Diego! – Mitch “the Man” Ruskie

(No one called Mitch “the Man” – PM)

Elsa – Your school work wasn’t up to par with what I saw Freshman year, but your voice is beautiful. I know we were rivals during our first three years here, but I know I could never rival your voice. Thank you for singing and not trying to get straight A’s. Hope your music deal is everything you dreamed – Lucy Whittaker

E – Meet me at our beach. I’m not leaving without you, you aren’t leaving without me.

D – Okay but I have three conditions. Bring your varsity jacket. Bring matches. Bring our notebooks and your yearbooks. I’m bringing mine.

(Daniel and Elsa were arrested for their open fire, which the police spotted from the freeway, and drug possession, which they both claimed to have sole responsibility for. They were both fined and given 500 hours of community service, nullifying Daniel’s scholarship, but not Elsa’s recording contract.)

Case Report and Compilings by Phillip Masterson. 6-17-06

It’s funny how Christmas changes when you get older – I got floor mats for my car and a bunch of cold weather clothes. My sister got lots of different sized packages filled with mounds of dollar bills, because she asked for money.

She’s also decided to get a job so that she can work right up until she leaves for college in August – she has a theory that if she doesn’t work her first semester of school, she’ll be able to fashion longer lasting friendships. So she’s saving for that and wants to supplement her savings with a job that she hasn’t gotten yet. She’s excited for the possibility that a family friend might have an in at one of those throwback diners where girls in short skirts and rollerskates bring your food out to you, so she’s practicing. In case they ask if she can skate.

She had to get into the attic to find our old kid stuff – she remembered she had rollerskates but it turned out she had rollerblades (isn’t it funny that memory can morph things like that?). They were dust-covered and taped with teal duct tape that I had bought to make duct tape wallets. She didn’t remember why she taped them – it could have been fashionable, maybe a quick fix. I think it’s because I had a surplus of the tape after I tried to turn wallet-making into a business, and when it failed, I started to just cover everything in the tape. My old bulletin board is a pointillist approximation of a wave in swatches of different blue tape.

She’s wobbly on her skates – her knees keep knocking together because she’s scared to put all of her weight on her feet. I want to give her tips but I don’t think she’d listen, especially after I found my old skateboard in the attic with her, got on top of it and prompty fell on my ass. There was a time in my life that I could land a kick flip about 30 percent of the time. But those days are over, I guess.

“How does it feel?” I ask from my perch on the curb.

“Horrible. I’ll need real rollerskates. I don’t think they’d let me wear these.”

“Well, I don’t think the concepts differ much. Practice on these and then use a box of your ones on a better pair.”

“I hate the idea of spending money just to make money.”

“Isn’t that one of the principles of business?”

“I forget, did you major in Economics or Anthropology?”

“Careful with that sass, Sis. Your tips will suffer.”

She’s skating from car to car, dragging her hands along the sides to keep her balance.

“Confidence, sister!” I yell.

“Screw you!” She rejoinders.

The box with the skates had old pictures of me and her together, staged shots my Dad took of us when he still took pictures for the family’s Christmas newsletter, as well as a couple rolls of undeveloped film. I think one of them is prom with my Senior year girlfriend, Mattie Hall – I called her when I got home for the holidays, but she didn’t answer and hasn’t called me back yet. I’m always more ready to go down memory lane than anybody else.

My sister has gained some measure of confidence and now is throwing herself across the street, not really propelling herself with that instinctual weight shifting that we all somehow pick up somewhere when skates are on our feet. Instead, she pushes off from a car, pinwheels her arms wildly, and lands on a car on the other side.

“The neighbors aren’t going to like it if you break a window,” I tell her.

“You won’t like it if I break your window!” she yells back.

“Just skate! You used to skate! Remember the roller-rink they used to have at Funlandia? We used to go every week for a birthday party or something. Just let your inner kid take over.”

“What, like you and your skateboard?”

“All I know is, you can’t pinwheel your arms if you have a tray full of milkshakes.”

“I know that. Damnit. I wish I could just work at the movie theater, like a normal teenager.”

I get back on my skateboard, and trust my feet a little more, even if I’ve traded Etnies sneakers for Brooks Brothers loafers, and propel myself over to my sister.

“Here, get away from the cars and just skate behind me. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I could fall and have to go through horrible facial reconstruction surgery that makes me look like a completely different person, and I would have to go through identity therapy.”

“Is identity therapy a thing?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like a thing.”

We’ve started down the street, side by side, an eight-wheeled 18-year-old and a four-wheeled 24-year-old.

“Can I tell you something?” I ask, keeping pace with her as she finally starts to stride out.

“What?”

“I really miss the time when we would have to be invited downstairs for Christmas.”

“You miss getting toys.”

“That too.”

“Well, toys have changed a lot,” she says, gliding with her hands behind her back. “Hey, I think I’ve got it back.”

“Like riding a bike!”

“Nope.”

“Well, it’s not about toys. It’s just… I don’t know. I don’t like to think that Mom and Dad and you and me are all equals now.”

“Like they don’t have all the answers any more, just like us.”

“Exactly. You ready to try it with a plate full of something?”

“No.”

“I think if you do tricks with the food, you’ll get better tips.”

“I think if I wear a short enough skirt, I won’t have to do any tricks.”

We stop at the end of our street and then turn around and go back.

“Does it feel weird to leave and come back?”

“It never feels like coming back. It feels like I’m going someplace new.”

There are a lot of things that someone can be disillusioned with these days, but I refuse to let my birthday be one of them. Honestly, every year, I have the same group of five over, they choose things to give me from my internet wish lists, and then we watch a movie and I tell them what I’m going to do with the rest of the year, how this year will be different than last year, this is the year I will leave Point Cabrillo, I’ll leave the lighthouse, I’ll give most of my belongings away to charity, and I’ll finally use my savings to buy one of those pick up trucks with the one room apartment in the back.

It’s funny, though – we may not have a lighthouse keeper anymore, but the computers that run the lighthouse certainly need maintenance, so instead of a lighthouse keeper, you have a lighthouse computer keeper, and they still pay me the lighthouse wage set forward in the city charter 100 years ago (adjusted for inflation). They still put me up in the house, and it’s hard to travel when you’re the only person that knows the programming code the lighthouse program was built on.

The romance is mostly gone, though. I can have people over, which is probably the single most devastating thing to the lone lighthouse keeper image. I’m not the only person in the world, fighting a battle against the elements and the jagged rocks, grizzled with a flowing beard, wrapped in a yellow rain slicker, controlling the fate of ships so they don’t fall victim to the shoreline. I think the lighthouse keeper has given way to the air traffic controller, which is sadder, because you’re beckoning people towards you. It’s all much more lovey-dovey; I’m sure they have to keep their beards trimmed.

That’s what I think about every year at my birthday. I start with myself and how I should finally get away from the coast and see the land of the free and then the other lands of the (presumably) depressed and opressed, but then I get to thinking about these five friends that come over year after year and the lighthouse, and then I think about training one of the fool kids that apply for the job that would probably remind me of a romanticized version of a young me, and then after I hire him for his go-get-’em attitude, he’ll sigh audibly any time I try to teach him something to take home and think on. I think about how I need to leave, and then I realize how hard it is for me to leave as the years go by.

When everyone leaves after my birthday I take a piece of my cake and walk over to the cliffs that the lighthouse used to look over. Ships don’t really come by any more, or not with the frequency you would think would require a lighthouse. I make a big show of using Navy Morse Code if anybody does come by my vintage lantern I found in the basement of this place, if I’m there and the computer isn’t doing all the work keeping ships safe from the jagged edges of the rocks. I use my fingers to bite into the cake and wipe my hands on my pants after every bite, because, why not. When I’m finished with that slice, I go back inside and think about what it means to be a year older, still doing a job I took from a classified ad looking for a computer programmer back in the 70s. I haven’t even updated the system here. It’s still floppy disks. There are all sorts of weather warnings and interesting things the modern lighthouse can do, but any time I go down the coast and see one of these show-offy things, I just think back to Vegas and cheapness and I wonder if there is any dignity left in any profession any more, or if all of it is just money-grubbing and button pushing.

There’s more cake, and I sit at the table to wolf it down, still without utensils. I’ve lost most of my romantic notions about lighthouse work. I know, for example, most boats these days are equipped with GPS and all of those bells and whistles, which is why I hardly ever see any boats around here anyway – no one navigates by the sight of the coast. People just want open water, blindly cutting their swath through the ocean, secure in the knowledge that their computer will supplement their knowledge.

But: here’s what made 20-year-old me take that job, and what makes it so hard to leave even now, is that there is this idea that every now and then I’ve surely saved some poor saps’ life, and if not their life, at least their job. I’ve been a guiding light, a guardian angel of the coast. I may be sitting and letting the light be controlled by what is essentially a Commodore 64 with a more complex back up system, watching my gut grow and my beard get more knotty, as my brain gets weak with lack of difficulty, but there’s someone out there who felt the light fall onto their face, slicing through fog so thick you could drink it like a cloud smoothie, and felt saved from inevitable doom.

That’s why I do it. That’s why anyone does anything, if you think about it. Just feeling that someone noticed what you did and felt better about themselves because of it. That’s why sewage workers do what they do, I’m sure. Same with those invisible curb painters that seem to come in the dead of night to refresh the red paint on a No Parking zone. I’m on that lower rung, something 99 percent of the population probably doesn’t even have to think about, and I don’t mind that.

And, that cake’s gone. I shouldn’t have had it all.

The Hotel definitely had history, but the girl who worked the front desk neither cared nor thought much about it. She could only think about two things on any given night – whether she could sneak a drink from the bar and how much longer her shift was going to last. Tourists would ask about the ghost, or the fire at the turn of the last century, or the glass etchings, or their room’s wallpaper, and she didn’t want to think about it. If she learned the answer, it would stay forever, and she needed her head space to think.

On the second floor, the man slowly packed his things into his suitcase and then sat on the edge of the bed. His suit, pressed perfectly yesterday, which felt so right just that morning, had relaxed its fit and wrinkled on cab rides and train trips around the city. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against a chocolate stain. The sundae from Ghiradelli Chocolate’s cafe was to blame, the suggestion of ice cream a last ditch effort to romance the client. The stain remained. A drink from the minibar couldn’t make him more destitute, he decided. Poor is poor.

Two empty rooms on the third floor had open doors. One room held the cleaning lady, who tried to be invisible and succeeded about 95 perent of the time, the other room held the forgotten things of a couple who were in too much of a hurry to remember everthing. This happened all the time. The cleaning lady would find two wallets full of crisp fifty dollars bills, lots of different IDs, a bevy of credit cards, and a small bag of marijuana. She would gasp, sit down, and think about what to do for a very, very long time.

On the fourth floor, a woman felt more shakily alive than she’d ever felt in her life, more than the night of her prom when she realized her date had snuck in alcohol, more than the night of her wedding when she realized she would have to fulfill her “marital duty” as her mother called it. She waited for the door to be knocked so that she could say, sweetly, “Come in,” and the man would find her on the bed. She had 450 dollars in twenties and one fifty rubber-banded neatly on the night stand, next to a condom.

Two men who occupied rooms at opposite ends of the hall on the third floor stood on top of the Hotel and shared a joint they had purchased from the young couple that hurriedly checked out that morning. The men didn’t know each other, but they had both been asked if they liked to “relax ” in the hotel bar by the messy-haired young girl. “When was the last time you did this?” one man said to the other. “I can’t even remember,” the other man answered, smiling. They coughed in unison and laughed. They didn’t say anthing after that.

The girl at the front desk got a call from a credit card fraud company about the room on the second floor. She deferred the call to the morning, when her stupid boss would be there. He could deal with that problem. Bernard made her a drink that was mostly alcohol, and she drank it swiftly, ready to be numb and sort of crazy when she finished. She could meet up with people after work, talk about real plans for their real futures, away from all the people who might ask her how to get to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The man felt considerably better after four or five little bottles from the bar, and he laid on the bed wondering what was next for him. He could get another loan, but for what? He could go back to managing fast food joints, but the thought alone made him go back to the minibar, maybe even kill himself. He didn’t want to kill himself. He wanted to be rich. He wanted to afford the minibar in this hotel room without thinking about the price of the bottles. He poured himself another little bottle, watched the drips make ripples, then disappear.

The cleaning woman decided to keep a quarter of the money, leave the drugs and the IDs, and destroy the credit cards herself, although she didn’t know how – She didn’t want to be caught with scissors in the room, and she didn’t want to take them home, so she decided to wait until the front desk girl left her desk to get another free drink – then, she could use the document shredder. In the mean time, she counted the money in the wallets, cleaned the room, and wondered how bad it would be to just keep it all.

The woman said her line and watched the man – no – boy, walk into the room. Too thin, too young, voice too highly pitched. She judged him to be about the same age as her son, and with that thought, covered up. “How old are you?” she asked the boy. He didn’t answer. She handed over the money and found another fifty in her purse, and asked the boy again. “I’m 20,” he answered. “Can I have a drink?” He went and helped himself from the bar, and the woman felt all of her shaky nervousness dissolve into worry.

The one man felt too weird on top of the roof, so he took his leave and went to his room, which felt too claustrophobic. He went outside, where a boy was smoking a cigarette, watched by an older woman. He didn’t know what to do about his hands. The other man wandered into the lobby and watched the front desk girl laugh with two boys. The hotel felt dirty, even though it was fairly clean. He looked up at the name of the hotel, etched in glass, and he wondered, briefly, whose job it was to clean that window.

I have a scary story for you.

You’re alone in your house. It’s got a living room, study, bathroom on the first floor and three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second, but no one is in any of them. Your furniture is poised on its legs, balanced and made of wood, ready for something, anything, but its unclear as to what, it’s just taut and on the verge.

You’re in a cushioned chair in a living room, you’re watching the window – cars go by, but it’s quiet. You’re not expecting anyone. You’re alone, and you’re going to be alone, and you’re braced and motionless, held petrified by the fact that no matter what might happen tomorrow or the next week or the next month or next year – you’re going to be alone.

That’s it.

It gives me the creepy crawlies. When I think about it, it makes my hair stand on end and my blood run cold. When I read a scary story, or watch a jump-at-you movie on television, it’s the same feeling.

I don’t want it to be this way, but I learned from the poker games I used to play with my cousins; you play the hand you’re dealt. It seems simple, obvious even, but every time you’re dealt your cards, it’s hard not to imagine what it might be like if you had one different card, or two – if those cards changed, you’d have a straight. A full house.

But those aren’t the cards I have. That’s not the hand I’ve been dealt. I’m dealt an ace and a bunch of nothing, because I’m going to be alone, because I love someone who won’t – can’t – love me back.

I remember when I met him – back in high school, in biology, dealing with dominant and recessive genes, the class tittering with repressed sexuality when our teacher (a pervert in his own right) announced the class was going to have “sex”with one another. Our notecards acted as our dominant and recessed avatars.

“Me and Henry are having sex,” a strange boy announced. The class roared with laughter. Maybe they didn’t exactly roar. My memory has probably turned up the volume, but as soon as we figured out together that our kids would have blue eyes and straight hair, we were friends. You can fast forward through the hanging out at lunch, getting our licenses together, dealing with our girlfriends. I didn’t know back then, really, what cards I had. I didn’t know the cards I’d been dealt.

Or maybe I did know. There was an air of electricity when we were playing truth or dare with our friends and jokingly, our friends dared us to kiss. We both renounced the possibility immediately, he ran naked around the neighborhood instead, and now I play that night over and over in my head like a television network that only plays reruns.

I’ve been told to feel empowered, or at least not to feel disenfranchised. To hold my own and to feel like thecards in my pocket are worthwhile. Sometimes I feel like the people who tell me that are playing a different game of poker than me. I’m playing five card, they’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em, because their life holds more possibility than mine.

I don’t want to kiss anybody else. I want to kiss him. When we came back from college to re-evaluate, live in our parents’ houses, regroup, save money, we drank whiskey together at his parents’ and talked about what could have happened back then and what would happen now, now that we were educated and the world was supposed to be our oyster. Something should have happened then, I thought – but somehow, along the way, he made his money and I made mine and he got his wife and I got my furniture. My nice furniture and my nice job, and my nice friends who all clap me on the back and parties and tell me I should date. Their hairdresser is single, they say.

Perhaps there’s a note of melodrama, and perhaps I should date that hairdresser. Maybe we’d have sex in his apartment and he’d make french press coffee the next morning, but I would have to look into his eyes and tell him that it was nothing, even if we like the same bottom-of-the-bargain bin movie and think french press coffee is the only way to drink it. It’s nothing. I still hold the same cards, and I can’t change a single one.

I’ve got a deck of cards that I carry around with me in my pocket. I shuffle it and re-shuffle it and randomness says that someday it will reshuffle itself back into perfect order. After X amount of times, that should happen. I cut the deck and shuffle, I make a rainbow of cards and check, and then run through it again. The cards are well-thumbed, the plastic shows its age. I sit in waiting rooms or airport gates or subway platforms. Only recently I noticed a queen was missing – so I’m not even playing my non-game with a full deck. I can never put it back in order. I can never play the game right.

I think about him and his wife and his family when I’m alone in the house – my house, so empty, that I meant to fill with so much, that should be filled with him. I think about her, away on a business trip, or with the kids at her sister’s house. It’s the only thing that can smooth my skin from goose bumps, strengthen my resolve to look in the mirror while I wash my face – that maybe, somewhere along the line he wonders what it would have been like to kiss me that night of truth or dare. It’s not the sort of thing that makes any sense – but like I said. I’m one card short of a full deck.

So.

My son played me the song I wrote two decades ago when we were driving to his soccer practice. He said, Everyone I know loves this band’s song, it’s number one right now. You might like it, he said. He put the music on in the car and I listened to the words I wrote in a notebook in my parent’s basement, the chords I strummed and scribbled down hurriedly, caught in the throes of inspiration, hurting from heartache and writing and singing poorly to get it all out.

He watched my face while I listened to the song and he asked me what was wrong – I must not have hid the emotion on my face as well as I thought I did, and I pulled over. You’re red, Dad. Your face is red. And as soon as the anger took hold – at that very moment – it left. I listened to the guitar solo that my father had actually helped me with, and then the post-chorus breakdown and the fade out and my son looked at me like he had never seen me before. I like the song, I said. It’s got a nice beat to it. My son rolled his eyes, I always say that. I said, I feel like I’ve heard it before.

My son looked at me with real concern in his eyes. It’s a new song, Dad.

I did not really feel like I was stealing your song when I started to record it with the new producer who had been assigned to my album. The first six songs were mine, but no one liked those, even I thought they were crap – too standard, too easy, too much like I had just listened to pop records and wanted to make a pop record. And then the man – the superproducer, as some call him – said, I heard you play a song not too long ago in a coffee shop, was that yours?

And my first crime was saying, absolutely yes. I didn’t know exactly the one he was talking about at the time, for those couple of seconds, until he sort of hummed the chorus back to me and I realized that it was your song that I was covering that night, and I was covering it because I missed her. You know I miss her. And that song was about missing her and it was better than the way I said I missed her, which was sleeping with Debbie Rollins and telling everyone about how she was the best I’ve ever had.

We wrote together sometimes and I started to concoct in my head that we had written that song together. I know we didn’t, but it was easy to pretend that we did – we wrote other songs together, I just started melding the memories together until it was that one time, the one time I came to you with a song, the one that you didn’t like that ended up breaking up the band, you remember. You left and married her and got a job and I didn’t. Not a real job, anyway. So when I stole the song and recorded it and sang it from the heart – better than you, you have to admit that – I felt justified. You got the girl, I got a three minute pop song.

I bought tickets for the whole family to see him perform the song. I presented the tickets to Claire as a present, like – aren’t I cool, aren’t I a cool Dad and husband, I’m taking everyone to a rock concert. The kids were excited and asked if they could bring someone, and I said sure. They brought friends. The six of us went to the show and sat down and at first I had vague ideas of jumping onstage with him – I can afford tickets that bring me close enough to jump onstage, if I can pass the bouncers and everything. But then he came onstage and I saw how he looked. Old – he and I are the same age, growing up together, in the same classes, scraping by at the bottom of the barrel back then because we were too cool to achieve. But he looked old. The life I almost had.

The tour has the best lights yet – a number one single does that, you get to buy that effect where it looks like you are jumping through a rain of sparks, and there’s confetti cannons at the end of every song. When I finally play the single, the crowd goes absolutely bonkers. Before the single, I used to pretend that when I looked out, I could see her – the girl you won and I lost. And one night, my heart jumped into my throat because it almost looked like she was there, with someone who looked like you, and I blinked and forgot a couple lines, but the band is professional, they made it look planned. I looked out for you and realized that it was just my mind playing tricks, conjuring you up to make me feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty. You won once, I get one win. That’s how it works, right? Everyone gets a win?

It felt weird to be there, so we left our seats. Claire said it was too loud. It was funny, to her, that we went and saw him, the guy I used to be best friends with back when we first started dating. Didn’t he introduce us? Claire asked in the lobby. It’s hard to remember all that. I bought her a glass of white wine that was overpriced and bought myself a beer. I don’t know. I can’t remember myself, I answered. I could hear the loudspeakers, muffled by the doors and all the bodies dancing and slamming into one another. I could hear him play my song and I smiled. At least everyone gets to hear it.

I miss the unicorns. That must have been a long time ago – I don’t have much of a sense of time anymore, but I feel like I haven’t seen them in forever. They must have been a while back. So was the time when I did all of this on a horse. I miss that horse. He was someone to talk to on the long roads between things, between towns, between errands and errants. And I know it sounds stupid, but I felt like that horse – all those horses that I ever rode in between and to and from and into danger and away – they all understood whatever I said.

I don’t talk to my car the way I talked to my horse. I had to get used to it. I didn’t have to get used to a gun, though. I took to guns right away. The first time I had a gun in my hand it just felt immediately right, and when I shot it, with the deafening roar and the bruise in my shoulder and the smell of gunpowder and fire; I let out a whoop of delight and told the man who made the gun he was a genius.

I miss that phenomenon too. I miss meeting the men who made things from beginning to finish. If I was going to shake the hand of the guy who made my car, I’d have to walk up and down an assembly line and my arm would probably fall off. I play a marching song on the stereo and let the beat match my heart, rat-a-tat-tat. I’m off to slay a dragon that’s just woken up and it’s another thing that I haven’t done for years.

They’re huge things, dragons. They fall asleep for centuries and you don’t hear a word out of them. Dragons are just waiting, their hunched backs like giant hills – mountains, in this one’s case – and they’re still for eons. They’re damn good at it. Sometimes, a dragon will stir and the whole countryside goes into a panic while everything shakes. He’ll open up his eye and take a look at what’s happening and he’ll fall asleep for just a little longer. Another couple decades, he seems to say. We’ll see what’s happening then.

Princess gave me a call on my cell phone to tell me to find the dragon and vanquish him. Cell phones have got to be the single most annoying thing the modern race has decided to bestow on everyone. I liked those mop-haired pages and their scrolls of calligraphy. They were funny little guys, completely at a loss if you asked them anything that wasn’t on their script.

I switch the CD to something a little more baroque, and my phone vibrates on my leg. It always gives me a bit of a start.

“Are you near?”

“Yes, Princess – What do you want me to do after the dragon?”

“Vladimir, baby, I have something special to ask you.”

“Anything you want.”

“I want you to lose to the beast.”

She hangs up. That’s how the Princess is. She saved my life once. I can’t remember when, and I can’t remember what she was Princess of back then, because she isn’t the Princess of anything now. She just has me. For eternity. I made my peace with that a long time ago. It’s not really my place to ask how and why things happen. It burned me up, centuries ago. But as soon as I made my peace with it, it disappeared. Funny how things are like that sometimes.

Losing is a strange prospect to me. I don’t really know how to just go up and lose – poke him in the eye and run away? I could just turn around – make a hairpin turn on this highway and drive quickly the other direction, but that doesn’t sound right either. This dragon is the size of two mountains and if it wakes up, it will wreak havoc and destroy – maybe everything? At least until China or Japan can nuke the damn thing, and even that might not do anything.

The idea was never to vanquish the dragon in the slaying fashion, by the by. It was just to put him back to sleep. There’s a dragon lullaby that’s been around for generations that doesn’t get used because, well, if you’re looking for a dragon, he’s probably on top of something valuable, and if he’s on top of something valuable, you don’t want him to be asleep. I was just going to go and play the tune on my little electronic piano and call it a day.

I try to call the Princess back, but in typical Princess fashion, she doesn’t pick up, and when I think I feel my phone vibrating with her calling me back, it’s actually the ground shaking. I can see the ridges that make up the dragon’s back, I can see the stone that it has nested in shaking and giving under the strain of millennia-old muscle used for the first time.

When it rears its head, I think about the unicorns again. Why did we let them die but these terrors continue to live?

I gun the engine and connect my keyboard to the car’s stereo system, unsure of myself. I’m supposed to lose this fight. How? The dragon’s head turns towards me, its eyes open and it yawns fire at the road below my rented car. The rubber in the wheels melt to the asphalt and I decide that if I’m going to lose, I’m going to lose the old-fashioned way. I get out. I’ve never been so close to death before.

The dragon feels me before he sees me. We’re both so old – we feed on the same energy source. He gives me a once over, and before I can cower or close my eyes, fire engulfs me entirely.

The last thing that flits before my vision are the stars in the night sky. Melting.

I drive to this spot when something happens. Like when Pancake died, I came here and thought about all the times I thought to myself: I have the best damn dog in the world. And when Joanna broke up with me back in high school, ending our four year relationship – I came here. I came here when I got my acceptance letter to college, too. And when my Mom said she was getting married again.

I try to get here when the sun is going down because it’s at this weirdly perfect spot where you can watch clouds turn color and then hopefully disappear – they usually do, clouds like to get out of Nevada City even more then its younger residents. Then I just let my eyes adjust to the darkness, because I trust them. You don’t need a flashlight if you trust your eyes to give you night vision, and you have to trust your eyes, even if you don’t trust the rest of your body. I’ve had trouble trusting my elbows recently. I’ve been knocking into too many people.

Then the stars come out. I lay on my back in the dirt with my head propped on a rock and I let them slowly rotate around me. There was some article in a magazine with a circle around a point of light with an arrow to it that said, “Second Earth?” and it went on to say that it was a planet that was exactly like ours, and a couple people were quoted, talking about how infeasible it was to get there within any of our lifetimes.

It was good to know, though, that if we ever screw it up so badly, here, there’s a Plan B. I know that’s what all the scientists were thinking. This Earth could be like, a bad try, and there, right in front of us and a couple billion light years away, was a fresh start.

I need to stop thinking about fresh starts, though. Banish all thoughts of escape routes. I have actual Plan B, a series of three white pills, in my pocket. It’s an overload of hormones, to tell her body not to make a baby. My girlfriend told me to give them to her tomorrow morning if that’s what I think should happen. She believes in coincidences. A condom breaks and she thinks it means we’re meant to have a kid.

That sort of logic never made sense to me. A kid is the sort of thing that coincidences shouldn’t govern. I remember when my sister came home from church saying that there shouldn’t be abortion in the world anymore, and my parents telling her, with me within earshot, that abortion can save a child from growing up in a horrible way.

But I don’t think a kid would grow up in a horrible way with me. I just don’t know if he’d want to be on Earth. He might look at us with fear in his eyes at something horrible on television and I know I wouldn’t be able to say something like, “It’s going to be okay, Chief,” because I know that when I watch those news stories, I think that I should have really gone through with the whole astronaut training plan I had when I was six, because astronauts have the only clear escape route out of here.

The stars spin around me and I’m already back on Planet B. I wonder what it’s like there, if it’s already inhabited – I bet all the vegetation is regenerative, so you pick an apple and it immediately starts to reappear. If there isn’t any threat of people or virus or beetles, I bet you can eat anything, because nothing would have built up a defense. Bite into a tree, it will taste like chocolate – or something even better than chocolate. Something that no one in the world has tasted.

The article said that no one will get there in this lifetime, but I read another article in a different magazine that promised that someone alive today will live to be 1,000 years old. I immediately wrote on that one – Not me! Because I bet it’s one of those things where alive is actually in quotes. They’ll keep your brain tissue alive or something. That’s not alive.

When my Dad was my age, he already had a 2-year-old and I was on the way. I thought about that when my girlfriend told me that the condom broke and she was supposedly in the most fertile part of her ovulation cycle. She told me that it was my decision because I would have to be working while she was taking care of the baby. She also told me that we wouldn’t have to get married if I didn’t want to, but she had that look in her eyes that meant that she wanted to get married. It eas the same look she puts on when there’s one piece of sushi left and she says that I can have it.

Maybe if I raised a kid, he’d get to be 1,000 years old and live on Planet B, and when he was 750, he would get a message from me from an old telegram service – Western Union will still be in business, maybe – that says Hey STOP you know STOP you were nearly stopped STOP from existing. STOP. And when I realize I’m sending my unborn son or daughter intergalactic Western Union telegrams, I know what I’ve actually decided and get up, my backside wet from dew and the stars about 65 degrees arced left from where they started.

I jiggle the pills in my pocket and wonder if I left them buried in the dirt, if a deer would eat them and then a fawn won’t be born, and then I wonder if I’ll let my kid watch all those old cartoon movies like Bambi. I don’t think so.

The ice cream I’m eating is delicious. My god it’s so good. It’s creamy, first, right when you put it on your tongue, and it starts to spread immediately and the pleasure center of my brain lights up like Vegas because it’s so foreign, this frozen cream in my nearly 100 degree mouth. I let that first spoonful melt on my tongue and close my eyes and stop walking for a second. Dear Lord, it is so delicious. There’s butterfat in here, it said so on their signs. I don’t know what butterfat is, but that’s got to be how it tastes so good. That’s part of it. The rest of the flavor comes on like a freight train towards a car that has stalled on the railway. It’s vanilla at first. There’s something more though, it must be that ribbon of caramel even though I dug around it for the first bite. A whisper of it.

I remember that I’m walking and I’m in the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. I’ve veered off, my legs shuddering because the ice cream tastes too good. I eat another spoonful and have to sit down on a bench, next to a dog. He’s smiling. Or panting. Dogs look like they’re smiling when their mouths are open. I smile at him and say, “It’s Vanilla Caramel with Sea Salt.” And take another bite. It’s been maybe six or seven months since I’ve had ice cream. I told myself I would deny myself ice cream for six months and it worked like a charm – the next bite I had of ice cream (the one I had one minute and sixteen seconds ago) was the most delicious bite of anything I’d ever had.

I don’t think I’m fat or anything. But it’s fun to deny yourself something for a while. To anticipate it. Sometimes the world denies you instant gratification by announcing a movie you’re going to want to see maybe eight months in advance of when it actually comes out, and that’s when you start to really become aware how time moves – so when you deny yourself something, it’s doubly difficult. It’s nearly impossible, too, because you’re the only mountain in the way, and you’re not a difficult mountain. You’re a mound sometimes, easily stepped over to get to your ice cream.

The dog looks at me with his mouth closed and his ears perked and I say out loud, “If I was going to get a dog, I’d have to go on a diet.” It sounds crazy out loud but it makes sense. I’ve denied myself a dog all my life, so I have no idea what it would be like to have one. It’s not like this ice cream. I’ve had ice cream before, and when I denied myself ice cream, I knew exactly what it would be like to not have it. I knew I would start to see ice cream everywhere and Ben and Jerry’s would bring back my favorite flavor and the neighborhood shop would come up with something like Strawberry Balsamic which I would be dying to try – and I knew that when I did finally get to have ice cream again it would be transcendant.

The cup is gone. I’m sucking on the spoon. I drooled a little bit. Like the dog’s doing now.

So if I got a dog, I’d have to look forward to it and I’d have to deny myself something else. I’d have to go on a diet. Maybe no red meat. That would make sense because then the dog and I could eat red meat together when I got him. I bet you dogs would be wonderful cooks if we let them. I imagine the dog next to me in a chef’s hat, in my apartment, cooking me dinner. He barks when he needs something.

“You want peppercorns?”

“Bark!”

“Okay, I’ll grind them up. Are you sure I can’t use this already ground pepper?”

“Grrrrrr…”

“Freshly ground peppercorns it is.”

I can only imagine the sorts of flavors dogs would mix. They lick sidewalks sometimes, I’ve seen it. They know flavor, and they don’t mind bad flavor. I bet, after a really good long time of being on a diet, I would be incredibly excited to eat the sort of delicacies a dog would create.

I let the dog smell my hand and then I start to pet him and he closes his eyes and scooches his body forward so that he can put his head in my lap. Can dogs have ice cream? I want to get another scoop and I bet he would chomp it down and match me drool for drool as we ate together. There was that flavor back there I wanted to try as well – baby coconut and mango. I had a bit of it when I was there but it was too exotic for right then. I had to go a little bit more traditional.

The dog starts to lick my hand, like he can already taste my want for ice cream. I don’t necessarily have to go on a diet to get a dog. I’ve denied myself a dog my entire life – I did it without knowing but now I feel all those 25 years without a dog. He would accept me even if I was a little bit too big around my thighs. And he could taste what I cook. Maybe I’d eat less because I would be sharing. The owner comes and looks at me and I say, “I think I want a dog.”

He unties the leash from the bench leg and scratches his around his ears.

“You can’t have mine,” the guy says. The guy kind of looks like his dog. Alert. Big eyes. I picture him with his mouth open and tongue lolling and laugh.

“That’s okay. I’ll find one of my own.”

I feel like I’m dying. I feel like every single one of my parts is shutting down, or if not shutting down, giving their most minimal effort. It’s hard to get out of my bed in the morning, it’s a process. It’s 45 minutes of begging and cajoling and promising and breaking promises, of my knees threatening mutiny while my back joins in and my brain wonders, what’s the point? What’s the point?

I’m not old enough to be like this. I’m not old. I don’t smoke, I hardly drink. It’s just… something that I’ve thought ever since I learned Newtonian Physics back when I was a kid and they told us it was all because of an apple hitting him in the head. Gravity pulls a little harder on me. It’s like some taller guy comes up behind me and just constantly presses down on my shoulders, pushing me further into my shoes. I tell you, I go through the soles of my sneakers way faster than I should. When it’s muddy out, I sink lower.

I can feel it. And my bones don’t know what to do, under all that pressure to perform the same daily tasks of riding my bike to school and to my job, the same things everyone else does, but they don’t have my constant strain. Sometimes I dream about Newton, going up to him and asking him about what he thought about my problem. I’d point to my bike tires. Newton, I’d say, they lose air so quickly.

On my bike, when I get going, that’s the only time the weight is lifted, like that bully who holds me down can’t keep up. I transfer all of that heaviness to the bike, and that’s why my tires bend unnaturally, and lose their shape, and do all the things that tires aren’t supposed to do. But it doesn’t matter, I can fix it. I’ll fix it to feel light.

Somebody might say that I’m fat, but look at me. I’m thin as a rail. I weigh 40 pounds less than I should. But the springs in my bed still groan when I lay down, initially resisting and then giving in to my weight, knowing that as soon as I envelop myself in its sheets, I’m anchored there for as long as I possibly can. Soon, when I start to rustle my sheets, my bed sighs. It has me.

This isn’t an excuse. It’s an explanation. It’s why I hang my head when I walk, why I found the boy’s birthday card on the floor. And here’s why I opened it, why I took the money, why I did it without thinking. I could make myself feel better about it by pretending like the money was payback. Here you go, fate was saying. Gravity is playing an evil trick on you. Here’s 40 dollars.

I bought new grips with that money, and rust remover for the handlebars. And then I found another kid’s card a couple days later, took it right out when I saw the bright envelope; if not me, it’d be someone else – I bet all petty thieves steal the bright envelopes, hoping for money inside. And karma paid me back again. 100 dollars, for graduating – or for dealing with the sheer difficulty of extricating myself from the sheets. I bought a nice new seat with that money. I felt lighter than ever when I rode, I didn’t think about who didn’t get their money, I just thought about me.

I woke up one morning and I hopped out of bed because I knew it was Monday and the mail was going to come, and I had gotten the new pedals and the stronger frames for the wheels and now I wanted something different – a better light for the front so I could feel safer riding at night, maybe. Something. There’s a lot that karma could pay for.

Mail never comes for me – just mailers. Junk mail. Stupid mail that makes me mad I exist. I left marks in the hall carpet while I was there at the mailboxes, ripping my trash in half, leaving marks like a bookshelf that has stayed in the same place and left grooves in the carpet.

I reopened my mailbox and I put my hand all the way through my box and reached over, letting my long fingers wend my way into the box next to mine. To the left, to the right, above, below. I found bills and the same junk mail and only once piece of mail that was interesting. Big and white, with curlicue calligraphy and Mr. And Mrs. in the title. I opened it and found myself staring at a blank check.

For a wedding, for whatever present they liked, from so-and-so, and so-and-so’s wife, and you can call them Dad and Mom, but you don’t have to just yet if that makes you feel uncomfortable. I held the blank check and thought about the bike I could buy. I walked over to the cycling shop and saw things that would help me fly across the pavement to all the things that I hate doing and have to try to accomplish before my body gives out and says enough is enough.

I looked at my bike out the window and saw the handlebars and the grips and everything and then I took a walk outside and my whole body screamed at me to take a taxi to the nearest mattress store. I don’t feel bad about the money I have or the blank check that’s going to buy my bike. The universe is giving me that money. I stop into a store and buy a soda, drink half of it and feel horrible. I’ll buy that bike, I decide. The one that’s a better version than mine.

I’m not even mad when I get back to my bike and everything I bought is gone. Karma gave me this blank check for a reason.

We’re looking to make a few limited-edition prints for our loving fans. They’d look a bit like this:

So let us know what you want so we can get them printed! We’ll give you a shout when they’re ready to buy.

To Marcus, the bronze sign seemed less like instructions, and more like a challenge. He often confused the two. In fact, it had been an alleged misinterpretation of the rules that had netted him the day off from school. Not surprisingly Marcus had seized the opportunity to shadow the buses on their field trip to the aquarium. As painful as a mandated excursion with Roosevelt Elementary School could be, it was equally awesome to be present free from their jurisdiction. Honestly, could anything be better than watching as his fellow students shuffled from one exhibit to the next at precise twenty minute intervals while he stood on his perch at the big tank railing and attempted his best Cheshire cat smile?

He had found himself sufficiently distracted by his toiling cohorts until a sneeze had forced his gaze downward, where the brass sign was bolted firmly to the lip of the safety railing. Marcus read the proclamation:

Please do not throw any change or other refuse into this tank. Our aquatic residents appreciate your consideration.

Almost without thinking, his hand was in his jeans. A copious jangle of change sifted through his fingers. Without a ride, Marcus had braved two and a half buses to get to the aquarium. He read the sports section of a discarded paper, less interested in the final scores than the blotchy pictures of athletic prowess. Before leaving for the stop several blocks from his house, a quarter raid was performed on his father’s left sock drawer. The right sock drawer held treasures too, but not the kind you could spend. Items extracted from the right had found themselves the center of attention during many a lunch period. Condom balloons became a frequent 5th period occurrence until one kid went to the nurse after eating a peppermint flavored specimen. The left drawer was a guaranteed coin mine, a veritable breeding ground for quarters and dimes.

Marcus separated a nickel from a tuft of lint and held it over the shark tank. It was so easy to disobey; the joy of it was somewhat distasteful. The point wasn’t to actually sink some silver into the still waters below, but to upset someone by doing so. For the briefest of moments, Marcus wished he hadn’t been suspended. If the whole class were surrounding him, he’d get as big a reaction as he could hope for. Peter would do his weird snot laugh that always ended with him coughing. Ellen and Alexa would probably squeal and then suck down the last sips of their mothers’ peppermint lattes. It would be the chief subject of conversation for the day, maybe even the week. But the class had moved on to the walls stacked high with minnows and phosphorescent guppies.

“Don’t do it,” said a tiny voice.

Marcus hadn’t noticed the small girl approach him. She couldn’t be more than four years old, yet she didn’t seem to have any guardian with her. Her hair was frizzy, like someone had just rubbed a balloon up and down her head. A pattern of freckles rushed from her ears to her nose, detouring across her cheeks in the process.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Marcus offered, rather unconvincingly.

“Sure you were. You were throwing a coin into that shark tank. Don’t.”

He raised himself out of his perpetual slouch to his full height, and choking his eyes and voice with disdain, queried if she, little thing that she was, planned to stop him.

“Yes.”

He waited for some kind of further answer, but the girl chose to stare off towards a wing of the building Marcus had yet to investigate. He was disturbed by her conviction. Never in his eight years terrorizing suburbia had anyone so definitively told him he couldn’t do a certain thing. For a moment it stopped him, but just as quickly he was irate, and seizing on the momentum of his own anger, he pulled back his arm, rendering his appendage a slingshot, and sought an appropriate target to aim for.

“WAIT!”

A couple heads turned, but the immediate assumption was that Marcus was the girl’s big brother, and as such, was teasing or tormenting her. The adults resumed their respective tasks, relieved to not be relied upon to inflict authority upon a young stranger.

“What is your problem?” he snarled under his breath.

“It’s the wrong target,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

She reached up on her toes so she could whisper in his ear.

“It’s the wrong target. We only get one chance. Don’t waste it on this.”

Slightly bewildered, but recognizing a fellow troublemaker when he heard one, Marcus followed the girl as she guided him towards the annex he had yet to see. They passed the long glass coffin of a deceased hammerhead you could poke at with gloved fingers, then a full wall-to-ceiling display of a school of cod incessantly circling their confines. Finally she led him to an elevator.

“Brilliant,” he whined. “You’re leading me out of this entire stupid place.”

He slid down the elevator’s door in defeat.

Without a glance in Marcus’s direction, the girl pushed the UP button and stepped over him when the doors dropped his weight. He scooted his butt and legs inside the box and rode the several floor journey to the top without righting himself. When he finally stood, he saw the girl’s intentions.

The rooftop garden was small, stuffed between office annexes and supply rooms. A thick glass door led them outside, where the planter boxes hid them well from the unsuspecting hordes of aquarium, visitors eating lunch below.

“My mom works here,” explained the girl. “I can’t get away with anything on the main floor. But here,” she interrupted herself to hurl a penny beyond the planter box and onto the back of a lunching man. “I own here.”

Marcus grabbed a handful of change. He let the metal sting his palm, then sent a shower of copper and silver raining over the picnic tables.

Due to time constraints, these 1,000 words were written by Zack Ruskin – Believer Magazine intern, short story collection author, and overall good guy. Thanks, Zack!

This is one of those things that is best done very drunk. One shot of whisky, two shots of it. Three, maybe. I don’t have anything to measure with. I was at a bar when a bartender was training and she was told to count to four as she poured, and that was a shot, but those bottles had those spouts.

Still. One, two, three, four – three times – I have 12 seconds of whisky in my coffee. Drunkenly alert, that’s the way to go. I need to be able to will my feet down to the subway, across town, and into where she works. Tony told me about it and ever since I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind, like a top 40 song. But a particularly good one, just a little more dirty and with slinkier bass than any top 40 song has any right to have.

What I’m saying is Julia Bell is a stripper now – or she’s one of those girls behind the glass that just gyrates erotically until you pay them enough to take it all off? There’s definitely a difference. Voyeurism comes in different flavors. It’s the difference between having a cup of ice cream or a cone. And I guess this is like having a flavor of ice cream at home and then buying it from a store. It’s all too much economizing for my liking, I’ve never liked the idea of paying to spend time with a girl, I don’t even like paying for all the date. We should both pay to spend time with each other.

I’m projecting, here. I actually don’t know. I’ve never been to a strip club before, or a glass window – not the type with a naked girl on the other side, anyway. If I need to look at naked girls, there are magazines and the internet and Cinemax. And I don’t need to be literally next to another guy or dozen guys looking at the same thing. But maybe strip clubs aren’t about the sex? This is a question I can ask Julia.

I briefly consider wearing a disguise so that Julia doesn’t recognize me, but Tony said she invited him to come over and watch her dance, which struck me as odd because that’s not the Julia that I remember, that’s more like Isobel Walker who lived down the street from me and would flash guys her boobs for a dollar back in fifth grade when no other girls had boobs but her. Again, I didn’t attend. Tony did. He said it taught him a lot, especially because he spent another dollar to feel them. She ate apple slices during the exchange.

I don’t need to wear a disguise because I doubt Julia Bell will recognize me. It’s been six years since I’ve seen her, and she wasn’t the type of girl who would see a guy like me. I remember her writing cheers for the cheerleading squad in iambic pentameter, and her making a scale model of the Bastille out of sugar a month before the project was due so that ants could start destroying it. I had a big crush on a girl with such great ideas. So I can wear my mask of age and my wallflower mask and it means I don’t need a big fake mustache or anything, no matter how cool that might look.

At the place, I pay the cover charge and go inside and sit down and there’s some girl named Paradise up on the stage, but she isn’t dancing, she’s nearly naked and she’s using an antibacterial wipe up and down the pole. Everything is sexual in here. I realize Paradise is Julia Bell and at the same time I wonder why it is I came here. I know that I had an idea when I left, but the whisky and the caffeine chased it out and now all I can think is, Julia Bell is going to be naked in front of me and I’m going to watch all of these sad men stick money in her g-string, which is probably some extended, disgusting metaphor for high school.

She starts to dance when a song comes on with bass so loud it shakes the glasses full of low alcohol content beer. She takes off her clothes, she gives sultry looks with her pouty lips that used to kiss Lee Blankenship. She finishes after a couple more songs and comes over to the table next to me and flirts with a guy, asks if he wants to spend some time alone with her. He says he’s looking for a girl named Veronica, so she comes and sits at my table. I take her offer.

We go to a room with a small velvet couch and I remember why I wanted to come here. Originally I had some sort of revenge fantasy planned out where I reveal who I am and then pay her to dance for me, which isn’t really revenge at all, it just points out how sad our lives are. What I really wanted to do was come here and just talk to her while she’s at work. As normal as if she were working in a coffee shop.

So I pay her and she starts to push her body against mine and my hands are pressed into the crushed velvet and then I say, Julia, it’s me. It’s Oliver, from high school. And she stops and puts her arms around me and says, Wow, Hi, I remember you. And I ask her how what’s up, how is life? and she says, just a second. I’ll be right back.

Then she’s gone and that image of naked Julia straddling me and smiling while she remembered who I was is burned onto my retinas, to be used whenever I like. Then a bouncer comes and throws me out onto the empty street. No touching, he says. No touching.

It was cold on the East Coast when I left. I wore a jacket all the way onto the plane because the airport’s heaters were spotty at best, and I got off the plane in Los Angeles sweating. My Dad picked me up and we didn’t talk much on the ride home. We planned what to do for the Christmas lights on the house and that was about it,.

When we pass my old high school, he says, “That reminds me,” and turns down the satellite radio to tell me they tore down my elementary school and expanded the park that was across the street so that big baseball diamonds occupied the whole space. He says, “My tax dollars should go to tennis courts.”

I don’t say anything back for a little bit, but I do text Scott to see if he’s back from his European tour thing yet. If not, it won’t go through, my phone will just give me that sad error message that blames itself rather than the other person’s phone service. “I really liked elementary school,” I finally say to my Dad after the pause stretched out too long. “I know,” he answers.

The house outside is the same house as it always was, the same facade as the house three houses up the street, and four houses down and across the street, but inside is a winter wonderland. Every year it’s beautiful inside our house, with candles on every surface and a giant 9 foot tree and enough stockings for 3 or 4 large families and ceramic elves peaking out from unexpected corners. My Mom hugs me and offers me coffee from a thermal carafe, which I drink even though the caffeine is going to keep me up for the rest of the night. The three of us talk for a little bit and then retreat into a book (Mom), a movie (Dad) and my old room (me). Not a lot to update thanks to Facebook. Scott texts back that he is home and a sad face about the news, and after I take stock of my room’s recent paint job and my closet door’s mirror fixed, I leave.

“Can I borrow your car? I have to do some last minute Christmas shopping.” My mom says I can’t use her car and my dad says I can, so I take her keys and drive and pick up Scott. I don’t need to Christmas shop, but I don’t want to be in the house very much.

“It’s weird to be home,” he says when he gets in the car.

“Yeah, it’s always weird to come back.”

We drive aimlessly, until some high school memory track kicks in and I’m already driving over to Barnes and Noble, where we wander the aisles and I pull out titles for him to read. He buys one and we leave, bemoaning a lack of pretty girls sitting in the easy chairs. The conversation is of a high school vintage too.

We drive to the mall and walk around the outdoor part, which has been expanded and added to and the ice cream shop has been replaced by an add-your-own toppings yogurt place and the only non-chain restaurant in the mall has been replaced by a California Pizza Kitchen. We both grab yogurts and laugh that there are people in coats. It’s sixty degrees outside, and I’m wearing a hoodie as an afterthought. Scott’s in shorts. The mall closes down at ten, and we’re asked very nicely to vacate by a mall cop that looks vaguely like someone we both knew in Geometry.

When we’re back in the car, I remembered the mixed cd I hid in the backseat, which is still there, back from when I wasn’t allowed to listen to music during my first three months of driving. The mix is all ska and punk and a couple guilty pleasure singles from bands that have disappeared since. Scott and I both still know the lyrics and we sing along, especially when Cursive pops up to sing about the daughter he didn’t know he had.

“Let’s go anyway,” he says.

“I think Samantha might manage that In N’ Out now, actually,” I answer. “Let’s go there.”

She does, but she isn’t there, she’s taking the day off to spend with her daughter, who got taken away from her when the guy that knocked her up proved to a court she was addicted to cocaine. We get back in the car with chopped onions and cheddar cheese melting on fries making grease stains on white bags, which we aren’t allowed to open because I know my Mom still holds to the no-eating-in-the-car rule.

I don’t put it off anymore. We drive to where the elementary school was, where Scott and I met way back when, where he gave me mix tapes with Weezer and I traded for my mixtapes of Benny Goodman big band. Where I did well and waited for praise like an overeager puppy, and he preferred to blend in the shadows. Where we fought valiantly to be the only geek allowed to play basketball with the cool sixth graders. Where we grew up.

It’s green and huge, all of those baseball diamonds side by side. We pull out our bags of lukewarm cheese fries and eat it leaning on the hood of the car. The park is pitch black except one corner, where a stadium floodlight is stubbornly lit. We’re drawn to it like moths, and we find an errant softball and lob it to each other.

“How was the European tour?”

“I didn’t know we’d made it so big over there,” he says, shrugging.

“How’s the East Coast?”

I shrug back.

We throw the ball back and forth and I don’t try to assign any meaning to it. I’m only here for a week, I think, and then I can go back home.

When I transferred the money to Scarlett online, I wanted to trumpet to the heavens how amazing the internet and internet banking was – I added a little note in the transfer description that the bank translated without capitals or punctuation: I LOVE YOU AND CANT WAIT FOR YOU MUCH LONGER and then the transfer time and a confirmation code. I remember thinking, in that expensive Paris flat, that I was a robot without her, and the only way she was going to come to me was if she felt guilty and had a passport, and paying for her passport was a way to do both.
I smoked cigarettes in the rain under the Eiffel Tower that day, knowing every cigarette was 3 minutes further into the future. A parisian girl lit the first cigarette, and every one after that was lit by the orange end of the one that came before it. Scarlett called it “burning rope,” which she got from the military school in Iowa where she went to high school. Cigarettes were the only vice allowed the students– that and sex, because the school provided condoms. So both were like prison currency. Scarlett told me once that she was always pretty poor, which was hot and gross at the same time.

I burned rope through half the pack and I felt like I’d swallowed a hundred tiny knives. When I got back to the Paris flat and checked my e-mail and hadn’t gotten anything yet, I remembered I had to allow for the time difference and the annoying little fact that Scarlett didn’t have the internet.

Paris was possible because of my brother. The day I told him I was in love with Scarlett, we were in a cafe and drinking about 50 espressos each, running up the tab because we both knew we could walk away from the table and the only consequence would be confirming the less-than sterling American reputation. I told him all about how when I got back to New York, Scarlette and I were going to move to Malibu, on the beach, and just love each other and work in trendy restaurants. I remember the pitying smile he gave me and the caffeine jitters that stirred in sugar cubes for us. We both had to keep our hands on our knees so that we didn’t shake the table.

The top floor flat was my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s new husband’s old place where he brought his mistress, who was my brother’s girlfriend, and the guy felt awful about the whole thing when it all shook out, and told my brother to live in Paris as long as it took to get over his new wife. After a month there, my brother asked me to come drink with him, so I did, with Scarlett planning to follow when her passport situation righted itself.

Scarlett and I met when she was crying outside a mini-mart and I stopped to offer her a cigarette. She told me her sordid tale about some drug dealer who had taken her out thinking she was a prostitute, but she just liked short skirts – a predilection we shared. It wasn’t long before she moved into my apartment and we had separate blankets on my bed because she tangled sheets with her dreams about frotteurs and being strangled.

I loved to be the one she could wake up to and cry into. The whole savior thing, the white knight, the guy whose arms she could wrap around herself while I remained half asleep. When I played her covers of cute love songs on guitar, she told me I was the nicest boyfriend she’d ever had and then we’d kiss and tangle the sheets, both of us, together, closed eyes but not dreaming, although sometimes it felt like I was anyway.

Paris felt strange with my brother, getting drunk in bars where I had to order with my poor French, because my brother’s french was impossible to understand even though he was supposedly “fluent.” He kept saying that he wanted to come back to New York while we walked aimlessly and took croissant tours of the city, my name for our spiral routes, buying pastries to fuel our tired feet. When we would get back, I’d check my e-mail and there’d be nothing. And she didn’t have a cell phone, which was quaint back when I was right there next to her, and even though I was trying to be good family and be there for my brother when he needed me the most, all I could think of was the images of tangled sheets and her tears and how she always needed to be comforted by somebody.

She sent me an e-mail, finally, about a week and a half after I sent the 110 dollars she needed for the passport, and she told me about the guy at work and then said I didn’t need any more details, just that it happened and she felt bad – that was the word she used – she felt bad about it.

I called six people before I got someone who could hand the phone to her so that she could talk to me. All I could do was ask her repeatedly for the 110 dollars. I need it, I kept saying, I need it to buy some things out here, I need it.

She sent it back and she didn’t write anything in the transfer, it was just all those numbers along with the confirmation time, and I know she doesn’t have internet which meant that she used this new guy’s internet to do it. My brother and I could share pain now, so we did, we burned rope through two packs of cigarettes underneath that red awning on the balcony of the apartment, and I thought about the exchange rate and how many cigarettes that would buy, passing the time until I didn’t need to feel time passing anymore.

Sometimes things turn out okay. This morning, for example. I’m driving to work and I’m going to be late because I remembered the parking structure is being sprayed to exterminate that beetle that eats car paint, so it means I am going to spend ten to twenty minutes finding a space, but then I take the wrong freeway exit and a nice, parking meter-free street appears. It ends in a walkway that leads straight to a bridge over the freeway, right to a path that meanders to the office building.

I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.

In the elevator up to work, someone asks me why I’m smiling, and I can’t tell them, because that would definitely ruin my little find. A place to park during this whole paint beetle debacle is the sort of thing that people crowd around like donuts from the good place, the place that was featured on “Good Morning America” that puts real fruit in the frosting, not the place where two letters are burned out, leaving the unappetizing “NUTS” lit during the early morning donut run.

Work is work is work, is work.

The next day is the second to last day of the beetle extermination so I park in the same spot and walk across the bridge, noticing a blue chalk scrawl that brightly proclaims: “If loneliness were something you could hang up on the wall, then I could be a priceless piece of art.” The message goes from one end of the bridge to the other, and I either want to take a hose to it or spray some sort of glue fixative to it. I’m not sure if I’m lonely or if I just think loneliness is beautiful. When I get to my office I look it up on google. People have said things kind of like it.

I wonder if a kid wrote it for about 3 or 4 minutes, and then I start working and I forget about it, and work is work is work untl the next day, the last day that pesticide is supposed to disperse, and the message is gone. In its place is something else, scrawled in a different, vibrant green.

“I’m in love with the idea that love will not fulfill me as much as all the money that I’ll make from being famous.”

I get to work and I’m sad and I’m misremembering the quote. I have a meeting and I scratch out what I think the quote is on a piece of paper, and then I realize I haven’t been paying attention to the meeting, and then work is work is work and then it’s over. I go home and I make instant macaroni and cheese and watch the television show that the whole office is watching; so I have to if I want to be able to talk to anyone tomorrow.

When I’m driving to work, I remember I do not have to park in that neighborhood for the day – the beetle pesticide is gone. My car’s paint is safe. Everyone can park without any fear of anything. I choose the “wrong” exit and park in the neighborhood again anyway. It’s best to be safe about these things. I should give the pesticide ample time to disperse.

On the bridge, the message has changed again. Back to blue and much more contained, the letters much smaller and only a quarter of the bridge is full. “If I don’t feel love then do I feel lonely? Or do I feel something much worse?” This time I write it down on a pad of paper I keep in my briefcase alongside the notes I took from the television show, all my talking points.

At work I accidentally ask the question in the middle of a discussion about the television show at the water cooler. Someone asks me what I mean, and I tell them, maybe the love interest is thinking it, and everyone looks into their respective cups of water and coffee and thinks for a second, and then they go back to their desks because the boss is around and he asks us what we thought of the television show, and we don’t want to talk about it with him, so we just say we didn’t see it.

When I walk back to my car, I stop at the chalk writing and stoop down and take a fresh sheet of notebook paper out of my notebook. Do you need to talk? You can talk to me at five thirty tomorrow, I write. I’ll be here and we can talk. I find a rock near my car and take my piece of paper and put it underneath a rock and then go home.

The next day is Friday, and I’m late because I went into one of those shower comas where the water is hitting you in just the right rhythm that it’s like you’ve fallen asleep. I only woke up because the hot water ran out and at that point I had 10 minutes to get to work. I park in the parking lot and work. And the boss talks to me about being late and I derail him by saying I caught the episode of the show and we talk about it and I say the quote from the sidewalk and he smiles and thinks about it and dismisses me.

I go back to my car and drive halfway home before I realize it’s 6pm and I should’ve been there to talk to whoever writes the chalk messages. I drive back, like a mad man. I take the “wrong” exit and I park on the street and run to the bridge, but there’s nobody there. There’s no writing. There’s nothing.

I kick myself for being so stupid, leave another note about meeting on Monday, and make way for the ambulance before I get back on the freeway to head home.

I remember someone told me once that the best way to get a girl to love you is to save her from a dangerous situation. Maybe do it twice. At the time, I was drunk and on my third beer. My friend was mixing himself a martini and adding six olives that were actually stuffed with bleu cheese, so when he stirred the mixture with his finger, it turned a milky grey. Thumping music played in the background as he explained that being scared and then safe with you triggered a very primordial emotional response. A midwest university did a study on it, he said. The results were there.

I didn’t think about this friend and his story the night that Velouria and I had a knife pulled on us. The man in the mask asked us for money and I gave it to him, but then he asked for Velouria’s necklace, which was handed down from generation to generation, the gem in the center of the charm hidden in a relative’s cheek as they secreted themselves towards America. I told him, respectfully, no. His right hand shook, he nearly dropped his knife, he looked into my eyes and then into Velouria’s – she buried her face in my shoulder – and then he left.

Velouria kissed me hard when he left. She smelled like honey and clover and maybe nutmeg, and I took her face in my hands and kissed her hard and said, I’m sorry that happened. And she pulled back and said, thank you for handling it.

That night, we were back at my apartment, and I was working on a new recipe for a cupcake with goat cheese frosting and she came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my middle and pressed her face into my back. I kissed her with my hands away from her body (they were covered in goat cheese and pastry flour) but she grabbed my arms and pushed them onto her back. Thanks again, she said. That smells amazing. I told her: You smell amazing – I know that nothing bad can happen when I’m with you. She smiled and licked some of the frosting off my finger. That tastes wonderful, she said.

When I got in bed after showering, she snuggled up close to me and we were warm under the duvet, hot even. I fell asleep with a bead of sweat traveling down my brow, and woke up to the smell of something wonderful baking.

For a moment, I panicked – I left something in the oven, I baked in my sleep, I ate in bed – but I turned and realized the smell came from Velouria. Her hair was perfectly tousled, her arms akimbo, the top sheet was twisted between her legs. A trail of crumbs led to her shoulder, and I rolled over and pushed my body against hers. Her shoulder smelled like an apple cider pound cake, and I couldn’t think of a better way to wake up, especially on a cold morning in Autumn. My girlfriend baked for me. Beautiful.

I got up and went to the kitchen to find nothing – no pans, no dirty measuring bowls, no pound cake. Velouria walked into the kitchen in a robe, yawning a few minutes later and poured herself a cup of coffee. She brought the smell with her.

Where did you hide the apple cider pound cake? I asked. She looked at me with dopey, sleepy eyes. Hmm? Her expression was tired confusion, like a cartoon. She was so beautiful when she furrowed her brow. I didn’t bake anything, she said. Then I guess it’s just you, I said, leaning across our breakfast table and kissing her. You smell like baked goods.

She brought her nose to her shoulder and breathed in deep. I smell good enough to eat, she said. I might just, I said.

It was hard to keep my hands off of her, and when I wasn’t with her, my thoughts off of her.I started to wonder if my want of her had turned into needing her, and I kneaded her into every loaf of bread that day. I opened my briefcase to find the finished goat cheese frosting recipe I worked on the night before to find a note from her tucked into the folded, stained post-it chain from the kitchen.

Everything of mine should be yours, she wrote. I think we should get married. Every morning I make the same equation when I wake up – the time I can be away from you subtracted from the time I can be with you, and the difference of the two, and it’s starting to look like one side of the equation is zero. Twenty four minus zero is still twenty four.

When I got home, I called her name into the darkness of my apartment. She had told me she would be waiting, but I stopped and lingered over and purchased a ring to give to her, to fulfill her ring finger’s destiny. She was in the bedroom, naked on the sheets, and the entire room smelled like raspberry crumb bars, burnt sugar, spilled flour.

It smells delicious in here, I said.

It’s all me, she said. Lick my shoulder.

I did. She tasted like butter and pastry cream, flour and beaten eggs, whole milk and hints of raspberry.

What’s happened? I asked.

I don’t know. But I’m yours, she said. I’m safe as long as I’m with you. Please, bite my lips.

I obeyed. My teeth sank into softness like I had bitten into raspberry truffle. Bright red fruit puree dripped down her chin. She stuck her tongue out to taste it. It’s like raspberry jam, she said. I tasted her and agreed. There are blackcurrants in there, I said.

Savor every bite, she said, bringing her hand to my lips.

As I bit into her, I wondered how to make the cupcake that would taste like her.

Is it possible to stop sweating? Like, your body doesn’t have any more moisture to put out? I feel like the beads of sweat on my body have to peter out eventually, but it doesn’t show signs of stopping. It’s me against the sun, and even though the sun is so far away, it seems like it’s winning.

My friend George (who’s actually a girl named “Georgia”) had this thing she taught me in high school called mind maps. She started doing them in Advanced Placement European History on the blank maps that we got of the Baltic countries and the Netherlands, drawing in her own fanciful versions of mountains and rivers that would have driven any self-respecting cartographer crazy. Then she’d draw where her rambling thoughts went – starting out someplace neutral and then, as her thoughts became more tangled, heading out into the forest. When her thoughts veered someplace sexual, they tromped through rivers. When she was reaching some place of higher thought, she drew paths to the top of her triangular mountains.

At the end of the period, she’d hand over her mind map and I’d be able to parse out how her mind jumped from cartoons she watched that morning with her little brother to the way her shoes were pinching her pinky toes, then hopped her way to foot fetishes and why people end up hating their spouses.

I had a big crush on George back in high school. I can remember how she looked every day and how she acted, and I can remember lingering after a class so that I would make sure to walk out of the classroom with her, maybe offer her my company to her next class, maybe hold her books (so classy, so old-fashioned).

If I was going to start my own map of how I got here, sucking on this flat stone in the middle of the salt flats, I think I’d start there. I was going to start back two weeks ago, in that survival class where I ended up flirting with the girl sitting next to me rather than listening to the survival guy (bearded, of course) talk on about how to find water in the desert, but that wouldn’t be quite right, because I only started flirting with her because my ex-girlfriend Elise told me she had found somebody else, and I was hoping she would be one of those girls who would always hold the torch for me.

The sky is far too blue here. Even through my sunglasses.

It definitely starts with George, because that was also when I started having a car to drive around in, and that meant I had the freedom and power and ability to choose where I went and who I went there with, which meant I chose to give George rides, much to her boyfriend’s chagrin. I remember trying to kiss her outside her family’s apartment, and thinking when I got home (lips unkissed) that I wanted to give her everything and yet she wanted none of it.

And then from there, I started dating Mirah, who was beautiful and kissed me a lot, even in public, which I thought was great, but she didn’t do anything like show me how to make mind maps or explain how to peel oranges in one continuous peel (another talent of George’s) and that’s when I first learned that it’s unfair to compare girls to one another, but also learned that it’s impossible to not.

It didn’t matter anyway because I called Mirah “George” and she thought I was gay, even though she knew my best friend, as I referred to her, was named George. From there, the map would take me to that girl I made out with at the only high school party I went to, who I kissed because George was there, and she had come with me but was going to leave with someone else, someone who wasn’t her boyfriend, which meant that it’s not that she didn’t want to cheat on Paul, she just didn’t want to cheat on Paul with me.

Then, that would take me to college and that letter that I got from George where she told me all about her new boyfriend Henry, and his british-ness, which led me to Kelly, and her total lack of redeeming qualities other than her willingness to sleep with me. And when Kelly realized how bored she made me, I got lonely and flew to George and she didn’t kiss me (again) but we did hold hands while we ate ice cream, which was probably the nicest moment I’d had with a girl since, well, her. So I remember trying to find other girls who felt nice to hold hands and eat ice cream with.

George made mind maps. I make girl maps, and I guess that means that my mind is full of girls, and I’m just some sort of steel pinball, bouncing around, always returning down the hole where George stayed, which I guess is like the ball returning home.

After my nice moment with George, I dated Miranda, and then Elise, and that happened at the same time, and I was juggling both of them which left no time for me to think about George, or so I thought. But Miranda found out about Elise and broke up with me, and then Elise found my letters to George and broke up with me, and I can remember that’s when I decided I need a change, I needed to learn how to survive on my own.

But then that girl in survival class looked sort of like George and made me feel better about myself than Elise ever did, and we flirted and I thought about her instead of surviving so all I took from that class was to suck on a rock if you get thirsty and don’t have water.

And here I am, surviving, but my map is useless.

Like this story and picture? It’s available as a notebook on Blurb. 

A girl like Mandy Spitzer is the type of girl who my Mom would say gives the milk away for free. The guys at school had different terms for it, of varying degrees of niceness. I think my favorite was, “Her lips just get bored kissing the same set every day,” which I liked because it made it seem like it wasn’t Mandy Spitzer’s fault, that it was just her damn lips, which weren’t something she could control. Maybe it was something like the Energizer Bunny and his inability to stop hitting his little white drum.

But if it was something like that, where does Mandy Spitzer keep her battery?

Lou Davidson, last Monday morning, told the eighth grade homeroom that kissing Mandy Spitzer is like making out with blackberry cobbler, which made me think of birds, and the way that the mama bird eats something and then throws it up in the baby bird mouths. Suddenly there’s the image of Mandy Spitzer biting into a freshly baked pie, chewing it up and then shoving her mouth onto Lou, and it makes me so sick that I have to leave home room.

Did I mention that I’m in love with Mandy Spitzer and I don’t think anybody – not Lou Davidson, not Gary Ferrerra, or Scooter Tompkins – should be kissing her at all? It should be me, it should be my lips that she’s energizer bunny-ing with. Lou tells me in secret that her lips are deeply colored because she squeezes blackberry juice onto them in the morning along with vaseline. It’s her own lipgloss that she invented and wants to get patented someday.

Like I said, I’m in love with Mandy Spitzer.

I asked my dad in a roundabout way what I should do if I’m in love with somebody, and he got flustered and ended up sitting down with me and showing a more animated, less informative version of the video we watched in health class about “Our Changing Bodies,” and then he asked me if I had any questions, and all I could say was no, so that was a colossal waste of time.

I thought about asking my younger sister, but she’s only seven, and even though she regales us with stories of her three boyfriends that she’s “juggling better than Bozo the Clown,” I know she’s just blowing smoke. I saw one of these so-called boyfriends touch her arm the other day and she was getting one of her friends to circle-circle-dot-dot like the poor boy had the plague. So, yeah. No one can help me with my Mandy Spitzer problem.

Mandy Spitzer has her two friends, Leesa Showfield and Nora Verinski. They sit at the same place for lunch every day and discuss the many shortcomings of our eighth grade class. What I do every day is walk by their table, compliment Leesa on her neckerchief or whatever, and Nora on her bangles, and then I walk on. I think it’s kind of mean, but it’s all I can think of to do – eventually, she’s going to have to come up and talk to me and ask why I’m being such a jerk. I’m ready for it. Here’s what I’m going to say.

“Mandy Spitzer, the reason why I compliment them is because they need as much bolstering as they can handle if they are going to be around someone who is as beautiful as you are every day. Plus, if I started complimenting you I would have to start from your toes and work my way all the way up to the space above your head which glows a little bit from your radiance. And that would take a while, and I wouldn’t get to eat my lunch and I know that Leesa and Nora would get real bored. So I just have to skip it every day. You understand, right?”

I never get the chance to say my speech, which is in its third draft by the way. I was going to talk about the ends of her hair at first, but I thought she might think that I thought she had split ends, so I skipped it and added that bit about how she glows. One day, Leesa and Nora came up to me and I thought I was going to get the thrashing of a lifetime with their fluorescent fake fingernails. Instead they said, “Mandy wants you to meet her by the blackberry bushes after school today,” with Leesa starting the sentence and Vera taking it to its fantastic orchestral finish.

“Oh, cool. Um, I hope I can make it,” I said.

“You can. Bring mints,” Vera said while Leesa was leaving, and they both giggled away.

After school. Today. A girl like Mandy Spitzer should give more time, she should know she deserves my brown Sunday school loafers, spit shined, my hair combed and gelled to one side and maybe even my clip-on tie, secreted away in a pocket during school, but brought out for the big moment.

And by the blackberry bushes! I replace my mama bird image with a better one: Mandy Spitzer has puckered her lips and is holding a just-ripened blackberry there, right at the symmetrical center of her mouth, and instead of going right in for the kiss, I press my lips up against that berry and we squeeze our mouths together, popping the little balloons of berry one by one so that juice drips down between us.

That day after school I wait and imagine different scenarios and wonder if there is a way that I can stretch this berry-scented makeout further, from eighth grade to high school, from high school to college, all the way across the expanse of time that Mandy Spitzer and I have to live. Because if you ever get to kiss a girl like Mandy Spitzer, you should try to keep kissing her for the rest of your life.

It was the day the city beekeeper’s bees got loose. I superglued my windows shut and duct taped the space between the floor and the door because if I get stung by bees, I go into epileptic shock and my heart stops. There are medicines for this, but I don’t have health insurance. When I was ten and told to carry around the syringe that would save my life, just in case I got stung while I played with friends, the irony of one stinger saving me from another was lost.

I had my radio tuned to the news station and watched worriedly as swarms of confused and probably angry bees made their way around the city. The bees were screwing with the reception of the local news. Swaths of Michael Jackson interspersed with Lady Gaga would break through, as though I should dance while death knocked on my door.

To be honest, I was happy to have an excuse to stay inside. Time weighed so much on my shoulders when I was out in the sun, and I always feel like I should buy something when I walk around. Something to commemorate the walk, like a Milky Way or a pair of nice wool socks. It was good to stay inside, away from all that consumerism and time.

Originally, I tried to sketch the bees – cartoon versions of scary things have a way of making the real-life things more bearable (Scooby-Doo cartoons are built on this premise), but after my 7th or 8th, I still felt like bees were scarier than any bogey man. I started practicing my juggling in time to the static, dance beat, and nearly indescernable rhythm of the newscaster’s voice, enjoying the feeling of the weight of the juggling balls in my hands, trying not to focus on the colors that spun, instead focusing my gaze out the window.

Yes.

That’s when it happened.

After I had gotten a nice cascade going with the juggling balls I focused in on her, across the street, with her own cascade of red hair, blue and white striped shirt and fair skin. Even from such a distance of across the street and four floors up, we caught each others’ eye. We stared. I knew it wasn’t just because she was in awe of the trick (although I had kept the balls in motion). She saw straight into me. And the funny thing about that was I saw straight into her nearly simultaneously, like we had created eyeball sized tunnels that reached perfectly to each other’s souls.

While she saw my fear of bees and my hatred of novelty rap, I saw her ongoing search for strange flavors of ice cream and her distrust of men who wear their watches on their right arms.

Our gaze only broke – our eye tunnels collapsed – because of a bee, those poisonous little creatures that now not only threatened my life but my very happiness with this woman of my dreams. Perhaps she had opened her mouth because we all go a little slack-jawed in the presence of our one true love, or maybe she was going to whistle at me – but whatever the reason, my one true love’s face contorted. Her mouth had opened slightly to reveal a pert little pink tongue and a distressed bee saw it as a perfect situation in which to commit suicide.

The radio recepetion was switching channels at a fever pitch now as I watched helpless while my red-haired woman flailed and tried to gain attention from someone who might help. My phone, unfortunately, was useless in the situation – the bills and final notices provided nice kindling for fire in the winter months we so recently left behind. All I could do was finally stop juggling and press my fingertips to the glass, watching as her errant limbs hit some lazily droning bees, angered them, caused more stings, and my heart broke while my love continued to panic. The vicious circle roiled onward. Eventually, she fell to the ground looking much less attractive than when I first spied her. She looked like someone floating on a lazy river instead of a cement walkway, only not as peaceful because of the rising red welts. She closed her eyes and gave up.

So it was that a conundrum fell to me. What to do? Commit suicide and go and comfort her? Watch helplessly as my fiery, unnamed love perished? The newscaster spoke of great honey losses, but was interruped when Lady Gaga advised me to “Just Dance.” I considered it, but Michael Jackson intervened, insiting I “beat it.” I always listen to the classics.

I pulled a fishnet stocking left over from a previous relationship onto my head and donned my heavy painter’s overalls and ripped the duct tape off my door. I bolted down the stairs, out the apartment building’s lobby and across the street

“Miss!” I yelled, muffled by the fishnet

She turned her head to see me, and opened her recently stung eyelids to reveal soft green eyes. They widened and her body convulsed, sending some resting bees off of her and on their way. She managed her way to her feet and took off down the street.

“No! I’m here to help!”

My true love was fast. Faster than me. She had not fallen prey to the psychological torture of being attacked by bees, either, because she seemed more scared of slight-framed me than running into more recently released bees. I stopped in the street, huffing, tired of zigzagging from the swarms in my pursuit of this beautiful woman.

I caught my reflection in a stop window and saw the stranger staring back. With the fishnet on my head muting my features and red paint splattered on my overalls, I did look terribly frightening, and I finally understood why she was running.

I made my way back home unstung, and decided to never love again.

Joyce stood in the “Basic Tools” aisle of the hardware store, trying to do mental math. How much money did she have yesterday in her bank account when she logged on? How much were the pancakes and black coffee she had this morning? How much money did she tip the nice waitress with the red hair who kept trying to force fresh squeezed orange juice on her?

All of her equations kept coming up to less than zero, which meant she would have to steal the hammer and nails she needed to fix the boat, which was unfortunate. She really hated stealing, even if she was good at it, and even if it gave her a rush when she shoplifted, walking out of a store with a clandestine item (chocolate bar melting in her pocket, two pairs of Victoria’s Secret underwear tried on but never taken off, CD in the lining of her purse).

She wandered further back into the store and saw a little boy alone in the aisle of nuts and bolts, putting his hand into the buckets and closing his eyes. When he opened them and saw her, he stiffened and his hand shot out.

“I’m not here to bust you,” she said.

“You’re not my Mom,” he said, and he walked down the aisle, away from Joyce, looking over his shoulder like she might follow him for some reason.

Joyce put her hand into the same bucket the boy had his hands in, enjoying the feeling of the bolts getting out of the way of her hand. It was cool, calming. Her hand felt its way towards a bit of surprising rubber, which she pulled out. It was a bouncy ball.

She bounced it once then put it back where the boy had hid it.

Joyce took some long nails out of a different bucket and wandered her way around the rest of the store. She went up and paid for the nails, had them put into a bag with handles, and then left the store, only to come back a couple minutes later. She put the hammer into the bag and wandered around more, only to stop in front of the signage area. Letters and numbers hung on the same type of nails she had just paid for. She traced a black, simple “J” with her finger. She took it, dropped it into her bag, and grabbed an “O” and a “Y.”

The boy who hid the bouncy ball saw as she went back to grab the “C” and the “E.”

“You’re not my conscience,” Joyce said, but she left with the three stolen letters and the stolen hammer and the paid for nails, and she got none of the rush that she usually did.

She wandered away from the hardware store and up the two-lane road, which was marked only by white paint. There weren’t many cars on the road up here, she walked for hours and didn’t see any a single one. She tried mental math again. How much money had she stolen and then where had it all gone? She didn’t remember all the things she’d ever stolen, and she could never figure out why the money kept leaving as fast as she could steal it.

When she stole, she’d usually want to steal more. Like feeding a beast that just got hungrier no matter how much you feed it. It was a slumbering creature, which was good – sometimes it would fall asleep for days, weeks, months at a time. Joyce liked when she didn’t want to steal things, when she felt like she had gotten something out of life worth paying for. Like the company of that redheaded waitress, and the fluffy pancakes, and the coffee that just tasted rich and exciting.

The caffeine still pumped through her as she crested a small hill and saw the mist and the valley lay out in front of her, all the way to the lake where her boat was hidden. Well, it was actually a nice young man’s boat who didn’t know that the evening he spent with her was also all the payment he was ever going to get for the boat and the boat trailer.

Joyce wanted to steal just one more thing before she got to the boat. She could smell campfires to the left and right of her, which meant some intrepid folks had gotten up and maybe stuck cinnamon rolls on the end of marshmallow roasters. Or maybe they were just melting the soles of their rubber shoes onto the edge of fire pits. Regardless, a breakfast before she started fixing the boat seemed in order, so she followed her nose to a couple’s campsite, tromping through soft pine needles, tripping over roots, making a path all her own.

The couple was attractive – their hair was mussed, they had coffee percolating on the edge of their fire pit, the boy was trying to get the propane attached to an ancient Coleman camp stove, the girl was giggling into her sweatshirt sleeve.

“Hi there,” Joyce said. I’ll just steal a bit of their kindness to strangers, she thought.

“Hey fellow traveler,” the boy said without turning around. Joyce went over, softly shoved him aside and expertly attached the propane to the stove and got the burners going. They were both suitably impressed, and the boy took a camp toaster out of a plastic container and put some slices of bread onto it.

“Want some coffee? A slice of toast?”

Joyce sat down on a log and took their kindness and offered no grace in return.

“What are you building?” the boy asked, gesturing at her bag.

“I’m fixing a boat. I’m off to steal a bit of the world that I think is mine.”

The boy and the girl looked at each other and nodded. “The world doesn’t just give you anything.”

I am addicted to change. It’s horrible. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I remember the time that I spent changing channels on the television, ever more rapidly, until I was rocketing through all 200 channels in 30 seconds and I had gotten up to pace around my apartment.

Everywhere I go I want to look at new things. I want to see something new every time I blink, every time I move my eyeballs, every time I turn or walk or run. I want new cement blocks to pass under me and a new color of sky above me, and I want everything in between the ground and the sky to change, to change, to change.

I keep changing my position that I sleep in. If I wake up and I’m looking at the same stretch of wall that I always look at, and the sun isn’t shining through the window in a new way, or I haven’t drooled on my pillow to make a new pattern, it doesn’t matter what side of the bed I get off on, it’s going to be wrong.

I spend most of the money I have on different cereal, and drink flavorings that dissolve in water. I always buy the sample sizes – four different flavors to a pack. I don’t get any pleasure in the sickly sweet neons or crunchy sugar, I just need change.

There are about 108 different placements on the shower for water temperature. Cold water does not help with soapsuds. Boiling water makes me pink and covers my body in blisters. Why a shower should be made able to boil is a mystery, but change has to be had.

I watch the first episode of television shows, and only about halfway through. Cartoons are the best, but I run out of new cartoons quickly. I only need to see the bunny and the hunter once to know that the bunny is never going to get shot.

I skip wildly through movies. So much sameness for so very long – same theater or same couch, same giant drink or big popcorn, same style and same actors for so long.

I think the happiest I ever am is during fireworks displays, but I can’t sit still. I run around and look at different people’s faces, I run closer to their origin and then further away. It’s exhausting but I can collapse happily on a hill and then roll downwards, the world spinning, nothing but change and explosion filling my ears and vision and skin; but here’s the sick part, the really wrong thing. I get home, mix up some flavored water (pineapple citrus and cherry kool-aid drink flavors) and I start to remember that it was the same sky. Same stretch of grass. Same holiday. And then I can’t sleep, because I get so sad that all I can afford is the one apartment, with all the same walls, and the same bed, and the same everything.

I know that my life needs to change – just one last time, though. I tried doing it slowly before but it didn’t work, slow doesn’t fit me, it’s part of my disability, my addiction. I can only do it if it’s fast and I force myself to change all at once and then never again. I know exactly what I have to do but sitting and planning hardly works, and it’s getting worse and worse. The plan is now on fifteen different types of paper, on two different computer screens, on my phone, on a cassette recorder, on a tape recorded with a Super 8 video camera. I don’t need to gather the pieces, I just needed to have them all somewhere so that I would stick to it.

Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and put on blinders, like a horse, like if I see the right side and the left side of the world, I’ll get spooked. I’m going to walk to my kitchen and pour myself cereal and put half a cup of milk into it. I’m going to drink normal water. I’ll walk out of my apartment and go to the park and watch the pavement pass beneath my feet. I’ll sit on a bench and start to read the encyclopedia. I’ll sit and read until I get too tired, and then I’ll walk over to the hot dog man and get a hot dog. I’ll eat the hot dog with only mustard, and then I’ll walk back to my apartment, on the same side of the street I walked before, put on the Beatles’ song “I am the Walrus,” and read more of the encyclopedia. Then I’ll boil noodles, I’ll watch the Hitchcock film North by Northwest on VHS (the fast forward is broken) and then afterwards, I’ll lie in bed looking up at my ceiling, on my back, and sleep a dreamless sleep.

I’ll do it as long as I can. I’ll take no pleasure in rain or new bits of gum on the sidewalk or new pages in the book. I’ll probably skip the hot dog if the park hot dog man isn’t there. I won’t talk to a stranger if they talk to me, they’ll think I’m deaf probably, but I don’t care, I need to break myself of my habit.

Soon I’ll be able to take little pleasures in the sameness, and that’s when I know the cloud will lift. I’ll enjoy the cracks in the sidewalk or the sounds of the walk and I’ll enjoy the taste of mustard and hot dog every day. But the clouds will really disperse when I can enjoy change and sameness at the same time, when I can finally enjoy the feel of turning the page of the encyclopedia, and love that it’s the same book, but a new page, and that’s when I can take my blinders off, and I can walk away to someplace else that might remind me of home.

Disbelief and snickering met the press release, but headlines were duly changed and lead stories were updated. The President was declaring the third to last week in his term of office the Week of Love. The President’s premise was simple: seven days off to find the one you love, to throw yourself at that person without excuse, to surrender yourself to youthful reckless abandon and chase the intensely human and American dream of finding the one you were meant to be with.

The President hoped the measure would raise the nation’s happiness index, which was hovering perilously close to suicidal levels. Never had a country been so close to offing itself in one fell swoop.

The seven days off affected everyone. The President called upon the nation’s cadre of spinsters, asexuals, people with obsessive compulsive disorder that precluded love, lone wolves and other willing members of the single life to run the country’s airlines (which would fly for free for the week), entertainment (also comped), hospitals (service gratis), restaurants (dirt cheap), and police force (paid 4 times their salary) while the week went on.

The happily married or committed American couples were to take the week to reaffirm all that they loved about one another. The President held a press conference directed solely at them, using phrases in his speech like “the country’s backbone,” and “America’s most treasured and least rooted for team.” He told the American Couples to remember that they were also America’s Sweethearts, and he asked for anyone who was in a happy union already to share a kiss at 9pm Eastern Time outside wherever they resided.

The high schoolers of America rejoiced in what was sure to be the most dramatic and most talked about weeks of their lives. Terminally shy band kids worked nervously with their awkward hair while rehearsing speeches meant to win over the most beautiful girl in school. Charming and well-spoken but ultimately misguided young men took the opportunity to suggest to the girl they were dating that perhaps this was it – the perfect chance to lose their virginity during a Nationally sponsored holiday, and get married. In that order. Lovestruck 13-year-olds kept apart by families swooned with the chance to live the happy half of Romeo and Juliet.

The nation’s pessimists spoke vehemently about the ridiculousness and childlike naivete that accompanied the most ridiculous stunt of presidential schmaltz since Kennedy held tea parties during his election. They pointed at graphs with unhappy downward spirals and cited abysmally small numbered percentages. They planned on staying home for the week, perhaps drinking the nice cognac they had bought the year earlier, getting drunk and yelling obscenities at an empty apartment, condo, house.

The nation’s optimists sighed and congratulated each other, patted themselves on the back and agreed that it was nice to be right – everything was going to turn out okay.

The nation’s elderly tut-tutted the lack of planning (only three months notice? Why so much rush?) but smiled at the thought of passed on love ones and talked of nothing but love lost while hoping for one last bit of shared companionship. The nation’s toddlers were paired off by hopeful and doting parents. The forty-somethings considered chasing the ones with half their age, the twenty-somethings briefly considered pursuing those twice their age.

Those three months before the President’s nationally sponsored “Love Week,” The United States of America saw a glow of happiness unlike any other. Television watching was down, walks in the park were up. Condoms were sold out for miles around the smaller towns. Soldiers were ushered home to be covered in affection by lonely significant others. Independent shop owners let their staff go on their vacation, and fiddled with the thought that all of this love would bring in more business. Chain store district managers and store managers let their staff on holiday and then worked on a schedule for the next months that would make up for the lost time. People talked endlessly about possibility and happiness and being filled with something good, like they were a piece of cake filled with frosting and wonderfulness. People hugged more and kissed more.

Divorces went up. Marriages went up too. But the percentage stayed the same.

The weather got nicer.

Pornography sales dropped ninety percent.

Pessimists waited for the other shoe to drop.

Optimists took off their shoes all together.

The President watched the happiness index of his United States and smiled. He had had trouble falling asleep in the weeks leading up to Love Week the same way he used to on Christmas Eve. He thought about how his bachelorhood was considered his greatest weakness at the beginning of his campaign and then his finest strength by the time he was elected, and then his smile began to sag and as usual, he thought back to law school and winter mornings spent with Linda.

Linda and the President (he wasn’t the President back then – he had a far less pompous name) made pancackes together on winter mornings. Pancakes just didn’t seem like Summer. They would revel in each other’s presence, and the skin-to-skin warmth, and they kissed while new batter cooked on the griddle. They didn’t talk about his political career, they talked about what herbs and vegetables to grow in their garden. The President, at that time, had little political aspirations. Linda, at that time, didn’t plan on leaving the President with a cryptic note to meet her on a bench on a specific week in a specific year.

Instead, the two just ate their pancakes and smiled and decided on rosemary and basil and tomatoes and zucchinis, and Linda dipped her fingers into melted butter and ran it through the syrup and held it out for the President to lick.

The President planned to sit on the bench with the faded note in one hand and pancakes wrapped in tinfoil in the other, and he knew he would never feel more American.

I discovered today that the five people I’m closest with aren’t safe from my prying mind. I can just get inside their heads and walk around, and I do. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s like I already took one cookie from the cookie jar without asking, and so I might as well have another, since I’m definitely going to get in trouble anyway.

The insides of people’s heads are exactly like you would expect them – disorderly file cabinets. I waltz into their heads and take a look through their files, first of all, the ones marked Laney, since those are the ones I am most interested in. What do these people think of me?

1. Mom: My daughter who is lovely in all the right ways, but I’m worried about her dating habits and I wish she were looking for a real man.
2. Bryan: Laney is the girl I am in love with, but I can never let her know.
3. Reese: Laney is the girl I am in love with, but I can never let her know.
4. Farah: My best friend, but not a good one to tell secrets to.
5. Penny: My sister who is a better person than me all around, but she doesn’t know it.

These people are all right, except for my sister Penny. I do know that I am better than her, at least at being a daughter and a friend, but that’s only because I’m 22 and I have more practice than she does.

I didn’t realize I was actually in everyone’s mind’s file cabinets for real until I repeated something back to my Mom about Dad that she said, “I couldn’t possibly know.”

The conversation went like this. In the role of Laney, I cast Drew Barrymore back before she sucked. I cast Annette Benning as her mom.

Drew: How did it feel to know that Dad was cheating on you in high school?

Annette: Excuse me?

Drew: With that girl, you know. Laura or whatever. How did you get over that?

Annette: Where did you find this out?

Drew: You told me. I dreamt about it, last night.

Annette: Go! To your room. You couldn’t possibly know this. Go to your room.

After that, I knew that my waltzing into heads was a real thing, something that I could actually do. I looked through Mom’s file on Dad that night and I knew never to talk about him again, at least, not until he comes back in a knight costume and whisks her off her feet, which was filed under Dad, subcategory “Hopes and Dreams.”

Right before I go to sleep is the best time to get into everyone’s heads. Or, the only time. I just lie there and think about, say, Reese, with his soft curly hair and his astronomy homework that he needs to finish to get a good grade and graduate. I don’t know why he doesn’t think I know he loves me. I do know.

Bryan and Reese just couldn’t act on it because they are friends and both know that the other loves me but don’t know that both know it.

It was confusing for me too.

So I just think about him and then I think about his ear and opening it like a door, and then I’m inside. Waltzing. There is always waltz music playing, I don’t know why, and it’s fun to waltz by yourself. I keep meaning to go ask a hypnotist or a psychologist if this is how they feel when people tell all their secrets to them.

I don’t really know how to use all this information. It doesn’t help me with my sculpture or art history. It doesn’t help with my business. It doesn’t help me be Laney any better, I’m just going into their heads and sometimes I look out through their eyes.

Farah is lying with her boyfriend tonight, and he is sleeping. She’s getting up, though. She gets a glass of water and then stares at her cabinet and then takes out a bag of flour. I watch and I’m excited. She’s going to bake in the middle of the night? She brings the flour to the bedroom and takes the blankets off her boyfriend, then spreads the flour over him. Then she kicks him awake and shrieks when he gets up.

“A ghost! A ghost!” She runs out of the room and he runs after her, and he stops to look in the mirror and literally jumps a foot in the air. He falls backward and Farah is laughing and all I can think of as I lean against her files is that I was glad to witness what just happened.

I leave when she goes over to kiss him.

In my own bed I realize I don’t want anyone going in and checking out my files. I don’t want anyone to see what I really think of Reese or Bryan, and I certainly don’t want my sister to know that I think I’m better than her or my Mom to know that I can get whatever I want out of her. I want all the power I can get in our relationship.

And then there’s the matter of everyone else. If I can get into these five people’s heads, surely it’s not like that cell phone service where it’s only the people I call the most. Maybe I can get into everyone’s head. Maybe I could be an omnipresence in the city, finding out the deepest secrets of the minds in every apartment. I could tell the mayor if he was going to be assassinated, if it was in a file. I could make sure all couples are true to one another. In the coffee shop, I could know exactly what people planned on ordering.

I wonder if I didn’t file things back where they belonged, if that would change anything. If I just switched files. I could change everything.

Let me tell you how everything changed. Especially New York City. The earth is mostly the same. It still has blue oceans and if you saw it from space, you’d still see the same land masses. Everything in its place. For now.

When I looked in the funhouse mirrors with you, I knew we looked wonderful together whether we were fat, skinny, short or tall.

The city changed when two guys accidentally discovered how to teleport; that’s what started it, at least. The two guys were named Ptolemy (his nickname, which he hated, was Mimi) and Fortune (no nickname), and they managed to teleport when they were trying to invent a laser trebuchet, which is less ridiculous than it sounds. Lasers can only shoot in straight lines, and the United States Army was interested in seeing if they could lob concentrated balls of energy at their enemies, and were willing to pay seven figures to anyone who could figure it out. When Mimi and Fortune first turned on the spherical energy generator, it zapped everything in the room into their purest energy states, turned it into a ball, and lobbed it 4 miles in about the same time it would take someone to Google “trebuchet.” Unfortunately, exactly four miles from Fortune and Mimi’s house was a cement block, which they and their apartment/lab’s furniture were unceremoniously fused with.

When I compared our hands, your fingers fit perfectly within mine, above mine, around mine. If you held your hand up to the sun, my hand fit perfectly in its shadow.

When the two inventor’s hapless girlfriends found the teleport trebuchet, they pretended it was their idea, patented it, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder. Unsurprisingly, North Korea and the United States got into a bidding war, and while the girls were sleeping off a night of we-got-offered-two-billion-dollars celebratory drinking, a gunfight between special agents for both parties ended in the United States unceremoniously stealing the device. The girls woke up to find a lovely gift basket made by Special Agent and Chief Scientist Robert Lewis’s wife, who felt bad for the two recently single psychology majors.

In our little apartment in New York City, we could get to the roof, and we would play our musical instruments and sing songs to the kids playing over-the-line.

The laser teleportation device, or SULU (Sub-Universal Location Unifier) was deconstructed then reconstructed by the United States Government’s top scientists, but they couldn’t figure out how to teleport anyone further than four miles before a group of Canadian activists stole it to help relocate deforestation companies into someplace more useful – like volcanoes, or deep ocean crevasses. The Canadian Activists located an interesting addition in Fortune’s design: the ability to choose what the ball of energy could transform into after impact. Fortune had no idea that whatever things in the vicinity of SULU would be the things transforming. Left on the normal setting, they would turn back into whatever they were. But if you put a little item inside a polycarbonate box, it would nudge their energy in that direction. This is how the Canadian Activists turned the mall developers in the Quebec forest into pinecones.

When we stopped smoking cigarettes, we discovered how we smelled again, and delighted in the absence of the scent of smoke from our clothes. You smelled like almonds and vanilla and some difficult-to-obtain spice.

Eventually, the Canadian Activists were subdued in a shootout between Haitian crime lords, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a particularly venomous Cuban cartel, and SULU was nearly destroyed in the process. Luckily, the parts brought back to the United States were exactly the parts that the government scientists weren’t able to replicate, including the polycarbonate box that the original deconstruction team thought was part of its poorly constructed casing. They lobbed a mouse four miles to the East, and the scientists there confirmed that the mouse was the same. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted to use the machine to send agents instantaneously into areas they needed agents to be, but four miles from the main offices was not what they had in mind. They wanted SULU to throw further. Would 3,500 miles be possible? they asked.

You and I slept well together, which was strange. I wasn’t expecting to meet someone who I didn’t steal the blankets from, or kick, or sleep walk away from. Instead we curled into a ball together and rolled into the corner of the wall the bed was in and stayed like that, curled up as close as we could be, warm and in a cove of blankets.

The scientists went to Central Park to test the stronger version of SULU, which they dubbed PLATO (Possible Lengthener of Area Travelled, Overall). They were worried that they would accidentally send something important from their lab with the stronger version of the machine, and weren’t exactly sure what to expect. They increased the energy but there wasn’t much energy needed. They looked strange with their little trebuchet in the park, especially with all the wires hooked around the wooden spoon that lobbed the energy balls. They wanted to make it look better, but hadn’t had the time to make a nice casing yet.

When were in Central Park that day, and we were eating bread with goat cheese and brie and drinking boxed wine that we had put in a water bottle, I had a ring in my pocket. I kept putting my pinkie through it while I kissed you.

Special Agent and Chief Scientist Robert Lewis’s wife had thoughtfully put a rose inside the polycarbonate box for him to find the last time she visited the lab, but he hadn’t found it yet. The scientists turned the teleportation device on and it took New York and turned it into a ball of energy that fit into the wooden spoon.

When I took the ring out, the last thing I smelled before we were scattered to the wind was roses.

Benny is the type of guy who always has loads of money. He never needs to think about it. Here’s an example: Benny and I were in a restaurant and I was telling him about my Mom and getting real choked up about it – she died a couple years ago and I don’t really think about her as much as I should – and he paid for my dinner, and his dinner, and then he had everyone leave the restaurant for an hour. I didn’t even notice it ’cause I was blubbering, but Benny just thought I would like to have that emotional moment in private, so he basically bought the whole restaurant for a night.

He’s a real nice guy like that. But it makes me want to pay him back, even though I have trouble knowing how. I mean, he can buy me a restaurant, but I can put my hand on his shoulder and tell him everything is going to be okay, which is all I really wanted from him that night when I was talking about my Mom anyway.

Benny and I met a long time ago when I was trying to get across country to see my family and he picked me up in Evanston, Wyoming. He asked me what I was doing in the little brewery in town and I told him I was just floating on home. I had drunk a few too many, and he told me he could take me as far as California, because after that, it’s just water.

Thats where I was headed anyway.

When we were driving, he asked me what my philosophy on life was, and I told him. When you’re driving, even if you don’t want to, you get really philosophical on life. The road just does that to you. I said, “Well, I think it’s all about karma. I think if you’re a bad person, you’re going to come back as an ant or a beetle or something, which is why there are 600 million different types of insects these days. So many different types of ways to be bad. But with so many people being bad, and dying, there were less and less people being born or reborn, so animals had to take their place.”

“Animals?” he said.

“Yeah. Animals die and since they’re so good and keep to themselves and just survive. Think about a really good dog that keeps old folks company in one of those retirement homes. That dog dies, and he gets to become a person. That’s why I think people are getting better these days. That guy trying to save the world, Al Gore? He was definitely a real friendly basset hound.”

Benny laughed and asked what I thought I would come back as when I died and I said I still hoped I had time to change that. He told me he was worried too, because he had hit a little baby squirrel with a rock at his last rest stop on accident, and that would be bad for karmic points. And that was just the latest on a long list of badness.

“Was it on accident?” I asked.

“Well, I was throwing rocks at the thing, but I never thought I would hit it. It made my heart stop.”

“Feeling bad about it makes me think that you’ll be okay in the karma department.”

Anyway, a rich guy like Benny, he decided to take me on as his Karmic Supervisor, even though I’m not a shaman or anything, and he basically likes to follow any of my good deed whims. I think he’s worried, that if he were left to himself he would just keep doing bad. I think it was after the Wizard of Oz when I told him we should get into a hot air balloon and let the wind take us and fix the problems wherever we landed.

He wasted no time. He bought a big hot air balloon that looked like a globe and we headed anywhere the wind blew. We would land and he would try to fix problems with me talking to folks and him paying money where he could. It was satisfying. It made me think back to that trip to my Mom, when I first met Benny. I guess I was his good will project back then – he took me to the hospital and he got a better room for her, and a better hospital bed and better doctors. He hated seeing me cry, and I was blubbering every single day. I wish he had been doing it for my poor Mom instead of for me, because I think that’s what happened, that’s what went wrong. The good will in the room was misplaced, and that’s why she died. He worked tirelessly on any project, but it made me wonder sometimes if it was the right project.

He paid a company to help us float over the Atlantic Ocean and over Europe when we got bored of bird’s eye America. We hardly ever touched down, except for once we saw a cruise ship helping a steamer that had gotten wrecked in a storm.

Europe made Benny cry. There were so many parts that were still broken from the wars. Benny looked at Europe the same way I looked at my Mom. He was crying at the churches that were still broken and the battlefields and the war-torn ghettos the same way I cried at her frail, broken body.

“My family, Winston. This is my family’s fault. We’re the ones who build the explosives.”

I wanted to console him. Hand on his shoulder, something like that. But I had no idea what to do. We flew over Germany, looking at the remains of the Berlin wall.

“Did we do too much good, Winston? Or did we not do enough? I hope I get to choose what I get to be next, Winston. Because I don’t ever want to be human again.”

I look at a girl who looks at the cats who look from left to right, from left to right, from left to right. The little gold cat paws go up and down in unison. The girl looks back at me mimicking the cats and I have to smile. I walk up to her and touch her hand. I call it her paw. It’s good luck, I say, to touch the paw of these cats. That’s why they have them in Chinese restaurants, they are supposed to bring you luck. Touch their hand as you walk out of the joint and you’ll have had a great meal and your next day will be even better.

She looks at me and then looks at all these cats along the wall and then looks back at me.

She says: They’re silly.

I say: You’re silly.

She goes cross-eyed and skips to the other room. It smells like a Glade plug-in and it’s giving me a headache. She’s only knee-high, this girl that I’m looking at who doesn’t like to look back at me without a silly face on. She’s taller than knee-high, actually, but she likes to crouch down to knee-high and jump out at me.

She says: You’re slow.

I say: You can’t run in a museum.

There’s that Steve Martin movie where he rollerskates through the art museum and I’ve always wanted to try that. I bet she would too, but I would have to buy her pint-sized rollerskates and those are expensive and she’d just grow out of them.

I look at her and she looks at a painting of shapes and she looks back at me.

She says: I could do that. I really could.

I say: You can make a lot of money.

She says: I’d buy ice cream and I would buy the right to eat it whenever I want.

I say: That’s 100 dollars a night you would have to spend. That’s how much it costs to eat ice cream whenever you want.

She skips away from me and goes back to the cats, and I am looking at her and the cats and I want luck. I touch her hand.

She says: Let go of my paw.

I want to touch the hands of these cats because I bet you that would help. I need luck. I want it. I sneeze into my hand and then wipe it on my jeans and then she copies me and she does a good job of it. She’ll probably grow up to be an actress.

These cats, one of them would look good in her room. I want their ancient luck, the type of luck that will not only bring her back home to me alive every day, but also give her powers. The type of luck that makes her the pretty one, but not the stuck-up one. Maybe it will give her great grades, too. And she’ll always be on time. I want to stack the cards in her favor.

I look at the price of these golden cats and I think about the red wall behind it and I want to paint her room that color because it makes these cats looks how they should. They are rich, they are gold-plated, they would make life gold-plated; or, just gold, through and through.

I hear her padding away and I see that she has taken off her saddle shoes and I want to give chase, so I do. I take off my shoes and we are off in the museum and we slide across the slippery wooden floor and run into walls and breeze past security guards who look like they are about to follow us, yelling. They don’t. They leave us for another security guard to catch in another section. I do a triple twist like I’ve seen with those ice dancers and she does the same thing. We softshoe together.

I do that thing where I switch my knees and she watches, mesmerized.

She asks: How do you do that?

I answer: Magic.

She giggles and runs off and then I see her stop and look up at a woman that I don’t know. The woman is severely dressed, in a blazer and matching suit pants and a severely white blouse. She holds the girl’s hand and looks at me.

The woman asks: What are you doing here?

I don’t say anything.

The woman asks: Where are your shoes?

I don’t say a word.

The woman asks: Why are you alone with my daughter?

This is the question that I will actually have to answer. The other two were warm-ups, but this last one is the one she wants to know the most.

Me: I wasn’t going to take her against her will, but I was going to ask her to come along with me. I was going to buy her a slice of chocolate cake and I was going to steal one of those golden cats and I was going to put it in the car with us, for luck. I was going to shower her with love and affection and I would treat her with respect and we would change her name in every state. I would call her Blu-Ray and Alice and Doctor Fantastic. I didn’t have any plans after that, I was only thinking that she could really softshoe and I was having fun dancing with her. That’s really all.

The girl: This man is funny.

The woman (to her daughter): I don’t like when you wander off like that. I don’t want you hanging out with teenagers who skip school. And you know that people who smell like cigarettes are criminals.

The woman (to me): You can leave now by your own accord or I’m calling the police.

And then the woman in the blazer starts up the counting game. My mom used to play it. I know the rules. I don’t ever want her to get to ten.

The three pigeons arrived on Lyndon Street and strode down the right side lane in unison. There are many names for pigeons – flying rats, trash birds, dirty parrots. But no one called these three pigeons what they were: Harbingers of Doom. In fact, people didn’t call them anything at all.

Everyone on Lyndon Street kept doing exactly what they were doing before the three birds began their strut. A baby might have noticed the three birds, but the gurgles and burps of babies are regularly untranslated and forgotten. Not even the baby’s attempt to point brought the Harbingers of Doom to the attention of any passerby.

However, what the pigeons brought was noticed almost immediately, first by Susan Wells who sat down to get her hair cut for prom with giddy anticipation. She wanted to tell the woman to make her look like a “pretty pretty princess” but she held her tongue and instead explained the complicated processes that she desired, memorized from the pages of Seventeen.

The pigeons’ first act was subtle, and directed only at Susan. She noticed when she shivered from the cold water being sprayed on her beyond-shoulder-length hair but thought it might be jitters, until the hairdresser’s comb fought a small kink in the luxury of Susan’s hair and tears welled up in her eyes. Susan’s hair was no longer dead, limp and lifeless, hanging off the back of her head the way clothes hang off the wearer. Her hair had come to life.

The hairdresser was used to yelps, however, and went to grab the scissors to trim Susan’s split ends. Her first snip felt, to Susan, like someone had taken her left hand, put it in a guillotine, and chopped, severing just the first few inches of skin off her fingertips. Blood dripped down Susan’s back from the freshly cut hair and she sobbed into her hands while her hair briskly snatched the clippers from the woman and threw them across the room.

Secondly, the pigeons’ directed their doom and destruction towards a muscle car parked poorly at the end of the street. The man who drove the car, Lionel Evans, came out of an ice cream shop licking an ice cream cone and found his way into the car, only to feel his seat writhe underneath him. Unnerved, Lionel looked behind him to see two cows form out of the seat leather, with a sound like two beach balls squishing against one another. The cows mooed angrily in the back seat, pushing the weight limit of the backseat to its breaking point and popping the back tires.

Lionel got out of his car just in time for the two front seat cows to take shape and fill out the rest of his car, bursting through the roof and popping his two front tires under their weight. Lionel’s heart rushed while he watched the cows moo and squirm against one another, while a passerby said, “You should really let those cows out.”

Still, the pigeons strutted unnoticed, even though no cars went down the right lane of Lyndon Street. No one saw them walk by Lionel and his car and his four re-formed cows. Susan Wells’ cries could be heard even two blocks down as she tried to find a way to staunch the blood from her hair.

The pigeons had one more trick up their beaks, but they made sure to be on the sidewalk before they attempted it.

Every single bit of asphalt – be it refilled pothole or original blacktop – all the gravel, all the oil, all the quartz inserted manually to make the street shimmer on Summer days; all of it vibrated. At first, all hands of everyone on Lyndon Street went to see if cell phones were ringing, because that’s what it felt like at first – just a low, insistent vibration that tried to alert you that someone was trying to tell you something.

Then every molecule of the street decided to go back from where it came from originally: a mixture of quarries, volcanoes and far-away stars. Lyndon Street dead ended where a freeway intersected it on one end, and stopped being Lyndon Street and became Petunia Avenue at the other. Its entire length of asphalt changed its gravitational pull from down to the earth’s core to wherever it came. The bits of street shot like rockets – through cars and traffic lights. They shot through some unlucky people’s feet.

Susan and Lionel looked on and decided that their day was going to get worse and worse. Other people, like teenager Peter Doyle and grocer Orlando Rodriguez, had the fleeting feeling that they were witnessing a miracle, and nothing like this would ever happen in their lives again, and they had no idea how to describe it.

Others didn’t notice anything wrong at all and stepped into the freshly vacated street, only to find rebar and dirt.

The three pigeons – the Harbingers of Doom – stopped their march and looked back to see what people were saying to one another. They saw two women pull a third up to the sidewalk after she fell when she didn’t notice the street was gone. They saw a child feeding his sandwich to a cow that was being pulled out of Lionel’s muscle car. They saw a doctor who was passing by the barber shop scratch his head as he tried to bandage up suffering Susan’s head.

They were a little peeved that they weren’t noticed, but realized that people have more important things to do with their lives than notice pigeons. Groups of friends grew larger while more people tried to make sense out of the things that had happened. Strangers pointed at all sorts of oddness on the street and made lifelong connections with each other.

Now that the three bad things had happened on Lyndon Street, all the good could start happening again. The pigeons took flight and disappeared into the blue sky.

The traveller sat down on a bench, his body’s heater working so hard it had turned his nose red. It had forgotten about his fingertips though. He shoved them deep into his pockets to steal some of the warmth from his spoiled lower body.

It used to be that it took lots of math and meteorological mumbo-jumbo coupled with knowing where Mars was in the night sky for him to know what the snow meant – but now he just had a feeling, located along his spine, that would send tingles through his entire body when he woke up. They wouldn’t subside as he brushed his teeth, either, like other spine-tingling emotions.

The traveller knew that if he was ever scared, the best way to get rid of the creepy feeling was to brush his teeth.

This snow was not like other snow. Most other snow is encased in a protective covering to keep you from getting to the uniqueness inside the flakes – something having to do with the electrons and the frozen hydrogen bond’s vibration. The ozone layer changed everything, though – the ozone layer would restart the vibration and send the electrons spinning in the opposite direction and the protective covering dissipated and suddenly, all those brilliant snowflakes opened.

These snowflakes were falling universes. Sometimes the world inside the snowflake was just mildly tweaked. Donuts weren’t tasty, perhaps – the preferred snack of cops changed to Oatmeal cookies (no raisins). Other times, the snowflake world was incomparable to our own. Colors changed their dynamics, the feeling of “home” would never exist (except in the Traveller’s heart), the idea of warmth and happiness would be replaced with other emotions and exothermic descriptions.

But the snow was ubiquitous. The cold, falling universes were universal. The traveller’s grandfather was the one who explained how it worked. When the traveller was young, his grandfather took a small test tube from the freezer.

“This is where your grandma is. I’d go, but in there, she’s slowly forgetting what it’s like to need somebody.” And then, his grandfather explained what type of snow allows inter-dimensional travel, and how to do it: touch your pinkies together and hold them aloft and wait for a snowflake to fall.

The boy thought about this for a long time – the loss of his grandmother, his sad grandfather, the snowball fights he had witnessed and participated in that could have resulted in paranormal travel. It wasn’t until he was 25 and feeling lonely and sad about his lack of employment, and lack of overall life meaning that he first held his pinkies aloft on his apartment complex’s roof and transported himself away from everything.

Now, the traveller felt very sure that he had returned to the world he remembered from his youth and yet he wasn’t perfectly sure. Were evergreens always so spiky? Did light always glow around the edges like that, or was that a result of needing a new pair of glasses? He sat on his bench and kept his hands firmly inside his pockets.

In a way, he felt like a failure, and he remembered that feeling vividly from the world he had left so long ago. His grandfather and grandmother had created his father. His father and mother created him. Even further back, his great great great great grandparents fought whatever fighting had to be done to survive and continue this branch of the family tree, and yet here he was, alone, still. Old.

He closed his eyes and thought about the world where there was no age. People looked as old as they felt, and you could watch young ones transform to teenagers as they learned to kiss, or doddering old fools become thirty year olds at the drop of a hat when the thirst to prove themselves returned without reason. He liked it there but felt no allegiance to anyone. No one stayed who they were, they changed when they wanted to be someone or something different.

The traveller took his hands out of his pocket to adjust his scarf to cover up his nose. The filaments from the wool framed the bottom of his vision. The grey strands looked like tired, colorless grass.

Did he want to stay? Was it so great to be back where he had come from? He remembered something about the world he had come from and the traveller wondered if that feeling existed here. It was like love, but it wasn’t the emotion that people placed on their wives or their children, it was the feeling that they attempted to describe when they said something like, “I love risotto,” or, “I love action movies.”

Love could mean anything in the world he had come from, he remembered that because he felt that aforementioned love-type-feeling in a few of the worlds. The traveller would sometimes speak in one of these universes and he could remember saying, “I love the sky here,” and everyone looking at him perplexed, or “I love that dogs can talk here,” and dogs nodding but cocking their heads to the side and asking if that hadn’t always been the way.
He wanted someone to come outside and tell him that they loved snow, or loved his scarf. He wanted that material love that was only available here, at home.

When a couple of young guys came crunching through the snow, he said, “I love the sound of freshly fallen snow crunching beneath feet,” and they both looked at him funny and didn’t say a word.

So this wasn’t home. The traveller closed his eyes and sighed and took his hands out of his pockets, ready to hold them aloft and continue his journey, when one of the guys thought he was out of earshot and said, “I love that there are crazy old guys everywhere.”

The traveller put his hands back in his pockets, and decided to stay put. He got up from the bench and decided to look for hot chocolate.

Ally and Carter were trying to capture the animal. It wasn’t a squirrel, because it didn’t have the required bushy tail. And it wasn’t a rat, because it didn’t have the required disgusting tail. For now, Ally and Carter just called it “Critter.”

“Run along the side of-”

“You have to block-”

“If you chirp at it, maybe-”

They weren’t sure what they wanted to do with it when they got it – Ally fleetingly thought she could put it on a leash, and Carter briefly imagined training it to be a hat in the winter. For the moment however, they were caught up in the glee of a chase.

They followed the little furry thing into a backyard, and when it went under a fence, they went over. They were single-minded and completely focused as they chased it through two more yards, and when the furry thing bolted through a hole they weren’t expecting, they both ran right into a tree that clinked and rang in answer. Both children looked up to see dark blue bottles hanging down towards them.

As they got up and brushed themselves off they realized that each of the four trees in this particular backyard had blue bottles hanging from the branches, each filled with a different amount of liquid.

Carter started to wonder what the liquid in the bottles was for, but a perfect Summer breeze interrupted his wondering and played a beautiful sonata on the bottles, like an eerie, playerless organ.

Both children had chills up their spines and goosebumps on their forearms, which was compounded by the un-oiled squeal of the screen door to the house opening. A frail, hunched woman appeared from the semi-darkness.

“Well hello, you two. What are you doing here?” Her voice sounded like crunching leaves in Autumn.

“Why do you have all these bottles tied to trees?” Ally countered. Answering questions with questions was a great way to stall being in trouble.

“To make that beautiful music,” she said.

“Did you make this?” Carter asked.

The old woman beckoned them inside her house while she nodded. Ally and Carter had a brief eyebrow conversation and decided that they would go into the house, but only for a little while, and only because it was so hot. They walked to the door, began breathing their mouths in case the house smelled like old lady, and wiped their feet on her mat.

“You young folk like pop?” The woman asked. She went to her refrigerator and took out a couple of the same blue bottles that hung from her tree. She poured the two sodas into tall glasses and shoved the glasses into the children’s faces in such a way that they couldn’t refuse them. They sat down on a couch that threw up dust.

Carter shifted uncomfortably. He was thirsty from Marmot chasing but he didn’t like the way the soda smelled and he knew he wasn’t supposed to drink things given to him by strangers. He pressed his forehead to the glass to feel the coolness, and Ally looked at him through the glass, which distorted her face. Carter laughed and then they both looked up at the woman.

“Drink up!” She said.

“What’s your name, Mrs.?” Carter asked.

“I’m Mrs. Meer. You two must be thirsty. Were you chasing a marmot?”

Ally put the glass down on the coffee table in front of her to gesticulate. “So that’s what that thing was!”

“Are they vicious?” Carter wondered.

“On the contrary,” Mrs. Meer said, “They make great pets to have on leashes, and you should see the fashionable, warm hat they can be in the winter!”

The kids shared an astonished look with one another, and Mrs. Meer prompted them to have a sip from their glasses by looking at the drinks and looking at them and smiling with ugly crooked teeth.

“I’m not allowed to have soda unless it’s dinnertime, Mrs. Meer,” Ally said, sensing danger.

“And I have… Die. Beet. Us.” Carter said, trying on a word his parents used.

Ms. Meer looked at them hungrily, and the kids stood up to excuse themselves.

“It’s rude to not drink what’s in front of you, children,” Mrs. Meer said. “A poor woman like me – it’s my only pleasure to give kids like you pop.”

“How did you get all those bottles out there?” Carter couldn’t stop asking questions, despite his growing fear of the woman. Both kids hadn’t rid themselves of the chill they got from the glass bottle symphony they heard earlier.

“I have my secrets, you have yours,” Mrs. Meer said, attempting a smile again.

Ally thought about many things after Mrs. Meer said that. She looked around the house, which had empty blue bottles on every surface, except for a strange portrait album that had pictures of children bursting its seams. She thought about kicking Mrs. Meer, and she thought about Carter, who kept almost reaching for the glass of soda in front of him, and then remembering at the last second that he was trying not to drink it.

Then, Ally had a stroke of genius. She saw Mrs. Meer open her mouth in delight when Ally took the glass off the table, and then her eyes opened wide in surprise as Ally sloshed the carbonated liquid out of the glass and into Mrs. Meer’s mouth.

Carter cheered and Mrs. Meer melted as a tone rang out over the two children, raising every bit of hair and skin on their body to spine-chilling attention. Mrs. Meer liquefied incredibly quickly and shot across the room, into an empty blue bottle, filling it nearly to the top.

“Gross,” Carter said, wrinkling his nose.

Ally took the bottle outside and tied it to the tree, then took another bottle down and tipped it over. The little bit of liquid became a surprised teenager.

“We have a busy afternoon in front of us,” Ally said.

Carter started to climb the tree to get more bottles.

The yellow canvas beckons to the boy but he worries about what would happen if he went inside, and he worries what will happen if he doesn’t, and so instead he just passes by, sometimes tracing his finger along the side of it.

There are lots of things on the boy’s mind. Car accidents are one of them, but not in the grisly sense, just in the sense that he could witness one and it could come straight for him and perhaps it would incinerate his wallet. Then his parents wouldn’t be notified and he would be reported missing, and his days up in heaven would be spent watching his parents search and search for a boy that had been pronounced missing, but was in fact dead.

He writes his obituary sometimes. Not all the time and not on pieces of paper that could get around; instead he types it into his computer and then presses the command button and the “a” button at the same time, selects everything, and presses delete. It is calming to write the type of life that ends sweetly without tears of regret.

His biggest worries occur in the time between his arrival home to the time when his parents will arrive. He watches the news while doing his homework (with worrying as much as he does, he’d had to learn to multitask) and waits and worries that his parents will appear on the television, and then he wories what it will be like to be alone, and then he worries that it is insensitive to worry about the alone part when he should have stopped at worrying about the terrible accident part.

He can’t bear to imagine his Mom without his Dad. He can’t bear it the other way around either. He has imagined it both ways, in his head, and he has thought about them dying together, and he has worried and sometimes cried about any of it.

He worries about other things too. If he owned a dog, how would he keep that dog safe? If he did poorly on this test, how would that look to the private high school he wants to go to? If he doesn’t finish the book, how will he know that everyone makes it to the end? And if they don’t make it to the end, he worries about all the ways it could have been all right, and then he scribbles on scratch paper about every mistake each character made. He worries about lunch germs and making friends and losing friends and basketball concussions and Alzheimer’s Disease, and how that disease scares him more than anything, because he is sure that he is going to get it, and he is going to get it soon.

There is a silver lining about all of these worries that the boy is very aware of: As long as he worries, nothing terrible happens. Nothing even remotely bad happens.

He can’t remember a time that anything bad happened, and he can’t remember the time he didn’t worry, so he imagines that he has worried forever, and as long as he worries, then there will be no tragedies. His parents love him and almost always came home on time, and if they aren’t home on time they came home in one piece and sometimes have presents.

One day he sees on television that a very small meteorite doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere all the way and hits a man right in the forehead. It goes all the way through, but they don’t show that. They just show pictures of the man with his family, and they show the woman crying hysterically, saying, “I didn’t even know something like this could happen.”

The boy sweats and immediately remembers the yellow tent and the promise posted at its entrance. The man proclaims he can divine who you care about most in the world, and how they will die. The man tells of his sophisticated machine that can show you exactly how it happens, and under what circumstances, and then he asks for his one hundred dollar fee and you can leave with the safe feeling of knowing exactly what is going to happen in your life.

Suddenly, it isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity. He must know exactly what to worry for because he was worrying about general death, not specificity, and he could never imagine all the ways his mother and father might die, and he doesn’t want to. The boy knows that once he is told, he will immediately begin worrying about it, and worry about it forever, and he knows that if he worries about it, it won’t happen.

When the man originally showed up with his tent, the boy went into the shoe box where his important items are kept and counted out birthday allowances that he had saved for emergencies. He put the envelope with twenty five-dollar bills in his backpack and stopped by on his way home from school, but he didn’t go through with it. Instead, he worried about how he would explain the missing money to his parents, who thought he was saving money for a bicycle.

The next day, on his walk home from school, he determinedly walks the cracked sidewalk to the dusty lot with the yellow canvas tent in the center. The boy walks through the canvas doors framed by branches, and pulls his backpack to his front. Inside, the ground changes from dust and weeds to densely packed dirt. The heat and humidity is stifling. The man inside – the ownner, probably – is dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt. He reads the newspaper while sitting on a metal folding chair in front of a curtain.

The boy takes the envelope out of his backpack and holds it up to be taken away. The man doesn’t blink or count the money, he just ushers the boy into a room with a stage and shows the boy how he will die.

I want to buy a pair of jeans and I want a plaid shirt, and I think that will be my new uniform. Kind of like a cartoon character, I will just wear the same thing every day. I’m tired of having to look into my closet and think, “What should I wear?” And I bet you Doug never wondered what to wear. And that sponge named Bob, he wore that same box/tie/shirt combination everywhere he went. I think I could even find a pair of suspenders and a tie for fancy occasions, but I think the pair of jeans and the shirt – that will be all I need now.

That’s exactly how I want to look. I want to look sort of like… unchanging like that. I want to have that same, cold, calculating look in my eyes. I think the plaid will help with that. And maybe I should take up cigarettes too, and carry around a bottle of vodka. Vodka will be my water, and I won’t ever eat because I will be suppressing my appetite with cigarettes. Maybe I should add coffee in there too, so that I’m caffeinated. With the plaid shirt that this guy is wearing, I bet I could fit the box of cigarettes right in that front pocket. And I’ll be drinking too much vodka for just one flask.

Do they make cargo jeans?

I can imagine myself now, lighting a cigarette and taking a swig of vodka and then spitting it out and lighting it all on fire to the amazement of the crowd. I bet that’s a real great way to make money, doing a thing like that. I couldn’t do it in a place like this of course, because the clothes would catch on fire and I would probably have to pay for everything, even though I’m sure there’s an insurance policy like crazy.

The list so far is cigarettes, vodka, some coffee but I won’t carry that around, a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt. And I guess I can limit myself to a flask of vodka a day, so I won’t need cargo jeans, which should exist even though they don’t. If it comes to it, I can always just sew another pocket to the outside of the pair of jeans. That shouldn’t be too hard, and then I could have a nice side pocket that everyone will have, and then people will start designing jeans with side pockets and I won’t have to sew any more pockets onto people’s jeans for them, because I know that people are really into having the “original” of things.

If I stand up next to him, can you imagine these clothes on me? I know that I don’t have that nice grain that he has, but can you imagine it? I don’t want to try the clothes on because I hate the idea of clothes that have been tried on. I want them to be new clothes, I want to be the only person that has had them on, and if I try them on, it will ruin the illusion that I am the only one these clothes were meant to be on.

Can I give an unlit cigarette to this guy? Don’t worry I won’t burn him down. I just want to take a look and see what that looks like.

It looks tough. This guy looks tough. Do I look that tough? Jeans and plaid are sort of a cowboy thing, am I a cowboy? Not really at all. This isn’t turning out right at all. And cowboys don’t drink vodka, they drink whisky. I need something more early nineties. I need corduroy.

I still love this cartoon character outfit idea. I mean, if I put those clothes on and wear them every day, it will be like I’m becoming someone else. It’s like when someone wears a hat every day and they start to look like they should always be wearing a hat until a teacher tells the someone to take the hat off, and you think, “That’s like asking me to take my nose off. I bet you that kid needs that hat just to smell things anymore.”

I want to be like that, I want these clothes to sort of fuse to my body, I want them to be a second skin. And I don’t want that skin to smell like cigarettes, so maybe I should give that side of things up. And I don’t want to reek of vodka and coffee either, and I bet if I was drinking only vodka and only coffee all the time, I would smell awful. I don’t want smelling awful to be my trademark. I just want this corduroy shirt to be my trademark.

The idea is, if I have a corduroy shirt on all the time, and some sweet girl lets me take her to a movie, she will put her head on my shoulder and leave it there because the movie will be one of those movies where you get really into the plot and it doesn’t let you go. She will leave the theater and she will have these corduroy marks on her face and I’ll take her home and even though her blood will be circulating through her cheeks, she won’t have necessarily gotten rid of them yet, so when she gets to her room to wash her face before bed (it was a really late movie) she will have those corduroy marks on her face and she will touch them lightly and think, “Nothing could be more perfect than my face like this right now.”

Corduroy and jeans is definitely it. This guy makes it look great too. Are these for sale? These mannequins? Can I buy one? Can I buy a part of one? If things look good on him, they will look good on me. I’ll take one of him, and that corduroy shirt and a pair of jeans.

The billionaire wondered what to buy next.

It was difficult for the billionaire to spend money, more difficult than he thought it would be. He was a famous billionaire because he actually had a billion dollars – the money wasn’t invested anywhere; there were no stock options, no trust funds, no hedge funds.

He wouldn’t have had a hedge fund anyway. That sort of thing sounded too much like someone could trim his money away, into the shape of a duck. Taking his money out of investments was the last hard and fast decision the billionaire had made, and that was a long time ago.

When he went out to buy things, people recognized him and gave him whatever he was buying for free. They knew he was good for it, or something silly like that. He went to buy a t-shirt and when he went to go for his wallet, the clerks always stopped him and didn’t make him pay.

From a business standpoint, maybe this was sound, though. Maybe all the other billionaires would follow his example. He didn’t know: he didn’t have any billionaire friends to ask. He had some millionaire friends, sort of… at least, he went to their parties when he was invited. But it was always awkward, because he would stand to the side and no one would really talk to him, and he wouldn’t know what to talk about anyway.

Days slipped by the billionaire all the time, without him noticing. He wondered how Bruce Wayne did it – Wayne was a billionaire, and he seemed to always be busy with supermodels and training and inventing Batman things and then, at night, being Batman, plus he ran that business or at least went to some meetings… that all seemed terrible to the billionaire. Instead, he just wandered about his mansion, looking out on the nicely manicured lawn and thinking about things he wanted to buy, if there were any left.
When the billionaire was a kid, he didn’t want to be a billionaire. The “I want to be rich” thought never crossed his mind. He never knew what he wanted to be, except for the vague notion that maybe he could be a carnival ride operator. He would watch the guy with the tattoos at the county fair pull on the levers and press the buttons and then, the kid that became a billionaire would watch the people come off the ride happy, and he thought: There it is. That’s the job for me.

He sort of forgot about that, though, and instead he invented that thing that made the machines that makes machines a little bit faster, and he sold it away, and instead of paying off his car and paying for a nice trip to Alaska for salmon fishing, like he wanted, it turned out it was worth a lot more than that and he ended up with this big giant house and all of those cars that were given to him for some reason, and the hammerhead shark shaped pool, and he wanted a helipad but didn’t want to take the lessons for it.

The billionaire wanted to go out and buy something, though. He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki chinos and put on the sunglasses that cost two grand or something, and he went outside and walked all the way down his manor and into the street and all the way into town.

At the gas station, he was instantly recognized and the man who owned the gas station came out to shake his hand. The billionaire shook his hand and the gas station man asked if he needed anything, and the billionaire answered:

“I’d like buy a candy bar,” and the man scurried off and shouted from inside the little shop, “What kind do you want?” and the billionaire didn’t answer right away because he couldn’t remember the name of the one that had wafers and nuts and caramel in it, so the gas station attendant came back out with an armful of candy.

This isn’t what I wanted, the billionaire thought as chocolate bars melted in his pocket and he chewed a piece of gum. Is gum candy?

The billionaire wasn’t sure. None of this is what I wanted. How did this all happen? Why didn’t I get married? Wasn’t there a girl back there who wanted me to marry her, and not because of my money? Was there a reason I went on this walk?

He thought about reaching for his cell phone and calling someone to bring his car over, so he could go home, but he didn’t. He kept walking on and forgot that he wanted to spend his money. He noticed that there was a couple rides set up in a park and he headed that way, stuffing the empty wrapper for the gum in his pocket and choosing a chocolate bar with nougat.

There was a man pulling the levers with tattoos on his arm for a sky bucket ride, and the billionaire watched no one get on for a long time. No one wanted to ride the sky buckets, but the tattooed operator was sending the little multi-colored carts anyway.

How much does one of those cost? The billionaire thought. He looked at the tattoos on the operators arm. Couldn’t be more than a thousand, he thought. What would I get?

“You want a ride?” The operator asked.

“No,” the billionaire answered, “thanks.” He was scared of heights. Another reason why Bruce Wayne is insane. He was always jumping off buildings, even though he couldn’t even fly.

The billionaire went and laid down underneath the sky bucket ride and watched the empty buckets go by. He tried to remember what he wanted to be, and couldn’t, and he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to be now that he could do anything.

He pulled another candy bar from his pocket and let the day drift away.

She was not allowed near anyone’s television, she was not allowed to hold a remote. The last time she tried she was unattended, she was 3, and her parents were questioned for negligence and abuse for leaving their child alone in a burning room.

When she touched the voice recording machine and it sparked and exploded, the parents’ explanation was believed and they were sent home with their electric baby.

At the doctor, he shook his head.

“There is nothing wrong with this baby,” he said, “but please don’t let her near my ear flashlight.”

It had heated uncontrollably in his hands.

In elementary school, when everyone else was learning computers, she sketched with a wooden pencil (no metal banded eraser) while she walked on the asphalt. She was very good at drawing and very pleased with the fact that her birds looked like birds.

When everyone else listened to music, she was playing music on her violin and her piano and her guitar with the nylon strings. She desperately wanted distortion when she got older and angrier, and she enlisted a tech wizard to buzz and distort her guitars after the fact. When he gave her the CD, she had to wear gloves and she couldn’t play it, she just hung it up in her room.

It was incredibly difficult not to use watches or clocks or cell phones or cars or music players or blenders or irons. She was a wrinkly, late, unreachable, quiet person who never had smoothies. People thought she was weird and quirky until they asked her to prove her strange disability to them and the air would crackle with electricity as she would ruin a hapless third grader’s handheld video game.

When she fell in love at sixteen, she wrote love letters to the boy who understood, and he wrote more beautiful letters back. He took her to movie theaters and stopped wearing his watch and didn’t bring his cell phone. He loved skateboarding with her and bike riding, which was risky but not so risky that she didn’t do it anyway.

Some days were worse than others. She would wake up and she wouldn’t take a shower because the metal in the shower would shock her body with sharp pangs of static when she touched it, gluing her fingers to the bar and flexing her triceps involuntarily.

Doctor after doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her. On the bad days, she wasn’t allowed into doctor’s offices. Sometimes she erased video stores just by walking in front of them, especially when she was angry. Anger wasn’t good for her condition, so she was calm and played music when she was angry or kissed her boyfriend and held his hand, or she would take long walks into the sage brush and hope that she wouldn’t be bitten by ticks.

Sometimes she would think about zapping people that walked by her, like she had a special power that could actually be used. Someone would duck in front of her in line for the water fountain. Zap! Someone would be mean to her boyfriend. Zap! Someone would get a better grade than her on a final. Zap zap!

Her parents didn’t know what to do with her, as a software programmer and a graphic designer, they hoped to share with her all the things that their digital world held, but she was kept at arm’s length. One time, they tried using a mouse that would track the movements of her right pointer finger, but she tried to double click and on the second tap of the air, it was as though a bolt of lightning had shot into the monitor screen and exploded every little bit inside.

So they didn’t pay as much attention to her as she became older and more self-sufficient, and she started to resent them for it, and so she eventually tried to leave the city that they were so fond of and she hated. She wanted the country side, where nothing ran on electricity and she could touch whatever she wanted without worry that she would break it.

“I’m going to go to the countryside,” She told her boyfriend while they held hands and walked the city streets.

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

“Can you come without a computer? Can you come without a phone? How would you eat without a microwave?” He wouldn’t be able to eat without a microwave, and he thought about how his parents would want him to call sometimes and then he wouldn’t be able to.

“Why can’t I bring those things?” he asked.

“Because, I am not going to live a life with those things in them. I am going to be on my own, without a machine, and I am going to feel good instead of dangerous.”

“You are dangerous.” He tried to be flirty. He tried to nuzzle her nose.

“I am not dangerous. I am hazardous, and only in this stupid city where everyone has to have a car.”

She touched one when she gestured to it and the stereo would never work again.

“Or a phone…” She touched a payphone and all the quarters that people used started flowing out of it and the boy who loved her briefly wanted to chase after the small mound of change but thought better of it.

“I want out of all this electricity.”

He didn’t know what to say. “What if you just discharged it?”

She didn’t understand.

“What if you just touch train tracks or something metal and shot all of your energy into the air and you were diffused forever?”

She hadn’t thought of that. No one had ever thought it was something inside her that could go away. She kissed him for his thoughtfulness and then shook her head.

“I don’t want to be fixed. I like the way that I am. It’s a warning and I’m taking it.”

She crackled with electricity and assuredness and shone brilliantly in the night.

I am not so sure that I should have gotten unlimited text messaging on my cell phone. I have stopped talking to people directly, and I have started texting no matter what the circumstance is. The upside of this is twofold: One, if I am hearing my friend’s voices, it is because I am with them, and I always hated the disembodied voices that accompanied cell phones. Two, I think text message alert sounds are much less annoying than cell phones ringing.

The disadvantage, as a diving instructor and SNUBA employee, sometimes I send out text messages and won’t get answers until much later – apparently cell phone companies don’t think it’s important to provide service to people who are out in the Pacific.

It’s a strange little dance that I play these days, texting with wet fingers on my waterproof phone, conversing with friends and family in the little pockets of service that appear randomly amongst the waves, while my crew of Hawaiian tourists look at the multi-colored fish and I check gauges on their air pressure.
A SNUBA raft is a lot like a reverse grove of Aspens. The air supply is kept on the surface, so everyone is anchored, just like how a grove of Aspen trees is actually one single organism, since each of the trees share a root system. I love helping six people share one mechanical lung.

I explain it like that before we go out: You all are my trees.

They don’t get it and I don’t care to explain and usually I have a text to answer anyway, so after I tell them that they are going to share a lung, and then that they are like a grove of trees, usually I leave them to wetsuit up and start tapping on my bulky phone to my girlfriend or my mom.

I have seven people on my raft today, and I am taking them out to a part off the coast of Hilo where there are supposedly lots of sea turtles. This crew is pretty experienced, so I don’t need to go down with them like I have to sometimes. Some people keep coming back to SNUBA, even though they should really graduate to SCUBA. Stop sharing a lung, I want to tell them. You’re not an Aspen, you’re a weeping willow.

I told a woman with long hair that the other week and she told me I was weird.

The texts I sent after they first went down:

to Mom: Happy Birthday! You’re not old, ma!

to Danny: Beers later, compadre?

to my girlfriend: Miss you, sweet pumpkin pie.

I can’t remember when I started to call my girlfriend sweet pumpkin pie, but she hates it. She really does. I think it’s the type of hate that borders on love though, and I am wondering if I should ask to marry her with a ring in her piece of pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving. I look up at the sky and think about how the sky is just a waterless ocean, and how I hate it when they match in color because then I just feel like I’m lost in an artist’s start to a painting.

I text that to Luis, who would think that was poetic.

All the texts wait in my outbox, a little army of messages that would send when we reached a pocket of service, so instead of looking at my phone or looking at the sky, I look at the gauges and notice that the younger woman is using a lot more oxygen than everyone else, so I put on my goggles and look down and see that she is face to face with a sea turtle. Good for her, I think.

My grandfather looked like a turtle, when you get down to it. He had those glazed over eyes too, and I think that’s how he lived to be 110, he just stopped seeing everything. My mom blamed it on the war, his glazed over expression, but I think it was all the refined sugar he put in his coffee. How else would his eyes get so glazed?

Utah has the largest aspen grove in the world – it’s named Pando, which means “I spread” in latin, and it might be the oldest living organism on Earth. I slowly move the SNUBA-ers to a different spot, thinking about what would happen if we could move Pando, maybe into a museum or something, because I don’t think people should go there whole lives without seeing Pando, and people don’t really go to Utah just for fun.

Suddenly my phone flurries with text messages sent and received.

text from Lyle: Cmng 2 the big island this Summer! Still got a couch 4me?

text from my girlfriend: We need to talk about some things.

text from Cindy: U R so bad at txting me back!

I look at the gauges for a second and it looks fine, and then I start texting back as much as I can, especially to my girlfriend. I don’t need to text Lyle or Cindy, especially because both of them used texting language, and I hate that.

to her: Talk about what?

from her: Us. Let’s not do this over text.

A tourist guy surfaces and talks to me but he’s mostly unintelligible because the waves are pretty big. I didn’t notice. I need to get everyone ashore, but before I pull on their lines, I fire off a text to my girlfriend that says: Texting is just as good as talking sometimes. and then I look at the gauges and see that no one is using any air.

I stick my head down and see that I don’t have a single person attached to my root system. I put on my gear and go down to look for them while the guy who survived climbs onto the SNUBA raft and all I see are bubbles.

My grove. Someone cut down my grove.

I hear when you get back from Antarctica after working there for a year, you get headaches from all the color. That makes sense to me, I can imagine that. All that snowy white can be so brilliant, but it’s not the same as a really red coat, or the riot of color that is a walk on a crowded beach. Sometimes, when I walk on my beach, and all I see is skin and bikinis and bright blankets and violent clashes of neon, I have to come into my room and lie down.

I don’t think I could do Antarctica. It’s too bad, because I would love to be melancholy for lack of shades of green. I would love to be heartsick over a lack of chartreuse. It would be like I was in love with the color test on television and she wasn’t answering any of my calls or texts or e-mails or letters. I never get that much emotion over our color spectrum, and I’d like to.

The paint is peeling in this drab little beach house. The red brick is showing through, and I hate that red brick. If I were in Antarctica, that brick would be what I would dream about. I imagine grey cement breeze blocks would be the norm for the living situation if you worked in Antarctica. I bet my fellow scientists or janitors would try to liven things up a bit with photos and patriotic flags from whatever country they came from, but I wouldn’t. I would just live with the sweet ache for color.

What’s the drabbest color that food comes in?

Today, the world was painted in gray for a short while – the fog rolled in that morning and didn’t roll back out for hours, the sea was grey with white tops, hundreds of seagulls were enjoying my rooftop. I can hear them walk on the aluminum, and it isn’t annoying like I thought it would be. It’s soothing, a reminder that there is real life out there.

When I close my eyes to get away from the brick, I think about those seagull feet replaced with penguin’s. I want to look outside and sea a polar bear ice fishing, and for a moment I can almost convince myself. I go to my window and look out, readying myself for disappointment, when I see a girl shedding a padded jacket revealing a white bikini underneath, laying out a towel and acting like the fog is a side effect of sunshine.

She’s slathering on sun screen.

She is a crazy person.

I want to go out to meet her but all I can think about is Antarctica. I don’t think she would want to talk about Antarctica, but it’s what is on my mind. I could ask her about fog bathing. Is it good for the skin? Or maybe I could just sidle up next to her, put down my own towel, ask to borrow her sun screen.

I don’t do either, because I don’t want to disturb her. She’s rummaging through her bag, she’s looking for something. Sunglasses. I throw open my window to see if she is noticing something I’m not, because I can hardly see the grey ocean through the murk. She is imagining all that sun, I am imagining so much snow.

I like her white swimsuit. I think that would work in the mandatory swimming pool in Antarctica, although I wouldn’t go if people wore the bright colored madness they wear here. If I finally escaped the maddening color of the world, I’m not sure I would ever come back.

She is twiddling her fingers in the sand, and I decide I have to go out and talk to her. Outside, the mist and fog is so thick I feel like I could fill a glass of water just by whisking it around. I wander over to her blanket and ask if I can join her.

“Can I join you?”

“You’re not in beach wear at all!”

“I didn’t think it was necessary in all of this.”

“Wait three minutes.”

I wait. A beam of light shines through the fog like a beacon or a lighthouse, and then the fog decides it had someplace better to be. The clouds lift, the sea turns its normal shade, and already I see cars filing out of the houses and driving the short would-be walk to the beach.

“You’re right.”

I flop down next to her in my coat and ask her the only thing I can think to ask her.

“Would you ever work in Antarctica?”

She looks puzzled for a second, or at least her eyebrows do. I want to reach over and take off the shades and break them in half so that we can have a normal conversation, but I notice that my hair is all wrong and the puffy coat I’m wearing makes me look frumpy, so I try not to be violent.

“It’s cold there, but I might. All of that beautiful, boundless white. Can you imagine it?”

I look around and I see that the beach is filling up with all of these people that I cannot stand, all of this color that my eyes hate drinking. The sky is blue with white cloud remnants and I look back to my house and notice that the aluminum is rusting. The grey is losing its normal shade of grey and becoming that ruddy red.

“I can’t imagine it,” I say.

“I hear when you get back from Antarctica, all the color hurts your eyes.

“The Visible spectrum is pretty offensive.”

“It makes you seasick, too. And it gives you headaches. Color actually affects you, like you were colorblind and suddenly, someone tells you that you can see.”

I get up and brush the sand off when I realize I have nothing to tell this girl. She tugs on the hem of my jeans.

“I’d go, just to feel that,” She says.

The four bandmates laughed at a private joke on the couch. One of the mop topped boys reached forward and grabbed the bottle of Jaeger. He offered it to the interviewer.

“Want some?”
“No. No thanks.”

The interviewer scratched his pen on his pad of paper, scribbled some of the nonsense they just finished correcting each other over, and then asked an old standby.

“How did you come up with the band name ‘LazrFrg?”

He pronounced it awkwardly, like he didn’t understand the words the letters suggested. The lead guitarist spoke up.

“Just say Laser Frog, mate. Don’t twist your tongue over it.”

The interviewer wrote that down.

“You wanna answer this one, Joe?”
“It’s your story, Tom.”
“I just feel like I’ve already talked a lot today.”

The interviewer interrupted them to say, “None of you have said much of anything.”

“Cool your jets, Rolling Stone. Here’s why we’re Lazrfrg.”

Joe stood up to tell the story, like he needed full circulation through his body.

“Back when Tom and I were just lads, fresh out of grade school and enjoying the Summer, we had spent the day running around the park. It was one of those summer evenings that seem like it’s just not going to ever become night, like the dark blue sky was going to stay that shade forever.”

Poetic, the interviewer wrote down.

“Don’t scribble while Joe tells you a story, Rolling Stone.”

The interviewer put his pad down on the table and looked up at Joe.

“Well, we were horsing around with a ball or something, when Tom notices a frog jumping around near the street. We followed the little bugger, trying to catch him, talking all the time about maybe keeping him as a pet or something, when we get further into a small thicket on the edge of the park and Tom decides not to follow.”

“I’m a coward.”

“Tom’s a coward. Not me, though. I followed the little froggy even further, like he was leading me somewhere, like if I caught him he would lead me to Narnia or something like that.”

The interviewer made a mental note. C.S. Lewis fans.

“Eventually he hopped into a little cove that I’d never been to before, and when I hopped down I was in the middle of hundreds and hundreds of frogs. The little one I was chasing was only about three inches or so, but the other ones… there were some as big as your head, croaking and ribbiting away, like I had just crashed their dinner party and they all wanted to know who I was. I was literally surrounded, and I can still remember how it smelt – like rotting wood and decay and everything wrong with the world. The croaking of a thousand frogs is deafening.”

Joe was pacing now, and the bandmates, who obviously heard this story before, were snickering on the couch, watching Joe walk back and forth, looking down at his feet, lost in his memory.

“Well, you can imagine how it felt for all of them to suddenly go silent. The only sound I could here was my own breathing, because I was trying to breathe through my mouth, but only in short bursts because I didn’t want to catch some sort of frog or toad death. All the frogs turned and looked and this little tiny one jumped down, right into the center of everything, right in the middle of this large flat stone. It sort of skittered around slowly, looking at all these frogs that were in this little cove, then looking at me. All the frogs turned to look at me, but it was still soundless. I remember that specifically. Not a single sound when they all moved to follow that tiny frog’s gaze. And then, like someone had switched on a light, the little creature turned a glowing reddish pink and croaked.”

Joe sat down on the couch, took a sip of Jaeger, then got back up. The interviewer had totally forgotten he was supposed to be at least taking mental notes. Tom had his hand over his mouth to hide his laughter.

“I still don’t know why I did this, Mr. Rolling Stone, but right away, I snatched that little pink frog up and bolted out of the forest. I ran and imagined those little creatures chasing me through the forest, hopping like mad, croaking louder than the wind whistles through the trees in a storm. Tom says I was imagining it to this day, but when I came out of the forest, he was there waiting for me. He saw the brightly glowing frog in my hand and said the only thing an 11-year-old lad would say.”

Joe looked to Tom.

Tom obliged. “I said, I dare you to eat it.”

“I did. I ate that frog right away. It felt strange, sliding down my throat, like it wanted to get further down into me, like it was pushing against the sides of my stomach to lodge itself inside of me. And then, I felt a change come over me. A tingling.”

Joe looked to Tom again.

Tom said: “His eyes glowed with that same pink and red.”

“I spent the rest of the night hopping like mad around the park, Tom chasing me, worried, asking if I was all right, asking how it felt. I ripped off my shirt and he could see the glow of the frog in my stomach, bright and unmistakable. But I felt fantastic. I felt like my legs had an elasticity to them, I felt like I could fly. Little hops, big hops, I was possessed by that little laser frog.”

Joe sat down again, poured a shot of Jaeger for everyone. Silently, all of them, even the interviewer, downed a shot.

“And I still feel like that frog is inside of me, Mister Interviewer. Sometimes, when I play, I can feel his glow.”

The interviewer didn’t say a word. What bullshit, he thought.

The birds weren’t cooperating, and my shrink ray was losing its charge. I’ve been telling everyone that those solar-powered outlets are exactly what every street corner needs, but even if there was one here, I wouldn’t have been able to use it. I needed more amps than a common outlet would provide.

Alice could not have picked a better day to be born – every day for the past 24 years has been sunny without a single cloud. I kept shrinking Alice and then bringing her back to normal size. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It was supposed to be a birthday present: a ride on the back of a seagull. The tide was cooperating too – nice little waves for her to swoop over.

“I can shrink you one more time, Alice.”

“Can you unshrink me one more time?”

“That’s what I meant. I meant I can complete one more shrink/unshrink cycle.”

“Okay.”

The other part of her present was a bird saddle, something that didn’t even exist before I made one out of leather. She unwrapped that part first, and I didn’t tell her it was a horse saddle that I had modified and then shrunk, but I think she knew it, especially after she saw the shrink ray that I had wrapped like it was a present for her.

The shrink ray was not hers to keep. It was on loan, for the day, and then I would take it back and make millions shrinking luggage to fit into people’s pockets and then unshrinking it when they