La ballade des chasseurs de la tragedie

 

            I’m holed up in a hotel.  Room service has brought me 12 shrimp cocktails @ 6.95 a pop in as many hours.  Five shrimp per glass of sauce, that’s 60 shrimp.  The bottle of bourbon I checked in with is almost empty.  In the bathroom, the sink full of ice has run out of beer bottles.  I didn’t let the maid in this morning.  The blinds have been shut since I got here.  Electrical tape is masking the TV screen.  Judging by the digital alarm clock, it’s 1:12 AM.  That makes today Sunday.

            I need to write this all down.  Someone has to, and I can't think of anyone else.  Too much has already been said about what they did and why.  The rumors are already twisting into myths and lies.  I am going to avoid the traps the sensationalists have fallen prey to.  I will not speculate on motives, nor results outside of my scope.  I was privileged to witness some of what happened, and my accounts of the rest comes from those involved.  I will only write what is certain.  As for the rest, others have let their imaginations run wild, and will continue to do so.  In fairness to the dead, I need to set down what really happened.  So people will read it, and will know the truth about it all.

            This might, for all I know, be a suicide note.

            I don’t really feel suicidal, but that might change when this is over.  It doesn’t matter yet.  Maybe I’ll end this, go out to my car, and blow my brains over the back window with the nine-millimeter in the glove compartment.  I like thinking of this as a suicide note.  It makes it urgent.  It means someone will read it.  You will.  You’ll hear about me, somehow - at the checkout line at the supermarket, your Mom or Dad will hear the latest.  They’ll phone you, wherever you are, to make sure we were never friends.  And we never were, were we?  You’ll hear, and you’ll read this because you think you’re in it.

                        You are.          

            This is for you.  I remember you.  I know you.  I know you look at your life: your waxed SUV that only goes off-road in the sense of an exit ramp, your casual Fridays, relaxed office environment career; your three cocktail lunches.  I know you smile on Sunday Mornings and think you’re happy.

            I’m writing this to tell you you’re wrong.

 

Canto I. Chinua Achebe Blues

 

August 14th.  5 AM

An ashtray, pregnant with dog-ends, upended and fell silently into the piles of laundry on the floor.  Spidery fingers fumbled through bedside debris, found the ringing phone, and brought it beneath the sweat soaked sheets.  Nick’s voice was unintelligible as he answered.

“ngh.”

“Nick?  Dash.  I, uh… well, fuck.  It’s on.  He’s doing it.  Midnight two nights ago, this farmer outside Poughkeepsie wakes up ‘cause thirty three roosters decide to crow at the moon.”  Dashiell’s voice was tinny and digital with encryption.

“Five.”  Nick placed the handset on his pillow and pushed his shirtless back up the wall until he was sitting.  He frowned at the clocks scattered about, then bent over to find yesterday’s jeans and with them today’s cigarettes.  Dash would be patient.  He knew he was calling at five, and wouldn’t begrudge Nick the customary five minute wake up time. Halfway through his second cigarette, a cup of cold coffee and congealed milk rinsing the sour taste from his mouth, Nick picked the phone up again.

“Thirty three roosters?  Who the fuck has thirty three roosters?”

“John Kirby, Amenia, New York.  Had thirty five until three days ago.  Sometime during the night, the oldest two were pecked to death, and the rest started screaming.  He found them, covered in blood, crowing at the new moon.  It’s happening, Nick.”

“Who else knows?”

“Kirby’s a Catholic.  Mentioned it to his priest.  Priest called it in, and it found its way to me.  So, pretty much everyone.  You’re the first one I called, though.  How long’ll it take for you to be ready?”

“Three days, maybe four.  What do we do about Matt?”

“We?  Sorry, man - you.  You gotta do something.  I got shit to do on my end.  School, remember?”

“Yeah.” 

Nick shook his head, then let it fall back against the wall, stretching his voice farther into the thick scratchiness of just woken basso profundo.  “Christ.  I thought I was going to have a fucking weekend this time.  Yeah.  Three days?”

“If you can swing it.  Any ideas for a replacement?”

“For Matt?  Yeah, I’ve got an idea.  He’s throwing an acid test out at the quarry tonight.  I’ll feel him out, see if he hasn’t turned up any hopefuls.  Three days.”

“Three days.  Hasta.”

Nick hung the phone up with a ragged exhalation.  Did Dashiell ever sleep?  Shaking his head, he rolled out of bed and pulled a filthy pair of jeans to his waist.  The sight of the squalor around him brought first a frown, then a shrug, as it always did.  There always was always tomorrow.  He tugged on a pair of broken boots and a clean t-shirt and walked for the door.  As he passed the couch, he bent over to rap the shapeless form snoring under a sheet there.

“Oi.  Johnny Boy.  Business calls.  Mind the shop and try and do some fucking dishes, OK?”

Without waiting for a response, Nick braved the dank and creaking stairs and ventured out into the muggy, nausea-grey dawn.  Five hours earlier and a few miles west, Marc McNaulty was being thrown out of his girlfriend’s apartment.

 

August 14th, 12AM

            A wine glass lay shattered at his feet, and it occurred to Marc, looking at his now ex girlfriend, that if her eyes kept widening, they threatened to end up the same way. He blinked at the glass, at the blood flecks on the tile, at the wine puddling around his feet, and frowned.  That sneaking suspicion that something, somewhere, had escaped him.

            “I... I think, you know... at times like these.”  His voice was thick and slow from the sudden, after-the-crash silence it interrupted.

            She frowned and sat down, pushing a stray auburn lock behind her ear.  She was still staring, and Marc thought her wide and silent eyes would envelop him at any moment, that he wouldn’t be able to speak, that he’d fall to his knees crying and asking forgiveness, asking her to take back her final words. Her eyes were the rich yellow of wolves and owls and a thousand awful sonnets scrawled in Marc's diary.  He stared at them, already beginning to miss the inspiration they represented.  Then, with a shrug, she broke the spell and looked away. He was still paralyzed. She slowly drew a cigarette to her lips.  He stared at the cuts on his hand, shifted his weight, and found his voice.

            “...about thermodynamics, and entropy, and... and if things start well, if it’s all working out, and you know what’s going on, then slowly it seeps away and the information is gone, and...”

            He looked down at the wineglass, its broken stem still upright.  One foot lashed out, toe first, and knocked it over. 

            “...and so it’s all so fucked up, it never works, never can.  Like when I was little one time, right?  I was out on this sand bar and I was six and it was summer, and when you’re six summer is forever and...”

            He gave an apologetic wince as he took the wine bottle with the still bleeding hand.  It was, he realized, too late for apologies.  It was too late even for excuses, but Marc wanted to be understood, to just for a fleeting instant be understood, by this girl.  Who, as he floundered around his monologue, was watching him the way one watches theater: with no sense of connection to anything that came before or would come after.  She would not interrupt, Marc would not ask a response, and the moment would remain like that, sacred, unprofaned, and utterly disconnected and irrelevant. 

“...and sandbars are too, and I’m all alone in the middle of the sandbar.  Not really alone, but alone in the special six year old way where if you’re not thinking about them, and you cant see other people, then they can’t see you either, and so you’re alone.  And I was building a sandcastle.  It took hours,  It was huge, with spires, and, and those... things.  Minarets.  And seaweed flags, and seashell windows, with roads, and... and everyone came to look and they were smiling and oohing and I was explaining defense plans against the invasions, pushing these snails around like soldiers, and they loved it.  They were fucking eating it up, couldn’t get enough of me, and I, like, thought I’d be in the fucking newspaper or something.  You know, Genius Boy builds Worlds Greatest Sandcastle?  And so...”

He took a deep breath and coughed at a shallow gulp of wine.  She kept staring.

“And so the sun started to set, and the people left, and I was still working on it, when the tide started to come in.”                  

Marc nodded slowly and paused in a manner he might later have described as dramatic for another mouthful of wine. 

“My parents came and got me, an hour later,  I was crying... like, hysterically.  I’d been repairing the castle, dumping and packing sand onto the walls with one of those tiny little kid buckets, but the waves kept pulling the sand away, digging away at the walls, pulling down the seashells...”

            He shrugged. 

            “Everyone on the beach was staring.  I was screaming and kicking and they carried me away and the castle crumbled.” 

He hadn’t meant to say so much, had meant an apology, an explanation, but... but he didn’t care anymore.  He might as well finish his exit scene.  He was standing awkwardly, bottle in one hand, its label smeared with blood, and was suddenly self-conscious of his posturing.  Scratching at his ribs, he finished the last of the wine and sighed, then walked over to her and gently set the wine bottle down on the coffee table.  Broken glass skittered out from under his boots.  He lifted his coat from the sofa, pulled it on, and set his shoulders for the door.  He had it open before the script let him look back.  He realized that her expression was not empathy.  It was not understanding, or concern, or any tacit unutterable compact between them.  She was waiting for him to shut up and get out, and had been all along. 

“Yeah, it... I... it just...” 

He shrugged again and shook his hand once, sending more blood to spatter on the floor, before lifting his fingers to suck thoughtfully on the wound.  In the moment, it seemed appropriate.  Tears and the ocean mixing on his tongue, he shook his head and walked out. 

            He shut the door quietly, and went out into the wind for the proverbial long walk home.  The roads were blissfully empty, none of the usual assortment of lovers cavorting, kissing in long embraces in doorways, smiles so wholefully content and sweet they would have rotted his teeth out in this mood.  He raised one arm and signaled a passing cab.  Inside, he sucked again on his bloody fingers as familiar ghosts, selves of the distant and of the uncomfortably not-distant past rose, one at a time, to remind him of other cab rides, other girls left in tears, other times he’d kept his chin up and his upper lip stiff.  This spring seemed to hold no new beginnings, no  fresh hope, just the same old stale cigarette smoke and tired memories.

            “The best thing about cabs,” she’d said, “is the way people are always waving at you, like you’re famous.”  He had favored her with a smile that he found insightful, ironic, and at the same time self-knowing.  Then the expectancy he had seen in her eyes had given him pause, a skipped beat as the winter had held its breath.  He’d realized an awful lot in that moment.  He’d realized that he’d actually just wondered  if she was kidding or not.  Of course she’d been kidding, no-one, especially not her, was that stupid.  But that instant’s doubt had spoken volumes on the course their lives would take together. 

Were all truths so silent, he now wondered, creeping their way stealthily in under windowpanes and whispering in sleeping ears?  Visions of trout’s dreams and stolen cherries brought words unbidden to his lips.  Waters and the wild, waters and the wild.  He blinked, morose and dry-eyed, out of the taxi window as the night grey buildings sped by, each facade a solemn frown.

            That other night, in that other cab, he’d made a choice.  Tired of cabs home alone, tired of creaking floorboards and cigarette smoke on the rafters of an empty apartment, he’d forced a grin.  And, to follow the grin, a wry nod  “All the popularity four bucks can buy.” 

The windows of that cab, he remembered, had been rainstreaked, though he didn’t remember rain.  But that had been another city and another life, a city where windows had raindrops even when the skies were bare. 

Resolutions notwithstanding, even as she had curled under his arm, leaving him a clear view of the moonbrushed river flowing past, he’d already felt the cold grip of thermodynamics, its inescapable equations permutating somewhere, digits spinning down on some cosmic counter, whittling order and safety away with each brushing scrape of a zero.  And now, in another cab in another city, Marc felt the old familiar chill as the world spun him closer to Entropy.

 

August 12th.  3 AM

New York in August bears a serious resemblance to Hell.  Like Jules had always said - "I'm not gonna lie to you, Matt.  I'm not gonna say New York is hell, but they share a zip code."  Matthias shook his head, rubbing his face with both hands and coming up with twin palmfuls of sweat.  Jules's voice, in memory, led directly to memories of Jules's blood, of Jules's intestines tangled in the seaweed when he’d had found him, face down on the beach on Long Island.  It was coming up on one year since Jules caught a bad case of dead, and Matthias was finally ready to finish what they'd started back then.

            Rounding the corner onto C, he turned right off twelfth and dodged the Latinos stumbling out of the bodega.  Closing his eyes, he counted his steps, and came to a stop.  He turned right, then left, then right again, looking up and down the avenue.  The sky was still pink, even at three AM, and the neighborhood still busy - knots of kids from the projects across the street were here and there, drinking and walking in packs.  The police were nowhere in sight.

            A moment's panic mounted at the base of his spine.  He shook his head, hard, and pushed on the buzzer to the right of the doorway in front of him, ringing apartment 6E.

            A slide opened, he was sized up from behind it, then the door unlocked.  Kid Sinister, an angry-nosed mulatto out of Flatbush, leaned out to peer up and down the street, then opened the door fully and stepped back.  Matthias let it fall shut behind him, squinting in the dim and flickering fluorescents of the stairwell.

            "Yo, Matty Mouse.  What'chu need, man?"

            The silver row of top front teeth were the Kid's trademark - he'd had the canines elongated into fangs.  Which, while admittedly being intimidating as all fuck, made the above into an incomprehensible slur along the lines of 'Yo, ma'mouf, 'shoonee, ma'?"  Matthias thought about telling him to go fuck himself and his short-counted sacks.  A sigh, and he answered,

            "A bundle.  And I need to see Turkey Joe."  Ninety dollars in five bills, folded into quarters, was pulled from his back pocket and offered over. 

            Tugging on his Lakers cap, the mulatto bared a wide grin and plucked the cash from his trembling fingers, then pulled a rolled bundle of wax paper baggies from the pocket of his ankle-length shorts and offered it back in exchange.  He laughed, shaking his head, and pointed at a door behind the stairs.  "Fucking stupid, looking for Joe.  But he waiting, anyway."

            Matthias didn't answer, pocketing the heroin and walking over to open the door and step into Turkey Joe's office.  Joe had never come any closer to Turkey than East Queens.  As a matter of fact, he was probably of Swedish descent - pale hair and paler skin.  Matthias had never seen his eyes, since Joe'd been affecting a pair of Lennon glasses ever since he knew him.  He figured them for blue.  But Joe had, at some point, become the go-to for the Turkish Mafia from his office in Alphabet City. So he became Turkey Joe, and so he was the man Matthias needed to see.

            Joe was sitting at the janitor's desk, his back to the far wall.  The air conditioning was cranked, and Matthias watched as breath writhed, trying to spell some warning before it faded into tendrils of meaningless dissipation. Joe didn't say anything as the door shut - he shook his head sadly and stood, walking over to an antique refrigerator in the corner and pulling out a small, six and one half ounce bottle of Coca Cola with a faded and peeling label.  He sat down, laid the bottle on his desk, and spun it.  Matthias hadn’t moved.

            "Finally making your run for it?"  In Joe's glasses, the reflected image of Matthias distorted as it swallowed dryly and crossed the linoleum floor. On the desk, the bottle was slowly wobbling to a halt, its dented cap facing squarely at his navel.

            "Got everything I need lined up, Joe.  I'm gonna make it."

            "You know this bottle leaves this building, they'll be onto you.  Won't have much time."

            "Yeah.  They won't catch me."  Matthias tugged a thick roll of bills from the other back pocket and dropped it onto the desk.  "Six grand.  Like we said."

            "That was a year ago, Matty Boy.  And I owed Jules a favor.  Price is seven five.  Aren't many of these left, and lots of people are looking these days."

            Matthias's mouth opened and closed, but he simply nodded.  This was not a place to waste one's breath.  Digging into the front pocket of his ragged jeans, he found a fold of money, and snapped it open, counting ATM-crisp hundred dollar bills onto the green formica table.  When fifteen had been laid down, he returned the slimmed bankroll to its pocket, and reached a hand for the bottle.

            Joe's hand closed around his wrist before he'd gotten there. 

            "Listen to me, kid.  Your friend got you into this, he was the one who knew what was going on around here, and he bought it trying for the prize.  You touch that thing, you go outside with it, and you are in the game.  No turning back. Better hit the street running and don't plan on stopping in this life time. The cryptophage, he's in town.  No way he won't be coming after you.  Most likely already is.  You savvy the crypto?"

            Another mute nod as Matthias slid his wrist free and picked the bottle up. His skin stuck to the glass, colder than anything had a right to be, the chill settling immediately into his muscles and weighing there.

            "Yeah.  I savvy.”  He turned and walked back for the door, wrapping the bottle in an old t-shirt and stowing it in his satchel.  “Be seeing you, Joe."

            And then, he was walking out - past Kid Sinister and the savagely skinny punk rock nymphette in the stairwell.  Past the bodega and back up twelfth, his steps accelerating slowly, strides lengthening, the panic rising like bile to the back of his throat, until he was running down Third Avenue for the subway at Astor.  The bottle was his, but God only knew if he'd be able to get the rest together before they found him.  This could be his last chance to die.  But with odds like this, no way he’d need a second one.

 

August 15th.  1 AM

            Marc’s apartment was cold, his plants unwatered, his answering machine sullenly unblinking.  But the phone rang before he had the chance to slip into soliloqual self-pity, or to do anything more than get some Bandaids for his hand.  The manic laughter as he lifted the receiver was unmistakable, and brought an unconscious grin to Marc’s lips.  It had been too long since he'd heard it.

               "Marc!  Matthias.  Howareya!"
               "Umm... not so good."
               "Whaddyamean, not so good?"
               "Well, uh... you ever read Hamlet?"
               "No!  No Hamlet tonight, my little droogster.  I'm at a payphone in a diner outside Fishkill; we're giving a test out at the quarry.  Be there or be a chick band, man."
               The chick band was L7.  L7 was slang for square.  Matthias, marc pnce remarked, wished more than anything else that he’d been born a Cockney.
               "Jesus.   No, Matthias, I don't think..."
               "Yes you do, Marc.  It's your biggest character flaw, but we all love you for it, man.  Now get up here and pontificate publicly like last time, would you?"
               "Look, that was last time.  Like, -the- last time.  I can't do this anymore."
               "Marc, please.  It's not the same anymore, not without you... you were always the real miracle worker, man... look, just come, break a few minds, take a few drugs... you know, good times."
               "I dunno... c'mon, Matt.  Don't ask me to do this.  Please.  Not tonight."
               "Marc - for serious, man.  Please come.  I got something... I just really need to talk to you, okay?"
               "Serious?"
               "Like a heart attack, man."
               "Fine!  Fuck- Yeah, one hour.  Keep..."
               Matthias gave a cry of victory to whatever throng of teenagers surrounded him this time, was met by responding cheers, and hung up before Marc could decide on a witty parting line.
               "Asshole."
               He tossed the phone in the direction of the cradle and lit a cigarette.  A pause caught his motions while he focused a brief, intense study of the ash gathering at its tip, but he found no new insights into the new threads loosening from the invisible loom.  Marc took a deep breath, walking to the closet and mentally scrambling for inspiration. These were never easy affairs to dress for.  I mean, god forbid you dress as, like, Elvis, and there's another Elvis already there.  You're now suddenly bound together by the logic of the party for the rest of the night, no matter how much of an antisocial homunculus he might turn out to be.  A tuxedo.  A tuxedo is always appropriate.  Before he knew it he was strapping the cummerbund on and already in his head rummaging through the medicine cabinet.  He heard himself repeating, even as he mentally tallied pills, what he’d said to Matthias the last time they’d been girding up for war, "No way this party is manageable, not without very serious, no-nonsense, industrial grade hallucinogens."
               And, since everything else seemed to be backsliding,  he didn't bother to feign hesitation.  He strode into the cramped whitewashed wood confines of his bathroom, found the film canister in the back of the medicine cabinet, and shook it open.  Adurol, Vicodin, Dexedrine, Ritalin, Mescaline, Ecstasy, and so on.  A dozen and a half pills in his palm.  And a shiver of excitement climbing his spine at the very sight of them  that made him wince with momentary reproach.  As if these castoffs and leftovers from parties long over were something to be proud of.  As if everyone he knew couldn't produce the same or a longer list from their medicine cabinets  And yet, somewhere inside him, a teenager still grinned at the variety of colors in his little pillbox stash.
               Fuck the amateurs.  He was committed.   He swept most of the pills into the bottle with a deft and practiced flick of the thumb, capped and pocketed the bottle one handed, and swallowed the night's selection.  An Ecstasy-with-Heroin, Mescaline, and Amphetamine cocktail.  An old fashioned Haight-Ashbury speedball, recipe adjusted for the changing times.  Marc dropped the bottle into his pocket and glared at the mirror, thinking of Travis Bickle as he walked out.
               He left his car parked at an all-night diner, and hiked the trail to the quarry.  Standing in the jagged shadows of a towering elm, he looked down over the party and took stock.  Matthias in priest’s garb, giving communion with God knows what.  Check.  Caribbean hash gods flailing on drums.  Check.  Naked hippies dancing around bonfires.  Check.  Cowboy, with horse.  Check.  Martians with rayguns, Jedi knights with light sabers, Renaissance geeks dressed as Elves, Dwarves, and what looked like the entire supporting cast of The Hobbit, Check. Midget, making a very un-subtle point of avoiding said Hobbit contingent.  Check.  (Not entirely unlike noted filmmaker David Lynch, Matthias always insisted on at least one Midget.  Marc had never decided on the P.C. ramifications of this and had given up wondering.)  And now, the crowning touch.  The one guest no party is complete without.  Marc drew a silver cigarette case from the tuxedo coat and tapped the cigarette thrice against a thumbnail before lighting it.  He adjusted his bowtie, straightened his shoulders, and sneered.  James Bond.  James “I Expect You to Die” Bond.  Carefully making his way towards Matthias’ circle, he kept his face frozen in the ruthless smirk of a British assassin about to get laid.  
               "Blofeild, I shee your tashtesh have remained the same," Marc brogued.
               Matthias turned, grinned, and without missing a beat made the sign of the cross and offered a round, plat pill.  
               "Ah, Commander Bond.  How good of you to join us."
               Marc grinned and swallowed the wafer, tasting sugar, cornstarch, and an unfamiliar metallic pharmaceutical twinge.  He bowed his head, letting Matthias murmur the necessary incantations.  This was all getting a bit “Hair” for him, but the crowd loved it.  If Matthias was the reigning Czar of this private hell, Marc was Rasputin.  They'd been doing this for years together, routine after routine, gag after mindblowing gag.  It was a war of sorts, a relentless assault on banality, stasis, and all forms of organized reality.  Or so they'd described it to each other so many years ago.
               It had been August, and an unnaturally starry night for Chicago, a thick and lush sky full of UFOs and shooting stars.  They'd come from art school together, two hallucinating self-titled intellectuals standing in a parking lot with index fingers raised, hoping for grateful Dead tickets.  And, standing there, they'd both seen the bell-bottomed hipster skipping, ten feet each slow and graceful bound, hanging impossibly long in the sky, arms and legs swinging and stretching out in time with each singsong whisper.  At the apex of each leap, "...trips..."  The two turned to face each other, wordless.  Matthias, it should be noted, was the first to break this reverie.
               "Fuck...  It's totally unreal, man.  People have no fucking idea.”
               "Huh?  Idea of what?"
               "How... how everything is so cosmically fucked when you're tripping. Like, fucking -reality- bends for you..."
               Marc had shrugged noncommittally, staring up at the stars and their drunken spinning.  "Maybe someone should tell them."
               Matthias had nodded, eyes widening as the scope of what they were about to begin reached him.   The plan's web stretched from that point, that origin, that crossing of the great axes into a dimensionless unity beside Soldier Fields.  They were determined and organized and, for years, they'd done what they did, and they'd done it... 'well' wasn't really an operative word in the situation since no-one else was doing it.  But they took pride in their work, and were as close as the siblings they proclaimed themselves to be.  Predictably, a girl came between them.  Marc had heard through the grapevine that she’d left Matthias in a Juarez prison, but by that point Marc had already moved, cleaned up his act, and gotten a job.  Matthias became part of a misspent youth, a memory to toast in absentia, and nothing more.  Until tonight.
               Matthias shook Marc awake, and motioned around the recently un-abandoned quarry.  
               "Foolproof plan twelve?"
               "Twelve?"
               "Chain of Fools."  
               Canines flashed as Matthias turned to punctuate the announcement, leering wild-eyed at a young bride covered in imitation pigs blood.
               Marc stood with a flourish, threw back his head, and sounded what he hoped would pass for a barbaric yalp.  It was, predictably enough, answered.  Half the throng surged suddenly, crowding around the two, jostling and screaming, and for an instant Marc forgot the games, forgot the predictability, forgot the time he'd spent away from it all, and was a part of the howl.  But the moment passed, and Matthias felt its passing.  Clapping Marc on the shoulder, he turned an empathetic frown, and slowly nodded.  As the howl died, Marc emptied the rest of the pillbox into his mouth and liberated a Steinlager from an androgynous asian in head to toe sparkling silver.  This evening seemed to call for greater pharmaceutical assistance than he'd reckoned.
               The cocktail he'd already taken had, however, suddenly decided to seize the phenomenological reins, and the crowd's faces melted together into a grinning blur, firelit and eyes wider than ever any had a right to be.  Like the slow motion carnival-scene smiles slowed down as the music swells in a movie, the faces seemed predatory, drawing something from him he didn't want to give.  Summoning the familiar revolutionary assault resolve, he matched the grin, baring fangs and snarling.  He was a professional, this was what he did.  
               Matthias' silent urgings kineticized the crowd, who felt the circle around Marc and drew back, respecting the radius of their newfound locus.  Marc leered at the crowd, and leveled Matthias’s ceremonial dagger at a scantily clad Batgirl.  "A sacrifice!  A sacrifice for the dread lords!"
               The girl's eyes widened, and she shook her head no, "Dude... this is, like... bad tripstuff.  Demons 'n' shit..."
               "Bad trip?"  Marc's gaze achieved a practiced state of wide-eyed, nearly transcendent luring enthusiasm.  "No... No, these are friendly Demons. You'll -like- them!"
               Marc found himself writhing in snaking half-moons around the fire, with an improbably tall aborigine, a Jewish anarchist from Columbia, dressed in cut-off fatigues, and hundreds of beaded necklaces, and whose spiderlike gangly dance was accompanied by spinning the long wooden spear he carried.
               The moon had risen, and stained the ripples in the largest kettle lake. Rainwater the black of ichor, of colorless fear, stretched down before them.  It was a new game, Chain of Fools, and Matthias was the center link.  James Bond was smoking a quiet morphine-laden Camel, staring at the faces rippling on the waves, his eyelids sagging in repose.  He flicked the butt into the waves with a slow streaking parabola which hung in the still night long after the hiss had ended.
               He stripped off his shirt and dropped it into the sand, padding slowly over to join the knot of half or wholly naked revelers waiting for him. He pulled on the climbing harness he was offered, and clipped himself to one of the ropes unfurling from the weight Matthias held.   Together, the eight contestants swam out into the center of the pool, until the fires no longer lit their faces, and the shadows of the dancers loomed, gargantuan kokopellis on the granite cliffs.   And then, linking hands into a ring, they took a collective breath and sank, yanked beneath the surface the moment Matthias pulled the weight from its raft.  Hands tightened as they began to speed farther and farther down, deeper into abysmal darkness and sepulchral silence.
               The rocky walls were blacker than the sky above, and a flashlight lashed around someone's wrist was tugged at by the waters, illuminating stray features, pale faces leaping suddenly out of the dark to break into horrific smiles, obscured by the undulation of minnow-schools of bubbles speeding back skyward.  Hand in hand, the ring sank lower, the chill seeping in through clammy skin and gripping frightened skeletons.  Marc shook a hand free, and brought his wristwatch into sight; Twenty seconds.  With a sudden kick, a blonde wraith broke free of the ring and urged himself towards the welcome of air waiting above.  Marc hardly took notice of the hand grasping at his, reforming the ring, nor of their continued descent.  The luminous face of his watch was shining still in front of him.    The dull thuds of his slow heartbeat were footsteps down a long hallway, the pale blue Indiglo light a door opening, a warm apartment he'd never see again.
    The watch was a birthday gift, one he'd greeted with a sigh.  She'd blinked in surprise at his reaction, doe-wide green eyes registering insult and incomprehension.  "You don't like it?"
               Shifting his weight, he had reached a hand up to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck.  
               "No, no... I love it.  That's the problem."
               "This qualifies as a problem on your planet?"  She grinned up at him.
               "Well, yeah.  It means I'm going to have to get rid of my scarf."
               She didn't look any more understanding.  He sighed again.  
               "I mean... Okay, so, like... people have this, this finite limit imposed on them at birth, right?  This maximum number of inanimate objects.  A total of things they can sustain.  Like jugglers, or... or like little private suns."
               She blinked again.  He remembered her eyes and her blinks better than anything else about her.  Eyes the green of sunrise oceans, and long elegant eyelashes capable of such eloquent derision.  
               "Is this a joke?"
               "No, for real- my number, I happen to know, is five.  And right now, I have a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, my wallet, my keys, and my scarf.  If I wear the watch, I have to get rid of the scarf.  And, like... it's cold, and I'll miss the scarf and all," he grinned, " but that's a fucking cool watch."
               The flashlight streaked upwards in a storm of bubbles, and the remaining four were left blind, the touch of hand to hand, the pull of the weight, and the chill of the darkness all that was real.  Stars, literal stars, began to slowly spin before him, constellations converging and whirling away, fireflies under dogwood trees on summer nights long ago.  Marc shook his head, letting loose a flurry of bubbles as he sought to expel the vision.  The diver to Marc's left squeezed his hand once, and disappeared.   Another hand found Marc's, and the three continued to fall.
               A sudden lance of light rock illuminated above their heads; the rest of the party was trying to check on them, but they'd gone too far already.  The flash made Marc blink, visions of hospital ceilings, the knowledge of a blossoming life within his womb, the guilt of extinguishing it.  This was not his mind, these were not his thoughts, what weird hurtling brain had his soul caught in its butterfly net to hitch a ride with?  He was stowed away deep in the hull of a machine he suddenly failed to understand.
               Whalesongs began their slow humming, the vibrations oscillating through him, sounding on him, strange songs of horrible regrets and interminable longing.  Pressure began to make itself felt, sinuses and ears strummed as taut wires.  In the geologic blackness, the stars became diamonds, souls forged into hard gem-like beauty by the weight of the waters.  Shapes had begun to appear out of the diamonds, the dots connecting truly now, when the last of the descendants had begun his return and left Matthias' hands linked to Marc's.  The two drifted together and entwined their legs, the ropes digging into bodies pressed close.  Marc felt Matthias' heart beating against his right breast, a countertime to his own.  The two beats, synchronized by some strange outside force, filled his eardrums, the two tranquilized organs spasming slower and slower.  The embrace ended with a kiss, brief and fleeting, and Matthias soared away, rising like an ascendant angel to meet the sky.
               The sickly watchface was a ghost, a specter of the forgotten surface. Three minutes.  Marc imagined the tranquilizers as somehow slowing his metabolism down to the point where this sort of stunt became possible.  The harness stopped pulling him down; the weight had hit bottom.  The ropes' tension gone, he'd lost all sensation.  He moved his arms in small circles, feeling nothing around.  Within the black about him, blacker forms coalesced and dispersed, a continual unraveling.  He saw his life mirrored there, watched daughter, sister, and mother weaving, and knew it was the crone's comb, Penelope's secret, that held the ascendant house of his horoscope. His life had shattered with a wineglass tonight, and he'd returned to a hell he had sworn a thousand times never to see again.  Holding his arms out to the side, he tilted his head back, and shrugged out of his harness.  Above, a circumference wobbled fluidly, deathly pale light teasing and inviting him.
               But what lay behind this veil of kisses?  Entropy was down here, in the deep, in turbulence and water currents, in the patterns of bubbles that rose from his numb lips.  This was the legacy of an absconded father, beneath the Thesean rock the waters, and beneath the waters the cold truth of oblivion.

    He couldn't tell if his vision was swimming, if the stars were drug hallucinations, or his brain begging for oxygen, if this sojourn was suicidal or enlightening, but he knew it didn't matter anymore.  Fuck The Buddha.  He wasn't going to accept this ever again, this time the sandcastles would last.  Wriggling his shoulders, he cast his head back, grit his teeth, and squirmed towards the waiting night sky.  His arms broke the water first, and he arched his back, allowing himself the momentary conceit that his ascent might continue, that the water would continue to recede and fall away beneath him.  But it stopped, just beneath his nipples, and rose again, until only his head and shoulders were free of the black, a Kilroy negative against the night.  Blinking and gasping, he shook his head and stared at the havoc engulfing the quarry, absorbing the frenzy with remarkable alacrity.

            Cops had arrived.  Squadrons.  Legions.  Teeming hordes of them.  They were pursuing knots of teenagers who scrambled up bluffs only to encounter more waiting. A riderless horse was trampling bonfires.  Martians were leveling rayguns at the police.  The sky was a shattered hologram, spotlights and sirens turning the starscape into a collage, each shard reflecting an angle of the whole, each perspective held in isolation from all others.

            Marc blinked, shook his head to clear the water from his eyes, and stared.  A cop holding a flashlight in one hand and an automatic handgun of the large, black, and persuasive sort in the other turned and aimed both at him.  He saw the cop’s eyes open in recognition.  Then the explosions started, and the cop turned and sprinted away.  Marc couldn't match the cop's recognition - familiarity, deja vu, it was all too vague to someone having problems with his own name.

            The water’s surface rippled with Moire crosshatches as siren strobes traced their scars across the kettle lake.  Away from the chaos, alone in the lake, none of it was real.  Marc floated in solipsistic peace, holding his breath, and wondering if he’d taken the proverbial second left at an astral Albuquerque and come up through the wrong kettle lake, in the wrong quarry.  But he was not so self absorbed as to deny the immediate danger of his surroundings.  And so, slipping back into character as James Bond, he paddled silently to the shore, crept from the water, and pulled his jacket on, then sprinted barefoot for the shadows and trails back to his car. 

            The run was the most extraordinarily alien experience of his life; he did not follow the shadows as much as they seemed to follow him.  He felt ley lines beneath his feet and followed them, dancing along spiderwebs that stretched across the arena, staying invisible in the borders that separated the frames of violence and surreality.  And he was invisible, between worlds, and he knew he would continue to be so, so long as he managed to stay atop the walls of the labyrinth, cheating its rules, refusing to descend into any of the scenes the night offered.

            Looking back later - that night and in the days that followed, he was able to remember flashes and snapshots of the chaos around him.  Matthias had been shot.  Though it didn’t register as Marc sprinted by, the next day he remembered everything about that moment.  Matthias grabbing a pistol from a fallen officer.  Turning, firing into the night, and the three separate forces that struck his frail body, spinning him one way, then the other, then pitching him backwards to fall, kicking, from the precipice behind him.

            His car was where he left it.  The road above the diner was closed, and through the window, Marc saw a few officers in the diner, getting coffee and sandwiches for the long task of identifying and arresting the mob to the north.  Shivering, he folded himself into his car and drove away in silence, his windows rolled down, his mind blank. Still wearing the tuxedo pants and jacket, he climbed the stairs to his apartment..  All he wanted was to sink to his knees, vomit into the toilet, and crawl to sleep.  Mourning and regret could begin early the next afternoon, long before he would dare to consider himself awake.

            Instead, his stereo greeted him as he pushed the unlocked door open.  A cigarette burned in an ashtray, and a leather pea coat, not his, hung from his chair.

            “Someone’s been eating my porridge...”  Marc called the ghost into sight, stepping in and letting the door swing shut behind him.  The toilet flushed, water ran behind a closed door, and in stepped the ghost.

            Nick grinned at Marc and walked over to retrieve the cigarette.  Marc recognized it as one of his own, pinched no doubt from his freezer.    Marc blinked and shook his head, and sat down, looking up as he tried to cope with the situation.  He never met Nick in a good state of mind.  Marc figured Nick just knew when his life was falling apart, and showed up to step on the pieces.  The first time they met, the Dandy Warhols were on the jukebox of a drag bar in Amsterdam and it was Christmas Eve. 

The year before Marc had been walking across Times Square when he heard the song. He’d gone to the Virgin in Times Square to try and find something by this New York band called Stage.  He’d seen them in Prague, opening for Kiss.  Instead he ended up picking up Come Down by the Dandys because he wanted something as witty and pretentious as he was.  And as he crossed the street he saw a billboard that said War Is Over.  It was signed Merry Christmas, Love John & Yoko.  He wasn’t sure he’d ever gotten a better present.

And, if that was the Christmaseyest he’d ever felt, the next Christmas Eve was the least.  He was in Amsterdam and freaking out because his stepfather was in the hospital for his kidneys and he hadn’t spoken to anyone in something like two weeks and all he wanted to do was call his mom and tell her how sorry he was.

And the first Christmas, in Times Square, this one song just got all the emotion he was feeling.  That’s the only way he could think describe it.  Because, a year later, it’s Christmas Eve, and he’s gutshot with this weird rock and roll weltschmerz.   It was Nick who first told him about the word, one night when they were drinking and Marc was trying to explain foiertrunken.  Merriam Webster defines weltschmerz as, “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.”  It translates as world pain.

So it’s freezing in A’dam and he’s dressed like an extra from Trainspotting in an undersized t-shirt and hoody and bloodstained jeans so thrashed that it looks deliberate and he's shaking with the cold or malnutrition or god knows what.  He may very well still be tripping.  And he has just spent all evening panhandling for Guilders.  At one point, he went into some kind of neon lit shrine to the new grocery sciences to use the payphone, but some Dutch mother with a gaggle of churning monsters was talking to the cashier about the Christmas card she’d gotten.  Not that he spoke Dutch, but they were passing the damnable thing back and forth and giggling each and every time they opened it and it played Away in a Manger.  The rain didn’t seem so bad.

And he wanders around looking for a phone.  Except it’s Christmas.  So everything is closed.  And all the windows are frosted and glowing and he’s starting to feel more and more like a scrooge or one of the ghosts.  And he walks into this bar that’s totally empty except for a tired and sagging old drag queen behind the bar.  He creeps in, and he’s sniffling and he walks to the phone at the corner of the bar and dumps his pocketful of change onto the bar and starts trying to dial transatlantic except the phones are all busy.  Mom’s.  Dad’s.  Stepdad’s.  All of them.  And he’s starting to panic more and more and then suddenly the jukebox comes on and it’s playing Holiday, by the Dandys.  And so Marc is gutshot with this feeling that the band is singing about a place full of elegance and cool haircuts, where everyone is hip and brilliant and beautiful.  And he is suddenly struck in the stomach by the certainty of distance, the certainty that the place the band is singing about is so far away, but that just a year ago he was inside the song in a way he can barely understand now.  Rock and roll weltschmerz.  And he loses it, just starts coughing up tears, doubling over and shuddering with surrender.

And it’s Nick in the corner who put the song on.  Nick’s not his real name.  If you ask, he’ll say he doesn’t have one anymore.  It’s sort of involved, but he used to be a Rock Star and then he disappeared and now he’s… whatever he is now.  Nick’s skinny enough to look tall in a crowd, and his hair at this point was still Britpop big, but he’d dyed it blond, and since he’d always had black hair in the band, Marc didn’t recognize him at first.  Besides all of which – Marc didn’t really look.  He started to cry, then to hyperventilate.   He may have tried to walk out, leaving his day’s wages carefully piled on top of the phone, but he didn’t make it – he collapsed, or stopped, or just decided to have a sit down.  And, Christmas Day, he wakes up on Leentje’s couch.  She’s still in drag, if Mrs. Claus counts as drag, and she's feeding him oatmeal.  Nick is feeding him vicodin.  Between the two, he recovered.

            And now, in his apartment in New York, Nick is smoking his cigarettes and grinning.  He’d gotten a haircut – suggestions of a pompadour, manicured sideburns – a young and hungry Elvis.  But he was still Nick, and Marc was not ready to think about what his presence meant.

“This, Mr. McNaulty, marks the end of your life as you know it.”

            “Yeah, well…” Marc ran his hands through his hair, struggling for something appropriately sinister and nihilistic.  “Well, my life’s been unraveling since I was born, you know?  Had to end somehow.”

Nick pointed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on Marc’s desk. 

“You ever read that?”

“Yeah, I wrote my dis… yeah.  Yeah, I did.  You?”

“Mmm hmm.  One of my favorites.”

Marc just nodded, unable to follow the conversation.  What do you say to the cop sitting in your apartment waiting to arrest you?   Was Nick even really a cop?  What the hell kind of scam as he running?

“You should think about the book, Marc.  You look to me like a spear-carrier hanging from the mast of a boat.  Not like a Danish prince.” 

 “Yeah, well- they’re all dead, right?” 

“We’re all dead.  Do you really want to die in someone else’s play?”

            Marc was, understandably, speechless at this point.  Nick just flashed a grin and stood up. 

“Time to go.”

  Marc looked around.  ‘I’m being arrested,’ he thought.  ‘Is there something I should do?  Water my plants one last time?  Unplug the stove?  What would my mom tell me to do?’  All Marc could think to do was shrug and nod.  Nick, absentmindedly,  gestured at Marc’s feet. 

“What, you wanna go barefoot, in a wet tuxedo?”

Marc rubbed his face. 

“’m still tripping.” 

Nick nods and has the audacity to smile again. 

“Yup.  Should make understanding what’s about to happen that much easier.  Get dressed.”

            While Marc puzzled over what to wear, if the other cops were going to sodomize him more or less if they knew he was tripping his proverbial balls off, the cop ended up picking his clothes out.

            Nick led Marc downstairs to a red dodge charger parked illegally in front of his apartment building.  He didn’t say anything, just pointed the remote so the doors unlocked and waited for Marc to get in before sliding in behind the wheel.  Marc started to speak, but Nick just smiled and held a finger up, tapping it against his lips with a nearly inaudible hiss.  He pointed.  Two men in gray suits crossed the street, walking in perfect cadence.  They pressed the buzzed of Marc’s building.  The super, scratching furiously at the back of his dredlocked head, opened the door.  The men flashed badges.  The super’s Caribbean features grayed and he motioned them inside.  As the door closed behind them, Nick put his foot down and Marc was pressed back into his seat as his street blurred away behind him, tires noisy on the morning asphalt.

            He looked around the car, deciding to ignore the breakneck pace at which the skyline was disappearing.  The rearview mirror had electrical tape over it.  A portable CD player was attached with Velcro to the console and trailed a wire leading to the stereo.  A plastic figurine took Jesus’ place on the dashboard, but had a distinctly non-canonical look to it.  Marc was reaching for a closer look when Nick spoke.

            “You can’t go back there.”

            “What?”

            “Those men.  They know where you live.”

            “They’re not with you?”

            “Jesus.  You really are tripping.  No they’re… they’re the enemy.  Not with us.”

            “Us?  You’re arresting me, remember?”

            “Not exactly.  Listen, you’re tripping, we’re driving, and we’ve got a ways to go.  You maybe want to sleep?”

            Marc agreed with this line of reasoning.  Last night, he’d written himself off as useless for the next fourteen hours, and even if he was speeding around in a dodge charger with a police impostor, there was nothing to do about it until he sobered up.  God knows, he’d only make things worse like this

            Marc rubbed his face again.  He recognized the figurine, now.  It was a molded plastic model of a devil.  Nick turned the music up and Marc surrendered, shrugging and leaning back into his seat.  This would all, no doubt, make sense one he sobered up.  He figured something had worn off, or something had kicked in, because neither the driving nor the encroaching sun kept him from falling asleep.  Panic waited until he awoke. 

 

August 15th, 9PM

            Marc woke on a highway silhouetted by the setting sun.  He didn’t see any exit signs, so he wasn’t sure which.  Nick was still driving, intent on the patterns of traffic through which the car was darting fluidly.  Marc winced at the tremors in his hands and lit a cigarette to cover them.  Cracking the window, he took a few deep breaths to counter his shakes.

            “So,” He asked, “Nick?”

            “Yeah?”

            “Where are we?” 

            “Way to Ashville.  About halfway there.  You hungry?”

            Marc shook his head no, shuddering.  He watched his pale reflection. 

            “Matthias is dead, right?”

            “Why do you say that?”

            “I saw it.”

            "You saw what?"

            “I saw Matthias get shot.  Didn’t you see it?”

            "I didn’t ask what you think you saw.  Just the for real.  What did you really, actually see?"

            “Dude, he’s dead.  He picked up a gun and he got shot.  Three times.  Then he fell.”

            "Right.  Something that looked like our friend fell off a cliff.  When you got there, what... fifteen?  Twenty?  How long’d it take you?"

            “Ten seconds.  What are you saying?”

            "Okay.  When you got to the edge, ten seconds later, someone who looks like your buddy's three stories down, looking dead.  He's lying there... face down, right?  Am I right?"

            “…yeah.”

            "Yeah, see?  I knew it was gonna be face down"

            “What the fuck is your point?  So he fell face down.”

            "Sure.  Sure, Marc.  No, you're right.  They shot him like that, he falls like this, yeah - no, you're right.  He'd have to have landed that way.  Absolutely.  But, you know what else?"

            “…I never saw his face?”

            "Bingo.  Never saw it.  They coulda chucked Hoffa off that cliff and you'd never see anything but..."

            “So he’s alive?”

            "No, He's dead, alright."

            “Why?”

            "'Cause he got thrown over a cliff and fell from a three story drop straight down to the bottom.  He's dead."

            “How do you know?”

            "I rolled the body over and looked."

            “Then what the fuck is this about?”

            " I wanted to make a point, okay?  These people, they don't fuck around.  They're serious.  Serious, and really fucking good at what they do.  They want you, they're gonna make your life twelve kinds of miserable 'till they find you."

            “What, they’re looking for you?”

            "The both of us, yeah.  From a long way back.  Doesn't make a difference.  Point is, they remember us.  See, they have real real long memories, when it comes to things they decide to forget.  And you, Marc, are definitely something they want to forget."

            “So what the fuck do I do now?  I thought I was out of all this shit.”  A hint of a whine crept into Marc’s voice.

            "Do?  I don't know.  Run.  Hide.  Keep your head down and your ears up.  That kind of shit."

            “Hide where?  That was my apa-”

            "Outside.”  Nick interrupted.  “Way out, you know?  Get gone.  Off the map.  Where the sidewalk ends.  Places like where we’re going.  Anonymous.”

            “Nick.  You’re telling me I have to spend the rest of my life in a hippy town?”

            Nick laughed. 

            “You'll see.  You're not alone.  This shit?  It's big.  Big and old.  They've been hunting us for centuries, now.  They get better at looking, we get better at not being seen.  There’s more of us, now.  Me and Matt, we made contact.  A whole world of us, and this country was supposed to be ours.  Almost was, too.  'till we blew it and fucking went and let those fuckers snake it out from under us."

            Marc blinked, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

            “What?  What are you talking about?  Who stole the country?”

            Nick sighed and repeated Marc’s head shake. 

            "Doesn't matter.  Nobody agrees.  Nobody knows, is my bet.  Besides, half what this is about is history.  Theirs or ours.  They keep writing us out.  Making like we never happened.  And they keep doing weird things to time.  Calendar's all fucked up.  Gotten worse since the weathermen went.”

            “The weathermen?”  Marc barked a short laugh.  “We’re fucking weathermen now?  Jesus, Nick.  What’s next, the Yippies?”

            Nick scowled. 

            “Levitating the fucking cage.  Like that’d fix anything.  Bunch of Johnny come lately fuckwits, the lot of them.”

            “Nick…”  Marc laughed uneasily.  “I’m supposed to be the one on drugs.  Are you mental or something?”

            "Alright already.  Forget I said anything.  Nobody said you had to.  Just don't worry about them, then."

            Marc pointed with his cigarette.  “What was that about a cage?  The pentagon, right?  You call it the cage?”

            "Cage?  Hell, yeah, we call it a cage.  Look at the fucking thing.  It's a god damned pentagram a mile on a fucking side.  You never wondered what it was there for?  Or what the fuck they keep inside?"

            “Enlighten me.”  Marc leaned back, grinning contentedly.

            "America."

            Marc blinked and forgot his grin.  “What?”

            Nick nodded solemnly.  "Like I said.  America.  They snaked it out from under us and that's where they keep it.  They got the heart of the land.  The fenceless frontier.  The can-do pioneer spirit.  The American Dream.  The cowboys and the minutemen and the Tribes and the inventions and everything that was ever great and free.”  His voice stayed low, though his excitement was betrayed in the quickening of his speech and a manic gleam in his eyes.  “They caged it and they put all these straight lines around it and now its theirs and look at this place.  Crankhead rednecks running the country and clowns killing kids and fake sugar and chips that leak out your ass and and don't even get me started on cable TV."

            “…and how, exactly, did they do all this?”

            "It's the Ley Lines, Marc.  Those assholes are fucking them all up.  Moving everything around and straightening out all the kinks 'till it's all one big grid.  Those mother fuckers are draining all of the fucking life out of this country and keeping it all for themselves."  Now it was Nick’s turn to whine, a shrill lament underlying his voice.

            “What do they do with it, if they have it caged?”

            "Do with it?  Fucking nothing.  They just want it to have it.  To hang from their fucking black iron walls."

            “Why?”

            "Because that's what they're there for.  To want.  To take.  To fix.  They're the Enemy, that's what they fucking do."

            Marc leaned back, frowning, and scratched his neck.  He nodded.  “So, ah… how’d you find all this out?  Last I remembered, we were just using drugs.  Nobody had guns.”

Marc fell asleep listening to Nick’s story.  It came on suddenly, something kicking in or something wearing off.  He was picturing her apartment – not as he had left it, all blood, broken glass and silence, but before that, when it was good – yellowed light, Stereolab, hot tea and long talks. An appropriate eulogy would be, they ran out of things to say, and Marc went back to looking for things to take.  It had lasted almost three years.  Six months of neurotically cleaning up his act, finding a job, re-matching all his socks.  Then two and a half years with her.  Three birthdays, two holidays.  Two weeks ago, he’d started in on the remnants of a vicodin script.  Last night, she found syringes behind the toilet.  Right now, something behind his sternum trembled uneasily with the realization that he hadn’t packed anything for the come down.  Knowing that the sick was coming, Marc happily escaped into dreams.

He was in a club, surrounded by friends.  Everyone was high on something, but there was nothing sinister about it.  They had a table and were sprawled around it on couches.  The music was good, and the dance floor was packed.  Marc bent over, reaching across the table for a candle, then used it to light a cigarette.  He lowered his head and inhaled a line of something.  Sinking back into the couch, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The music changed suddenly, all treble and harmony vanishing, only a muted and echoing bassline slowly pounding.  His eyes snapped open.  The club was empty.  The air seemed cold.  A vibrato sound was cycling through the space, reminiscent of whale songs and feedback, as though a didgeridoo were being played off camera somewhere.  Every few seconds, the bassline and the didgeridoo jumped, skipped, and repeated themselves.  He stood up, leaving the cigarette to smolder in its ashtray. 

Across the dance floor was the DJ booth.  The record was skipping.  Marc reached out his hand and nudged the arm of the turntable.  The bassline roared back through the speakers, and the club was full again.  But the people, now, were ghostly and pale, dressed in suits from the 40s, and listlessly milling around in circles.  The didgeridoo was still playing.  Marc followed the sound, turning to where the bathrooms should have been.  Instead there was a long and tiled hallway, something out of a subway station, somewhere.  And sitting against the wall was the source of the music - a hunched figure with a hooded sweatshirt.  The figure set down the didgeridoo.  The strange reverberations stopped.  Long fingers, bent in unsettling ways, raised up and pushed back the hood.  An old man leered at Marc, his brown hair glistening and moving as though in a breeze.  With horror that forced an unconscious step backwards, Marc saw the man's hair was a seething mass of engorged ticks, each one oily and plump.  Marc turned away and ran from the echoing laughter, back towards the dance hall.

Instead, he found he was wandering around the empty halls of an abandoned hospital. Fluttering visions of orderlies disappeared around corners. The hallway was a cluttered mess, with medicine and cleaning carts turned over and their contents scattered about the floor.  Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen and only about half of the lights worked, some of them hanging by their wires and swaying, giving a sensation of perpetual motion. Other varied debris was in piles here and there, clothing, coloring books, a mattress or two. There were doors to rooms all along the hallway.   Some were opened, others closed, some were missing doors altogether.

Stretching along the entire length of the hallway walls on both sides was an intricate design. It first looked like something a child would do, but there was a pattern evident, just beyond his grasp. Looking like a cross between African tribal designs and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the scrawling filled the middle section of both walls completely and seemed to do so for the entire, interminable, length of the hallway. The medium used in one section appeared to be crayons, in another section it appeared to be dried blood, and where he stood was a section done in black marker.

Marc reached a hand out and opened the nearest door.  Inside, a blonde boy was strapped, naked, to a steel operating table. Thick white bands covered his ankles, his genitals, his nipples, and his eyes.  His mouth was open and bloody.  There was a creature, some kind of squirrel or rat, something with talons, a lizard's head, black lusterless eyes, and a long bushy tail.  It was  standing on the boy's chest, its nails dug into the hairless flesh, and it was in the process of eating his lips. When the creature looked up and hissed, Marc saw the boy's teeth and tongue had already been consumed.

 

August 18th, 7PM

Waking up, Marc had a slow and laborious return to consciousness.  The shapes and forms of a cluttered ceiling resolved one by one into mobiles and exposed beams, wind chimes and tapestries, pinwheels and fly strips.

Sounds took longer.  There were voices all around, coming and going, footsteps and music and drumming.  He sat up.

He was naked under a patchwork quilt, lying on a couch that must already have been ancient when it had its fashion in the seventies.  His bare feet found the comfortably scuffed wood floor.  The house was definitely inhabited by hippies.  Exposed wood, bright tapestries, religious iconography that seemed on first glance as planned and considered as a Jackson Pollock.

A thick woman with dyed red dredlocks and patchwork corduroy pants walked in, carrying an armful of vegetables.  She grinned.  “Hey, Tim Finnegan!  You hungry?  You just missed dinner.”  Marc shook his head no, looking around for his pants.  She laughed and shrugged, and walked into what looked like the kitchen.  “Under the couch, sailor.”  Dutifully, Marc lifted the quilt to his knees and bent double to peer between his feet.  He pulled out a freshly folded pair of jeans, on top of which was his wallet, the remnants of his cigarettes, his lighter and a broken watch.  Marc pulled the jeans on and draped the quilt over his shoulder.

A sandy haired beatnik wearing only overalls steppes in as Marc had put a cigarette to his lips.  “Dude.  Sorry, man.  House rules – no death drugs inside.”  He shrugged and sauntered off while Marc parsed the command.  A frown, and he stood, shrugging his shoulders under the quilt, then padded into the chaos of the kitchen.

The redheaded woman was at the sink, washing vegetables.  A fair-haired woman and a bearded man were on either side, washing and drying an impressive mound of dishes.  Marc stood for a moment in the doorway, trying to remember who it was who said that all deadhead girls look like Sharon Tate, and all the guys look like Manson.

A screen door led out to a porch, he gathered from the steady blur of children scrambling and stumbling in and out at knee height.  They were complaining of scraped knees, lost toys, cheating and rule-breaking, asking for jars, asking for cookies, yelling, laughing, and running.  Marc waited for a lull in their traffic, and shuffled barefoot out to the porch.

Beyond the screens that bounded the ramshackle old veranda, an overgrown hill descended steeply out of sight.  Mountains rose in response.  The trees were changing colors and the sun had just set, traces of the incandescence fading slowly into periwinkle starlight.  He folded himself into an armchair and lit his cigarette.  The children were all outside, chasing each other in circles and lemniscates, catching fireflies, and singing along to what Marc slowly noticed was an old transistor radio somewhere in the kitchen.  The signal drifted lazily in and out, but the children all knew the words to the Radiohead anthem that seemed destined to remind them, later in their respective lives, of nights like tonight.

Marc blew smoke at the ceiling and rubbed his face.  This house was alien in a way he’d never expected.  Just from the people’s faces, from the way they looked at the tribe of children, Marc knew h didn’t belong.  He scratched at the fleshy inside of his elbow and wondered where these people came from and how they found each other.  Was there a secret underground, he asked himself, where good and wholesome people found each other and abandoned the world of cities?

               The woman with the red dredlocks sat down next to him, the odor of the joint she’d just smoked as plain as her hair dye.  Marc pulled the quilt close around himself and shivered.
               “How you feeling, tough guy?”  She had an easy and undemanding smile.
               “Okay, I guess.  Cold.  Where’s my shirt?”
               “You tore it off the first day before your fever broke.  Between that and the puke, we didn’t even keep it for compost.”
               “The first day?  How long was I out?”

“It’s Thursday.  That was some detox.  Haven’t seen one like that in a while.  Lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah.  I, uh... I took something...”  Marc rubbed his forehead, trying to remember what the communion wafer had tasted like, but couldn’t remember past Matthias being shot.  “Anyway.  I’m better now.  Where, uh...”

“Where’s Elvis?”

Marc laughed and nodded.  “Yeah.  Elvis.”

“He’s in New York with Dashiell.  Should be back tonight.  They said they’d pick you up when they know  where the next stop is.  I gotta say, sailor – you’re running with some big dogs.  You sure you’re up for this?”

Marc considered the question, then nodded.  “Yeah.  I... I’ve been around the block, you know?  Just getting back into the swing of things.”  He pulled the quilt tight as the evening’s temperature fell with a light breeze.

“Don’t call it a comeback, right?”  She lit a hand rolled cigarette produced from somewhere behind her ear.

“...been nowhere all along.”  Marc grinned and let himself nod along with her.

“So, how long?”

“How long?”

“How long have you been...”

“Invisible?”

“A fluxist.”  She shook her head no.

Marc blinked.  “A fluxist?  No, wait.”  He held up a finger, frowning.  “I’ll get this.  Flux.  Change.  Chaos.  Proteus?”

She shook her head no with the same easy smile, indulgent and teasing.  “No.  I’ll give you a hint.  Heraclitus.”

“Oh.  Right.”  Marc nodded abruptly. “Got it.  Fluxist.  Heraclitus.  Flux.  All, meaning nature, is flux.  Panta rhei.  And, er... and nature loves to hide.  So flux loves to hide.  So, fluxist, being that nature which hides.”

“Barbara accelerates.  That works.  So.  How long?”

“Well, first time was with N... with Elvis.  Me, him, a couple other friends were gunning for tragedy for this crazy old guy in Phoenix.  He dies, I bug out, and I try to get my name back.”

“And?”

“And I had the dream again.”  Marc rubbed the back of his neck, squinting at the last of the sunset.  “I’m off the map.”

“There are no maps for these territories?”  She shrugged, making the quote into a question, and flipped a coin at him. 

Marc caught it and stared.  It was, in fact, a pin – a while pin with the symbol for a path integral in black.  Marc laughed and nodded, dropping the pin into his pants pocket.  “Not bad.”

 

August 17th, 4AM

“Hey, kid.  Wake up.  You can’t sleep here.”

Dashiell, who hadn’t been more than half asleep, nodded and pushed himself up to a sitting position, then rolled his weight forwards and lurched to his feet.  He stooped and picked up his book bag, and shuffled down the length of the payphone-studded wall to duck into the bathroom.

Under the fluorescents, his green hair looked like it had bled into his skin.  The t-shirt of which he was so proud had stretched at the collar, and the white lettering of THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED had accumulated grime and stains somehow.  Dash washed his face with the powdered soap and coaxed his hair down from the clumps and cowlicks it seemed to prefer.  He looked at his watch, indulged in a melodramatic sigh, and he shouldered his bag again, shuffling back out of the bathroom, past the rope which marked the ticketed passengers’ waiting area, and got on the escalator.  The janitor who’d woken him up was mopping the waiting area.  Penn Station, at this hour, was given over to the homeless and the janitors.  Dash pulled his wallet out of his front pocket and replaced it in the rear pocket where it belonged.  The chains attached to it had tangled, and he shook them loose as he was borne higher.

Outside, he fumbled a cigarette out of its crumpled pack and lit it with the third cardboard match.  He’d almost finished it when ambulances screamed to a stop, and EMTs rushed past him, scurrying down into the station.  Dash finished his cigarette, flicked the last of it away, and followed after the paramedics.

He passed them on the escalator.  They weren’t hurrying now.  They were taking the stairs, muttering back and forth with the brevity of colleagues to whom the zipped body bag they carried bore no weight whatsoever.  Dash walked across the terminal to Dunkin Donuts and bought a large coffee.  Sipping it, he joined the circle of derelicts who were sullenly watching the empty escalators.  He shrugged, and looked around.  Another janitor was using a loud machine to wax or polish the floors.  Whichever.  Dash looked around, frowning as he tried to remember which one of the homeless folk was missing.

He had it.

The old Hispanic woman.  Dash had fallen asleep wishing ill on her and hers, trying not to watch her unashamedly noisy consumption of a chocolate ice cream pop.  Messy, half melted, and so loud Dash assumed she was trying. 

She’d fallen asleep halfway through, and dropped the mess onto the floor.  Dash’s last thoughts before sleep took him as well were profanities about her snoring.  And now she was dead.

Dash sank to the ground with his backpack against a brushed steel column and sipped at his coffee.  With a sudden clatter, the anachronistic timetable began to flip its cards.  A conductor's voice announced that his train was boarding.  Dash stood again with a muted groan and found the right stairs down.

The sun was rising by the time the train left the tunnel in Queens, and Dash gave up on hopes of sleep.  Instead, he pulled an oversized pair of headphones over his ears and concentrated on the lyrics.  They Might be Giants.  See the Constellation, off Apollo 18.  Dash had just discovered the band.  Nick might make fun of him for teenage angst, but Dash knew that deep down, Nick still believed in rock.  And Dash?  No question there; Dash had never doubted.

He got off the train at his station and waited for it to pull away before walking down the empty platform and crossing the tracks.  Across the street, he bought another cup of coffee from 7-11, then walked up the hill to sit with his back to a street sign and wait for the other kids to show up to the bus stop.  It was only a ten minute wait before they arrived.

Having slept among strangers on the floor of Penn Station, and having ridden a nearly empty train home, Dashiell couldn't quite understand how it was that he felt even more alone now that there were people around.   Last night he'd gone into the city to see Mitch at NYU.  Ever since Mitch graduated, there'd been no one left on Long Island worth talking to.  Dash was able to be social in the NYU dorms.  They all smoked pot, they watched Rocky Horror, and Dash knew what to say and when.  But then at one Dash left to catch his train but he missed it so he ended up wandering around midtown watching people for a while, and falling asleep on the floor of the waiting room again.  He'd done this all before.  And, just like the other times, the loneliest he felt was here, watching his peers share a cigarette and gossip as they waited for the bus.  Dashiell lit his own cigarette where he sat and tried on a scowl.

School was the same as it had been the day before.  No homework done, no conversations.  He didn't have a lunch period.  Instead, he got out of school during tenth period, took the early bus home, and keyed into the split level ranch that the insurance had left his mom.  She was, astonishingly, home.

"Dashiell, have you seen mommy's keys?"

Dash surveyed the scenery, noted the various jackets and scarves strewn over the Laura Ashley furniture, and intuited that his mom had a date tonight.  "By the door." 

He went to the fridge and pulled last night's dinner out, stripped the tinfoil off and replaced it with saran wrap and left it to spin in the microwave.  A second later, he opened the microwave again and spun the plate.  At a minute and a half, he wanted the mashed potatoes facing the other way.  Experience taught that the food spun evenly every minute, and he didn't want to repeat the experience of thumbing a mass of irradiated potatoes.  Superheroes had been born from lesser mistakes.

His mother bustled in, opened the cabinets and rummaged for aspirin.  Dry swallowing them, she waved at him with her fingertips.  "Thanks for being so quiet this morning.  Mommy has a little hangover."

Dashiell nodded and watched his food spin behind the clouded plastic face.   His mother left.  The bell rang.  He took the plate up the carpeted stairs and into the converted attic.  He set it down on top of a pile of dirty dishes.  He took off his backpack.  He walked to the far wall and sank to the corner of the floor, with his arms crossed over his knees.  He rested his forehead in the crook of his arms and tried very hard not to cry.

 

August 18th, 12AM:

Dashiell was smoking a clove and leaning against the fences that guarded the arch at Washington Square Park, watching the traffic down Fifth Avenue split and flow around the obstacle. 

 

August 18th, 10PM

Nick was behind the wheel.  Dash had called shotgun, and Marc was stretched out along the backseat, his head leaning backwards out the open window.  Everyone was smiling.  It was a Jack Kerouac night, with the air so sweet you could taste summer, the stars draped low from the sky, and the only thing that mattered was that they were young, they had a car, and they were driving fast.  There was a gold hammer and sickle painted on the corner of the car's roof.  Thankfully, the doors worked.

“Nick?"  The wind failed to entirely erase Marc's voice from the back seat.   "How fast are we going?"

"One twenty."  Nick paused, then nodded in agreement.  "Yeah, you're right.  Here, Dash - get a bottle of robutussin from the glove compartment."

Marc thought about this for a moment, but beyond massaging the bridge of his nose, did nothing.

"Take the wheel."  Nick unscrewed the bottle cap and upended the bottle, swallowing the viscous medicine in one draught.  Dashiell seemed nonplussed. 

Marc sighed.  "Fine, fuckers.  I'll bite.  Why do we want Nick robotripping?"

Nick looked over his shoulder and grinned.  "C'mon, Marc.  You ran this scam before I did.  Dashiell, tell Marc who owns the highways?"

Dash nodded and propped his feet up on the dashboard, the better to cross his elbows over. 

"The highways," he began, "are inhabited by the rusting gods of the new Aztec pantheon.  Velocity is fueled by carnage, and the chrome fangs of their grilled smiles are always hungry."  Dash was reciting this phrase as though he had memorized it.  Marc thought it sounded vaguely familiar, so he pulled his head back inside the car to listen.

"Our intermediary with the Nuevaztlani speaks through the radio.  Wolfman Jack. The Wolfman once broadcast illegally from Mexico, before the airwaves were bought, and had cranked the megahertz so high he still echoes around the stratosphere.  Kids up past curfew in Peoria can still tune in if they try hard enough.  But he's harder and harder to get through to, so we use Lester as a go-to."

Marc sat up, leaning into the front seat.  "Fucking Lester Fucking Bangs?  We're using Lester Bangs?  Are you for real?"

Nick's head whipped around and he fixed Marc with an angry glare.  Marc winced and nodded.  Nick's left forearms still bore scarred writing.  Back in his rock days, he'd been asked that question.  Was he for real?  And his answer was to take a razor to his arm and carve 4 REAL so deeply that wedges of flesh were still missing and he'd had to end the interview and be taken to a hospital.  Marc regretted bringing it up. "Oh.  Right.  My bad.  So, uh - Lester Bangs?"

Nick nodded emphatically, trying not to giggle.  "Yeah.  The dextromethorphan's all Lester.  See, Lester, when he's a kid, he gets this acid, right? And he can't decide if he wants to eat the acid or just drink cough syrup.  So he casts the I Ching, asks what's gonna happen if he eats Acid.  It says confusion.  And he asks about the robutussin, and it says..."

"Enlightenment."  Marc nodded.  "So you're robotripping to get Lester on our side."  He sank back into the faux leather upholstery and shook his head.  "Better change the music."

Nick pounded the heel of his hand into the steering wheel and laughed.  "Dashiell!  Some stooges, if you please!" 

And Dash, grinning along, pulled his feet under himself, opened a sticker-covered laptop, and ran a cord from it to a cassette which he slipped into the stereo.  And suddenly, across the warm North Carolina night, Iggy wanted to be their dog. Like the man says, age cannot wither, nor custom stale him.

**

Stop in NYC - burn Mickey @ Times Square, get $$$ in a coke can.

**

They were at JFK long before they should have been.  Traffic bled around them.  The police didn't seem to register them.  The gas never ran out.  They drove at a steady one twenty all night, Marc would swear, and arrived before sunrise.

Marc let the car coast to a stop inside a hangar in the cargo area.  The gate had been left open, the hangar rusted and stained with disuse.  Inside, however, was a full sized 747.  Nick got out first, and walked back to open the trunk. 

Dashiell turned in his seat, looking worriedly to Marc.  "Hey, he didn't say... I... I don't have a passport."

"I don't think this is a passport kind of place, Dash."  Marc pushed Nick's seat forwards and stepped out to stretch.  "Wonder where we're going."

Nick answered by handing him a black suitcase.  "Amsterdam.  We need to find Ty-Ty."

Marc looked at the plane.  "Amerigo Airlines, huh?  Cute.  What'd they, pick this thing up for cheap on Canal St?"  He transferred the suitcase to his other hand.  "Nick, what are we looking for that we need Ty-Ty?"

"Same thing we're always looking for, Pinky.  Just don't know what it looks like anymore, and Ty-Ty's the only one who sees it."

Marc let this go, and walked towards the plane, pausing to wait for Dashiell and the rest of the luggage.  He left his suitcase with a red hat, and followed Nick up the stairs and onto the plane.  

            The in flight movie was A Clockwork Orange.  The stewardesses brought trays of tequila shots.  They couldn't open their window shades, due to some mumbled explanation involving regulated airspaces.  Dashiell got drunk quickly and loudly and passed out.  Nick stayed up, flirting with the Catalanian models across the aisle.  Marc downed two shots and closed his eyes.  Sleep would be welcome.

 

August 19th, 7PM

"Lost?  Why does this fail to surprise me?”

“Chill, kid.  We’ll be fine.  Look, this is Casablanca, right?  The luggage is en route to whatever they use as the flea market around here.  We’ll drop by Abdullah’s or whatever tomorrow, ask around, and buy it back.”

“Abdullah, huh?  Yeah, if you say so."  Dashiell shook his head and followed Nick into the nightclub.  Marc had stayed in the taxi, he was going to visit the grave of someone named Leentje.  Nick knew who she was, and asked Marc to buy a bottle of Stoli to pour over the headstone for him.  Dash didn't ask.  So this was Amsterdam.  It wasn't as cool as everyone said. 

            The bar was way too trendy, he decided on first glance.  Wrinkling his nostrils in distaste, Dashiell stepped carefully past a blonde girl dressed in white leopard fur trimmed leather and walking an actual leopard on a stout leash.  What kind of person wears the fur of their pet?  A moment’s concern for the cat’s fate later, he followed Nick, weaving an intricate path through the undulations of writhing dancers towards the conspicuously less well-lit tables in back.  Nick pointed to a table behind a Tibetan-embroidered curtain, and turned to squirm his way towards the bar. 

            Dashiell edged closer to the curtained booth, then pulled the cover aside and slid into a seat, finding himself staring into the two largest blue saucer-eyes he’d ever seen.  They blinked slowly, and he rubbed his eyes, fighting to break their gaze.  Like a Cheshire cat in reverse, she appeared from behind them, filling out the space between and around her stare. Early twenties, blonde, decked in black, and quite possibly the most stunningly attractive individual he’d ever laid eyes on.  Not so much beautiful as attractive - the way gravity attracts meteors and blue lights attract flies.  Stunningly the way impact or electrocution stuns.  This was not good.

            “Mnsr. l’americain?”

            “...”

            “Dashiell?”

            A nod.  He’d managed a nod.  Suddenly struck by the inanity of his behavior, he bowed his head with a rueful, blushing grin.  “Yeah.  Orthense?”

            “Mais oui, who else?  You are the new friend, eh?”  And then the orbs were fixed on him again.  He’d always felt uncomfortable as the target of stares; people who looked straight at him during conversation had a peculiar way, all their own, of making him nervous.  He blushed further with the insinuations of that comment, shaking his head no.

            “No, I mean... yes, but...”  That’s it, he thought, stammer.  Dazzle her with your Porky Pig impression.  Rico fucking Suave.  “I just met Marc a week ago.”

            She nodded, blond ringlets tumbling in waves with the motion.  Dashiell felt muscles tense, felt a palpable blow of pain knot in his gut.  He could taste his desire and loneliness, and would have, had he thought of it, sworn by his ability to count the atoms separating their lips in that moment.

            “A week?  That is not so very long, and already you follow them n’importe-ou?”   

            He raised a hand, hiding his eyes behind his palm as he pinched the bridge of his nose.  Cigarette.  A cigarette will help.  Fumbling awkwardly through his pockets, he shrugged to her, deliberately keeping his gaze on the table. 

            “He worked for Vic Verurteilt... with Nick.  I... You know.  I don't know.  I don’t have a choice.”

            Avoid her eyes, Dashiell.  Just don’t look into them.  She’s a basilisk.  A siren.  A whole lot of fucking trouble.  Eyes locked on the burning tip of his cigarette, Dashiell never noticed the hand’s approach, and flinched back as, chuckling, the girl reached out to pat him on the back of his.

            “One has always a choice.”

            A shrug, a nod, as if the rolling of his shoulders could wriggle the lingering tingles of the touch off of his skin as a duck shaking water from its feathers.  Opening his mouth to speak, regardless of the absolute absence of any thought that might even share a zip code with rationality within his skull, Dashiell finished by blinking and breaking a broad grin.  Nick had returned, with drinks.

            “Orthense!  Hey, honey.  What’s the haps?”  Sweeping in with a cocky grin, Victor Verurteilt 's apprentice leaned in to plant a peck on each of her turned cheeks, set drinks on table, and hurled himself into a seat.  “I see you’ve met Dashiell.  He’s a good kid.  You back down now, hmm?”

            A throaty chuckle from the girl, a nonchalant shrug, and she leaned back to light her own cigarette.  Black-papered and gold-filtered.  Dashiell figured it for a custom brand. 

            “Dashiell, Orthense here is a friend.  Aren’t you, Orthense?”

            She looked away, and as her eyes wandered lazily over the curtain, Dashiell felt his cognition returning.  “So, like... Nick.  What’s the story?  You find Abdullah?”

            A laugh from the girl, as she turned to favor Nick with her stare.  Nick, unsurprisingly, seemed unaffected.   “Abdullah?  Have the little birds lost their nests?” 

            Nick flashed a momentary glance of annoyance towards Dashiell.  “It’s nothing.  Minor detail.  Look, we’re here to talk to Ty-Ty.  You know where he’s at tonight?”

            “Mais oui.  Of course I do.  He’s drugged into a stupor at the heart of some party full of people half his age.”

            Nick massaged the bridge of his nose, rolling a wrist at her.  “Right.  I knew that much.  You have anything more specific for us to go on?”

            “Well, Mister James.  Because I like you and your little friend so much, yes.  I happen to know where he is holding court tomorrow night.  I might even be persuaded to point you in the direction of a young man looking to unload invitations.”

            Dashiell’s outburst of relief was preempted by a sharp step on his foot.  Hiding the aborted speech behind a cough, he turned to watch Nick slowly nod.  “Right.  And payment?”

            “Coin of the realm, cherie.  Gossip.  Secrets.  Stories.”  She let her cigarette fall into the last of the champagne, and steepled her fingertips, looking at Nick.  With a slow and sure grin, Nick nodded, leaning back in his chair and spreading his hands. 

            “Not a problem.  You ask, I’ll answer.  Anything under the stars.”  His smile and posture invited a return from her.  And, huntress closing in on the prey, she complied.  She leaned over the table, pursing her lips, then aimed two slender fingers at Dashiell.

            “Him.  What is his secret?  What brings him here, in the company of the hunters, seeking an audience with the old man?”  She sniffed, turning her gaze from Dashiell to Nick.  “Why is he a pilgrim?”

**

(Orthense is a man.  Dash gets drunk. They wake up and get stoned.  They sing Moon River.  Nick comes back with luggage.)

 

August 19th, 11PM

Nick tracked down the kid with the invites.  Marc never found out what he traded for them.  But, just after sunset, Marc found himself walking into yet another party.  Dash thought it looked a lot like the one from the night before, but Nick disagreed.  Only difference Dash saw was that Marc was here for this one, and that he, Dash, had dressed for this one.  He'd somewhere acquired a leather trench coat.  He thought it made him look like a rock star or an assassin.  Marc thought it made him look like a highlander fan, but didn't comment. 

The party was in a warehouse.  The location, combined with the large bouncers and the red velvet rope, disoriented Marc for a moment.  They could have been anywhere.  New York, Paris, New Orleans... Marc felt himself losing track, felt the world turning into one continuing warehouse district, with only the local variety of signless bar to distinguish city from city.  He sighed.  Nick offered the tickets over, and Marc and Dashiell followed him in.  This dutifully following thing was getting to be a habit.

The same crowd from last night was inside. It was obvious who Ty –Ty was long before they met him.  He hadn't aged since Marc had seen him last.  He was, however, three times as old as the rest of the party, at least.  Shocks of white hair fell from under a pith helmet.  Custom glasses, a red circular lens over the left eye and a green rectangle over the right, had slid down his aquiline nose.  A stained safari shirt was untucked over ragged jeans and his sandals, the rumor went, were hand-me-downs from Moses.   He was napping on a high backed wooden chair on a raised dais, with velvet ropes keeping the crowds at bay.  Getting to him was always an exercise in diplomacy.  Pressed up by the swell of the crowd against the ropes, Marc waved one of the two bored looking ravers sitting on the edge of the dais over.

"'scuse me!  Hey, what up?  Need the word from Ty-Ty."

"He's busy."

Marc appraised the youth's outfit.  It seemed standard raver fare, bleached hair, a washed out complexion, a glittering Lycra shirt and baggy UFO pants.    "I'm an old friend," Marc said.

"Come back tomorrow.  He's busy."  The bleach job's bored expression never wavered.

Marc opened his mouth to supplicate further when the old man called over,  "Hey! Gunga Din!"

The raver turned back.  "Yeah?  I mean, Yes, Sahib?"

Marc looked down to hide his laugh.  So Ty-Ty was still on his white man's burden kick.  This should be fun.  Dashiell tapped Marc's elbow, looking skeptical.  Marc shook his head and patted a hand at the air.  "Just watch," he whispered.

"My native guides didn't trust the newcomers.  White skin was still foreign to them, and their primitive superstitions forbade them from letting outsiders into their village."  The muttered narration was Ty-Ty's trademark.  Thankfully, he wasn't invited to many poker games.  "Gunga Din!  This is friend.  You let them in."

The raver, sullenly playing the part of the loyal native, shrugged and unclipped the rope and the three of them climbed the dais to stand in front of the old explorer.

"Bloody savages.  Spend all their time peacocking around.  No higher intellect, you understand?  I fear for when civilization reaches these parts.  Though... they make good guides.  Loyal and hardworking, as long as you keep your eye on them.  Don't turn your back, though- they look harmless enough, but if you're not careful they'll leave you in the jungle fr the snakes and the ants.  This one time, I was-"

"Ty-Ty.  It's me."  Marc crouched beside the chair, ignoring the glares from the babysitters.  "Listen.  You know what we're looking for.  We need directions.  What's it look like?"

The old man pushed his glasses up his nose and fixed Marc squarely in his bizarre, two-tone stare.  "Three years and no word, and now this?  You haven't learned a thing.  Look here, Marc, or whatever you're calling yourself now.  Do you know why seers are blind?"

Marc recoiled from the force of the sudden focus, then shook his head no.  Dashiell, beside him, offered, "So they're not distracted?"

"Poppycock.  Rubbish."  Ty-Ty snorted.  "It's Heisenberg.  Always has been.  The more you know where a thing is, the less you know where it will be."

Marc nodded slowly and, with Nick's foot prodding him from behind, asked, "So... uh... where's it going to be?"

"Ask me what it's going to look like when you find it."

Marc sighed.  "What's it going to look like?"

" I don't know."  Ty-Ty's laugh was short lived, and gave way to a sigh of age and regret.  "I can't see it now. I'm... I'm out of tune with it."

Nick finally spoke.  "Ty-Ty.  I brought... I've got something that should help.  A microcosm of it.  Will you help?"

The old man looked at the crowd around him, at the three young men kneeling before him, at his native guides, and at the thronging dancers beyond, and nodded with a sigh of resignation.  "Yes."

It was at that moment that the Sisters of Mercy crept over the loudspeakers, covering Pink Floyd and asking if there was anyone inside.

Nick handed Marc a length of surgical tubing and stood in front of Ty-Ty, holding a syringe.  As Marc rolled the old man's sleeve up and tied the blood off, feeling for veins among the scars of decades of abuse, Nick spoke in a slow, incantational monotone. 

"The cure for the world's pain is the sangreal.  Morphine is the cure for pain.  When mixed with your blood, the morphine will transubstantiate and become the royal blood.  The syringe is the bleeding lance.  Your wounds will be anointed with the blood of Longinus's spear."

Marc nodded his readiness and Nick administered the shot.  All three stood back once Marc removed the needle and the rubber tubes.  The old man sagged limp in his chair.  The babysitters looked at each other in fear.  A hiss of breath escaped the skeletal form on the throne.  His creased lips began feebly to twitch, and then to bend in the motions of speech.  The static hiss warbled, a radio finding a signal, and oscillated about the signal, words blending into static and back again, signal trading places with noise.

"... Arthur went to Africa, people said he was running guns.  But running guns is just turning lead into gold.  He had found the alchemy of the word ... his youth, and now ... found something ..."  The hiss returned, reached its peak, and subsided bac into the through of language.  "...before he could make it.  Djami went to Paris ... his grief, and ... James.  James learned the recipe ...wrote it for safe keeping.  The whisky that woke Tim Finnegan ... mixed with the royal blood ..."  The static fought through again, as the three of them, leaned as close as they could to the trembling lips, clenched their jaws in frustration.  "... coded in the book he left.  The code is what you seek.  And its shape is the shape of thought, its sound the sound of speech."

And then Ty-Ty went limp again, a soft snore rolling away from him.  The three of them walked away and had just crossed the velvet rope when the old seer sat up suddenly and called after them, "Hey, kids!  Watch your six, the crypto's walking again."

Marc and Nick nodded without turning around, edging their way through the crowd.  Dashiell inhaled, but before he could ask, Marc answered.  "Cryptophage.  Eats secrets.  Bad dude."

"You know we traced him back to Bodie, Colorado?"  Nick asked.

"Figures.  Bad man out of Bodie.  Fucker'd have to be that old."  Marc's voice was tired and matched the droop of his shoulders.  "Where now?" 

Outside the warehouse, Nick offered cigarettes to Marc and Dash.  He frowned, and shook his head.  "Well... okay.  What do we know?"

Dashiell chimed in first.  "The recipe is in code."

Marc nodded, studying his cigarette.  "Yeah.  But I've read Finnegan's Wake.  If Joyce hid it in there, he hid it really well."

Nick grinned.  He seemed, as usual, to know where this was going.  "And the key to the code?"

"It's the shape of thought and the sound of speech."  Dashiell shook his head.  "What's that?"

"The sound of one hand clapping," Marc answered. 

"No.  It's the shape of thought.  Do you know what thought looks like, Marc?"

Marc shook his head, rolling his wrist and motioning for Nick to get on with it.

"But you know someone who does, don't you?"

Marc blinked.  He looked up, furrowing his brow and staring at Nick's features, then nodded slowly.  "Yeah.  Is she still living in the hell house?"

Nick nodded.  "Ayuh."

"When's the last time you talked to her?"

"Couple three years.  She and Jules and Matt were all living together when I left."

Dashiell, by this point, gave voice to his annoyance.  "Who is she?"

"Her name is Elodie."  Nick answered.

"She... she's an old friend."  Marc added.

"She lives in Paris," Nick said.  "In the 11th.  We'll take a train and be there by morning."  And he walked off, back towards the brothel with the luggage.  Marc, frowning at his shoes, trailed after and Dashiell hurried to keep up.

 

August 20th, 1 AM

Thalys took five hours to trace a trajectory from Amsterdam to Paris , by way of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels. On the train, Marc was watching his reflection in the window, and wondering where they all were headed.  Dashiell took his headphones off and paused his game of Quake to ask Nick, "So... this Elodie chick.  What's her deal?"

"She's an old friend of Marc's.  One of us.  Used to live with Matt.  Haven't heard from her since Matt got nabbed down in Juarez."

"How'd you meet her?"

"Through Marc."

"Marc?"

Marc didn't turn from the window.  "It's a long story, Dash."

Dashiell's urgent silence seemed to speak volumes on their current state of transit, stuck together in a train car with nothing else to do.

"Fine.  So, me and Matt and I were out, looking for drugs.  We're crossing Washington Quare, when we hear this chick.  Foreign and speaking English and she's mentioning not just Eleanor’s and Tropicana, which everybody knows anyway, right?  But Bag in a Bag, Little Prince and Raw Dog.  She's talking about all the Bodegas and all the brands of heroin in the East Village.  And we walk over, and we realize she's a fucking tour guide."

Marc, staring away still, smiled and nodded without turning his head.  "Yeah.  Elodie was cute, and Georgian, and there's a whole gaggle of giggling Swedish girls with her.  So, eternal gentlemen that we were, me and Nick trailed north after them, and tried our best to blend.  We pointed and oohied, stared up an awful lot, you know.  Acted like tourists. It's kind of fun being a tourist in your own town.  I recommend it."

Marc laughed.  "Yeah, that was fun.  She made us, of course, for ringers.  It probably either had to do with the fact that the Smoke-Smokes left us alone, or with the fact that we didn't have cameras.  She didn’t seem to want to interrupt the tour, though, so she just gives us these dirty looks, and we all go down Saint Marks.  We wait while the group photographs drag queen waitresses, and squatter punks, and all the rest.  Next thing you know, we're on Avenue D in the middle of the day, copping with three dozen tourists."  Marc nodded solemnly, turning to grin at Nick.  "Christ.  Cool as we thought we were, man.  Elodie’s balls put us both to shame."

Nick frowned with a shrug and Marc continued.  "So, yeah - there we are and Elodie's taking the kids to cop.   I recognized the cat at the door.  Kid Sinister, crazy little gang banger, with silver-capped teeth and custom long fangs." 

"Cameras are flashing and clicking and, two by two, the tourists stepped forwards and paid, like, quadruple price for real, meaningful souvenirs of New York.  Not the kind of statue of liberty shit you can find in every airport from Topeka to Minsk."

Marc leaned forwards, grinning.  "Elodie, meanwhile, took this opportunity to approach us. “It is obvious you are not from the flicks," she says,  "Must you really incrust on our purchasing?”  She talked like that.  Swear to god, I still remember.  It's 'cause she'd been living in Paris."

"But Matt never spoke french, and he's just dumbfounded.  Latin and Greek the boy gets, but parlays francays or spreackensees doytsh, and he’s lost.  Ah, well, I says to myself.  He’ll just have to settle for a second-prize Swede.  So I turn to her and I say, “I love this tour."  It’s always good to open with a complement.  You know.  Nice shoes, wanna fuck?  So I ask, “Do you cover other cities?”

            “You cannot be here." She said.  "Break yourself, or I shall summon the Child Sinister, or worse.”  Now, you gotta understand.  French transliteration into English has never failed to weaken my knees.  So I make like I'm agreeing, and Marc's elbowing me in the ribs, so it comes out all, “We won’t leave... without your phone number.” 

Marc pitched his voice into a falsetto French accent and quoted, “I don’t have a phone.  I’m living at the Socapido.  You know it, yes?”

"Socapido.  Ssocapidoo.  Ssocapi Deux.  Picasso two."  Marc nodded as he reeled off the transformations.  "The French, who still use fucking Pig Latin as barrio slang, they love this shit.  So, the Ssocapi 's this art-squat in Paris, seven floors of painters and punk-rockers.  Named 'cause of its location - it's across from the entrance to the Picasso museum, in the Marais.  Right near where we're going."

"But anyway," Marc continued, "Given that the Ssocapi is a squat in Paris, what's an annex doing in New York, and where is it?"

"It took twenty seconds," Marc said,  "for this to go through my mind.  Then I go, “Bien sure que yeah, I know it.” And she says, “My name is Elodie.  Meet me at five, and you may buy me dinner.  Now go.”

"And so we went.  Back west up Charlie Parker, we looked for our shaman.  Mysterious Parisian art squat somewhere in Manhattan?  Two hours to find it?  Preston, of course, was the answer we were looking for."

Nick grinned as Marc continued.  "Preston the prestidigitator, that's what he called himself, and he was the infallible guide to anything and everything from Wall St. to 10th.  We found him on the grass at Tompkin’s Square Park.  Middle of December, everyone else is in peacoats and scarves, and Preston’s got his shirt unbuttoned past his nipples.  Typical.  Leather pants, a blousy white shirt, and an acoustic guitar.  He looked more Algerian than Androgynous those days.  He was holding court over a tattered blanket, two young NYU kids watching the joint he was waving.  Preston, he tells us Ssocapido's the newest spot.  Kent St. in Williamsburg, near where that speakeasy used to be, that sold the coke."

            "Kokie's Place."  Nick interjected.

            "Right.  So we stand, we shake hands with Preston, bum him out one last Camel Light, and we walk off to find a bathroom."  Marc looked up at Nick.  "You ever see him again?"

Nick shook his head no.  "Nobody did.  None of us ever saw Preston after that day."

Dashiell waited for a few seconds, then frowned when it seemed the story was over.  "Wait.  What then?"

"Then?  Then the usual things happened.  Dinner, drinks, went to her place, fooled around... normal stuff."  Marc shrugged, grinned after a squint at Dashiell.  "Well, normal to some of us anyway."

Marc sighed.  "No, seriously," he said, "we went out for dinner, we went to a party - Elodie knew Ty-Ty, she's the one who introduced us.  Elodie and I ducked out early, and Nick..."

"I stayed at the party, ended up at this rooftop barbeque brunch in Long Island City.  It's where I met what's her name."

"The children's book one?"  Marc blinked with the effort of recollection.

Nick shook his head no.  "No.  She was before, back when we were going to those Brooklyn parties."

"Rubulad."

"Yeah, those.  No, the one on the rooftop was the sculptor."

"Oh.  Right, yeah.  I liked her.  What happened, again?"

"I don't know.  Same thing that always happens.  Whatever."

"Anyway.  So, in the morning, I'm in Elodie's bed, and she just rolls over - we're on a mattress on the floor - and she opens up this laptop and starts typing.  Says she needs to reset encryption schemes for her research.  She was trying to map the web, figue out what kind of space it existed in."

Dashiell nodded slowly, trying to picture this.  His fingers traced links in the air as his lips, unconsciously, spelled out HTML tags.

"Hyperbolic," Nick said.  "She was constructing an n-dimensional hyperbolic manifold, to demonstrate the geometry of the world wide web."

 

August 20th, 5AM

Rue de la Forge Royale was a short, narrow road with no real sidewalks to speak of.  Rounding the corner off the Boulevard St. Antoine, the three of them were walking in the middle of the street.  A picnic table, empty under a leafless tree, marked a small indentation in the buildings that lined the street.  There, someone had spray painted the eminently stencilable face of Che, in a three color scheme surrounded by graffiti.  Nick and Marc, in perfect unison, dropped their luggage in front of the table and stared down the block.  The beautiful old building affectionately called the hell house still stood.  But now its ground floor was a twenty  four hour pharmacist, gaudy in the fluorescence of the green neon cross out front.

Dash, headphone wire trailing out from under the hood of his sweatshirt, paused beside them and waited for their advance.  Nick was the first to gesture at the apartment across the street and force a wan smile, pointing to the flickering blue light radiating from inside.

"Well, at least porn guy hasn't changed."

Marc frowned and nodded, then followed Nick's lead when he lifted his bag and walked towards the north.  Outside number fifteen, which had been a door and was now the pharmacy between thirteen and seventeen, the three Americans craned their necks to stare up at the third floor.  The coming dawn was just illuminating the tops of the buildings.  It was still night where they stood.  A young intern in a white coat opened the pharmacy door and gestured to the back.  Nick shrugged and went first.  The intern opened the door to the stockroom without a word.  Marc didn't bother wondering at this, concentrating himself on his old complaint about the lack of take out coffee in a city famous for it.