Not even a speck on the map, a smudge. A velvet freight car rolling six miles west of some god awful freak show. I could hear whistles, birds and trains and maybe one of those supersonic jets that plague the Nevada desert. It’s hard to believe that there is a place without a ghost in this country. I had graduated from marijuana (what we called “smoke” or “grass” or “doobage” or even “silk”) to cocaine (“weight”) to crystal meth (“glass”) and finally to glint. Glint didn’t have any other names and I don’t know its medical classification. You rub it on your gums and within minutes you are above your own body, watching your clumsy form smash a lamp here, overturn a coat rack there.

Ice age is coming from the east coast. The birds dig themselves underground and the grass squeaks at you when you step on it.

So I had, somehow, been given some sort of secret box that could only be opened with the right key. My memory of receiving this box is lost in some kind of glint fantasy, outrunning the law on a straightaway blast towards California. Like a bullet leaves a gun. It might have all been a dream because my next memory is that I’m in this abandoned tenement building with holes in the walls, holes in the floor, separate holes in the ceiling, probably places where there was copper wire and it had been pulled out in a salvaging operation. Maybe Tin Tin did it.

I’m in the building, running up the stairs. I don’t take the elevator because it creaks and rumbles if you toss a baseball in it. There’s someone with me and I think it’s a girl, maybe the girl, but she stays just out of my vision and no matter how fast I turn my head, she’s just out of view. I’m throwing the baseball up the stairwell and rushing to catch it as it bounces from stairs to ceiling, hoping it won’t make it out the window. It’s pointless anyway, the baseball goes right through those stairs like butter. It always ends up one floor below me.

So I’m going up and down these stairs, chasing the baseball. But there are snakes. There is a whole pile of snakes that moves faster than the girl, they get right behind me and inside me and I begin to lose control of my arms. I feel them in my blood, hissing and twisting there like a rotten tooth when you’re eating steak. The adults had a name for me when I was a kid. They would whisper it behind their hands and then stare at me.

The ball finally gets to the bottom floor and this time it doesn’t punch a hole through the stairs. It bounces off and rolls into the lobby of the building, past some kind of angry painting that is urging me to do horrible things to myself and to the girl. I can almost hear her voice back there, I can almost see her pale skin. Her hair cut into that perfect style, the kind that lays just right on the head. I say aloud, “I tried to leave this all on your machine,” and I feel something land softly on my shoulder. It could be her or it could be a snake. Either way, I brush it off and go after the baseball. Nothing more ridiculous than a grown man chasing a baseball in an abandoned building that has evil intentions.

But then the baseball changes. It turns into a bird, a black bird, a crow. It flies straight into a wall and then straight up to the ceiling and it continues like this, bouncing from one boarded spot to another. It never touches the ground but I can’t catch it. I don’t even want to catch it but I feel I have to. I have to see if it leads somewhere, this crow.

I’m trying to bargain something here, I realize that. I know that I’m talking nonsense because it was probably just a dream. But maybe if you had been there. If you had seen the way this bird could just hop from wall to ceiling, fluttering wings, completely mute, and never touch the ground. I could feel those eyes on me. I could sense some kind of massive conspiracy working against me and all I could do was chase this bird. Up the stairs we went, my legs having an uncanny knack for landing in the holes. I was constantly stopped short, thrown a curve. I’d crash down through the stairs just a bit, up to my knee, and sometimes I’d bite my tongue. That taste of blood in my mouth, like sucking on copper. You can put a penny in your mouth and it’s the same thing.

I had some vague desire to turn up at the cop’s house and kill his family. I had some notion that I could gut his whole family in front of him before he could even pull out his gun. He had his head shaved in just such a way to inspire instant hatred. He scowled when he lit a match. He could turn milk bad just by walking past it. He was probably too proud to ever be dirty.

We had been out challenging trains. That’s what we called it. We’d play chicken with the train, but without cars. We’d just wait until it was bearing down on us and see who could hold on the longest. Tin Tin had even been hit once. He jumped out of the way just a split second too late and the train clipped his ankle as he was in the air. He spun end over end before landing in a ditch stuffed with ugly rocks. He blamed the alcohol but we all knew the truth. He cheated death just to hold it over our heads. That he had the nerve to do something that stupid while we made a leap when the train was a dozen feet away. I don’t think any of us ever forgave him for surviving that night.

We had a lot of glint, we smoked some doobage, we drank cheap wine. God, it was great. If it hadn’t been for Blake’s reward money, we never would have found the place. We could have followed those train tracks all the way across the county but we never would have recognized the place. It had that enchanted air to it. When you lay down in a certain way, you could see how the branches of the trees held up the sky. For a time, it seemed like the one place in the country that didn’t have a ghost. It rolled back from a swamp but it was clear in this one spot. It always smelled like babies.

I had gone around the back of the house to get in. There was a broken mirror on the door, we’d broken it to do cocaine off of. It was just a sliver of glass and if you held it wrong, you’d come away with a bloody hand. We always wanted to mix the blood with the weight because someone told Tin Tin that this was part of a ritual. Tin Tin had become the leader of the gang by eliminating all potential rivals. So we followed him like you’d follow anyone that’s in charge. Something about his face put me in mind of freighter ships on Lake Michigan.

That mirror seemed to be all the house revolved around in those months. A 1/8^th mirror and we’d see bits of ourselves, just dashes of our reflection. It was the closest thing to heaven in those days. The things you add onto yourself as you get older, the way you hold your cigarette while you smoke. We’d watch out the window. Nuns running up and down the avenue (some kind of community outreach program was on the same block) and the kids that would dash into the street, trying to retrieve a foul ball. That was the genesis for our idea to challenge the trains. That and Blake’s reward money.

But to really understand what was happening, you have to realize that maybe people aren’t good or bad. Sure, we were uneducated criminals. If you laid a dollar down for your drink and then walked to the bathroom, we’d have taken it before you got back. If you left your car’s window down, you’d be missing your tape player if we walked past. But maybe that’s not a bad thing? It’s hard to say exactly how you can run off-course. Maybe it’s the headwinds, or it could be the tide, some kind of imbalance in the weight of the ship, I just don’t know.

But, on the other hand, if you had an emergency and needed someone to watch your kid, we were right there for you. We wouldn’t dope his formula so he’d sleep it off. We’d put tape over the outlets so he wouldn’t get shocked. Someone would be there making cooing noises and playing peek-a-boo.

I had come in through the back door and I tripped over a wire. Someone had booby-trapped the back entrance. I pictured a bowl of tarantulas being overturned above my head and braced myself for the attack but nothing happened. I didn’t hear anything so I called out, “Who’s the wiseass that booby-trapped the porch?”

Gravy was leaning against the wall in the hall between the kitchen and the living room and he just pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started packing it against his hand. Jerry Brownshoes entered the kitchen, scraping past Gravy, and stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at me.

“I said who’s the wiseass,” I said, getting nervous. I thought maybe I’d walked into the wrong house by mistake and these people just looked like my friends. And then I had the troubling thought that I could so easily mistake strangers for my friends or that, even more sinister, my friends were common enough for me to mistake them so easily.

“Tin Tin’s not feeling so good,” Jerry Brownshoes said.

“Yeah?” I mumbled, standing up.

“Somebody stabbed him.”

I walked past Gravy into the living room and found Alison and Betty and Sally sitting on two sofas. Nial was at the desk, cleaning out the barrel of an antique musket. Tin Tin sat in a chair, sweating. He had a hand clamped securely over his left collarbone.

“Somebody stabbed Tin Tin?” I asked the room.

Gravy pushed passed me and sat on the arm of Tin Tin’s chair. “Here,” he said, offering a handful of pills. Some of them were very large. Tin Tin saw this clearly.

“How am I supposed to swallow those?” he demanded.

“For the pain,” Gravy explained.

“I said how, not why.”

“Should we take him to a doctor?” I asked the room.

Alison laughed and said, “Good idea.” Then everyone laughed. I felt ashamed.

For a year I went to therapy because I was doing bad in school and got into a few fights that weren’t really my fault. And I lost every fight I was in, I thought that counted for something. And my mom would smack me on the back of the head and say, “Good idea,” every time I suggested that the house be cleaned up or the rent get paid. She said it like I was a complete idiot and Alison said it the exact same way. I didn’t like feeling like I was 13 years old again, especially not in front of my friends.

“Oh, we tried to take him,” Nial said. “But the chair.”

“Right,” I said. “The chair.”

Jerry Brownshoes snuck up behind me and gave me a playful kick to the back of the knees and I fell down again.

“We should have rigged that sledgehammer,” Gravy said, turning to Jerry Brownshoes.

“But people don’t know,” Jerry said. “You can’t spring a thing like that on people without telling them.”

“Yeah,” Gravy agreed, “but if we told them.” Then he turned back to Tin Tin and said, “I can get you water for the pills if you want.”

“I couldn’t swallow those even with water,” Tin Tin said and that ended the discussion.

“Hey, come on, hey,” I said. “I’ll take you to a doctor. I know a doctor.”

Alison laughed again and said, “I’ll bet he’s got a great writing arm.” And then she laughed so hard she fell off the couch.

Betty looked from her to me and tried to explain, “Alison has stopped taking her medication and is now living the clean life.”

“Balls,” Nial said. “This damn barrel is warped.”

“You’re not gonna shoot it, baby,” Sally said. “You just need to point it at them.”

Nial held the barrel up to the ceiling and looked up through it and said, “Yeah, but if I do have to shoot it, the thing could go sideways and take out one of you.”

“It can’t be that bent,” Sally said and stood up to look at it.

Nial turned on her viciously and said, “Don’t touch it! I’m doing my best to make sure there are no fingerprints on here!”

I said to Tin Tin, “Hey, man, do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

Tin Tin considered and then said, “What about your tires?”

I looked down and said quickly, “It’s not raining. That’s all that matters.”

“Leave him,” Nial interrupted. “He’s gotta stay there because of the chair.”

“What is this?” I asked Jerry Brownshoes. “Why does he keep saying the chair?”

“There’s a spring poking through and I think it got him in the liver. If we pull it out without medical help…”

Alison giggles wildly and says, “Jerry Gray’s Anatomy!”

“I’m sorry for her,” Betty said. “She’s out of medication. She’s stopped taking it altogether.”

“This is too weird,” I said and went back into the kitchen. Gravy followed me in there and he whispers to me, “We’re going to get the guys that did it. Could you stay with Tin Tin?”
“I think he needs a doctor,” I tell him. “He’s bleeding all over the place.”

“We can call the fire department to come cut him out of the chair after we get back. But we have to leave soon or else these guys are going to get away.”

I promised to stay with Tin Tin but I planned on leaving right after they left. The thought of sitting with a bleeding Tin Tin all night, on All Saints Day no less, was just too much for me. I went digging for the mirror but somebody had stolen it. Finally, I stood up and said, “Well, Tin Tin…”

“It was an accident,” Tin Tin blurted out.

“What was an accident? The chair or what?” I replied, making my way towards the door.

“You ever see things that aren’t there?” he said, glassy-eyed.

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

Then he stood up and walked toward the television.

“You can move,” I said, literally shocked.

“Of course I can move,” he said. “Not a damn cripple.”

“They said the chair-“

“I told them the thing with the chair. I just didn’t want to go back there with them.”

I studied him for a minute and then said, “Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

He considered and then answered, “Not unless I get really bad.”

“What’s really bad? How do I judge?”

“You know,” he said, “talking in tongues or something. Or if I pass out.”

“What if you just…you know…die?”

He’s crossed to the window and he turns around and says, “I think they’re stealing your car.”

Saw something strange in a store window. Can’t explain what it was, and maybe this was another glint dream, but to the best of my knowledge it was an overweight shopkeeper scraping out the veins of a bulimic model. Her legs were splayed enticingly but her face was a mask of pain. I saw that window every day for maybe two weeks, getting more and more perplexed each time. I thought maybe I could find a way out of this daily existence, this semaphore life of inaction. I dreamed of that model, the bulimic cheeks turned sallow and pale. I saw her hitching up her skirt, lifting a leg gracefully over a leather chair, always a leather chair. I could see the slip she wore slowly sliding off those rounded shoulders, all bone and muscle.

And then maybe the dream changes and she’s my ex, as though I’d ever be lucky enough to have an ex like this. She was the kind of woman you never get over, they become your downfall. But I had a girlfriend, I had a number of ex-lovers. I knew the intricate run of the bones that make up the hips. I had a crystal-clear recollection of the taste of champagne swallowed from that little dip in the nape of the neck, right where it meets that forgiving collarbone.

So in this dream, after it has changed and the model and I have had a torrid affair, I find myself leaving a picture of myself outside her door. I’m burning white candles. I’m shouting her name into the wind as it rains down upon me. I’m chasing some ghost so real I can actually put my arms around it. I write her name on a slip of paper (Kate, always Kate) and I burn it in a bowl. I am anxious about the strength of the fire. I know my passion could inflame the whole kitchen. So I quickly light the slip of paper and then run for the sink, turning on the tap and grabbing the spray nozzle. Whether this is to prevent a fire or to protect myself should this ritual make Kate instantly appear, that is for a greater power than I to decide. But I do not feel comfortable until I have that spray nozzle in my hand.

Then we’re at a cocktail party. The evil shopkeeper is there, he’s always dressed as some kind of demented Santa Claus, the clothing seeming almost like maternity-wear on his stocky frame. I loathe this man instantly, even before he’s opened his mouth. But he takes things to a whole new level. He stalks my beautiful Kate, he hounds her relentlessly through five rooms of this wretched party where meat is served in raw slabs. The people are dressed in their finest but each wears some kind of prosthetic face so that the only thing real are the eyes. Even the teeth are stowaways, they’ve been ripped out (no doubt by that evil shopkeeper) and replaced with some sort of impossible ivory reproduction. These teeth send out secret signals in their clatter and I soon lose track of the party. These could be a flock of flamingoes.

I am lagging behind Kate as she eludes the shopkeeper. His suit is growing an angry red, changing color to match his temperament. I dreaded some kind of projectile weapon. I could just picture him removing a fine, lead powder pistol and slowing to load it and shooting my dearest right there in the crowd of flamingoes. I could see the red spread out like a blanket pulled from a pocket, an opera practiced from time long forgotten. I saw this all clearly in my mind and rated the threat as very real, yet I felt almost prevented from quickening my pace to catch either of them. I was constantly being stopped by the dead-eyed party attendees, congratulated on my tuxedo, patted on the back about some business deal I had succeeded in. I wanted to punch them, I wanted to rush right over them but I feared this would cause a stampede. I was as polite as my inner demons would allow me to be, fearing some sort of vicious reprisal from these paper dolls.

And then I finally overtake the shopkeeper and I join my beloved. I spread her skirt behind her, some vague notion that I can give her wings to fly away. I see her reflection in a shattered mirror, I see her cut into a million little pieces, none of them adding up to a whole. I touch her regal skin, I feel the velvet and the pulse beneath it and then the hand falls on my shoulder. The shopkeeper has captured us, he has taken us prisoner. But he releases Kate, he gives her away entirely. I see the cuts on her forearms, I see her dripping nose. I see the shadow of an old person waiting to enter her body, biding time until it becomes her. I see her walk away awkwardly, looking back in terror. I see it and I turn back. I give up the chase and surrender. I prepare for him to scrape my veins out.

But when I look in his eyes, I only see myself. He has no personality, he is not real, no more than the others at the party. I see myself, I see a reflection of something I’ve been missing my whole life. I see a hook protruding from my chest and when you turn it, my blood will pump in the other direction. I see the question mark shadows, I see the caged bird’s lonesome song. I look up to avoid seeing myself but now I’m above my body, now I’m looking down into my own eyes. The loop of this reflection could go on forever. I scream for Kate, I shout until my throat is raw and I’m breathing smoke. My heart is running on a bad battery, my legs are made of glass.

I stop and picture a swan. I picture a swan gliding softly into the bluest water possible. This is on the coast of Mexico, some town that has no memory. There is the weight of disappearing altogether. There is a danger of vomiting out my soul in some strange bartering exercise. Kate touches my hand gently and, for the longest moment, I am free from the searing pain of life. It’s strange, these varicose social passageways.

But now I’m back, I’m back in this room of cardboard cut-out people. Kate has escaped, she has run to some far corner where gravity eases off by degrees. Before I can stop myself, I’m on my knees, staring up into the lifeless face of the shopkeeper. He’s become everything I’ve ever feared, everything except what I fear most.

And in the end, it’s not where he sticks the needle in my vein that hurts. It’s where the arrow was removed from my heart.

It was about ten degrees and falling, outside some outlet store in an outlet mall. There was literally nothing else around and I was trying to score. I thought I saw some kind of magician but when I approached him, there was a misunderstanding and a bigger man grabbed me by the collar and said, “That’s enough. You, out.”

So it was back out into the cold, and I understood why sometimes a wolf will eat its baby. I felt a space between now and later. I felt a complete envy for collapsing stars. I knew that free agency pays very little in the long run. I saw white turn to red, I felt a ghost brush my back. Snow. Snow and wind. I threw a cigarette butt towards a pigeon and thought I would cry.

Went out with Angie to where the ships had run aground. Sacred spot, maybe sailors had died. I could just imagine the ship ramming, stopping short, and then maybe the guy went through a window. Do they have windows on those big ships? I think maybe they do. I think they have to. Sometimes you need a clear view.

So we were angels that day. We walked through the wreckage we’d seen on the news, we held hands in secret runarounds. We played ankle music over black tar heroin. She had the look of a horse when it hasn’t had enough. We could almost make out smoke signals, or maybe some kind of broken semaphore. She said the words that resonated the most ever.

But when we got back to town, it was like we hadn’t left at all. Tin Tin was in a beef with the bartender, he’d sold him some bad hash or something. He used to pound on his chest in that bar and yell, “What do you mean no more for me? I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough.” That’s just the way Tin Tin was. You couldn’t hate him or anything. You couldn’t even look him in the eye when he got like that. He’d kill you as sure as he’d light a match.

That particular day I was speaking of, that was the day that Angie realized she was in love with another guy. I was okay with it.

She stared at her feet and said, “This is nobody’s fault. You didn’t do anything.”

I just nodded so she said, “No, I mean you could have been better. You could have, you know, been there.”

Trying to placate her, I said, “This doesn’t change you and me.”

“There is no you and me,” she replied, that most amazing painted toenail still drawing her attention. “There hasn’t been a you and me for a year or more. You aren’t where I live.”

So we looked back over the forest, away from where the ships had run aground, over the forest on some hill was a grain elevator. I asked if there was farming in this area. I didn’t think there were any fields here. She shook her head and said, “That’s not a grain elevator.”

“Well what the hell is it? It’s on fire.”

“It’s not on fire,” she told me.

“There’s smoke right there. I can’t believe what I’m seeing here. That grain’s on fire and these ships ran aground.”

She started walking away from me and said, “It’s a chimney. They cremate bodies there.”

Tin Tin was allowed back in the bar on the condition that he drink quietly in the corner and tip heavily. He was not allowed to ask for the channel to be changed (one of his favorite activities; he loved to watch boxing matches from the mid-80’s and explain why each fighter was better or worse than Sugar Ray Robinson) or to talk to the waitress. He paid no attention to the dancers that night, but I saw him looking wistfully at the television set. The television was playing a re-run of Gunsmoke.

Car broke down on outskirts, some kind of vague warning from above that fuel gaskets can be blown. Thought about burying a whale in a gravel pit, the right absorbency. Power line came down and landed on a car that Fred had been in with Suzy. Suzy lost her toenails and Fred just wasn’t there anymore. His valves had fused shut. The sun didn’t come out for a long time and Suzy crawled into the woods to escape some kind of wolf that had been getting closer. She just dug a hole in the ground and disappeared.

But I guess the important thing was that my jacket had been stolen from Bernie’s bar (the Vini Vici), which had become like a home to me. It might have been the last place I felt safe. It saw me through bad times and also had been at the heart of many good days. Tin Tin had gotten onto a good score. He claimed he had found an abandoned semi somewhere near Barclay, but we found out later that he had actually hijacked it with Tony’s crew. I never knew him to carry a gun but I wouldn’t put anything past him. Tin Tin had gotten a reputation as a loose cannon and he cocked his hips a certain way when he walked. But the semi only had a shipment of little Visine bottles. We made a day of it at the campus, selling Visine to pothead students.

Some kind of burger joint off the highway. Tin Tin’s got six bullets in his pocket, five of them spent cartridges. He’s trying to refill a printer’s color ribbon. He’s got some kind of kit to do it. He’s explaining how they calculate acres with just a few short measurements. Then he’s talking about triangulation to learn the height of a mountain from the ground. I interrupt him to tell him that I was seeing his ex until yesterday.

“She’s got a style would make one of those Impressionists cream in their shorts,” he offers.

“It was nobody’s fault,” I try to explain. “Life doesn’t shake hands, it crawls right up on you.”

“Well I was well shot of her six weeks ago, a month ago, last night, and probably today. It’s hard to tell anything when it comes to love. It’s like…have you ever seen one of those 3-D art pictures? You know, where it’s just some blob pattern but if you look through it then you can see a spaceship?”

I told him I did even though I’d never trained my eyes to see whatever was in those 3-D pictures.

“Well you’ve gotta consider that maybe that’s what love is. You don’t know what you ever have until it’s gone. When they take it away,” he says. Then, “Christ, I think I got ink in a cut. That’ll go straight to my heart, won’t it?”

I conceded that it might.

“Just what I need,” he muses mirthlessly. “A tattoo on the inside.” He pauses and then says, “Tell me about her. What was she like after me?”

I had gotten some of the story from her after we first began to grow into our bodies’ handshake. Cupping her chin in my hand, I would plead with her, bargain. I would lock her slowly into some kind of drowning chasm and then fling the roof off the house of cards. The bed was barely big enough for two and we often slept on the floor because it was more comfortable. I was like a wino in a gutter.

First she would trade verbal blows with me, accuse me of the most horrible things. Her condemnation of me was a lubricant, it was an affirmation of the secrets I couldn’t bear to show her. What I kept from her was a longer hallway than what I actually showed. But sometimes at night, she would levitate. She would float right off the bed, or the ground if we were sleeping there, and she would turn cartwheels ahead of me. She became a vision in white, she became a worm that goes straight for the heart. I always pictured her underground, holding a flashlight, guiding people to a secure spot during the air raid.

Eventually, I saw an evil presence in myself. I found myself staring into the mirror, trying hard to remember the Spanish phrase for “not there at all”. That one still eludes me, as all good things do in my life. I could have spoken her name at that moment but I was sure some kind of curse would descend upon her. I knew that any words that came from my lips would be damaging. I wanted to patch the hole in the hull, but I was too busy bailing out the water.

I traced lines along her birthmarks and freckles. I found perfect lines between two points to another to another to another. It became sheet music and I hummed the tune of her beauty. She called me callow, she called me spiritually malnourished, but only after the verbal assaults. This was the stuff she really felt. This was the part of myself that she could only tell me in confidence as I breathed in her scent, her spirit a séance away from split-level thinking. I nearly bruised my tongue trying to explain how I felt about her. I found that six thousand words suffice when I only have one in mind. So she overturned my resistance, my corduroy rebellion. You tell yourself a million times that you’re going to get what you want but when it comes, you’re usually looking the other way.

She reached deep inside me and handled my heart with her bare hands. She prodded this and stretched that, she tried to make me see that everyone dying was just a part of life. And she would say, “It’s nothing you did. Once something dies, that’s it.” She had let go of my heart after pulling it from my chest. She wiped the blood across my lips and said, “That’s our last kiss.” She left it to me to sew the wound back up.

But what can I tell Tin Tin? Tin Tin who once beat her and kept her from the things and people she loved. Tin Tin who saw constant reasons in his own behavior to distrust her completely. Poor old Tin Tin with his sulking manner, his belligerent fists, his powdered snow inflections. There was something about him that scared me. He couldn’t reach into my chest and touch my heart but I knew that if he started calling me names, everyone else would join in. Either to gain his favor or because they’d always secretly harbored a hatred toward me and now Tin Tin was endorsing the abuse. I always tried to stay on his good side because I wanted to be liked, and if not liked then at least believing I was liked.

So when I told him that I had been seeing Star, I think it’s natural that he thought I’d said I was seeing stars and admitting some kind of neurological malfunction. How could he know I’d go behind his back and take up with his ex? How could he expect me to have a life of my own that didn’t always intersect with his own? Some people, it’s like you don’t exist except when you’re with them. I felt the same with Star. She wasn’t really there unless she was there with me. She wasn’t really anything at all other than an object that I could project onto.

A last scene from that relationship, one that I try to relate to Tin Tin. It’s six AM and the sun has just started to come up. I am pacing the apartment, worried about some guy that thinks I’ve ripped him off. I’m continually checking the lock on the door, muttering to myself that it won’t do much good against a sledgehammer. I feel predatory, I feel like a shark or a cougar. Star is working on a stuck zipper with her delicate hands. Typically, we haven’t slept this night. We were up all hours arguing and pleading and accusing and confessing and begging to be absolved. Our sins were often invented just for the act of absolving, like it was possible to create salvation. I once tried to tell her that I wasn’t a bad guy. I tried to impress upon her the importance of self-worth. She coolly responded that when Jesus comes back, he won’t even make it to 30 this time.

I slipped out around 7 and went up to the diner to get a couple muffins to bring back. Her favorite was chocolate chip, mine was black forest. I also got some orange juice. The taste reminds me of Methadone. I caught my reflection in the glass of the door and realized how far I am from the person I really want to be. But I thought I knew where I was going and I thought that was enough. I thought there was an anchor somewhere in this world. I thought somehow I could push the tide back with a wave of my hand. I walked in silence, trying to enjoy the fact that the world was waking up.

Back at the apartment, there was a note on the floor. It was some kind of moral inventory, the subject myself. She had ranked my attributes according to their prominence in my personality and behavior. The best thing that could be said about me was that I never hated myself openly. There are some secrets you keep back, carefully secured against the picklocks of biographers. But seeing this list, it crystallized some unnamed dread inside me. It was like hearing the safe slowly being opened, one tumbler at a time. It was grossly unfathomable that she would have to weigh me on a scale. That maybe she didn’t believe the horrible things she accused me of but was slowly coming to believe them. I tore the list up and threw it in the trashcan. But this presented its own problems. Now she would know I’d seen. There was no way to hide what I’d just done. It was time to wake her and confront her.

She was not happy to be awoken and she was less happy to see me with that torn up list in my hand. I tried to take it back. I tried to change the whole thing and laugh about it but the laughter turned to tears and I echoed a sentiment I’d heard once in a country song in some bar that Tin Tin quickly got us thrown out of. I reached behind myself and produced the monkey that is on all our backs. I told her, “I have so much love to give and I don’t know where to put it.”

She left that afternoon, saying something about a modeling contract in the city. I think she’ll stay gone. I think when you’re confronted by the absolute horror, the sickening honesty, of humanity, you’ve had more than your share. You go back to some gated community where you’ll gossip about whatever it is that women talk about at the grocery store, at the beauty parlor. That your life will become about your kids and your garden and your kitchen.

I want to look elsewhere anyway. I want to see green patches that aren’t artificial. I want to see a mountain and guess its height before I climb it. And when I get to the top, I’ll just sit and think about bars where pianos have been drinking. I’ll consider a bird landing on a branch and how it has faith that the branch will not detach from the tree. I will look at myself the way a mother looks at her child and slowly gives away a piece of herself.

Some kind of auto accident. Georgie dies and Nial wants them to drag the river. Georgie had Nial’s guitar and typewriter in the car but now both are missing. When the cops suggested they had ended up in the river, Nial wants to drag the river. Then he tells us that the cops stole them. Tin Tin says Nial should take revenge but even he doesn’t believe it. He just wants Nial to believe it’s a good idea.

Next thing, Nial’s putting up reward posters for his guitar and typewriter. Tin Tin scoffs at them and says, “You draw that yourself?”

“Yeah,” Nial says. “I think I really captured the spirit of the guitar.”

Might as well have been stick figures. I want to say this but Nial is notorious for bearing a grudge. I once said his shoes were losing traction when there was an ice storm and he didn’t talk to me for the rest of the winter. Spring came and he just started asking for cigarettes. It took me until the end of the summer to even get him to say my name. Well, it just shows. Sometimes the friends you choose end up choosing you.

Then Blake showed up with the guitar and typewriter and demanded the reward. This was before we even knew Blake, before he’d killed the cat and started a fire in the kitchen. We saw some kind of damaged soul in there, some kind of demon picking him apart piece by piece. Nial gave him the fifty dollars, thirty dollars was in change in one of those big plastic water coolers.

“What do I do with this?” Blake asked.

“You roll it,” Nial said, examining the guitar for any signs of wear.

“Then what?” Blake asked.

“Then take it to a fer chrissake bank.”

Blake looked at me and said, “That’s not cool. You don’t give a man change. Hey, tell him to give me cash.”

“It’s cash,” Nial says.

“It’s not cash,” Blake said, searching for support with his eyes.

“It’s as good as cash.”

Blake took Nial out for a beer and when they got back, it turned out Blake had the same fourth grade teacher that had taught Nial two years before. They came back like soldiers without scars. Tin Tin didn’t like it. “Who’s this Blake?” he’d ask. “Have we got our car doors locked?”

But Blake liked us all so damn much. After the fire, he wanted to make things up to us. That’s when he started looking for a piece of land to build a new place on. He was convinced we could build it ourselves. Tin Tin offered to keep us in beer if we actually built it. So we went and looked for land and ended up with the train tracks. Our spot of heaven just this side of hell.

I think maybe it’s important that what I said earlier about Angie was said. Because I don’t want to forget that we shared that day. That was just how life was. People came in and people went out. There was no middle, or never much of one. Once someone had come in, they would soon go out. Angie stayed the longest, maybe three years. I made new friends and broke the friendships, I lost old friends and I buried a few new ones. That hand that touches you when you feel yourself start to fall at the skating rink, it can push you down or keep you up. But you don’t control that hand. You don’t even know whose hand that is.

It gets strange from time to time. Those days when the sky is green like a hailstorm and there’s no sound on the street except civil defense air raid sirens. You start to plot ways out of the plastic wrap. You start to weigh the pros and cons of extra-absorbent paper towels. You start to think that the blood that drips out is falling in a pattern, it’s trying to tell you something. Sometimes you’ve just gotta walk until there’s no sky over you anymore. Until you reach the sea and enter it. And become it.