Asshole bandit cops are closing in on the group, all of them oblivious or so sure of their safety that they make no move to escape. Suspicion whirls around like carrion vultures, last age of a dying planet. With bureaucratic efficiency, the new line is cut down in primetime television viewing, dragged naked into the street or thrown off buildings, thrown under the wheels of a bus, legs severed at subway stations, prisoners beaten to death in their own cells. Those that aren’t killed end up committing suicide, one in front of a live studio audience. The tv ratings climb high and the masters of the world smoke their thick cigars.

Down on street level, there is the presence of a latter day messiah complex at work. Crack addicts are selling their soul to get a piece now that the clamp has been put on. People are murdered out of fright, out of blanket need. We watch from rooftops as stoolies are dragged into the street, denying their guilt and shivering with tears, and strung up on lampposts at street corners. The game is to stay alive long enough to ride out this wave of drought and pick up the crumbs that fall off the plates.

Dealers specialize in cotton dreams, sawed off thunder sticks, eight ball oracles. We drown ourselves in grain alcohol, watching legless rabbits attempt to outrun an on-coming ATV, howitzer dragged behind, teeth scattered in road, blood fingerprints on discharged weapons. Gun sales go up and everyone is trading things in. I myself pawn a typewriter so that I can buy H but even that’s a waste because there’s none to be had in this town anymore. The clamp is firmly on and we are each stuck in our own space.

Negro faces begin turning up offering sub-quality product, claiming they’ve just arrived from Mexico, senor, and would like to proffer some of what the south-land has to offer. But they are run through with broadswords, hung beside the stoolies, propped in window displays, all holding signs that say “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you here”.

Box car races in far off provinces of the island, whole gaping nation turned with eyes to the sky, as next wave hardware stretches farther than east to west travel, races the sun in dogged earnest, all while the supply remains cut off. The power goes out eventually and we are engaged in strict ruckus, skinhead youths stalking the streets with tire irons and baseball bats and chains, beating their own members severely for not beating others enough. Crystal ball explosions in Little Italy where bags are selling for eight times the normal price, still a far sight better than Chinatown where cats are turned to ash and sold as powder. The hierarchical integrity of the junk business is compromised and dealers move out of the area for a few weeks until things settle down, too worried about how they’ll explain there’s nothing to sell, too afraid of receiving the stoolie treatment as it’s being called, broken alabaster tooth sockets that can never be refilled.

There is a langorous odor of emptiness blowing on the wind, the smell of a fire from thirty miles out to sea. This time period is when I’m approached by everyone, every single junkie looking for a fix. I have the same questions for them that they have for me and the dance continues, no one leading and everyone following.

Mary is shooting up some baby formula in a kitchen apartment, where bats hang from the ceiling and the television gives off only fake snow. She’s telling us all about the time she was a transvestite impersonator at a club in New Zealand, explaining to us that young boys are often taken with the near other sex, the nearly there collection. The marrow in my bones aches with the absence of junk and Mary says, “Make sure that this formula is room temperature. If you shoot this when it’s boiling, that’s you fucking well finished. That’ll be the end of it. All for nothing, you see?” And she lifts the needle up to the light to show off the blood collected in it before pointing it at her open mouth and squirting the blood back home.

Balthazar is an underwear model for a popular designer and even he’s been unable to score inside the city. He complains of drug testing done on him as a youth, an experimental ADD drug called Overtem, and has the wounded prizefighter face of a born loser. He is the only person in the room that’s really there and not just a shadow, a ghost. Balthazar has a standing offer of $500 for a single fix if anyone can find it but he’s been ripped off on it so many times in the last week that he now shoots before he pays. It’s just a matter of time before the missing ingredient is found and his whole heart is stopped in his chest, run too far on baby laxatives and baking soda with quinine.

The cops are bringing everyone in and cracking heads before asking questions. This is a new shade for them, unbelievable until this point, but we don’t even care about it anymore. All that matters is the need for a fix. I’ll be taken in next, I’m sure of that, my secret assignment won’t buy me immunity from this vagabond turn down. Levels are arranged in such a way that I’m still at the bottom but they’re rapidly moving down the ladders to scoop up my contemporaries. Balthazar and I escape Mary’s just as the cops show up and we hide in the incinerator chute and watch her dragged away, vomiting furiously on the police as though in malice, the cops beating her calves with wooden sledges.

The city itself has become a hostile place, a virulent community with evil intent. We emerge on a city street we’ve never been aware of before and watch a funeral traipse down the avenue. But now an angry lynch mob is descending upon us and Balthazar drops his pants and removes his shirt and begins his routine of modeling, trying desperately to prove himself a valuable member of some community, as though we should all aspire to be paid to walk around in our underwear. It makes no difference because Balthazar is swept up by the mob and they string him up beside me.

“There must be something wrong,” Balthazar says. “There must have been a point in the past when we could have made different decisions.” But the crowd disperses for no reason after Balthazar’s stopped kicking and I remain on the ground. I work my way out of the purple rope and escape into the night, racing rats for my apartment with Isaac, losing as always.