The Nova had no stereo so she kept a shitty boombox in the back seat,

tinny old punkrock tape, Dead Kennedys or some shit, getting their ass kicked by the wind and the straining engine and it didn’t matter anyway since all she heard was Joey.

“So leave then,” casual shrug and deep drag of his cigarette, not even looking up from his canvas, angry red and black slashes across sickly fishscale shapes. “I’ve had it with this clingy shit.”

And Lucy feeling more and more lonely inside her own skin, more and more useless, as if the more he ignored her the more pastel, the more translucent she became. Like a ghost in their little Hollywood apartment, leaving behind a half-full coffee cup, a teal green blob of Manic Panic hairdye on the edge of the sink, desperate to leave some kind of spoor, some small proof that she was still here, only to find everything cleaned up and pristine the next day.

In the darkness up ahead somewhere was San Francisco. A new city, a new life. A place where someone might look right into her eyes, might ask her if she wanted anything, if she was hungry or cold. A place to reinvent herself, if only she could believe in it. Out here in this dull dusty no-mans-land her fantasy of San Francisco seemed about as realistic as the Emerald City of Oz.

A black fluttery shape sprang into road in in front of her – a bat? an
umbrella? – and she slammed on the breaks, her heart whiplashing in her chest as the car skewed off in a cloud of bone-colored dust, tire squeal replaced by the grating crunch of gravel and then silence, ticking of the engine weirdly in sync with her pounding pulse.

She was shaking so badly that it took a full minute to unfasten her
seatbelt. Suddenly in a panic to get out, gasping and fingers scrabbling around the doorhandle Lucy whispered fuckfuckfuck until the door finally popped open and she tumbled out.

The road was near deserted, only an occasional shuddering semi roaring past and enveloping Lucy in dust and diesel stink. On the other side of the freeway was a featureless wall of rock. Her side was some kind of orchard, endless rows of identical, leafless trees like Halloween cutouts as far as she could see. The Nova steamed on two flat tires and she kicked it spitefully, sending up a spray of grit.

The thing she had hit was about 25 feet up ahead, semi-collapsed amidst winking cubes of safetyglass on the shoulder. It looked like a broken umbrella skeleton festooned with shredded plastic bags and scraps of rusty foil and it’s crooked winglike crest flapped in the hot desert wind.

“Fuck you,” she told it, spitting a wad of gritty saliva onto the yellow line that divided the questionable safety of the shoulder from the speeding death of the freeway. Watching her spit dry almost instantly on the tarmac, Lucy found herself noticing the detritus around her thrift store boots. There were all kinds of things, weird things like a cracked plastic letter H with prongs along it’s center bar, a watch with no hands, a can of soda she had never heard of, it’s size slightly smaller than normal, emblazoned with a pale and anachronistic logo. There was a flattened stuffed toy of some sort, a greenish thing sort of like a cat with no ears and an old porno magazine folded open to a spread of a shopworn blonde getting it in both ends from headless goons with bad tattoos. A Polaroid that hadn’t come out, just a gray green blob bisected by a streak of red like a wound. Bits of metal and shards of glass, crumpled paper and cigarette butts. And Lucy, just another scrap of unwanted flotsam, stuck here for fuck knows how long with no cellphone and no one to call anyway, no AAA and worthless Joey about as likely to come out and save her as Superman or Mother Theresa or Bruce fucking Willis.

“So what are you gonna do Lucy?” she said out loud, her own name lost in the rumble of a tanker truck going the other way. She spat again, dry dusty flavor shriveling her tongue. “Walk I guess.”

She grabbed her knobby vinyl purse from the passenger seat and locked the Nova’s doors – like someone’s gonna steal the damn thing on two flat shoes but urban habits die hard. Standing for a moment, toeing the Polaroid, she was struck with sudden inexplicable anxiety about leaving the familiar comfort of her car. Which way should she go? It seemed ages since she’d seen a gas station and it seemed a reasonable assumption that there ought to be one up ahead fairly soon. But she was quite preoccupied and she could have passed one without noticing.

Nevermind the fact that thing was up ahead, that dark flapping thing that had caused all this trouble. Wrapping her arms around her skinny ribs, Lucy set out in the direction she had come without looking back. She walked forever, or so it felt, one foot in front of the other and chewing her lip, humming tunelessly. The orchard never seemed to end and it’s relentless sameness gave her no hint of how far she’d gone. Two cars and a truck passed but none even slowed as they blew by and Lucy felt sure that Joey had finally won, that she really was
invisible now and she’ d just keep walking until she died of thirst here in this dry unchanging wasteland while fat unseeing tourists and sleepy truckdrivers drove by sucking their Big Gulps and singing along with top 40 radio. Finally something different up ahead, just a lump by the side of the road. Probably some dead bloated animal and Lucy found herself breathing more shallowly in anticipation of the stink. But the closer she got, the less sure she was. It seemed too skinny, too lopsided. When she got within 10 feet she started to notice metal struts poking up out of it and was hit with a plunging elevator realization in her gut. It looked a lot like that thing she had hit. She slowed as she approached it, realizing at the last second that she had chewed her lip bloody again. That copper flavor mingled with dust and carbon monoxide on her tongue as she bent to peer cautiously at the twisted shape at her feet. It was a dead animal or part of one, here a row of yellow dog teeth set in mummified black gums like beef jerky, here a broken stub of bone protruding from a nest of snarled wire and hair. Clusters of dirty pigeon feathers and patches of matted fur along with the familiar umbrella struts and shreds of plastic all tangled together. It made her uneasy and sick, just a stupid heap of trash but there was something about way the wind made it flutter and seem almost ready to leap at her just like it had leapt at her car…

It couldn’t be the same thing. She had left that thing miles behind her back with her car and her scratchy punkrock tape and that shitty boombox that someone probably smashed the window to steal by now.

Looking back over her shoulder she saw nothing but endless road and skeleton trees and found herself struck by an awful vision of that scrawny thing flapping awkwardly up into the sky and winging raptor-quick to plunge down up ahead and wait for her all sharp rusty points and predator patience. She sidled past the ragged heap, almost expecting it to snake out and snag her pant leg. Maybe there was a whole flock of these things strewn all along the road, whispering to each other in their secret plastic-crinkle language about the strange lonely girl with the green hair and the bloody lip. She hurried away, afraid to take her eyes off it, in case she looked away and back again to find it closer. When she was finally far enough away to safely turn her head, she spotted another car parked on the shoulder. Someone with a cellphone maybe? Someone waiting for her with his lights off and a hard-on and a gun in the glovebox. Or maybe just another empty car, owner gone on down the road looking for help. Maybe she’d find the owner a few miles down, dried bones tangled up in wire and torn plastic.

Ok now she was just freaking herself out. She made herself breathe slowly and resisted an urge to check on the thing behind her.

You’re acting just like a girl, Joey’s sardonic voice told her. Grow up already.

“Fuck you,” she said to Joey, to the garbage bag monster, to her own stupid self. “Just keep moving and pray for a goddam SpeedyMart.”

The car up ahead was a Nova. A black Nova. What are the chances of
that? she thought Two Novas broken down on the same stretch of road. More likely than the truth, the terrible slow-dawning truth that it was her Nova, familiar battered warhorse she had bought from her old boss for 500 bucks and driven nearly into the ground, sitting forlornly on two flat tires, just like she left it. As she approached it, she felt a twist of nausea in her gut, hands shaking as she gripped her key and of course it slid into the lock like she knew it would and there’s her boombox with the tape popped out, half-ejected in her sudden panicked stop. Paper coffee cups with chewed edges smeared with blue lipstick. Her things. So what the fuck happened?

How did she get so turned around? She’d heard about people lost in the woods going in circles but how the fuck could she have been following the road in the same direction the whole way and still wound up back here. She backed away from the car, keys jingling in her hand. OK fine, however it happened, she’s here. Now what? Wait here? Yes that was the only sensible thing to do. Just wait and eventually somebody, some cop or something, somebody would have to stop. You weren’t allowed to just lounge around by the side of the road. A cop was always there ready to bust her for speeding, so where was Dudley Do Right when she needed him? She would wait. Anyway there was no way in hell she was gonna venture back out into the night and get herself even more lost. From here she could keep an eye on that thing, make sure it wasn’t sneaking up on her. Throwing a glance back at the flapping heap, she got back into the car. After a moment, she reached over and locked the door.

Lucy was getting thirsty. Her tape had repeated more than 3 times, and she had turned it off for a few minutes before the silence started to drive her buggy and she turned it back on again. No one stopped.

There was a bottle of Evian that had maybe a half inch left in the bottom on the floor by the passenger seat but she was saving it for a just-in-case she really didn’t want to think about. There was nothing to eat but the fuzzy butt-end of a package of cherry Rolaids and four mint flavored toothpicks. The thing that was really starting to get to her was the fact that she had no idea what time it was. It had been around midnight when she had left L.A. and she had to be at least an hour into the flats plus the hour through the mountains would make it 2ish when she’d hit that thing. Then add at least an hour of walking and at least three rounds of an hour-long tape so why wasn’t the sun starting to come up yet? And she was really very thirsty. She reached down and picked up the Evian bottle and set it up on the dashboard. The umbrella thing was still there and didn’t it seem a little closer?

Christ, Lucy you wanna nip that kinda shit in the bud right fucking now.

Lucy turned the bottle so the label faced her. You want mindgames why don’t you just go move back in with Joey. But it was closer. It had turned a little too so that two winglike struts stuck up in the air like horns. OK so the wind blew the thing over, big deal. Probably weighed about as much as a pigeon or a paper bag. It got blown out in front her car once too, no reason it wouldn’t get moved by the wind again. Except the trees were still as charcoal sketches against the black sky. There was no wind at all.

A car then, Lucy told herself. The breeze from a truck passing. But she couldn’t remember a car or truck passing at all within the last tape round. She curled up against the seat, cheek pressed to the cracked vinyl. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to nod off, anything to kill time till the sun came up, bland yellow sunlight making everything mundane and non-threatening. Morning commuters with go-cups of bad coffee and hey Marge that gal looks like she could use a little help and no more shadows, no more garbage bag monster.

She found herself thinking of all the things scattered along the side of the road, things that must have meant something to someone once. Things that had been tossed or fallen from the windows of speeding cars and disappeared, become invisible. She made up stories in her mind about where the things came from. The magazine was found in the glovebox by a religious wife and tossed in a fit of holy fury. The once cute stuffed animal was an unwanted gift from an unforgiven lover, jettisoned during a high speed argument. The H had been part of a sign in the back of a truck – HARDWARE maybe or HOTDOGS or ever HOT GIRLS XXX jostled loose by bad shocks and blasting, bass heavy music. The Polaroid was an attempt by a driver to shoot down into his own lap at a 90 mph blowjob. She wanted all these things to have history, to mean something but she knew that even she never really noticed anything by the side of the road. It all meant about as much as the bad rear-projection in a cheesy TV show. What was that old black and white show, Outer Limits or Twilight Zone maybe, where the people were stuck in time, moving too fast while everything around them was slowed to an almost indiscernible crawl. The one with the little girl on her tricycle heading slowly and inevitably towards the truck. Well for Lucy and the things strewn around her it was the opposite. All round her people were speeding by with no awareness of her molasses-slow, neverchanging existence. Nothing ever changed. Nothing except…

Lucy sat up sucking air, mouth dry as a dustrag and her eyes wide — that thing where was it now? Was it closer? It was still dark but it had to be getting lighter… was that a hint of dawn in the distance or just the yellow fever glow of the sodium lamps. She squinted down the road, looking out for the thing, the garbage bag monster, but she couldn’t see it anywhere. Could it have finally blown away for good or was it out there just out of sight waiting for her…

“For fuck sake Lucy,” she said. “You really have lost it.”

Her body felt cramped and stiff and the air inside the car was stale, redolent of old coffee and burnt brakes. She felt sure she would die if she didn’t get out and stretch her legs. The thing was nowhere. Maybe it got bored and flew down the road to the Dennys for a Grand Slam and a big fat slice of cherry pie. She laughed out loud and popped the lock, swung the door open.

Christ the last thing she wanted to do was start thinking about food. She got out of the car, chewing her lip and concentrating on not thinking about food. Not thinking about garlic pepper squid from her favorite Thai place or molasses cookies or lasagna or her dad’s banana bread or summer barbecues with a cut-in-half 50 gallon drum and sticky-sweet spareribs and corn on the cob and cold beer and…

The thing was on the roof of the car.

This weird little shriek slipped out between her teeth as she flailed out against it with both hands, wire and ragged metal ripping her sleeve and the skin beneath and she stumbled away, brushing at her arm like it had touched fire or something contaminated. The thing tottered and fell in nearly hypnotic slow motion landing with a wet snapping plastic sound between her and the open car door. She turned and ran, breath ragged in her parched throat. She had no idea which direction she was headed but she didn’t care as long as it was away. The scrawny trees flew past and the road unrolled beside her and paring knives dug into her calves and gut and she kept running, kept running until she tripped and nearly fell, dry heaving with her palms pressed against her thighs and her heart close to bursting in her chest. She ventured a look behind her. Nothing. No car, no garbage bag monster, nothing. Nothing but road and trees and broken glass and bottlecaps and cigarette butts and her, shaking and near tears andfeeling stupid and angry and sick.

Her arm really hurt. It throbbed resentfully and the scratches looked dark and puffy in the sodium light. Her mind whirled with thoughts of tetanus and infection and she made herself start walking again, just keep walking no matter what and what fucking time is it, the night can’t just go on and on forever, can it?

She was thirstier and thirster and she couldn’t stop thinking about the water bottle left behind in her car, the water she had been saving – should have drank it dammit then I’d be less thirsty now – and how people really did die of thirst out in the desert, how happy she was gonna be to see that SpeedyMart. She would just go right in and put her mouth under the Mountain Dew spigot and let em call the cops. Where were you when I needed you pig-fuck? she’d say and she laughed out loud, a rough grating sound like her feet against the gravel.

Every step she took thumped like an extra heartbeat in her arm and she stopped to roll up her sleeve. The skin was hot and swollen and the lips of the cuts had peeled up and blackened, shiny like…

…like plastic.

She started trying to signal cars, waving her good arm hysterically
but no one stopped. They just sped by, spraying her with grit, silvered windshields as blank and blind as cataract covered eyes.

Leaping up and waving at a passing SUV, Lucy fell, landing heavily on her injured arm. She screamed, pain blaring up through her arm bones, shooting up the side of her neck and she rolled onto her back, sobbing and holding her wounded limb out away from her body like a dead thing. Her broiler-hot forearm was now studded with gravel and shards of dirty glass and the shiny black splits had widened, sprouting curls of wire like newborn ferns. It was beginning to stink, a curious blend of burnt rubber, sun-dried roadkill and rust.

She scrambled to her feet, shaking her head, eyes squeezed closed and started to run again. She ran until she was tired, stopped gasping and then started again, stopped and started, laughing and sobbing until she could not go another step and she collapsed in the dirt, half hallucinating flickering bits of plastic brushing against her cheeks and eyelids and a sound like a thousand crackling garbage bags and she lay there drifting in and out of consciousness as the black-edged cracks crept across her chest and back. When she swatted at the imaginary tickle of plastic on her face and felt gritty, quivering feathers bristling from a thick split that had formed behind her ear she yelped and wrenched herself back to her feet.

There was a car coming, blinding light and engine shrieking like a hoard of angry wasps. A kind of desperate fury coursed through her, obliterating everything as she flung herself towards the speeding car, overwhelmed by this mad desire to smash the windshield with her bare hands, to drag the clueless occupant out through the broken glass and shriek into their bloody face “I’m real you fucker I’M REAL”. The moment elongated into a lifetime as she tottered in the yellow wash of the headlights, a single word over and over in her mouth like the dry click of insects.

“Stop.” she said. “Stopstopstopstop…”

The car hit her, and for an instant there was no pain, only a curious hot weightlessness as she spun up over the dented black hood . The bug-splattered windshield filled her vision and the driver’s face on the other side seemed huge and distorted, so pale, green hair like chemical fire and bloody chapped lips skinned back in terror and then blank nothing like cold black plastic smothering her, obliterating everything.

end

I hate Christmas. The holidays. The time for families to gather to share love and good cheer. Bullshit. I try hard every year to forget there is a Christmas precisely because it reminds me of my family, but this fucking world won’t let me. They’ve romanticized a nightmare.

Now a major industrialist, my father can list many crimes to his name, some commercial, some social. But the greatest are against his family and me, his oldest son. When he first started, he made me and my younger brothers and sisters work in the “family” business on our country estate. Sometimes through the night. Once when I nodded off — I was probably ten at the time — I’ll never forget how he made me stand outside in the snow. Barefoot. I caught a severe cold and almost suffered frostbite. Only then did my mother intervene. She sternly lectured him that she didn’t have time to wipe noses and rub feet. She had charities to run…

Because of his charm and rapidly advancing position in society, he frequently escaped the inquiry of the law. So he starved us, he beat us, he deprived us of sleep. Out of pure malice. Or to manipulate us. And he got away with it all.

On Christmas he strangely thought he could make it all right. By lavishing us — and everyone he knew — with mountains of gifts, he thought he could atone for the foul, frightful being that he was the rest of the year. How sadly wrong he was. Yet I realize now he was not unique. Guilty of what so many people are to some extent, buying the right to inflict pain.

I ran away one winter when I was young enough to forget exactly when, yet old enough to have the strength. I tried three times. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the stable for a fortnight. The second time, he raped one of my brothers in front of me. I wasn’t daunted by the threat, only quickened by it. The third time, I escaped into a heavenly indigo night, lungs heaving painfully and legs plowing heavy and wet through the snow.

And I never looked back.

My lips kiss the mouth of this Jack Daniels bottle and I take another long drink. Coughing as the liquor spikes my throat. Funny how parts of the gun remain so cold, yet my hands are sweaty and warm. When I can’t douse the pain with the alcohol, I sometimes think of using it. But so far I haven’t. Not on myself (obviously) or anyone else.

My black slacks wrinkle and crease from sitting so long. The stereo radio crackles with late-night music from a modern rock station. At least it isn’t Christmas music. Nine Inch Nails. Head like a hole. Black as your soul. I’d rather die than give you control. He had a strange aversion to the color black, and would never let us wear it. Perversion drives me to wear nothing but that now. Contrasting with my pale skin. And faded grey eyes…

The whiskey is making my head heavy. I shift in the chair, the heat of the roaring fire gently licking my face and bare arms. For many years, I wouldn’t even have a fireplace in my home. Even that reminded me of his annual hypocrisy. For who doesn’t look at a fireplace and envision stockings nailed into the mortar? Who doesn’t think a mantle is naked without them?

As my eyes close and my chin dips to my chest under the cottony weight of the whiskey blanket, I recall the letter I received from my father three years ago. Your mother and I are getting on in years. We’re sorry for what’s happened. Let’s put our differences behind us. We want you to take over the family business. And we miss you. Please come home.

Manipulative bastard.

Please come home…

Hark how the bells
sweet silver bells
all seem to say
throw cares away

Smoke belching from the cold fireplace steals my breath. I jerk awake as the gun quickly slides out of my hands and smashes against the lamp, leaving the room utterly dark.

Except for their eyes. My brothers and sisters. Faded grey orbs in the light…

…and luminous in the night. How else could we see as we worked?

Christmas is here
bringing good cheer
to young and old
meek and the bold

Their fishhook claws and teeth gouge my arms, face, legs — barbs in my flesh pinning me to the chair like an insect specimen. The modern rock station has succumbed to Christmas music at the midnight hour and the stereo indicator lights wink. Green. Red.

Skin cracked and thickened with age, blood vessels bursting under the surface, hair white and tangled. Ruddy lips wet with whiskey as he crouches before me, larger than even I remember. Father.

“Well, well, well,” his voice rumbles resonantly before he takes another drink of the Jack Daniels. The liquor sloshes in the bottle, and he dangles the bottle neck in his bloated fingers. “If it isn’t my son. My wayward fucking son.”

My brothers and sisters laugh like squealing rats. Heart pounding, I silently watch him with that childish fear.

“For years your mother and I looked for you.” Of course he couldn’t find me. I’m the only one besides himself not on The List. He wipes his mouth on a white fur cuff. His eyes have their own luminosity, a subtle fire of contempt for humanity. “Then we found you and thought about visiting, just to check on you. But no,” he says, eyes narrowing, “we decided, Son, that this Christmas you’re coming home for the holidays.”

One seems to hear
words of good cheer
from everywhere
filling the air…

Screams from my throat as their hands tear me from the chair. Punctures and scratches raise red, blood welling on my skin as my arms desperately flail through the smoke.

…On on they send
on without end
their joyful tone
to every home …

…songs of good cheer…

Christmas is here.

Cinders scatter onto the carpet as they force me into the fireplace. My head strikes the mantle as I struggle and I slump, blinded with electric pain under the flue. Soot rains softly over my body and blood from my ear trickles down my neck as small, strong hands heave my limp form to the roof above. Hooves pounding. Clattering.

And he laughs. That terrible laugh.

Merry merry merry Christmas…

Merry merry merry Christmas.

Our uniforms are not designed for comfort–special Kevlar, too many Velcro pouches of heavy gear–but the worst is the steel collars we wear to avoid getting fanged. It’s like a clerical collar of metal designed to strangle you and cook your neck at the same time. Mine is pitted from all the bites it has deflected. Our ordnance hasn’t changed for about ten years: Ashwood stakes, garlic in aerosol cans, auto-assault rifles packing silvertip slugs with little crosses embossed on each bullet head. The little crosses still work; virtually none of that other religious claptrap even phases your boneyard-variety vamps, these days. Nights.

We haven’t been able to call them “vampires,” legally, ever since Alucard Vs. the State of California, 1995. Turns out they have the rights of normal human beings, so long as they are “provably alive,” and the courts determined that there was really no applicable difference under law between “living” and “living dead.” That damned attorney, whatsisname, Winter, not only got all the appeals by various churches flushed, but showed that sociologically there was no legal distinction between vampires and homeless people. Think about it. In fact, vampires often preyed upon homeless people, putting them sort of on the rung between gangbangers and East LA bartenders. Well, that lawsuit loosed a real shitstorm in the courts. All of a sudden vampires wanted their rights. Their own language had to be legitimized–Nosferatonics. “Sanguinary Parasitism” took its rightful place alongside Creation Science and Scientology. Social Security was damned near busted out flat.

And we went from being heroic, modern-day Van Helsings to just another bludgeoning bully-arm of the LAPD. As you might imagine, the budget for vamp-smashing pales next to the appropriations for what politicians call the “war” on drugs. Cutbacks savaged us. We had to go to silver plating, for the bullets.

Then tabloid TV shows began stalking our stakeouts to document how we abused vamps. Thankfully that amounted to nothing because our supposed “victims” never registered on videotape, and were invisible in the surveillance photos. We were all acquitted.

Finally we had to eat a bushwhack–an officer was ambushed by a crowd of juvenile vamps, drained like a juice-pak and left hanging upside-down with his eyes removed and limbs broken in front of the Hollywood Station. In broad daylight, not to put to o fine an emphasis on how little they respected us. The news treated us fair because the officer had children. The vamps themselves didn’t look old enough to prosecute as adults even though a couple of them were into triple digits. Public sympathy elevated the profile of our unit, and all of a sudden it was payback time.

We nailed an old-schooler–slicked-back hair, opera cape, the works–living, or unliving, inside a junked hearse in the middle of an auto salvage yard. It was amazing how fast he talked once we set fire to him. He gave us the location of the crypt. We gave him the business end of an assault auto and a full magazine of silvertips right in the face. Our first bag of the work day.

Now, inside the crypt, just shy of dinnertime, my partner Naylor levered back the stone lid of a sarcophagus and shined in his worklight. Man, vamp or no, the occupant was drop-dead gorgeous (she had obviously dropped dead that way) and it seemed a pity to mess her up by driving in the stake. But that was our job.

Naylor shifted the lid further back. “Take a look,” he said, and we all moved in.

She had centerfold boobs too big to be real–gravid, too round, enough flat sternum between them to land a small airplane–just like those lesbian vampiresses in Hammer Films’ more lurid Technicolor melodramas. The kind of tits that looked great in repose, or in a still photo; the kind that would hang crookedly like bags of broken glass if she was moved.

Our unit deployed, each selecting a sleeping target. Weirdly, every vamp in this crypt seemed to be a female with inflated breastworks; a kind of adults-only Vampi-rama. Stake-points were positioned and, at my say-so, the mallets would come down in symphonic synchronization, three whacks each.

“Hit it,” I said.

I never saw what became of my teammates.

Upon penetration came the usual chorus of cheating, hellish howling, the smoke of corruption freed, and the steamy fizzing of the bogus human form you expect when the earthly corpus begins to deliquesce. At least, that was how it was supposed to go, and did not. I saw that my stake, which had sunk firmly, was not jutting up and liberating gouts of blood, but had flopped over and was crumbling like a rotten tooth stump. A million miles from my ears, my guys began screaming.

My hands were dissolving. The smoke from burning flesh was my own. When I inhaled, the corrosive steam began to gobble up my lung tissue.

In human beings, the most metabolically user-friendly kind of breast implant is composed of a plastic bag of saline–salt water. Vamps never had to worry about bodily integrity because they just regenerated when damaged. What they had to worry about was sharp wooden objects being driven into their chests. Therefore, to preserve your own existence, those plastic bags hanging off your front could be filled with a bit more bite than saltwater. Something that could eat a wooden stake in half in four seconds, for example.

I grabbed rearward for my gun but my target swept my feet and was on top of me, shrieking, one full breast dangling, its voided partner still sizzling and smoking, its load discharged. She drove down hard from the shoulders, swinging one of my own wooden stakes dead-bang toward my open mouth, and the last thing I learned was a new meaning for the word implant.

This chariot to hell is a cherry-red ‘68 Caddy convertible, sporting a 390 V-8, with New York plates. Fado bought it on a whim two weeks earlier from a used car dealer outside of Buffalo, opting against the ‘58 Mercury Medalist, passing on the ‘56 Bu ick Roadmaster, sneering at the ‘60 Dart Phoenix convertible, finally settling upon the Cadillac because that was the most American car possible. Fado traded in the rusting Austin Healey he had picked up in Provincetown and paid the dealer the remainder of the Caddy’s price in cash, mostly hundreds with a few twenties sprinkled in like hot peppers in a casserole. The two men drove the Cadillac in a serpentine path through twenty-four states on elaborate errands of compulsion and academia, collecting cha chkies at every stop: a Smokey Robinson air freshener in Detroit and an Al Capone night light in Chicago; vials of holy water shaped like the Virgin; ivory-handled straight razors; shrunken heads; ritual daggers; voodoo dolls. The fuzzy dice were perhaps Senor Fado’s greatest exercise in indiscretion.

Under the front seat the Senor keeps a loaded Czech handgun: He has many enemies, and they do not all possess artistic temperament. Fado’s companion is nineteen, a student at the California Institute of Art. His GPA ranges between 1.9 and 2.6, depen ding on which teacher he’s managed to guilt-trip, seduce, or blackmail. His Chicago family is wealthy, but the boy is outcast from his kin and would be destitute if not for the providence of his great-grandfather’s trust fund, which provides money to a n umbered account by direct-deposit every January — money which the boy then squanders each year before May. Against his families wishes, Andre purchased a one-way courier ticket on KLM in June and made a pilgrimage, straight-razor in hand, to Fado’s loft , where he finally met the Master, whom the boy and his compatriots worship like a god. Now it is September and the boy is accompanying his mentor through the blasted wasteland of the Southwestern United States. The boy has a taste for cocaine and has h ad many lovers. How do I know these things, you ask? Is it a child who asks me this, an infant? This question strikes me as naive; perhaps it is being posed by one who does not watch the evening news. I may be enjoying an avocation, but this is not am ateur hour.

With the radio tuned to Nevada’s only “all-Elvis” station, Fado and the boy ride a 325-horse iron dream-chariot to the land of their destruction, burning rubber on the one-way death trip. Driving through the sandstorm Fado puts his shades on; the boy has never removed his own expensive sunglasses, not even during their stop outside of Mesquite. Andre cuddles up against his lover, softly singing “Just Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” along with the radio. Fado lights an unfiltered Black Lung wit h a death’s-head Zippo and chuckles to himself.

The DJ announces “Viva Las Vegas.” Fado laughs out loud and turns up the radio, singing along as he cruises Las Vegas Boulevard at 15 MPH, the Caddy bathed in the radiant blood and molten gold of the neon lights. Blackjack. Poker. Baccarat. Slots . World’s Most Beautiful Ladies. T-Bone Steak $5.99. Fado bellows incomprehensibly through the parts of the song he can’t remember or can’t properly pronounce; English is, after all, his seventh language.

They find a motel, the Valentine Palace, and Fado arranges for the King’s Suite — which is, luckily, still vacant — at a rate of $499.50 plus local hotel tax. “It is for me and my companion,” Fado says, winking at the desk clerk, a bald man of thir ty or so. The desk clerk returns the wink with a conspiratory laugh, saying “The bed is very large, it has our special vibro-fingers massage, that’s a trademark, you see. And you don’t even have to put in a quarter. The sheets are satin, and the bed and bath are shaped — well, as you would expect them to be in the Valentine Palace.”

Fado and the clerk stare at each other for a frozen, aching, pregnant moment, the clerk’s sweaty upper lip quivering, and then Fado explodes in laughter, cackling maniacally, slapping the desk clerk on the arm. The clerk laughs along nervously with S enor Fado.

“And the room has a stereo?” Fado then asks. “It is not America without rock and roll. My companion and I, we like to play Elvis while we — do it American style!”

Fado is intentionally playing games, as is his idiom. The clerk starts to laugh again, when Andre appears in the doorway. The clerk, his upper lip sweating more than ever, glances back and forth between Fado and his boy. His bald pate turns bright red in a second. Coldly, he says “You’ll find the bed’s massage controls next to the television set.”

“Thank you, Senor,” says Fado unctuously. The clerk hands Fado the key to room 235 and Fado winks at him one last time before leaving, receiving a cold stare as his answer.

The desk clerk has his own secrets to hide. He made his own pilgrimage recently, to Los Angeles, without his young wife’s knowledge or consent. How can I know these things, you ask? How can I track the movements of the reviled Senor Fado — and so many others — with such unflinching attention to detail?

This question seems the musings of an adolescent who has not yet learned to respect things it does not understand. Or a lamb, wailing incoherently on its way to the slaughterhouse, howling the requiem of the small-brained mammal.

Obtaining this knowledge is a simple matter: as simple as the look which passes between the boy Andre and Mario Fado as they retire to the room with the heart-shaped bed and complimentary vibro-fingers massage to enact their ancient and forbidden ritu al.

*****

I am the dream you pray you never have. I am your worst nightmare. I can haunt you in the midnight and come after you with an upraised scythe like Death on a pale horse of information exchange and untraceable neurotoxins. I can turn your credit rat ing into a noose made of fiber-optic cable, knotted securely around your throat. I can reach out from Krakow or Tokyo or Djakarta or Bogota and ensure that you die tonight of natural causes at the very moment your dreams take you, whether you are sixteen or ninety, whether you are a schoolteacher or a drug dealer or the President of the United States. I can start a war in a third-world country for economic reasons, perhaps no more compelling than to ensure an unbroken flow of refugees, and therefore con tinued drug traffic, through an adjacent country. Without effort, I can find out what books you read, what porn videos you rent, your favorite brand of liquor, the dosing schedule of your Prozac prescription. I can track down your place of birth and era se you, with the effort you might use to destroy a mosquito. I can wipe you from society, vaporise your existence, destroy your progeny. I’m the God you have convinced yourself does not exist. I am your father and mother, your lover and friend, your wi fe and husband, your doctor, your priest, your boss, your landlord, bookie. I am nobody, and your reflection.

*****

Andre undresses without emotion. Senor Fado has sprawled himself on the heart-shaped bed, sipping at the coagulated remains of his blue-raspberry slush, into which he’s mixed expensive Finnish vodka. He watches as Andre removes his clothes. Andre s tands naked, perhaps thinking about immortality. Smiling to himself, Senor Fado gestures toward his suitcase. Obediently, Andre retrieves it.

*****

I’m the devil. I’m God. I’m the guy who signs the hall passes from Purgatory. I have hammered down vodka tonics with Nikita Kruschev and puffed Havanas with Fidel. I’ve done lines with Noriega, slung back Harvey Wallbangers with Nixon, shaken hand s with four Kennedys. I’ve traded dirty jokes with Jimmy Hoffa. I’ve shared tequilla and lime with top officials in the PRI and ridden in tanks crossing the border into Afghanistan. World leaders eagerly join the line to accept my unholy communion — f or none shall come to to power except through me, or through one such as me. I’ve dropped viruses into the Pentagon computer and killed little old ladies with piano wire. I’ve started wars and police actions and riots and sold fissionable material and k ilos of heroin for sums which in other contexts would be considered ludicrous. I’ve signed the lease on concentration camps, thrown the switch on more executions than I care to total up. I smile a dark smile when you nervously tell your children I am a myth. You, my friend, you are the myth, for I am the only reality. I am the nightmare that walks and talks, because there are no countries any more.

*****

My connection to the bastard artist Mario Fado is perhaps a matter of some complexity, for there are many more superficially important issues for one such as me to deal with in this age of information. But it is my pleasure — my hobby, might I say? — to indulge in certain avocations. My interest in painting started in early childhood, but I was later compelled by circumstance to abandon such artistic concerns. Perhaps the art teacher who kindly informed me I possessed no talent had something to d o with this, but be sure that I have dealt with that matter in my own definitive fashion. I spent my early years in what was fashionably referred to as the “underground,” learning the language of those who reject and refute all national affiliations in f avor of matters artistic. Though I do possess something which resembles a national origin, I consider myself a citizen of the world. And while it could be suggested that I maintain a native tongue, I long ago learned the language of the rootless cosmopo litan, and I now speak it eloquently.

Do not think that my work in intelligence precluded my having personal concerns. I remained quite interested in the work of various artists affiliated with the countercultural underground. I am not beyond admitting that I was vaguely jealous of them , since my own artistic ambitions had been abandoned. But such emotion has no place in this stage of my life. Mario Fado became, to me, something of an obsession. I was both fascinated and repulsed by his work, and I found him an interesting problem of modern history. For Mario Fado was not the usual sort of artist. Within any given art scene, be it in London or Berlin, Paris or Los Angeles, Hong Kong or Osaka or New York, Mario Fado’s name invariably brought a hush over the conversation, and occasio nally a nervous titter. He was considered the outcast of the art world, though his paintings still drew price tags into the hundreds of thousands from collectors of exotic merchandise all over the world. These collectors invariably purchased Fado’s work through anonymous brokers, since to publicly admit a desire to own Mario Fado’s work would have brought the Senor’s outcast status to the purchaser.

I, however, occupied a different world from other devotees of art — a parallel world, but one illuminated by a darker sun. I did not consider Fado an untouchable — quite the contrary. Through my years of intelligence work, as I learned the languag e of betrayal, I followed Fado’s career in whatever spare time I had. When I left my national agency and went freelance, my powers were vastly increased and my abilities exponentially magnified. This is why I am able to indulge my current obsession. Ma rio Fado is not untouchable. He speaks my language; I speak his. Our hands work identical magics in different realms. Fado and I are the same.

We are brothers.

*****

I get out of the rented black Lincoln, putting my sunglasses on to protect me against the blazing neon of a Las Vegas midnight. I stalk silently down the motel corridor toward Fado’s room. From the pocket of my suit I take a length of piano wire, cu rled luxuriously between two wooden dowels.

*****

I am no longer affiliated with an offical intelligence organization, as you might think. There are methods to get in touch with me, processes by which to seek my services — though I am more selective of my assignments in recent months. But this do es not constitute a bureau or agency as such; more a kaffee klatch. Consider it, then, a federation, an association of friends and acquaintances who share an aesthetic agenda.

*****

Fado’s paintings are like a blight on the art world’s public image. But he has touched the nerve that lies deep inside my soul, and caused my heart to come alive. The fashion in which he creates his nightmare paintings of decay and corruption — it is the same talent with which I paint my works of blood and bone across the canvas of the new world order. But I paint on a bigger canvas than most — bigger, even, than Mario Fado’s. My landscapes are the world you live in.

*****

Fado’s medium, contrary to appearances, is not oil paint, or at least not exclusively. He does not work in acrylic, charcoal, watercolor, pastel. Fado paints in the blood of his victims.

Surely you understand that this is not murder in the traditional sense? For Mario Fado in all cases obtained the explicit consent of his models. And drew their blood with sterile needles and blades, wearing rubber gloves. He took only the blood he needed, mixing it with oil paints, certainly never more than a coffee cup’s worth at a time, usually less. But do you understand what it means to paint with the blood of the living? Fado’s models are invariably young men who worship him — groupies from that same underground of rootless cosmopolitans I used to run with. Is it any surprise, then, that their souls are captured, frozen in the canvas on which Senor Fado paints? And that in that moment when Fado deserts them upon completion of his blood pa inting, their despair is absolute?

*****

Fado has completed twelve in this series, and is at work on the thirteenth — it will be Andre’s portrait. It will be completed in transit, for Fado imagines that such a work will be somehow more aesthetically pleasing — I do not imagine that my ref erence to “rootless cosmopolitans” would elude Senor Fado. There are twelve Fado Blood Paintings, and twelve soulless corpses, each boy a suicide.

*****

Inside the King’s Suite at the Valentine Palace, Fado is hard at work. Andre is sprawled on the heart-shaped bed, his flesh opened and the front of his naked body slick with blood. I pause outside to contemplate the fate of my brother, and to smoke an unfiltered Black Lung.

*****

You can speculate, if you like. I suppose it is quite possible that it is my dalliance with Martin, a twenty-two year old boy who found himself (after his affair with me) one of Fado’s “models,” that drives me to take this action. But it is not cras s revenge that I seek. I am not a jealous lover. Martin’s suicide was a beautiful act in itself, and I can appreciate Fado’s part in it. And likewise, there is a final portrait to be painted, with the blood of a man who has far more talent than I. Do you not understand what it means to paint with the blood of the living?

For one such as Fado, it means the clever theft of the victim’s soul. And for his victims — excuse me, “models” — it means inevitable suicide, for who, even in this age without nations in which I am the only God, can live without a soul?

*****

Perhaps the boy’s ghost does haunt that painting, for it obsesses me, there in the darkness of the hallway, as I contemplate the surgical strike I am about to execute. It is as if the painting is that of a ghost. I can see Martin’s joyless face, wit h the signature across his throat:

“Fado.”

It is time for me to sign my name on another, less willing, throat.

*****

I have killed, and I will kill again. But for your sake, much more than for mine, do not consider me a murderer. I am an art critic.

*****

As I approach the door, I hear a scream. It is Fado. There are three shots. The boy’s scream mingles with Fado’s in a macabre sonata. Pulling the handgun from its place at my belt, I blow the lock, kick the door open through the cloud of smoke. I point the gun at Fado. Do fools never differ? Has someone come to claim Fado’s soul before I can?

The boy, Andre, is cowering in the corner, his front covered in blood. Fado’s oil paints have been splattered across the heart-shaped bed. Fado himself is sprawled on the red velvet bedcover, the vibro-fingers massage suddenly activated, his lifeles s body jiggling obscenely. The pistol hangs limp in his fingers.

On his face is a look of indescribable terror — and his body appears dessicated, utterly.

The radio is playing “Love Me Tender.” Above the headboard a black velvetKing weeps a single crystal tear. Andre looks up at me, weeping, choking back his sobs, tears mingling with the blood down his front.

It is as I suspected. Someone has beaten me to the punch, has taken the life of Mario Fado. He or she has exacted a more complete form of art criticism from Fado’s helpless body than even I would have been capable of. The walls of the King’s Suite are covered with angled mirrors, reflecting the carnage into a sanguine and pornographic infinity. I lift my pistol, point it at Andre, for he has seen my face.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I say to no one, or to my reflection. “And Viva Las Vegas.”

I pause.

It is doubtless Fado’s taste in men. He always selects the same sort as lovers and models. But it is stunning — the resemblance between my erstwhile lover Martin and this boy Andre. I would almost think. . . . .

But it is the first rule of wetwork that you do not allow a pretty face to give you pause. I thumb off the safety.

*****

Back in the black Lincoln, taking the onramp to 15, I chain smoke and consider the experience. The things that occurred do not seem possible. I will follow my original plan. I will take Interstate 15 to Salt Lake City, abandon the car, purchase a p lane ticket back to Amsterdam. The events at the Valentine Palace do not affect my plans, but they will doubtless haunt my dreams.

I am not normally inclined toward judgments of fact or fantasy, preferring to leave that sort of deliberation to men with advanced degrees and nothing better to do. But my mind keeps returning to the moment when I first saw Fado on the bed, without a single cut in his flesh, and the moment when I regarded the boy I was about to kill. It is not possible that I saw Martin’s face reflected in that of Andre, and yet I did something I would have thought impossible: I let the boy live.

The face I saw in the hotel room was not that of a ghost. But I cannot shake the feeling that Martin was there with his brothers at the Valentine Palace, wreaking their horrible revenge.

*****

How can I know this thing, you ask? You are a dog, a simpleton, a beast. I am well acquainted with the time it takes to draw blood from the human body in any kind of an organized fashion. It could certainly have been Martin’s — excuse me, Andre’s — blood I saw painting the wall above Mario Fado’s lifeless body on the heart-shaped bed. But some artistic instinct tells me it was not. It was Fado’s.

How else would the aesthete’s desire be satisfied? Fado’s lovers were art students, after all, doomed by Fado’s actions never to become mature artists. Is it not possible that the creative need within their souls matured without bodies, wandering th e corridors of the afterlife? The word painted on that wall makes it clear. This was not an act of corporeal revenge, for who among the living would have such a twisted sense of humor? Present company excepted, of course. Graffiti serves as a tool of dissent or protest, when other tools are unavailable. And this graffiti was certainly a compelling protest. I will repeat that word over and over again in my sleepless nights, as I have done for many years. I will see it written in blood until the end o f my days:

Fado.

*****

Across the heartless desert, Nevada’s only all-Elvis station plays “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” and “Blue Hawaii” and “Mystery Train” and “Burning Love” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” I listen to the morning news, waiting for a story on the kill ing. Nothing. Perhaps this country is not ready to hear news of the real world. All the better for me.

*****

My talent as an artist has been questioned before. It is therefore appropriate that this most important work was not executed by my hand. With my tools I have drawn the many faces of death, but the final portrait of Mario Fado was left to those who knew him best. For such a thing — I think you will agree — is a work of the greatest possible intimacy.

*****

The desert sands rain upon my car like a plague of locusts. Dawn weeps blood across the morning sky. The radio plays “Don’t Be Cruel.” I light an unfiltered Black Lung and turn on the windshield wipers.

“Fucking cold, man,” he muttered, shivering as he held himself in the chill. He shifted against the urine-spattered cement wall and leaned back against a gang tag sprayed in white paint. Something small and hard pressed into his ass from the bottom of his back pants pocket. Jonathan extracted it: a small tube of Barges glue. Kiro’s sister owned and ran a designer shoe shop on Dayton in Beverly Hills. He must have swiped this nasty-smelling shit from there.

The party. It started in Bel Air and ended somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, nothing any sane Los Angeles boy would be at, unless he was the son of a big-assed industry financier. Backed two goddamn Oscar nominees. Jonathan rolled the glue tube between his fingers – a cheap high, a cheaper laugh at his expense – then tossed it aside. “Happy fucking birthday to me,” Jonathan exhaled, rubbing his stubble-shaded jaw as he stared into the shadows across from him.

“It’s your birthday?” the old woman whispered, sniffling. Bright moonlight explored the darkness between them as clouds parted above, molding shapes against the wall. “How old are you?”

Jonathan stared harder at the layers of gray draped over the opposing wall, movements flitting beneath like tricks of the eyes. “And you care because…?” he asked gruffly.

“It’s a full moon. And when your birthday falls on a full moon…” Her voice diminished under the roar of a passing car. When it passed, she resumed more firmly, “Are you well?”

“Oh, yeah, I feel great!” he grumbled sarcastically, holding his stomach as he tasted cloves and hops in his bile. He coughed, mucus rattling in his chest. Soon, the shakes would start, with a blinding headache searing his temples.

“I took care of one like you, once.”

Memories flooded his haze: kindergarten vandalism, stealing from his German father’s wallet in third grade, beating Karen Warner’s little brother until he bled for his insults and cried in the hallway for his crippled sister…

Jonathan is a special needs child, the counselor had explained. Let us help him –

“I doubt that, lady,” Jonathan replied under his breath, shaking his head.

“I did,” she insisted quietly. “He was younger, of course. But just as stubborn. I took care of children long before I came here like everyone else…”

Jonathan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Against the far wall, nested the mass of shadow from before, but nothing rested against the concrete. Only –

“…to be someone,” she hissed in his ear.

Jonathan turned suddenly to the left, startled that she sat beside him only a few feet away. So strung out can’t even hear goddamn straight. But he saw her more clearly now: a ratted wool blanket pulled around her frail shoulders, a rat-chewed rain cap with an upturned brim over a wiry nest of gray hairs, and thread-worn Nikes torn and crumbling at the spongy rubber soles. Her eyes glimmered faintly, surrounded by a landscape of leathery skin baked under the eye of the Los Angeles sun. Weathered beauty remained in the slope of her nose and the rise in her cheekbone. She rested one withered arm over an enormous bundle on the far side of her.

“Oh, I was already someone, actually, a very great someone. I even had this wonderful lover – he was a street performer and artist, and had many other more humble occupations, some involving cinder. Anyway, he told me that my vanity would catch up with me one day and it did. I wanted to be even bigger. So, when they wanted to tell the story of my life, I came here.” Her face darkened a shade as she lowered her voice. “But I was nasty, a real…bitch.” She wrinkled her already wrinkly nose and smiled to herself at the word; she seemed delighted to call herself such. “But they didn’t want that, you see. So even though my biographer had copiously documented everything, including my personality, the studio changed it. They made me sweet and caring. Soft-spoken, even. Oh, they loved me at first, got what they wanted, then they discarded me…spit-spot.” Her voice cracking, she sobbed and wiped her nose on a rag.

Jonathan squinted. “What did you say?”

“They discarded me — ”

“No,” he interrupted. “That phrase.” He squinted again, then exhaled loudly with pain, slumping against the concrete. Jonathan frowned – the phrase, the lilt in her voice. “You English?”

Silence.

“My mother was English,” he finished, unsettled by the emptiness between them. The heroin, the booze that night – all sedatives against that simple statement. This night of nights.

An icy cramp crept up Jonathan’s legs and into his stomach, chilling him from the inside where the heroin had kept him sweetly warm. Jonathan sat as still as he could, holding himself tighter to keep the ache at bay. He thought of his father, who had squelched Jonathan’s acting aspirations early in high school. This industry chews you up and spits you out, he’d always say. “So, you some actress or something?” Jonathan asked, hoping her answer would distract him from the physical onslaught.

“Me? Oh, no,” she tittered sadly. “No. I just love children. They’d send me in for the naughty ones. The ones who wouldn’t behave…” She hesitated, then gave Jonathan a tender look. “Your mother was English? You mean, she’s not…with us…any more?”

Closing his eyes, Jonathan felt wet grass against his knees like yesterday, sinking into the lawn by her headstone. Fists beating green blades. Hiding in the mausoleum until his uncle found him sleeping under a stained glass window, face red with grief…

“Shut up!” he snapped, half crazed at the old woman and his raw mind for availing itself so readily to imagery so painful. Then, more gently, “I don’t like to talk about that.” A mild throbbing touched his temples. It hadn’t happened that long ago, after all.

After a long while, the old woman shifted in the gravel and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, then continued, already well on her own mental journey, a gravel path worn smooth by her heart’s many pilgrimages. “My favorite part about the children, you see, was helping them understand there was something greater. If a child believes in something greater, something…fantastic,” she said at last, “he’ll behave. I’d turn them around, I would.”

Jonathan smoldered. Behave. That’s all those sorry assholes ever tried to make him do. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about kids!” he snarled. “Sometimes they just wanna be left alone, you know?”

“But you’ve been alone for some time…haven’t you?”

Silence.

Jonathan’s gaze wandered blearily down the dry cement walkway. Cars used to cross the overpass above him, he guessed, but not any longer. He had no idea where he was, probably somewhere in Inglewood. Dumped his ass far away from help or home, The Offspring howling from the Aiwa stereo in their convertible BMW. Consciousness wavering…

And it feels, and it feels like heaven is so far away…triple ice cream scoops, tonsils need new Spiderman jammies, picking me up at Grandma’s, left Where the Wild Things Are at the beach, Cookie monster hugs, I love you…and I ran… pictures that still glow faintly from the celluloid streets …but black roses and hail Mary’s can’t bring back what’s taken from me…

“It doesn’t have to hurt forever.”

Tears ran down his cheek. He lay on the ground now, curled tightly in the fetal position, head on his arm. The old woman watched him from the shadows compassionately, like a grandmother checking her feverish child in the middle of the night. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at him like that. Jonathan pushed himself up hard, spitting on the ground. His chest suddenly bloating with a heated heaviness, he gazed up at the old woman, wishing for a piece of her. A little piece of that which was mother, magic, a small blessing in his hand… “If they loved you so much, how come you became a piece of shit?” With a pang of guilt, he realized what a jerk he must sound like. Jeezus, listen to yourself. Don’t be such an asshole. Rich kid. Homeless woman. Have a heart or something. “I mean…you know. Didn’t you get a piece of the action?” he continued more thoughtfully. “What happened?”

Her bottom lip trembled. “Oh, it’s a terrible story. And it wouldn’t have become so dreadful if they hadn’t broken my…umbrella.” She turned away from him and unwrapped her bundle, revealing a black plastic garbage bag bulging with her worldly possessions. “It’s not the sort of thing one can…repair…on one’s own…for certain reasons…” Her whole face quivered and puckered as she spoke, eyes shifting quickly from Jonathan to her bag. Jonathan craned his neck with childlike curiosity as the big inky maw of the bag opened and she withdrew a tattered black umbrella. Long strips of threaded black cloth hung slack from a wooden frame. A precious antique. Jonathan knew nothing about antiques, but he knew this thing was old. “Look.” She leaned toward him, offering him the handle. Rot wafted from her nearly toothless mouth and her eyes gleamed giddily in the moonlight like beads of water on a leaf. “They broke it.”

Jonathan couldn’t see anything except the jagged end of the wooden umbrella handle pointed straight at his face. The giddiness in her stare made him uneasy. “Yup. It’s broken all right,” he announced, edging away.

The old woman laid the broken umbrella across her lap. Digging in the black plastic, she brought up a round piece of jagged wood. Gazing miserably at the lump in her hand, she spoke to it. “You deserved better. Really you did. And I wish I could have helped you. But without you…I’m nothing.” She dabbed at the wood with her rag, shaking her head sadly. She then held out the lump of wood to Jonathan. “I remember that day like it was yesterday. When I protested and threatened them for misrepresenting me, they said they didn’t need me anymore. They took my umbrella…and broke Polly.” Her voice cracked with the last. Tears welled in her eyes as her lip trembled again.

As he peered into her outstretched hand, Jonathan noted with great surprise that the round piece of mahogany wood had been carefully carved into an extraordinary parrot’s head. He took the parrot’s head from her and examined it in the moonlight. Beak, eyes, fine feathers all masterfully coaxed from the wood with life-like precision – except for the neck, which was splintered. “It’s nice,” he said, far more awed than he expressed. The parrot’s head felt warm and heavy. He imagined it was once an impressive handle. “That’s harsh, man. Why do people hafta do shit like that?” he said, carefully placing the parrot’s head into her outstretched hands.

She peered at him with innocent granny eyes and said, “Because they’re fuckpigs.”

Jonathan grinned widely, completely surprised by her profanity, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest crescendoing to a rosy roar. The laughter shook him hard, tears leaking out of his squinted eyes as he rolled onto the ground…

…but nothing met his shoulder except cold air. Jonathan didn’t care, didn’t notice, didn’t stop laughing. The gnawing stomach pains evaporated. His whole body trembled with joy as he rose higher, arms and legs flailing against the shadows. Jonathan opened his eyes to find himself rising upwards under the grimy underbelly of the overpass. His mouth gaped as he threw the old woman a stunned look.

“Ah, look!” the old woman tittered proudly. “That’s what happens when your birthday falls on a full moon!”

Ecstatic, Jonathan howled maniacally with his arms outstretched like Superman. Tumbling and turning he hooted, making shushing noises. “Look at me! Shit, look at me! This is…this is heaven, man!” was all he could say. “Pure fucking heaven! Woohoooo!”

Suddenly, the rumble of police helicopter blades swept the overpass from above and light abruptly flooded over them – a routine check for drug trafficking. Strong gusts pummeled the ground, throwing dust against the walls and Jonathan’s suspended form. “Shit!” Heart pounding, Jonathan sunk to the concrete as he ran mid-air. Newspaper headline: COPS CATCH FREAKY WHITE BOY SUSPENDED IN AIR DURING ROUTINE DRUG SWEEP. His boots struck the ground and he stumbled as he noticed the old woman: she’d drawn the dark woolen blanket over her head. So still, she looked lifeless and forgettable. Black rags, trash under shadow…

Jonathan’s heart swelled with sadness. Inspired beyond his 19 years, he scrambled in the stirring dust and retreating search light, beating the concrete with his palms until he found what he was looking for. Quiet moonlight reclaimed the walkway as he knelt beside the mound of woolen blanket. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he began politely, “but can I see your umbrella again? And…um…Polly?”

Darkened granny eyes gleamed suspiciously between the folds of blanket. “What for?”

“Look, I’m trying to do something nice for ya,” Jonathan said. “Don’t turn into a psycho paranoid mumbler on me, okay? I’ve had a weird night.”

Obediently, the old woman withdrew the umbrella and parrot head from her black plastic bag. Jonathan took them reverently and, uncapping the Barges, deftly and effectively repaired the splintered break. When he finished, he handed the whole umbrella to the stunned woman.

For several moments they sat there together, unspoken gratitude hanging in the air like burning sigils between them. Craving a cigarette and a hot shower, Jonathan stretched his weary legs out along the walkway, propping his head on his arm. Sleep gently laid a hand on his cheek and soon he dreamt vaguely that the helicopter returned, blades whipping cool winds over his skin as it rose into the clouds…

*******

Sprawled on the concrete, Jonathan didn’t wake until sunlight warmed his brow. Sharp pains stung his bones from sleeping so awkwardly. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands. With a thudding heart, he glanced to his left at the abandoned walkway. As he sat up, hand on the wall for balance, something small crunched underfoot: the tube of Barges. He picked it up and rolled the crushed flat tube between his fingers. The cap was missing. Such a fuckin’ dope whore, he thought miserably. He’d fallen to new lows. Fuckin’ glue-induced nightmares. As he’d suspected all along…

He stood unsteadily and, as he leaned against the wall, his nose nearly brushed foil stuck to the concrete at eye level: a chocolate bar wrapper covered with marking pen writing. Surprised, he tugged the note from the wall, leaving two small fuzzy glue spots that reeked faintly of Barges on the cool cement. And he read it:

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for fixing my umbrella. Now that it’s restored, I am myself again and shall settle accounts. I understand that Walt is dead. But there are others…

Au revoir,

Mary

Jonathan grinned. “Hey, I never told her who I was. How’d she — ?”

Silence.

Profound silence.

He folded the foil note reverently as he wandered eagerly into the Los Angeles morning.

Gradually, each street had mutated into a warren of such apartment buildings, chockablock, of equal height, in differing colors, as the few remaining houses were systematically leveraged and eliminated. Generally, anyone could score an equal-opportunity apartment with a splendid bathroom window’s view of someone else’s bathroom window, about ten feet away, on the next lot. Very few houses held out–mostly older residents, subsisting on Social Security, paying low property taxes and seasonally fending off ever-more-lavish offers from the developers who never stop needing to swallow up that last square foot of unexploited ground. Usually the old residents cave in for the money, or die, at which point their heirs cave in for the money. Nail any of their offspring on the street after the realty sign goes up and you’ll usually hear a tale of woe about how they don’t wish to sell but “have to” because of debts, or other responsibilities they’ve averred. It’s not the sale I mind, it’s the attitude. There goes the neighborhood. Then guys like me move in because they can’t afford anything better.

Munster Drive was not a proper drive, more an avenue, named after some forgotten city father or local booster who had no idea his name and memory would be completely overridden by a hysterically bad television show. The residence featuring the garage sale was one of only two bonafide houses left on the block, in an honest-to-cinderblock garage, packed to the rafters with old furniture and dusty cardboard boxes. A vague, antique-shop smell hinted that there was at least one abandoned rodent nest, somewhere way in the back. A terminally bored thirteen-year-old girl was doing her best to beat a Gameboy. She was sitting on a metal folding chair and wearing gigantic shoes with five-inch-thick rubber soles. Her hair was lank and streaky blonde, there was a minor skirmish of microdot pimples on her forehead, and her attitude broadcast that she was dying for some stranger to notice her nipples so she could tear into a him with choice, properly outraged invective. She popped her gum as a way of acknowledging my presence; she was good enough at that skill to produce a sound like a small-caliber gunshot in the confined acoustics of the garage.

“Hi there.”

“Hi.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

She rolled her eyes, stark eyes, the kind of frank brown that look really smart with blonde hair. Was I an idiot? Was she sitting here, obviously under duress and protest, for her health? Couldn’t I read the goddamned sign? She crashed into some sort of scoring crisis on the Gameboy, which began emitting distressing little noises, and gave up on attacking me for ruining her afternoon. She inclined her head to indicate I could enter the musty darkness. “Whatever.” Then she vanished into the game.

Old kitchenware. A blender that would look attractively retro if it were polished and the cord replaced. A crippled rocker, much scarred, probably broken by the growth of one or several kids. Maybe the gum-popper had climbed on this chair as a tot. Maybe she could smile. A vanity with no mirror and a missing drawer was haphazardly piled with books. The books weren’t arranged or turned spine-out so the titles were perceivable; most bargain-hunters who had ventured this deeply into the garage had been more interested in the vanity.

It was a sight you used to see in used book emporiums: Haphazard interbreeds of cheap book club editions and savaged paperbacks; bargain reprints of public domain masterworks in their billionth printing; jacketless hardcovers, runaway library copies, outdated dictionaries, useless travel guides. In every stack, everywhere in the world, at least one copy of last year’s best-selling blockbuster. I picked up one. It was a paperback with a spine four inches thick. It still smelled the way paper mills do, which isn’t pleasant. Some of the older books scattered in front of me smelled differently.

Because certain vintages exude specific bouquets, it is possible to become a connoisseur of books. Foxed paper can possess pedigree. And those hiding, deep within the convolutions of their brains, the secret love, the almost-forbidden passion for books, can sometimes rely on dead reckoning, on the magnetism books provide for those who pause to be attracted. It’s like a spiritual divining rod at the moment it selects a direction. Bingo–a little red paperback spine declared itself to my eye.

It was a copy of a Ray Bradbury book that had come out more than thirty years ago, part of a uniform reissue of Bradbury’s work. Golden Apples of the Sun. It looked like it had survived a bombing. It looked like an orphan. It looked like it wanted to go with me.

Most of my personal library had bitten the street years earlier, in a charming bureaucratic tragedy I like to call the Great Shitcanning. It involved credit card numbers and the storage locker into which I had filed too much of my life for far too long. By the time I learned that the locker was no longer under my name, and its contents had gone for landfill or used-store credit at the hands of employees unknown and untraceable, management of the storage establishment had rotated its usual five or six times and the misdeed was buried in ancient history, which was to say, more than one year ago. Along with my clothes, which had become moth-riddled, and my kitchenware, which had become obsolete, and my desk, which had grown senile from rot, had gone all of my books. I had put them where they could remain safe until I could decide about new living arrangements in another state, and they had been mugged en masse while I was out of reach. To rebuild was impractical, out of the question, absurd. I had already invested effort and love into the books which had died, or been executed, and my heart just wasn’t into the idea of recapture until I opened one of those books at the garage sale and the smell hit me.

The trim edge of the ravaged Bradbury was so soft that it invited my thumb to ruffle the pages. It felt worn-in and comfortable. It appealed directly to the tactile centers of my brain.

“How much for this?” I held up the book.

The young miss squinted sourly at it. “A penny.”

It had to be a trick. “You mean a penny, as in one cent?” I could go on about coppers and Lincoln heads, but that would make me a geek trying lamely to play suave, or worse, a grownup trying to dazzle her.

“You got it.”

“One single penny?”

“Including tax. The whole box cost us like a dollar, so it’s no big.” Her eye lent the book in my hand what I could only call less than half of a once-over.

I guessed she meant a whole box of books, which had found their way to a pile on the vanity back there in the darkness. “God, I don’t even know if I have a penny. People who have to give you four cents in change usually just throw you a nickel.”

“Yep, or you leave ‘em in those little bins by the cash register, you know–if you have one, leave one, and if you need one, take one.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can still buy for a penny.”

“You can buy that book.”

“Sold.” There was exactly one penny among all the change clogging up my pocket. Perhaps it had found its way there for a reason. All my life I have preferred to believe minor superstitions like that, trusting in their reliability and basic harmlessness. I’d picked a penny from the sidewalk just yesterday. Perhaps this one.

She dropped the penny into a bustle of bills and change rattling around inside of a cigar box. I thanked her but she said nothing else.

Back inside my apartment, third floor, with a “balcony” about the size of placemat providing a splendid view of the building across the street, I got myself a drink, sat down with the paperback, and finished reading it cover to cover in less time than it would take to watch a movie. Sometimes, when you’re starving, you eat like a goat.

I work as a traveling senior process engineer for a company you’ve never heard of called CortCom. I work with a lot of people who possess a pile of important physics degrees, and basically we make sure the metal plating process for microchips works the way it’s supposed to. If you’ve ever been near a computer, home or otherwise, CortCom is a big invisible part of your life. Most of the books I see these days are tech manuals, or bindered report folios. Not until I sat down with the paperback from the garage sale did I stop to realize I’d pretty much given up reading for pleasure–with the usual excuses involving too little time and too many things on screens, begging my notice.

This is difficult to explain rationally. I fell into that little book. I was engulfed by it. It was like an old film I’d seen of a writer, actually writing. The film had been digitally enhanced and colorized, but it was clear that it had originally been in black and white, and shot on actual film stock. Someone long ago had decided to make a movie of a writer at work. Big mistake. In nearly ten minutes of footage, the writer types out maybe a single line on his old manual typewriter. The rest of the time, he sits with his back mostly to the camera, staring at a blank sheet of paper rolled into the machine. The fancified version I saw was a download from some now-forgotten website, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was the most boring waste of time I’d ever endured. But it got saved to one of my desktops and eventually I watched it again. And it got more interesting, the more I watched it.

The writer is a guy about 30 (I guess), wearing a white dress shirt several sizes too big, but tucked in and belted as if that was the fashion and not merely a haberdashery mistake. The way the shirt moves and drapes, you can tell it’s hot in the room. The light is a single incandescent bulb in a hooded gooseneck lamp, very noirish, harsh enough to form an occasional hot spot in one corner of the frame. The man is smoking as he works. Rather, he’s not smoking. His cigarette burns in the ashtray the whole time he’s staring at the paper. The man–the writer–gets perhaps one puff off it before it’s dead.

He stares at that empty page, seeing something I cannot. It has absorbed him, and elapsed time means nothing except the slow, sinuous meandering of smoke toward the ceiling. No cursor prompts him. What he does, with little motion, with exacting concentration, is burn up enough energy to pop a sweat on his brow. It’s not just the heat. I can sense the closeness of that room, and wonder where it is, or was. What you might see if you looked out his window.

It’s not a commercial film; no brand names or product placement are visible. If this were done today it would be simple enough to optically insert the right merchandise in the right places, so the idea of this film is not to sell anything. The frame for the image itself referenced an internet link that no longer existed.

There’s a calendar on the wall in front of the writer, to the left, but the data is indistinct. The picture on it was a cityscape at night, too vague for me to tell exactly which city. I blew up the image and tinkered with the playback for clarity, and still couldn’t read the calendar. I sort of began to wish I had that calendar, which you could tell had become like a tiny window for the writer. When he wasn’t gazing into the blank whiteness of the paper, he was looking at the calendar, abstracting into the picture there, maybe imagining himself somewhere else. That was when he took the only useful drag on his smoke. He holds it in a long time, perhaps pretending that the night skyline he sees is right outside his tiny room, maybe trying to pick out stars against the urban upglow. The smoke trails out of him contemplatively. Could be a city he once lived in, or aspired to.

Sometimes I wished, more than anything, that I could read the line this mysterious, unidentified character finally decided to write. That longing, that unexpected and unexplainable emotion, was similar to what I felt not as I was reading the paperback I’d just bought, but after I had finished it. I put it on the mantel for my fake fireplace. It looked absurd, like an armoire holding up a single inadequate book. I returned to the garage sale the next day.

I did not take the book whose blurb proclaimed it to be by the best-selling writer of suspense in all history; I tried later to find that author’s name on a database and all my searches returned zero hits. I wanted the orphans, the obscure and lost books, and eventually selected a weak-spined Book Club edition of a novel titled Mad Horizon, by L. Clark Stevens.

It cost exactly one penny.

The chair was now occupied by a young boy, eleven-ish, who made it abundantly clear that removing his headphones to speak to me was a nuisance.

“Are all the books a penny?”

“I guess.”

“Where’s the girl who was here yesterday?”

“Keisha?”

“Is that her name?”

“What do you want to know for?” He narrowed his eyes; they were the same color as his big sister’s. “She’s probably off getting pregnant or something.”

“Why are the books only a penny?”

“Because that’s what they cost.” He rolled his eyes.

“That’s what they cost you, or that’s what you’re charging for them?”

“Can I help you?” A new voice joined us, in a stern tone that indicated annoyance, possible danger flags, and that help was a dishonest word to use. The woman who interceded had to be the mom; she fulfilled no other stereotype.

“I was just asking your son why the books only cost a penny.”

Now her eyes narrowed. They were algae green, and stormy with suspicion. “What makes you think he’s my son?”

I tried to force a conciliatory smile and it felt like fish-hooks, reeling my lips back, all bloody. “I was just curious about the price.”

Mom held her distance. She had a very militarized concept of personal space. I swore that she was preparing to say, why were you curious, but instead she looked around, as though assuring herself this was no ambush, or a big gag featuring hidden cameras, then spoke more personally, less like a tape cartridge was madly spooling off fight-or-flight responses inside her skull. With a dramatic sigh, she said, “Them books are a penny because Keisha asked me what to charge for them, and I didn’t have no idea so I says, just charge a penny because nobody’ll want them anyway. Hell, I just put them back there to make that vanity look more, you know, attractive.”

“You didn’t think that was a real bargain price?”

She watched me, sidelong, like a creature of cold blood fancying a strike. “No, I didn’t think that,” she said. “Who reads?”

I read Mad Horizon all at once. When I noticed my TV screen was dusty, around midnight, I laughed out loud.

The following day being Monday, the sale signs vanished and the garage was padlocked when I walked past it. On sheer impulse I decided to knock on the door and make a pre-emptive offer to take all the remaining books off Mom’s hands. Through burglary bars, an aluminum-framed door window, a dirty screen, and even dirtier scalloped drapes, I saw the kid from the previous day recognize me. Instead of answering the door he ran to fetch Mom. She stayed fortressed inside even though she recognized me, too.

“Now, what could you possibly want?”

“I thought I’d stop by and ask about the rest of those books in the garage. If it’s not any trouble–”

She overrode me. “Mister, don’t come around here. I ain’t got the time and I don’t want to talk to you.” Her eyes were distressed, as though the world had horsewhipped her one time beyond the day’s limit, or perhaps she had merely lost the remote control to her TV. She wheeled and stomped off as though I was a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s the kind of rude you expect in the city.

The boy was watching me from a side window. When I turned to look back at him, he vanished behind Venetian blinds. When I had walked to the entryway of my building, I glanced back and caught him standing on the sidewalk, still staring. He lit into his house.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I could catch him or the girl, Keisha, outdoors and out from under Mom’s fascist umbrella of influence. Most likely, the entire remaining pile of books could be obtained for free, or a pittance.

I did some work at the desk but my heart wasn’t really in it. The little icon for the strange playback of the writer, writing, beckoned. I decided to re-read a little of the Bradbury when I was buzzed from downstairs by someone identifying himself as Detective Weinstein, who showed up at my door moments later in the company of a uniformed officer. He asked if I’d mind a brief interview.

All of this struck me as weirdly, unnecessarily formal. Every cop in the city possessed a code card that would grant them instant access to buildings like mine, and since all the gun control hysteria the police had rarely had to ask permission to do anything. The first place I had ever seen cops wearing the exterior body armor–that is, outside the blouses–had been in Mexico City, but it was a fashion the LAPD was born to love. The armor came with all sorts of rigid little nylon pockets and tabs and slots for pens and cuffs and a special badge-mount and snaps to support the standard-issue sidearm belt, which pulled a lot of weight off the policeman’s waist.

Detective Weinstein’s gaze went directly to the paperback in my hand. “Doing a bit of reading?”

I shrugged. “That’s not a crime, yet, right?” I forgot, as most thoughtless people do, that levity with the police is always a rotten idea.

“Lady up the street says her daughter is missing.”

“Would that be a girl named Keisha?”

“Now, how would you know that? The mother gave her name as Victoria Jasmine Marina Wilson.”

“The girl told me her name was Keisha.”

Weinstein strolled over to my so-called balcony, leaned out, and pointed. “See that house?”

It was the garage sale house. “Is that where Mrs. Wilson lives? I didn’t know her name.”

“She sure seems to know you.”

“I don’t see how. Other than being amazingly rude to me.”

“Mrs. Wilson thinks that you may know something about the disappearance of her daughter. She directed us to this address.”

With the help of her piggy-eyed son, I thought.

The officer, whose nameplate read Sternberg, held up the copy of Mad Horizon from my fake fireplace mantel. “Here’s another one.”

“Video it,” said Weinstein. He pointed to the book in my hand. “This, too.” Sternberg recorded images with a little hand-held camera. Weinstein squinted at the cover illustration. “Guy looks like the Devil. And what’s Mad Horizon? Sure doesn’t sound like a bestseller.”

“You actually read this shit?” said Sternberg, replacing the other book as though it might have slimed his glove.

The need to be alone, and free of these two, rocked me like the wave of disorientation that slaps a drunk who tries to stand after one too many. No sane person wants the scrutiny of the police on them for any reason. I tried to steer this abrupt little nightmare back toward rational thought. “Okay, let me just get this in focus: Mrs. Wilson finds her daughter has taken off and she aims you guys at me.”

“You were seen talking to the daughter day before yesterday. You returned the following day, and again this afternoon. Why?”

“I got these books at a garage sale at that very house. I went back to see if I could get the rest of the books since the sale was only over the weekend.”

“You went there three days in a row to get books, and you didn’t even know which books?” The acid in his tone could have dissolved a tooth in a glass, overnight. “Pardon me if I say that sounds incredibly lame.” To Sternberg, he said, “Did you see any books at Mrs. Wilson’s?”

“No sir.”

“They’re in the garage,” I said.

“We looked in the garage,” Weinstein came back. “Zero books.”

“Well, then, she got rid of whatever didn’t sell.”

“Got rid of them how? Books like these, nobody would buy, so how come we didn’t find them in the garage, as you say?”

This was getting frustrating on a level that transcended mere aggravation. “Are you looking for books, or for Keisha?”

“Why do you keep calling her that?”

“Because that’s what she told me her name was.”

“You two seem to have had quite an intimate little conversation. Did you touch her or initiate any form of improper physical contact?”

“No, I–”

“Did you proposition her or make any sort of lewd commentary?”

Sternberg muttered into the mike Velcroed to his shoulder and came back with, “Couple of jaywalking pops, one arrest when he couldn’t produce proper ID.” I realized he was talking about my record.

“Look, I don’t know what this crazy woman told you, but I saw the girl once. I bought this book. The next day her brother mentioned that ‘maybe she went off to get pregnant or something.’”

“That’s a peculiar thing to remember.”

“That’s why I remembered it.”

“Sure it’s not like a fantasy you had, about getting her pregnant, maybe?”

“You’re the one having the fantasy,” I said, forgetting that where humor is a bad idea, sarcasm is a catastrophe.

Weinstein’s eyes went flat and metallic. “You better watch your fucking mouth.”

“Sir,” Sternberg said. “Better have a look at this.” He was standing next to my computer. He had already clicked on the little image of the writer, writing. I kept my lip zipped with the expected line about private papers; Weinstein would no doubt ask, what papers?

Instead he just stared as though witnessing a live donkey act. “Now what the hell is this supposed to mean?” He swiveled his scorn toward me. “What, do you jerk off to this?”

Sternberg held up one of my business cards. “He’s some kind of tech guy.”

“Oh, outstanding.” Weinstein rolled his eyes. “Some internet pervert. Here we got a local weirdo with a clear view of the subject residence, ritually repeated contact at the same time every day, a house full of books and some sick shit on the computer. Log it as a speed bench warrant and search this dump and I bet you find a pair of binoculars and some porno.” He dropped both the books from the garage sale into a plastic evidence bag whipped from of some inner pocket, like a magic handkerchief.

Sternberg collected my wrists and I heard cuffs jangle. Brusquely.

“You get to take a ride with us,” said Weinstein. “Seem more like a fantasy, now? You’re not going to make any more comments about how you know your rights, or how you pay my salary?”

When the cuffs were snapped, I knew what I thought, and what I might have said.

“Want to know what part of your story sucks?” Weinstein continued as I was hauled away, and people who I didn’t really know poked out their heads to watch, most with relief. “That crap about your going back to buy books, not bestsellers. Nobody actually reads those other things, anymore.”

They held me for three days and finally had to release me when Keisha turned up as a runaway. Needless to say, my “evidence” was never returned, and I was sprung on my own recognizance, which means probation, which means doing the egg-walk. You can still find books if you’re willing to look for them–”books” being different from “bestsellers,” as Weinstein pointed out–and are prepared to weather the social stigma of actually possessing them. It’s like smoking used to be. It was bad for you, but people did it anyway until it became illegal, and they still kept lighting up after that, but fewer and fewer. That’s evolution.

Preparing to open another crumbling book, from a disreputable source, will make me feel like I’m igniting something that will kill me. But I’ll probably open it anyway, wondering who is watching me as I do it. At the computer I try to diarize my feelings into words that peter out after a single, pathetic line:

How much longer before what I’m doing evolves from misdemeanor to felony?

And before I slink back to my reading, I stare at the blank wall of my apartment, visualizing the anonymous cityscape, trying to see the stars.

The funeral was today.

I wrote a film some years back about morgue workers. I watched tape after tape of interviews, the mortician’s assistants telling frightful tales about bodies unrecognizable from their wounds, which they dressed and coated with layers of cosmetics. They had learned to make Death rosy-cheeked and peaceful.

My father’s death was far from peaceful. A heart attack ripped life from him in a single spasm of rage.

This morning before the funeral, I performed my ablutions numbly. As I washed my face, I scarcely felt anything for the man who’d slapped it repeatedly. Every morning for many mornings in my life, I tried to wash away those splattered red streaks, war paint not applied in any ceremony but in an explosion of fury. When I finished drying my face with a soft towel, I stood in that little room, amongst the porcelain and steel and glass, and I cried. Not for his death, but for his life…

I remembered being a child, hiding in the bathroom. It was the safest room in the house because it had a lock. I could lock out the violence during my father’s rampages, to keep him from taking out his wrath on me. I’ll never forget the day when he almost broke down the door because I had locked him out. Like a flailing ape, he’d put his foot through the door. I screamed. I remember thinking, I might as well let him in, and I did. Because if I didn’t, there would be no door left. No safety in the future. Let him in, for Christ’s sake. And he hurt me that day…

As I dressed, I pulled black stockings over my long smooth legs, remembering the bruises that once purpled my thin, white skin. Now, little spidery veins crawl over small patches of that skin. Not too noticeable yet, but soon. Very soon. I pulled my long cinnamon hair into a bun and fastened the black woolen cap on the crown of my head. He’d forced me to cut it as a child, despite begging and pleading.

That hair. Mousy brown roots hedged my scalp. Cinnamon, I tell my friends, is my “natural” color because it’s the color I want. A color untouched by him or time.

I last spoke to him ten years ago. Then distance and hatred and my refusal to subject myself to his abuse, even over the phone, swallowed his voice. In his old age, he grew more acrid, more intensely disgusting in his language and bearing. My mother grew senile, deaf, and blind. Because she was too powerless to leave him, her body desperately outbid her good sense for escape. I last spoke to her in that same conversation with my father. Her blindness and deafness, in my mind, manifested from her denial, which betrayed me by ignoring my pain.

I pulled the veil over my face and examined myself in the mirror. The black lace cast vague shadows over my features – features that did not, in any way, resemble my father. And if they did, I would deny it with my heart and soul and lips. I did not resemble him, inside or out. He was a creature. A monster. An ogre.

Something inhuman. Yet something ironically, darkly magical.

He would sit by my bed at night, telling me stories. Fairytales. Ghost stories. Tales of sorcery and horror. He’d motion toward the shadows, demanding that they stop their movement toward my bed. And they would, too. Like children with gentle fathers, I did not fear monsters at night when my father commanded them to be still. My father was the King of Shadows. They – like me – fled from his outstretched hand.

And when I awoke the next morning, he’d want to know if I’d had any dreams. He could interpret dreams. He’d go to his two-hundred-year-old Chickering piano, on top of which he kept the large book of “oneiromancy” with its flaking antique pages and dusty, threading olive cover. I remember the angel inked on that cover, carrying a scroll. With wonder and majesty, he’d withdraw that book and open it reverently, reading descriptions of the places and things in my nightly reveries. The book was written in Old Greek, so the words slipped between his dry, doleful lips in an ancient language of thee’s and thou’s I could not understand…

Like my dreams. Like him.

?????????????????

My Uncle Andrew arrived soon at the door. He wore a dark brown suit, his hair slightly mussed as it always was. The only relative I spoke to any more, he was affable, superstitious, and drank like a fish. He was my Scottish mother’s youngest brother, and he shared her large, hazel eyes and creamy skin, although paler than she. Uncle Andrew never disparaged me for not speaking to my parents. He and his wife, Mary, had no children. Mary herself was a delight, plump and sensual, with perfumes and powders in her purse. She had a high voice and all the girlishness of the world painted on her sweet lips.

“Did you see your lawn?” Uncle Andrew asked anxiously, as soon as I opened the door. “It’s a bad omen on a day like this.”

“Uncle Andrew,” I said, pulling on my gloves, “what could be a worse omen than a funeral?”

He hugged me tightly. His sharp aftershave and the starch on his collar stung my nostrils. Unusual smells on my carpenter uncle, who rarely shaved.

“I’m sorry, Lindsay,” he whispered into my ear. “But you must really come look.”

When I walked outside, Mary stood on the lawn, hands on her wide hips draped in black rayon. “Andrew, what have y’been telling her?”

“It’s an omen, Mary. Now, get away from it!” he said, shooing her with his hands. Mary rolled her blue eyes and, leaning forward slightly in her gait, stomped off to the sidewalk.

I stepped carefully over the freshly mown grass. There, despite the gardener’s visit that morning, sprawled a large ring of mushrooms, some five feet in diameter. The mushrooms themselves sprouted four to five inches tall.

“It’s a fairy gate…”

“It’s a fungus.”

And so they argued. I crouched in the dew, unmindful of my stockings and pumps, examining the pulpy, offending stumps. Bluish and porous, their pallid flecks of dust coated the thin, freshly cut blades of grass beneath. I removed a glove and tentatively reached out to touch one of the caps –

“DON’T!” Uncle Andrew said, grasping my wrist, my fingertips centimeters from the soft cap. Something of my father leapt to life in me that moment, and my fingers recoiled into my palm. He wouldn’t have touched it. He would have pointed it out, admonished me about its wicked magic, then later that night pluck them from the ground, telling me the next morning how the dark fairies had gone and taken them with. That is, if I survived the morning without a visit from his ire.

A tear burned on my cheek. “Let’s go,” Uncle Andrew said softly. I let him help me up.

?????????????????

Phantoms chased us as we drove. Phantoms of doubt and fear. Why was I leaving my sanctuary today? My quiet home, my hideaway. I needed the closure, I told myself. I needed to see that, indeed, the monster was dead. That is why I went.

We arrived at the church early, the sky almost white, the way it gets on Easter mornings. Impossibly thin and cool, the air seeped through my veil and raised tiny bumps on my arms. I hated mornings like this. Too ethereal. Too light. What could anyone grasp on a morning like this? Perhaps that was the point.

As I slammed the door closed of Uncle Andrew’s sedan, I fell to gazing at the church, a large Greek Orthodox cathedral. Golden saints stared from stony windows, two fingers of one hand raised, pressed together in the gesture of biblical teachers, the other hand grasping a book. Domed, squarish, and Byzantinely beautiful, the church gaped at passersby with its large, round rosette window, heralding to the lost that within it guarded knowledge.

“Greek?” Mary asked, confused.

I shook my head. He wasn’t Greek. At least, we didn’t think so. We never knew his nationality. His parents adopted him in the ‘20s, when records were scarce. But he did speak Greek, as well as Latin and Spanish and French. Even German and Russian. Although unfathomable to me, his belief system was nothing as well organized as this bastard branch of Catholicism. Perhaps he’d converted recently? I couldn’t tell from the will.

“It was what he wanted,” I said quietly. Uncle Andrew nodded.

We entered the church, the small, warm vestibule heavy with the smell of burning candles and frankincense. To our right stretched a bed of sand, strewn with lit candles. Despite the candles and the sunlight from the doors, the inner dusk contrasted sharply with the weather outside. Two more doorways lead into the church, the archways gilded, the walls red and soft. Rich, dun oil paintings of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus flanked each doorway.

An old woman stood at one of the paintings. Bundled in a thick, olive woolen coat, she wore a black scarf on her head. I did not recognize her. Then again, I wasn’t surprised. What did I know about this man now? What could I have guessed about his life and his friends, if he indeed ever had either? She blinked at me, her olive skin like wrinkled vellum around her unreadable eyes, and she muttered something in Greek, motioning to us with her aging hand. Silently, we watched her as she kissed the picture, reached into a small basin of water, and then crossed herself with her wet fingers before entering.

Unquestioning, we did the same.

She entered the almost empty nave. The old woman knelt at the base of the aisle between the pews on the red carpet, crossing herself. She then rose and moved into one of the back pews, her head down, and she knelt again.

Her movements distracted me from the shining, open black coffin before the altar. My stomach rose into my throat as I fought seven different emotions from overwhelming me. Uncle Andrew took me by the hand and Mary patted my back. “S’all right now, Lindsay,” he said gently. “S’all right.”

Beyond the coffin stood the heavily gilded altar wall, with doors leading to the back of the church. Two saints depicted on those doors held staves, fingers raised. They reminded me of the fairies in my father’s books, painted in brilliant jeweled tones, like those delicate pictures carefully guarded by tissue pages.

Father John entered the nave in his black and gold vestments. A big man with round hands, he spoke with a deep voice and a thick tongue. His beard, massive and grayish, wreathed a broad face, a priestly Santa. Thirty years ago, I would have reached for that beard and pulled it.

“Ms. Bryant,” he intoned. He lead us to the front of the nave, sensitive to my distance from the coffin, and seated us. He reminded us what to expect (we’d discussed this before on the phone) and assured us that everything would be fine. I believed him. His silky, watery eyes conveyed measureless compassion. I lost myself in his eyes to avoid accidentally gazing upon the contents of the coffin.

Women began singing in the choir loft – “Kyrie Eleison” – and soon people arrived. Faces I hadn’t seen for years appeared in the sunlit nave, swimming in stained glass waters. Uncles, aunts, old family friends, their suits pressed and black, they each approached first the casket then me, sadly extending their clammy hands. They solemnly murmured their condolences, as if I still had his last rage roaring in my ears. I allowed them their charade and accepted their sorrow. Mary’s perfume mingled with the burning incense, faintly reminding me people were there who knew the truth.

Eventually, my older half-brother, Eric, arrived. He was as tall – and as late – as ever, his bright red hair faded to deep auburn with grayish threads, the lids of his green eyes heavy and tired. He pushed a wheelchair down the aisle toward the front pew.

The chair cradled my mother.

I had been dwelling so much on my father and his earthly sins that I’d forgotten my mother. Now here she approached me, her waist-length silver hair braided into one ropy plait, her once-blue eyes webbed with cataracts and masked with angular, smoky black sunglasses. Frail. Crippled. Deaf. My heart thudded weakly to see her. My betrayer.

My mother.

Eric stopped the chair before me, her gnarled feet inches from mine. She wore black tea slippers sewn with little pearl beads. Her pale, dry skin stretched over her arms and hands, like the twisted birch that rapped against my bedroom window in the wind. She didn’t seem to know where she was, her lips quivering.

She held a package in her lap. Her fingers worked feebly at the brown paper.

“Good to see you, Sis,” Eric said, nodding to me, his voice all gravel from cigarettes.

“Good to see you, too,” I said, unsure if that was true. He didn’t believe me when I told him about Father’s abuse. He had his own kids, his stock business, his house wife. His own father had been a saint, God-rest-his-soul. How could such things happen? Over the years, Eric espoused several, very condescending theories about my sanity, and many quite cruel reasons for why I wasn’t married. He briefly exchanged greetings with Uncle Andrew and Mary. They’d all seen each other earlier.

Mother opened her mouth and a faint sound escaped her throat. For some reason her tongue could not form words. I realized, with horror, that she’d suffered a stroke. Eric bent down and retrieved the package from her lap. “This is for you,” he said.

I took it from his hands. Heavy. A book. He immediately wheeled Mother away to the opposite end of the front pew. And there we sat, divided as always.

I touched the package cover and trembled. Ghostly cold hands seized me beneath my sleeves, running their invisible fingers along my skin. I thought maybe this was the oneiromancy book, but then I peeled back the paper.

The Red Fairy Book.

This Lang classic was my father’s favorite. As a child, I’d read it thousands of times (or, it seemed that way). My fingers lovingly brushed the smooth paper picture of the Pink Princess riding her elaborate steed and I eagerly felt underneath for the deep red cloth cover. When I was little, I did not know that there were other colored fairy books. I later saw them in paperback, lined up in a New Age bookstore. I thought, I could buy all of them now, but realized they had no magic. They were cheap, thin copies of this magnificent ancient tome heavy with dust and age and imagination. I thought they called it “The Red Fairy Book” because of all the brutality in it, all the blood. Or because of the color of Rose Red’s lips. It didn’t matter. It was mine. It was his. It was magic.

I opened the cover. Immediately childhood bloomed in my nose. Paper, dust, ink…my childhood with this book and others. A drawing inside in sepia inks depicted an ogre carrying a large spiked club over one shoulder, dragging a young girl by the hair with his other hand…

I had tried to scribble it out with a brown crayon. The paper was wrinkled there by my seven-year-old self’s tears.

I heaved a long, hoarse sob. Uncle Andrew put his arm around me. The funeral rites had begun. I cried through them, harder and harder, the pain driving up from my torn, little girl heart through my stinging eyes. Through my soul. I noticed through my pain why my father had requested these Greek rites. Like the fairy book, they were dramatic, mythic, and colorful, yet dark in their obscure, occultic movements and ululations. Father John’s sooty incense was to drive away demons, but for my father it surely drew them.

He was The King of Shadows. And he was dead.

Uncle Andrew held my hand tightly. He tried to move the valuable book from harm’s briny way, but I clutched it tighter in my hand. I only let go of it long enough to occasionally dab my eyes with a soaked handkerchief.

Then, as the rites drew to a close, Uncle Andrew hesitantly whispered in my ear. “Are you going to look in the casket?” Father John had stopped the final rite – The Closing of The Coffin – and looked at me directly, waiting. He stood aside.

I would do it. I would go forward and see him, put The King of Shadows to rest. I stood, my knees weak and my heart thumping, The Red Fairy Book – the only fairy book – under my arm. Yes, I would go.

Then I heard a voice. Voices, actually. They fluttered over the pews carelessly, people thinking they were not heard, but were. “She made that shocking film for PBS last year,” said the first. A woman. Then, a man. “Yes, and they kicked her off the set…for her violent temper.”

I died. And died. And died again. Uncle Andrew rose, supporting me with his arms. Shaking and lamenting, I moved toward the coffin and pushed Uncle Andrew away. I had to do this alone.

I could see my father from far off. My hand found the edge of the casket and I pulled myself toward the opening.

There he lay, sleeping, a short man wearing a blue suit he’d loved. Those terrible black brows that were always driven together in frowns now rested separate, still, smooth. His skin had always been slightly tan. As always, I wondered where he came from. Perhaps he was Spanish. Or Mediterranean. Or Italian. No one knew. The topic now rested, no longer merely forbidden, but unreachable.

I expected to see an ogre, with large yawning, warty hands and a hulking nose, arms thick as tree trunks, dirt caked in his hair, that spiked club by his side, piercing the satin sheets. But he was so very human. I thought that if I touched him he would turn to dust. I wanted to feel the skin of his hands, those hands that drove away shadows and trust. Those hands I never understood. How could a man teach a child things so magical, so profound, yet turn and hurt her in the same aching breath?

Tentatively, I placed my fingertips on his. Created to creator.

Instantly, his skin flushed ebon. Starting from his fingertips, shadows ran over his hands and up his neck. Like scorched bark, his skin flaked and his lids shriveled from his closed eyes, lips retreating from sharpened teeth. His forehead bulged, troll-like, and his fingers curled, the nails dropping off, as his arms twisted and hardened. I screamed – I must have – locked in witness of his transformation.

He was no longer human, but a creature of pitch and craft. Antediluvian. Legerdemain of the foulest fairy wood.

The King of Shadows.

And that’s when I heard them. Wild things, deep things, dark things. Squeaking and howling, cursing the light. They strutted, pranced, and gyred in their abysmal procession toward the sarcophagus.

I turned to meet the seething mass as it made its way from the vestibule, doors held open by the old woman, and fell on my knees before them, skinning my legs on the thin red carpet. Surely they came for me, to punish me for some unrealized trespass.

They lurched forward, hissing and gabbling, until they reached the coffin. The largest – an ogre who stank of shit and bile and dirt – reached toward me. I thought he would grasp me by my cinnamon hair and hoist me into his hairy arms. Instead, he reached over me into the box with his filthy hands and carefully extracted the withered body, holding it high above his head. A feral chatter swelled triumphantly, and monstrous, papery flapping things swarmed through the watery, stained-glass light. The ogre’s voice bellowed hollowly above the others, a cry of conquer.

Then, they left as they came, those things of shadow and secret and fear, carrying the body of their king.

And I watched them, my knees burning, my heart grieving. Not for his death. Not for his life…

…but for how much of him was in me.

Ten after eleven and I’m leaning against the sheetrock of my usual Saturday night spot, the righthand wall of Lillith’s dancefloor. Silhouettes of dark figures sway in the fog of the room, the features of nearby dancers discernible in the faint red overhead lights.

The club’s actually attractive tonight. Reminds me of the way it seemed when I started coming here around a year back, the excitement I got from observing impeccably dressed people before I could predict their outfits, the rush I g ot from listening to mysterious music before it became routine. As the bass of “Love’s Secret Domain” by Coil vibrates the room’s foundation, seeps into my skin as if it were liquid static, this place seems new to me again. Magic.

And big fucking deal if it’s drug induced. Jeffrey gave me the hit over a month ago, but I didn’t take it ’til tonight, didn’t resort to chemical happiness ’til I got bummed-out because Sean flaked on plans to go out with me around half an hour beyond the last possible minute, or however the expression goes. Responded to my two reminder messages with an abrupt “Can’t make it,” no explanation given, no chance for me to question, line chopped off the second syllable of a generic “la ter.” I’d actually looked forward to seeing him. Must be a pay-back for something.

Whatever. I’d already gotten dressed, which is why I ended up here anyway, date or no date. Wouldn’t want to waste a complete outfit, even if I’m basically bored with the scene at Lillith’s. Wouldn’t want to waste a dose of X, e specially if it could make the old dive interesting.

I close my eyes and feel the touch of light to my eyelids, the caress of cigarette smoke to my cheeks. Ah, I could really get into a cigarette. Even better, a clove. I can tell this is good X, because I never crave cigarettes , don’t even like to be near them. And Sean had said the batch of X circulating now is bunk! Damn was he wrong. I feel myself sifting into the wall, the back of my knees and shoulderblades turning to warm water.

Open eyes and there’s a sea of phosphorescent splotches, glowing whitepainted faces, dark make-up around the eyes. Now the club is full of its regulars, dancefloor packed with night’s creatures, people lined up on either side of me . The room has come alive in no time, and I’m drenched in its electric energy, eager for something to happen. Ready to walk away from the wall and the chubby punk girl on my left who’s sloshing beer with loud gulps. Ready for excitement, adventure like I used to have, instead of the ennui my life has become. Ready for some new kind of kick.

“Skin and Lye” by Malign starts up, Xavier’s voice full of fury, voice growling and screeching over ominous background music. The crowd on the floor dances slowly, writhing, sending ripples of movement into the audience gathered ar ound them, tendrils of smoke twisting around safety-pinned jackets and teased hair.

I breathe in smells of leather and hair spray and cigarette smoke, a long slow breath, their scent filling my nostrils, settling on the back of my tongue. I smack my lips. The X has hit me full-force, and I am on fire.

I see two figures standing out from the others, standing out from old friends of mine, fucks, whatever. Two figures draped in velvety black material, hooded cloaks framing their delicate features, fragile-boned faces. Strands of r aven hair spill ’round the edges of their slate-colored skin.

I can’t tell if they’re male or female or both or neither, but they’re pressed close together, leaning against each other, shoulder to shoulder. Siamese twins with the exact same build, except that one stands a couple of inches tal ler than the other.

Who are they? I’ve never seen them before, but they’re too perfect to be real, too lucid to be a dream. Somebody new ! New, completely new and free of the “Oh, I’ve heard about you from so-and-so” garbage that’s about as in teresting as a soggy microwave pizza box lining.

Brow moist with sweat. My skin hot, alive. They’re staring at me seductively, dusky eyes brazenly glowing, and I feel my blood rush. They’re devouring me with their eyes.

I’m dying to speak with them, introduce myself, but I have no idea where to begin. Must be the drugs. They’re beautiful, completely androgynous and alluring. How could I resist the opportunity to speak with a couple of people to whom it’s obvious they can have anyone they want? It’s been so long, so dreadfully long.

Dead Can Dance’s “How Fortunate the Man with None” begins, and I feel Brendan Perry’s smooth voice cover my limbs with a blanket of tingling sensations. The X is hitting me so hard, I’m on the verge of either exploding like a grena de or passing out. My eyelids flutter, the image of the duo blurry, the clusters of people in the room bleeding together into a smudge, like watercolors painted on a paper towel. I’m being reduced to the sway of the music.

“Hi.” I hear a voice within earshot, and I open my eyes wide, focus. “I’m Byron.”

Something twists inside my stomach. Now the erotic duo is directly in front of me, close enough to touch, the taller of the two extending a slender hand. Byron. So he’s male. I place my palm within his, grasp it. Shudder at its warmth as he politely pulls it away.

“And I’m Gitane,” a second voice adds, offers a hand of her own. My palm meets hers, rests against smooth skin. Gitane. A female. I examine her chest area as she retracts her hand, but none of her body shows through the m aterial.

I study their faces, compare the similarities between their meticulously arched eyebrows, deep chocolate eyes, prominent cheekbones, well-formed noses, raspberry-stained lips. It’s remarkable how closely they resemble one another, each a mirror image of the other’s striking elegance.

It’s impossible for me to speak, impossible for me to look away. The whole club has been shut out, and nothing but this sensual feast exists, my heart racing as I’m devoured by their ethereal presence and the refrain of “The worl d however did not wait / But soon observed what followed on .”

Byron and Gitane are statuesque, patiently await my response.

“How Fortunate the Man with None” crescendoes, peaks with lavish strings and horns. Byron leans forward, centers his cool ivory face before mine, wraps his hand around my upper arm.

“With us,” he says, face expressionless as he tightens his grip. “Now.”

He positions himself between the punk girl and me, twists my arm like a slab of taffy as he scrapes me off the wall and slides behind me. Shoves my left hand up my spine, stops when my knuckles press between my collarbones. Steps forward, overtakes my balance, shoves me chest-first toward Gitane.

I stumble, feet sweeping the floor as he steps again, pushes me past Gitane, steps again, again. He weaves me through the mass of people standing around the dancefloor, strands of their sticky hair brushing my forehead and cheeks, their sweat and perfumes stinging my eyes, dripping bittertaste between my lips as I try to cry for help. The weaving stops when we make it to a cluster of goths and cyberpunks blocking the doorway marked with a flickering “HEAD” sign in blue neon letter s. There’s a splitsecond pause; then he uses my upper torso to part the crowd, their shoulders and metal jacket adornments smashing against my ribs, shouts of “Asshole!” and “What the fuck?” following as he pushes me through the bathroom en trance.

The room is washed with dull yellow light. I feel my face squinch in disgust, the stench of piss and lemon air freshner filling my nostrils as I’m led toward the urinals. Byron moves up to the left side of me and reduces his grip on my arm, frees it from its locked position. It drops, dangles. Gitane files in on my right, the two of them leading our dance across the slippery tiles, the floor slick with toilet water and spilled beer. We slide past an empty stall with its door o pen, a closed door, a closed door, an open-doored stall with a leatherman hunched forward taking a piss. Then we make it to the last stall, where a generic-looking guy with a brown buzzcut is exiting. Gitane steps behind me, allows room for him to get a round us. He does a double-take.

My feet slip as I’m shoved into the stall, but Gitane and Byron hold me up, prevent me from busting my ass on the floor. Byron slams the cubicle door shut, the sound of metal against metal echoing ominously. It fades, and muffled reverberations of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound” remain.

“…From the cradle bars / Comes a beckoning voice / It sends you spinning / You have no choice…” Siouxsie’s eerie voice still entrances me after all these years, voice rich with enchantment and disheartening splendor. “…Following the footsteps of a ragdoll dance…”

A flurry of hands unfasten my pants and tug them open, the air cool on my bare ass. Natural instinct overpowers drug euphoria, and I reach down to cover myself, suddenly aware what’s happening.

“No!” Byron shoves me onto the toilet, my asscheeks slapping the porcelain seat.

“But I- but I-” I hear myself speak, but my words are high-pitched and pleading, sound foreign.

“But you what?” He grabs the bottom seam of my shirt and rips it to the collar with a single flick of the wrist, tatters the velvet into two pieces.

“I’ll use you as much as I want, day or night, for as long as I want.” He tears the remainder of the shirt off me, tosses it onto the floor, whacks me across the ear. A lightningbolt of pain cracks into my temples.

Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? I look up at the two sets of eyes glaring at me and see a faint reflection of myself repeated across the four murky orbs, my pants wadded around the knees, private parts exposed, c hest patterned with the fresh splotches of red and purple across it. I’m embarassed at what I see, how I feel, vulnerable and afraid.

Byron leans forward and tenderly kisses me on the shoulder, his lips warm and smooth as liquid, hood tickling my jawline. “But you’ll love it,” he whispers against my neck, his voice deep and comforting.

I watch Gitane watch him lick a trail to my ear and flirtatiously flick the lobe, and I’m filled with a strange sensation of pleasure, a combination of submission and dominance and exhibitionism unlike anything I’ve experienced. By ron’s hand moves up my thigh, and I’m scared, excited, my cock starting to rise.

Gitane unbuttons the neck of Byron’s cloak and removes it from him, exposing the tight white skin underneath. She drapes it over the side of the stall and he moans into my ear, his hair tumbling down my back, his voice passionate a s the sound of rustling velvet.

Gitane pulls at the neck of her own cloak and extracts it, exposing her small frame squeezed into black satin bustier. A boy, looks maybe sixteen or seventeen, must have borrowed the i.d. of an older brother or friend, opens the s talldoor halfway, tries to enter. The door bumps Gitane’s back as she situates her cloak beside Byron’s. She turns, notices his innocent face and laughs, her lips a violent red smile.

“Whoops! Guess we forgot to lock it,” she says.

Boy takes a half-step back, blue eyes wide, disconcerted. Byron moves from me, pulls door rest of the way open. Grabs the boy by his shoulder, holds him in place.

“Well, hello,” he says. “Watch.”

Eyebrows raise in disbelief.

“Huh?”

Byron spreads my legs apart with his knees, pushes each to either wall of the stall. The metal partitions are cold. I flinch. Gitane pulls my head back by the hair above my neck, laughs again. My lips part and release a soft moa n of embarassment. She leans forward, positions hers around them and pulls back, strings of saliva snapping between us. They fall around my cock head, cling to it as if it were a may-pole.

“I said watch.”

Byron keeps one hand on the boy’s shoulder, digs his fingertips into the flesh around the collarbone, extends his other arm to reach the half-hard bulge between my legs. He circles the head with index finger, smoothes the spit into a ring. Spreads it down my cock. Forms a fist around it, pushes down. Pulls up. Pushes down.

“He likes this very much, see?” He says, third person, detached. Sneers with the crinkles ’round his eyes. “See the way his whole body moves with the rhythm of my hand?”

The boy doesn’t answer, also doesn’t look away. Stands there in a stupor of fear and awe. He looks vaguely familiar to me, though I don’t know why. Stares at me with iceblue eyes, looks down at my dick, now fully erect. The exci tement in his face crackles, pops like baconfat.

Hand continues moving up and down my dick. I shut my eyes, moan.

Gitane scoops a breast out of her bustier, pushes two fingers between my lips, pries my mouth open, inserts nipple. I stroke it with my tongue, lap the saltysweet taste of her skin.

Open my eyes. She and Byron are violently kissing, lips pressed together, jaws in motion. Byron’s eyes are also open. One of his hands still holds the boy in place, the other pumps my dick. He watches us,

Stops kissing her, smiles at me, takes his hand from my bulge. It bounces, rebounds from his touch. Throbs.

Slowly, delicately, he pushes away from me. Tugs on my bangs, forces my head upright. He unzips his tight pants and his cock falls out on its own, half-erect. Fingers run through my hair, Gitane’s, Byron’s. Pulls me closer. His dick is directly before me, its head large and light red.

“Come on,” he says, his voice stern. “Suck it.”

Splitsecond longer of cock before my face; then disappears between my lips, into my mouth. Eyes close habitually. I take it all the way to the base, my nose buried in dark tuft of hair, his musky scent filling my nostrils.

“Yeah,” he moans. “That’s good.”

And it is good. I love the way he feels in my mouth, the energy of his dick throbbing as he slides it against my tongue. Pulls himself out to the head. Pushes to the back of my throat.

I move my left hand between Gitane’s silky thighs, nudge the strip of material covering her sex. Her clit is hard and slick. I rub my fingers against it, smear her wetness. Rub it harder, faster. Feel her thigh muscles tighten a round my hand, her hips jerk.

I touch myself with my right hand, cock throbbing and burning. Thrust my forefinger deep into Gitane’s wetness. Move my tongue against Byron’s cock so slow it’s barely moving.

Samples of bubbling water, hollow drumbeats, an angelic voice. Ambient dreamscapes of The Future Sound of London seep into the stall, accelerate our sensual energy.

Byron shudders, starts pumping furiously. Almost too much for me to handle. Tears form in my eyes as his dickhead bangs against the back of my throat, balls slap my chin. My lips make sloppy smacking noises against the base of hi s cock, and a small retching sound escapes from the back of my throat. I desperately gasp for air, but I love it.

He loves it, too. “Oh yeah,” he says through clenched teeth. “Keep fuckin’ blowing me. Suck me off, you little slut.”

His deep voice intensifies my excitement. I stuff three fingers in Gitane, her inner lips hot and luscious. My dick drools, and I tighten my grip, pound in rhythm. Pound furiously.

I squeeze my tongue around his cock and look up, watch the muscles in his stomach tighten. Watch him groan as Gitane plays with his nipples. He thrusts his hips forward, greased cock rapidly gliding in and out of my mouth as he le ans against the boy, cradles his arm around the adolescent neck.

The boy’s eyes meet mine and a sharp rush of panic shoots through my chest. Oh my God. Those eyes. I know those eyes. Reminders of that glossy blue, that soft face, that scraggly bleach blond hair, the small silver hoop earring, swim from the depths of my memory, the inner recesses of my mind. But it can’t be, just can’t be, they can’t be. My consciousness swirls.

I pull my hand from Gitane and long ribbons of wetness stretch down her slender legs, spill onto mine. Byron continues thrusting himself into my mouth with an increasing sense of urgency, groaning desperately, arm locked tight arou nd the neck of the boy, standing solemnly, staring. Those eyes. Those eyes. Those eyes freeze my lips with a chill of horror, the edges of my teeth scraping Byron’s skin as he gives himself a final shove in my mouth.

He pulls out and comes with an idle rush, sperm cascading from his cockhead and sticking onto my face and neck like ornaments, like quivering jewels. His discharge reeks of salt and soured milk. The small puddles collapse under the ir own weight and shimmy down my shoulderblades, my stomach, my shrivelled cock, in thin pasty trails.

There’s a trace of gummed-up whiteness in my eyelashes, but I don’t move to wipe it away, don’t move whatsoever. The boy’s lips unfold in a soft gesture that could be shock or disgust or pity, and it’s astounding how much I know h im, remember him.

Byron examines his midsection, yawns, flicks a stray pearl off his pisshead toward me. It spatters into my right eye, crude and merciless.

An acidic stinging stifles my vision, makes me wince. I frantically knead my aching lids with the jointed edge of a fist, but slender fingers scramble around my wrist, pull my arm away. Within seconds, the fingers find their way t o my face and calmly move back and forth on both eyelids, producing tears that wash the stinging away. The fingers then move to my forehead, my cheeks, and sweep off small lumpy bits, smooth my skin to dry stickiness.

I blink until the blurry orb I see transforms into the young boy. It’s the sandy-haired teenager who’s comforting me, caring for me with his gentle touch, leaning forward into my muddled space, his azure eyes sparkling and curious.

He smells of soap. I recognize the vigorous rhythm of the Orbital’s “Halycon and On and On,” realize he’s moving towards me.

He presses his lips to mine and gives me a rough kiss, a kiss of inexperience, tongue darting around in my mouth, scraping against the rawness in my throat. The kiss is uncomfortable and long. His tastebuds feel like dry gravel as he pushes his tongue farther into me, wiggles it. It’s as if he’s trying to reach all the way to my heart, yearns to lick my soul.

I clumsily wrestle with him, attempt to bulldoze his tongue back to its home, when suddenly it hits me: I taste myself in his mouth. I twist my tongue around his, taste the sweet nectar of summertime at my grandparents, taste the excitement I felt sneaking out of the house to smoke pot with my best friend, taste the swarm of adrenaline I had when I lost my virginity. I taste the richness of memories, and I want to tumble into them, wallow in their splendor.

The boy breaks our embrace, backs away from me with a grimace, leaves me panting, my torso quivering. Gitane and Byron have clothed themselves, and he clings to them, glares at me with glittery eyes.

My stomach grumbles. I’m hungry for that taste I found, crave it the way a dieter does chocolate. I know I can’t have it; I know the boy tore himself from me because of the bitterness he discovered back in my spongy cave of a mout h, a bitterness toward life and humanity that tastes like poison to a boy whose innocence remains unmarred, whose romantic ideals still seem plausible.

The frantic way he clutches Gitane and Byron, small arms sunk elbowdeep into their cloaks, tells me he’s afraid my depravity will work its way into him like a virus. I’m sickened by the realization of what I am, this jaded monster I’ve become. But I wonder who Gitane and Byron are, why they’ve come to me, what they represent, what sort of lesson they’re trying to teach.

Splitsecond and they are gone, stall deserted, door gaping wide, stained grey concrete wall replacing the line of vision where they were. I try to call after the boy, call my name, but it catches like a cinderblock in my throat. His name, my name. He who I used to be.

Tears blossom and flow like blood as I sit in this stall, frail and slump-shouldered, wishing I could return to the face that once was my cradle, my home.

“Head injury, 15 minutes!”

The radio room PA system beeped frantically with the paramedic call for the latest trauma patient. Nine-year-old Rachel Anne Roberts tested at a “1” for every phase of the Glasgow Coma Test: unresponsive. Triage quickly ushered her gurney through the double-layers of automatic glass doors and into the trauma room. Blood draining from her right ear. Many cuts covering her frail body…

“Hypoxemia and hypotension? What are you fucking waiting for?” I yelled. “Get her stabilized, goddammit!”

Nurses in cobalt blue cotton scrubs scrambled to intubate the girl so she could breathe and x-rayed her skull: Three cranial fractures. As we raced her gurney down to OR, she suffered an epileptic seizure. She was very seriously injured, but she was in good hands: mine. I was Dr. Timothy Samuel, the best neurosurgeon at UC Davis Medical Center. That’s not ego; it’s record.

I gave her a 30% chance to live.

She closely resembled my first cousin Maggie, a little girl with straight blonde hair and wiry fingers, who caught lizards and made up sweet songs. She died when she was 12 in a flooded river near the family home in Missouri…

But that was a long time ago.

Later that night, I explained to Rachel’s parents that she might die. We had to see if the swelling decreased in her braincase.

Her mother, a short Southern woman, wiped her wet red cheek with her open palm. She asked if her daughter was in pain, and I assured her she wasn’t, although I frankly didn’t know or care. She was unconscious, not likely to feel anything. Her very tall, Norse father nodded silently as I spoke, his neck stiff like a hobby horse. Sometimes he’d close his eyes, and the lids trembled – raw, pink, and sallow – over his tears.

Their fundamentalist preacher arrived later, dressed as a priest so he would be admitted to her ICU room to pray over her. Hospital policy apparently influences who dies shriven and who doesn’t.

Rachel remained in ICU, slowly improving, for one week. An ICU room proper has only three walls: the fourth is a draped blue sheet. When I’m in one of those rooms with a patient, the shapes of the nurses and other doctors passing by remind me of a puppet show curtain. They unnerved me that morning, the puppet actors and their shadows, suggesting more vividly than usual their illusory roles on my morning rounds. I needed to examine Rachel’s scalp sutures and the bolt in her skull measuring the pressure in her braincase. She was tethered to many, many machines tracking her vital signs. And she was comatose.

I didn’t believe in miracles. My only miracle was being accepted on staff at the Medical Center – it was my first choice of residency. No one ever receives their first choice, no matter how well they do academically. I graduated magna cum laude at UC Davis, valedictorian of my class. No miracle: That was dedication. And superior intellect.

But I suspected her father believed in miracles very much.

When I arrived, he was unburdening a litany of guilt to sleeping ears still flaked with blood. I waited somewhat impatiently beyond the puppet curtain until he finished. He did not look at me, but stood by his daughter’s bed, holding her fever-warm hand. Then, “Dr. Samuel, do you believe in God?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” I replied curtly, yet honestly. Inured to such talk, I made some notes as I checked her sutures.

“I suppose you don’t believe in the Devil, either,” he said quietly.

Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than talk about religion or God. Not since Maggie died. I stopped thinking about those subjects long ago. I turned my curiosity about abstract matters to gray matter because it’s far less…sensitive. I focused on the machines and shook my head.

“I don’t, either.” His sallow face reddened. “When I was a little boy, my Scandinavian Grandma – my bestemor – used to tell me of the old religions. The old gods. I swear,” he said, trembling, “this looks more like the work of Loki than any of that nonsense the preacher tells us.”

Loki…

“Look at her. My baby looks like she’s asleep but she can’t wake up.” His voice cracked, watery, and he looked directly at me, his blue eyes accusing. “If there’s a Devil, he’s a trickster like that Loki,” he said. I felt strangely self-conscious and afraid, even though this man was obviously so simple. Then he grew somber. “Bestemor said Loki was so evil that the gods bound him underground in this gray place where twin snakes drip venom on his face until the end of the world. Until the final battle of the gods of Ragnarok.”

I remembered the myth from the University. My geology professor read myths about geological phenomena from the old Norse bible, the Poetic Edda. Something about a woman – His lover? His sister? – catching the venom in a cup until it filled. While she emptied the cup, venom dripped on his face. His cries of agony caused earthquakes. Or so the story went. Those lilting, haunting rhymes of ancient bards were then triggered by Rachel’s father…By the River fettered Fenrir will lie,‘till the twilight of the Gods draws nigh; and nigh to him, but thou hush thee now, thou breeder of ill wilt be bound…

“Sounds like he’s under control to me,” I said, checking my watch. I slid open the puppet curtain to leave, glad to be leaving this warm room swimming with religious doubt and grief.

“Never been a literal man,” he continued, “not even with the Bible. That’s my wife’s doing, that preacher.” Mr. Roberts paused. “I think Loki’s trying to break free. If he hasn’t already.”

He hadn’t.

*****

After that week, Rachel stabilized. We removed the bolt from her skull and moved her to Room 303 in the pediatric section of that ICU floor – a real room with a door. “Miracles” happened in those soapy-smelling halls. The comatose awakened. The lame walked. Hope returned. But there was no guarantee. That day, her mother took me aside in the hall and asked me hesitantly, “What are her chances? I mean, with the brain damage.” Her father looked on, cynical and silent.

“Well,” I said, “in a year or so she will be more or less the same girl.” I lied. The human mind is really too variable. But we can’t let them know when we don’t know the future. They would lose faith in us. When God has stopped talking to them, we are still there with our knowledge, even if it’s incomplete.

Their tired, grief-worn faces lit up. Nancy, one of the ICU nurses, most likely told them Rachel would never awaken, and if she did she would stay a “vegetable” the rest of her life. We often rotate Nancy out of the ward because of patient family complaints, even if what she says is true. “Thank you,” the mother said. She started to cry again, this time with tears of hope and relief. “Thank you.”

I shook her pliable hand – I don’t trust a weak handshake; it infers a weak mind – and the clammy but firm one of her husband. I’m not lying technically. It isn’t completely impossible, I assured myself. The human brain is a mysterious organ. Take the function of dream. The night before, I dreamt of Maggie and her empty casket. They never found her body. I found it interesting how the image of that hollow casket broke into my REM sleep, especially on rainy nights.

Brain surgery we can do. Dream surgery we can’t.

I excused myself and left them in the hall as I rushed, chart in hand, to my next patient. Actually, I don’t rush well. I’m a taliped: I have a clubfoot. I limp when I walk, but I’ve mastered it somewhat over the years. I also have a little scoliosis that tips my shoulder forward, but I’ve managed with that, as well. And I haven’t sympathy for anyone who can’t.

Only three halls comprised the third ICU floor of UC Davis Med Center. I knew them well. My next patient rested three doors down, a woman in her 50s who had suffered a stroke. I doubted she would ever fully recover her sight or the use of her right hand. I scanned the chart before entering, but halted suddenly.

The room was dark. A figure in the bed shifted its head slightly and sighed, a low, hushed groan. “Good morning, I’m Dr. Samuel,” he said.

I flipped the light switch. Nothing. I double-checked the number on the open door and squinted into the darkness. “Well, you’re not quite Mrs. Carroll, are you?” I joked.

“Come in, Dr. Samuel,” he replied quietly. “This is the right room.”

Confused and compelled by the darkness, I entered, navigating the bed by the light from the hallway. “Seems we have a mix up with the records.”

Darkness shuttered his face. The light from the hall reached only as far as the foot of the bed in this windowless room. From what I could see, he seemed an unusually tall man. He sighed again. “A little chaos is always welcome…as are you,” he said, his voice low and garbled like water retreating into a drain.

“Thank you,” I said. Oh, he’s a character, I thought, turning over the chart and readying my pen. “Now, can I get your name so we can straighten this out?”

Above and to my left, the television flickered on, throwing bluish gray light across the bed and the face of my patient. Shadowy images flapped silently on the screen and more faintly, like wind-drawn clouds, across my patient’s elderly, distinguished face. A nature show about birds, apparently. Crows? Ravens? They moved in uneven oily streaks across a gray sky.

My patient wasn’t watching the television, but stared steadily at me with frosty blue eyes beneath soft milk-white hair. Those eyes telegraphed the chronic pain of the terminally ill, the lids wrinkled tightly in an unending throe. Into each nostril was firmly implanted a forked nasogastric – NG – tube filled with pearly fluid.

He said nothing. And then, I wasn’t certain he’d spoken at all.

“Dr. Samuel, call 213. Dr. Samuel, 213.”

“Excuse me a moment,” I said, leaving to respond to the page.

I stepped out of the room and into the well-lit hall. Nurse Nancy strode down the hall past me. She stopped, her narrow eyes scanning me. “Dr. Samuel,” she asked teasingly, “who were you talking to in there?”

“I didn’t get his name. Send maintenance to fix the light.” I stepped past her, thinking nothing of it. The teasing gleam in her eyes turned sharp and discriminating as she looked into the room.

It was empty. And the light was on.

*****

Being a good student of Western science, I let my rational mind temporarily catalogue the event as a daydream. In a trauma center, a neurosurgeon is on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I think my daydreaming was due to exhaustion. I rarely vacation, and when I do I go to the desert where it’s quiet and empty. Dry. The beauty of the desert is unchanging, unlike most things. It’s something I can trust, something I will never lose…

Responding to the page, I entered the waiting room for the ICU floor. There stood Mr. and Mrs. Roberts with an attorney. “We hear you have Rachel on large doses of Thorazine,” Mrs. Roberts said angrily. “How is our Rachel to come out of the coma under that much Thorazine?” Mr. Roberts was silent as usual, but this time he was grim and distant.

“I understand your concern,” I told them, “but without the Thorazine, she risks having another epileptic seizure, which might induce a stroke. We’ll definitely risk losing her then.” I silently cursed them for questioning me. It’s not uncommon for families who feel powerless to attempt to influence the treatment plan using legal brawn.

The parents looked to one another, then the attorney, who shook his head. “The Roberts request you reduce the Thorazine dosage, Dr. Samuel. They’ve weighed their options. It’s their right.”

I considered the odds for her survival. To my surprise, my knees started shaking, my stomach acidic. “I’ll look into it,” I said weakly. “I have to speak with the Chief of Staff. And there are papers to sign.”

“We’ll be waiting,” the attorney said.

Rachel’s room was at the end of the pediatric hall. She was now lying peacefully in her bed. Much of her blonde hair had been shaved away for surgery and her face was bruised. After the surgery, she had suffered another epileptic fit. An NG tube fed her stomach through her nose and an I.V. in her right arm contained the Thorazine drip, a crucial ingredient to keeping her alive. The drug limited her brain activity and therefore the epilepsy. Doctors once used it to treat schizophrenia, as it inhibited hallucinations. Reducing the dosage would most seriously endanger her life.

Then again, she might wake up, too.

As my foot crossed the threshold to her room, icy darkness washed against my leg. For the briefest moment, I waded into the nightmarish river that swept away Maggie’s body, the muddy waves slapping my face as I gasped for air. The flood water surged into my mouth, my nose, and soon my lungs as I flailed for the shore. The storm rained frosty nails on my head. I could barely open my eyes…

I found myself lying on my back, windless, watching the black birds flutter in their gaggle or murder across the flickering television screen. The hard tiles bit into the back of my skull, shoulder blades and tail bone. One flailing hand found the steel carriage. Above me hung the NG bag swollen with luminous, pearly fluid. One large dewy drop ran off the bag, about to fall on my forehead like a clear drop of rain.

I sat up quickly before the fluid hit my skin. I listened for a splash, but it never reached the floor. The distinguished old giant rested in his bed as before, the door beyond closed. He regarded me urgently, as he still seemed to be suffering.

“I need your help,” he said. “I’ve been in pain for far too long.”

“Who are you?” I asked, standing and backing away. I’m not a large person. In fact, I’m a bit short, maybe 5′5″. I wear lifts, which raise my height an inch. But even though my patient hardly looked able to cause me harm, he still frightened me.

“Look at my tubing,” he demanded. “I want you to remove it.”

“I can’t do that,” I spat, irritated at him as if he were a normal patient, yet my heart galloped with horror. “And I can’t help you unless you tell me your name.” I wondered if I was dreaming, but I’ve never had dreams like this. Perhaps I was lying in one of the beds of the trauma center downstairs, an oxygen mask over my face and fingers on my pulse, or farther down in psychiatric… I was somewhere; anywhere but here.

He violently threw back his head in a spasm of agony, his lips curling from long, sharp white teeth. “Please,” he whispered.

Reluctantly, I moved forward and withdrew the penlight from my white coat pocket. The light shook in my hand as I trained it on my patient’s face. For all his appearance, there was something vaguely inhuman about him. Correction: something extra-human. As I drew closer I noted the unusual girth of his jaw and the irregular shape of his iris. His pupils dilated, oval-shaped, and he regarded me cruelly. His skin smelled faintly of ash and salt peter.

The NG tube forked, parting for his septum as it plunged into his throat, but it did not remain tubing. Rather, it solidified as it entered, blood-stained and scaly, ivory prongs swelling tightly against his large nostrils. Even the capillaries closest to the surface of his nose had swollen and broken against his skin in strawberry starbursts.

I then examined the carriage and unlabeled NG bag. Pearly. Glistening. “Who administered this?” I asked, lulled into this weird reality by the ordinary feeling of cool plastic under my fingers.

He closed his eyes and exhaled softly. “My family,” he replied.

“Look,” I told him, “I can’t help you unless you tell me who your doctor is. This NG is feeding you because you can’t eat. If I remove it, you’ll die of starvation.”

“I have suffered long enough!” he growled, his voice a trembling chorus. Cold wind blasted my back. I turned, thinking the door had opened, but it remained swallowed in shadow. “Only a god can help me,” he said more calmly, regaining his composure. “And you are a god. A god of this age.”

Perhaps it was true. But at that moment that was not how I felt and I certainly wasn’t going to advise him of it. I edged away from him again and looked for the door, now outlined by the hallway light shining through the cracks.

“You’ll soon acknowledge the power you have over life and death,” he said. “And suffer the guilt true gods bear with it. When you do, you’ll help me.”

I quickly found the door and opened it, warm golden lights spilling on my legs. As I walked into the hall I heard him again say, “You’ll know. You’ll feel.” His voice rumbled like running water.

Footsteps clapped down the hall. The chief neurosurgeon, Greg Armstrong, arrived smiling. “Tim,” he said, “good work with the Roberts girl.”

My body slumped, suddenly sluggish. I checked my watch and, to my astonishment, some nine hours had passed since I spoke with the Roberts family and their attorney.

“You must have chosen the correct dosage,” he said as I listened through a haze of exhaustion. “She’s awake.”

I thought I’d just been to Rachel’s room, but my nightmare occurred on the opposite side of that ICU floor. When I arrived, the crowded room tittered with happy relatives and friends who had previously only held vigil. Now the dead awoke and even their pastor joined them to witness the miracle.

“It was G-g-god, Mommy,” Rachel said, her speech slightly slurred, as her mother wiped her soft, pink cheeks with a damp wash cloth. “She saved me and brought me into a big cave where it was foggy and gray and cold.”

It’s quite normal for those who come out of coma from traumatic brain injury to attribute their waking to the hand of God. They often become hyper-religious and evangelical for some time thereafter. But clearly whatever Rachel was evangelizing did not sit well with the Roberts’ pastor, who grinned through coffee-stained teeth.

“Dear child,” the pastor said, taking her hand, “God is a man. Our Father. You mean ‘he’ not ’she’.”

“No, Pastor W-williams,” she protested. She pulled her hand away, shaking her head. This level of agitation was normal. “It was a really scary lady.” Rachel clawed at one side of her face with her freshly clipped fingernails. “Her face peeled and smelled bad, like the r-rabbit we found in the ditch one day. She said her name was Hel, and her daddy is L-l-loki.” Almost vacant from her injured intelligence, the little girl’s eyes wandered earnestly from relative to relative.

Just as Pastor Williams began to correct that “hell” was a place and not a person, Mr. Robert’s eyes widened, ringed with fear, and his cheeks blanched. He pulled Rachel close, desperately whispering lilting words – undoubtedly from his bestemor – in her ear. Her mother, Pastor Williams, and the rest looked at one another uneasily.

“Hello, Rachel,” I said, entering the room cautiously. With each step I felt slightly more sane, more grounded in the real world, with so many mortals around me. The hem of my white coat certainly felt holier. “How are you feeling?”

The bruises had mostly healed, but ghostly yellow splotches clung to her temples. She focused her shining eyes on my face solemnly. “Dr. Samuel,” she said unsteadily, “Hel sends you a message.”

For my life and my sanity, I could no longer dismiss quasi-religious missives. Images of the large old man and the ravens flickered in my memory like that television screen as I crouched by her bedside. Listening intently. My heart beating savagely…

Rachel leaned toward me, her breath sour with thrush but her voice oddly and infinitely steadier. “Hel says, ‘It is better for you to hang yourself from the tree than to release my father from his sentence.’”

*****

I went home.

Before I left, I instructed the staff to watch Rachel carefully for signs of epileptic activity. I told the nursing staff to page me should there be the slightest change in her condition. I asked Greg to reassign my trauma center call duty and I took a cab to my house, my nerves too worn to drive.

The cab dropped me off at my lovely, two-story home, not far away. A local, award-winning architect designed and built it three years ago. Generous skylights and vaulted ceilings covered the dwelling; I rejected the terrarium and tall trees she’d suggested. Geologists claim Sacramento lies in a floodplain that floods every two hundred years, making insurance for my home almost prohibitive. I live there alone. I’ve little social life, by necessity and choice. After Maggie’s death, I was shunned, so I made solitude my practice for life.

I wearily ambled up the concrete pathway to the oak door with the stained glass inlay of a curling rose and unlocked it.

I opened the door and walked into a river.

Huge winds beat colossal trees and scolded the earth with vicious howls. Fingers of rushing air probed my mouth, nose, and ears as I screamed. “Maggie! Maggie!”

I couldn’t see her. Then: “Timmy!” Faint but clearly her voice. “Timmy!”

I ran gawkishly toward her voice, my tennis shoes alternately sliding and sticking in the mud. Sheets of water unfurled from the river’s edge as the depths rose from the rain. Angered that I would dare to press onward as quickly as they drove, the winds turned against me. The cold and the wet punished me almost as harshly as my panic and guilt as I ran down the river’s embankment, blinking against the wetness in my eyes.

And then I saw her, just her blonde hair and frail hands. She clutched a jagged tree root for dear life, waist high in the torrent. She was so small the river could carry her away like a paper boat and fold her body under one of its rippling arms. I cried out to her again as I straddled the root, digging my fingers and heels into the flaking bark. “Hold on!”

Her wiry little fingers gripped my outstretched hand and the sleeve of my windbreaker as I grasped her wrist. The last time I had held that wrist, I pulled her close and told her I didn’t care if we were cousins. I didn’t care what the adults said. When we were old enough, we would get married. She kissed me on the cheek with those raspberry lips and smiled at me with dandelion-green eyes. If I knew love, it was then in the blue veins under the peach skin of her wrist and in the gentle ping of her giggle as it echoed along the river before the rains began.

All I knew now was terror. Her wrist slick with mud and river water, it slipped from my hand. Before she could scream, the current pulled her under and away. As I ran downstream, frantically scanning the turbid, rushing water for flecks of peach and blonde, I wished we hadn’t run away. I wished we hadn’t fought. I wished…

A flash of lightning. Then, thunder exploded in the heavens and a tremendous groan creaked above. Blindly I fled the falling tree’s crushing limbs as they crashed toward me in a swell of leafy whispers. My weaker ankle twisted painfully beneath me and mud smashed against my neck and cheek as I slid over the edge into the water.

Cold. Weightless. Dream-like. What seemed so terrifying, so threatening, now soothed me. I relaxed, bits of leaf and debris scraping my skin, as my body settled into the freezing dark. I inhaled.

Not air. Death…

I opened my eyes. No longer floating, I awoke on a stretcher in an ambulance, vomiting leaves and water and dirt.

And pain.

I opened my eyes. No longer on a stretcher, I twisted in the sheets of my bed, crying out hoarsely. My throat scratchy, my skin hot. I’m over-worked. I’m exhausted. I’m hallucinating…

…but thou hush thee now, thou breeder of ill wilt be bound…

For ten years, I had little to fear. I knew the human body, and now the human brain. I knew all there was to know and I should not have been afraid.

But I was.

And, buried somewhere in my clothes, my cell was ringing.

*****

Mrs. Roberts flung herself at me as I entered the waiting room. Grief-stricken spittle flew from cracked lips as she beat my chest with her fists. “Why did you reduce the dosage?” she shrieked. “You knew this would happen! You knew!”

Friends and family mourned loudly throughout the waiting room. Mr. Roberts pulled her away from me and Dr. Armstrong stepped between us, exuding expensive aftershave and hospital authority. In his late 40s, he was a formidable surgeon, but a better administrator. “We’re deeply sorry for your loss, Mrs. Roberts. But you were informed of the risks,” he told her firmly but gently, “and you signed the forms. You chose to take those risks.”

“But you knew what would happen!” she cried. “You shouldn’t have let us do it!” She broke down, repeating the last bit over and over.

Her father’s grieving body uncurled from its silence, fists clenched. His twisted face raised heavenward as his wail echoed in the death-stained, godless halls…

“LOKI!”

I excused myself ineptly, and, as soon as I broke through the door to the ICU halls, I ran. Like that frightened little boy, I ran stumbling down the halls of the ward, anguish breaking through my skin in a sweat. I knew Rachel had suffered an atonic seizure, a lightning strike to her injured synapses that generalized and short-circuited her brainstem. I ran to her room and knelt by her now empty bed. I placed my forehead against the mattress edge and cried in long heaving sobs, for the first time at all since Maggie’s funeral.

The room grew dark around me. The television screen flickered, the ravens swarming over the neon grains. I raised my head and found my patient in the bed beside me. He cried out in agony, and the ground shifted beneath me.

“Cut the serpent’s head!” he gasped as the last throe passed. “Cut it! It will end everything. It will bring Ragnarok,” he intimated. “Save us both the pain.”

“I’m no god,” I sobbed. “I am no fucking god!”

“Oh, but you are,” he growled luridly. “Your actions saved that girl and then killed her. And you lied to them. You tricked them. You’re a trickster god…like me. The only one fit to cut the serpent’s head!”

“I haven’t power over life and death!” I cried, choking on the tears of self-condemnation in my throat. My face close to his, I saw deep into his pupils – snowy caves of malice and trickery. Then, the tears subsiding to hot anger, I remembered Rachel’s words. “I’ve been warned about you,” I told him. “Warned well.”

“By a brain-damaged little girl,” he said coldly, “babbling about God and hell.”

I backed down, doubting. I was arguing with hallucination. I knew what this meant: I was insane. I must have been. My practice was over. My life…was over. Overwhelmed with this realization, I wanted to die. My body was never worth living in since Maggie died, but my mind was – until now.

“A brain-damaged little girl,” he said, his voice drawling and spiteful, just like the sheriff who cursed me at Maggie’s funeral, “worth no more than that blonde-haired, white trash little cunt you let die in that river.” He licked his lips, then said cunningly, “You never really loved her, did you?”

The television screen exploded and glass rained on my back in a bedlam storm of blackened wings and otherworldly shrieks. Howling with me-hate, god-hate, all-hate, I grasped the tubing with both hands and pulled madly with all my strength. The giant roared triumphantly, the caitiff cry of the trickster. The skin of his nostrils tore, broken and bloodied, and the ivory spikes emerged venous, scaled and slithering…

Inhuman all were they, crying into the night. And inhuman all are we, struggling in the twilight. The twin-headed serpent bore into my skull, driving deep down, down, down once called the alimentary canal to my lungs and bowels. It drips its poison in pearly, glistening drops as I writhe in the gray, bound far beneath the ground. I see above me a beautiful young woman with raspberry lips and dandelion-green eyes. With her wiry fingers she removes a cup (or is it an NG bag?) and I scream. She says, “Loki,” and I scream.

For here I am and here I will stay. Someone must suffer, they say. Until Fenrir the Wolf swallows the Sun and kills the light of day. Only then the gods each other they will slay. The gods of Ragnarok.

Until the gods die, I writhe here in the gray.

In pain.

Nineteen and full of attitude, chopped off hair dyed purple and tumbling down over kohl-smudged eyes, fishnet and thigh high boots and you knew what you were in for when you came into my booth. I got all the grovelers, all the little rock and roll boys with lacy panties under their ripped-up jeans. The naughty sluts and the fetishists and the ones who took my scornful sneer as a cue to fall to their knees.

But even among perverts, there are the truly bizzare, the people whose kicks make even the most jaded scratch their heads. People like the Pizzaman.

He looked just like every other guy who came through, furtive eyes set in a bland, forgetable face, button down shirt and jeans and thinning hair. Except he had a slice of pizza in a paper bag and a takeout cup full of soda and ice. Since a lot of guys come in on their lunch hour, I didn’t think much of it. He ducked into my booth without making eye-contact, so I shrugged and went inside. Tokens slipped in one after the other and then the whirr of machinery and the shutter cranked open.

He already had his maggoty little dick out, phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear. I smirked and picked up my phone.

“I’m gonna put on a show on for you,” he said.

Amused by this, I sat back on my tall stool and raised an eyebrow.

“All right,” I said. “Entertain me.”

He took the slice out of the bag, and did the last thing in the world I could have expected. He wrapped it around his cock and started fucking it.Biting down on my lip to keep from laughing out loud, I watched him humping away, orange grease dripping between his fingers.

“It feels just like a pussy!” he said.

Horrified, I try to imagine what kind of pussy he had that felt like a slice of pizza.

Peeling off the thick crust, he turned around and stuffed it up into his loose asshole, working in and out as crumbs stuck to the surrounding hairs. Crust firmly in place, he turned back and continued furiously fucking the deteriorating slice.

He came then, stringy jiz mixing with fat drops of tomato sauce and melted cheese. But he still had a full minute to go, and the show wasn’t over yet. He ate the sperm-streaked pizza with relish, saving the crust from his asshole for last. As a grand finale, he took his cup of soda and ice and removed the plastic top. Sliding his cock in among the icecubes, he pissed into the drink and drank the whole cup in one shot.

“What did you think of my show?” he asked.

I gave him an evil smile.

“Not bad,” I said. “Next time, bring a hotdog. With plenty of hot mustard.”

Then the time ran out, and the shutter slide closed, but not before I saw the bright possibilities in his eyes. I knew he would be back.