

## Tatterdemalion

### by

### Ray Succre

Second Edition

Published by Capacity Press (Ray Succre)

Copyright Ray Succre 2008-2012

Cover art. Ray Succre

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This book is dedicated to my father,

Steve Morrison.

February 28th, 1957 - March 17th, 2005

Tatterdemalion

With my father's eightieth birthday came a responsibility on his part to wither. That his body had yet to degrade in an acceptable manner was upsetting to my brother and I, and it was expected, on this even decade celebration, that he would at last become old as ruins. To expediate this natural metamorphosis from stubborn physique to shambling codger, I presented him with a new, sturdier cane. I had felt he might come to rely on it more if it offered him a steadier bracing, and that his body and back would have no choice but to adapt to it, and begin fitting the appropriate mold of eighty years. The birthday cane was a signal so obvious I felt he shouldn't have a way around it. He would have to become old, adopt a miauling feline, and stop eating spicy food, right then and there in front of us.

It was during this particular birthday, over frozen pizzas that seemed to have been prepared with inadequate heat, that my father first informed me he had decided to try his hand in a stage-play. I did not approve and Percy gave a laugh. Old by most standards, dad's health had slowly descended into a callus-like tenacity. He put on a show of steadiness, but I knew the medley of enlaced, recurring troubles he had developed. His smell required pills, and the pills that fixed his smell gave him gout. The gout medication he digested per morning made his stomach worry, which aggravated his ulcer, and the bismuth chalk he drank to remedy this caused the allergic reaction that would later, by several hours, cause him to smell so awful. He also ingested an anodyne each night to level the pain in his lower back, allowing him to sleep. He had geriatric ailments, yes, but none of the rickety soul that was expected of him.

In the world of aged men, there were many kinds of those most old. There was the stubborn old man, an archetype, to be sure. There was also the whimsical senior that went along well with his grandkids. There was the invisible geezer, entombed in a small apartment with cats and soap, and there was even the particular sort of old man that was euphemized to exhaustion during his funeral: Full of life, decisive, a born leader, strong-willed...instead of mouthy, rude, bossy, and close-minded. I often wondered how I might summarize my own father once he was gone. Several words came to mind: Talented, thoughtful, regimental, and even driven. These words seemed accurate, but needed tails attached, indicating they were only as defining as the words around them. For instance, he was talented _as an editor_ , thoughtful _when in charge_ , regimental _though absorbed_ , and while my dad was indeed driven, it caused him to forget people at times, even a younger me. He was driven _too far._

My father's cane, and my offering of a new one for his birthday, was useful to him. He needed one to walk any distance over a few feet. This was indicative of the problems I foresaw in his attempt at theater. I couldn't but try to understand his reasoning, which I found suspect and faulty. While his mental abilities were confident and sound, after an analysis of his physical frame, and the fact that he needed a cane to function, his stage-play endeavor couldn't be anything but trouble.

How could my father expect to memorize hundreds of lines and perform them in front of a crowded theater? He was supposed to be going senile, and in so doing, become somewhat cute and sad; a loveable, stoic burden. His body was designed to begin whining over the physicality of playing shuffleboard and sleepy games of bingo. He was supposed to be eating bland cups of various, zestless feed, not eating chemical-laden frozen pizza and talking about the excellent espresso he'd had earlier in the day. He should have been focusing the last of his mental capabilities on trying to be sly, so he could question us in covert ways and quietly determine if his boys had hidden plans involving his future subsistence and its possible relation to sugarless pudding in the lukewarm room of a nursing home.

"The director gave me the part. I'm already in," he had explained, taking in a bite of the room-temperature pizza, of which he ate from atop the box it came in, as a plate. I found this new desire of his to involve himself in the world to be an obvious and ungrateful shirk of his natural responsibility to become correctly feeble. He acted like a bachelor, and now he wanted to act in a play. I knew the play he spoke of, as well. A filmed version of it had been required in my sophomore English course. I'd read some of the play, enough to get the point, and as the responsible student I'd been, dutifully skipped the two film-showing days to play video games at home.

I explained that undertaking a stage-play at his advanced age and with his troubled body was a glorious notion, but a doubtful event, and had to be a failure waiting in the lea. What did he know of acting? My dad hadn't acted on a stage once in his long life. After some talk, quiet on our parts to denote fragility, we discovered his sincerity for this prospect of acting was stronger than our arguments. My brother, Percy vacated that night behind uplifted eyebrows, elevated to the point of fractured skull, but I remained, slow to support my father's goal. I accepted it, but with inner grudge. I was the younger by sixteen years, having played second to Percy most of my life, and it could be supposed I was the most eager for my father's admiration, or else the least experienced in the world and thus naive enough to still think of art in an open means.

"Well, I think it's trouble, and I know Percy's laughing about it right now, but who knows? You might discover a hidden talent you didn't know about," I conceded. My father seemed perturbed by this statement. The lips turned down, their edges drew arm-ward, and he gave a soft consonantal emission. My father's frown, I had learned long ago, came from the outside in. The expression appeared on his face first, and was then followed by any negative thoughts. He could frown at something before it was even said, but it took a few moments for him to develop the reason he was annoyed. His frowning was like a trigger that let his mind know to start defending and opining. It was obvious I'd stamped at him and with a tone too lecturing for a son to use with his dad.

A person could be indelicate when crashes were needed, as in war, business, fact, things that required a staunch hand, but when faced with an old man that raised you, who had shaped much of your early perception, and who you owed much of your way of love to, you had to walk with caution. My father, the old man with skin thirty years too young for his true age was searching to revalidate his presence in a new arena, despite the sadness and reaching involved. Revalidation was perhaps the most animal-like trait a man could exhibit. It was the overthrown, exiled lion drawing dangerously near at times, showing his pride a logical conclusion, that he was beaten but still there, that he existed well enough, and shouldn't be forgotten.

My great aunt Ida, a woman who never swore and had carried the burden of frugality deep within her for as long as I'd known her, had done something similar and sudden when, at seventy-four years of age, she decided to buy an unvirginal Corvette. That wasn't such an awful idea, as a car was a car, but when the Department of Motor Vehicles rescinded her license a mere two months after the purchase, she was stuck with her fetching, canary-yellow Corvette in front of her shy house, inutilized and idle to the point of shame. This gave off an uncharacteristic juxtaposition, as my great aunt's home had undergone a systematic conking over the last decade, and matched her health with considerable accuracy, yet before the front walk to this wilting life sat the graphic, youthful sports car.

The name of the bright color this car exhibited was indicative: this vehicle was as a vivid singing bird she had managed to cage, but that she wasn't allowed to hear. As was Ida's nature, she wouldn't let anyone else listen to it either. The car sat on the street and called attention. The car slept. A suspicion kept between Percy and I was that, when her maladies caught her at end, the gamey Corvette would be left to my father, who wasn't allowed a license either. One could be confused while aging and a person _could_ be indelicate about life, if needed, but with things like Corvettes, last wills and testaments, and stage-play tryouts, I supposed a person could have no choice but to be certain.

I could believe I understood my father's predicament, once I'd mulled it enough. Change was relative, and there was a personal iconography involved in every movement of a person's life. My father Joe, a retired editor of a literary magazine and a man who had been exposed to more reviews of plays, movies and albums than he could have remembered, was bored. He needed a touch of metamorphosis, even at this later stage in his life, and had struck out to act in a stage-play. I supposed it could have been something more damaging, or something more irritating to Percy and I. Dad could have taken an interest in parachuting, or decided to tour the active volcanoes in the Ring of Fire.

My own days had been encased in change, as well. Shortly before my 30th birthday, my home had been invaded by an unwanted problem, and who spent a good allotment of his time in the old Schaffer oven in my apartment. I had thought him a strange overnighter, and a temporary nuisance, but his couch-surfing, or in this case, oven-surfing, seemed to have no end. He was no roommate, but an invader, however a creature so mythical that I had no power to ask him leave. My weeks were spent writing poetry and following the advice of this interloper, putting up with what I had come to understand were tantrums, in essence. The oddity of the arrangement was such that I had no urge to tell others, despite the violence that occurred at times in my apartment. I had once attempted to tell my father about my predicament, but ended up facing the strangeness of it in my words, and in the end, altered my story and simply told him I had a cat. No matter the repercussion, I was a touch unique because of my 'guest', and this was a sensation people often tried to pay for, to ill affair.

"It's too late for me. The bash is over," my father said, tired but pleased I'd stayed so long. I knew I had poems to write at home, and so the timing of this was salutary. Being tired was a good signal he was old, yes, but then I also felt a little tired.

"We should get a coffee or something this week," I suggested. He gave me a look of curiosity and then brought up what I didn't want to talk about.

"You go see your doctor yet?" A sigh formed in my mind, traveled a short distance, and stopped just short of my mouth.

"Yeah, today."

"And?"

"They re-upped my antidepressant," I said.

"That's it?" he asked, agitated. I shrugged.

"Dad, I'm fine. I got depressed for awhile. It was shitty. I feel good now. I'm fine," I explained. This wasn't true. I felt anxious and fidgety of late, but I didn't feel depressed. That much was correct. He looked me over for several seconds, then back at his half-eaten slice of now cold, prefabricated pizza.

"Yeah, all right," he responded, doubtful.

"Anyway, happy birthday, pop. And I hope you dig the cane; it's solid rosewood," I said, teasing in the slight and approximating the conversation's end.

"It's like giving a housewife a cake mix for Christmas. Ah, but I like it, sure. Thanks son," he reciprocated. It was pride time. Thanks son. I didn't beam, but I could have. Somewhere in the midst of teasing and unfunny stabs at one another's expense, we had a firm substance between us. He thought I was weird, yes, but we got along better than some other fathers and sons.

He settled on the couch, his shoulders reaching a mild slump. After setting aside the pizza, he made a somewhat false attempt to admire the new rosewood cane in my presence. My cane gift was far more functional and superior than Percy's unwrapped, thrift copy of _Old Man and the Sea_ , which indicated he didn't remember that our father, as an editor, had stated several times in our youth that he didn't like Hemingway. I watched as dad laid the cane aside, but near, and took up a copy of his old magazine from a small stack on the end table.

I opened the front door against the chain and it made a loud, ear-jarring noise that caused me to smash my teeth together in surprise.

"Shit, sorry," I said, leaning the door back and removing the chain. Why he insisted on having a door-chain affixed, when he already had an imposing deadbolt ready for his worries, was silly to me.

"Keeps thieves out, and dummies in," he said, amused. It was my turn to frown.

"Yeah well, you're paranoid. Goodnight, pop."

"Night."

### TWO

"Why won't you remember Ingleman?" he asked, head full of metal scraps that underwent constant collision in an awful, ear-scratching ruckus. As the Red Dragon dogged his head forth from the oven, nostrils flared and seeping a viscous grey smoke, the billows of the oven choked the air in my lungs, causing me to gag. Toxicity came to mind, entered my body, swallowed me in my kitchen among the bachelor-worn pots and pans. Shakiness had overcome my knees and I was having to remain conscious of standing. Answering the questions the Red Dragon prowled me with was difficult with a mouth full of coughs.

"There's never been anyone in my life named Ingleman. I don't know why you keep bringing it up," I managed. Over the year, this guest had overrun my apartment. As with the often tangential interests of layabouts, the Red Dragon had gone from cordial visitor to rampant boss in very little time. His knowledge of poetry was astute, or at least, he knew more than I did, which gave an astute impression. Though he was just as failed as I was in the publishing realm, he was far more dedicated. He had taught me a few keen tricks about getting poetry written, but the price for his teaching me was ongoing. He made me send his poems out, with my name on them, to magazines, trying to publish. When they rejected him, as they did me before I gave up writing, he grew angry. Still, there was no dodging that he was here to help me in some way or another.

"Ingleman knows you better than anyone. He's going to have you," the dragon groaned. This talk of Ingleman had begun only in the last few weeks. It was an odd twist to our usual conversations. The dragon was beginning to seem more like a dictator than a confidant, as I once thought him. Our relation had centered around poetry at first, and he'd been friendly about it. I was pleased to have finally found a mentor that was interested in me. After some time of study, and our own private workshop of sorts, he'd assigned me a sort of quest to complete, unrelated to poetry. With a mythical creature, I had discovered, things like quests and journeys, legends and treasure, were important. They came along with the creature, a whole package of fantasy. I was far more intrigued in the quest he'd given me than with his mention of this person I didn't know, or even with his poetry assignments.

"Tell me what's in the jar," I said, returning to the topic I held in greatest interest. The quest, of course. My life had become as a swarthy chrysalis, wherein I could see out, but nothing could see in. He had promised me at the start that the jar was to be my way out, and the treasure for which my life would blossom. This was vague, yes, but it did sound tempting. Ongoing talk of it with the dragon had only set me to course. I wanted the jar, whatever it meant, whatever was in it. The dragon continually reinforced that this treasure would benefit my soiled life.

"That fake father of yours...ironic that he's taken to acting. He's been acting like your real father for years, and now he wants to act for others," the Red Dragon heaved. His foreclaws, out of the oven and on my carpeted floor, caused a smell of burning hair to lift into the apartment. He only came out of the oven when we spoke, and he grew larger for these discussions of quest and oddity.

"Leave my father out of it. I need you to answer my question. Please; I've been patient," I said. I'd found that taking a direct course with him tended to get me more information, but I needed to end my statements with something on the suffering he was putting me through. I'd tell him what I wanted, then end by saying please, mentioning that I was going through a lot. This tactic seemed to work with most people as well. The trouble with being caught speeding a little wasn't so difficult to get out of if you used 'please' and 'sorry' here and there, mentioned you were going through a lot, and used examples: Your relationship had just crumbled, a family member was sick, you were distracted because your very soul was being dismantled and sucked out by debt...

The interest the Red Dragon had in my father was obvious. The Red Dragon had once been a writer and tried to print in _The Tatterdemalion,_ among a vast number of other magazines in several countries. _The Tatterdemalion_ was my father's literary review, of course, as he was both founder and editor. He had retired the magazine a few years ago, but in the time for which he kept it alive, my father had rejected a great many of the dragon's poems, while never sending more than the preformatted, blank-filled rejection notice. This had made the Red Dragon very angry. His spite concerning the magazine was surpassed in heavy degree by his disgust for its editor.

"Ingleman would cut him back and glean the organs for candy," he said.

"There is no Ingleman," I repeated, "C'mon, where's the jar? I know you can tell me. I've suffered, here."

"It doesn't exist," he said with a smile. Baiting me in this fashion was unnecessary. The dragon's antic of goading reminded me of a NAVY basic training video I'd watched when I was younger. People followed orders and did what they were shouted at to do, but no matter how well they did, someone had it in their mind to meddle and shout at them, even if for the purpose of showing these new enlistees they could be shouted at.

"Then you wouldn't exist either," I responded. This was a volatile tactic, countering him with such clarity. He was liable to burn me again. My skin had healed since the last assault, but there was no part of me that ever wanted to experience the oven element up close again.

"It's up your ass, is where it is," he said, annoyed. I'd reciprocated with too much strength, and he was shutting down again. I wheezed for a moment, clearing my lungs of smoke while squinting my eyes and waving my hand before my face.

"Please, we've done this too many times. I'm a good guy, I've let you live here for a year now. I can't cook anything in the oven, my power bill is offensive, the apartment is flaming hot all the time...help me out, do your job," I continued.

"Help you? I want you hurt. I'm here because I love it here. This is my place, more and more. You may as well not exist for all you've been worth," the dragon said, lifting his chin toward me. I hoped it didn't infer another bite. The last time he'd bitten me, I couldn't go near my kitchen for two weeks and my arm festered around the fang-burns like wax around a hot, metal piston.

"Where's the jar? Please tell me. I can't...just tell me what's inside it." I said, altering direction. Any information I didn't already have was crucial. My quest to gain the jar had stalled at the query stage, and I felt like my time was wasted day in and out. It was like a messy little torpor. He baited me with the jar, and when I began feeling the lust for it, he kept it from me, and instead began throwing this Ingleman character at me, who didn't seem to exist. There was an Ingleman in the Boston phone book, yes, but she was a nineteen-year-old girl who lived on a houseboat and didn't seem to have even a shred of connection to me, the dragon, or the jar. The references to Ingleman seemed to be the dragon's way of toying with me, a light jerk of the string by which I dangled.

The beast had been living in my oven for over a year, and refused to leave. He'd been so cordial and favorable at first. His behavior had changed, however, and the violence and baiting had ramped up in the last few months. I had made several attempts to rid my apartment of him after the first bit of violence, but these had dwindled into inevitable failure, and only seemed to anger him more. In time, I allowed him stay, though with a closer connection to fatigue than to actual tolerance. Allowance presupposed I had a choice, and I didn't believe I had such. The abuse I had sustained in the last few weeks had been worse than usual, and the Red Dragon had intensified his unruly behavior. The sparks of our mutual dislike had grown tremendous. He now surfaced in our conversations berating me, spitting cruelty atop me, taunting me about the jar. When I spoke with him, I, myself turned a slight red, sensed my skin cover in a hard form of cutis. It felt as if my body was being re-forged into rusty iron. I hated the Red Dragon, but had learned that the one way I'd be rid of the creature would be to outsmart him, over time. Once he gave up the location of the jar, he would leave. We both knew this. That's why he changed the subject so often and why he baited me.

"They told you something. To take something," he said, low and angry.

"Who?" I asked, suppressing the guilt in my gut.

"You know who. What are you thinking of doing?"

"Nothing. They said to try more of the anti-depressant. My dad made me go. It was just talk."

"If you do that, I'll hurt everyone," he said with menace.

"I know you will. And no, I won't take anything. But I'd like to know about the jar, okay? I'm cooperating." The Red Dragon groaned and rolled onto his back in the oven, exposing his belly and genitals. The scales deepened in color and density here, as if to show that he was more armored in these places.

"Grow up," the dragon said. There was a moment of quiet then, the single present sound being that of the mild sizzle that came from his sweat dripping onto the stove's hot element. There were so many things that I needed to do, and soon, but all of them involved getting the jar first. I needed my life back. I needed a career and money. I needed to leave Boston, because I was sick of it. I needed to start having relationships with women. The Red Dragon had arrived to help me do these things, but his motives revolved around poetry and baiting me with the jar, and now this Ingleman name. I didn't think he could be trusted anymore. The Red Dragon was malicious.

"I have a new poem for you," he said then. I felt my stomach turn. I knew this would be coming, as our regiment of talk and writing had become set and unavoidable. I still curled inside.

"I don't want a new poem," I said, whining.

"Get the pen. This will be published," he said, sure of himself.

"What if it's not? Are you going to attack me again?" I asked, bitter.

"It will be published in _Ploughshares_ ," he added, not listening to me.

"They'll keep rejecting you. Don't make me do it anymore."

"GET THE PEN." I squinted my eyes and held my head for a moment. With resignation, I retracted the pen from my shirt-pocket.

"It's too hot in there for the ink to take," I tried to reason.

"Come inside," he said. Awkward, I bent and climbed into the oven. It was blistering hot, and my hair felt tight in my scalp. The dragon began orating the poem, line by line, giving me the breaks, the punctuation, and in one instance, italics. At the end, he spat forth a title and then reread to himself. I'd written it down, letter by letter on the back oven wall in small handwriting. The side walls were already covered in poems. My hand was sweaty and tender from the heat, while cramped and aching from the odd position my wrist needed to maintain in order to write on a vertical surface while hunched in the oven.

"You turned the heat up... I can tell. And we're running out of room," I said when finished making a tertiary change he wanted.

"When that happens, you'll write on your skin," he told me, annoyed.

"See? The ink runs," I said, a call-back to an earlier conversation. I watched as my most recent letters began dribbling and bubbling like the rest had against the hot metal wall.

"Let it run. You send this to _Ploughshares_. They'll print it."

"They won't," I said, crawling backward like a toddler toward the door of the oven.

"Tell your father I love him, like I love you," he said, sinister.

"Tell him yourself, if you can," I said, wishing I hadn't. This struck him quiet for a moment.

"Get out." I used the bottom of my shoes to nudge the door down, opening the oven.

"I'm getting a job in a few days," I said, changing the subject somewhat. I couldn't let the conversation end yet. I hadn't even been offered so much as a hint about the jar. The dragon snorted and lounged back on the hot rack, his balls against the metal strands, a searing sound coming from the contact.

"Sure you are. It's the same thing again and again. You'll work, if you keep the job past a moment. You'll try to succeed; and good for you, what a guy. You'll give them your best blood and then they'll go milk, and turn. They'll expect too much. They'll begin hurting you, and you'll defend yourself like you always have, poorly. When that happens, you'll be back here, with me, mine, in the oven. Don't bother."

"No, I'll keep this job. I don't know what it'll be, something from the employment office, but I'll keep it," I stated.

"After enough of these shitty jokes, there'll be nothing left of you for Ingleman to take," he said, opening his mouth and panting a moment. His pink tongue moved forward and back as his lungs drew and shot out the air, methodical.

"There is no Ingleman. And I'll keep this job."

"We're going back to square one," he said, angry. I dreaded this more than his other punishments. The burns were horrible, then uncomfortable, then negative memories, but starting over, as we'd done once before, was torture. It meant more time in the oven, less talk, far more poetry, and no mention of my quest for the jar. It was returning to kindergarten and pretending I didn't know algebra.

"What? Whoa, no... no, c'mon. I've gone above and beyond here... I let you live in my apartment, I answer your stupid demands, I don't leave for very long..."

"You shouldn't have gone to see them. Pills. That's a travesty waiting to happen. We're starting over."

"That's unfair. It can't work that way," I protested.

"Fuck you. Get out, and shut the door."

"No, let's talk some more. I know we can reach an agreem-"

"Get out! You've bored me. And don't answer the phone." He turned on his side then, closed his eyes, and lowered his chin to the grill, the way a dog sleeps. I frowned and sighed. I'd lost the conversation again. There'd be no talking with the dragon again until he chose to wake up and call on me. Having been left without answer again, I backed to the edge and climbed out of the cramped oven, into my kitchen. I'd made no ground with the dragon and I knew he'd be all the more angry next time for it. The stakes continued to raise, but the momentum only declined.

" _Ploughshares_ ," he said as I reached for the oven door, "and turn up the heat." I looked at the settings of the oven. I was right, he'd raised the overall degree of heat from 400 to 450. I grunted and closed the door with care, making sure to switch the internal light off, and then reaching over the idle burners, I twisted the oven's knob to 'BROIL', which was only a notch above where it had been. I didn't want to think about how much stewing he was going to do in there while I was gone.

Resigned to another failed attempt at locating the jar, and having had the dragon blather at me about Ingleman again, I sat in my living room, quiet, trying to imagine what I'd do with the jar when I found it. I supposed my actions in this would depend upon what the jar was, and what it held. After all the work, all the energy I'd placed in my search to find it, I knew I was onto something. Nothing that elusive was pointless. Nothing.

After typing the poem into my laptop, I filled in the cover letter the Red Dragon had instructed me on earlier in the year. This was the 26th submission the dragon had ordered me to send, and there was the chance it would be the 26th rejection we'd receive, as well. Things were going to sour, and I couldn't help but sense my father had played a part in all of this, by rejecting the dragon so many times in the past. I supposed this couldn't be helped, of course. The dragon's poetry was godawful, and the worst aspect of these submissions I had to send for him was that I had to submit them with my own name. It was embarrassing, even after my own past failures to publish.

The submission finished and the cover letter filled in, I sealed it in a large white envelope and affixed the postage from a ream atop my television. Then I walked down to the apartment mailbox and set it inside for the next day's post. The stairs and hallway were cool on my skin and it was a gratifying relief. I couldn't imagine what would have happened if I didn't live on the top floor. Any other and I'd have complaints from upstairs neighbors over the constant, sweltering heat coming up from my apartment. At least I didn't have that to worry about. The third floor of the building was unoccupied but for my dwelling, and my neighbors below went most often unheard.

When I returned, a gust of heat enveloped me. In this hellish, burning blanket, which drew me into the apartment as if a spark to a bonfire, I staggered. I slowly adjusted again to the temperature and entered my living room, where I lit my one cigarette for the day, fidgeting as I did so. As per my addiction's zeal, the sense of nicotine anticipation began shopping in my hands for a lighter. This cigarette would be the most calming sensation in the next 24 hours, when I'd allow myself to smoke again. The heat in my apartment was too much to let myself smoke often, and I'd been trying to quit ever since the Red Dragon first arrived. The dragon gave off enough smoke without me hot-boxing my apartment day and night.

As I sat down in my sweat-stained chair, taking mild, soothing drags from the cigarette between my fingers, I lost myself to stillness. Moving in the minimum for awhile felt good. I lifted the cigarette, had a soft drag, held the smoke in like the fond memory of a long gone friend, and then released it, calm as I lowered my wrist to the chair again. After a few minutes, I stubbed out the finished cigarette and, as I leaned back into the chair for lack of else to do, the phone rang. I sighed, rubbed my eyes, and let it ring.

### THREE

The play was Irvine Galstrom's _The Skull Finder_ , a once-touted Broadway production that lauded actor Michael Hausen had made famous, before he moved on to Hollywood and began taking on the film-roles of 'oppression-fighting heartland rancher', and the occasional, glitzy, 'gymnastic diamond thief'. _The Skull Finder_ , along with Galstrom's other plays, had seen little light in the last decade. I would assume this was due to his having been tried for pederasty near the tail end of his career. I couldn't recall if he'd received a conviction or not, but I know I didn't see his plays mentioned much after that.

_The Skull Finder_ was the story of a young gay man who falls in love with an old straight man, and through time they realize a sometimes uncomfortable friendship, until a middle-aged woman comes between them. A purblind love-triangle ensues, to dramatic element. A friend of the director, my father had been cast in a lead role, and was optimistic. He was not to play the young man or woman.

I made a lily-pad of my father's apartment over the next month, dropping in with frequency to check on him and help prepare his stage presence, which I knew nothing about, but found fascinating. With the opening night but a month away, he had begun reading other plays, as well as renting many filmed plays to watch in his bedroom at night, while drinking cold tea. It was the driven aspect of him, which rose from its bed-sheets at unpredictable times, but that always delivered him into professionalism. I'd seen it many times, but not since he'd retired his magazine. Giving time to my father in the preparation of his role was more an act of curiosity than support, but it read the same either way. I was helping my old man in the manner he needed, regardless the reasoning.

He was spotty at first. There was emphasis in his lines that seemed timeworn and over-dramatic, and this had caused some of his longer orations in the play to buckle and degrade. American English had changed to small degree since the writing of _The Skull Finder_ , but enough that he was having difficulty making the more retrofunctional dialogue sound real. He would have to start fresh with each line, it seemed, trying to inflect and having nothing from the previous line to go on. He didn't have a good leave when he spoke. I had suggested he watch a movie or two with a good monologue actor, to see how to end a line with enough force to give him a place to pick up the next line. He rented some movies and it worked. I dreamed myself an acting coach and wondered if I should arrive at his apartment each visit with throat-lozenges ready and one-act practice drills.

He was nervous about the production. He'd met the other leads and had worked hard with the back-stagers to figure out the timing of the scenes and what he needed to do between them. The routine of putting on a play agreed with him, I'd noticed. He was fidgety when reading lines, but the fly-fast nature of the production going wrong here and there, needing to be fixed and patched quickly, was similar to his past experience with editing _The Tatterdemalion._ The jitters that had swelled over him were no match for the man I knew lived in my father's skin. I added 'masterful' to his eulogy, which could also be rendered, between the lines, as ' _obstinate nit-pick'_. Still, with the passing afternoons and his reciprocal study, he had grown stiff and affirmative in his portrayal of Edward, the older, straight man. He was working hard, reading much, and trying to wrap his tongue around the very notion of Edward. For the sparse time he had remaining, my father had many lines to ingrain in his matter and was not going about it with haphazard.

"Damn it... do you think I came here to say goodbye to you?" my father asked. I stood up, setting aside my molten chicken pot pie in its tin, and pointed at him with the finger it had earlier burned.

"What do you know?" I countered, trying to put some real disdain behind it. "You're not what I am, you'll never get it. And Clara was my friend... My _friend_!"

"So I can't have a friend, Sam? I'm only supposed to have you? Is that it?" my father answered, cold.

"You... you used me to get to her, you pig. And you _fucked_ her. I felt close to you... and you used me," I said, hurt beyond words, conjoining my young, homosexual life and my crushed friendship into an ellipse of sadness you could see from the sky.

"You should say that with more disgust, I think," My father advised.

"Gimme a break, I'm not in a play. And you said 'Sam' just now," I advised.

"I did? Again?"

"Yeah, just focus on the name 'Adam'. Think Adam and Eve or something," I coached, "and keep going. I have to get to the employment office by noon."

Though I'd shown defense, I was getting into this acting thing. It was almost a high, or a kind of ongoing foreplay. You were someone else. You were a designed human. It was a matter of showing the design and filling a body. I could see why the term 'acting bug' had evolved. It was almost as if a person could catch it like an illness. The sobering aspect of this bug was, of course, show time. Like any high or foreplay, I wouldn't want to do it in front of a thousand people. My father snorted and then turned away from me, running his hand through his gray hair.

"I didn't fuck her, Adam. We made love, Clara and I," he stated, hitting the line hard. My father had a way of making swear words count. While rehearsing, whenever I said the word 'fuck' in a line, it always came out sounding insidious and sharp. He could just say it and it sounded like everyday speech. I wondered where a person developed a skill like that, and suspected it came either from a lifetime of swearing, or possessing a knowledge of profanity that treated it as a wondrous commodity. A harsh word from my father was rare. I decided he was becoming a good actor.

"What do you know of making love? You're a fool," I blamed.

The dialogue, far from what I could recognize as being top-notch, seemed very phony and difficult to say without a certain level of hamming. I had failed as a publishing poet, but I did have an ear, and I knew what I saw on the rehearsal pages was deliberate and stylized for theater. The lines were structured around being on a stage and carrying over a crowd. It made sense to me, but still sounded off when said in my father's living room. Galstrom's play had won awards, sent its original young-man lead into Hollywood stardom, and was often mentioned with a tone of reverence by my English course instructor back in high school. Despite this, it still seemed a play like all others, which was proposal-like and involved people standing in bright lights talking louder than was real.

"Should I emphasize 'Clara' or 'I' in that last line?" my father asked.

"Uh, let me think... 'We made love, Clara and I'... Well, I'd think neither. Emphasize 'love', but as to 'Clara and I', you know, just say it plain, like it's something you're used to, or that you've reconciled already. Does that make sense?" I envisioned my father standing before the podium, thanking me while holding his Tony or Oscar, then returning to the side-stage where I stood, the greatest son ever.

"I'm gonna hit with 'Clara'. Anyway, I thought you had a job lined up. Architect, wasn't it?" he asked, sitting down in a chair and commiserating over his impossible-to-eat pot pie. It was break-time. Our rehearsals were peppered with them, which gnawed at my worries from time to time. He'd be on his feet for hours once the play began. I hoped he could handle it. I imagined opening night would be the worst one for discovering you couldn't perform.

"Well, architect jobs are pretty coveted," I answered, "and I did the time, waited and smooched, you know, but then they ended up giving it to some other guy."

"Did they? To who?" This was an odd question. I checked my watch.

"Who?" I repeated, thinking about it.

"Yeah, the person who got the job."

"Huh, I don't know. It didn't occur to me to ask. They just called and said they were going with someone else. I'm sure I wouldn't know the guy. Anyway, I'm gonna have to leave here in a few minutes so... we should rap up the scene."

"How do you know it was a guy?" he asked then.

"That they hired? I guess I don't. I just meant they gave it to someone else."

"I'll tell you, I'd go down there and see this person. Find out what they have that you don't." For a moment, there he was, a version of my father imported direct from my childhood. The dad that lectured less than he calculated. The Joe I once knew who could decipher all things into a simple few sentences. The father of all simple advice. He didn't transgress into that man often anymore.

"Are you serious? I'm not gonna go spy on someone that got the job I wanted. That's stalking or something," I said, amused.

"It's survival, and it's manhood, and survival doesn't have stalking laws." he said, looking over his lines and fanning his pot pie. Was he serious?

"Yes it does, dad. People go to jail for them all the time," I responded.

"FINE! WE FUCKED! What's it to you, anyway? You need to get it through your head that you're not a possibility for me. I'm straight and so is she. Reach the conclusion!" he exploded. The living room shot away from me and I was on stage with my powerhouse father, his dialogue leaving his body like vital blood itself.

"I can't get over it! And you don't want me to!" I replied after a moment of scanning through my production photocopy of the play.

"Well maybe that's true... just maybe it is," he said, sour, "But this isn't the world for that. This is the world for being who you are. This is the real world, Adam."

"You don't know who I am. You've never known," I said. It was true. He'd never known. I was Adam, a man of plights, in love with an older man that didn't love me back. Of all things, it had to be a woman who caused me such grief. A woman I had befriended, and who my secret love-interest had copulated, and now I'd lost them both. Edward, Clara, gone. I was alone. Adam without an Eve or serpent.

My father's apartment, while far from spacious, had undergone a caustic remodeling in the last few days. His pack-rat nature had subsided for a time, and he seemed in the process of removing the heaps of items that had overrun his living space. His stacks of back-issue literary reviews were gone, though I knew he couldn't have thrown them out, as valuable as he thought them, so I had to assume he'd paid to store them somewhere. Gone also were the three coffee tables that had taken up one complete wall of his living room, having made it unusable and inaccessible. These had been given to him, one by one, by passing friends and editors, an in-joke between them that I was never in on. He neither had the will nor heart to get rid of them. I could only surmise he'd paid for these to be stored somewhere as well.

"Okay, so maybe I don't know you. Not enough. But I know you're not like Clara, and I know... I know you're not like me," my father said.

"We sound like fools, you crazy old bastard," I countered with venom.

"Wait, does it—I don't have that on my lines..."

"No, I was just stating it for record," I answered. My father pursed his lips in a bored manner, an expression I could trace back to my junior high years, when he often employed it as a mechanism to end a conversation.

"Well, you're thirty-something, so get a job, for the record," he said, one part tease to two parts truth.

"I know. But just think: In a month, I'll have gained employment somewhere, and I hope for decent pay, and you'll be having marvelous fun in your guy-guy kissing scene at the end of act three." My father's eyes expanded in a harried and irritated way.

"Ah lord, I know. You read that?"

"Yep. You know, I'd never gotten to that part when I read it in high school," I stated, "I only read the first half. Rereading it the last few days brings back memories, though. I remember some of the other kids' parents were pissed about it, you know, the school giving their kids a book with queer behavior in it. Shows how much times have changed. The Pledge of Allegiance is out, queers are in." I said with a shrug. My father raised his eyebrow at this statement.

"You know, I heard that word said the other day. Queer. I always thought the gays considered 'queer' a derogatory term."

"Uh, I don't know. I think it depends on who's saying it, or where you live." I replied.

"At any rate, you're mother has to be laughing in her grave, right?" he joked.

"I'd think so."

"Isn't she, though? I'm not looking forward to that scene. It's the end of the play, and I've got to be really worked up, which is tough at my age, and then I have to smooch the other male lead."

"And in front of all those people," I poked.

"We're nearly sold out. I'm gonna do it."

"Help the guy out. Eat a mint before the scene," I said.

"Have you met Sam? Playing opposite? He's not acting. He's really a gay guy," my father said, as if I'd never heard of such a thing.

"I haven't met him. Is it that you have to really kiss a gay guy that bothers you, or is it that you have to kiss a _really_ gay guy?"

"Uh, in this case, I think both," my father said, deflating into his chair again.

It had always seemed odd to me that my father was so disturbed by gay men. I knew he was not so disturbed by the notion of homosexuality as he let on, having found proof of this when I was in high school, and finding his stash of adult movies, many of which contained scorching, eager lesbian scenes. He, like most men I knew, found the notion of two men together, whether it be for sexual means or in a committed, loving way, disturbing. The reason I found it strange he be so unsettled about the existence of gay men was due to the sheer volume of them he had met over the years.

In my earliest childhood, my father had been more the redneck than anything, before we moved to Boston, but his more conservative mind had somehow managed to shift after the move. He undertook his goal of editing a literary magazine and, after several patchy and misguided attempts, succeeded in establishing the journal for which most knew him. There were gay men present at every quarterly launch party, and many of these same men had become slight friends of his, though in truth, more for the ongoing acceptance of their writing into his pages than actual, bonding friendship. For a man that could logic out the motives of anyone and feel compassion, it was odd that he have such a hang up about gay men.

Having been the editor of _The Tatterdemalion_ for near twenty-five years, he'd been opened to the world slow. His terse and judgmental nature, which he'd instilled in me growing up, had passed into a kind of tolerance. He was more relaxed, more interested, and more of an understanding human being than he once was. I found this to be disheartening. While I liked him more now than I had in the past, there was something almost shameful in seeing someone go back on their views so late in life, even if it was for the better. My father's hick mentality had been replaced, over time, with a metropolitan manner, which was to the world's benefit, but sometimes I missed the hick. There were times I made up new closed-minded rants in my head, watching my father give them like when I was younger. Becoming a different person, altering one's morals and perception, is something most people fear and are disgusted by. My father becoming more modern and open-minded, in this light, almost seemed as if he'd been invaded or possessed, having been run down and tagged, once tired enough. Even though he'd become what I felt was a better person, it was strange watching his opinions and angry personality, over the years, wilt back.

I supposed that, even at his most negative, a strong, rigid man was still a strong, rigid man, whether you liked him or not. Unflinching and expectant, people counted on these sorts of stubborn men to be who they were, even when the people disapproved. With logic, you could expect a man that randomly punched you in the face to be an asshole. That was an act that an asshole would do, decking you like that. You didn't want to discover, even after a great amount of time, that he was, in actuality, a nice, wonderful man after all. That could introduce the notion that _you_ were the asshole.

Even considering his now metropolitan stance on most things, and his newer mode of understanding, he still had trouble with the thought of two men in a romantic light. I chanced it was humorous.

"Do you have to kiss him with tongue?" I asked.

"Jesus, stop it. No," he laughed.

"You might want to if you're serious about your performance."

"Right, then I'm not that serious," he said with a subtle grin, managing to get a small forking of the pot pie past his tongue's temperature sensors.

I had noticed when I first arrived that the cane I'd bought for his birthday seemed to be absent. He had expressed earlier that he was going to be on stage without it, and that he needed practice walking around for short durations on his own. This he seemed to be accomplishing well enough, though I couldn't but wonder where he'd put the cane. I imagined he'd want it near, for when he tired. The stronger reason for my wondering was that I had yet to see him using it and had witnessed him revert to his older cane several times now. The gift-giver in me worried he wasn't fond of my semi-expensive, rosewood present.

"Where's your third leg, by the way?" I asked, acting in the offhand. He looked up at me with thinking eyes then, and lifted his fork upward as if to make a strong point. However, he didn't speak, and turtled his way with fork back into the blistering pot pie. Having a question go unanswered was a pet peeve of mine, though I doubted if my father knew it. This particular agitation had developed in my early twenties.

Some time passed and I'd eaten about half of my pot pie, when it came time to vacate. My father licked his teeth, having finished his dinner, and I checked my watch to discover I'd need to leave quite soon.

"I can't believe you're going to be in a famous play your first time out," I said, blowing with caution on the thick, steaming matter my fork had lifted from the hot tin.

"I can't either. It was a whim, I guess, but it's happening. I'm Edward."

"I'm making flyers that list 'Hot Male Action' as one of the show's taglines," I said, juvenile.

"Pff. I even have to do it all dramatic. Like we're such good friends at the end, that I really _want_ to pucker up with a guy."

"Welcome to theater," I offered.

### FOUR

The micro-thin carpeting was officious, and the sheer whiteness of the textured walls felt wholly enclosing. I was carried as far as the machine could take me, striding on its back into the fantastical database of listed employers. Each sought out specific positions to be filled by members of the cavalier unemployed, such as I had joined and frolicked amongst numerous times. There were construction jobs that demanded you provide your own headgear and toolboxes. There were convenience store clerk positions that stated no college students or seniors would be considered. There were print-shop jobs that required bachelors degrees, and of course, coffee carts and their ilk, demanding more illogical experience than should have been tolerated by law. I had a method to arouse better jobs than these, while providing little of my own materials or experience. It was the Miscellaneous section, where few traveled in search of employment.

I perused quickly through the various headings, categories and sub-listings to quench my minor curiosity, but the section from which I had garnered the most work in the past was Miscellaneous, and it was in this section I settled myself. Here, one could find the jobs that didn't fit into the major categories, and after my foray through the other worlds of employment, I found it more useful to escape into the heading I hoped would provide me with work. I was pleased, therefore, when I found several jobs, none of which required experience, that I could attempt navigating the line for.

I ambled through the odd and off jobs, some of which were full-fledged career beginners. I was a doe hopping through my little meadow and sniffing at wondrous berries in season. What bright little jobs these were, seeming to come to life in the most random of fields. My history with employment, and the employment office itself, was long-lived and quite weathered for my age. Was I a lazy doe? Had I trundled through the woods without reserve and stopped to drink for durations that were too short? No, by my thought, at least. I felt these woods were lively with the almost unbearable hording and territoriality of other creatures. Maintaining any job for long had proven difficult for me, as I ended up stuck in perpetual small-talk and inconsistent benefit. I could manage a routine that required the same watering hole day after day, if needed, but my situation hadn't become dire enough for this. To my knowledge thus far, the woods were full of pricks.

"Blue sheet, huh?" the man beside me asked. We were standing in separate lines, of which there were but the two, and his line, moving swifter than mine, had brought his meaty shoulders near to me. He was quite overweight, wore denim overalls, and had paint-splotches on his black work-boots. The receding hairline and hard-pumping blood in his arms and neck alone denoted a difference in generation.

"Yeah, I'm giving it a shot," I said, extending my talk enough to indicate I could be spoken to for longer than a sentence, but to little gain. The blue sheet was any listing the printer spit out that belonged to the Miscellaneous section. It printed each section on a different color of paper, except for Food Service and Domestic, which both printed on a kind of off-white, highly recycled paper, for reasons of heavy use.

"Blue's tough, I heard," he said.

"Huh. What do you got? A yellow?" I asked. Yellow sheets involved jobs that took place in foundries and woodshops, things like that. The section for these was titled 'Wood Products and Metal Work'. I wondered if a plastic shop would also be found here. If so, did plastic workers feel discriminated against for not having their field appear next to those ancient, granddaddy names of Wood and Metal in the title heading?

"Yep. Handy-man. Trimark is in town doing some kind of flick, and they're hiring a group to paint an entire neighborhood for a location; a set." This seemed like a rare and inspiring sort of job, something you never saw in Boston, or at least, in the employment office.

"No shit?"

"Nope. I hope I can get on out there. They pay pretty well, and I get dental for a few weeks. That's what I heard, anyway." I looked, more drawn by his statement than for my own reasons, at his teeth then. They were ghastly and he was missing one of his canines, giving him a look like that of the inbred stereotype. I chastised myself internally for thinking the word 'inbred' in relation to having seen his teeth. The characterizations and images in media exposure and highlight over the years of a young life couldn't be ousted once you reached a certain age. My brain had sponged so heavily and for so long on stereotypical, two-dimensional characters, both in films and on the news, that I couldn't help but find myself thinking this man was inbred and southern, as goes the cruel cliché. Of course, he had no accent, not even a Bostonian lift, and was most likely from the west coast.

"Sounds good; what kind of movie?" I asked.

"I don't know. Who gives a shit? Wage, man."

"Ah."

"They pay, I work. Well, hopefully," he said, changing his tone a moment and taking a glance at the secretary at the line's mouth, for whom he would have to rely on to accept or deny his application of the job. She seemed pernickity, her small piggish nose diving into the forms on her counter and repeating things in a nasal, parental tone.

"Gotta pull the pay to fund the play," he added then, musical.

"Yeah, I definitely get it," I agreed, wishing we weren't talking like buddies or cohorts. I was comfortable at a distance, but twitchy up close. When a stranger began talking to you, there were limits. Once worn-out phrases and stock statements began cropping up, I wanted it over.

"So, what's yours?" he asked, returning his focus to me.

"Uh, from the Miscellaneous list—"

"It's blue."

"—yeah. It's a surgeon job," I said. Part of me wanted to accent the word 'surgeon', but that seemed like bragging, so I just mumbled it, the words coming out like chicken broth pouring down my chin. His eyes widened a notch.

"Shit man, I had a buddy, Rick, did that a couple months ago? Yeah, so he couldn't pull it off, though. Said the stress is fucked."

"I've heard that," I conceded. I knew the blue sheet jobs were considered more professional, for which I could infer there was more responsibility, but contrary to my statement, I had heard nothing to the effect of the stress being unmanageable. In truth, it just seemed logical that his statement was something someone would say, sooner or later. A person could tell you "Steer away from the stock market...it's a trap", or "Vacations in Wyoming are cursed", and I could give the same response: "Oh, I've heard that." This was one of the few things one could utter in response, and that was half-true every time you said it, regardless of whether you'd ever, actually heard such a thing.

"At least you don't gotta worry about malpractice, huh?" he nudged.

"God, I hope not. I'm gonna give it a try, see if it takes. The worst is I'll hate it or get canned; then I'm back here," I said. The man gave me a nudge on the shoulder then, which made multitudes of cells in my back and arms reel back, disturbed at the contact and shitting themselves.

"Hey, do it up. That's what it's all about. Something has to give sooner or later," he stock-stated; my blue-collar, industrious buddy, glancing down at his yellow printout, then back at the front of his line. I had a difficult time swallowing this particular line of reasoning. I'd heard similar things said over the years, and none of it seemed to do any good for me at all. These were similar to my response of "I've heard that". They were something to say when your mouth was open, statements that resembled idle mantras to be spoken when you thought you were losing a rigged game. _Do it up? That's what it's all about?_ Do it down, was more like it. Each month in a job, each next job, each second of every blinking moment doing what someone else told you...you were doing it down, a minor deviation from the level previous, like water evaporating from a driveway puddle. In the end, all that would be left was loose silt and a slight residue of oil. You had done it up. You had undergone what it was all about. You were a husk.

I needed to clear a path before me, and a chance to ride it out before that happened, before I was too old or ugly for the young and attractive people waiting on me, or worse, that I waited on, before I was too failed and angry to exist in the eyes of anyone else. The fat man, who I learned was named Jerry Alder, was correct in the third portion of his statement: Something's gotta give sooner or later. I could hold this and chew it there was so much truth in it. The mathematical law of averages was on one's side. If there was one thing I understood about math, with my terrible grades and 5th grade computation skills, having a mathematical law on your side was good. I found it far more inspiring and believable than the simple trust-borne idea that the heavenly elite were backing me, for love, straight out of some ancient, middle-eastern book.

Something had to give. If someone threw themselves in front of the oncoming enough times, again and again, they'd be struck sooner or later. _That's_ what it was all about, trial and error, averages, action and reaction; looking for a job that was looking for you. I couldn't help but worry, however, that there was nothing oncoming for me. Certainly, the manner of getting a job through the employment office was not placing yourself in a stream of oncoming possibilities, but more like climbing down into a riverbed that was nearly dry, with no rain in sight, and chasing the remaining trickles endlessly. _You_ were oncoming, but everything else was running from you like you'd just let out a cough among quarantined citizens in a viral outbreak.

"There's a problem with your application," she said. Being a black woman, she had already made me nervous. While having no predestinated allocations of race or birth-body, I had somehow grown over the years into a kind of unsettled worry over my role with black people. I had known several over the years, for short durations, and most due to jobs I'd worked, but I always found myself speaking in a guarded and cautious way around them. I didn't want them to think I was racist, or had any notions of superiority or inferiority. I was a good guy, but so much had happened over the last few decades that I couldn't but traipse with care when talking to a black person. What if I said something accidental that seemed racist? Or alluded to my having even a single thread of over-whiteness in me? After watching a television show wherein several black people mentioned having a disdain of the term 'African American', I simply couldn't use it anymore. I didn't know what the newest, politically correct terminology was, but I knew most terms could come off racist to someone, somewhere, so I'd fallen back on using the term I heard most often on television: Black person. I was horrified of being thought of as racist.

"What's wrong with my application?" I asked, thinking these words out several times before saying them. Once, I had mentioned I was thin-skinned in the vicinity of a young black man, and he'd given me a look.

Her nose was whistling with a slight, irritating timbre and I wondered if the broader noses I saw on most black people were prone to less or more whistling, or if, in the race, the frequency or depth of nose-picking changed from that of say, a smaller-nosed pacific islander, or the average Caucasian. Maybe that was a racist thought...

"In the ethnicity question, which you should know by law you are _not_ obligated to answer, and we advise our applicants not to...you've check-marked 'Caucasian'," the woman informed me.

The stakes seemed to have risen, and now, for better or worse, I was talking about race with a black woman. Race was the last thing I wanted to talk about with anyone of a different race. Shit, was that a racist feeling? It had a difference in race as a prerequisite...

"I did, sure," I responded. She stared at me a moment.

"Sir, I think it's pretty obvious you're Hispanic, and not Caucasian," she said, eyebrow raised.

"Hispanic? I'm not Hispanic," I said, but then I thought I'd said that in a way that came off too defensive, like I had some sort of problem with being Hispanic. I didn't. What was wrong with being Hispanic? Nothing, except that I wasn't. She took a short pause and looked down at my blue sheet, then back up at me, averting her eyes somewhat. I hoped she didn't think I was racist. I supposed I was tan, yes, but for her to assume I was Hispanic because I had a tan was... well, maybe _she_ was racist.

"Sir... you're not obligated to fill out the ethnicity question, so let's just clear the check-box and move on."

"Why? I filled it out correctly. I'm Caucasian. That's the right answer," I said. It came out wrong. _The right answer?_ Had I really said that? It sounded like an idea of superiority seething out of my mouth and I wished I hadn't said it that way. I'd filled it out correctly because I was white? Dear god.

"Sir, the problem is that you look Hispanic, and while I don't think that will matter, I think if someone sees 'Caucasian' on your app, and then they look at you, they might decide you didn't fill out the application honestly, for whatever reason, and you could lose your job for falsifying the application; even if you haven't." _For whatever reason?_ What did that mean? I have a reason for claiming to be white? Why would I do that, if I wasn't white? It inferred I thought white was better, didn't it? I needed to calm down. I conjured an image in my head of a built, high-ranking, black rapper telling me to fuck off, and that I was nothing. This helped a little.

"How do we resolve this?" I asked, slow, confident I wasn't giving off an image of myself that wasn't true.

"Like I said, I'll just clear the checkbox, okay?" I thought this over and shrugged.

"I guess that's fine," I said, wanting the situation past me, "Do you think they'll hire me?" A change of subject would be wonderful.

"Well, they may. This is over at P. Morris Medical Center, and they have good benefits, so if you do well, you've got a good chance of being kept on past the initial temp day."

"Cool. When does it start?" The listings in the employment office never gave specific information. You'd be given a job title, the requirements, and a few preferred traits, with only an occasional mention of schedule. That was it. They didn't even state how much you'd be paid.

"Let me check." She began typing in a systematic and very precise way, looking up data on her computer. Her hands, for being a bit pudgy, moved in a way that was almost improbable.

"Okay, there's another problem. We have it listed out there as being Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6am to 3pm, but it seems they've updated their needs and there's a different schedule now."

"Oh?"

"I've got it at Tuesday _through_ Thursday, but with the same time, 6-3, and everything else is the same. So, three days a week and you'd start tomorrow. 6am"

"I can do that," I said. She gave me a hard look in the eyes, then a somewhat steady gaze at my hands before speaking again.

"All right, we're gonna go ahead and do this one. I'll push it through and approve it. Be there at 6 sharp, because this job has a 2 hour orientation. After that, they'll have you shadow the house, and then, if you do well, you'll work the day and be asked to come back for the next."

"The house?" I inquired.

"In this case, a resident surgeon. One of their own," she clarified.

"Thank you," I said. I meant it. She could have very easily declined me and sent me back to the lobby computer, the back of the line, square one. I'd look through more listings, find another job, talk with some new buddy in an awkward and forced way, and then try again, nervous. I was pleased she was giving me the referral.

It was while waiting for her to print out the all-clear that it happened: As she typed my information into her computer, looking back and forth between my blue sheet and her screen, I caught an obvious, though brief look at my crotch. I couldn't have mistaken it. She looked right at my groin, a second passed, and then back to her screen, seeming to nibble at the inside of her cheek. With public notice of crotches and the like, I held a strange worry that I was flawed. Once, when in high school, a girl in my Civics class had caught me staring into her groin, bored with class and letting my eyes wander. I didn't even realize I was doing it, but she did. When I looked up at her, she had a horrified expression and had stopped chewing her gum. For all the trouble, intimacy, taboo, and stigma they carried, crotches simply shouldn't have been allowed in public.

I risked a quick glance downward to make sure my zipper wasn't open or something. All seemed well. Feeling a touch more at ease, and as she looked back at a printer that wheezed and churned to animation, I chanced a stare at her chest.

### FIVE

I held the small item in my palm and stared at it. Beyond the simple discretion I held over using it due to a visible hair stuck on its outer edge, the lozenge didn't appear to be any color I had ever placed in my mouth previous. It may have been foolish, but my little fantasy of being my father's acting coach had taken a hold on me while perusing my local convenience store, and I'd bought a tin of throat lozenges. While my stronger reasoning for the purchase was that my own throat was a touch sore from the smoke in my apartment, there was the chance that my father's voice might experience trouble in the long orations and seemingly endless dialogue of _The Skull Finder_. Like a good helper, I'd have the soothing lozenge-action covered. The tin had also been in a dusty bin of dozens and marked with a sale sticker.

It was sienna in color, but then had flecks of black in it, as well as the black, straight, short hair stuck in its easily-depressed, pocket-warmed exterior. What were the black specks? My brother, Percy sat on the edge of our father's bed next to me, eyeing the lozenge as closely as I was.

"It's a cough-drop. Just eat it," my brother said. We sat in my father's bedroom, on the foot of his loosely made bed, waiting. I felt like a child again, sitting that way on my father's bed, my feet not touching the floor, next to my brother in the same position. It was as if our dad was going to come out of his bathroom any second with a stern look and an angry shake of the head. He'd begin with, 'You two just don't want to listen, do you? No, you want to cause trouble. I expect it from _him_ , but Percy, you're older. You should know better.' and the lecture would begin, as it often had in our youth, followed by my worry over whether he was going to use the belt or not. With Percy having been sixteen years older than me, use of the belt had been my exclusive. My father had never tried to use it on Percy, who had been old enough to live on his own, drink in a bar, and pay taxes.

"There's a hair on it," I said, frowning. My brother rolled his eyes. Why he hadn't moved out when he graduated high school was a precision tactic on his part. He instead enrolled in the nearest community college, taking classes for criminal justice, for which he would eventually grow bored, and after a last, half-assed term, drop out. He eventually became a boat salesman, then a manager of other boat salesmen, then began his own dealership. I didn't see him often, save for our less-than-common meeting arena of dad's apartment. As vacant he was in my adult life, in my youth, while much older than me, Percy was always around, and usually trying to stir me into various modes of adult trouble, which never does well for a child. He gave me my first cigarette, which almost made me cough my lungs clear of my body, and he'd also crusaded me into my first fight with another kid. I had lost, manifestly. Percy had laughed. He was just that sort of young man back then. Any more, he was vague; a grown man in his mid-forties with a wife and a house the likes of which I'd never own.

"It looks like one of yours, so what's the problem? Pick it off and take the damn cough drop. Coughing bugs me," Percy said.

"It's a lozenge, not a drop, and I'm not eating anything that has hair on it, even mine. And what are these black things just under the surface?" I pondered.

"Hell, I don't know; some of the drugs or something. They work, just eat it."

"I don't want it," I said, suppressing a cough. The irritating fumes and smoke I'd been subjected to while in my oven with the Red Dragon over the weeks had scratched my throat a bit, though the hacking came in a delayed fashion. My throat was sore from the coughs, but more from the suppression of other coughs. My apartment was a touch smoky these days, and though I did fine while in it, the contrasting air when leaving the apartment proved problematic. It was when I entered particularly dry environments that my itching cough arose. My father's apartment was about as dry as his old furniture, which seemed moisture-less. I felt as if I'd leaned too close to a blazing fireplace for an extended span and was now paying for it. The infernal little itch was a dry one, at the back of my throat. The soreness was rudimentary, but that itch crept up so randomly and quickly that I couldn't help but burst into a round of coughs every few minutes. Clearing my throat only caused the itch to creep in with more constancy.

"You know, you could avoid this kind of scenario if you'd take responsibility and quit smoking." Of course this turn in subject would happen. Percy, despite his eleven year run of smoking, had quit a few years ago, and now had a righteousness about it. The irony was that he, himself, had pressured me to smoke so long ago, and hooked me.

"Just say 'you should quit smoking', Perce. When you add in the notion of responsibility, you just piss me off and make yourself sound assy. I'm down to one a day, anyway."

"That's not quitting. And 'Perce' was my kid name."

"You're still a kid; a rich, middle-aged, weirdly adult-like kid."

"Yeah well, there's nothing wrong with that. And 'assy' is in no way a real word."

"Then stop fitting the definition," I said, ending on a cough that slipped past my constricted blockade. Percy shook his head, giving a slight nasal exhale. He looked at the article in my hand again and snorted.

"Just eat the cough drop already."

"It's a lozenge."

"All right, eat it." he said. I pondered grabbing the back of Percy's head and cramming the hairy lozenge into his mouth, and when he spit it out, disgusted, I'd ask why he didn't want it in his mouth. He'd explain it was because of the hair. He'd admit it.

"You still think he's gonna pull off this play thing?" he asked then, switching modes. Percy's view on my father's upcoming acting debut was a mess. He seemed to despise the idea, and thought dad was going to make a flop-job of his role in front of himself and the whole world. As with all of Percy's opinions however, he also held an affirmation for the opposite. He was supportive to the extent of showing up and watching rehearsal from time to time and even managed to say a few 'good job' kind of statements. Percy loved playing devil's advocate. He was that rare form of man that could use optimism as a form of pessimism.

"Well, he seems committed to it, and he's been practicing a lot. So, yeah, I think he'll do fine. Maybe he'll do great even," I replied.

"If you say so; it's sad, if you ask me." I didn't ask him, and though I did think my father failing at this new endeavor would be sad, I didn't expect he would, and Percy would just have to eat it and start back-patting once the play began. It was as if my brother wanted our father to fumble it. I supposed I understood that, but there was a large lapse of couth in Percy. He wanted our father to fail, not because it was plausible, but because Percy would _enjoy_ it.

"Fuck off, Percy." This summarized my line of thought in a succinct and fashionable manner. He didn't do as asked, however, and instead socked me in the shoulder. It was a sophisticated irony that as grown up as Percy had become, he somehow hadn't grown up at all, despite the age he had over me, the career, and his dutiful, voluptuous wife, Mina. Percy had always been a caring sort of bully, and this had acted as a magnet for attractive women.

I was surprised when my brother married, though not surprised at all once I saw her. She was a model, something for which my brother had always compared the women he dated, or so I'd noticed when younger. Models were the height of dating, to Percy. I'd thought as much when very young, but once puberty had left me and taken its lopsided toll on my teenage years, I found I was more of a girl-next-door sort of man, except not movie girls-next-door, who were models, and only dressed like normal people, or the film industry's version of normal, at least, but actual women one might find living next door. There was something inviolably sexy about proximity. Mina, however, was the temptress character straight out of a romance flick, the wild card that the male main character had to overcome, with some expense of nerves, to discover he loved the other model pretending to be the woman I'd be more into. Percy was a big kid.

The door to the bathroom opened then and our father came out in his character clothes. He looked nervous and a little embarrassed. Costume wasn't a fitting name for what he wore. It was a fairly staple old-man outfit, and seeing him in it made a distinct impression of both theater and great-grandparenting, despite that my father had never been made a grandparent.

"Hey, look at old Joe! Dressed to the nines," Percy said, mock-impressed. My father ignored him, adjusting where his flannel shirt tucked into his high-tide beltline.

"It's okay? It feels weird to dress up. I've never worn this kind of stuff," he said.

"It's a little stereotypical, but you pull it off pretty well," I said, wishing I hadn't. The costume was that of a geezer. While I wanted my father to act his age, I had this idea that he could somehow do this while also retaining some coolness. It gave me hope that in my own old age, I wouldn't smell ancient and might still wear what I pleased.

Khaki pants pulled up past the navel with a tight little canvas belt. White tennis shoes from a discount outlet. A flannel shirt tucked in and buttoned all the way to the top, which only seemed to accent his lizard-like neck skin. Of course, he had to jam his head up into the classic, tweed newsboy cap, the traditional checkers-in-the-park hat ever since folding chairs and urban parks first met. All he was missing was a walker, titanic spectacles, and perhaps a sour expression.

"I pull it off, huh? Well, I think you could pull off crossed eyes," he said. He knew I didn't mean anything by it, and I knew he didn't either. I watched as he lifted a foot and looked at his exposed, thin, gray socks.

"I think I have to buy one of those straps that hold socks up," he said, annoyed.

"A garter?" I replied. He frowned and nodded.

"Funny. Anyway, this is it, but I don't have the glasses on because they haven't found the ones I'll use yet," he said. The outfit was commonplace, yes, but on a stage, in lights, and at a certain distance, it seemed acceptable. In this case, the banality of it was more than a simple indicator, as with most stereotypes; I saw older people wearing the same thing all the time. It was somewhat real.

"How many lines does he have?" Percy asked me, eyeing our father as he would an uncooked pork roast left on the counter for too long. Percy's humor in our family had always taken on a kind of insult-and-love mode. It was standard Percy boilerplate that he do something like ask me a question about our father right in front of him. Percy was the sort of man that would tell a waitress his meal was awful, then, when she offered to take it back, say he was just kidding. It was just his odd humor. My father understood it better than I did, though we both seemed to end up as the butts of his statements equally.

My father took a bow, then stood up and re-examined his shirt. The front of the shirt had un-tucked to small degree. This irritated him. I hadn't seen my father with his shirt tucked in since the age of ten. He looked at me then and waited for me to answer my brother's question.

"How many? Well, all of them," I said. My father thought this an interesting answer and raised his eyebrow.

"C'mon, how many?" Percy repeated, poking his index finger in my ribs as annunciation.

"Dad," I asked, "how many lines does Edward have?" My father smiled and shrugged.

"You don't know?" I asked.

"It's senility. This is what it looks like," Percy added, chuckling. My father readjusted his belt. He couldn't seem to feel right in it.

"Naw, I've got the whole thing memorized. It wasn't easy, either. Edward is 196 lines," he said. After a moment he saw what was in my hand.

"What's that pill?" he asked. I had pinched the lozenge and was simply holding it, mostly to taunt Percy, and planned on throwing it away.

"This? Throat lozenge," I said.

"Are you sick?" he asked, wanting to take a step back but controlling himself. My father had a mild germophobia, though this only manifested when in the presence of someone noticeably sick or unusually dirty. With the exception of mild arthritis, which had set in when we moved to Boston, he'd been of solid health until his early seventies, when the gout began. His other ailments were quite minor and passive. One of the reasons my father rarely found himself sick with any seasonal flu or airborne trouble was his strict rule of exiling those infected, family or not, to oblivion until they were well again. He'd be angry if I had the flu and had still come over to his apartment.

"No, relax. I have a cough from smoking. Mainly, the lozenges are for you. I'm your acting coach," I said, trying to inflect he should be amused by this. He gave me a confused look and then shook it off.

"Quite smoking," he said. I turned to Percy and nodded. _See Percy? That's how to do it_ _without being an ass._

"So, this looks all right? Not too fake or anything?" dad asked then.

"No, it's good. I've seen that outfit on people," I said.

"At a distance, on a stage, it'll look convincing," Percy agreed. We were on the same wavelength there.

"It works," I said.

"Good. I'm gonna wear this getup a little each day, get used to it. It's uncomfortable, though. I'm not a buttoned-up guy. It's like wearing a poncho or something," he said, then added, "Feel like a drink?" I was surprised by this.

"Do I feel like a drink?" I repeated back to him.

"Yeah, sure," he said. My heart popped. _Bonding time._ I had so rarely been offered a drink with my father. Most of this was due to my father's lack of drinking. He had a taste every now and then, but had never been much for inebriation.

"That'd be great. Make mine strong," I said, pleased.

"Make mine weak," Percy added.

"Make it however you want, I'm not playing bartender," my father said, gruff, leaving the room and making his way toward the kitchen. I stood. Percy, rising up next to me, then flicked his finger at the back of my neck.

"Dick. How's your ulcer?" I asked.

"Fine, so long as I don't drink," he said, smiling.

"Then I'll give you the strong one," I replied.

Something about dad being in that old man getup made him seem ancient, and like someone you needed to humor. Sitting in the living room, I couldn't help but disguise my thoughts of senility, fragility, and even moldiness, with other terms: Aged, antique, advanced life, golden years, and then phrases like 'plugging along', and 'still kicking'. He was only partly our father anymore, in those khakis and tennis shoes. He had suddenly taken on the appearance of an old duffer. Even his mannerisms, though usual, now had an air of being old to them. It was mystical. It was pleasing. It felt like, for the moment, in that costume, I knew in all ways what to expect from him. It made me feel young and in place, doing my small but energetic part in running the world.

The living room had undergone more changes. He had a newer television, though with a smaller screen that was flat and looked expensive. Someone—my father wasn't strong enough anymore—had placed it in one of those cheap wall-mounts you could buy at most hardware stores. It made more room for his furniture, though most of this had also been removed. He now seemed to have two chairs and a couch. His desk, as always, was against the window and looked much used. I found it odd that his apartment, with the exception of the wall-mounted television, was beginning to look similar to mine. I wondered if interior design habits might have a passable, genetic starting block. I made an internal note to mention this amusing hypothesis at some point.

"Is that one of the new High Resolution displays?" I asked him. My father looked back and upward at the new television.

"Pff. Yeah. My neighbor says they're the best quality and all that, but frankly, it just hurts my eyes. I don't know why they have to keep changing everything. My last television was fine and didn't hurt my eyes."

"This from a man that used to obsess over the components of his entertainment system. My how the savvy have fallen," Percy said.

"You could put the old one back up," I suggested.

"I had my neighbor donate it to the thrift store down the street," he replied, a little perturbed.

"I swear I made this weak," Percy interrupted, looking at his drink with a grimace. He sniffed his nose then and had another sip.

"I love a good drink," I replied, pretending to be enjoying mine with ultimate luxury. My father looked at the television a moment, then back to me and dropped back into his relaxed mood, swirling his drink with a light, careless motion.

"Yeah, go ahead. Jab," Percy told me, "You're not the one with the ulcer."

"It's nice to sit back and have a sip every now and then," my father threw in.

"Hey, suck it," Percy said then, going too far and not being funny. He did this at times and most often when he had little to offer a particular conversation. My dad ignored the statement, his standard reaction when Percy started up any kind of shock-talk or made an over-the-top reply. Once, with Percy and I taking down expensive cognac in a bar downtown while discussing something trivial, Percy had drunkenly uttered that his wife Mina had a heart-shaped asshole. I didn't know what to say to that, and ignored him just like dad would have. It was a good overall strategy to use with Percy.

The whiskey was cheap but there was affection in the moment. I hadn't had a drink with my father until the age of twenty-five. I'd never seen him drink growing up, but I always knew where the bottle was. It was as if he drank once a month, for one night, and had a mere shot or two. He had written about drinking quite a bit, during his stint with short stories, before we had moved to Boston. All of his characters were heavy drinkers. My father had a touch of Spillane in him: 'As the dark of night encompassed Sward's mind and mood, he'd need something to heat him where it mattered...' that sort of thing. But my father, himself, was a very light drinker.

These moments where I'd sit with him and put back a whiskey and Coke were nice. I felt more like a man in these scenes than I did when I'd found my first job, driven my first car, entered my first bar, or slept with a woman for the first time. There was something oddly paternal and very American about whiskey, despite that the bottle we were pouring from stated it was Canadian whiskey. There was a kind of old west, democratic, _mano a mano_ feeling about whiskey in American culture. It seemed imbedded in the youth of my father and his, and that I was able to get in on it during my own time seemed like a kind of passing of rites, or testament to my being accepted by my forefathers. This may have been an odd sensation, but one I had noticed many times. Whiskey was John Wayne in a wooden saloon after running some jackass out of town.

My father was mentally still as we sat and sipped our short-glasses down.

"Ready for your guy-on-guy session?" Percy asked. I snorted.

"Yeah, you been practicing the kissy-kissy with your co-star yet?" I added. Percy laughed. He hadn't actually learned anything about the play, and had gleaned this particular tidbit from me. Percy didn't concern himself with dad much at all. He was the first child, though my father had children late in life, and so Percy had always been too young to fit my father's shoes very well, yet he was too old to hang out with me when younger, even though he attempted both of these things heartily. There was a sturdy and objective gap between all three of our ages. Dad was eighty, Percy had finally reached forty-six, and I was but thirty-one, making me not even half my father's age, and nearing two decades the younger with my brother. Percy had started driving the year I was born, but didn't move out until I was ten. Mainly, he toyed with me back then and got me to do inappropriate things and swear in front of his stoned, twenty-something friends.

"Not this again," dad said about the kiss remarks. He was trying to unbutton the collar on his flannel shirt, to let his neck breathe.

"Sorry, I just can't wait to see it," I said, "I'm taking pictures and using them as Christmas cards." Percy took account of this and flexed his face into a blackguardish, cruel smile, nodding. He was quite fond of my statement. I wondered then if Percy might steal my fictitious idea and enact it. Such a brazen, comical idea at someone else's expense seemed like something for which he'd make a sneaky attempt and cackle over for years. I may have said it in jest, but it was his style, for certain.

"Laugh now. Have you seen the woman playing Clara yet?" my father countered.

"I haven't seen anyone from your play," I responded.

"Well, she's foxy." I scrupled on this, amused. I'd never heard my father use the word 'foxy'. This was a dated and surprising term, more in line with the decade in which _The Skull Finder_ was released than present time.

"She is, huh?" I responded.

"Yes, she is. Middle-aged and foxy. And I get to kiss her _three_ times in the production, and once with some passion, even. I think it's a fair trade."

"Check out dad, the ladies man!" Percy said then, spurred by this sort of talk.

"You have it all worked out," I added.

"Don't forget it," dad said, nodding, "You get your good looks from me. Remember that." My brother tittered in his chair, loving that statement.

"Ha! Are you hearing this?" Percy asked me, boisterous.

"I'm hearing it."

"Some apples fall far from the tree, and I worried about you for awhile, but nobody can dodge genes this good," my father said, hamming it a little and getting a kick out of himself; I laughed again. I had discovered a few years ago that a drink could put my father into a great mood, though whether it would or not was a coin toss. The last time I'd had a drink with him, he'd gone the somber route.

"So, eighty would be the age for picking up women, huh?" I teased.

"Damn right it is. Eighty's the new forty. My cane has lust written all over it."

"Jesus, I hope that wasn't a metaphor for something else," I said. Dad smiled and leaned back, sipping his drink, letting it end on that statement. We sat for some time, during which I scouted for the rosewood cane. His mention had brought this to mind. I found it leaning near his bedroom door. The new cane didn't appear to be getting much use.

In minutes, Percy had become bored, I had sputtered into antsy motions of my fingers, and dad had ceased registering any temperament at all beyond that of a slow moving reptile beneath a heat lamp.

"I found a job. Start tomorrow," I said finally, introducing another topic. I would have preferred talk of something else, but what I'd said was all I had. My energy had started to bottleneck and the silence was becoming too audible. My tongue had loosened a bit from the whiskey, as well.

"Oh?" my father roused.

"Carwash attendant?" Percy offered.

"Surgeon," I informed them, my tone one of idle statement. My father's eyebrow raised and Percy stopped in mid-sip, which was what I'd hoped would happen.

"Son, you be careful," my father said then, "that's dangerous."

"Christ, a surgeon? You? I seem to have this memory where you started throwing up after skinning your elbow. You're squeamish; you can't be a surgeon," Percy said. While I had wanted the barest smudge of attention from them over the upcoming job, I didn't want familial validations on my failure-prone nature.

"It's fine. I can pull it off for the money it pays. And I'll be cautious, yes," I informed them.

"What do you know about medicine, anyway?" Percy asked.

"Well, I don't know the field much, so tomorrow I start training. There's no guarantee I'll be kept on after the temp day, so who knows? It might be nothing. But it's a job."

"That's a lot more than a job, kid," my dad replied, quite serious. I could detect the judgment mechanism whirring behind his eyebrows. His eyes took a snapshot and rubber-stamped 'HALF-WIT' across it.

"You'll pass-out the first time you open up somebody's knee, or whatever surgery you do," Percy commented with humor.

"I'll handle it. I'm not worried," I said, waving them off. My father continued his long stare at me, then drifted off on a thought. His eyes weren't focused on me, but about me in general.

"You're not worried?" my dad then asked, seeming to have stewed on that particular statement. He lifted his glass of whiskey and ice and had a sip, watching me.

"If you can pull it off, _I'll_ be impressed, that's for sure," Percy commented.

"I've no indication that my life requires your respect to function," I said to him. My father choked on his swallow of whiskey and then sat forward in his chair, shocked.

"Where the hell did that come from?" he asked me.

"Whoa, okay; too far little brother...mellow," Percy added, his statement one of amusement.

"I'm not worried, is all," I reiterated.

"What is this?" my father voiced with anger, flinging his hand up in my direction. We stopped and looked at him, feeling like we'd been caught in some sort of mischief.

"What?" I asked, innocent.

"Son, that is the stupidest thing you've ever said. You're not _worried_? A surgeon _should_ be worried. What are you thinking?" I didn't know how to respond, and my father merely stood and retrieved his cane from against the doorjamb. Percy didn't respond either and quietly sipped his drink. Our tension meters had triggered, and both of us knew not to quip and jab when our father took on such a serious tone. It was getting-grounded time, or grow-up time.

Dad made his way into the kitchen and began making himself another drink. I looked at Percy, concerned, but the look didn't register with him. He simply shrugged. My father going into the kitchen meant more to me than his having vacated for a moment to cool off. It was the second time in my life I'd seen him go for a second drink. I had offended him more than intended, which had been to not offend at all. This was uncharacteristic of him and caused me to feel terrible.

"What a shit thing to say," I heard from him in the kitchen, "I didn't do anything to deserve that. 'I don't need to impress you to function'." He was mimicking me. So that was it, he had somehow though that statement was aimed at him, and not Percy.

"Dad, I wasn't talking to you when I said that," I explained, loud enough for him to hear me from the living room. When no response came, I let it pass, as it would do no good to press my father. I instead sat and waited for him to return to his chair and sit back.

My visits with him were of a staunch value to me, even when they included Percy. The time was approaching when I would have to be more honest with them, and I wanted to cling to these better moments for a span first. I knew things would get rocky once I told them about the dragon and my mission. My brother and father had only recently begun getting together like this, around once a month. Percy's schedule was unruly and his busy regiment had quetched him from me a decade ago. He made no reservations for dolloping me with his time, but with the mutual fulcrum of our father, an intersection point for our perpendicular lives, we could sit in the same room and, taunting aside, be familial to some degree. I felt somewhat like a tag-along, but the youngest of siblings always did. It seemed important that I enjoy my family as much as possible, because it was only a matter of time before I would have to admit my true quest to them.

It had been months since my initial conclusion that I wasn't quite steady in the brain, and I had settled into a slow acceptance that my mental stability was flawed. The jar was more than treasure, it was my only way to keep from debilitating. I would go mad without it. The Red Dragon had finally told me as much, and I believed him. The treasure in the jar could have been anything, and I would need my family, at some point, for the good times to come when I obtained the jar, or the bad times if I failed. Things were less right with me by the week, but I was confident.

It paid to have family. Family, above else, was charged with imparting a certain love on you, no matter how embarrassing or failed you were. I trusted them, and long after discovering it myself, I worried I would have to inform them that I was, as if following a painful and statutory program, quietly losing my mind, and that it was all going to be a wonderful, brilliant party.

### SIX

It was loneliness. When I moved to Boston, there were no people that I recognized. They wore clothes and crashed parties; they drove and flew the skies. They'd jump from commercial airliners and land in excellent, quaint bistros and before vendor carts with antiquated hot dogs covered in chopped vegetables. Some dove beneath massive boats and grew gills that were canisters on their backs, but the rain fell on all. They were, in their worst moments, alone. Some of them fell in love, and then left it. Some stayed a part of love in order to duck out of singularity, while using it to create an isolation from many other things; on finding bliss, no matter how temporary, frivolous or chemical, it is standard behavior to all but disappear. Some others, however, could not fall in love, or were pressed hard into gags played on them by people who talked about love enough to convince anyone it was everywhere. Some people leaped from the streets into tall buildings and died there with budgerigars. Some of them, being banned from the sewers and free filth, began twisting neighborhoods into new, modern sewers. Some of them shot one another, then voted, while others fucked and ate groins, then preached literature. Boston.

I considered my lack of friendships to be tantamount my optimistic nature. It was as simple as flowing water in an even tunnel: The more pressure at one end, the more towards the other the liquid had to go. Anything could cause pressure. Good, bad, irreverence, faith, shit, jobs, money, an abundance or lack of genital dimension... Having masterful and longstanding friendships would have made me worry about being alone. Having no friends made me want them, even with venom. Wanting friends was much better than worrying you'd lose them. I had very little anyone seemed to want, and therefore bluebirds sang atop my gut. I was the loneliest, happiest shit ever, at times. It should have caused alarm in me that this particular logic might infect my psychological state in a disturbing and morose way, and it should have been obvious that a disorder of some sort would catch me sooner or later. I supposed I hadn't realized my flaws early enough.

"Are you okay?" the young man asked. Opposite me on the bus was a kind of gaunt youth in tight clothes, a skateboard in tow. If I skateboarded, I'd wear athletic clothes and a thick hat, and spend much time trying to invent new tricks I could then tell people about.

"I'm fine. It comes and goes," I said, trying to calm my arms. There were occasions, yes, when my mental frame seemed to fold in on itself, and I grew confused. My arms jerked a little when this happened, seizures of a sort, but manageable. This twitching-arm phase of the spell was one of three 'tics' that I had, but only lasted a minute or so, and usually when I was idle and bored. The jerking arms problem was mild in comparison to the two other phases I knew would follow it.

"What is it, like epilepsy?" he asked, disturbed.

"Uh no. Well, I don't know. It started about a year ago. It passes fast so, sorry." I replied, arms twitching at my sides.

"Dude, you should see a doctor."

"Dude, I'm a surgeon." This seemed to push him off his moment and so he resigned himself to looking through the window at the passing boulevards and avenues. He was uncomfortable after a short while, when he noticed I was staring at him in a steady and unwavering fashion. Against my will, and almost in a satisfying way, I was boring a hole in his face with my own. I couldn't help myself; it was phase two of my spell. Jerking arms was always followed by the staring problem. I'd lock eyes with someone, anyone, and make grueling, personal-space discomfort. I'd been threatened over this particular phase several times in the last year, and I thought it was possible I'd be threatened again, on the bus, at that moment. After staring, the final leg of my spell would occur, and it lasted anywhere from minutes to hours. Phase three of the spell was the dilemma of having to state the obvious.

My nonsensical arm jerks ceased, tapering into a mild vibratory sensation, and I continued staring at the youth, eagle-eyed, mad-dogging, any other animalistic form of bolting your gaze on someone and not wavering. There was never a good time for it, and I'd be stating the obvious very soon, taking random bits of information that were so obvious as to be aching from it, and spouting them like a village idiot or young child, and just in time for my job interview at the medical center. The young skater turned away from me and tried to ignore my upsetting stare.

While we traveled, I noticed the young man was tapping his foot to a bit of music that didn't exist. He was keeping time with a song, but wasn't listening to one, just thinking it. That, by several forms of logic, could be construed as seizure activity, as well. There was no proof that music was causing it, no matter how much the young man might have expressed a song was in his mind. For all I knew, he was a seething lunatic at the reigns of a psychotic imagination.

"You keep starin' at me and I'm gonna hit you with this fuckin' board," he said, still not looking at me. It was okay, I deserved it.

"You have a skateboard," I said, pointless. It seemed the third phase had begun, which was troublesome but in one way beneficial, as it meant I no longer had to stare. Phase three of my 'fit' always lasted longer than the first two, sometimes up to an hour. Being able to avert my eyes again, I did so and then sat still for the remainder of the ten-minute trip to the P. Morris Medical Center. When we arrived, I passed the seat with the young man in it and he gave me an aggressive scowl.

"Hats go on heads," I told him, stupid.

The medical center was larger than I anticipated. The two newer wings stretched out, surrounding the parking lot and locking it on three sides, but the main building, connected to these via large hallways, looked to be in disrepair. It was a juxtaposition as the two wings looked clean and modern. They were additions, I had to assume, and semi-recent. The fact that these additions were called wings was apt, as they fanned out much like the wings of some large, officiously-designed bird. If a vulture could mate with an office building, this was what the offspring would look like. The entire set of interlinked structures appeared to have three floors each, as well as a half-exposed basement floor in the center building, which had been built down a slight hill. I felt strange entering a building on its second floor.

"The glass door is see-through," I mumbled to myself as I pulled one of the clear front doors open and entered. Inside, there were people scattered about, faltering in hallways, and I watched as several people curved from an elevator into the main lobby, continuing on into a small cafeteria. The cleanliness of the center was overbearing, and though I had showered that morning, I began to feel filthy by comparison.

"Hello," an older woman said, passing me and making for the exit. I'd been caught in the awkward situation of being greeted by a stranger. She had nodded, so now I had to nod back, because if I didn't, I was rude, even though I had no want to nod at anyone, especially a stranger in a hospital. She held a small folder of papers in her hand, a purse bunched beneath her arm.

"Your have two ears," I said, wishing she hadn't spoken to me and caused me to say such an obvious, unnecessary, out-of-context thing.

"What?" I simply left her behind, chastising myself for my behavior, though knew very well I couldn't make the tic stop until it subsided on its own.

The P. Morris Medical Center was spacious, and while the structure was somewhat simple from the exterior, with but a wing off to each side, the interior was more complex. Once inside, the medical center proved architecturally demented. The ceilings were vaulted, which gave an open, field-like quality to the main waiting area, but then the beams that stabilized the roof were visible for effect, while also being set at strange angles. They weren't wood, but some sort of organically perverted, plastiform facsimile of wood, from what I could discern on the floor level. The walls didn't appear completely straight or angular to the usual ninety degrees most populated structures utilized. They seemed close, but not ninety; eighty-four, maybe. And the floor, when you looked up at the vast and somewhat dim ceiling lights far above, felt to be falling out from under you. It was as if a small clinic had, in the manner of a Boa snake, managed to swallow a warehouse, distending its own, thin shape around it.

"Hi, do you have an appointment?" the man behind the desk asked. I stood there before him, yet looking behind him, into a room full of patient records and a sexy young woman sorting through them. I didn't prescribe to nurse fantasies, but would have made an allowance with ease if the woman I was seeing at present were the nurse in fantastical question.

"You think I'm a patient," I said, a buffoon, cursing myself deep in as my cortex. He gave a small near-smile.

"And you're not?" he asked, mild and going along.

"I'm male," I said. He gave me an odd look then, trying to figure out just what I meant by that.

"You have a job," I said then.

"Uh, that I do. Oh! Are you the temp?"

"I'm wearing new shoes," I replied.

"The employment office sent you down. Okay," he said, relieved to understand why I was standing before him. I was more relieved, though dreaded having to converse while in this phase of my nervous disarray.

He looked at a sheet of paper to the side of his cluttered workspace, scanning it for what I assumed was information regarding temporary employees. I thought it odd that everyone always said 'down' when referring to someone arriving from elsewhere. The employment office sent someone down. People came down to visit. People went downtown. Information came down the pipe. I supposed at the top of a mountain, someone would eventually have to use 'up', but who knew? In geographic lay, the P. Morris Medical Center was east of the employment office, and as far as I knew, at the same height above sea level. There was no down. Then again, it would sound strange to hear, "Oh, you came east from the employment office."

"My ankles are connected to my legs," I said, nodding. He snorted.

"Uh, okay. You'll just want to go down those stairs over there, to the bottom floor. Talk to Pam, she's the receptionist you'll see there on the right. She'll get you set up for orientation."

"Stairs go up and down," I said, frowning at myself. The young man agreed, though after a slow, curious lift of his head. A look of concern fostered his lips apart, but nothing came out. After a moment, he looked around to see if anyone else was listening. When he felt it was clear, he leaned forward and spoke, quiet.

"Listen man," he said, "I'm cool, I get it. But seriously? This isn't the sort of job you can pull off stoned, you know? I mean, I hit my share, especially with the girls, right? You know what I mean. We're in sync, here. Yeah, but I'm telling you, the medical field... Uh uh. Too much shit to go wrong, for real. You might want to back out of this one early. Or come back straight." He was hip and personable, young and understanding. He was rising up in the world from the ashes of minimum wage and may have worked at a degree in his off time. He had concluded I was stoned. I noted his soft dimples were effeminate and his nose was distinguished, but his tone informed the ear that he was smarter than he looked, and he could have possessed a non-subservient sense of humor.

"You're a pussy magnet," I said, instantly covering my mouth and jogging to the stairs, horrified at myself.

"Uh, thanks," he said with distaste. Poor me. Poor him. From his unusual reaction to me when realizing I was a new surgeon, I discerned there was likely a certain void between surgeons and receptionists, and I'd broached my first use of it with the deft hand of a ham-tongued throwback. People often followed that first impressions were the most important, but this was incorrect. The idea was that you could never make a first impression again, once you'd caused one. I thought a staunch and well-executed second impression could override the first and augment it into a much better one, if you could pull it off. What you couldn't get back, where reality was prevalent, was who you were. After a simple greeting: Hello there... You were rendered into a new being, and one you had to become and perform as, ever-onward, because now someone knew you existed that didn't previous, and that version of you they had encountered was relative to and within them. Including the bus-trip contact, I had become a diseased asshole with the mental aptitude of a narwhale, and then a foul-mouthed, stoned-out loser with conversation issues. I would be re-established in these modes every time I encountered the people that designed them, unless I could make that wondrous second impression a good one.

Regarding their thoughts of me, the personalities had been created. The young man at the reception desk might like me to strong extent in the future, but the cursing, toker idiot who said weird things would always exist in our minds. I'd have to be that character in some way, forever, like a car-crash you couldn't forget, or a cruel insult someone gave you that struck in a particular, hurtful way. Scar tissue developed. It would stay there, inner and outer.

"You work here," I said, after making my way down the stairs and to the next reception desk. She was in her fifties, skinny, had tiny teeth.

"And?" she shot back, unphased.

"I'm in front of you," I announced.

"So... are you supposed to be the temp I've been waiting for?" the older woman asked. I held myself back and concentrated on not speaking. Instead, I gave a shaky nod.

"Through the door to my right," she instructed, "then, on back to the room next to the drinking fountain. The doctor will be in shortly." It sounded like what she would say to me if I were a patient; except at the moment there may have been more wrong with me than with half the people in the waiting area.

I entered a hallway through the door and passed the drinking fountain. I then proceeded to sit in a fluorescent-lit room for twenty minutes. The air was warm but the feeling it had in my body was cold and isolated. I had to wonder if there was a difference between clean and chemical-bathed when it came to things like air, walls, furniture, water... I supposed there was a big difference. The room I found myself in was clean, yes, but it felt to be grimy with sterilizing disinfectants and saturated with stale, unnatural air-freshening scents. Again, the construction seemed odd, this time in the form of rounded moldings in every corner making any angular connection meld together with a kind of rubber webbing or concave smoothing. It was discomforting not to see a corner. There was a sink and vending machine present, and I assumed the room was a sort of break-area for employees. After some time, a doctor entered.

"The recruit?" he asked. He looked smart and quick to rile, as well as energetic.

"I'm a human being," I said.

"You don't say?"

"This is a medical center."

"I suppose you're right; stupid question. Obviously, you're the guy. And hey, you're here on time. First one in two weeks," he said.

"This room is white," I answered, kicking myself in the psyche.

"Tell me about it. Hurts the eyes, right? Anyway, we've got a busy day ahead so I need to ask you a few questions before I can commit to having you shadow me." This was, with probability, the end of my stint as a surgeon. How foolish and dumb I'd seem when my nervous disorder started answering his questions.

"You're a doctor," I said. When was phase three going to end? I was going to blow this job any second, uttering blunt and obvious things from my mouth, crop-dusting those around me with my doltish patois. I was in luck however, as the doctor smiled.

"Hey, as long as you got that one down, we're gonna work out just fine." _What a relief._ Perhaps I'd happened on one of the few that found it acceptable to be told the obvious over and over again. Many people found it satisfying, but it had to occur in the right circumstance.

"First off," he began, "Do you have any experience in the medical field?"

"Our city is Boston," I answered, certain I was two minutes away from a security escort from the building and grounds. He chuckled.

"Okay... right."

"There's gas stations in cities," I said.

"That's true. Um, I'm assuming those are the jobs you've had, then? How about meat-cutting? Butcher jobs? Anything like that?" I opted to force myself quiet, rather than let my mouth move, as it wanted to. Carefully subduing my nearly uncontrollable urge to speak, I crushed my lips together and simply shook my head to answer the question.

"Play the guitar?" he then asked. What a strange question. This was difficult for me to do, but I kept my mouth shut again and nodded with the speed of an inebriated dugong. I had played for a few years when younger, but didn't now. I felt a screaming sensation in my forehead. If I didn't start talking, as my brain had opted I should do, it would be like depriving myself of a bathroom break too long. The inevitable result of this would be the worse for my struggle, and a malevolent experience for anyone concerned.

"Dexterity then, good; have you ever seen a surgery before? An operation performed, maybe on television?" I grunted and kept my lips tight, feeling them wanting to part so the phrase 'oceans are water' could come out. I overcame it for the moment and nodded that yes, I'd seen a surgery on television. I felt like I couldn't breathe. Subduing my urge to state the obvious was an intense and negative act that gave me a sense of injuring myself. It was like hitting the sixty-second mark while holding your breath, when breathing becomes all you can think about and your body begins turning against you.

"Okay, that's a start. Here, take this." The doctor handed me a scalpel and then retrieved a Dixie cup from the bottled water machine. He set the cup on the table.

"All right, let's see what you've got. Take the topmost rim of that cup off, with the scalpel, and you have to keep the cup in place with a single finger, pressing it down in the middle... see, like that, with a single finger." _A test._ I did well on tests. Securing the cup with my finger inside it, I carved the scalpel around the cup, using a microscopic caution when removing the brim, and with as much fluid motion as I had available. Once the cut was complete, I stepped back. The doctor knelt down and looked with a specific interest I'd never seen before. He was contemplating intricacies and micro-details of my cut.

Most of the things I had done throughout my life could be looked at from a great distance to discover if I'd done them right. A box atop a stack of other boxes. A car parked between the appropriate lines. You could discern if I'd done it right from a quarter mile away. This moment with the resident surgeon was the first time anyone had taken initiative to get down and examine something I'd done up close. It was scrutiny, real scrutiny. It made me feel like an artist.

"Wow, this is good. This is damn good," the doctor finally muttered. Christmas lights inside my body lit up and a feeling of wondrous warmth and celebration filled me.

"You're kneeling," I said, hoping the phase would soon pass.

"Yes, you have to get very close to your work as a surgeon. Do you have an affinity for blood?" Affinity?

"Chupacabras drink blood." _Shit,_ I was ruining it. The doctor liked my work, and I needed this job. The last thing I wanted was to piss off a good interview. To my amazement, the doctor stood and, giving me a size-up, nodded with a weird little smile.

"I meant to say 'aversion', not 'affinity', sorry. But I see what you mean. Specialists have special cares. Of course there's life involved. Whole battles can be summarized by the simple device of blood loss. The stuff is crucial to life. I shouldn't diminish its value and importance by stating the obvious. You're right." _I was right? He'd stated the obvious? About what?_

"People are human beings," I said then, hating myself. I was unable to keep my mouth shut. The words left my mouth without so much as an approach at permission. The doctor patted my shoulder and nodded.

"That they are, friend; the human animal. We shouldn't forget it. And they certainly need us, for life, for health, and as you've said, to understand the truth that runs inside their very blood, and yours, and mine... the real _life_ of it all. Let's help people shake these 'Chupacabras' they face, right? I think we're on the same page," he said, staring in deep thought toward the farthest wall. I was stunned. If we were on the same page, it was a weird one. The surgeon wadded up the cup and rim and tossed them into the trash, beckoning me to follow him down the hallway. I trailed him, confused but pleased, looking about at the people that passed us, sick people, nurse's aids, assistants carrying boxes of files. I followed behind the surgeon as he led me toward the hallway of the east wing. We were doctors.

"All right, we'll need to get you cleaned down and into scrubs. We've got a cardio trans in twenty, and I'm gonna need your hands. Oh wait," he said, stopping to think. A moment passed as he scratched his nose. The people milled in the hallways and I glimpsed a teenaged girl in a waiting area reading from a magazine about surfing.

"You know," the surgeon continued when his thought had paved, "this day is gonna be a torrent of organ work, so maybe you and I should swing through the cafeteria early and get our coffee while we still can. Let's head back, sound good?"

"I've had a successful interview," I replied.

### SEVEN

"Oh god, you broke it...his chest broke." I said, my lower lip quivering as the acidic concentrate in my stomach activated and began lubricating my throat and mouth. My voice dropped an octave. I was getting hints of the 16oz hazelnut mocha I'd powered down after leaving the cafeteria, and I couldn't unflare my nostrils. My surgical mask made it difficult to breathe without that stuffy, hospital smell infiltrating my nasal passages, and then there was the sloshing, undulating murmur of the patient's heart, which resembled the grunts of a strange, fat animal rolling over and over in a birdbath.

"This is how we get in. Sternotomy. It's just like cutting a plank of wood; you cut until there's not much left to cut, then snap the rest. No biggy, we'll wire all this back together on the way out," the surgeon said. I gagged and blinked several times.

"Is it supposed to break so jagged?" I managed, winded. The sternum hadn't cracked up the middle or anything so routine as I would have imagined was proper. The surgeon had busted the sternum like a double-stick popsicle slammed against a counter's edge, and it had split and ruptured and splintered apart. It wasn't a reaction one would expect to happen in a human body, but more as with snapped and twisted bamboo.

"Sure. It's fine. Now get with me here, I need you to secure the ribcage," he replied. I bent down and, weak, wrapped my fingers around the edges of the man's two racks of ribs. With a choking grunt, I lifted. They came apart and opened like a saloon door, exposing the bulbous lungs and a portion of the patient's heart. How was it possible the surgeon could manage to chew gum during something as overwhelming as this?

"Oh fuck, I can see it breathing..." I mumbled, looking away and gagging.

"It? C'mon man, are you kidding? This is a human being we got laid up here. This is somebody's dad. Say 'him', not 'it'. Show some respect. Nobody calls you 'it', right?"

"His lungs..." I burbled, trying to begin a sentence in which I would explain I had been referring to seeing one of his lungs expand when I'd used the term 'it'.

"Yeah, his lungs," the doctor said with humor.

"They're all wet," I managed to say, my eyes affixed to them as they continued inhaling, exhaling.

"Oh, well yeah, they're watertight," he said.

"They're just _breathing_..."

"Of course. They'll do that the whole time. We'd be in trouble if they didn't. Let's just move this one around a little, lift..." the surgeon worked his hand beneath it and the man's left lung flopped like a deep gray water balloon over the latex-gloved hand. There was a disturbing noise to this as the lung bent and continued, slimy, inflating, wheezing from bulbous to flat, almost seeming to be its own living creature. The surgeon jiggled it to the side and held it back with a hand. The heart was exposed. It wasn't red at all, but more like the shade of gray you'd find on a shy-cooked cutlet of beef.

"Jesus, it's small," I muttered. I had always imagined a human heart would be larger.

"Oh yeah; yeah," the surgeon said, peering at it close. There was a drop of blood that had managed to perch on the rim of his spectacles. He didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, just look at all this disease on the left main," he continued, immersed, "You don't live long with a coronary artery that shot. Fucker must eat butter all day between menthols and beer. See the lesions? Those are widow makers. If we weren't grafting that left main today, this guy'd be history by Christmas." The surgeon squinted then, seeming to focus his entire being through the small glasses tied around his head, and into the man's chest. I couldn't bring myself to look but for quick glances that affected me almost to the instant. The light above the patient was hot and I found myself perspiring, holding the ribs open like a double-lidded box, blinking rapid to try and keep focused while swimming in the surreal impossibility I was witnessing, and touching, for that matter. That was but a minor trouble when compared with my current campaign against an upward tide of vomit, a skirmish that I was beginning to lose. I lobbed my head forward and back to keep the acid down as much as possible, swallowing again and again, taking quick breaths.

"Oh shit, is it...is it supposed to- eeh, he's bleeding that much..."

"Yep, the heart. There's gonna be blood," the surgeon responded, coy.

"Ugh... fuck..." The surgeon ceased what he was doing and sighed.

"Are you gonna be cool?" he said after a moment, irritated. I had to wait until my esophagus was clear to answer, and when I spoke, the surgeon looked up at me with impatience and frustration.

"If... I'm cool. I just..." Then I saw it, something impossible.

" _Jesus!_ " I blurted out, "He wrinkled his nose! He just wrinkled his nose! Is that-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm it down," the surgeon said, frowning, "don't worry about it. It's totally normal. We got this fat sack slipped off on so much Propofol, he's gonna sleep like a baby at will for the next decade. They should market the shit for insomnia."

The patient was a middle-aged, glossy-bald man with large hoop earrings in both ears. His barrel chest had been shaved close and prepped with Betadyne, an orange, oily, translucent gel that was supposed to ward infection and the like. It smelled odd and so did the man, who, despite being out cold, was sweating as though from a long basketball practice. He had a tattoo on his right forearm that was either black-art flames, or some sort of botched Celtic knot-work that ended up looking triangular and random. It was design, and didn't seem to signify anything. The lights bore down on the somehow still living body and with another glance into the cavity we'd made, I was reminded of some red casserole in the display case at my local grocery store's deli, sitting under the heatlamp for hours, crisping at the edges, watery in the middle. The thought of food almost had me throw up then, and after a short battle against my turbulent, souring stomach, I cleared my throat. I was trying not to feel the ribs I was holding, by using the middles of my fingers for the task. I wanted to disallow contact with my fingertips, to lessen the tactile experience of feeling the sickening texture of a man's insides.

"That's wrong... that's just not right... I can't watch," I said, feeling weak both in body and spirit.

"Bullshit, watch this," the surgeon said, reaching over and tickling the patient's nose with his pinky. This action left a small dot of red on the left nostril's edge. Almost to the instant, the man's arm started rising and wrist bending, to scratch his nose. I swooned a moment before the horror woke me.

"Are you fucking serious? They can feel?" I said, aghast. The surgeon chuckled and pushed the arm back down, held it for a moment, then shook his head.

"A trip, right?" I felt the room swivel and then duck down below my chin. I blinked, shaking my head with incongruous shock. Then the room settled down and I was there again, though for how much longer I didn't know. Seconds were stretching into minutes. I was forcing myself to breathe, as my mind had begun urging me not to for some reason.

"I don't feel okay," I said, dazed and feeling as if my thighs were sliding up into my stomach.

"Relax, it's a joke. See? I have my knee up under his triceps. Made the arm lift from there; look," he said, amused. I leaned over and saw that this was the case. He'd tricked me and made the patient's arm move by lifting his knee under it. What kind of cruel prick would do something like that to someone in obvious discomfort?

"So what about the wrist then?" I asked, as the wrist had also curved as if to scratch, not just the arm. I was disturbed by everything the world was then offering me.

"Yeah, I don't know. That kind of blew my mind. Must be a reflex or something."

"I can't do this." I said, abrupt, breathing hard through my nose to try and get the smell of the man's inner chest cavity out of my nostrils. I began looking at my own chest, and was quite aware, for the first time in years, that it was there. I could feel every nerve in it. I could feel my sternum being broken and ripped to the sides. I could feel a hand sliding under my lung and flopping it side to side. This was a twisted neck of the medical woods and my tour guide was an oddball. I wanted out.

"You're fine." the surgeon said, not paying much attention to me. I squinted my eyes and steadied.

"No. I can't do this." The surgeon looked up at me then and gauged for several seconds, looking into my eyes, seeing me swallow, watching my lips purse, my shoulders shake.

"Get it together." he said, simple.

"I don't think I work that way. I can't do this," I repeated. He rolled his eyes and then focused on me, speaking slow.

"Listen buddy, this is where it counts. There's no going back, we passed that when we started cutting. Now, I need somebody in here with me, and you'll just have to do."

"But I-"

"HEY," the surgeon said, interrupting me. His eyes contained a clarity that hurt to look at. After the surprising raise of voice, he leaned forward, looked down, and swatted my hands away, taking over my grotesque job of holding the ribcage open.

"You can't do it?" he said then, in a baiting way, "You can't help this guy stay alive with me?" From the schoolyard tone I was picking up, he seemed a sentence away from calling me a 'chicken'. His brows furrowed like that of an angry mole. He nodded to himself then and I heard his lips part.

"All right. I understand. You need to hear this, so listen close," he said, "Right now? What we're doing? This is _noble_. You're taking part in something that is greater and older than anything else you know. This is ancient man. Right here... and he's sick, in need of help, and we're barbers, but modern; and we know our shit. You understand? We're a part of something that's _important._ " Then, almost as if he'd set me up with that bit of esteemed monologue, he adopted a childish, cartoon-like voice and used his hands to open and close the chest cavity, making it talk to me like a mouth.

"Please help me stay alive, guy. All I need is a little bypass. Please?" the chest cavity said, its makeshift mouth opening and closing like a deranged, low-quality puppet maw. I stared into it unable to move or think.

"I need you to harvest me a saphenous vein," it continued. My throat made a kind of mild barking noise without my consent and I swallowed hard.

"What?" the ribcage continued, "What—oh, you're squeamish? Feelin' sicky? Aw, but I sure _love_ a good saphenous vein." The wall opposite me vibrated and the light seemed to flicker a moment.

"Seriously," the surgeon continued, now in his own voice and having stopped the grotesque thoracic plead, "We can't change the line-up in the middle of the game. A procedure like this...it'd be different if we were talking an ingrown toenail, but we're not. We're doing a cardiothoracic autotransplantation, and nobody, least of all this poor fucker, can afford to have you bail out on me. Not at this particular moment, you follow? So take a second to get your shit together, breathe a little, and then let's hit it."

I sighed, not out of sadness or any sort of resignation, but against my own will as my stomach forced the air from my esophagus and mouth to make sudden room for the stream of vomit already on its way. The sigh became a minute belch and I fell to my hands and knees, vomit exploding from the edges of my surgical mask, which I hadn't been able to remove in time. I gagged hard and threw up a second time on the heels of an abrupt and uncontrollable honking noise that escaped my throat. I managed to tug the now greasy mask off after a moment and empty my stomach yet again onto the immaculate floor, disgorging in a pathetic, humiliating, dog-like way. The surgeon above laughed, both derisive and annoyed.

"I thought you had the stuff," he said, shaking his head.

"Nnn- wait." I said, my throat raw and temples throbbing. I seemed to have surpassed any human nausea I could have imagined previous. I also felt pitiful and purposeless, unreliable. What a big puking failure I was.

"Wait?" the surgeon repeated, disgusted, "wait for what, man? For all that retch you let loose NOT to contaminate my operating suite? It's too late, dumbass. There's no..." He paused here, trying to isolate his thoughts into tactical words, but seemed to find himself only getting angrier, "Oh, you goddamn temps. I can't get a leg up with you people. You guys defy even the law of averages, you know that? I mean, given enough of you through the months, at least one of you idiots sooner or later would have to simply work out, right? Be the one? But no, not you, not them, not anybody. A whole heap of nothing." It was apparent I wasn't the only one who thought highly of the law of averages, except I was using this law to get a job, and he was using it to fire me.

"I'll tell you," he griped, "the Massachusetts State Employment Department has managed to create and continually produce a mathematical fucking anomaly; just wonderful. Get your shit and get out."

"I'm sor-" but another rapid jettison of my stomach's contents punctuated my sentence early.

"You're fired," he said, plain, "Now go tell my receptionist to get her damn scrubs on."

### EIGHT

The high temperature of my doorknob should have been indication I needed to stay away for the night, which I had done twice in the past, but I was so shaken up by the horrid outcome of my stint as a surgeon, I didn't pay attention to the sign. As I opened the door, a hiss of hot, moist air enveloped me. Was it this bad? I entered my apartment frowning atop my own breathing, as the smoke and sweatbox air burned my lungs.

He was out of the oven, crouched in my kitchen. The Red Dragon's tail rolled and flit about, searing the ground wherever it touched. My foresight months ago in removing the batteries from my smoke detectors had proved to be a blessing. The dragon's sudden increase in size and heat was not. I'd never seen him at full size before, or this hot, even in the oven.

"I thought you couldn't come out all the way," I said, worried. In his tantrums, he could punish me in the oven, bite at me and rip my clothes to rags, but he couldn't come out past his forelegs, he couldn't enter my apartment. The oven was his home. He fed on the heat like a vent-worm in an ocean trench curling at the mouth of a volcanic fissure.

The dragon curled his lips and spat at me, a near-boiling, thick saliva that would have seared my face had I not tilted back in time. He lifted his large head and his scaly ears drew back like a feline about to move on a terrified, unearthed shrew. I swallowed and took a step back.

"You went there again," he said with an anger that could have posed as calm. It was the false, strong voice you heard before someone intelligent socked you in the eye. My mind turned on defensive sayings, my response a bobber, idle on the surface and awaiting the right, potential fish to jerk it down. As my thoughts scanned for response, I could do little but question.

"Where?" I asked, confused, a dread encompassing my heart and stomach.

"Them," the dragon replied, low and with menace. His tail struck against a table leg then and it caught minute flame a moment before extinguishing. I saw that his claws had come out, and his raggedy haunches had lowered. Was he thinning? I could see the outline of his ribs through the scale-coated skin.

"Who?" I asked. The Red Dragon slammed his forepaws on my kitchen floor, creating a tremendous, deep sound that made me feel as if I were much smaller than I was. The neighbors were going to be pissed.

"You smell like them. Did they give you pills, you fuck?" he asked. His voice was getting hoarse, weak, despite the force in his words.

"Pills? No...Jesus, you think I went back to the shrink?" I responded, my worries subsiding but my fear increasing. I'd never seen him this angry.

"It was a different place," I continued, defensive, "I went to a new job. It was for a work, not for my mind."

"I can smell their little outfits," the dragon said with vehemence.

"I'm sorry. I didn't go back to the shrink. I didn't," I stammered, backing against my front doorframe. A rippling sound effused from his throat and he shuddered. He was growing tired, flimsy. Being out of the oven was flash-starving him, and by the second, he was diminishing in girth and stability. Was he going to die? I began to panic. I had to get him back in the oven; without the Red Dragon, I couldn't obtain the jar. Why had he come out? Was he so upset as to leave me, to kill himself, or was he planning on taking us both from the world?

"I CAN SMELL IT," the Red Dragon bellowed, seeming to struggle at putting any power in it.

"Get back in the oven," I said, apprehensive.

"You ruined it. Ingleman will take you," he muttered, minacious.

"You're sick, get in the oven. I'll put it on broil," I offered, near to stuttering, I was so distressed. The dragon grunted and came at me, clawing forward. I made a yelping noise and put my hands up as he leaped, crashing against my chest and grasping my arms. We shot backward and disappeared into my apartment, which was an entire world. The walls stretched back around us. I screamed and time fell into a groaning of seconds that had engulfed hours. I was a shrieking nothing, an anti-doll, and the only world in which I could exist was a hot torpor.

Time dislodged us again, and I woke, a squalling man in a small, miniscule hell. I flung my hands up and choked. The smoke was everywhere. I collided against the dragon's hot scales and my lips were burned as my hoarse voice scraped past them. Oven burners wrapped around my forearms and my face was dipped into boiling liquid. I kicked. I hurt as if I was being burned to strands, and then rolled and fought the air. Then I was back, and struck hard, sent careening across my apartment. My body collided with the television horizontally and a billow of smoke curled me over on the floor.

"You made me, then forgot me," the dragon said through my skull, but his voice was near gone. It was the attempt of gruffness by a laryngitic dog.

"I didn't take any pills," I muttered, a last attempt to explain, to resolve, to appease him back into the oven. The ceiling exploded above in fire and dripping heat. Thousands of cinders were falling on me, igniting my hair, burning my skin. I jerked on the floor as my hands made a furious effort to dislodge the fog of searing embers from my skin. I tried to stand and the rubber on the bottoms of my shoes began gumming to the carpet, melting and uneven. I could feel the Red Dragon's breath mingle with my own, in my throat, down into my lungs. The dragon clawed me over onto my back and came down with all his weight on my chest, again and again.

A vision of the jar vanished in my mind. I'd never get it now. If he wasn't about to take my life, he'd toy with me ever on. The awful situation was by no fault of mine. It was a mistaken thought. I wondered how many innocuous, unfortunate people had died throughout time because of something so human and trivial as a simple misunderstanding. What terrible last thoughts they must have had. Their agony and the knowledge of it by others was what spurred people still living to invent legends and superstitions regarding ghosts and hauntings. It was fantasized that these dead people, wronged and past their inevitable end of function, still somehow remained, sadly trapped in the miserable role of everlasting confusion, while hating all, forever. Revenge was such a potent human trait; some of us thought it could even surpass death. Would I become a ghost? Would I click off? With all the people's bodies having shut off through the ages, why was there no answer to what happened next? How many of them winked out pleading to an unmerciful fiction? What a sad end. My chest sputtered then and I gasped.

I broke. All of me to scrap. My sternum gave way under the force and I fell in on myself, pathetic and burned all the way to the center, the intima, the very lump of shit that made up my dopey, clumsy soul.

I used my last breath to say I was sorry.

I opened my eyes, which felt to have torn lids and singed lashes. I was on the floor of my living room. Had someone opened a window? There was a draft. Was I not dead? There was pain in my chest and head, and with that pain came thought, and sense. I sat up with effort, my body heavy, trying to breathe. The oxygen I drew held smoke, and I found myself gulping it into me, as if I'd surfaced from too long a grope at the bottom of a simmering lake. Had years passed?

"It's in you, now," a female voice said from the kitchen. A breeze blushed across my arms, cooling to my singed lacerations and battered skin. I sat up against the back wall of my apartment, aching. There was no sign of the Red Dragon near me.

"What's happening?" I mumbled aloud. The living room emanated a low-lying mist of cold air. There was an odd, frozen sheen on my ceiling, covering the soot and black flakes of charred spackle.

"You'll feel it burning you inside. There's his smoke in you," the voice said.

"Who's in there?" I stood on my weakened legs and felt a small, but painless pop in my left knee.

"It was like _Ploughshares_ , _"_ the voice said, "A rejection slipped under your door. You tried to be as good as the dragon, but you couldn't. You were rejected too many times. It turned one of you inside out and all the fire escaped. You forgot the dragon long ago, an accidental problem, but then you remembered him wrong and brought him here. It's _Ploughshares_ all over again. Rejection. He got out of the oven, a nightmare version, and waited for you to come home. You'll feel him burning your insides soon, eating the vapors in your head. You remembered him wrong. You rejected him."

I rose to my feet and stood in my charred, frigid living room. It had undergone the effects of a flash fire, but the fire had somehow extinguished itself. The Red Dragon was nowhere to be found, and my apartment, for the first time in a year, wasn't sweltering. It had been overtaken by an unsettling cold.

"He left because he thought I took pills," I muttered.

"No, you rejected him. He's not gone; he just can't find you anymore. Not until you see him right." My shoes felt strange around my sore feet and I noticed as I entered the kitchen that the soles seemed to have melted to the point they were warped and no longer flat. My chest was effusing a shrill and irritating pain, as if I'd poured hot coffee over a sunburn inside me. My skin stinging, I was aware that all of my chest-hair was gone, burned away. Feeling my face, my eyebrows were still present and the top of my head seemed fine. My god, how was I supposed to find out what was in the jar, and where the jar was if the Red Dragon had left me? I heard the voice humming from the kitchen, a caring, female voice. I entered the kitchen and stood there. My oven was destroyed, a mess of twisted metal strips, singed knobs and wires, and thick, broken glass. I turned my head.

"You're in the refrigerator," I said, upset. The door to the appliance opened on its own, then. There was an obese woman in my refrigerator, and she appeared dead. Her skin was pale white and her lips were blue. She looked as if a body on the verge of noticeable decay, but just at the verge. Black veins showed through her arms and legs, and her massive amount of flesh draped over the produce bins and various crushed food items. She was packed into the refrigerator and the sight of this was dismal. She was huge, and her fleshy head was at an odd angle from her pursed shoulder skin, folded up in the refrigerator, nude, and staring out toward the far wall of my apartment in a vacant, lifeless way.

"I have to be cold," she said, unmoving but for her lips. Even her eyes, while looking out, didn't move or waver.

"What—who are you?" I asked, my stomach turning. I tried to focus on my father, my apartment, my street, normal things I wanted to dwell on to keep my mind stable. Things had escalated or I had deteriorated a certain amount.

"I'm yours," she said, "I'm your Blue Dragon."

"I don't understand," I said, wanting to cry.

"That's because you're so, so blue. Come inside and lay down with me."

"Fuck that. I don't want you here," I came out with, my face scrunching as I held back my terrible insides. My face began to feel strong pressure as I kept myself back and the tears in. Why was this happening? What was I anymore? I sat down on the floor with a defeated posture and resigned into a blank look at my own feet.

"Ingleman wants you," she said, "and you have to prepare."

"I shouldn't listen to you. I don't know you. I think I shouldn't have listened to the other one, either," I said. There was frost atop my shoes, and the insides of my nostrils felt crisp, as if beginning to freeze.

"Of course not, that's madness, but you did, and it's too late. Ingleman tastes you."

"Who is he? Who's Ingleman?" I asked, turning inside. The mouth of the woman opened in a long, slow yawn and then shut.

"Come inside where it's cold and let's talk about your day." she said, plain. I looked down at my floor, which was blackened in places from fire, but now beneath a slight coat of frosty, translucent white. It looked like half-burned wood left in the snow for a night, and in fact, somewhat was.

"My day may as well have never happened," I said, wallowing and unable to look into the refrigerator, at the illogical and disturbing image of her. The light within the appliance had brightened, as if owing to some force the new entity seemed to have provided while taking her crumpled perch there.

"You can't do anything right," she added. I snorted but nodded, beginning to weep.

"No." My nose was running and my continual sniffs came between contorted, face-reddening sobs. Did everyone know? My family knew, the man who'd tried to train me today knew, and there were throngs of short, bad relationships with other employers, as well as flimsy, failed dates with women in my past. I supposed there was no dodging it. I did everything wrong, and everyone knew this, even me.

" _Ploughshares_ ," she repeated, "You should have known better. We'll be smaller from here on out."

"What?" I managed. The shock of my apartment's new, ruined state and the Blue Dragon, a freezing, fat corpse packed between the walls and layers of my refrigerator had dulled me to meaning.

"We need a subject. Let's start with the man who told you not to come back today," she said. No steam left her mouth when she spoke, and with each word, the sound entered my ear with a cooling sensation. Her voice and very words caused a physical impression of cold on the skin.

"Today? The surgeon?" I questioned, sad.

"What he called you. That's our subject," she reinforced, seeming to have knowledge of my day without my having said anything to her.

"When...when I was leaving the lobby, of all the things to call someone..." I broke out with, holding my thought for a moment before continuing in a heavy breath. She knew. She'd somehow heard. _Did everyone know my business? Did they know what I was, the thing that the surgeon had voiced with such vexed blatancy?_

"It was like school again," the Blue Dragon said, compassionate but coaxing.

"Yeah, he followed after me and he said I was... he shouted the word 'pussy'," I said. I hadn't been called this in decades, and the surgeon's parting word had immersed me in self doubt and humiliation. It was said back in Stoughton by Phil Kiphardt, in 4th grade while he waved my bad drawing around in front of his friends. It was muttered months later by Kurt Niedecker, standing above me and watching me cry after his kick of a football sent it careening into my face, accident or not. It was sung in our backyard in a little song from Percy when a coughing fit from my first cigarette made me sick to my stomach. It was me, an underdeveloped and everlasting pussy. This could have been the title of my autobiography.

"You _are_ one," she responded, wedged between the refrigerator walls, an obese corpse judging me in the wreckage of my apartment.

"I'm a pussy," I repeated. _Did everyone know?_

"And a crybaby," she added.

"Stupid."

"A nutjob."

"And pathetic," I moaned.

"Come inside. Let's talk poetry."

### NINE

The employment office was grueling. The complete and senseless, drug-addled mindset a cat might take on during routine neutering held more enticement to me than waiting in the state office. After an hour of becoming that much more obsolete, a woman with an overabundance of synthetic fruit odor vacated one of the automated job search machines, and I sat down. Minutes into frustration, the older machine explained to me a situation of corrupted files and inaccessible entries, and in a prompt and dutiful way, shut down.

I had to wait another twenty minutes to get at the next machine, which did work, but had an unusual warp in the monitor glass, making it difficult to read any small print that appeared near the middle of the screen. This diminished print was usually the most crucial of the data presented, and so my eyes were strained and sore from deciphering the strange, coded guidelines and prerequisites of the various jobs I toileted through. There was also a twinge of stress in me over the stares of everyone else who came near me. My face had healed well, but still had a sunburned look and my right hand was covered in home-affixed gauze, to keep my recent burns from open air.

After another round with the Miscellaneous section, I printed out my job order and wriggled my body into a line of others. It was either synchronistic or sad that he came up next to me, both of us in the same lines as in our last meeting. Jerry Alder. The big buddy.

"Back again, huh?" the fat man joked.

"I suppose so. That surgeon thing didn't work out," I said with a tone of purposeful understatement.

"I've heard it's hard. Shit, I couldn't do it." There was a pause before I decided to continue talking to him. I was so bored and dulled waiting in line that I would have conversed with my own rectum had it the gumption to introduce a topic.

"So how about you? Trimark, right? That thing with the movie set didn't work out?" I asked.

"No, I'm on that. It's been great, but I didn't get on the full-time crew is all. I got part-time, and so I'm down here trying to pick up a second temp job to get my rent covered. I tried to get 'em to hire me on for two part-time shifts, you know, put the eggs in the same basket, but they saw through all that. It's a benefits thing. At least they pay out at the end of each day," he said, heaving the fat and muscle on his chest with his breathing and gestures.

"Huh. Is it hard?"

"Paintin' the sets? No. Easy as hell. I feel like I'm stealin' every time they pay me. Shit, come on down sometime. They got tons of little jobs they're tryin' to fill. Pal of mine got on as a gaffer."

"No shit?"

"Yeah, there's work with these movie guys; lots of it. It's temporary, which is the shitty part, but while it's on, it's on. What do you got this time? Blue slip, again?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm gonna try this Peace Officer thing. I've seen it on there every time I log in. Never checked it out, so I thought I'd give it a go."

"You're gonna be a cop? Jesus man, that's just negative," he said, rubbing his protuberant stomach with his broad left hand.

"Negative?"

"No, not like...just because you're not a real cop, is the thing. They train you to be one, but until then, you're just whoever. You get all the shit jobs. You know, grunt stuff. And I'll tell you (I know because my sister's boyfriend did it for awhile, right?), the shit jobs when you're a cop are shit, shit, _shit_ jobs. You know what I'm sayin'?"

"I hear that. Fetching coffee, that sort of thing? I figure I'll end up riding shotgun in some patrol car and doing all the ticket-writing or something."

"No way," he said, a goofy look on his face but with a serious tone.

"No?"

"You gotta get your head turned around on it. Those are the GOOD jobs for cops. They're easy and nobody's screaming in your face or trying to run off. A shit job for a cop is when they make you the guy in the bullet-proof vest that goes in first."

"Oh god..." I said. Was that true? For the possession of a job, there was neither the momentum nor the esteem in me to let one of my organs get torn open by some shady tweaker with a last-stand handgun.

"Have fun, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so. You think I'd really have to do that?" I asked, disquieted.

"Ah, I'm just messin' around. All my sister's boyfriend did was hold the leash for a canine unit and let go of it when they told him to. He got a better job, is all. That's the only reason he quit."

"Oh," I said, not sure whether to give the chuckle that was expected of me, or vocally define the man with any number of the roughshod names I was then coming up with.

"Jesus, you freaked me out there for a second," I said, stifling myself like the invertebrate get-along I was.

"Sorry, heh. Gotta laugh at life, right?" No, you didn't.

"Sure," I said. What buddies we were.

The line shortened by several people and I found myself at the front desk, my mind turning on the notion of holding canine leashes and saying things like: "Dispatch, we got a 139 in progress in the metro-rail 12 station, require backup." I'd say my officious, coded lingo into nice, black radios with lots of little buttons, knobs and general switches. I'd meet sergeants, lieutenants, rookies, detectives, assholes and good cops, all the stereotypes I'd seen in movies and for which I'd fantasized about interacting with, as a child. If there could be fantastical luck, a hip sketch-artist or profiler might start up conversation with me in the locker room whilst we holstered guns and talked freely on cop matters after a steaming, near homoerotic shower.

I set the blue sheet down on the counter and waited as the same woman I'd met previous typed in some information. She had worked this position for at least as long as I'd been frequenting the Boston Employment Office. I wondered if she might worry over my choice of employment this time, considering the subject of race had come up in our last meet. Didn't television wrap its more black-demographic comedy shows around the subject that cops are discriminatory toward them? I hoped she didn't think that I, as an officer of the law, would be like that. Character-wise, my life in a cop movie would have had me more the action man. I'd be the one jumping across scaffolding while chasing down the arms-dealer's henchman, while my smart, black partner below took a shortcut to ultimately catch the henchman in a later alley, just in time for one of us to save the other's life. Was it a negation on my non-racist soul to like movies in which a certain racism was friendly and affirmative?

"Gonna hunt down some felons, are you?" she asked, small-talkish. I chuckled.

"Only the ones that have it coming," I said. This bothered me though. It indicated there were felons that didn't have it coming. Like maybe innocent blacks that were persecuted. Did that come across in the statement I had made? I hoped not. My back began to feel sweaty.

"I see. I also see you don't have any experience in criminal justice or law enforcement," she said. While she hadn't rolled her eyes, she kind of had. My brother had studied criminal justice while at the community college twenty years ago, and he'd thought it all quite simple. I had for some time suspected I had a twitch of intelligence over Percy, successful though he was.

"Uh no. It said experience wasn't necessary, though."

"I know," she said, idle, looking over my form. She didn't look like she was going to refer me, for once.

"I think I can do this job, miss," I said, trying to shape her decision before she could fully realize what it should be. Then, a thought began nagging me. _Why had I said 'miss'?_ It had an essence of informal formality, which was what civil people used with other people they found trivial. Using 'miss' in my times was akin to giving your dog a middle name, an act of unnecessary clarification, though I supposed it was still a very human thing to do. I'd never been good with the protocol usage of mrs., ms, and miss, and didn't use them. For all I knew, this woman was married. Had I used 'miss' to sound more dignified and professional in the employment office, where it was obvious I had neither dignity nor profession? Maybe I should have said ma'am. No, that had a kind of southern ring to it, and the south was where slavery had happened.

"You sure about that?" she asked.

"About what?" She looked up at me as if I'd confused something that was clear.

"About you thinking you can do the job," she reiterated, flat.

"Oh, I'm all over it," I said. That was good. That was confident.

"They get upset when we send over someone that doesn't stick around. I don't want to waste their time. You sure you're 'all over it'?"

"Like white on rice." _Dear christ._ Why had I said _that_ atrocious bit of banality? Well, because the first phrase in my head was 'like stink on shit', but as my mouth opened I realized I couldn't say that in a government office, so I changed it and said the next phrase before I could think. I worried she would think I had some sort of subconscious, lingual, metaphorical connection between 'white' and 'capable'. I begged the fates she didn't interpret it that way. I only meant rice is white, and so being all over something like 'white on rice' was akin to fitting the mold to succeed at whatever thing was being questioned. I punched myself in the mind. Why didn't people say 'like syrup on pancakes', or 'like butter on toast'? There'd be no questions then, and I wouldn't feel like a racist at the employment office.

"Like syrup on pancakes," I added to be safe.

"What?"

"Yep." I left it there. She only raised an eyebrow and lowered her eyes back to my form. She must have thought I was a loon. An image of Aunt Jemima filled my mind, a supermarket mascot character that was black, home-grown, and fat. I'd said 'like syrup on pancakes'. I looked at the woman before me and wanted to cry.

"All right, I'll push this through. We'll see what happens. There's no guarantee they'll want you once you get there, though. You start day after tomorrow, 4pm. Be on time," she said. At the end of her methodical instructions, however, it happened again: a glance toward my crotch.

"Thank you," I said, wondering if this glance was in my head or not. It seemed she'd done it, taken a peek of interest at my groin, and it was the second time this had occurred. An animal of habit and reaction, I followed up by checking out her chest again, and found myself gravitating toward her left arm, where I noticed the bottom edge of a dark tattoo, mostly hidden by her short-sleeve. The tattoo was of two words, and I couldn't be certain, but it looked very much like the capitalized lower half of the words 'BLACK POWER'.

She hit a key on the keyboard then, and hard, as if in conclusion. A few moments later, the industrial printer behind her kicked on and, with the pace of a troublesome bowel movement, a white sheet of information egressed from the rubberized slot. After, a smaller slip yawned from the slot as well. She fetched these in a heavy and plodding manner before coming back.

"This is a list of everything you'll be required to bring with you the first day," she said, nudging her finger on the large sheet, "and this is your referral. Bring it with you. There is no orientation. You'll be shadowing for the first two weeks, then on standby for one month. After that, if it works out, you're in," she said, seeming to be reading this from a script in her mind.

"You like tattoos, huh?" I asked, constipating in my soul and wanting to throw myself out the window. Her forehead wrinkled and there was the tiniest groan from within her closed mouth. As she handed me the printout, seeming to be perturbed in the slight, I noted her lips had pursed.

"Because I've always wanted a tattoo," I tried to recover, "Do they hurt?"

My grimy, Caucasian body, pink and white like yogurt on ground chuck, stood there with a kind of gap-toothed, moronic posture, smiling my inquisitive face into an ache. I was an exposed and embarrassed drip. Inside my mind, I ripped my way out of my jocular, caveman self and emerged as tender and quivering as a shaved pet. I was better on the inside than I was on the outside. I had intrinsic goodness, but a social and cultural amentia the likes of a half-dead eel. What a dope I was.

"4pm. Sharp," she stated with a sterility of tone that was almost mesmerizing.

### TEN

Any exchange with sunlight the large auditorium may have needed had been gone without, and for some time. The playhouse was much larger than I would have thought. The rows of chairs seemed to go back a hundred yards, upward at the rear, and were offset from each other down the rows at such a degree that the seating created an illusion of circular patterns. There were four aisles, including the outer two against the great walls, and the stage alone could enclose three apartments like my own. A hundred people could stand on that and still have room to move about.

The entire room, vast and open, was hampered near the center due to the discomforting placement of a massive chandelier. This object was so wide and hung so low that one couldn't but stare at it with dismal thoughts. The Brobdingnagian chandelier seemed of questionable sturdiness, and was all too present in the spacious room. I had entered the playhouse auditorium and walked fewer steps than I had fingers before my eyes snagged on that chandelier, its low framework gravid with crystal and metal. I'd heard my father mention this pendant device in passing, and knew that it was a Boston landmark of sorts. The chandelier was over a hundred years old, went the story, and my opinion was that this relic looked even older. It seemed an impossibility that the several thin wires and one single chain, though large and rigid, could hold that monstrous thing in position for long. It seemed only a sad matter of time before the fixture would snap loose and plummet down like a great glass bowl, crushing several dozen people to an obvious death. The chandelier had to weigh two tons.

"Dad, this place is huge and severe," I said, looking about as we walked onto the stage. Though it was a simple meeting and a few rehearsal scenes, some dress-up involving my father, I still felt nervous being on the stage. The wood itself was so serious. Standing atop it begged the word 'thespian'. I felt like a small bit of bacteria on a glass slide in a lab. Being on the important and time-weathered stage, a place that had hosted more productions than my father had lived years, was like climbing into a giant, unloaded cannon and trying to feel safe. The stage and even the air itself smelled musty and dramatic. The carpentry in the trim of the vast room was keen and must have cost its weight in money. There was no affixed, cheap trim where the walls and ceiling met, but hand-carved wood. You could still see the slight unevenness at the edges of the trim's routed design in places, even from as far down as the stage. There was something both inspiring and frightening about a handcrafted labor this large. I wondered then how inspiring and torturous seeing the Great Pyramids in Giza would be.

"How do they dust the ceilings?" I asked my father.

"I don't know; maybe a fluffy head on a long stick, from a ladder or something."

"This is much different than when I saw 'Of Mice and Men' in my high school's cafeteria," I mentioned. My father smiled.

"Well yeah, I hope so. It's The Wendy." He leaned on his rosewood cane as he spoke. I found myself feeling pleased, despite the obvious connotation that he was having problems enough to require the new, longer cane. I'd noticed that he was becoming more unsteady in the last few weeks, and I had to wonder if he was having problems with his feet again. It was sad but common knowledge that with the old, whether a car with rust-holes or a man with a disgruntled back, problems snowballed. Once the more serious problems initiated, with someone my father's age, they were quick to cascade. This was like a tide drawing sand out, which only needed catch more sand to increase in power. After enough began to move out, in time, the power of it could take stones and shells, weeds, garbage, logs, and then a man's life.

"That chandelier is going to kill people some day," I determined aloud.

"Yeah, it's pretty big. This place has been here since before our family even came to this country. I wanted to show you the view from the stage."

"It's completely imposing," I responded, "You nervous yet?"

"Heh, yeah," he said, taking a long breath, looking at the central back entrance that led to the concession and lobby area.

"It's all the more space for you to wow," I reiterated, "How many you think can watch a show?"

"Well, I heard it's 500 sitting, 80 standing, and however many can occupy the lobby, but that's not watching the show, I guess. Oh, and then there's the guest booth up there, but it's roped off." He pointed to the small, ovular porch about thirty-five feet from the floor of the playhouse. It looked more like an uneven ledge than a booth, and was in manifest disrepair.

"That thing looks condemned," I said.

"I think it is, but there's another word for it when the rest of the building is fine."

"Huh."

We stood there looking out over the empty seats and I began to realize this was a sort of father/son moment I hadn't seen coming. My father seemed to hold this meet of ours in the playhouse as important. I imagined one's nerves could be more settled about an upcoming event if one's friends or family knew more about the details, if they empathized. After a few moments with nothing said, taking in the frank view and letting our imaginations make shapes and details about drama and playhouses, I had an impulse to burst out in a loud, dubious, operatic note, though did nothing to enact this. My father stood with his weight through both hands on his cane, leaning forward and staring at the back wall, his thoughts elsewhere. I'd never seen my father nervous, not even when he'd lost his wife, my mother, so long ago. That loss had wrecked him, of course, but my father wasn't the sort of man to waver.

After a moment wherein he clicked his tongue; my gaze having fixed on the Damocles chandelier, postulating how it might look while plummeting into the seats, a younger man approached from stage-left in a pair of loose pajamas. He was barefoot and had trim but wavy, black hair. His nose was small, almost teddy-bearish, but still somehow defining.

"Joe, did you talk to Andy about your entrance in Two, yet?" he asked, approaching. He said my father's name in a kind of questioning, intimate way that was to-the-point, yet doubtful. I understood at the first word that he was gay. He exuded it, and the potential that he showed this trait of his openly was high. While this was a pigeon-hole my thoughts had created for him in the moment, it was distinct and probable. For every human being that defied a specific, material stereotype in a bare detail, there were three humans that fit it well, hence the existence of stereotypes. Not all crouching cats pounced, but enough of them did that you knew not to play along if you weren't in the mood. Some cats crouched just to feel like cats. The man's words bore the slightest trace of a counterfeit lisp.

"You're here," my father said, surprised.

"Yeah; that's what I do," the young man responded.

"Sam, this is my son. He came down with me to-"

"Hi, Joe's kid; listen, did you talk to Andy?" Sam returned. My father stopped talking a moment, and then rubbed his chin.

"No, Sam. I haven't spoken with Andy. He seems fine with the entrance." I could tell my father was annoyed. You don't spend your entire adolescence with the man who disciplined your mischievous and dramatic behavior without knowing how to spot the signs of agitation. My father was very good at keeping his bothers to himself, when he wanted to, but not from me. It was as plain as the beeping of a just-settled microwave full of hot food.

"If you don't talk to him, of course he'll be 'fine with the entrance'. He doesn't know there's a problem unless everyone tells him. You're friends, so you can talk to him, I'm sure. Let's get a hold on this and take the initiative... He should know the entrance is fouled up. Which it is. It's goofy. I don't want you to look goofy; it could ruin the scene," Sam said. This man was my father's opposite in the production, in the role of Adam, the young gay man that would be vying for the old straight man's affection while defending and hording a relationship with a woman he was friends with, and that the old man had begun romancing. This story was a lop-sided affair, with edge because of when it was written, though hindered over time due to the writer's alleged, real-life perversion. The young man turned to me then, as both Adam and Sam.

"Talk some sense into this one!" he said with humor. I pictured my father kissing him, as would happen in the third act, a scene I knew my father was both disturbed and unsettled by. I imagined their lips meeting, my old, ex-redneck father and this young, gay, preciously self-absorbed kid who didn't seem to care that my father and I were having a conversation. I saw their lips intertwine, eyes closed, hands on each other's backs in the silent, awkward air, floodlit and exposed like pinned, homo-insistent insects, as 500 people sitting and 80 standing watched with the eyes of tigers viewing meat-art.

When I responded with a simple 'sure', Sam nodded, bored. He then made his exit from our scene, nearly tripping as he descended the five stairs to the backstage floor. My father looked at me with a glazed expression.

"See? Acting is shit," he said.

"Eh, he seems all right. Nosy, I guess."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it. You probably think those pajamas he's got on are part of some scene, right? Like he's in costume?" my father prodded. I had assumed such, yes.

"He's not?"

"No, that's what he wears to the meetings. Like for comfort. He's nuts, I'm telling you. And this guy's in _everybody's_ business, not just mine. 'I want to change this couch, Andy, it doesn't match the set', 'Somebody has to repaint this backdrop, Andy, the Sun looks like it's from a baby book', 'Joe looks goofy when he enters, Andy.' I mean, christ, I've never had a job where a guy could bug that many people, not to mention the boss, and not get canned."

"Me neither. Hey, at least your boyfriend is good-looking," I said with a smirk. My father only twisted his mouth into a crooked look of disapproval.

"Well, it's theater, I guess," I offered, "Who's Andy?"

"My buddy Andy Leftwich. The director. He writes, too. I've known him for years." He began scratching his nose with the back of his hand.

"Ah. Sam meddles with the director, too, huh?"

"He mostly has others do it," my father said, resigned.

"Yeah well, that whole prima donna actor thing exists for a reason, right? Some people just get like that. I heard Michael Hausen won't do a movie unless the crew on hand prays with him each day. I read it once. It's kind of humorous because Sam's playing the role that made Hausen famous."

"I'm not prayin' with nobody who wears yellow pajamas as work clothes," my dad said, shaking his head.

"I'm just saying, maybe it's the role, right?" I joked, "Maybe playing Adam somehow naturally makes a person meddle, you know? Like a curse or a hex or something. The curse of the mummy's tomb...the curse of the effeminate, bossy, pajama-man...you know?" My father didn't respond to my attempt at zaniness, and simply looked out over the empty seats again. I let the moment settle and then returned to the topic he was feeling most.

"So, _how_ nervous?" I asked. He didn't respond, which was a strong response while atop the scrutiny of The Wendy's historical stage. He was uneasy enough to think rather than speak. We continued hovering on the wooden stage, our bodies upright as by wires from the eaves, our talk stilted, our appearance comical. Human props. My father stood, weight on my gift cane, with his eyes in the vacuous house. My mind was up on the three cups of coffee I'd had before leaving the apartment, a necessary task to awaken me as I'd stayed up late with the Blue Dragon writing somewhat fatuous, sentimentalist poetry. The new dragon seemed to favor confession and feeling, worry and language, rather than what the Red Dragon had used, which was a meal of simple angst, peppered with opinion.

There with my father, caffeinated and young-minded, my mental dependence was prone to drift. I began filling the seats with people in my mind. I set my mother in the front row, dead center, and beside her, my brother looking bored. I added my aunt Ida near them, her dead husband Charles with her, and several other long-deceased family members I'd never known well. In the back were people from the employment department lines, various employers, and women I'd crushed on at various points in my life. I even stuck Phil Kiphardt, a bully from my youth, near the center exit, watching and appreciative. Every seat became alive and watched me as I performed the role of myself, the good son spending time with his father. I summoned my voice from my diaphragm, and I gestured with strong, sure limbs, and everything my presence indicated was designated and honed. They applauded. They heckled. My mother looked misty and Percy threw tomatoes, his tongue hanging out.

My father's stare rose to the chandelier, which hung stagnant above us, ominous and skeletal.

"I miss big things," he said then, moving half of his mouth up, a touch perturbed.

"Yeah? What big things?" I asked, biting the hook and fading back into reality.

"You know, when I was a kid, everything was supposed to be huge. That's how it worked. Everything was designed to be bigger than life, right?"

"Sure." I didn't understand what he was getting at, but thought it best to agree.

"Even the advertisements for things were big. 'Come to the Hilton and see our luxurious ballroom', 'Take a tour of the tallest building in America', that sort of thing. I went to a gala, once. It was huge."

"I've never been to a gala," I threw in.

"God, our communist enemies were gigantic. A dollar bill seemed to weigh more in your hand. The cars were long, the houses were wide. You could buy things for pennies, you know? Just these little coppery scraps of metal with the head of a great man on them."

"You can still buy things for pennies, you just need a ton of them," I said, propelling him a little, but then inadvertently throwing him off.

"What?"

"I was just kidding; I get what you're saying though," I said. I supposed I understood his meaning.

"I don't think so. You're not from that time," he said. I felt uncomfortable, and put in my place, though could have offered a statement that he was sounding quite old in this discussion, which wasn't as much a discussion as a sad musing on his part.

"You know, even the people were larger; I don't mean fat, just...they had more, lots more. And I don't think I have to mention how big the wars were. Shit, the Germans reinvented war, then we flipped the whole mess on its head. The bombs were huge, the times were huge, the whole mess. And money, too. You could be a bum sleeping with roaches in your shoes and still feel like...like even in some poor, miserable way, you were still doing your part to help run the whole damn world."

"I know what you mean," I said, though this was more automatic than felt.

"No, you can't. C'mon. All that stuff is gone," he said, waving his hand. I had attempted to crawl out of my place, and been stuck back in it. I'd taken the defensive, which was unnecessary. I should have just let my dad reminisce and show the appropriate reverence I was supposed to be exhibiting. Instead, I continued spouting my own thoughts.

"There were plenty of big things around when I was a kid, pop. And some of it's still up and running. Look at Boston. It was huge and it's only gonna get bigger."

"That's not bigger, that's right of way," he said, "just small things reproducing. By the time you came around, everything was getting smaller. Watches, cars, streets, the yards...people. AIDS and the religious terrorists, even poetry... It's all so goddamned tiny, right? You can't get close to any of it, and you can't get away from it. And the Internet, good god, that's so small you can't even touch it."

"Well, that kind of small is relative. I mean, cell structure in the body is small and we don't see _that_ , at least, not without tools, but we still walk around because of it," I said, knowing I was only getting in the way of his brief walk down nostalgia avenue. My father didn't seem interested in my line of thought, of course, and simply rode forward on his momentum, his voice echoing in the luxurious, tall, grand warehouse for actors. What a scene.

"You know, when I was in my twenties, it was good to say something was 'artificially flavored'?" he came out with then. This sounded odd to me.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it was great. It was a selling point. Cherry candy that was artificially flavored; they'd put it in big, bold letters on the package: Artificially Flavored! Wow, kids, it's _artificial_...I mean, how cool was that? People made flavors from scratch, with chemicals. Like out of thin air. Kids loved it. It was science and candy mixed. Now, you see it stuck in tiny print they hope you won't read because 'artificially flavored' is no good. People want the real thing. Chemicals kill you. Real cherry, real vegetables, the real deal, and compact as possible. Well, let me tell you from my vantage point...real is small."

I didn't know how to respond to this. It seemed as if my father was having trouble with the augmentations the world had experienced in his lifetime; that much I could understand, whether his point seemed of interest to me or not. In my own short lifetime, I'd nearly given up on listening to music, because there was no end in sight. There was just more and more music. More bands, more singers. Some were contrived, some authentic, some popular, some anti-popular, and the entire realm of this gave me a headache. I had difficulty in wading through the scenes-within-scenes to find the one song I might like among the throes of press exposure and passing, thumping cars.

If anything, it felt to me like the world was getting larger, not smaller. Advertisers had been using the terms 'media' and 'experience' with just about everything. To them, you didn't go see a movie, you had a movie experience, for which they could charge more. You didn't watch previews before the film started, you were immersed in a media experience, to the benefit of ticket prices. Many products now required registration, and the creation of an online 'account' in order to access or use them. Everything seemed geared to catch you and drag you into the pitch, the decision, the purchase, the mutated way of life advertised. _Do you like this product? Here's fifty more. Don't forget to register._ It felt to me like the world was becoming more grandiose, conspired, and over-the-top with each passing night.

I found myself only nodding and trying to empathize with my father, but I rather liked the world I was born into. I could suppose he liked the one he had known, so really, we were the same. His moment was my moment, just with auxiliary detailing. I could imagine myself being eighty, and being upset that 'when I was younger, people had to be patient, wait for their favorite show to come on, read a book to get to the ending, date and impress someone multiple times to get laid, hang out to have fun...' I could imagine myself ranting about how the world had become too impersonal, too hit-or-miss, too etcetera...

"Nobody wanted the real thing back then, though. We were sick of it," my father went on, "we wanted big, artificial, invention and feats. You know? Men working hard, flying these incredible deathtraps just to go see the moon, agencies battling agencies in the muck of the world and telling you all about it. And now I'm eighty. Eighty years old. And the thing is, I'm in this playhouse, and my feet hurt, and I feel like a big stone the stream has to split around because I'm what's left of a big landslide that's almost gone."

"Ah dad, Jesus." I said. His notion was morose and cruel to himself. He felt somehow in the way of the world, my world, and that his had forgotten him here. How awful. Did he not understand that this was just a matter of perception? That he could change his at will if he so desired?

"But not this playhouse, not this place," my father said, "This place is so big it actually scares me." There it was... conundrum. He wanted his big world back, and it wasn't coming, and the playhouse was reminding him of how things were, and it scared him. How helpless that could make someone feel. I took this as my cue to be his second cane.

"Dad, you're all over this. You're gonna play it right, I know. If you weren't, you gotta think I'd know it, and I'd tell you blunt and fast, Percy style," I said.

"I'm not nervous about the play," he said, plain. My confused glance nudged against his brow-line. He gave a kind of grunting laugh then, and I noticed he was fussing with his wedding ring, rotating it on his finger, something I only saw him do when his mind was amped, but was forced to wait. It was a mannerism he performed idle, as when waiting in a restaurant for an order that was taking too long, or when younger, going over the constantly growing piles of manuscripts sent to _The Tatterdemalion_. It was one of the subconscious, reactionary habits he'd probably never realize he had. Noticing this made me wonder if I had any such habits.

"C'mon, let's head back to the dressing room," he said then, turning and setting the point of his cane ahead of him. He cleared his throat and began walking from the stage while I followed beside him. Strangely, I had been made to feel like a child who wasn't disciplined, or was too inconsequential yet to understand what was really going on in the adult world, the mysterious, responsible world that had no time for me because I didn't get it yet, I didn't see. My father's edition of the world, made of poetry, anger, setbacks in gusto, money and health, seemed to cause so much ill feeling.

"This is gonna be good," I said, referring to the play as we reached the stairs, but my father had no response. I decided to keep my there-theres to myself for a time, though at least he seemed more bored with himself than with my back-patting talk.

### ELEVEN

The morning had moved forward like a snail with a stutter. I had carouseled from bed after waking tangled in my four blankets (near a requirement, as my apartment was now bone-chilling cold at all times). My energy level was high, and my sleep, for once, seemed to have replenished me. After a short cursing bout at a chair leg my toes had met in accident, I entered the kitchen dull, but ready for my day. I wanted to trickle myself a cup of coffee, and discovered that I was not only out of filters, but the electricity had been shut off as well. I made several calls to various departments at the Energy Board before getting them to both notice and admit they'd cut off my power. After a rather lengthy and heated call to a supervisor named Nelda, my apartment was at last scheduled to have a special servicing.

The supervisor promised that my electricity would be turned on within 48 hours, which I determined to be an unacceptable length of time. Without another option, however, there was no choice but to accept it. They did apologize, though the person offering this, meaning the person that was supposed to feel bad for what they'd done to me, didn't actually know me and wasn't connected to my problem. She was just a supervisor in charge of one portion of customer service phone-calls. Poor Nelda; after I'd unloaded my common gripe in her ear, she apologized as per her job duty, while having no real association with my problem other than being of loose affiliation with the faceless company that had disabled my electricity.

"I'm very sorry sir. We'll get this repaired just as soon as..." but how sorry could she be? I was a voice of no relation to her at all. How often did she apologize through the phone to names she read off a screen? I began wondering if that was the real duty of her job, whether she knew it or not: Apologist. Being paid to give apologies seemed a terrible job. I was told after her insincere, scripted response, that it had been a neighbor's apartment scheduled to be shut off, not mine, though she wouldn't say which neighbor, of course. A part of me wanted to talk to the person who had made the mistake, the service-tech worker that came out and read the address wrong. He was the one that should have given the insincere, scripted apology.

After my tiring, crusading phone calls, I decided to have my one cigarette for the day early, as my craving's strength was of unusual proportion. I sat back in a chair and tried to enjoy every mellow second of it. I knew by nightfall I'd be craving another one, yet still make myself hold out until morning, so wanted to savor every instant of my cigarette while I could. When my body urged me to smoke tonight, I'd be able to look back on my satisfying cigarette of the morning and justify that I'd satiated myself enough. When quitting smoking, I'd found so far, the shittiest thing about limiting your intake was having a cigarette go bad. The cherry might fall off, or the cigarette would be split in the middle, or halfway through the experience, your phone would ring, not letting you truly focus and fully utilize the cigarette. You'd end up feeling cheated. Waiting for a cigarette, after having smoked a terrible one, was like not having smoked at all. You'd crave the more.

It was during this cigarette that the refrigerator door opened and the Blue Dragon whistled into my kitchen. My ears had perked at this creepy sound, and when it ended, she spoke.

"I like that song," she said.

"Oh?" I prepared my eyes for the sight of her.

"Baby, come here," she called. I hadn't found the whistled notes she let out to be song-like at all, and it added to the already disturbing notion of her life, or lack of it, in my old U-Line icebox.

Strawberry jelly and a plastic container of uneaten, furry, rice, six weeks old. Takeout box of lo mein and nine shriveled grapes on their ravaged network of stems. Soy sauce and near empty plastic jug of apple juice. A viscous, black sludge that would be unidentifiable were it not for the clear, plastic produce bag it had developed in, letting me know this was what remained of the broccoli I'd bought months ago. There was more discomfort in my existence from the refrigerator than simple cold or rotted food would have provided. The various jars and opened cans, often teeming with unknown bacteria, were pressed harshly into my back and legs, and I had managed to get a large streak of cold butter on my left shoulder, which was pinioned against the back of the refrigerator and continually slid downward from the smudge.

"Tie it in with the first stanza," she said, her head so near my groin I couldn't help but think certain thoughts. We were packed in the refrigerator, intertwined, her thick, stretched flesh all around me. The temperature was drastic to me, as I wasn't used to frigid air. When nights were cold, you turned the heat up. Cold was something I'd never had to suffer much.

"How do you want me to?" I asked. The way the Blue Dragon was constructing the poem was alien to me and I was already annoyed at the arrangement of our bodies in the refrigerator. Writing on the roof of our freezing, compact box was a pain (most so with trying to avoid touching the perishables, which had, indeed perished), but at least the dry-erase pen worked well.

"Juxtapose the gravesite by giving it softness, and keep to easy metaphor."

"Softness regarding what?"

"With the coffin in line 3," she said, "I called it a spigot there, which is very hard and mechanical. Now let's call it a blanket in line 19. Soft."

"I guess I get it," I said, evenly penning out a 19th line.

"That's fine," she said, "just fine..." She began whistling a series of disconnected notes.

The arrangement I had with the Blue Dragon was a change from what I had previous, with the Red Dragon. In that arrangement, I had to write the dragon's angry, harsh poetry, but with the Blue Dragon, I co-wrote, and the subjects were general in tone, with her ideas centered around the point, rather than the spouting language I was used to. Half of each poem was mine. I wrote it in conjunction with her. We revised together. I supposed, as warped and bizarre as the situation was, this was the closest thing to a relationship with a woman I'd had in years. Over the last few days, I'd written five poems with the Blue Dragon, and sent them out to various magazines. These were of a tier not as difficult as those I sent to for the Red Dragon. Rather than focusing on the larger names, those magazines with huge submission intakes and longstanding reputations, she preferred I send to publications of smaller circulation, a more relaxed protocol, grand ideas. The submission of these poems was lofty. While the Red Dragon had aims quite high in having me submit to _Ploughshares_ , _The Atlantic Monthly_ , and _The New Yorker,_ among others, the Blue Dragon was being more realistic, I found. I'd already sent a poem each to _Connecticut Review_ and _Spinning Jenny,_ and a submission of several poems sent to _Takahe_ , out of New Zealand _._ I had sent a record six poems to England for the magazine _Orbis_. They were still badge publications, meaning ones to tout if the poems were accepted, but they weren't the national, everyone's-heard-of, obesely circulated, prize mags.

"Title it. Then sign," she said. I thought for a moment, and wrote as a title: " _A-Sexual and Dirty_ ". Then I shook my head. That sounded dumb, though did explain what the poem was pretty much about.

"No, that's terrible," the Blue Dragon fumed, "Try ' _A Fuse into the Agamete_ '. It connotes something similar, but has more poetry."

"Agamete sounds cool," I voiced, doing as I was told. I then signed my name.

"We're done today. This goes out to _American Letters and Commentary._ "

"All right, I'll send it. Can we talk about the jar now? You promised we'd talk about the jar," I said, trying to initiate what I felt was the more important topic. The Red Dragon had tortured me for months and never even hinted at where the jar was, or what it contained, expressing only that it was crucial to me and worth locating. I knew only that my mind depended on managing my quest, and that I would, with an even pace, go mad if I didn't find the jar.

"You're progressing. I'll get you the jar shortly," she said. The veins in her skin, which were highly visible and black in color, pulsed for a moment.

"You're not toying with me here?" I questioned.

"Go to work. Tonight, when you're asleep, I'll give you a map, and tomorrow, you'll use it to find the jar," she said. Could this be true? I was finally going to get somewhere in my quest? After all the shit the Red Dragon put me through, a week with the Blue Dragon was all I needed for her to tell me where the jar was? I was overjoyed. Unless this was an awful lie, it seemed as if things were going to work out. I would have the jar and its contents soon. After all the time I spent with the Red Dragon, all the abuse and horror, the Blue Dragon was simply going to tell me where it was. I wanted to jump around, I was so pleased. What would be inside the jar? _Money? Wishes? Talent? Knowledge?_ My thoughts spiraled on the idea and I found myself feeling like a child about to open the biggest Christmas present under the tree.

"Remember, _American Letters and Commentary_."

"I'm on it," I said.

"And don't answer the phone," she added. I paused on this before replying.

"The Red Dragon told me not to answer the phone, too. Why is it okay that I make calls, but not okay to answer them?" The Blue Dragon let in to the eerie whistling again and the refrigerator door began to close. As it shut, she answered me:

"Because you don't know who's on the other end." The door sealed and I stood there, annoyed. This didn't provide me much of an answer.

The Blue Dragon was much more enjoyable to have around than the Red Dragon had been, though in truth, I was tired of having my appliances possessed and overrun by these spiritual, mythical squatters. These were my belongings, not theirs. The only reason I paid them notice was because of the jar, and whatever unknown wonders it meant for me. The jar was everything. Things would finally happen for me once I had my hands on it. While I no longer had to put up with flaming debris and abusive language from the Red Dragon, I wasn't fond of his blue counterpart when having to cram myself into the refrigerator with her. A staunch layer of ice-crystals had overrun my apartment, and I noted a five-inch icicle hanging from the disabled fire alarm in my kitchen's corner. The day previous, I had become stuck to the toilet seat in the bathroom because of the frigid moisture in my apartment, and several times had my lips stuck to glasses of water. These were easy to solve, however. I ran a towel over the toilet seat now just before sitting, and ran a licked forefinger around the rim of each glass before I took a drink.

The cold alone was tolerable, so long as I kept the heat on and bundled myself like a well-swaddled baby. My apartment was even colder that day, however, due to the electricity having been shut off. I found myself begging to the powers on high that the service personnel might arrive soon, and that my heaters would begin to function. Without a steady stream of floor heat, who knew to what extent my home would freeze? I might come home any day now to learn my apartment had become an ice cave.

After a trip to the nearest convenience store and the brief navigation of a stainless-steel machine, I was granted a cup of coffee. The searing beverage was welcome in my hands as I returned to the apartment. After typing the poem, packaging it with a cover letter, and filling out the submission envelope to _American Letters and Commentary,_ I let myself feel relief. Their guidelines said to send up to four poems, but I only had the one to send. I hoped they wouldn't mind. Technically, what I was sending was within the rules. I felt I'd accomplished my goals for the day thus far, and could relax. With my first day as a peace officer blooming before me, I wanted a small amount of centering time to get my head straight.

The coffee was not good, but the warmth it exuded was almost pleasurable in my frosty home. It had a plastic taste, absorbed from the polystyrene cup it came in, and I had burned my tongue and chin with it on the way up the stairs. The choppy, cool air in my apartment only exacerbated this burn with each breath. The creamer at the convenience store was an odd color, so I'd skipped it and planned on using milk from my own apartment when I returned. An unfortunate discovery was that with my refrigerator's new guest came less storage room in that particular appliance. Milk was one of the few staples that could still fit within it, and that I needed and possessed. To my misfortune upon returning home, I found that the milk had frozen solid, leaving me with nothing to diminish my coffee's black, acidic taste. After scraping some snowy frost from the top of my television with a quarter and adding it to my coffee to cool it some, I sugared the beverage with ardor and then toughed the black, ice-cooled coffee down. I'd have to pick up some powdered, non-dairy creamer on the way home, which would solve the freezing dilemma, as well as the creamer trouble. With filters in tow, I would be coffee-able by morning, provided my electricity was reactivated by then. I was getting good at solving problems, it seemed.

The phone rang. I reached for it and then remembered what the Blue Dragon had said, and slacked back in my chair, sipping my coffee. It rang seven times and then ceased. I hoped these ignored calls weren't important. I hadn't answered my phone in several months, though it was rare anyone ever called me. I did have fears about my father falling and not being able to get up, calling me to no effect because I wouldn't answer the phone. I worried about missing a call from Percy with a "Mina got in an accident, I need you..." kind of problem. I bit my lip thinking about the possibility of a call that might begin with: "Hello? Yes, this is the Poetry Editor at _Connecticut Review_. We got your poem, and we've all talked about it, and buddy, we think you're some kind of genius."

I couldn't but wonder how my day was going to turn out. I didn't have to go to work for some time, until 4 pm, which designated a night shift. It was strange, but I'd never actually thought about the police as being a 24 hour a day job. When I thought of the phrase 'open 24 hours', it was natural I pictured the signs of restaurants and lounges. It hadn't occurred to me that this phrase could refer to the police as well. I suppose being a officer was more than full-time, being a condensed class of lifestyle. I wondered if the person I'd be shadowing would be like one of the hard-boiled officers in the movies, and if we'd have to enact 'good cop, bad cop' on someone, a _perpetrator_. I hoped I wasn't going to be fulfilling blanks on tedious paperwork all day, and would at least get to ride in a patrol car.

Part of me thought that a job, as fat Jerry in line at the employment department had alluded, of holding a dog's leash all day long would be kind of fun; especially a vicious, incredible, professionally trained, drug-sniffing attack canine. A cop dog, really, an animal so important that it was given a federal job. Shit, I'd never had a federal job until now. What did that mean? I wasn't as good as a dog that could smell drugs? No, that couldn't be right. The dog didn't get paid, though potentially ate better. I supposed it could be said the dog was more reliable than me. Still, I knew the guy on the first floor of my apartment building grew hallucinogenic mushrooms and weed, and the dogs hadn't found that guy yet, so I was better, for certain.

As I sipped the coffee, already craving another cigarette, I tried to relax and pivot myself into a calm, freezing serenity. I had work lined up, my father was at play rehearsal all this week, Percy had been almost cordial the last time I'd seen him, and I was going to have the jar in my hands by tomorrow night. Things were better than fair: they were fair with momentum, and nearing the jar was a relief unlike anything I'd known in a decade. I was doing something important, a thing that could matter, and I was going to pull through, achieve, score the bounty. For the first time in months, I felt genuinely good.

### TWELVE

"Jesus christ, get if off me!" I shrieked, waving my unloaded gun in the air and trying to kick at the head of the flaming panda bear. The two officers started laughing, hysterical, choking bursts of noise from their redly-shaven cop faces. One of them had to lean against the patrol car to keep himself upright, he was laughing so hard. The panda gave a painful, loud moan and sunk its teeth into my ankle, ripping my leg back and forth while I cried out and kicked at its snout with my other foot. The bear began jerking its head side to side, both to damage me, and to evade the heel of my foot. The flames streaking off its back and forelegs singed my knees and thighs as I pat out those that had begun to catch on my dark police uniform.

"10-56! Shoot it! 10-56!" I screamed, pleading and hoarse, leaning forward to club the panda's head with the butt of my useless handgun again. The animal's head felt to be full of concrete. The bear wrenched back, pulling me flat onto my back, and then lumbered over my legs, beginning to get his teeth into my hip.

"HUH!" I barked, jabbing at it repeatedly with the base of my gun, kicking and kneeing toward its head and snout. My throat let out an incomprehensible medley of grunts and snorts. The panda's flames burned at my arms and waist. It reared back a moment, roared, and did a combination of leaping and falling onto my chest, having finally succumbed to the flames. I couldn't breathe. My neck was seared and my jaw ached from clenching my teeth together. I turned my head sharp to keep my face away from the still flaming, fiery carcass that had now pinned me to the sidewalk.

"Help me, you fuck!" I gasped to Officer Gonzalez, who, still laughing, sauntered over and pushed the panda off of me with a hard shove of his foot. I hunched myself to my feet and stumbled back, trying to breathe, my hands on my knees. I heaved air into my lungs and managed to stand upright. Then, leaning back and haggard, with a difficult time of maintaining my balance, I gave my own weak roar at the dead panda. When I ran out of air again, I breathed a few times and turned to Gonzalez.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" I shouted at him, panting. The other officer, who I didn't know, burst into an even stronger laughter near the patrol car, while my partner, Gonzalez, only lowered his head, trying to control his own impending outburst of humor.

"That's a new one. Oh, man...that's a new one," he said, shaking his head.

"Why don't you cuff it, rookie, it might try to evade," the other cop poked. Gonzalez gave me a thumbs up as his face became a single, rampant smile.

"You took it out with a newspaper and fire...Jesus, you're some cop, newbie," he said.

"Fuck you guys. I thought you had my back," I said, angry.

"I've never seen anything like that. You do know that metro police codes are for radio use, right? Not for yelling at one another."

"Whatever, I was dying," I said, uncaring. Gonzalez snorted, turning his head to the other officer for a knowing recognition of hilarity.

"Oh shit, what a day...you got your 'perp', that's for sure." Gonzalez said, taunting me for having used that term earlier in the shift. When I'd clocked in and started the day as a peace officer, I was expectant, and had notions. Big deal. Gonzalez had been a police officer for six years, and rather than show me the way things worked, he instead seemed to use me as a source of embarrassment, to get a laugh, the prick.

"Yeah, you got him, all right," the other officer said, "What is this, a 10-35? Working fire? Or else I'm thinking maybe a 10-54: Code 3 – Blazing roll of newspaper, yeah?" the officer chided.

"Man, this is a 666, if you ask me," Gonzalez chuckled, using his foot to roughly test the lifelessness of the smoldering bear. I gagged from the smell of burned hair and began pacing, working out the adrenaline that had tided into me when the bear attacked.

"Shit, it's Cookie, too. My kid loves this damn bear," the backup officer replied.

"Zoo mascot," Gonzalez added, "they got a cartoon of him in the ads. You're gonna be famous, newbie."

"What the fuck was I supposed to do? It was me or him. You saw it." I defended, raising my voice again. I was furious.

"Okay man, hey, okay...you did good; that was damn fine police work," he said, holding another burst of laughter in.

"Fuck you."

"You got him. You got the perp," he said, sighing with a grin.

"That thing was gonna eat me," I answered, disgruntled and wanting to punch him for leaving me to the devices of the maddened, fiery bear.

"Naw, they're herbivores, man," the backup cop said, chewing at one of his fingernails.

"Yeah, you must have smelled like bamboo or something."

I'd spent the last three hours with Gonzalez, patrolling various areas and disliking my new job. Not only did he have me do an allotment of tedious, unnecessary things, some of which were _his_ jobs, but he'd been somewhat rude all evening. Just after leaving the station in the patrol car, he had managed to spill his hot tea on the floorboards, and then had me clean it up. He called this 'Trainee Right of Way', and then continued to use the phrase as his tenet for making me his servant, more than a trainee. He had me walk into Quimby's to order him a snack, rather than use the drive-through, which would have been more sensible. He had ordered us coffee from a pull-up cart, then told me, once our beverages arrived, that he hadn't brought money, forcing me to pay. At one point, he had used the tip of his club to demonstrate 'pressure points' on me, stating it was for my knowledge, though I knew he was using this as his excuse to torture me with the club, which made me cringe and yelp in pain. He promised that by the end of our shift, he'd show me all the arm-bars and holds he knew. I wasn't keeping a fond outlook of this now that so much had gone wrong with our follow-up on the Boston Zoo escaped animal call.

"I need medical attention, I'm burned up," I said, feeling the sting on my limbs.

"Naw, most of those burns were already there," he said, referring to the last corporeal traces of my dealings with the Red Dragon. I'd told Gonzalez they were from a barbecue flare-up.

"Yeah but no, there's new ones," I said, "goddamn, I hurt all over. That thing had to weigh like two hundred and fifty pounds." My back offered twinges and I had bite punctures all over my legs and the left side of my hip. It had latched onto my sleeve as well, but never made the skin, just ripping my uniform up my arm.

"In Asia, they're the symbol of peace," the back-up cop threw in, adjusting his genitals with his hand and leaning against the patrol car. It was parked about thirty feet off, just before the entrance of the zoo. He'd pulled up during my skirmish with the bear, and seen the worst of it. This man was supposed to be my 'back up', but all he'd done was hop around and giggle with my trainer, witnessing my predicament.

"Well, not this one. This one was the symbol of me being mauled to death," I retorted. The bear lay in a slump on the concrete, the fire dissipating and giving over to a dense smoke that was nauseating. It smelled like fired meat, but not a kind I was used to. I thought it would make me sick for a moment.

"Man, you're in some shit now," Gonzalez said, "I'd fire you myself, but only the chief can do that, and he will, I'm sure." He seemed to be enjoying my failure as an officer. It was as if, from the initial moment we'd met in the station lobby, he'd plotted and designed my screw-ups with zest.

"You're gonna be lookin' for work, newbie," the other officer chimed in. What kind of back-up was he? He'd done nothing to help me when it was obvious I was in mortal battle with a mauling, baneful animal that weighed more than I did.

"You know, you're probably gonna go to jail," Gonzalez said to me then.

"Probably?" the other officer questioned with a smile. They exchanged a look of joy.

"Approximately," Gonzalez rephrased, musing to himself and staring at the smoldering, cooked bear on the ground, "This is animal cruelty, for sure, and those things are endangered."

So was I.

The paperwork was excruciating. Not only did I have to fill out reports over my interaction with the bear, but many others due to my having drawn and used my handgun in the capacity of enforcing public safety, despite that it wasn't even loaded and I'd used it in melee to strike the damn bear. There were forms and questions about the events leading to the 'confrontation', files that had to be completed on descriptions of 'victim', then duplicate copies made with a few things changed here and there for 'assailant'. I had to fill out a report on what the other officers were doing during this, as did they, and I even had to pen through a PR document legally binding me from disclosing information to the press. Worst of all, I had to have every single document signed and stamped off by multiple people because the computers wouldn't accept the name 'Cookie' without a last name, or as an alias without a human race description, and the system wasn't inclusive enough to handle animal cases. It was horrid.

Before the four hours of forms I filled out, I had to give a staunch, detailed synopsis of the altercation to my upper at the precinct. There are forms of anger so severe they take on other names: Rage, fury, bloodlust...and there are kinds of anger that can take on quieter terms: Annoyance, agitation, perturbation...but there are no words for the anger I found in Sergeant Hackle. His severe temperament was a mysterious, calm, eyes-on-fire but tongue-like-lotion kind of anger.

I explained that Gonzalez and I had been called early in the shift, at about 5:30 pm to the Boston Zoo, for what we had been told was an escaped bear that was frightening children. The panda bear was said not to be violent, but that there were no zoo keepers present that were prepared to handle the animal, due to a shift-change that took place at that time of day, and we were called to chaperone a maintenance employee's attempts to recapture it, as the animal was still on the zoo premises. It had left the physical zoo, and we were told it was moving about in the main parking lot. Gonzalez and I were given the call, and we reached the front entrance of the zoo shortly after. The Boston Zoo had been closed for a short time, and so had already been emptied of citizens, including the alleged children the bear had frightened off, giving us no eye-witness to the behavior other than the alleged maintenance man, who we could not initially locate.

We found the panda bear with his front paws on the turnstile, attempting to push it in a manner that we determined to be playful. I was instructed by Gonzalez to flank the animal by standing to its left side, at a distance of ten feet, and he did the same, on the opposite side. His tactic was that we would wait until the bear tried to exit the turnstile to get in close, and then we would simply trail behind it, following to make sure no one was hurt and the bear didn't wander too far from the property. The plan was to keep account of the seemingly innocuous animal until proper zoo keepers and qualified personnel could entice the animal back into its living area, or drug the animal and recapture it unharmed.

"Get to the part where you torched a goddamned endangered animal," Hackle said, monotone, his hands flat on his desk as if willing himself not to move. There was a vein on his neck that looked unreal and powerful.

I explained in detail that the bear had, indeed come out of the turnstile and, seeing me near the outer wall, had attacked without warning or provocation. It knocked me over and began trying to rip my left hand off, but caught only my sleeve. I began calling for Gonzalez to aid me, as well as striking the panda's snout hard with the butt of my palm, but to no avail. The bear then seemed to make a motion toward my throat, and feeling my life in danger, I drew my firearm and attempted to terminate the animal.

The sergeant closed his eyes, lips pursed, with no change in position or temperament. It was as if he couldn't bring himself to hear my story while looking at me. He breathed, waiting for me to continue.

Worried, I tried to summarize, explaining the ineptitude of Gonzalez, and how I discovered there was no ammo in my gun, which Gonzalez had given me only minutes before arriving at the zoo. This was in some form an impractical joke that backfired. The bear had let go of me and tried to vacate, but at about ten feet off, it slowly turned and, seeing me again, came back, stopping when it had me cornered. The bear had me pinned in a concrete corner where the outer wall and zoo entrance walls met. It wouldn't let me out but ceased attacking. Gonzalez had only started chuckling, thirty feet out, watching this interaction. I shouted for him to call for back-up, and proposed he shoot the animal if it came any closer to me. He'd been reluctant to call, but did so.

The back-up unit had arrived after seven minutes, a lone officer I later learned was named Sundi. Officer Sundi was a friend of Officer Gonzalez, I later learned. Sundi suggested I shoot the bear, unaware that I had no ammo. I did state that the animal needed to be captured, and that I wanted help. Neither of them made any effort to help in this matter, however. The bear then began growling and moved forward a step, and I shouted for either Sundi or Gonzalez to shoot the animal, as I had no bullets in my firearm.

"The fire," Hackles said with his voice, for the first time, elevated. I felt small and exposed, explaining the details of what had transpired at the zoo. When you put a story into a factual, this-then-that mode, it just made everyone sound foolish. It seemed more human and plausible if you could explain what each event made you feel, why you acted in a certain way.

Cornered with no exit, and with no aid seeming to be offered by either of the other officers, who seemed to be using the predicament to enjoy a sort of accidental hazing of me, the bear had come forward again. It began biting my right knee and dragged me down a second time. Of course, my describing this was not appeasing the sergeant. He wanted to know how I managed to burn the zoo mascot to death, and just how much justification he had in loathing me. He asked these things with little more than the pierce of his stare, and I nervously began my explanation.

I'd fought the bear off me and reached my feet, though found myself still cornered. With few options, I decided I'd need a more effective weapon. There had been a newspaper on the ground nearby, and I'd had a lighter, and I knew that animals were afraid of fire, so I thought I'd make a lunge for the paper and see if I could contain the animal that way. I'd make the panda back down, in a caveman fashion, by waving some fire in the air. Due to the inaction and ineptitude of present, fellow officers, I'd been given no other option.

After obtaining the newspaper, the bear lunged again, but with more fatigue than previous. I ignited the newspaper while the bear watched, curious, and let it kindle into a torch-like appearance. The bear did not seemed frightened of the fire, so I started waving it around, raising my voice to add emphasis. The other officers gave me no indication that this was a bad idea, and Gonzalez seemed to approve by nodding at me. However, to my surprise, instead of running off or backing down, the panda charged and attacked me again. I struck it with the fiery newspaper on instinct, out of defense, and when this did no good, I continued swatting it in the face and waving the fire before it, believing this would frighten the bear back. I had not suspected this action would ignite the animal's hair.

"So you took an endangered, frightened animal, who you had already _threatened_ and _assaulted_ , and who also happened to be covered in fucking fur, not just a little, but COVERED with fur that I might goddamn add anybody knows is flammable, and you decided to apply fire? To a charged situation like this?" Hackles questioned, slapping me over and over again in his mind.

"Uh, well because I didn't think..."

"DID YOU... stop to _wonder_ if a torch was an authorized, police-issue weapon?"

"No, I don't know...I...no, I wouldn't guess it is." Hackles put his hands on his face, covering his nose and eyes, rubbing with a beaten restraint.

"Go file your paperwork," he said after a moment, "and when you're done, ass-wipe, you come back here." He sounded as if he were going to shoot me when I returned. I pondered the idea of leaving. It was a certainty I would be fired over this, but it might be in my best interest to quit, first. I might garner for myself a smidgeon of self-respect if I quit. I couldn't, of course. The last thing I needed on my back was a police sergeant with a grudge.

I continued filling out the mountains of paperwork, all the while drinking stale coffee and eating bland pretzels someone had brought into the office section of the precinct. Gonzalez sat at a desk on the other end of the track-lit room, doing the same, tendering me the occasional frown. When I was finished with the packets and stacks of devious, interlinked, deadening office work, I returned to the sergeant's office and knocked, my nerves aroused.

"That you, ass-wipe?"

"Yes,"I replied, though with frustration at having to answer to that particular name.

"Then get in here." It seemed juvenile and a silly exercise of rank that he was ordering me into his office when I'd already arrived at it willingly. I sighed and went into his office, shutting the door behind me. Standing there in his office, I felt exposed and more than prone. I hoped this was the termination speech, with various details, and not anything else. I'd been fired before, numerous times, but never by someone with as much power as a police sergeant. I fretted there might be an arrest, or Internal Affairs was looking into my actions that day, or maybe he and Gonzalez were hunting buddies on the side and they were going to take me out back and beat me with a rubber hose.

"First off, you're done. You don't even have to hit the locker room to get your personal clothes. We destroyed them for the fun of it," he said. This was unexpected.

"You did?" I asked. While I was upset about the idea that my clothing had been destroyed, I was more worried about the other phrase he'd used. 'First off' meant there was a second off, or a third, a fourth...

"Second, you're barred from serving with the Boston Police Department, ever, in any capacity, for the remainder of your dumb life." That was more reasonable, and would benefit me more than them.

"Okay," I said. It sounded like I had agreed, but I was more letting him know he could continue talking and that I was listening.

"Lastly, you're not only going to pay for the uniform you damaged, but expect a bill in the mail in a week or so, for some other shit...personal shit. And you're just going to pay it. That's all. Then, we're all done with each other, got it?"

"Uh, okay. Personal?" I wondered if I'd somehow damaged a personal effect of his, or if Gonzalez had made something up on his reports. It was confusing.

"Yeah, personal shit. Pay it the one time. Just do it."

"I don't understand," I voiced.

"A boat payment, dumbass, you're gonna pay my fucking boat payment." This was some sort of off-the-record transaction. He was making me pay for something of his for the trouble I had caused.

"Sir, I don't want to make your boat payment. I really don't think I acted in any way that necessitates this kind of-"

"You're fired. Now get out," he cut me off. I lowered my head, which was a fake gesture, but the appropriate and expected one. I had a role to fulfill: The fired, failed worker bee. I'd done it so many times. They should have awards for how well someone can take getting fired, for how he can please you on the way out, by being so damned imperfect and satisfyingly fired. I was tired of doing this well, however, and realized it as I reached for the doorknob.

"Hey listen, I don't know if it helps to lessen anything," I offered, "but there's a dude in 3B of my apartment building that grows weed. I mean, if it helps," I said. There was a silence in the office that was punctuated by the tiniest rumble of his stomach. Hackles gave me a confused and irritated look.

"What's _wrong_ with you?" he asked. It was a relevant and good question.

### THIRTEEN

I was only a child when my parents prospered in me a sense of brand. My simple love of red-colored toys had been dismissed by routine for the phases of product placement and key purchases. When 68.14% of American youths aged 5-9 struggled to gain their balance on a Pogo-Wheel, so did I. When Janet Galang's debut album ' _Forever Your Mistress'_ broke numerous records in sale and marketing, I was the first one, upon hearing the title-track of the album after it entered the Billboard Charts, to purchase it in my neighborhood. The expense was key, as well as the name and popularity. The charts, the television promotion, the videos, the hip clothing... these were selling points that had worked into my mind, but that I understood were, indeed, reasons to ask Santa for the album and toys.

The two boys had approached from behind, though I hadn't heard them, the Courier Cassette Belt volume dialed high while I tried to bounce on my Pogo-Wheel, listening to Janet Galang singing the title-track ' _Forever Your Mistress_ '. When they neared me, I noticed their shadows stretching out before mine, and turned, removing my large red headphones. The two boys, Phil and Kurt had lop-eared smiles and Kurt had a dog-choker in his hand. They hadn't decided to like me, over the weeks in my new neighborhood. I supposed I had done dumb things thus far. I'd tried to have a new look when first moving in, and it was, as I learned, a stupid look. My parents had decided to let me have my hair cut in a popular fashion, but I learned after this event that no one liked the haircut. It was ugly on me, and the fad was dissipating anyway. An unfortunate result of this was that, unlike the silly outfit I had tried, I was stuck having to wear the haircut. I even pretended to be their friend for a day, and went to Phil's house after dinner a couple of weeks back, to try and 'hang out'. That was the first time anyone had ever punched me.

"Hello," I said, though knew their random visit was not for greeting and small talk. They were bullies, of course.

"Fat-ass," Kurt said, letting the choke-chain dangle from his hand. He swung it in a large loop then, above my head to try and make me duck or do something frightened, though as it came back, the chain struck Phil in the wrist.

"Ow, shit. Come on, what the fuck, man?" Phil said, annoyed. Kurt chuckled at this. He then turned his attention to me.

"Whatcha doin'?"

"I'm playing with a Pogo-Wheel," I replied.

"It's pink. You're fuckin' gay," Phil said with distaste.

"Santa brought it. I didn't want a pink one. Wanna try it?" I offered. Kurt began laughing and covered his mouth, leaning far back and laughing into his hand.

"Fuck no; it's pink. You still believe in Santa Claus?" Phil asked.

"No, I mean...nobody does."

"Wanna fight?" Phil then asked, plain, in the manner one might ask the mailman when the postage rates were going up.

"Why?" I asked. I didn't see the point. Phil always hit me until I cried, anyway. I hated fighting. I wasn't good at it and getting socked was only a notch more painful than socking someone else. In truth, I'd only hit one kid in my life, and in the third grade. I wouldn't have described what I did as 'socking' someone. It was far more like an inarticulate, awkward bopping to the neck and shoulder, where I hadn't even been aiming.

"I want us to fight. C'mon," Phil replied. Kurt, still laughing, began making his way behind me with a kind of animated stroll. This was a predicament I was used to, the usual setup where one of them would kneel behind me so the other could push me backwards and make me trip over the first one. I didn't want to do that, so I instead just turned to see both of them and backed up.

"Where ya goin'?" Kurt asked.

"Nowhere," I replied, wishing I was closer to my own yard. Kurt then lunged his face in at mine, real close, to make me flinch.

I startled, and at that moment, had a mystical vision. It was a bright flash of a scene that overtook my mind. Over a thousand miles away from my new home in Stoughton, I watched a young man who called himself InZpire turn to a younger boy, in a small Inglewood apartment in Los Angeles, California, and call him a 'bitch'. I saw and heard it with clarity. I was as if in two places at once. I stood beside the young boy, in Los Angeles, and paradoxically, I stood before Phil and Kurt, two of the bullies in my neighborhood. The moment this negative word, until then used as a derogatory term for a mean woman, was uttered from InZpire's mouth at his young friend, a shockwave in time and space rippled across the planet, saturating the minds of English-speaking youth in epiphany: _'Bitch' could be used for a male._ In this instant, the mind of Phil, in Stoughton, Massachusetts, swiveled at the signal of this shockwave, connected to the open feed, and subconsciously devoured the input. It registered in his eyes like the first pubescent moment a boy might witness a naked woman.

"You fuckin' _bitch_ ," he said. Rap music flooded the skies. Weightlifting sets rose from the ground of front yards. Bandanas flew across the neighborhood like migratory wrens and swaddled small groups of summer-shaved, suburban heads. Kurt laughed a moment in shock. The vision ended and I looked down at my feet before the two bullies.

"You called him a bitch!" Kurt exclaimed.

"He _is_ a bitch," Phil replied.

"I didn't do anything," I said, whiney. Kurt had stepped beside me and with a purposeful gentleness began fixing the dog-choker around my neck. I stood there and let him, for no real reason. Inactivity seemed best to me. After a satisfying moment of leaning back and admiring the fit, Kurt tugged the loose end of the chain hard and my face flushed. The headphones slipped from their perch and fell to the ground.

With less blood circulating and my insufficient intake of oxygen, I grew dense and laid myself on the ground, one hand trying to pull the choke-chain loose from my neck. Phil jogged in and kicked my arm away, laughing. The sidewalk grated against my face as my lips curled and my tongue extended. An urgent and wet sound escaped from my strained throat. After this, my eyes cinched shut of their own accord and I could make no sound, weakened, bringing my fingers to the choke-chain, which Phil only nudged away with his foot and the barest of effort, muttering 'bitch' each time. I could hear the tinny vocals and percussion emanating from the headphones, a foot away.

After a long span of silent choking and vague, awkward attempts to move, I blacked out. The slow suffocation had caused me to lose consciousness, and minutes later, having starved my brain enough for damage to occur, my mind began to vanish. When the tight choke-chain was still not released, after six minutes, my body shut down and my life left me. I lifted out of my body and stood there, next to it. The sidewalk went cold beneath my body, and the two boys watching exchanged worried glances. It seemed they had killed their neighbor by choking him, and they decided to vacate. What a tragedy had occurred. What a terrible thing.

Having thrown the pink Pogo-Wheel into the creek and stamped on the Janet Galang tape, Phil attached the Cassette Belt to his waist and the two boys dispersed to their homes to play their video game consoles and eat prefabricated meals from plastic bowls. My useless and cold body was left on the sidewalk, its clothing dirty from my last, sad attempts at crawling while unable to breathe. The body had been fat, awkward, and less mature than the mind of its possessor. Poor me; I hadn't matured at the rate of those around me. I was of lesser maturity. Not cooked enough, rare. I may as well have been seven, instead of ten, for all my unworldly knowledge. The stink of sweat and panic dissipated from my corpse in time, into the late evening air. As the Sun drifted below the town's hilly meniscus in a soft and uneventful manner, the Massachusetts twilight spread out for hundreds of miles.

I rolled over in a surreptitious, creaturely way and caught my breath. There was a ripping sensation in my chest as my lungs filled, as if Velcro being pulled apart. I'd been dead for near an hour, and my joints, as I woke, began to ache in the manner of a sleeping limb arousing. My flesh, cold and weak, was tight to motion and every thought in my sad skull was slow.

As I sat up, I felt a strange pain in my stomach and realized that my kidneys were sore. Phil and Kurt must have kicked me good while I was dead. What bullies they had become to me. I had so little space in which to be myself, and if I moved past that space, they were there, ready at slightest notice to aggress, to rise over me and show me they were tall, by making me small as a speck. With little thought as to how I should later react to them, I stood and made my way through the blocks to my home. My legs were inarticulate, from having no circulation for so long, and so I walked in a dumpy, frowzy way, having to stop numerous times as an incredible and overpowering sensation of pins-and-needles attacked me, the blood awakening my numb body. As the ballast in my death made an illogical rise, sliding me back into my life from the void, I began to hum in my bones, my life sliding over my heart as it slugged the blood through me, into my very senses.

My shoes were new Keds that had been purchased at behest of mascot Kolonel Keds, who I had seen on a cardboard stand outside of a popular shoe-store. They had been sleek and comfortable, but now that I had woken up from death, the shoes felt fuzzy and oblique. I had trouble walking until my circulation reached a full recover. I sobered, revitalizing with each living step, having returned from my trip into the body's final inebriation. The closer I neared my house, the more usual my walk and motions became.

When I arrived home, my parents were in the living room. My mother was sitting on the couch in her usual way, as the couch, specialized and deeper than most, was better suited to letting her skeleton relax beneath the overbearing weight it had to support. My mother had grown so large over the years, that she was unable to leave the house save for certain, well-planned excursions, which were treated almost as celebrations, or special days. Even on these occasions, she could only leave with the help of her husband, Joe, and our disabled-ready van. I entered the living room and groaned, my neck swollen and bruised from the choking.

My father, at that moment on his knees before the blank television, fiddled with several plugs, confused. His skinny frame had twisted over in an odd manner as he attempted to peer at some hanging wires beneath the television set. Things were amiss with his articles of entertainment, it seemed. I noted a new device, silver, on the floor and ready to be placed in the rack beside the television, once it was connected.

"I don't understand why this isn't working," my father said. His boots were new, clean, and the tread was thick as a plank of wood. I watched as he crawled forward, his head in the cabinet beneath the television, giving, for my mother and I, a view of buttocks, legs, and boot-tread.

"Maybe you're doing it wrong," my mother responded from the couch. She was laying in a prone position, on her side from the ribs up, but twisted at the waist, with her legs rotated flat on the cushions, the thigh-fat of one overlapping atop the other. She held a plastic bowl of ice cream near her breasts with one hand, and stroked the head of a spoon, fidgety, with the other.

"I'm not doing it wrong," my father said, deviled by the configurations of hanging wires and color-coded, coaxial heads. My mother grunted and tilted her head, flexing her neck muscles a moment.

"It might be broken." she ruminated.

"Gimme a break. It's a four-head VCR, and it's a Verdure. That's a quality brand and I know it works; I just can't figure out how to tell the damn Magnavox to receive it."

"Is it on channel three?" she asked, spooning a dollop of Neapolitan ice cream from the plastic bowl into her mouth. All of the plates and bowls in the tri-level family house were oversized to more efficiently accompany her eating habits, and the larger intake she required. My mother had always eaten on the couch and never at the table because it could not accommodate her form and the arrangement of her orthopedic chair. That I was only chubby and my father thin made this dining format difficult, and we had all ceased eating together years ago.

"No, and I can't think straight with you asking questions. Just...look, it's high tech is all. You don't have to put it on any channel. It just comes on, is the thing. Except it's not doing that for some reason. Just let me figure it out."

I sat down on the end of the couch and leaned back. My spine felt rickety and crepitated with my leaning. I took an exhilarating breath of air then, being sucked into a kind of sudden pleasure with being alive. It came and went. I was thrilled to be breathing, I was tired of living, I was excited to move, it hurt to move...what a novel horror having died was.

"Son, have you been fiddling with the Magnavox?" my dad asked over his shoulder as he crept back from the cabinet, careful not to smack his head on the rim.

"No."

"Maybe it has to have a movie in to work," mom helped.

"That's ridiculous," my father stated, "Percy must have messed with it. There's something wrong with the wires. That has to be it. They're not to the new standard or something. I knew I should have picked up those Samsung gold-shielded wires while I was there."

"Well, just hook the old one back up. I want to watch the movie." she said, lolling the spoon forward into her mouth.

"Michael Hausen will still be zooming around at light speed when I get this set up. You can wait," my father replied.

"I heard he shows his butt in this one," she remarked, tittering. My father made a disturbed groan at this and continued batting two of the wires back and forth looking at the television to see if this made a difference.

"Put the old one back in," my mother said, impatient. He coughed and then looked at her with his eyes at half-roll.

"Listen, we bought the thing, it's gonna work. If we go back to the old one, we don't have stereo sound. We rented the damn space movie with the great sound, and I want to hear the stupid great sound, and I want to see the big special effects with the big special machine we bought, so just let me set the damn thing up, all right?" my father responded, annoyed.

"Joe, it doesn't have to be perfect. I don't care if it's stereo," she said, getting upset about his gruff treatment. My father sighed and waited for his thoughts to collect. They did.

"It's not just a VCR and TV," he said, as if this were obvious, "it's an _entertainment system_. There's a whole system here. The four heads create a clearer picture and better fidelity, and there are no tracking lines on the screen when you rewind while it's playing. We can even adjust the volume with the VCR remote, for a change. The large screen shows it off the best, and the new VCR lets us plug the audio through the stereo, so we have the most realistic sound. Then I can adjust the EQ so we can hear the talking and all the... the big stuff. This'll give us the best clarity. It all comes together."

"If you say so," she replied.

"Ah, something must have gotten crossed. I'll start over."

Eight minutes passed before my mother noticed the pale complexion of her son. My father had rewired the system and organized everything behind the television into neat, tidy bundles, tracing every wire from its starting point, to where it plugged into a unit of the entertainment center, a conglomeration of high-priced devices my father had collected one by one, and which he felt were compatible to the point of possessing the prowess to make a movie better than it was in a theater. He stated as much from time to time.

"What happened to your neck?" my mother asked me, her head craned over and looking back at me from her position on the couch. I yawned and rubbed the tender lines on my neck from the choke-chain Phil and Kurt had used on me.

"Some boys down the street. They choked me," I said. She raised an eyebrow and adjusted her shoulders atop her body. This caused her to grimace, as something in her body sent out a pain signal. She readjusted to her original position and looked into her near-empty bowl of ice cream.

"Well, did you do something to them?" she asked. My father looked over at me then, a little concerned, but then went back to setting up his system, listening for my response.

"No," I stated, "they just attacked me. They always do." I had begun to understand that my place in our newer neighborhood involved my being of lesser likeability than in our old neighborhood. While we had stayed in Stoughton, we'd moved far enough across town that I didn't know anyone. I had two friends before moving, and though we were all picked on from time to time, it was mild teasing. Other kids used a name or two on us, and it was all designed for humor. They'd have a laugh at our expense, but that was the extent of the ill treatment. Here, across town and near the more urban section of town, the bullies didn't pick at those they disliked. They shoved, punched, swore, and stole from you. They didn't say you were shit, like the kids in my last neighborhood did, but turned you into it. If you stood up to them, they just stood up the more, and with friends. There was never just one.

"You know what you need to do?" my mother counseled, "You need to exude confidence. That's how to do it."

"People respect confidence," my father added, speaking from his perch on the carpet, seeming a supplicant to his Magnavox and Verdure rood-tree, "If you come off weak or too humble, you'll bring trouble on yourself." I believed him. It was true, and being confident seemed the best manner of doing things. His sixty years of life on Earth had taught him much, and I could discern from his voice when he was correct. This was unfortunate advice, however, as I could show little confidence. Exuding confidence when you were a diffident, sad, little cretin was like forgery, or cheating. One needed a reason to be confident, something that made him that way. I lacked in reason. One way or another, I was getting myself beaten up.

I swallowed a thick, sticky saliva that had been forming in my mouth. My salivary glands had returned to their full function and were absorbing the gummed, dried saliva from my recent dead mouth. My father tested the coaxial plugs to make sure they were all connected in the correct assemblage, looking at a small and confusing pictographic instruction chart that encompassed three languages.

"Just be yourself," My mother quipped.

"I died," I said. There was a pause as my mother took me in, thinking this over. As she opened her large mouth to speak, the room filled with the crashing, loud noise of static.

"HO HO! It's on! Okay, now the sound tape," my dad exclaimed, picking up a video labeled 'Stereo Calibration' from the floor near the television. I blinked with care, having to force my eyes closed all the way before letting them open. My eyes were dry and ached. They'd been open while my body laid on the concrete, dead. Everything about my body felt off, but moving in the proper fashion, returning to the normality of my ten-year-old, chubby, dorky body.

"Oooh, I'm glad...I thought we might have to take it back to the store," my mother replied, eating the last of her ice cream, which was anymore a milky cream than a solid substance. Dad inserted the video in the new VCR.

"Look at that! It plays automatic. I didn't have to press 'Play'. This Pioneer really is above the rest. It's a shame the calibration tape is made by Zenith, but I suppose it shouldn't make too much of a difference," Joe said. An image of headphones appeared on the screen, followed by a phasing, spacey sound.

"It looks great," my mother commented.

"Well, that's the four heads. We need to get one of those new 40 inch Panavisions. Some of the clarity of the four-head VCR will be lost until we have a television big enough to use it. And the new Panavisions have that screen-inside function, which is just incredible, I'd imagine," he explained. The video ran, instructing him when and to what level he needed adjust the stereo. While it did this, the video played sound patterns that rose and lowered in pitch and volume, from the left to the right channel. All that the videocassette really had my father do was turn the 'balance' knob on his stereo to the middle, where it had already been set. When done, the video informed him his sound system would be optimized to the 'fullest capability of modern quality' if he could hear a tone that was to follow. A tone followed.

"This is gonna sound amazing," he said, "It's full stereo sound. Let's put on a movie; something with lots of noise."

"Put on the one we rented," my mother said, confused.

"Naw, let's put on one we know, just for a second, so we can compare the sound quality. You'll see Michael Hausen's butt in a few minutes, don't worry," he said. She frowned and my father looked at me, pointing to the wall-mounted movie rack at the end of the couch.

I walked over to the movie rack, which was alphabetized by name of movie.

"Uh, do 'Aliens'," he said. Being in the order they were in, I was to fetch the second movie from the left, on the top shelf. Blocking my hands were idle issues of _The Tatterdemalion_ , which could be found everywhere in the house. My father never threw anything away. I lifted several magazines out of the way and obtained the video, then handed the black cassette to my father, careful to set the case in its original placement, to avoid scrutiny.

As he took the cassette and ejected the sound video, a jolt of sensory input rattled in my skull. I felt weak and swayed back, dizzy, as a vision of my father, dead on a sidewalk, entered my mind. He was old. There were lights on everywhere, and blood had trickled from his mouth. There was a poem in his hands, insects nearby. It was late at night. Confused, I blinked my eyes and shook my head. The hallucination ended, and just as I was regaining my balance, I was hit with another flash of images. I saw my mother, asleep. Her liver contracted and she began gurgling, throwing up. She choked then and kicked her feet. She was in a special bed with metal arms under it, machines beeping and making suction noises. She didn't look different at all. She looked like herself, today, but dying. The wave of these visions passed, leaving me shaken but unscathed in the newer Stoughton living room.

"We can fast forward by remote now, too," Joe said, pleased, "so say goodbye to previews and those annoying FBI copyright warnings."

"Do we have any popcorn for the movie? I'm snacky," my mom asked then.

I realized with a horrible, creeping sensation that I now knew the manners in which my parents would one day depart the Earth. I took in a deep breath and excused myself from the movie.

"You don't want to watch, kiddo? It's four heads. You'll be able to see the bullets in the air, or I guess lasers, whatever the movie has," my father said.

"I'm tired," I replied, uncomfortable and cold. I felt as if I'd been shot off the world, circled it, then fell back into my body; a tired, miniscule dog of a boy that no one would believe had done anything specific, ever.

"Don't fall asleep with your headphones on again," my mother tossed out. I nodded for show. My headphones had been taken by Phil and Kurt.

"Kind of early to be tired, buddy, but whatever," my father said after me as I walked down the hallway toward my room.

It was as all young, male rooms. There were assorted toys here and there, some devices and posters. I sat on the edge of my bed, examining Starscream, a Transformer. I made the robot transform into a fighter jet, then back into a robot.

"Robot _bitch_ ," I said to it in a feigned angry tone. It was what they'd called me while choking me. This was a renaissance word.

On the edge of my bed, I sat and sniffed my nose, close to crying. This was when he appeared: Magnum, star character of the television show _Magnum P.I._ On my poster, his red sports car shone on beautiful, vibrant grass near his cliff house, exuding power and speed. There was a helicopter in the background on a small pad, the sunny day lighting this perfect image of successful living. He left this behind and carefully stepped out of the poster on my wall, entering my bedroom. As he stood in front of the poster, tall and with broad shoulders, he scratched his black mustache a moment. He was gauging me with compassion. I looked at Magnum with tears in my eyes.

"Hey kid. You gotta relax, is all," Magnum suggested, soft, squatting down to reach eye-level with me. My crying subsided before it gained momentum, and I slid from the bed, going to Magnum and hugging him. The trademark Hawaiian shirt the P.I. wore was soft against my pudgy cheeks. How lucky he was to be an adult, to have a fast car and a friend with a helicopter. What a strong, tall man he was, in all that good weather, chasing bullies and villainous people to the ends of the Earth to solve their ill deeds and help others, to be himself, to have posters of him in people's rooms. He did everything by using his mind, using his fists, and using chance to his favor, alongside friends who were always there. What a lucky, good, smart human being. I started choking-up again.

"I know, kid. I really know," Magnum said, quiet. I hugged him tight, then let go and backed away, rubbing my eyes.

"Tuck in. I'll tell you a story," Magnum offered, "You'll wake up a little." This confused me, but I pulled my covers back and climbed into the bed without bothering to change my clothes or even remove my Keds. I brought Starscream with me, something to keep in my hands. My little shoes stuck up, making two cloth knolls near the base of my bed.

"There you go. Relaxed," Magnum said with a tone of balmy care. He examined my face a moment and then his gaze averted to the window. He breathed, deeply in thought before speaking.

"It's gonna rain tomorrow like you've never seen," he said, pulling the chair from my desk. He sat down in it and faced me across the room. It was almost as if he was going to begin reading a book. I pulled the covers up further, to my chest, leaving my arms and hands out with the Transformer. Was the man in my room Magnum? Was he the actor that played Magnum? Was he a hero? Was he another Michael Hausen on horseback with a gold star? Magnum smiled at me, seeming to do so from the pit of his stomach. It didn't matter who he was.

"Do you know what's going to happen to me?" I asked. Magnum leaned back in the chair with a small, troubled sigh, and nodded.

"Everything," he said. I relaxed back on my pillow and began transforming Starscream, trying to imagine 'everything'. Once transformed into a jet again, I held it up for Magnum to see. I didn't know what to say to him. I just spoke.

"He goes from a jet to a robot," I said.

"That's pretty cool, kid," Magnum replied with knowing eyes and upraised cheeks; "now settle in." I did so, setting the Transformer on my bed-stand, and closed my eyes. The character of Magnum P.I. leaned over in the chair and gave a ginger flick of the light switch. The room became darker than I'd ever known it could. There was a pause, and for a moment, the only sound in the room was my slight movement, adjusting beneath my sheets. The walls darkened and tilted in, encroaching on me again and again, and it was time, it seemed, to have a private and much needed talk with God.

"Someone's going to hurt you, but only once. After that, he won't stop at just hurting. You have to find his treasure if you're going to survive, kid," Magnum said with both caution and care. I listened and felt the air on my exposed face, wondering if I was going to sleep, or wake up, or die, come back to life.

"You know something's wrong. You may not be there yet, but Nowhere Place has your name. You're going there, and you'll get stuck, but if you want to make it out, get the treasure," he said.

"I don't like that." I replied, a sensation of dread filling my mind. Did I know what he was talking about? I did...but I didn't.

"The jar is in a nice place, and you can't get there. To find it, you'll have to make a fake—a counterfeit. It will lead you to the real one," he told me in the dark.

"Are you gonna help me, Magnum?" I asked. Outside of my window, I felt everyone in the world disappear. I was alone in my room and Magnum didn't speak. Then, the air itself popped and the world filled up with people. It was all the answer I was going to get.

"Fill a mason jar with cooking oil, kid, all the way to the top. Get that lid on there tight, and hold onto it. Don't let it go," Magnum said.

"Am I dead?" I asked him then. I watched as the difficult to discern outline of his body dissipated into the shadow of my room. He was gone. Magnum had left me. Was I still a child? Was I a grown man? There was a shuffling sound then, followed by heavy steps and a kind of breaking-seal of air. My mother's voice entered the room on a streak of light from the hallway. I heard the distant, kaleidophonic noise of battle in space from the television in the living room.

"Are you awake?" she asked from the crack in the door.

"Mom, I don't want you to die," I said, feeling cold in my bed.

"Oh, I can't stay, son. You've progressed."

"I don't want to know what's going to happen," I muttered.

"Well, that's just how it's done. You have to be a big boy, now. Remember, I kept you cold to keep you from burning, but now the fire has gone out. I shouldn't keep you cold, anymore. Now you know what I know, you can't be cold, you can't burn. You're in Nowhere Place and in the morning, I'll just have to be gone."

"Don't die, mom," I said, beginning to cry again.

"Oh, my big boy...look at you growing up. You're such a great boy that he won't ever let you go. What a great boy you are." she said.

"I don't want him to find me," I said, a tear running toward my ear. My mother sighed.

"Honey, he's already under the bed."

"Why won't anyone help me?" I asked, seizing in my chest on the approaching heave of a sob. I felt something beneath the bed jerk then and a horrible noise filled my room. I sat upright, moaning upwards in pitch, my eyes panoptic.

"You two have fun," she said, closing the door.

### FOURTEEN

When I awoke, my apartment was warm and serene. The sunlight entered my living room through the window and I felt as if I'd had the first good night's sleep in a decade. The even temperature of the room and a cozy sensation filled every nerve in my body, giving me over to a kind of placation that felt almost alien. This satisfaction with being was strong enough that I even decided not to smoke right away. My craving was on standby for a moment, and my mind was, for having just aroused from sleep, quite alert.

What an awful dream I'd had: Getting picked on by my schoolmates, my mother and father dying, ignoring me, an unimaginative monster beneath my bed. I hadn't thought about Stoughton much in years. I'd always been picked on for being ugly and fat, but when a child grows up, those things become less important. Life erupts and responsibilities pour down the mountain. You sink or swim or tread and hope. The dream had me wondering what had happened to Phil and Kurt. Within months of moving into our second residence in Stoughton, dad had moved Percy and I to Boston. There was no one in Stoughton to miss, and I tried to adjust to Boston with expedience, nudging the idea of bullies from my mind, as well as any other people in Stoughton. For all I knew, Phil and Kurt had started a school-shooting, or hadn't and were now drill sergeants or hard-baller CEOs.

It was strange how moist the air was in my apartment. Once I was out of my covers, I realized the ice crystals that had taken over my ceiling and walls had melted, leaving my apartment a charred, watery mess of drips and black flakes. Had the heat come back on? Upon entering the kitchen, I noticed the refrigerator door was open, and that the Blue Dragon was gone. I could hear the whirring of the cooling system in the refrigerator's back, but as I peered into the empty appliance, I saw that the light had burned out. It seemed she'd cleaned me out of condiments and various food products. Most unsettling to me was that she'd taken all the poems we'd written. There was no writing left on the inner walls of the refrigerator. It was barren. How could she leave, so sudden? I didn't have the jar yet, and had more questions than I could even think up, and now I worried I had failed in some way to keep her pleased enough to stay. As with the Red Dragon before her, the Blue Dragon had left me in a mode quick and sudden. What was going to happen now?

Though I was still in my underwear, I jogged down the two flights of stairs to the ground-floor mailbox and obtained the numerous letters and envelopes that seemed to have been crammed in there. It looked like days worth of mail, though I checked it every morning. I made my way back to my apartment in a hurry, and was certain no one had seen me running about in my underwear. I'd live my entire day to day life in nothing but underwear if the world would allow it.

In the cupboard, I extracted an old mason jar and, per my odd, nostalgic dream, filled it to the top with cooking oil and tightened the lid on. The Blue Dragon had said she would provide me with a map to the jar. It seemed clear to me that the dream was my map, though it felt more of an instructional experience, and from what I'd discerned of my odd dream, I was supposed to keep this fake jar with me until something happened. I couldn't ascertain what I was to wait for, but had to assume I'd know when it happened. Why would a fantasy of Magnum as wise-man lie?

My mind had adjusted over the years into a more cultural mindset, where exact answers and absolute closure, so often nonexistent, could be gone without. I didn't trust what was happening to me, what with madness, jobs, family, the jar... but I had no real choice. I would have to remain faithful that I'd be sane enough to recognize just how mad things were becoming, and long enough to solve my problems and get the real jar. For now, I'd have to bring the facsimile with me whenever I left the apartment, and hope this was all I needed to do.

After admiring the jar and what was a kind of amber beauty inside when light shone through it, I sat back and had my day's cigarette, going through the mail. After examining several envelopes, I felt my stomach churn. All of my five newest submissions had been rejected. There was a momentary depressurizing feeling in my head and my vision blurred, then focused again. In addition to the rejections, there also seemed to be my submissions...unsent.

"Wait, what?" I voiced aloud. I filed through the large envelopes, addressed to _American Letters and Commentary_ , _Takahe_ , _Spinning Jenny,_ _Orbis Magazine,_ and my most recent, _Pank_. They'd never been sent, having remained in my mailbox. I knew they hadn't been in the mailbox yesterday, or the day before, however, so they had to have been picked up.

I tapped the cigarette and tore open one of the submissions. It was all there: the self-addressed stamped envelope, my nice, brevitous cover letter, and the poem. What was happening? None of my submissions had been sent? Why did I also have five rejections, then? How could you have rejections for poetry you never sent, and from magazines that had never read them? It made no sense.

I held the sides of my head. None of it would congeal into any sort of concrete meaning. It was senseless and vague, like describing details of an object that didn't exist. Somehow, my submissions were being taken from my mailbox and then returned later, paradoxically alongside the responses of the magazines they represented.

How long had this been going on? Was my mailman responsible for this bizarre turn? I began to think back to my other submissions, with the Red Dragon over the last few months. They'd all seemed to go out, and were summarily rejected. None of them ever seemed to show up in my mailbox later. These new ones hadn't gone out because I'd forgotten to place stamps on them, but how could I already have the rejections if they'd never been sent? How was this possible if I hadn't sent the poems?

My attention was caught then, as my ears tuned in on a murmuring noise outside. It was a low din I realized I'd been picking up since waking, but it was quiet enough that I hadn't consciously noticed until just then. It sounded like foot-traffic in a mall, talking and moving about, but much quieter. There was something happening outside. Was that an almost inaudible choir I heard? I set the mail aside, my head pounding from the conundrum of my submissions and responses. My ears, far from being affected by my sudden headache, had focused in on what sounded like music for a moment, but then this sound blended into a kind of chanting. I walked to my third story apartment window and looked out, trying to locate the noise.

The day had encompassed an amazing brightness and the sunlight warmed me to considerable benefit. My skin began drinking in the sunlight to the instant. The Boston weather had been ruddy as of late, and this idyllic sunshine was most welcome.

Peering down, I saw what had to be around four dozen people, some holding signs, milling about and talking. I thought it was a parade for a moment, but then noticed the signs had slogans and images on them, many of which were distinct, and the people holding them weren't passing by, but fraternizing about in front of the apartment building. It was some sort of protest, or a march that had paused for a break. After a moment in which I tried to make out what was on one of the signs, someone shouted. More people began shouting then and I realized the crowd had turned its attention to me in my third-story window. Puzzled, I watched them for a moment watching me back. Were they trying not to be seen? Was something going on with my apartment building?

"Murderer!" someone below screamed up. It was followed by shouts, jeers, and in one instance, a woman's voice erupting with "There's the killer! There he is!" I leaned my head far out of the window and looked left, right, and then down. No, it was just me they were looking at. I was baffled.

"Hello?" I called down to them, having not invented anything better. At that moment, confused and scanning through the crowd of citizens shouting profanities at me, I was able to recognize what was displayed on one of the protest signs. It was a cartoon caricature of Cookie the panda bear. I leaned downward and read another sign, this one containing only text: _Innocent Panda, Guilty Pig_. A third sign read: _We Won't Forget You, Cookie_. In this last one, the 'i' in Cookie was dotted with a heart. I read these signs and looked about, thrown into a carking state of disarray and mental daze. Leaning from the window and trying to keep my underwear clad lower body out of sight; I decided to call out to them again.

"What are you—UNH!" I gasped, dodging up and ramming my back into the window frame. The hurled, unopened can of soda exploded against the wall beside my window, spraying me with carbonated liquid. I jerked back inside and stumbled, falling against the armrest of my couch. I sat up in shock, sitting on my floor in my underwear, holding the back of my skull as persecuting shouts entered my apartment through my window.

"This can't be right," I said to myself. I could hear the taunts and accusations from the street below. They were calling me 'The Paranoid Pig' and 'Panda Killer' interchangeably. _Good god,_ had I upset people this much; enough to resort to a protest outside of my apartment? I approached the window slowly and crouched, my head low. When nothing else came flying up at me, I stuck my head out again.

"It was self-defense!" I shouted down. I saw several people wind back with objects in their hands and immediately withdrew back into my apartment. Another soda erupted against the outside wall and a half-eaten pear flew inside, rolling across my living room. A spinning marker-pen stuttered against my window frame and fell back to them. A voice then rose through a bullhorn. It was male, and spoke with a loud but slow annunciation.

"It's not self-defense when you murder the defenseless," the voice cracked. This was maniacal. How could this have happened? I was a nice guy. I didn't want to hurt anything, and certainly not a cuddly panda bear. The tragedy was of an accidental nature, and the animal had been going for my throat anyway. These people...what self-righteousness they had. What driving judgment. What blazing balls. I had to be careful. For all I knew, these people might have been fanatic enough to lynch me from a streetlamp.

I picked up the phone and dialed the emergency number most Americans had known since pre-school.

"911 emergency, what is the nature of your trouble?" a tired and monotone voice answered, though with speed. She sounded more like a standard operator than a 911 emergency response member.

"Yeah, I figure this is pretty much an emergency. Uh, there's about fifty people outside my apartment protesting and picketing me."

"You're being picketed by a group of individuals?" she responded, a little surprised.

"Yeah, about fifty, they're throwing things at my window. They have signs, a loudspeaker...they're just out there. One of them threw a soda at my head when I looked outside to see who they were."

"What is the group called?" she asked.

"Uh, I don't know. I'm not sure they have a name. It's just a lot of people screaming at me with signs and things."

"Have they threatened you physically?"

"They threw the soda."

"That's all there was?"

"So far, I mean, if it had hit me I could have been knocked unconscious and fallen three stories. You guys are gonna want to get down here. It's like a mob in front of my building."

"What are they protesting, sir?"

"I think me."

"Do you know why?" she asked.

"Yeah, I accidentally killed a panda at the Boston Zoo yesterday. It was on the news. That's why these people are here. They're protesting me because I killed the panda."

There was a short silence after this, followed by some murmuring on the other end. She was talking to someone. After a moment, she returned.

"Sir, you're the officer that burned the panda bear at the Boston Zoo?"

"Yeah, but I'm not an officer. It was a temp job, for the day. I was already fired. I already filled out all the police reports on it, so they have records of the whole thing already."

"Yes sir. I'm aware of what happened. Is there anything else I can help you with?" I wasn't sure how to respond to this.

"Anything else? You're on your way, right?"

"What do you need, sir?" she asked with impatience.

"What? I need these people dispersed, is what I need."

"I would advise you to look at them and read their signs until they're appeased, sir."

"Are you fucking serious? How the hell is that gonna solve anything? I feel like shit about what happened to that bear, but it was self-defense. I want these people gone, so I can leave my building. Lady, I'm scared in here and I need something done."

"What would you have us do?"

"How the fuck should I know? Answer my goddamn emergency! I was a cop for one day, that's it. These people are nuts so I called 911. That's how it works, right? You handle emergencies? Or at least, you call the people that do after you talk to me, right?"

"I'm sorry, sir. They have a right to protest. I don't think I'll be able to help you," she said, officious.

"What? I—this can't be legal. They're THROWING things at me. That's some sort of attempted assault or something, right? And do they have a permit to be down there? Don't you have to get a permit to picket or something? Look into _that_."

"Sir, I'll explain the situation to you if you'll just calm down."

"I'm calm, okay? I got it. I need help is all."

"Sir..."

"I need help. Send the cops. Help me out."There was a kind of snorting that came through the other end. Was she laughing at me? Then there was a clicking noise. It sounded like the line had been terminated.

"Hello?" I asked. Had she hung up on me? There was a static buzz in my ear. Then, I heard a second clicking sound.

"Hello?" I repeated, horrified. There was a grunt followed by a man's voice.

"Yeah, listen up. This is Tom, the supervisor here at the emergency dispatch service. I've been assigned to handle your call." I heard. I sighed and felt the relief locate great bundles of nerve endings.

"Great, oh great...Okay, so do you know what's going on, or do I have to explain it again?" I asked, thankful to be on the line with a supervisor.

"Don't bother," he said, "My kid's got all three seasons of _The Cookie Show_ memorized, you understand? I had to sit up last night explaining what 'death' was to my five-year-old kid. Ask me how fun that was."

"Wha-"

"That bear was a goddamn symbol. For all of Boston, you understand? It was a cultural symbol for the whole city. My city. My kid's city. So here's how it's gonna work, dick: I'm pissed off, I didn't sleep for shit, and I hope you rot in there. Don't call back." There was a shuffling sound and then I heard the previous voice, the woman who had initially answered the call, shout, "Tell him, Tom!" and then I was disconnected. The line was dead. I held myself granite still for a moment, wondering if things were really befalling as they seemed. I was on the far side of appall. I was like the last, naked bit of metal in a grenade after the shrapnel had hurtled off.

I looked at the window with fright, a sour, nauseating taste beneath my tongue. My gaze fell to the floor of my apartment, which sloshed about my feet with the watery puddle of the melted ice crystals, water stained black from previous layers of soot and burned debris. Then, with a groan, I looked back over my shoulder at the nonsensical and impossible mail sitting beside my chair. An alarm in my mind went off.

I saw him, sitting there beside my mail. In the chair, having appeared in my distraction, was a man covered in a black, scaly sheen, and with a thin, long tail. His face was elongated into a short, rotund snout. He sat in my living room watching me with a fed-up expression. The light that struck his hard skin seemed to play atop it, and his eyes were sharp and coal. He was smoking my cigarette. I let the phone fall out of my hand onto the burnt, damp, stinking carpet of my living room.

"Blaaaaaaaaaaaack," he said, slow.

The mail wasn't real, there was a Black Dragon, there was a mob outside full of hatred and discontent, and 911 had hung up on me, which meant that the police had hung up on me, which meant that the very city of Boston had hung up on me, which meant...

"I'm fucked," I said to myself with a tone so shaken and trepid that one might have mistaken it for reverence.

### PART TWO

### FIFTEEN

The simple function of acting was that one human being indicate another. It could be said a person could take on the behaviors of a creature, or even a tree, or various other props in his performance, but the more general mode was that of portraying another human being. My father was cast in the role of Edward, a man younger than himself, but who he needed infuse with classical old age to nail down. He needed to act older than himself to accomplish a role of someone younger than himself. He had rehearsed this part with a trudging rigidity. The irony was that this role indicated my father was either not acting his age in real life, or engaging in a character that was unrealistic in design.

I imagined being an actor, and having a director tell me: "Go on, do something unrealistic". What would that entail? Did it mean I should start flying around the room, or explode into fire? It was a puzzle, and had a conundrum at its heart: I could say unrealistic things, but I couldn't realistically _do_ them. There would always be stretching and warping involved. Considering _The Skull Finder_ had won numerous awards, some of which were based on the play's unflinching realism, it was probable my father was the fantastical one, and not the role.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked. The kitchen was weighted in the scent of sesame oil and hot bell pepper.

"I'm pantomiming death," I answered, standing still as a road-sign, my eyes closed. He was stirring the various items in his searing wok and glancing over at my inflexible stance. His view of my character was lowering by the moment.

"I'm noticing some problems with your mime, then," he adverted

"Yes?"

"Dead people don't stand, unless we're talking fright flicks."

"I'm different. I'm the standing dead," I said, plain. My father turned back to his wok with a consummate sigh. Using a lighter hand, he nudged several large crowns of broccoli about.

"That's different, all right," he said, shaking his head.

A dead body lays flat, and so trying to portray that while being upright was strange and absurd. As with most things out of the ordinary, this felt like a challenge. It helped to imagine myself playing a dead man in an old western, where they have a coffin upright against a post or a wall, exhibiting the dead villain or standardized cur, propped up. I stood near my father in the kitchen, in my cedar coffin, propped up against the wagon they were going to use to haul me off.

"Found another job yet?" he asked, dashing ground pepper and stirring.

"I'm going to the employment office again tomorrow," I replied, imagining myself in line at the state office, a blue sheet in my clammy hand, a corpse looking for work. While trying to create the sensation of death in my portrayal, I began having trouble with the eyes. Visuals continued and would not cease, which wasn't very dead of me at all. I came up with blackness, which could have been due to my eyes being closed. While the blackness seemed more probable, it still felt incorrect, and so I tried to imagine seeing nothing. Then, when this became an impossibility, I tried to imagine not seeing at all, being sightless, like a blind person. This was worse. I swayed on my heels and my hands came out for a moment as I caught my balance. Standing up with your eyes closed was difficult after a minute or two.

"You ever think maybe that's part of your problem? That employment office scenario?" he came out with. I could smell the coriander leaves he'd added. This particular scent struck a bout of creativity in me, and I conjured a brief movie idea: A woman rendered blind by an accident or childhood disease, decides to attend a culinary academy, and after many trials, as well as showing up some of the other students, she becomes an excellent chef who cooks entirely by scent. She would have cinematic quirks like being able to detect temperature with her braille-sensitized hands. She would have a cutting sense of humor to cover a certain amount of bitterness that comes up later in the movie, and carry a reservoir of smart remarks to show up the teasing men around her, counteracting her infirmity. There would be some love interest involved that she'd sleep with at some point, and who would confront her and push her to try harder at some crucial point in the movie when the audience started getting bored. Wait, the movie starts with her at the employment office, and they won't give her a job because she's blind. That's what fires her up.

"What's wrong with the employment office?" I replied.

"It doesn't seem like any of those gigs work out for you," he said in a tone that was kind, which was done to blot out the real message: I screwed up too much. I had special needs. I was an arrant thicko.

"Well, not so far, they haven't."

"Maybe you should do what we did," he proposed.

"We?"

"You know what I mean; the way a regular guy got a job when I was your age." My father had always worked. He'd had a few jobs throughout my childhood, but not a one of them he held for less than five years. He was a denizen of his generation, which worked hard but forgot to play. It seemed on the verge of sin to lead a relaxed life to them. Well, until they were eighty.

"Which is?"

"You go the street. You look for signs," he apprized. I imagined my flesh being dry, decomposing. A rather uncomfortable sensation filled me when I tried to rummage in my mind a sense of having parasites and various insects living in my remains.

"What kind of signs?" The signs of death, if one were to look at it as an illness, were failed organs, hypometabolic caesura, the complete expiry of thought, disanimation of physical system, rigor mortis, decomposition, and clogged pores.

"Are you kidding me? 'Help-wanted' signs; what do you think I mean...signs from God?"

"A sign from God would be helpful as hell," I said. This was true.

"I wouldn't hold out for one."

It was cliché to think that times had changed since the era when my father had been my age. This fact was so given that it didn't make sense to place much thought on it. However, I also believed that human beings did very little changing over the centuries. Times shifted, values altered, and the very current of social interaction switched through various auxiliaries, but an inherent trait of humanity was that people were rare to change. I would have been just as much of a screw up in my father's time.

"Do businesses still put up 'Help-wanted' signs? I don't think I've seen one in a decade," I said.

"Start lookin'. I'll bet money you find a few. Try a deli. Or a coffee shop. You can make sandwiches or coffee, right? It's a no-brainer," No brain. That was it. To portray a dead man, I had to perform having no brain. How bizarre. It was like trying to imagine a new color that wasn't based on or comprised of any colors you already knew. Acting brainless meant acting in a way so clear and unmotivated that there was nothing in the portrayal. Wait, could clear be a color?

"Eh, I'll go with the employment office. I don't want a kid job."

"Are you kidding? Any kids I've met have better jobs. Paper routes and lemonade stands have been replaced with web design and coffee carts," my father noted, lifting a sliver of mushroom from the wok and blowing on it.

"Those aren't better jobs."

"They pay more than any of mine ever did."

"Maybe I'll start a lit mag," I ventured.

"Let me rephrase that. They pay more than any of my jobs did, especially as editor of _The Tatterdemalion_. Don't bother. Jesus, don't bother. If you're lookin' for a paycheck, don't edit a mag."

"I was just joking," I braced.

"Yeah well..." then he trailed off, riding a thought into himself. I opened my eyes, as if awakening from torpor, and tried to portray a conscious zombie, except with a normal mind, a normal job, the kids and a car; a dead regular, an insured and taxed guy.

"Speaking of mags, how's the poetry going?" he asked me. This was a pointed question if ever there was one.

"You know I gave that up," I said.

"You always say that, but I know better. I'm serious, though. How's it going? You submit ever?" he asked. It was a source of contention in me when my father brought up poetry. The paradox of poetry between my father and I was pinioned on meaning. I felt I understood the meaning in poetry better than he did, yet was certain he knew more about what poetry was for and how to weigh it. I didn't want to talk with my father about poetry, much less my own. He stood in his kitchen, an old man, retired, and my father, but he was an editor, foremost.

"No."

"No?" he questioned.

"I don't submit poetry," I averred with a tone that carried _en garde_ on its back.

"Huh. I figured you'd still be at it, the way you used to go on about print." My left eye gave a slight jerk and my lid fluttered.

"I was just reiterating the shit I heard you talk about. I'm an editor's kid."

"You make it sound like a negative. If you really wanted to be a poet, you'd be pretty thankful to be an editor's kid. Over the years, I printed some of the biggest talents in the country, and some international, too. You get more from growing up with that than you ever would at some university."

"You never went to a university. I did," I replied, a cross-bearer.

"Two terms doesn't qualify," he answered, a bubble-burster.

"They were enlightening," I said, a wise man.

"No, they were expensive," he replied, the realist. There were so many roles to play. I couldn't pull off dead very well, and I certainly couldn't manage being a student, or any of the collar roles, blue or white, and I'd never been much for entertaining gigs as boyfriend or responsible male. I was even worse at being irresponsible, which left me with a bland soul in a world that prized diamonds and shit equally. I was full of neither.

"When's Percy gonna show up? He's usually punctual to the point of annoyance," I said, taking the first conversational off-ramp I could think of.

"What?" he asked, put off his topic.

"Well, being fashionably late is great and all, but he kind of overdoes it, yeah?" My father looked at me and stopped stirring. There was an almost hurt look on his face. He squinted and gave an abrupt fling of his hand, tossing the wooden spoon into the wok. This was an act of finality. He then exited the kitchen. He was angry, or upset. I didn't understand at all.

"What is it?" I asked, perplexed. Though he had exited, I knew not to follow my dad when he was pissed off. I used a tactic my mother had kept in her repertoire quite well for many years: I talked to him from another room.

"You want me to keep stirring this?" I volunteered. I heard my father mutter in the living room, and while I didn't hear what he said, I did detect what sounded like the word 'bullshit' at the tail end of it.

"Because it'll burn," I added, frustrated. I stepped up to the oven and began stirring the vegetables, shaking the pan lightly. My father appeared again, standing in the living room and facing me across the space.

"Son, this is... I can't hear this stuff. I'm sorry, but you gotta... I know you've got some sort of bug-bomb thing going on at your place and can't go home yet, but I can't hear this stuff," he said. The wok spattered up oil and there was a static hiss of frying vegetables in the air. I'd told my father that the owner of my apartment building was spraying the apartments with insecticide, and that none of the occupants could enter until later in the evening. In reality, I couldn't go home because the Black Dragon had made rules, and a reverse-curfew was one of them.

"So you have to leave. Go somewhere else," he said, disappearing again, toward his bedroom. This was clear enough, and it sounded as if he were holding back tears. His statement sent a panic through my back. What had I said? Was Percy not coming over? Was dad upset with my job searching, or the editor/poet statements I'd made? Was my portrayal of the standing dead too bizarre for him to handle and I just hadn't noticed the signal? I couldn't think of anything that would justify this odd behavior from my father. Slowly, while culminating an approach for finding out what was going on, I turned the electric wok off and gave it one last, complete stir. I entered the living room, against my mother's passed-down knowledge that doing so would likely enflame the situation.

"Dad, what is this? You're upset."

"Just go. You should just go look for help-wanted signs or something," he said, irritated but holding back an ample notion. I could detect it on his mind. Something had triggered him into severity and he didn't want to tell me what it was. The dilemma may have been something foolish, on his part, or I'd offended him, teased too much. I began to wonder if I wanted to know what the problem was. Could it be something with the opening night of his play, which was only six nights away?

"Come on, talk to me, dad. Is it about the play?" I fished, feeling upset for him. Laughter wasn't the only contagious thing in the human universe. Yawns, paranoia, and sadness spread like chicken pox among people that were close.

"Oh, I'm nervous as hell about the play, son, but right now, I don't want to hear you going all crazy about your damn-" then he stopped, put his hands over his eyes and grunted. After a moment, he gave me a flat statement.

"I'm not doing this right now."

"I don't understand," I protested.

"Go." There was a moment of consternation where I wanted to start screaming at him, the old fuck. My dad shutting down like this should have caused a streak of worry and compassion to lightning through me like the switched-on jolt in a circuit. Instead, I found myself wanting to kick him.

"I can't go home until around one, and I'm not gonna walk around for five hours doing nothing, so fill me in. What could you possibly need to keep from me? Come on, I'm here to help. Something's bugging you, so let's talk about whatever it is." I had to wince inside, as most of my statements had begun sounding like clichéd auto-statements. _I'm here for you. Let's talk._ Was I saying something this unfeeling to my father, who had an obvious, editor's knowledge of clichés? These were the bulleted if/then responses that could be utilized by those with false-concern, or people entirely unprepared when they encountered some big ogre of emotional discharge off someone they weren't expecting to get it from. Those boring, short statements were what you gave a 2am phone-call that began with "I didn't know who to call...it's over...she left me."

"I know you don't understand, son. Christ, and I'm sorry but...just go."

"Dad..."

"No, go. Leave me alone."

"What the fuck is your problem?" I raised my voice, hurt.

"goddamn it..."

"Are you senile or something? What is this?" I badgered. My father scrunched up his mouth and gave a slight tilt in his stare, toward the wall. I could hear his breath shrill atop the steam.

"Son, you know how you're not supposed to wake someone up when they're sleepwalking?"

"What?"

"It's the same with being off your rocker."

"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.

"You're bananas. Nuts. You're goddamn crazy."

"Fuck you."

"And I'm sure as hell not gonna wake you up."

"Where is this even coming from? I think you're the one who's crazy, here. You're talking about 'help-wanted' signs and then you just bug out on me. I don't even know what you're talking about, right now. I might be off but I haven't done or said anything to show it. Did we skip over the segue that led from 'get-a-job' to 'my-kid-is-nuts?" My father leveled a stare on me, as if coming to a conclusion. Then his mouth opened and his speech decelerated. He spoke in a manner both stark and slow. The room became unbearably hot around me.

"Do you really think Percy is coming over?" he asked.

"What?"

"Do you...think...your brother...is coming over? I mean, _really_ think so?"

"Why wouldn't he?" I asked, defensive.

"That's the line of thought I want you to keep, alright? Just let it rattle around in that damn head for awhile. 'Why wouldn't he?' Just keep it in there and think about it," he said, cold.

"I don't...Did he tell you something different than he told me? He said he'd be over at eight," I informed, annoyed and tired of groping for meaning in this conversation. My father's jaw opened and his eyes pursed. He was utterly shocked.

"G-get out of here you fuckin' nut!" he rasped, shaking his hand toward the door.

"You know what? I don't get you anymore," I said, walking to the door with my then weak knees. My age and status as an adult meant nothing when arguing with my father. It was ingrained that I feel like miserable, weak shit if I ever detected he was upset with me, regardless of who was right or wrong. In this case, there was no right or wrong, just gray confusion I could only blame on senility, and a lot of spit beneath tongues. I opened the door and passed through it.

"You stay away for a while, loony," he said.

"Not a problem."

"Clear your head and get straight," he said in a raised voice, still sounding as if he'd been stunned by a knee to the groin.

"That's _my_ line, you old coot," I said, shutting the door hard behind me.

### SIXTEEN

I had needed less than a day to learn that I despised the Black Dragon. Every phonetic uttering that bubbled from his wild mouth seemed constructed for my humiliation and discord. He baited me with incessant superbia, and the only bare portion of the Blue Dragon's advice to me that the Black Dragon would agree on was that I keep the peculiar jar of cooking oil on me. He goaded me into poetry, yes, but while I didn't have to crawl into any appliances to do it, the poetry was sparse and dull, as he didn't seem to add much at all. In fact, aside from his occasional affirmation or decline, I'd been writing the poetry myself. This was fine, but he flocked about it with such egoistic preening that I began to suspect he was delusional. He felt the poetry was cracking brilliant, which was ironic because I wrote it, and his gauge of me was that I was worthless, helpless, and ignorant to the point of inanity.

I scrolled down, sighing, having slept very little. The employment office had opened only minutes ago and I was one of two unemployed people within its officious body. There would be more, so many that I wouldn't begin wanting to count them, but for now, at just past six in the morning, there were two of us. The Black Dragon had kept me up late berating me for what he felt was my utter cease of mattering in the world. Over the last week, his loss of temper had proven both sporadic and vivid. It was arduous to try and predict what would set him off, but quite simple to suspect something would, and almost each night.

I had to leave my apartment by around 5:30 in the morning each day to avoid the protestors, and couldn't go home until after midnight. I had told my father this late return home was due to pest removal. In truth, beyond steering clear of protestors, if I entered my apartment before midnight, the Black Dragon wrestled and choked me, threw things at me. His only statement regarding why I had to stay away until at least midnight was this: "You don't get days. Days are mine." The statement, uttered roughly a week ago, was followed by a brick-handed kidney punch that put threads of blood in my urine for a day and a half.

There were so many jobs I had already attempted a referral for. Some had ended at the query stage, at the front of the employment office line, with my being denied. A few were shut out at the point of interview, and there were multitudes of jobs I'd had, all ending with my either botching it or getting bored and quitting. Since the age of 19, the longest I'd held a job was nine months. In the amount of time it takes a human embryo to develop into a birth-worthy being, I could ruin anything. I could lose a job faster than the initial round of conception might take. My only scrap of luck in getting referrals for potential jobs was in the particular woman that was heading the line I'd enter. She had never denied me a referral, and I was thankful to the powers on high that she was working that day.

Architect: Had tried and failed the interview. Supermarket Manager: Less than a week and I was fired for visiting the free-sample booth too many times. Butler: Quit after an hour. Taxi Driver: Stamped off in a tirade after just over two weeks, with a scorching headache after being struck from behind with an as yet still unknown blunt instrument, and then robbed. Circus Trainer: They fired me by mail for not wanting to travel, according to the termination slip, but the real reason was most of the personnel were addicted to methamphetamines and too suspicious looking, so needed my help, and I didn't want to go score for them. Poet: My self-stated career, but since there was no pay, no one could fire me. I was stuck in limbo with poetry, and felt false inside. It seemed superficial to even use the term 'poet' in describing myself. Being a poet was like having a timecard, parking space, and title, but for a job that didn't exist. Telling anyone I was a poet was like telling them I'd been one of those modern humans that were suckered into 'buying' a far off star, and then claiming I summered there.

The clock tacked off increments of time that I filled with my empty, exhausted actions at the screen. It was in scanning down a shorter row of listings that I saw something new. Located second from the bottom in the Miscellaneous section of job listings was one in which I had yet to endeavor: _Protestor._ Underneath the heading, the relevant information stated no experience was required for the more common entry position. My duties would require I hold a picket sign, shout, sing if needed, and use what the listing called 'vigilance'. A prerequisite, instead of experience, was that I be able to stand for long hours.

I wouldn't have been interested in this kind of thing, if it weren't for the location stated in the details. Farsante street, which was my street. I had just found a listing to join the protest outside of my own apartment. My protest, the panda people, the 'go-to-hell-pig' shouting people. These hippies and activists hated me, wanted me to suffer, strove to show the outlying areas of Boston what a horrid person I was, and they were hiring. I retrieved my blue sheet from the printer with a kind of confused zeal I couldn't have acted if someone paid me. I had no idea what any of it meant, or why I was doing it, but I wanted this job. Something either mischievous or horrible could happen, and my mind was tenacious in grasping for either. Perhaps I could use subterfuge to get them to leave, or show them up in some way, from the inside.

"I want this job," I said, confident and strong, holding the jar behind my back with one hand. She looked over the sheet, then examined me just as she'd done in the weeks previous. This woman had never denied me a referral, and I was hoping she wouldn't begin doing so today. Her shirt was a bit more open than last time, and I had my glance early. I had never been much of a breast fanatic, even in my awkward, pubescent youth, but her large and fat chest held a kind of blatant presence you couldn't ignore with ease. Her breasts were wide and giant, as was the rest of her obese body. Something about her large size, and my having encountered her enough times, made her seem neighborly, or even maternal. She shifted on her seat and went over my printout, tapping her finger on certain filled entries I had made, and chewing at the inside of her cheek.

As the woman began typing on her machine, detailing my application and the referral, her sleeve lifted a touch and I was able to see her tattoo again. I had been wrong in what I thought it said. Instead of BLACK POWER, I encountered a slightly different message:

A second 'L' had been lifted, raised up very close to the two arms of the capital 'F', making the term 'BLACK FLOWER' but keeping the term 'BLACK POWER', as well. Something about that made me smile; Black Power and Black Flower. I wanted to pat her on the shoulder and tell her that I agreed: She was a black flower. I'd nod and look at her with sympathy and understanding. I would bond with this woman who held my employment in her flower hands. Then maybe I'd cop a feel. Wait, I was racist again. _Pat her on the shoulder? Why would a black woman need_ my _approval? Why would she want it?_ Ghosts of the third Reich appeared at my back and grabbed at my ass, calling me a tasty recruit. What a racist piece of shit I was. I might have been sexist, too.

"Sir, there _is_ a problem with this particular job that could bar you from obtaining the work," she said then, bored. Was it racist to notice her tongue seemed pinker than a white person tongue because of the contrast with her black person mouth? It was an objective observation, but...

"Oh? What's the problem?"

"They've been getting some crazies out there, and they won't take anybody that has a violent background. Also, we have a note attached to the file that says 'vehement belief in cause is now added prerequisite'." There was no skirting a statement like that. Someone needed despise me with vigor to join the protest through the employment office. I supposed I could handle this. I could hold a vehement belief that I was awful. I heard the door open at the front of the building and several people entered. Things were picking up.

"Sure. I vehemently believe in the cause."

"Yeah? What is it, then?" she tested me, looking interested. Were a black woman's brown eyes any browner than a white person's brown eyes? Her pupils were completely devoid of color, like fresh black ink, or an absence of light. Pupils seemed insectile, or machine-like. Her eyes seemed so dark and curt. I supposed her expression set was what probably did it. Logic would dictate the eyes had color, it was just her use of the subtle frown and unmoving brows that made her seem so high-contrast. Well, and the bad fluorescent lighting of the employment office. She had a quirkless facial presence that indicated she spoke a great amount less than she thought. She seemed like she had wanted a kitty for Christmas, as a child, and had been given a glass of pee instead, but then it happened so many times over so many years that she just stopped thinking about it.

"The cause to which I am called is to crusade against that miserable, worthless, failed-poet schmuck, who killed that beautiful panda bear," I said, straight. I mused that it would be amazing if, instead of a lighter brown skin, when a black person and a white person had a child together, the baby came out with panda coloring, a contrasting black and white design. How amazing would those people look? My mind gagged then and I tried to stop thinking these thoughts, as it seemed there was no avoiding the probability of being racist in them sooner or later. I was thinking about difference in color. That didn't make me racist, but thinking about the color and race of people was a gateway system of thought that was prerequisite to racism. How dare I think about panda kids? I may as well have been putting a white hood on. I tried to clear my head, then.

"Uh huh, and you want to protest the demise of the Boston Zoo panda?" she asked me, a look of mild inquisition.

"Yes, I do. That guy is a blight, a plague, his kind are no good," I replied, finding humor in it, but displaying sincerity. _Wait, his kind? What did I mean by that?_

"If you say so," she accorded, frowning and going back to her computer screen.

"I think that damn bear was crazy, myself," came a voice from behind me, "Always growled whenever you walked by its exhibit, rolled in its own waste. And it tried to kill that cop. You trust-fund activists just don't want to see the reality of things."

I turned and saw him. The surgeon with whom I'd trained; the man who I'd vomited in front of with an absolute lack of gastrointestinal control. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a red sweater that looked old and well-worn. What was he doing in the employment office?

"Oh, it's you. What's up?" I asked in a warm tone, not wanting to attempt to stick up for the protestors outside of my own apartment, whose sole reason for existence was to hate me. The surgeon had overheard I was going to be one of them, of course, but I didn't want to discuss it with him. Part of the dynamic he and I now had between us was embarrassment, weakness, and the fact that I was a real pussy in the face of cardiothoracic autotransplantation. He'd said as much. It seemed better not to admit I was hated by others, as well.

"Mad-ass bear. Shit, if that thing came at _me_ , I'd do the same thing. I don't care if it's endangered or not, it's an animal. If an animal tries to hurt a human, we kill it. End of story. That cop should be given compassion for what he went through, not slapped in the face with a bunch of hippy-dicks," he said. I wanted to put my arms around him right there, hug him and give him my most earnest thanks. It was the first time anyone had seemed to think I wasn't a monster over the panda killing. The unfortunate dilemma of my situation made this impossible. More pressing to me was why he was in the employment office line at all.

"So how come you're here, anyway? You have a job," I said. He blinked.

"Huh?"

"You're a surgeon. We met last week. I was the guy that threw up," I said, trying to force a laugh. I still felt weak and foolish over it. I had spent over an hour afterward trying to remove the stink of my regurgitation off my clothes and skin.

"Buddy, I sure as shit don't know you," he said with distaste. Had he really not recognized me?

"You're a resident surgeon at P. Morris Medical Center," I said, more for myself than him. It seemed obvious he would already know what he was.

"You're a fuckin' weirdo, man. Turn around," he said. I slowly turned back to the job referrer. What was going on? Had he been fired? Was he playing the system somehow by lying about where he worked to get some sort of unemployment benefit? If he was, I wanted to hit him. As a surgeon, he had to make more in a month than I could make in a year. Part of me felt like telling the job referrer this, and seeing where the cards fell. My line of thought on this dissolved when I realized she was looking at my crotch again. It was just as furtive as before, but I knew for certain it had happened this time. The Black Flower had most assuredly looked at my crotch. The surgeon behind me was staring a hole in the back of my skull. Both looks felt just as invasive and intimate.

"Settle down," the Black Flower said to the surgeon behind me. He didn't say anything, but I could feel him keep his stare. No doubt he had noticed the jar of oil behind my back.

"Uh, sorry," I voiced, realizing how annoying it must be for someone in her position to have to listen to impatient people argue in a line that would always end at her. I supposed she'd seen all sorts of out-of-work people in the time she had worked here.

"All right, I'm pushing this through. You got the job, so far. There is no interview, but you do have a contact when you get there. It starts each day at about 6am, which means you're already late."

"Oh, today?" That was the shortest notice I'd ever received.

"Can you do this?" she asked.

"Well yeah, I guess so," I said, put off by the suddenness with which this had happened. I had just looked up the listing minutes ago, and now I was late to work. I wondered if there was a world record for how fast a new employee could screw up.

"You guess so?"

"No, I mean yes. I can be there. I'll head over there after I leave here," I rephrased. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea if this job paid or not. I had to think that, given their hiring procedure, they must pay something, even a small stipend or token payment.

The Black Flower stood and moved toward the industrial printer, waiting for the referral slip to print out. She was a very large woman. Though she wore pants designed to conceal, it was apparent how thick her legs were, and she had an ass that would prove troublesome if scouting for seats in a movie theater. She seemed almost like the stereotypical movie character of the mouthy, fat black woman. _Jesus...did I really make that comparison?_ This was a unique woman with a tattoo and a huge ass and here I was comparing her to some two-dimensional character in a movie. Shit, was bad script-writing so ingrained in my growing up that I couldn't see someone for who they really were? I'd just pigeonholed this woman into a cliché. This posed my mind to wonder what cliché I'd be, if the world were a badly written movie.

The failed artist seemed staple; I could do that one...but it still didn't seem correct. Maybe a beta-male, the guy who can't do anything right, but tries hard, to humorous effect. No, those characters were always clumsy and they operated alongside a main character that was dashing and going through the pangs of love or whatnot. I played wingman to no one. Maybe I'd be that idiot that lives in his own fantasy world, and everyone accepts it by the end of the film and decide he's charming and favorably eccentric instead of being flawed and injured all the way in to his soul. No, my fantasy world sure as hell wouldn't include things like the employment office or a talking woman's corpse in my refrigerator. It also wouldn't involve me holding a jar of oil behind my back with one hand while standing at the head of the Boston Employment Department line.

The referrer bent low for a moment and opened a panel to the interior of the industrial printer. She peered in and adjusted something. My eyes were drawn to her hindquarters again. Looking at her posterior felt like an experiment, to see if I could do so without repercussion, even though I didn't feel to be interested much in doing so. The word 'booty' entered my mind then, and the inner walls of my skull clinched and spat it out of my ear near to the instant. 'Booty' might not be for me to use. It seemed like some kind of racial thievery to use the term honestly with myself. I could joke and think _'booty'_ , I could say it to be clever or funny, but I couldn't really think it, not for _real_. Although, if I were in a pirate outfit, I imagined that the term could be free for my serious, general use again.

"Enjoy," she said, turning and handing me the referral with her pudgy fingers.

"Aye, and if they make me walk the plank, I'll be back here in line tomorrow," I said with a chuckle and terrible attempt at an accent. Why did I say that? She raised an eyebrow, which was one of the only expressions she seemed to give that involved the use of her brows, or at least one of them. She then cleared her throat and set her hands on her counter.

"Sure," she said.

I left the line, bringing the jar of oil around to my front as I turned, to keep it out of her sight. I chanced a look at the surgeon as he passed. It was him, I knew it. I had no doubt. Was he milking Welfare or something? As I pondered this, I noticed that the referral the Black Flower had given me had another scrap of paper near the upper right hand corner, with handwriting on it. I'd never been given handwriting on a referral from the employment office before. Intrigued, I lifted it closer and, as I exited the building, smiled. How rare. What a new thing. It was a small, personal note from the Black Flower:

" _I know you were that cop. I pushed it through, remember? I don't blame you, either. Don't cause too much trouble._ "

### Seventeen

The endeavor of infiltrating into the anti-me protest required I disguise myself. I pondered how best to do this and came up with a variety of solutions, but few of these seemed plausible on my limited budget and lack of costume-savvy. After a short time of debate and dollar-counting, I shaved my head in the bathroom of a convenience store with a fresh purchased pair of scissors and a disposable razor. After this, I donned a new t-shirt from the same convenience store. The shirt read: _Historic Boston!_ Beneath this logo-like mesh of letters was the backdrop cutout of a city, and the silhouette of a panda bear. It was a tourist shirt, but would work wonders in granting me a strong, anti-me affiliation. I purchased a cheap backpack as well, to keep the jar of cooking oil in, as several early-morning protestors had seen me sneaking off with it.

These items and a shaved head alone weren't enough. I balanced my nerves for a few minutes before kneeling down outside the store. With a mustered willpower even I had questioned could be present in me, I held my breath and smashed my face hard a few times on the bike rack in front of the convenience store. I saw orange at one point and stopped to breathe, dizzy, my thoughts condensing into a vague confusion. Professional boxers called this stupor 'punch drunk'. After looking into a windshield and noting I didn't look different enough yet, I returned and slammed my cheeks and brows against the steel bike rack several more times. The pain was atrocious and my battered face ached, but I finally looked like a swollen someone else.

My lips engorged and numb, I made a kind of downturned, gruff mouth and flared my nostrils as wide as I could. I locked the face in. It felt strange to keep my nose flared like that, my eyebrows wrinkled in the middle, my lower lip sticking out just past the upper, but I managed it. I added a kind of sleepy look by lowering my upper eyelids. I had a new expression then, and kept it on until it started to feel natural, though nothing could alter the fact that I felt like a buffoon in my silly shirt and ugly, twisted face. After making a sign out of a yardstick and a large piece of cardboard from a box behind the convenience store, I made my way home, frustrated that my shaved head was cold.

There were near two hundred people crowded around my apartment building. I felt a strong sense of vulnerability when I bordered this scene, as I had been forced to politely nudge shouting, flushed, hornet-like people out of my way to exit my building numerous times in the last week. The situation had progressed to the point where I had contemplated sealing up my windows and ordering all of my food from delivery services. This tanked when the Black Dragon beat the shit out of me, causing me to consider staying away from home more, and also when it occurred to me that the mob below might meddle with my arriving food, or poison it, or release any number of their bodily juices on it.

The jar, swaddled snug in the backpack, made a heavy, continual thudding against my lower vertebrae, which was unpleasant and annoying. When would I get the real jar and ditch this facsimile? The real jar wouldn't need to be carried around with me, I hoped. My fantasies of what it contained had flourished since making the fake, and I now wondered if the contents of the real jar might be artifacts of a lost people, or perhaps the jar was a child's time-capsule, and I'd find some sort of old toys in it that would be very valuable at auction. Who knew? I could only hunger for it, hoping that I'd have it in my possession soon. As for the jar itself, I figured I'd simply open it and have whatever was inside; mysterious treasure, wisdom, riches...

My referral stated I was to meet with a woman named Ilya, who was in charge of new hires. The referral only mentioned that I'd be checking in with her, but didn't say where to look. With the number of people involved in the protest, finding a single person whose face I'd never seen would prove difficult. I'd be better off to ask around.

There was a bouncy, energetic young girl to my left, with dreadlocks and a chipped bowl of some sort of food product. She wore long-underwear pants with a flannel mini-skirt over it and had her hair in childish pig-tails. She seemed as approachable as anyone else near me.

"Hi there," I said, drawing closer. She sniffed her nose and sucked some noodles off a fork, then continued drawing them up from the bowl. The soup looked cold and of a stout age. How she could eat cold soup mystified me. I noticed she had one eye that was blue, and the other was closer to grey. It gave her a pinpointed, wily look, though the goofy posture and little sways she made while eating rescinded this look with ease.

"Hey there," I tried again, closer. She looked over at me and then around herself to see who I was talking at.

"Yes you!" I said, using a preformatted cheer and over-the-top friendliness that made me want to knee myself in the balls. After I heard her response, I debated doing just that.

"Friend or friend?" she asked, smiling.

"Oh, because there aren't any 'foes' here, right?" I responded. Flute music began playing in my head and a hairy, little love-imp descended from a fig tree and hugged my bristling heart. What wonderful, modern protesters we were.

"Hell yes, it's vigil, baby!" she said, using an odd motion of extending her hands toward me and out, palms down, almost as if she wanted a hug, except lowering her arms in a weird, reverential way. It occurred to me that she might be deucedly stoned. In my mind, I jogged forward with beads around my neck, to embrace her, and then just kept going, trampling her and imprinting my heel over her mouth, leaving her behind me.

"Sure thing," I said, "but I'm kinda lost, you know? I gotta find Ilya...you know where she is?" The young woman's eyes widened.

"Doo!" she said, but then didn't say anything else. I waited, noting that the noodle-product she was eating was made of distended strands of starch, swollen from having sat in the cold fluid for too long. The notion of this meal and its now ruined nature upset my stomach. It seemed she'd cooked it quite some time ago and let it sit for hours.

"So uh, 'doo' you know where Ilya is?" I repeated, forcing the musculature surrounding my mouth to perform a meager, frustrated smile. She giggled as if having just seen a dirty gnome's dumpy little privates. I looked around for someone else to ask, as the young girl didn't seem to have the capacity for common speech. She cracked her neck hard and grunted for a moment, then, she shivered in a strange and giddy kind of way. When I eyed her with concern over this, she began shaking her hands in the air. What the fuck was this girl on?

"You okay?" I asked, taking a step back. She was building and shaking her arms with vehemence, and I didn't know if she was about to let loose with some sort of peace-love, squatter-inflected, bipolar orgasm, or if she was on the verge of shitting her pants, but either way, there seemed a definite, impending detonation of some sort.

"Waaaah!" she cried, using a baby voice that was so convincing it became eerie. Had my very contact with her, my Judas-spy activity, caused her to regress into an infant state? Was she escaped from authoritative care, wherein improper restraint had been used? She shook and cried out again, her eyes scrunched and her face contorted, hopping and shaking and crying.

"Bye," I said and began walking away, quick. I stopped when she hopped after me and put her hand on my upper back. Suppressing my fight-or-flight urge to ball my hands into fists and descend into panicked skittishness, I turned and remained still. She was insane.

"You got freaked. Wow. That was a baby. Pretty good, right?" she asked. I blinked. After a moment she smiled and patted my shoulder.

"Hey man, I'm just buggin' out. It's no big deal," she said. I supposed I understood on some level, but I was wholly uncommitted to being all right with it. She had a traumatizing personality.

"So...Ilya. Do you know her, or what?" I asked, irritated, my nerves at sea.

"Yeah. And Ilya's a guy. He runs the distro table. It's usually by the fire hydrant. You're new to the Cake?" she asked.

"The Cake? Is that what the protest is called?" I asked.

"No, well yeah, but not really," she said. What a strange human being the world had created. She was so involved in her own, gonzo flakiness that she almost gave off a sense of comfort, odd as it seemed. I wondered if she would have slept with me.

"I'm from the employment office. It's my first day in the Cake," I said, feeling like a moron. Enlightened birds descended from the boughs of the great Mana tree and whispered their wisdoms in my ear, teaching me how to celebrate life by gluing macaroni to construction paper and refusing to vote.

"Oh hey, welcome," she said then, smiling bright. I only nodded. While I had managed a few sparse smiles in the time since injuring myself, this whole new face was beginning to tighten and ache. Smiling was a muscular contention. The outer fray of my eyebrows wanted to drop into their normal state, and almost began to feel as if weights were attached to them. The young woman took a few steps back and, holding her bowl of squatter-soup in one hand, extended her other fist at me.

"Cookie," she said, solemn. The name of the panda seemed to be in use as a sacred term to these protestors. I slowly raised my fist and repeated the gesture.

"Cookie," I performed. She jumped a moment and then went back to her original position, resetting herself and her soup-devouring place in the world.

"These people are bent," I said to myself.

The jar bobbing against my spine, I made my way through the organism of people, hoping I wasn't being recognized. The individuals present were varied even in their smells. Yes, there was a heavy assortment of incense-saturated shirts and coats, roll-your-own cigarette smoke, food, sweat, and the overall smell of grime, but there was also a keen layer of aftershave and body spray in the air from some of the more hygiene-minded people. I lowered my protest sign against my leg and moved with stable motions between the various bodies. There were quite a few dogs roaming about, as well.

"You're not from the Cascades, man. You're like, from the Rockies. You ain't real," I overheard a man say to another at one point.

"There's power in the Rockies, dipshit. Maybe you shouldn't talk about things you don't know," came the response. Beyond the twisted nature of the 'Cake', and the peculiar, psyche-puked behavior I noted, there was also a staunch allotment of gripes and groans in the air. There was a Socratic irony in that many of these people bore the traits and behaviors of outsiders, yet the conglomeration of them was herd-like. I'd seen protests before, on television, and there had been one outside of my high school long ago, related to some sort of budgeting crisis or error, and none of the people in those protests seemed all that eccentric. These people before my apartment, the cloistered mob of souls that had gathered to show me they despised me, the Cookie and Cake people...they were a few murders shy of a crusade. It was my misfortune that they were now necessary to me, though not for my new job among them.

I had developed a plan of infiltration and betrayal while dressing down for my role as protestor. This plan was more like a mission, for my own welfare, and involved a smidge of sabotage mixed with a major dash of morbid, unsanitary foulness. I planned on contacting a slaughterhouse, buying a whole, non-butchered, dead pig, writing 'POETIC JUSTICE' on it, and then, as a protestor, leaving it outside of my own apartment door. After a call to local media, and after returning to the role of myself again, the disparaged victim of disturbed activists, the hate-fest outside of my home would be seen on television as a congregation of malevolent, warped individuals whose tactics were too near mania to convey a message anyone else could rely on. They would disband in shame, having sullied Cookie's memory with their atrocious dead-pig attack, and with any luck, be shouted and heckled away, sick blights on the Boston scene. I believed this fitting, as it was close to what these tempestuous people had done to me in the last week. I would use my placement in their ranks to accomplish this; spy, traitor, mole...my new job was Secret Agent Man.

"Are you Ilya?" I asked him. There was a latte resting next to the fire hydrant, and the man who seemed to be keeping it had a small tray-table with a stack of photocopied flyers. He extruded the look of a manager, and took in my appearance.

"That's me," he said, expectant and waiting.

"Cool. I'm from the employment office. I have a referral," I said, extending it.

"Oh. Well, good. Welcome aboard. More of us, the better. Listen though, I want to ask you a few things first, okay?"

"Sure." I noticed then that the rows of people seemed to part for a woman I recognized. I'd seen her before, jogging in my neighborhood from time to time. As she made her way through the lot of protestors, she was muttering to herself, annoyed. While these people seemed to disdain me, they were at least being somewhat cordial to the neighborhood residents. I had to suppose these protestors had been shouted at by angry locals much in the passing week.

"All right, I mean, nothing personal, just questions. Like, have you had a felony or anything like that?" I had no felonies on my record, though his question seemed quite personal, despite his assurance to the contrary. He'd asked that, if I did not have a felony, had I ever obtained anything _like_ a felony; that was an impossibility. The particular title of that range of criminal conviction was exacting. There was felony, or something else that wasn't felony, but there was no gray area between. It was like asking if I'd ever been pregnant, and if not, had I been something _similar_.

"No. I'm not a felon," I said.

"Just asking. We've had trouble is all. What's the panda's name, by the way?" Ilya asked me. What a juvenile test.

"Cookie," I said, and for extra credit, I extended my fist as I'd seen the young girl do. He didn't seem to care one way or the other about my extra credit.

"You a journalist?" he came out with. I noted a line of suspicion and worry when he asked this.

"No, man," I answered. He looked me up and down, clicking his tongue.

"Okay, just gotta check, is all. So, lay it on me. What's your sign?" he then asked. This was the silliest and most clichéd thing I'd been asked in years. Did he really believe it mattered? Was he about to give me a tarot consultation or a tea leaf reading to determine where I should stand among the pox outbreak of people? Like a dope, I looked up at the sky and adopted a stupid, knowing expression, as if I'd been contacted by the stars.

"I'm a Gemini," I said, serene, returning my attention to him. I waited for what I assumed would be his smile and pleasure, followed by some general statement of "I knew it. Yeah, you're totally a Gemini." This would be bullshit, of course, as much so as my stating I was a Gemini.

"Uh, whatever. Your message there?" he asked, pointing at the picket sign I'd made and that I had resting against my leg.

"Oh that! Shit, I thought you were asking my astrological sign. Sorry," I said, laughing. He clicked his tongue again and waited, tuning about ninety percent of my existence out of his world. I lifted the yardstick and turned the unwieldy sign to reveal my message: YOU DESTROYED INNOCENCE.

"Nice!" Ilya commented, impressed. I attempted to turn up the edges of my swollen, bash-induced frown, but couldn't bring myself to do it. My lips felt tight to the point I wondered if they'd split during a smile. Instead, I answered his praise by standing as a statue, letting the breeze blow my hair and t-shirt about me. A children's choir sang in Latin while the sun broke through the clouds and lit my eyes diamond. Ilya took in a deep breath, seeing my brave and righteous frame erected before him.

"All right, Mr. Gemini," he said, clapping his hands together in resolution, "We got someone special joining the protest tomorrow, and I want to be caught up with everything by then, so I want to do our footwork for today and tomorrow all at once. Get it done early."

"Special person?" I asked, my attention taken in brief by a passing man who wore taped-up paper as clothing.

"Well, famous, at least. I can't really tell you more about it because of how it's all supposed to go down. And we're gonna get a lot of press out of it, too, a ton. I actually thought maybe you were a journalist when you came up, you know, checking out the scene undercover to get a feel for it before he shows up or something; like you knew about it or whatever."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"I can't say. This person asked for a minor reception. Anyway, we got some work to do, a little windshield distribution, all that. Just hittin' up parking lots and doin' some handouts. Let's take off for a bit and look for parking lots and foot traffic, cool? We gotta bring a few gallons of water back for the dogs, too."

"I am your disciple," I said. Who was the famous person coming to protest me? I had a celebrity that hated me now, too? I hoped it wasn't the mayor, or worse, a conscientious, middle-aged, alterna-jazz musician with huge pull. The last thing I needed was to end up on a music video station, the louse beneath some fusion artist's expensive shoes.

"Disciple, huh? Good, I could use a few of those," Ilya said, "Anyway, it's a little tough finding people we can give the flyers to in this neighborhood. It's all residential housing, and they all know about the protest already, plus there's so many of us we can't help but block the road sometimes. It kind of aggravates the locals. I know there's a parking garage about six blocks toward the park, though. We'll head there first." I didn't answer, my eyes locked on the 3rd story window of my apartment.

The Black Dragon stood behind the pane, looking down at me. He had no expression, which I knew to be afraid of. What was he thinking up there? Was he planning on hurting me for this? Would my involvement in the protest mean anything to him? Ilya scooped up his stack of flyers and began trying to hand them to me, then stopped, noticing my upward stare at the apartment.

"Ah, don't worry about him. One thing at a time, man," Ilya said, "Our little panda killer may not want to leave his safe ivory tower up there, but we got our act together down here. We'll get to him." I lowered my head and accepted the flyers, feeling the incisive eyes of the Black Dragon cut against my body as we left the building behind.

### Eighteen

Buckled and kinked on the floor, my sides aching, I held my breath and tried to turn onto my back. The Black Dragon crawled up beside me on his hands and knees and shoved me onto my stomach. He lowered his head and began trying to spit in my ear again. I jerked and tried to get up, bracing my hand beneath me as I lifted. He only pushed me onto my side again.

"Black," he said, kicking me in the chest so hard my weight lifted from the hip and I waved backward, limp onto my back. With the exception of guarding myself, I had given up trying to struggle against him. His presence in my apartment meant I was never safe. I was supposed to have the late nights in the apartment, as per our arrangement, but now it seemed he wanted those too. It was as if he didn't want me to return to my apartment ever.

I had decided that the Black Dragon, unlike the other two, wasn't trying to help me at all, but destroy my life and take over. He wanted my apartment. He had begun wearing my clothes. He used my phone to call numbers I couldn't figure out. In his most recent outbreak, he had urinated down on several protestors beneath my third story window. I watched from the mob, among them, and listened as they, of course believing the person above to be me, began shouting hateful jeers and vows of revenge. I heard one of them say 'kill', followed by a few words I couldn't make out, and then conclude their statement with 'motherfucker'. Things were escalating.

"Nn!" I groaned as his foot drove into my gut and retracted.

"Black," he said, jumping to the side and toe-booting my collar. I rolled onto my back and curled, squinting and gritting my teeth. He was essentially rolling me around in my apartment, kicking and shoving me on the floor. After a moment, he leaned forward and began trying to spit in my ear again. He was obsessed with it. I let out a grunt, flopping over and away from his stream of spit. I rubbed my palm over my ear, digging out the saliva with a grimace.

"Black," he repeated. It was all he ever really said when he became violent. He spoke with a steady phrasing of sternness, but when riled, repeated himself in both speech and action. After another kick, he stood up straight and backed up, letting me be. It was three in the morning and I could barely breathe. He went into the kitchen with a braggart kind of looseness, as if he'd just bedded someone, and swiped his dice off the counter. I heard him sit down in front of the low cupboards, and he began rolling and counting. This was a position he settled into often, shooting his dice, mumbling and hypothesizing.

What was I going to do? He hadn't mentioned the jar in days, and seemed hell-bent on tearing me up whenever I came home. The beatings were getting worse, the protestors were massing, and I'd learned I wasn't getting paid. It was beginning to seem like my involvement with the protest below was beyond an act of mistake, and now pointless. The Black Dragon, with fists and sharp treatment, would cast me from my home long before they did, if that was their goal. After spending the day with Ilya, I'd been unable to discern what his final intent was concerning me, the panda killer. I was certain he had more on his roster than simple chants and cheerleading.

"Do I still have to write a poem tonight?" I asked, shaky, my gut contracting and making me wince.

"After we talk about your brother," he said, angry. I heard the dice hit the floor again. I had called Percy several times in the last few days, hoping he could talk to dad for me, as there had been no reconciliation with my father. While I didn't feel Percy would be of much help, I did think using him as an intermediary was better than holding a grudge.

"Do you know where he is?" I asked, feeble. My father hadn't spoken to me since I'd called him a coot and left, and my calls to Percy's phone number simply rang and rang. I'd begun to worry, which was my unswayable nature.

"He isn't coming back," the Black Dragon said.

"What? Why?" I asked, staring at my ceiling and trying to keep it still. The dice hit the floor and the Black Dragon muttered several numbers aloud, counting to himself, then he answered me.

"He's dead."

I sat upright on a series of twisting movements, my ribs seeming to speak with each inch of motion. My face was flush and hot, and my ear moist and red.

"That's stupid," I said.

"He's dead, and you did it," the dragon replied, bored.

"This is more of your bullshit," I said, hating my life. I felt my temples throbbing and my pulse was prevalent to the skin of my neck and around my eyes. I was sure one of my ribs was cracked, as well.

"Fuck him. He was dumb," the dragon said.

"I'd never hurt Percy. That's crazy. He's a prick sometimes, but he's my brother," I said, wheezing at the end because of a caught breath. It may have been foolish of me, but now that the day's beating was over, my endorphins were buzzing me, and the wheezing only made me want a cigarette. I reached my feet and, taking precaution not to let my movements fall too quick, obtained my week-old pack from atop the wrecked television. I had a few left. The Black Dragon stayed in the kitchen, sitting in front of the cupboards.

"Riddle me this, killer: How old is your brother?"

"He'll be forty-seven next month," I said, wishing the dragon would move to the subject of the jar, for once. He only ever seemed to meddle with my head.

"Does he look forty-seven?" A strange rush began as I inhaled a drag from my cigarette. When I was under stress, a cigarette could near get me high for a minute or two. The relaxing nature of the nicotine subdued my hostilities and kept my blood cool. He continued rolling the dice, waiting for me to answer. It was an unexpected question.

"He's always looked younger than his age," I said.

"He looks mid-twenties," the dragon commented. I heard the dice clatter against the kitchen linoleum.

"I never thought about it. I guess so."

"Wife's a model, right?" the Black Dragon asked then. Mina was a model, yes. Percy made sure of it before they'd begun dating with any real depth.

"He mentions it often, too."

"You ever seen her? In person?" he asked. His leprose fingers swiping up the dice carried over the sentence with a brisk sound.

"Of course I have. I was at their wedding, for one," I answered.

"That's a lie. Where was the wedding?"

"Wh...in a church."

"Where?" I heard the dice hit the floor.

My head began to hum inside. I felt like I'd just slept for a year and woke up to a bee sting. What a marvelous cigarette. What a thankful smoker I was. I exhaled an allotment of smoke and sat down in my living room, across from the dragon in my kitchen.

"Here in Boston," I countered.

"Right? Wrong. How old was Percy when he got married?" the Black Dragon asked, continuing to drill his questions in me. I was used to this proceeding, as it always followed his physical assaults on me. The usual topic of these nonsensical questions was what an awful person I was, or how foolish I'd been, or why I wasn't as good as the Black Dragon.

"He would have been 26," I said, exhausted. I needed sleep soon.

"Which would have made you how old at the wedding?"

"Well, about ten." I stopped speaking then. I couldn't have been ten. What kind of mind-game was the dragon pulling on me?

"Go ahead. How old were you when they got hitched?" the beast pushed.

"I... this is fucked. I couldn't have been ten. That makes no sense. I remember sitting at the bar and drinking. Our mom was already dead by then, so there's no way I was ten. I was finished with high school at that wedding. I had dropped out of college already."

"Ten. You know it and I know it." I felt weak. The sweat in the small of my back began to itch and I was having trouble thinking with clarity. This was a trick of his. Was he changing my memories, forcing me to lose the only portion of my mind that I felt I could still hold accountable? According to popular science, the animal of man was a conglomeration of his memories and influence, with a systemic set of base-information in his genetic model. What happened if you tainted the memories? If my memories were being stirred to pieces by the dragon, what would I have left? Genetics and influence. A touch nature, a smidge nurture. One of these, genetics, meant nothing to me; the other was in the fists of the Black Dragon, in his violent broach of my stability, his spit and horrible words.

"What are you doing to me?" I gasped, looking at the two dice on the floor. They seemed to be rolling the same numbers again and again. Fives. The room felt to be filling with invisible blood.

"You ever seen a magazine she was in? The wife?" the beast asked then.

"Yes." I said, my mind shirking from giving this question much thought.

"Not a one," he returned, changing my answer for me, "And you never met her. Because your dumb brother never met her. She doesn't exist and neither does he anymore."

"That's all wrong. We were at my father's like, two weeks ago. He socked me in the shoulder."

"Fantasy."

"Bullshit. That was real."

"For real, it was bullshit. You're a sick piece of work," he said, flinging the dice again. Fives.

"None of this makes any sense. You're twisting things. You're messing around in my head."

"How old were you when he died? You can remember the books, I know that," the Black Dragon said.

"The books?" I asked. My mind flashed then. A small stack of books on the sidewalk; the rain had swollen them. My father told me to go get them because he couldn't.

"Wait, there's something..."

"What kind of books were they?" the dragon asked. My mind swiveled.

"College books, he walked to school from our house," I said, blurred.

"Left those spendy textbooks out in the rain. Remember why?"

"I think he dropped them."

"No. Wrong.Let's go this route: Why couldn't your dipshit dad fetch the books himself?"

"He didn't want to leave the house," I said, almost on autopilot at this point.

"Where in the house?"

"Just in the house. He was in Percy's room." _Wait, why had my father been in Percy's room... had this happened when I was ten?_ It felt much older than that. I began to question what I was remembering, doubting myself, my apartment, the dragon, my headache... What could I trust to be my own truth anymore? If the beast could get into my head and change things, what was mine?

"He stayed there all day and night," the Black Dragon added.

"Yeah... just looking at Percy's stuff."

"Because?" the Black Dragon prodded, rolling the dice again. The walls bent downward and listened as if there weren't another sound in the universe worth hearing. I just started crying. It had occurred to me. Because...

"Percy was gone," I said. I remembered. How long had I forgotten? Was I remembering this for the first time? Had it just happened? Was the dragon traveling backward in time and changing the future, along with my memories of the past?

"Smack. Truck. History." the dragon said, uncaring.

"She drove on the sidewalk."

"Some dumbass bitch."

"It was a lady," I said, phasing in and out of my apartment. I was sitting down in front of my television, shooting dice. Then I was sitting on the sidewalk next to Percy's books, a child.

"The first time or the second time, a lady or not, you did it. You killed him." I heard from the brush that lined the street. The sun shone down and I nudged the books, crying. Poor Percy, poor dad.

"Look in the closet," the voice in the bushes said. I turned my head and the sun went black. There was a colossal television clogging up the street. On the screen was what looked like an apartment set. Wait, I was there. I was in the set. I stood, older, looked at the Black Dragon shooting dice down the street toward my childhood house. A camera in my head spun, blocking out my eyes. The camera saw my closet.

"Go on. Look." I heard. I was in my apartment, standing. My cigarette had fallen from my fingers and I looked down, stepped on it, twisting my foot to snuff the thing out. It burned a small black streak in the floor. I walked to the closet door as two dice struck against it and rested between my feet. I opened the door.

"Oh god..." I said, seeing him. Percy was in my closet, nude, stained red with blood. It looked like he'd been burned in places. The Black Dragon stepped up beside me, looking in.

"See what happens when you forget someone? I bet he was all hurt about it."

"This isn't real...I've lost my head...You keep changing it," I said to myself.

"You're not losing your mind, pussy. You're finding it."

"What's wrong with me?" I asked with a strained throat, rubbing my eyes, my jaw quivering.

"Everything," the dragon said. So that was the answer. Everything was wrong with me. My father thought it, the dragons thought it, and a mob of people outside of my apartment seemed to agree, as well. Everything was wrong with me. Percy's body disappeared, then reappeared, no longer bloody, but in the same, hunched position, stuffed in my closet.

"Are you going to help me?" I asked, the water of my will at its lowest point. Had I dreamed this? I lowered to the ground and, seeking something steady, set my body flat, my face on the floor, my head congested, sobbing. I didn't want to stand up anymore. The floor was solid. It didn't change.

"I'll never help you," the Black Dragon said.

"Is there anybody else I know that's dead?"

"Don't be stupid. Get a pen."

"You can't expect...I can't write poetry right now," I said, holding my hands over my eyes as my nose ran. A human being couldn't get much messier than I was right then, inside or outside.

"GET A PEN. You'll be sending to _The Kenyon Review_ tomorrow."

"They'll never print it."

"Send it anyway," he reinforced with malice.

"And I know the mail isn't real," I said. The dragon chuckled then.

"Oh do you?"

"It never goes out. It just comes in," I muttered. A light burned out above and the room dropped a notch toward darkness. The dragon leaned down on his haunches.

"Now you're gettin' it," he said, quiet but venomous.

"I hate being alive," I came out with. The Black Dragon took a deep breath, tilted his head down, and dribbled spit in my ear.

"Black," he said.

### Nineteen

"Jesus, you stay up late, or all night?" Ilya asked me. I was in a state of numbness over the incessant droning of chatter, cheers, and conversation that swirled throughout the protest. It was difficult to format my thoughts in all of this activity and humming speech, and I couldn't hear Ilya well. I heard about every other word, and 'Jesus', 'up', and 'all night?' made sense to me. He had the bullhorn with him and I began wondering if he should start using it to communicate with me several feet away.

The crowd began one of the more communal chants they had, in which a majority of them would join in, heckling the man they thought was up in my apartment. I had noticed a hierarchy to hateful shouting in the Cake, and there were some slogans and rhymed vindictiveness that plainly didn't catch on so well, that hadn't enough rank. I looked at Ilya and nodded.

"Frogs and toads are different animals," I said. While the nodding answered his question, the statement did not. He looked confused, but let it slide.

"WE DON'T WANT APOLOGY, STOP POLICE BRUTALITY," the people were shouting. As a mass of parts, the throats, lips and tongues that forged this angry sentence had tangled into one another and created a singular, distorted voice that was overwhelming. The line was repeated three times, and then finalized with a shout of 'PROTECT AND SERVE MEANS ANIMALS, TOO', before recycling and starting over. The chanting would fall off every now and then, and there would be general milling and talking. Ever sporadic, it was eventual someone would start shouting the chant again, or another one, and everyone would ride into it with the tepid pique of male corgis admiring a row of mastiffs in heat. There was so much build-up, bottlenecked anticipation, and general excitement, but rapid exclamations of repetitious noise was all they were equipped to do with it.

My face had ratcheted back, tight, as if I'd sat too close to a bonfire through the early morning. It was taking on a leathery texture and composition, from the beatings I and the dragon had put it through. My body felt worse off than my face, but the slight hunching and limping I was doing only added to my disguise, so it was working out to my subjective benefit. I had required quite a few hard scrapings of my face across my kitchen sink faucet to get this version of my face to match the one I had yesterday. Putty could be mashed with the thumbs to make shapes and contours, but a rigid, layered, cartilage and muscle supported face required a higher tier of injury to be compelled into a reformation. A face needed to be tenderized a bit before it would consent to being modified. Cosmetic surgeons and boxers knew this.

"I look tired," I said. My shirt was discolored in the center, on my chest, from an entire 16oz mocha. I'd bought it earlier to help keep myself going, but my arm spasms had begun a round, and the coffee was given over to the repercussions of my conniption. This was as unexpected as any other time this problem chose to initiate my tic phases. I had squeezed the to-go cup until the lid came off, and then my spasms caused me to dumped it out on myself with a gesture that was so simple and curt, it would have seemed, to anyone watching, as if I chose to pour it on myself. I hated how unexpected the jerking arm problem arose. It was the only portion of my 'episodes' that I couldn't predict, as it was but a harbinger of the following two. I wondered if these shakes admitted a genetic makeup that would, in my later life, show me prone to Parkinsonism, or some other spasmodic dilemma.

"Are you cool?" Ilya asked in a loud voice, looking puzzled. I found my pack of cigarettes and lit one, thankful my hand and arm spasms had subsided.

Phase two had proven light and brief this time, but I'd had insults tossed at me for staring at a particular other protestor, and afterward tried to keep my staring focused on people looking away. Ilya had found me shortly after it wore off. I didn't like people staring at me, never had, and the second phase of my disorder always gave me the feeling I was a hypocrite. I knew how much being stared at by a stranger could anger someone, and in doing just that, I disliked myself. I was ashamed and embarrassed, unable to do anything about it. Talking during phase two was painful in a mental way, and blocked, like a person with an awful stutter. It wasn't the tongue that created the dilemma, but the axons and neurons, the cortex, the mind.

Ilya had taken a liking to me the day before, and we were protest-buddies, if there was such a thing. His advice the first day had tapered into a kind of comradeship. When we'd first met, he'd given over to relaxed lectures about what was going on. When he learned I wasn't an imbecile, he left the obvious information out and had stopped sounding like a counselor. It was ironic that I was now trapped into doing just what he'd ceased, which was stating the obvious. We waited near the fire hydrant, Ilya holding a leash tethered to someone's dog, waiting for the mysterious celebrity to arrive.

"We're protestors," I said, sighing in my thoughts. Ilya nodded. The chant had died off and we could hear each other without augmentation.

"Here, man. You need this more than I do," he added, bending down and retrieving his latte from the ground where he tended to keep them. Due to the misfire I'd experienced while trying to drink my coffee earlier, the stain ever-present on my shirt, I was thankful. Coffee sounded ideal, and I'd missed out on mine. I had a strong lug of Ilya's latte and grimaced. It was old and had cooled to the temperature of the air around us. It had no flavoring that I could recognize, but a strange, milky texture that I couldn't identify as proper milk or cream. The beverage had been diluted by some other substance. I had thought he drank lattes, from the container they were in, which had 'Latte' stenciled on it in a clear, hip, coffee-shop font, but this was some kind of cruel trick. I would have preferred black coffee to whatever odd drink this was. Was it gopher milk he'd added to it? I frowned and swallowed.

"Ugh, the sky is air," I said.

"There you go, a little coffee and everything brightens right? It can't be good for us, but if I don't have my coffee first thing in the morning, I swear it rains all day, literally."

"You're taller than me," I answered.

"Well, somebody's gotta be me, may as well be me," he replied, smiling, taking my statement to be an indication I thought he was in some way noteworthy or better than me, that I held a respect or interest in him.

"I have shoes," I muttered to myself, taking another sip of the strange, alien beverage.

A commotion broke out near the edge of our four-hundred plus demonstration, and people began shouting and cheering. Ilya hopped up a few times, looking over the sea of heads. His face lifted into a dramatic exhilaration and then he beat his chest like an ape.

"Hoo! That's the guy! We're on!" he said, letting go of the dog leash and jogging off into the crowd. The celebrity had arrived. I watched the dog run off, dragging the leash behind it as it disappeared into the crowd of people. I lost track of Ilya and so followed in the direction he'd gone, stopping at one point to ditch the coffee in a garbage can. I'd buy something else to drink later. Before I could drop it, however, another man reached over and took the cup from me.

"Dude, Styrofoam. What are you thinking?" he asked.

"I have organs inside," I said, rushed, and then continued after Ilya, my head pivoting like a spotlight on a tripod.

The people were crowding into a particular spot like a black hole of activists. In the center, when I drew close and could see, was some form of stretched sedan, white, and with the appearance it was washed twice a day. I could see the surrounding buildings shining in its sheen of glimmering paint. A door opened in the rear and a man stepped out. There was more cheering and numerous gasps.

"No shit!" a woman next to me said, surprised. I spotted Ilya, several odoriferous human links ahead of me, and I heard him shouting to the crowd.

"HEY! EVERYBODY CALM DOWN, ALL RIGHT? STAY COOL. LET'S NOT CROWD HIM." The man from the luxury car turned toward the voice and I saw his face. It rose into the sky in bas relief, every pore and rigid angle of his jaw emblazoned across the world in all recognizable clarity.

"It's Michael Hausen!" someone exclaimed. Others repeated it and the crowd began to buzz like a grid of power transformers. Michael Hausen, the movie star, the man who aced his talk show appearances with unfaltering attitude, the man the tabloids had once linked to every young, drunkard in actress heels. He'd even had an action figure a few years ago for his role in that movie about pirate Henry Morgan. I watched as he waved and prospered his amazing, toothy mouth into a smile that made him seem as important as a holy man.

"LEMME THROUGH." Ilya shouted. Hausen scanned for the voice and found Ilya edging into the circle the crowd had formed around the car. Ilya approached Hausen and they exchanged words no one could hear, and after this, they shook hands. Ilya knew Michael Hausen? The crowd quieted a level when the actor put his hands up and motioned them to settle down.

"Okay people...calm down, come on now, let's settle down, we're all professionals, here," Ilya said through the loudspeaker. When few people showed any response, he repeated a shorter and starker version, raising his voice. The crowd complied. I watched Ilya point at my apartment window and talk with an animated zest to the famous actor. After a moment, Michael Hausen turned and faced my apartment building, looking up at my window as if puzzling something out in his mind. Was he here to protest? Was he here to study for a role? The crowd became quiet and waited.

Sliding his face up the skirt of a mild breeze, Michael Hausen, the Academy Award winning actor and public icon, his perfect hair blustering about his head's unmistakable profile, slowly lifted his arm high into the air toward my apartment window, and extended his middle finger. The crowd became volcanic. They dissolved into cheer, screaming, roaring, flipping off my apartment, all of them, jumping around and shaking one another. Michael Hausen stood there, his powerful arm to the sky, his rigid middle finger carving a beam of celebrity light all the way to my sad, isolated third story window, and the moths about this apotheosized human lantern druzzed with fervor. My dilemmas of late had just ascended into a level for which neither I, nor Boston, was prepared.

"Holy shit! _Hausen's_ with us!" a man nearby sputtered, twisting with joy.

The mannerisms and usual mode of Ilya's face had altered into a new set, which bore the traits of intrigue, admiration, and empowerment. I could sense that he was more impressed with himself for carrying on a conversation with this figure than in what topic was being exchanged.

"Because you have to understand," Hausen continued, "There is no force in modern culture more powerful than an active consensus. Look at this country...land of the free, home of the brave, right? Beside the irony of that being a slogan anymore, how much bravery do _you_ see around this nation? I don't see so much anymore, you follow? And free... I don't even want to get into that."

"Action is authorized most when authority fails to act," Ilya commented. It sounded a slogan, as well.

"Yeah, I heard that one," Hausen said, "and I'd add, 'or when authority overacts'. See, it's not just action that's needed, but latent organization. And I mean _latent_. It's not about solidarity, as much as people seem to think it is. It's about established point-action, _distinguished measure,_ AND solidarity."

"Okay," Ilya offered, to demonstrate he was still following.

"Because there's your bravery, there's your freedom. That's what this land was founded on. When shit happens, it's up to us as living, breathing histories to intervene and show the world what has gone wrong," Hausen concluded. At the phrase 'gone wrong', he had made a brief glance and chin-lift at my window.

"Distinguished measure..." Ilya pondered.

"Yeah, and I don't like scumbags," Hausen added, smiling, his back against the fire-hydrant in an awkward but settled fashion.

"You're an actor," I said to him.

"Nine to five, buddy, only nine to five. More important, I'm a guy like you, who doesn't like people killing endangered animals, and especially not _this_ prick," he said, twitching his thumb at my window again.

"We breathe air," I answered, my mind turning like soured milk. How long was this phase going to last? I had legitimate things I needed to know, and this moment with Hausen and Ilya would be perfect for getting the details I would need to pull off my sabotage. My idea on ending this protest needed momentum and impetus, but my damned nervous tic was showing me to be rather simian, and at an important time.

Hausen just looked at me a moment, eyebrow raised; slowly, his face dawned.

"You seem like a nice man. Are you here with anyone?" he said, annunciating well and raising his tone. What a strange shift in character.

"Cookie was a Panda," I said, chastising myself in my mind. Hausen chuckled.

"Yep. Do you like pandas? They're my favorite, too," he said. Ilya, who was listening to this bizarre exchange, just looked back and forth between us. It seemed Michael Hausen had concluded that I was mentally challenged, or 'special', perhaps retarded, even...whatever term applied most in his particular community. I pointed at Ilya's chest and opened my mouth.

"Shirt," I said. Hausen quieted for a moment, but then couldn't contain himself and began laughing. It didn't seem rude the way he did it, but good-hearted. He then corrected himself.

"Sorry. Yes, yes that's a shirt. What's your name?"

"Cut it out, man. Now's not the time to screw around," Ilya said to me, interjecting.

"Sorry, I have these fits where I can't really control what I say," I explained, a choir seeping into my heart and blooming in happiness. I had managed to blather out a statement that was not obvious. It seemed I had recuperated enough to handle myself again, and the phase was over.

"Well cut it out," Ilya repeated, upset. I thought I might have detected a tweet of jealousy, as well.

"Fits?" Hausen asked, curious.

"Uh, sort of; I shake for a while, then stare, then I just say random things and I can't really control it. I'm sorry," I explained. I felt like the smudge left over in a toilet bowl after trouble.

"Are you high?" Hausen asked. Ilya's eyes widened. He didn't like that the conversation had become ordinary, or non-protest related.

"No. It's happened for awhile. I'm sorry."

"My sister used to get the shakes and say lines from songs she'd heard. She'd get nervous and do it as a comfort thing. This was when she was younger, of course, and she couldn't help it. But she was always high when she did it. Turns out she was allergic to pot," Hausen offered.

"Oh. Weird," I replied. I could see why this man was so likeable and interesting. Fame was a catalyst, of course, but he was rather warm and unique, aside. There was the matter of his despisal and overcast gestures toward the other me, who he believed was in my apartment above, but he seemed to be friendly for all else.

"Hell, I've got a high-jump injury from high school that still messes with me whenever I enter any kind of cold water. Makes my hip hurt like you wouldn't believe. You ever see 'The Diver'?" he asked. This was a reference to a movie he'd starred in almost a decade ago, in which he had played an Olympic diving team hopeful that had to overcome a younger brother's death by drowning. I hadn't liked it much, but it was a signal flare movie that year; a brief, budget-headed, summery contender.

"I saw it," Ilya said, joining the conversation with speed.

"Me too," I answered.

"Okay, so I was in the water for hours, cold water, every day, week after week. There was all this scheduling bullshit going on with the three pools, so they shot it all out of whack. I had to keep going back to the water scenes, over and over again. It may have been a short flick, but jesus, my hip paid in pain for that role."

"So, about today," Ilya returned to topic, "how would you prefer we handle the news crews?" This was the topic he had attempted to jumpstart several times, and it appeared it was going to have play, this time. Hausen kind of scoffed; more because of Ilya's obvious switch of subject and how sudden and rude it was, but he became thoughtful, as well.

"Honestly, man? I'll tell you, they should see me first. I know it sounds vain, but there's a logic to crews. Let 'em see me first, get their fill. It's so the cameras don't veer off the protest untimely. They're gonna know by then I'm here, and until they get their shots of me out of the way, they'll ditch the protest filming," he explained. It didn't bear the eloquence of his infamous 'we-will-not-fall' speech during the climax of _The Spartan_ , but it did make more sense.

"Okay, I get it. Give 'em you, then they'll cover the protest," Ilya affirmed.

"Shameful, but that's how it works," the actor said, shrugging.

"So how do we set this up," Ilya returned. Hausen dissipated into minor thought, looking blank at the cement between his feet, and biting at the tip of his tongue. After a few moments, he sniffed his nose and looked up.

"All right. Just fuck 'em, you know? They'll set up where they set up. Let 'em. I'm not here to get attention to myself, but we all know they'll focus on me being here. So fuck it, I'll show as quick as I can, but at a distance, and let's just let 'em roll camera and see where it gets us."

"What if they want to interview you?"

"Oh, they will, but no; no interviews. You can, but not me. If they start toward me and you want the interview, get in front of 'em and do your thing. It'll detract from the protest too much if I interview. I mean, if they zero in on me, I'll just point 'em to you. We have to keep it balanced. Let 'em see us, and me in the mix...god, that sounds vain of me, but shit, we all know they're gonna focus on celebrity, what they know, so...anyway, they'll just roll camera and do their thing. Let's make sure nobody's goofing off too much near the reporters or cameras... stay on top of whatever the crowd is doing, and we're good," he said.

"Sounds great," I threw in. It wasn't necessary or useful, but then neither was I.

"All right, I think I know how it should work then," Ilya said, mulling it over in his head. What an odd arrangement celebrity must be. Where did Hausen go to buy milk? How did he fare in a long line at a department store? Maybe he had someone buy his milk. Maybe he hadn't been in a department store in decades.

"Good. I mean, I don't want to be rude," Hausen said, "but I just can't poster-child this thing. That should probably be your role. After all, you _did_ set this function up. And pretty well, I might add," Ilya nodded and sighed, smiling. This affirmation by Michael Hausen gave him a good feeling. I remembered a news broadcast years ago that mentioned Michael Hausen belonging to some sort of charity program. The news on my television had shown him in a desert environment, surveying a ditch and shaking his head. I supposed it wasn't so bizarre he would be here in the Cake, but if he hadn't arrived, I would have never recalled that news broadcast. I patted my protest-buddy's arm, to relax him and give my false support, though wasn't really sure why. I half expected him to nudge my hand away, after the embarrassment he'd had over my stating-the-obvious antic.

"This is gonna get a lot of attention today," Ilya said, solemn.

"It's for the best," Hausen commented, "And that's the point, right? Show the public. Now, I remember you mentioned in your email some 'event' you were planning in the middle of all this?"

"Well yeah, a demonstration," Ilya affirmed. My ears lifted and I tuned in. A demonstration?

"When do you have it planned? I'm out for tomorrow night. I have another commitment I have to do while I'm in town," Hausen responded.

"Sure. It actually didn't involve you personally, but if you want to be in on it, we're doing it day after tomorrow. I don't know how long you'll be in town for."

"I've got four days," the actor said.

"Really? That's great!"

"My schedule is remarkably open this year," Hausen commented with a wry smile.

"Mine, too," I threw in, feeling a little pathetic.

"Well, here's how it works. I have an idea for this kind of powerful but positive, symbolic demonstration." Ilya pitched.

"Sounds good. What is it? What do you have in mind?" the actor inquired.

"All right, dig this..." Ilya said in a lowered voice. Hausen and I leaned in. After looking around to see if anyone was listening, Ilya grunted and, using his hands to gesture in a very animated way, he began quietly describing his plan. We were three cohorts, of equal stature on our new side-track of life. It was temporary, but I felt a part of the planning, the inciting, the activity. Hausen and Ilya exchanged notions and ideas, building on Ilya's initial plan with zeal. Even I added a detail at one point. This was the closest I had come to having friends in years, and we discussed the exacting details of hating me with utmost creativity.

### Twenty

Though the effect was more of shock than pleasant recognition, there he was, right next to my father, in the appropriate role of a meter maid. Gonzalez. I had no knowledge that my ex-trainer had an interest in theater, much less that he was to perform in the very play my father was starring. Then again, I'd only really known him for a total of about six hours on that rather awful day in which I murdered the iconic heart of Boston. If it wasn't for the constant settling of the floor beneath me causing a sense of inescapable anxiety, I might have been better able to gauge whether he was a good actor or not.

I lifted from my seat and balanced as the floor tilted downward an inch. It caught and stopped, the creaking subsided, and I used a shaken caution when lowering my posterior back into the dusty, ancient theater seat. The show was sold out, and I was angry at the theater personnel for having over-filled their guest seats. It almost seemed a better idea to miss my father's brilliant acting debut than sit in the condemned balcony they had perched me in. After belly-crawling under the boarded up entrance to the balcony, I'd found my seat, as well as a hearty portion of recurring panic. My belly was covered in dust I couldn't seem to brush off. While it did create a sense of importance, or of being special, watching the production above everyone else, the balcony wouldn't stop moving. Every shift of my weight seemed to make it lose another notch of strength. I worried that if I stood to give ovation at the end of the play, it might send me plunging the thirty feet to my death, or the death of whoever I landed on in the floor-level back row.

"It's not good enough, Edward. You never understood. The days came and went, and your eyes never looked back." Sam, as the young and homosexual Adam, spectacularized in voice.

"Adam..." my father, as the old man Edward, replied with grief.

"IT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Adam roared.

"Blood brothers," Edward returned. Sam's character wavered, in shock.

"What did you say?"

"Blood brothers, remember? Those days didn't need eyes, Adam... they had the blood," Edward said, extending his palm for inspection. Adam then lifted his own palm and stared at it as if, for some small portion of time, he was remembering the womb. I was impressed. My old man was passing through the membrane of this performance in vibrant colors. Even Sam, the young, attractive, gay man performing in the role of a young, attractive, gay man was being overshadowed. I knew my father had learned his lines, and done some play-watching research over the months, but I never expected he'd beetle through the crowd like this. He was as if a wonderful bouquet that had slipped into the lives of every viewer in the audience, including mine. You couldn't take your eyes from him. If it wasn't for the fact that he was eighty years old, I'd have to assume he'd be going home tonight with some definite and eager fan tail. Then again, with his outlook, who knew? Maybe he would.

The floor tilted forward several inches and I pressed myself back against my seat with my feet on the ground. My hands, wet from the tension, were unable to grip the arm-rests well, and I feared this was it. The balcony was going to collapse and I'd be thrown flailing like a depth-charged squid down onto the playhouse floor three stories down. The balcony's tilting ceased then, and kept a slight decline, meaning my feet would have to prop me from sliding out of my chair for the remainder of the play. I wanted to get off the balcony. I wanted to stay there and watch the play. Conundrum. The anxiety was making me crave a cigarette with an almost maddening caprice.

"All right, somebody has to pay this meter, or I'm callin' a tow truck," Gonzalez—as the meter maid—said to the two men. He sounded stilted, to small degree, but my history with him, and my knowledge that he was, in real life, a cop, gave his role some credence to me. I wondered if he knew I was watching, or if he had any noesis that Joe, my father, was Edward, the lead. My father turned to him then, lifting his chin and pointing at the meter.

"Let it ride," he said, rigid. There was meaning and depth in it, power, a callback to an earlier moment in the play, and it was handled with such care and mastery. I had trouble thinking about the man who'd said it being my father. He was as if another man: Edward born from Joe. Adam stepped aside and held his hands over his eyes.

"Jesus, Edward..."

"Let it ride, brother," Edward said to him, "Let it ride." I almost wept. It was as if the entire state of truth in the world had been funneled into this single moment. It opened up the play into a realm of depth I couldn't fathom, but had to believe was there by the signs it left, like dropping an ice cube into a glass of dark soda. I watched as Gonzalez stepped back, acting perturbed by his treatment. He exited in a huff while Edward and Adam stared at one another.

"I'm sorry, Edward," Adam said, slow. He was shaken. He was weary. He was post-anger but pre-redemption. Edward embraced him, hugging and comforting while they stood on the well-painted street set.

"We all fight ourselves, Adam. We're all monsters," Edward replied, nurturing and strong. Adam looked up into his eyes. They're lips crept closer, the lights brightened, and the theater became silent. This was the moment for which my father had dreaded in his months before performance. The kiss scene...the precise epicenter of confusion, hope, and care that the entire play was shocked around. Edward and Adam leaned their faces forward and closed their eyes atop the vast, empty stage. I closed my eyes as well.

### ***

People were screaming and shouting orders back and forth across the theater. I hung there, holding onto the lower railing for what seemed like an eon. The people came and went, shows were put on, actors cast and fired, prizes won. The crowd of theater patrons arrived again and again, watching everything from drab personal histories disguised as plighted fancies of class and creed, to melodramatic forays into the perverse and anecdotal. Plays? People put them on. People acted in them. People watched them. I was a person, but I hung from the balcony three stories above what was most likely my battered, bone-shattering demise in the imminent collision of my body with a row of empty seats. The four pound jar of cooking oil in my backpack was hindering me, hanging from the crook of my elbow and threatening to pull my hand free.

"They're getting rope, son! Hold on!" a voice came up. Logic would surmise this was my father, but I didn't recognize anything at that point, even a voice that should have been familiar. I heard 'son', so it must have been dad. The universe had sweltered and boiled off, leaving me in a mini-game with fate. The level in which I played was 'The Wendy', and the task for which I needed puzzle out was 'not falling'. I lacked confidence I could complete this particular goal, and began thinking of prayer. All of my being was focused on the not-so-simple task of keeping my moist, sweaty fingers wrapped around the smooth, polished rail of the collapsed, dangling balcony.

I let go in my mind. I felt the air rush up around me, my legs rising, my arms circling in crawls of motion as the climactic, resonating movie score started in and the audience witnessed the unavoidable death of the main character. This was the end of the film. Had I saved a child at expense of my own existence? Had I gone to bat against the villains and stopped them by my very life's forfeit? Had I been thrown from a bridge, or jumped from a burning building? Was I falling from a plane, landmark, or mountain of terrorists? No matter; it would be piously summarized in the epilogue. The improbable script would conclude. I was the main character of the story, and my death was more important than my life. It gave the story meaning. It filled the seats and emptied the popcorn bin. With my throat contracted around a grunt that had become stuck inside it, I squinted and looked up toward the ceiling, closer to me than the floor. I felt my shoes touch one another as the balcony gave another lurch. I heard a woman below scream that I was going to fall. My end was expensive, cruel, crucial, and near biblical. I had to die to create the emotion of truth. I had to come down to resonate. I would not make it to the credits.

"Can you pull yourself up?" came a man's voice. That was a question so preposterous and foreign to me that I wanted to laugh. Why would I continue hanging there if I could, by any normal means, climb to safety? I didn't respond, though not because the audience member's question was a forfeit of words, but because my mouth was full of plaster dust that had plumed when the balcony floor split. I had been granted but two seconds to find a hold on something hard when the balcony collapsed. The two forces had worked in unison. The plaster dust had shot into my face, gumming up my ability to speak, while the balcony's sharp drop had caused me a mad, panicked groping at the carpet, squealing into what I expected was the void. Now I was voiceless and imperiled. They may as well have set a coffin below and waited.

"Get him down! goddamn it, get him down!" I heard a gruff voice say. People seemed quite concerned with my safety, though I did note that all of them had moved the hell out from under me with speed when the balcony gave way. They now stood below but to the sides, out of range of my last possible flails should I end up losing my then unsteady grip on mortality. I imagined their concern with my predicament was coupled with a hearty fear of the balcony itself falling.

Then, I saw the hands. Someone had crawled to the edge on the third floor landing, to the entrance of the balcony, above me. I praised several gods and a handful of lesser deities. Some excellent soul was finally coming for me. They were male hands, and looked to know a certainty I found myself begging for and betting on. The man leaned over the drop-off, where the balcony's flooring had split and been torn apart. The amazing hands were a mere five feet above me, and they had muscular arms, and the arms had broad shoulders aside the man's head, and the head belonged to Michael Hausen.

"Jesus, it's you!" Hausen exclaimed. He went down flat on his stomach, letting his head drape over the edge. I gave a slight nod, unable to give any other sign that I was hearing him besides eye contact. My mouth was full of grainy plaster dust and the rest of my body was being utilized in dying.

"Shit, hold on, all right? I got something. It should be strong enough to support your weight." he said, his eyes wide and his mind turning end over end. I felt the fingers of my left hand slide an inch over the smooth, polished rail, and my backpack was growing heavier by the moment.

"All right man, we're on this. You stay focused on me, like this," Hausen said, pointing his finger back and forth between my eyes and his. When I nodded affirmative, he backed up to where I couldn't see him again. I saw some red, velvety rope issue over the top of the break and slowly snake down beside me. It was queue-line rope. Hausen stuck his head over the collapsed floor again, looking down at me with a concern that made my heart grow like a sponge in a glass of water.

"This is gonna happen, man. This is it. I got it on my end, okay? Just ditch that pack and grab the rope."

I nodded again, tears welling in my eyes. This behavior of watering eyes was not due to dust or fear, however. They were for Michael Hausen, who I now loved with all of my worthless, shitty heart. Tears left my eyes and rolled down past my ears, reaching my neck. What a glorious man, a hero, a champion. I would buy his action figure from a store tomorrow and make a little altar for it. I would join his fan club website and argue in the forums. I would wash his car and keep the ticket stubs for all of his movies I would now wait in line to see without qualm.

"You ready? Okay, think about it, drop the pack, and then grab on." he said, eyeing me with care. I wasn't going to let go of the backpack. The facsimile inside was too crucial. I didn't know what would happen if I lost it, if it broke, but if I didn't drop it, I might lose my life. I was going to have to try and grab with the backpack still hanging from my elbow's crook, and hope it didn't slow me too much to reach the velvet.

"You got it. Just ditch the pack, reach out, grab," Hausen prompted, a look of hazard and focus bearing down on me with compassion.

If I failed to grasp the velvet rope, or if I managed it but the rope didn't support my weight, I would plummet to the end watching him watch me. I wouldn't avert my eyes, not even when I hit. My sprawled, broken body would crumple into the seats below, with my last breath escaping into the moldy, landmark playhouse, and my eyes would be locked on his, telling him for a single, creaturely moment, everything. That's how fucking cool I decided he was.

He waited, looking down at me, watching closely as I turned my head toward the rope. It was right next to me and easily in reach, but my hands were wet and one of my arms was weighed down with the backpack and jar. I wondered if I'd have enough time to grab it once I let go, as the inertia might get me. I took in a nasal breath, filling my lungs, then blinked hard several times, clearing my eyes, trying to concentrate my senses on the straight line between my left hand and the rope. I saw the movement as a series of points on a graph. It was so simple, so straight, so unwavering and present. Plotting it took so little effort, because it was obvious and accountable. I felt an affrighted heartbeat come and go, and then I flung my left hand at the stained, red velvet.

Time approaches minds with the same certainty a bison uses when reaching a river. It stops, readjusts, lowers its head, and for the smallest instant—without so much as a thought—it drinks. My memories tangled and I felt the surf rise in my blood. I had so many cells. Crystalline, fragmented, thirsty. They ran amok in my body as each muscle and bone twisted, straining and living, dreaming of dreaming on. The weight of the air filled my hand and I grasped past this, beyond it like plunging a fist through water to strike a shallow fish. The water was cold, the velvet fish flit left, and the bison finished his sip.

"POW! That's how it's done!" Hausen exclaimed, "You just hold on tight and I'm gonna pull you up. Use your feet against the balcony to walk; one hand and foot at a time, right? You got it," Hausen said, giving his famous voice as commentary to my scene of survival, my harrowing moment of crowd-gasping action. I had my very own causal agent, a true _deus ex machina_ , and it was warm and wonderful. The main character didn't die, the story wasn't over, it would continue past the credits, and my character was primed for a happy ending. For shame, my script-writer had taken the money way out.

"Just use your feet to walk up," Hausen repeated, grinning, standing at the edge of the hallway where it once met the balcony, holding the velvet rope on which I dangled. One hand at a time, I made my way up, scaling once I reached the vertical, hanging balcony again. The jar swayed in the backpack, but disrupted me little. I funneled my being into climbing upwards, the most hopeful and encompassing of human traits.

Back in the hallway, I fell on my side, terrestrial again. I couldn't get the horror of falling out of my mind. I felt like I was still hanging, and that the rest of the world had simply come down to join me. I worked my tongue out, shoving the saliva-glued plaster glop from my mouth and spitting its flecks from my lips. When my mouth was cleared, I breathed the air like a straining, boat-floor cod.

"You got balls like I've never seen. That was fucking amazing," Hausen said to me, his hand on my chest. I felt like a child that had succeeded, finally, in gaining the respect and adoration of his no-nonsense, pillar of a father. What things then surged through my bloodstream; adoration, pleasure, thanks, joy, the indomitable power of surviving an end.

"Mr. Hausen..." I began, shaken and very conscious of my nerves and pulse.

"Mike, man."

"Mike. Thank you," I said. I meant it more than I could have expressed in my current position, which was fetal, inattentive, and weak.

"Jesus, I'm just glad you're okay. I saw you hangin' there and I thought it was over. What are you doing here?" he asked. I couldn't think of a reason this needed to be explained right then, but couldn't rummage a reason to decline answer, either. I'd come to see a play, to see my father.

"My dad's Edward," I replied, dazed and sitting up. When I started to stand, I wavered. The walls pitched back.

"Whoa whoa, hold on there. You can sit. No need to get up yet," Mike said. I became aware of the people around me. There were dozens of them and I could hear more on the stairwell, asking questions, sounding both horrified and relieved.

"Yeah, I should sit," I concurred, stunned and disoriented, "What are _you_ doing here?" I queried. It felt almost wrong to question the man who'd just saved my life about anything at all. If he'd told me he was a terrorist and was scouting for public landmarks to destroy, and that I had to both keep quiet about it, as well as repay him in money or sexual favors for saving my life, at that point, I think I would have shrugged.

"Me? I have sort of a thing for this play," he responded, "I haven't seen it in years, and no one puts it on anymore because...well, Irvine Galstrom has some problems. But I planned a trip when my agent told me it would be here. I've had him on the lookout for almost two years. I was in this play once. If you want to know the truth, the protest kind of came second to me. Or at least, it all sort of tied together." I remembered then, Michael Hausen had earned his big break as Adam, before he went on to Hollywood and all the struggling underdog roles and occasional action flicks.

"What did you think of my dad?" I asked, not really in any mood to hear an answer. Everyone was staring at me and I wanted the moment to be as little about me as possible, which wasn't very. I was thankful that the man who had rescued me was the famous actor, as everyone paid more attention to his presence than mine.

"Your dad's Edward?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Out of the park," he said before contributing a slight laugh, "I gotta say though, I think maybe you stole the performance." I didn't know how to respond to this, so gave a fake sort of chuckle, looking at all of the smiling, 'pleased-your-not-dead' faces. I heard the balcony creak behind me and wondered if it was going to fall. Someone down below gave a shout for others to vacate the floor.

"Hard to top a death-defying stunt; ask me, I know," Hausen said. I felt like an infliction, a half-wit embarrassment, having wriggled my shameful self into the evening plans of so many people, only to dance away with their night on the wobbles of my pitiful, dopey misfortune. The play had been but minutes from ending when the balcony started groaning beneath me. I had held still as stone then, wary and uncertain as to how I was going to get back into the hallway and off the disastrous, pitched balcony. I'd become trapped, and when attempting to move, the tilting had only stuttered more.

The way it began was with a crashing sound that emanated from the supports. My feet were jarred from the floor, my ass tossed back into the seat, and the entire balcony then collapsed, ending the play before curtain. I was the cellar twin that had escaped when someone forgot to lock the basement door. I was the stray dog with shit on its fur that came too near during the picnic. I was the accident waiting to happen, and I'd ruined my father's play.

"Was anyone hurt by debris?" I asked then. It hadn't occurred to me until then that the items I saw whizz past my head as I grappled the banister, including the falling seats, might have struck someone. What would an antique, wooden playhouse seat do to someone if it struck them from three stories up?

"I don't know. Nobody's said anything," Hausen responded. After a moment he looked up at the group.

"Anybody get hurt?" he asked, sounding as if his worry was legitimate. He was either a great actor, or a great guy, and I didn't care which had saved my life.

"Move...please move..." I heard and watched as my father pushed through the front line of onlookers in the hallway, dropping his rosewood cane in the process. He jerked forward and then, shaking, knelt down at my side. I was sitting up and running my hand over my head, my body sore and stressed. What a nuisance I was. All of the people present knew it. Once home, they would question what was wrong with me, and why I'd seen fit to hang out on a condemned balcony in an old playhouse, why I'd put other people's lives in danger. They'd talk about how I deserved an honorable mention for the Darwin Award.

"Sorry, dad. They told me to sit up there, and it just broke out from under me." I said. He looked down at the floor and took my hand, his lip quivering and a hard breath falling past it.

"You were so great, too." I muttered, meaning it. He gasped and shook. Michael Hausen stepped back and gave us a distance from himself and the crowd.

"Oh my boy...shit...ah shit..." my father mumbled, squeezing my hand and beginning to sob.

### Twenty-one

26th Avenue wound off before us as we traversed the route to _Il Costoso_ , an aureate Italian restaurant that had been erected with strategy on the north side of downtown. It was around sixteen blocks from the playhouse, and my father had felt like walking. There were near two dozen people in tow, most of them actors from the production, various backstage personnel, as well as my father's friend, the director. While our pace was slow as my father made his way, cane in hand, the walk was relaxing and a much-needed change of air for me. My adrenaline reactor had undergone a final dimming, and its closure was managed. I felt cooled in my chamber, and somewhat myself again.

"I know you didn't want to talk to the news," I said, apologetic.

"Ah, it was unavoidable. What confuses me is why the cops ignored you so much. They didn't even check to see if you were injured, or ask you what happened," Hausen stated, pondering. The police knew me as the colossal screw-up I was, for my stint as an officer, and didn't want anything to do with me. I was still expecting Sergeant Hackle's boat payment to arrive in the mail. The position I held in the Cake was one of subterfuge, but after Michael Hausen had saved my life, I didn't believe I could fulfill it. Duping him felt to be something beyond wrong.

"About the cops," I said, "I think I should tell you something." Hausen looked at me with interest then.

"Fuck 'em. They're disorganized; worst thing for any collection of people. And anyway, are you kidding me? Saving a guy while watching the play that started my career? You just cemented my comeback. I don't mean to understate what happened, but there are some things for which you never dodge publicity." I stared at him, wanting to explain that he'd saved the life of a liar, as well as the sole enemy in his involvement with the protest. It would be so simple: I'd open my mouth and say: _It's me. I killed the bear. You're not allowed to like me. I'm the enemy._

"Well, thank you," I said, hating myself, "I guess I could be dead right now."

"Forget that, man. Thank _you,_ " he posited.

"Listen, Mr. Hausen..." my father joined, dropping back to our place in the procession. I stepped aside and dwindled into thought.

"Mike," he replied.

"Mr. Hausen, I can't thank you enough. You rescued my son and I wish there was a way I could repay you for it." My father was sincere and his statement was one of asking. What an awful man I was. The aged actor had rescued me from a painful death, and in older days, I'd owe him a life-debt. My father wanted to repay Hausen, and Hausen had just thanked me, and my father was so pleased I hadn't been hurt, but I'd destroyed my father's play and was planning on destroying Hausen's protest. What kind of press would Michael Hausen get when I unleashed my dead-pig attack on him? He'd be branded a radical loon, like the others involved with the protest.

"Oh, I don't know anyone who wouldn't have done the same thing. No need to thank me, and repayment doesn't apply at all."

"Thank you so much. You're a good man. I owe you. Thank you so much."

I did feel a small and trivial touch of jealousy over my father's praise to Hausen, but this only made me feel more pathetic, and I let it pass with ease. I noticed then that there was a large fly buzzing my father's head, for which he swatted.

"Hey, I'll tell you what: Keep playin' Edward like you did tonight and we're square. Anyway, I was just the guy closest to the stairs. It could have been anybody," Hausen said. I imagined that was true.

"Well, it wasn't anybody. Thank you," my father stated, almost gracious. The fly landed on my father's head and he brushed it off, annoyed. At this point, we heard a calling from the head of our procession. It was the director, near the front, his neck craned around as he scanned the members of our group. He spotted Hausen and waved a moment. Hausen sighed.

"I said I'd have a talk with him; may as well get it over with," Hausen said, picking up speed and waving back to the director.

"Watch out, he's a sycophant," my father threw out. Hausen walked ahead to meet the director at the head of the group. It grew quiet and I became aware of how ominous a lack of traffic could seem. It was almost alien to walk among tall buildings and progressively designed urban shops and have no noise but your own. The loudest sounds present were footsteps, my father's occasional grunt as he swatted at the obnoxious, following fly, and the wings of the fly itself.

My pack had loosened a bit in the fall, and now had an uncomfortable, leaning placement on my back. I took it off and began readjusting the loosened strap.

"What do you have in there, anyway?" my father asked.

"Nothing important," I said, trying to come off ordinary. He smiled.

"Let me guess; few books and a writing folder, pen or two?" he mused. He seemed to think this was droll, my trying to hide that I was writing again. I was, yes, but it felt better to agree with him than try to explain the actual item in my backpack.

"Sure, that stuff," I said. My dad patted me on the shoulder.

"Do your thing." He sounded more like Edward just then than Joe. We walked another block, my father using his cane for balance and taking in the night air. The fly followed us, obnoxious and attracted to my father's head. He swiped at it again, then stopped walking.

"Son, listen. I don't think I'm going to the restaurant with you after all. But I wanted to talk for a second," he said. I looked at him, wondering if the walk had tired him too much. It seemed my desire to see him act his age was beginning to be fulfilled, and I found myself uncertain as to whether I still wanted it. He lowered his head in a sigh. No, he wasn't tired, this was something else, and I suspected it the moment the sigh left his lungs. I averted my eyes. It was apology time, he felt, for our argument of the previous week, when I'd called him an old coot and he'd demanded I leave him be. I'd thought about it and wasn't sure he was at fault at all. It was my madness that had caused our argument. Percy was gone, and I'd been acting as if he wasn't. My father hadn't been able to endure this. My mind was a mess and I couldn't but wonder how long he'd been putting up with my haphazard mental frame.

"I wanted to say I was sorry for yelling at you. I went too far," he said, swiping his hand near his right ear to shoo off the troublesome insect, which seemed to possess great dedication in wanting to make my father's head its landing pad.

"No, it wasn't you, dad. My whole brain's a pigsty. We all know it. I just wasn't aware of how upside down I'd become. Percy's gone. I know."

"That's good, son," he said, pursing his lips and nodding, sad.

"You should come to the restaurant, pop. It'll be fun. _Something_ has to salvage this awful night," I countered.

"I don't think so. I just wanted to make sure you remembered your brother."

"I do, and I'm sorry. I don't know how I could have forgotten," I replied, ashamed. The fly buzzed my ear then, causing me to flinch and send out a brief swat. The backpack hit the concrete, its strap having drawn loose from my hands. There was a crushing sound following by a watery lug. My father looked down at it and sighed again.

"Shit, no..." I said, bending and unzipping the backpack with shaky hands.

"Son, people forget things all the time; it's okay." I opened the backpack to discover what I dreaded. The jar had broken and all of the cooking oil had poured out. It began leaking through the bottom of the canvas pack and spreading on the sidewalk.

"Jesus, not this, not now," I muttered, panicked. How was I supposed to find the real jar and get my destiny back if I broke the facsimile? I could imagine the Black Dragon chastising me. I'd end up in the hospital over this one, and worse, I'd never get the treasure in the real jar. The fly seemed to buzz near the oil, mocking me, having purposely ruined my life with its own tiny, bullshit existence.

"Because remembering certain things are hard. Some minds have to make allowances, create room to keep more important things clear," my father stated, being compassionate and not paying any attention to my predicament. I could discern that he'd spent some time in the last week trying to identify with me, to forgive and support me. I busied my hands trying to snow-shovel the oil into a large puddle I could then scoop with my hands back into the pack, which was only leaking the oil faster. I was damned... I'd lost. The fly, as if satisfied, returned to pestering my father.

"Son," he interrupted, "stop it, talk to me."

"Dad, you don't understand. There's more going on than-"

"Would you listen to me a second?" he interrupted, perturbed. I sat on the sidewalk, appalled. The oil crept its way to the lowest point in the sidewalk, which involved a large crack in the concrete. This led it to the curb, then into the gutter. I wanted to cry.

"Sorry dad...that was...oh god," I said, feeling my sanity wanting to leave me right then. I would have to live with it; my lost soul, my horrible, disastrous, twisted life and my lapsed, ever cranked mind. There was no atonement coming for me, no absolution, no happy ending.

"I know it's nothing. Now listen to me, this is important," he said.

"Okay," I replied, shaken and sour.

"You remember when we went to Hager Lake, when you were a kid?" I hadn't thought about that in decades. We'd traveled from Stoughton, the whole family, and stayed in a cabin near the lake.

"Yeah, I remember that. I remember everything, I think. I just forgot for a little while," I replied, believing this was more about my having forgotten Percy. It was likely my father thought I had forgotten other things, and was doing his part to remind me. I watched as the oil ran down into the storm-drain, leaving me behind.

"You loved that lake."

"Sure, it was fun," I said, more automatic than felt.

"Caught the biggest fish they'd had in a year. They gave you that certificate." This brought a glowing brightness to my mind. I hadn't thought about my large trout award in quite some time. I had also caught the best dysentery they'd seen in a year, for which I felt, at the time, was far more deserving of an award. I wondered if my father still had my fishing certificate somewhere. It had been a great vacation, and the last we had undertaken before mom died. He slowly lifted his hand and, after pausing a moment, slapped the top of his head. The fly, having fleetly eluded the hand, droned on above his head in circles.

"Huh! Yeah, I remember that," I said.

"You should go there sometime. Clear your head," he offered.

"Sure, sometime," I lied. I didn't need an affirming trip into the past to feel better. I was more worried about the present.

"I'm serious. Go to Hager Lake. Try to find that one particular spot where maybe you were happiest, you follow?"

"Dad, I'm fine. That's just self-helpish and-"

"DO IT. It's time you had the real thing," he said. His cane fell out of his hand then and onto the ground. I looked up at him, perplexed.

"The real thing?"

"This business of jars is all dreck," he said.

"You...you know about it? I thought I was going mad," I responded, baffled.

"Oh, we passed that mile-marker way back, son." The fly landed on my father's cheek, and he didn't bother dispelling it this time.

How could this be? What insanity or trick was it that my father knew about my quest for the jar? Was it more fantasy? Had I spoken to him about it in some oblivious, blocked state? The Boston air crept into my hair and ears then, shrilling me in the night. I could feel every heartbeat and temperature of every living thing for three blocks. My mind opened and the fish therein began to feed on delirium. There was my father, standing without his cane. I turned away from him and looked off down Wilson Street, toward the eventual highway that could take one to Hager Lake.

"Dad, I don't know what to say."

"Get yourself together. Go to the lake. Get your jar. Just don't answer the phone," he said. I turned then in worry and saw him, still, hunched, breathing hard.

"I don't-" but I was stopped short as I noted the drop of black liquid fall from his lips onto the concrete. I watched as my father's mouth opened and a black, viscous fluid began drizzling out, down his chin. No, not a fluid, it was a stream of little things. It parted downward after leaving his mouth. They were flies. The one on his cheek joined into the stream, and the waterfall of vomited flies hit the concrete, each one spattering into a dot of ink on the ground. He was erupting.

"Jesus, dad!" I shouted, moving forward. He gurgled a moment and put his hands together on his stomach, as if to calm a digestive pain, and then fell backward, loose. When he struck the ground, his body exploded into loose papers. They scattered upward and out. I shouted without words, a horrified, vowel-infused nonsense, leaping back. He was gone. There was no trace of his body. He'd become papers and ink. He was gone. The poems of hundreds scattered across the sidewalk and began lifting on the breeze, blowing into the street and against the buildings, ink-stained and frivolous. A cover letter breezed between my feet as I lost my sense of being upright.

I dropped down on the concrete hard, striking my knees in the process. A slow moan left me as I picked up his cane. The ink trickled into the oil from my broken jar and the papers slid across the air, dissipating into the Boston night.

I set the rosewood cane on my lap. It was the gift I'd given to him for his birthday. The brass head was still warm to the touch.

"Hey man," I heard. My thoughts churned and I tilted my head, looking up; a terminal, drug-injected lab mouse to a passing vivisectionist in white. It was Sam, the co-star.

"You're sitting in oil or something," He said before walking on, catching up with the group. A fly landed on my knee. I wrapped my hands around my head and squeezed, crushing my mind inside, clamping it into servitude. What was happening to me? What manic jack-in-the-box had been sprung in my face? Was this the turning milk of reality? Was the trouble that my mind had become mired in fiction? Was it the proximity of dragons? Was it all just more waking up?

I stood, ink and oil having stained my pants, and I strayed the route. I left the group, feeling as if I'd found the surface from having been lost in the bowels of a dry, howling cave. There was no resolve. Not for me. There was no light anymore. All the purpose in the world seemed fake. He was gone. My father was lost into the folds of my disgusting mind like Percy, like my mother, like the world...but for how long, and to what miserable end, I couldn't know. There was the jar; the stupid jar. Everything else was damaged and appalling.

Inside my body, I felt a kicking sensation, fiery and angry, like something wanting out. Was it bad poetry? Was it a horror baby? Lung cancer? The Red Dragon? Was it my father? The kicking became shoving, moving me toward the Cake, toward my apartment. Was this the sensation of another me trapped inside myself and trying to dig through? My father's cane hung from my fist, its base dragging on the pavement as I walked, a memento or harbinger of the sick, awful world in which I lived. Was it even possible to assume anything was real anymore?

### Twenty-Two

When a man is lost at sea or in some other desolate habitat and needs sustenance to continue, he can neither be blamed nor judged for going to absurd lengths to gain it. The absolute nature of self-defense, which can even wear a mask of destruction, is unavoidable in terse conditions. You take what saves you. You ignore what doesn't. You follow clues. You have no choice. When you hang from a balcony and a rope is presented, no matter how flimsy or unusual, you take it. When you're dying of thirst in the desert and discover a lake, no matter how small or stagnant, you drink from it. When you see your exit on the highway, despite how many others you may have passed and that seem more appealing or enticing, you take it, even if it isn't where you really want to go. This is simply your exit, and you have to pull off.

The off-ramp brought me onto Highway 495, a rural stretch of pavement that fed into Folie County. This was a two lane experiment in infinity, as the scenery was prone to repeating itself. The world surrounding Highway 495 seemed to have been drawn by early background animators. It recurred, cycling past, drafting and regurgitating the same details and scenery in an ongoing succession of roadside Americana: The dried-out tree with the tire swing on the rotting rope, then the nice ranch-style house with the pickup in front of the garage, instead of in it...After this came the field, then a sign, then the tree with the tire swing and nice house again, the same pickup in front of the same garage, which all blended into yet another flat field that gave you an alarmingly minuscule amount of anything to notice or look at. This was unending. Yogi Bear ran beside my car, his hypophysial, dwarf sidekick, Boo Boo, sputtering dependably behind him as the backdrop oscillated past.

Ilya's car had a large, rust-eaten hole in the floor between my knees that allowed me to lean forward and spit onto the dizzying flicker of the highway below. It was more than sizeable enough for my foot to fall through, if I so chose to let it. This would have resulted in an instant wrenching of my foot from my body. There was a slight draft from this fissure that breezed against my groin, which was both unsettling and diminishing. Ilya, a conservationist and activist, seemed to maintain an unnecessarily oversized vehicle that was both bedraggled and wholly wretched.

With little to do, I mazed myself in tangential thought. While internal, this was the only trace of scenery I could let myself spend any time inspecting, though I didn't prefer to rummage through my head for very long. The volume of oddity in recent weeks had escalated into a nearly disturbing mesh of utter shit. It helped to try and figure out my life chronologically, with the newer happenings and memories replacing the old. The events in my life leading up to this journey, to fetch the jar I'd sought for the last year, were scattered in my mind like bits of skull from an orally admitted shotgun blast. Nothing made sense, yet things seemed to grow clearer with every cloudy drift of new information. This was like getting high to feel sober.

My brother Percy died in his mid-twenties, run over when I was ten. Somewhere in the following twenty years, I had flipped my head inside out and become drooling mad. It had twisted me up, but not so much as my father's new disappearance. How much of my life was madness and how much real was inestimable. The things that seemed unreal made the most sense, and seemed to affect me strongest, while the logical reality of my situation was more disconcerting and nonsensical than waking up with your hands on the wrong arms and wearing your own ass as a hat.

I had made a loose friendship with a celebrity which somehow pleased me, yet I had accomplished this under the pretense that we had something in common. We had nothing in common. At that moment, Michael Hausen would be standing in front of my apartment, righteous, hard-heartedly railing against the bad version of me, with Ilya in tow, while throngs of spectators and fully-blossomed protestors tore up my very being in their minds. I had started a list with headings in my own mind, and as I drove the long rural route to Hager Lake, I placed a check-mark in a mental box next to the item 'Boston Hates Me', and under the heading 'Probably Real'.

Ilya's 'symbolic event' that he had been planning was troublesome as well. I couldn't imagine a more frightening display of grudge against someone than a burning effigy. A cross burned into my floor would have been about as bad as the scarecrow of me that Ilya and Hausen, if things had gone by schedule, were about to burn on the street in front of my building. What a demonstration of anger that was: A public burning of a man's likeness to accentuate your staunch loathing of him.

I knew I wasn't going to draw pay for my role in the protest, which should have been mentioned in the job-listing. Who looks for volunteer work at the employment office? Now, I wasn't sure I would even be able to go through with my sabotage plan, which was another loss of payment. I was getting nothing out of being in the protest except for a friendship with a famous actor that was fond of one version of me, while despising another. Having a scarecrow of yourself lit aflame by an angry mob before your dwelling, and being a spy in the upper ranks of those lighting the torch...there had to be some reward in that somewhere. It was hard work, and older generations were always fond of explaining that hard work paid off in some way. Well, I supposed I could always just keep Ilya's car.

What my neighbors must have thought. I had to be thankful that I hadn't seen a neighbor in over a month. I'd had a searing hot apartment prone to noisy bouts of dragon tantrums, fire-breathing, my body being thrown around and scorched, and no one had complained. Then, I'd had my living quarters converted into a freezer by another dragon, my floor puddled with water and melting ice crystals, and still, no one complained. My apartment was part bog, at this point, with all the soot and grime that had accumulated over the span of the dragons. Now, I had a belligerent, muscular freak beating the shit out of me and usurping my things night in and out, stamping around, screaming, using my things while I was away, pissing on protestors, and yet still, no one was complaining. I was as if untouchable. Well, except for the ill treatment by the more enlightened squeaky-wheels of Boston, but that was due to my having inadvertently bear-slaughtered their beloved metropolitan pet, being a bad neighbor on a societal level, not a domestic one.

I had discovered, arriving home after much walking the previous night, that my mailbox was crammed full of rejections. It represented all of the poetry I'd submitted under the Black Dragon's instruction, as well as several rejections for poems I'd never written, much less submitted. None of them had gone out, but the responses were still somehow present. With the arrival of the Black Dragon, I had stopped placing postage on the envelopes purposely. The alternate realm I had to assume was in control of the functions of my mailbox needed to be exposed, and I certainly wanted to figure out what the hell was going on. In my mind, I placed a check in the box next to 'Mail Situation', under the heading 'Maybe not Real'.

As for Percy and my father, gone as they were, I had no idea where to file them. If my father hadn't been real, how had I been able to meet the people he knew in the production of _The Skull Finder_? How could Michael Hausen have met my father yesterday if my father didn't exist? It would have to mean Hausen didn't exist, or the play, or The Wendy, or, for that matter, Boston. That seemed too large a demographic to stick under the heading 'Maybe not Real'. I had to make a third heading: 'Questionably Fucked', and one of the first things I added to this list was 'Poetry'.

The drive was long and I grew tired of spelunking in my mind. There was nothing in there I or someone else didn't already know, and for my part, I was tapped. The highway scrolled forward like stocks on a ticker. I drove and drove, at times lapsing into bored lethargy, and then rising to a crest atop silly antics. When the monotony of the drive spilled over into boredom, I sang a song, doing the chorus too many times because I knew it with more clarity than the rest of the song. I played a blinking game. I became conscious of my breathing and then couldn't breathe unless I thought to, until this could slip my mind and become automatic again. I beat-boxed. I revved the accelerator in time to a beat. I adjusted my seat, didn't enjoy the new position, and then couldn't seem to find the one I'd had it in, so became uncomfortable and overly conscious of how silly having legs felt.

The lake was, as my poet nature swooned aside, serene. There was something about the vast and multi-colored view of a natural scene that caused a person to relax and divide. I wasn't immune to it, and as the Sun drew close to the expressionist mountain backdrop, and the wind rustled the boughs of the various trees, I felt peaceful. The jar was nearby, somewhere, if I could believe my father's final words, and I was to have it by late evening. I wasn't confident I could rely on myself to know where it was, however. I knew only that I was to find wherever I had once been happiest at this lake, and that was to be the X on my undiscovered, mental map. I roused after a moment and had a cigarette, having absorbed the view enough to realize it was just more of the world. I didn't owe it, it didn't own me, and I didn't feel as if I'd ever been settled in it correctly. I was like the limp, peeled grape stuck in the middle of the gelatin mold, too far from the other fruit to be alike, yet too immersed in the mold to escape, stuck between the surface and the bottom, suspended in a strange and unknown matter.

_Happiest._ What did that mean? I recalled having caught the fish, as well as a bout of rampant diarrhea from drinking the lake water. The fish had made me somewhat happy, though I suspected there was more pride than happiness to be found in that memory, due to my catching the fish with a kiddie rod and a worm that was already dead and dry. I tried to reminisce, to search along the tiny, forced threads of nostalgia, to discover in myself a sense of old joy. If there was a past happiness for me here, with a memory of it sleeping somewhere close to my warped psyche, in what part of this lake would I be most likely to find its trigger? What had I done here beyond fish and shit my guts out?

Then it was there, in my mind...the beer. The disgusting, fizzing, summer's day warmed bottle of generic beer. I'd taken it from the iceless cooler (we'd forgotten ice), and snuck off to a small, abandoned shed about sixty feet from the restrooms. The beer. When my father came out of the men's room and saw me there, sitting in the shed beside the spiders and musty wood, trying to hide the beer I'd stolen from him, he'd only chuckled and said 'Chew some gum after, so we don't get in trouble.' That was it; I'd been...happy, truly happy. My father had accepted my stealing his beer. I was like a grownup. I was, for even a moment, older than Percy. I was trustworthy and responsible enough. I kicked ass and could drink beer.

A light sputtered on in my head then. I felt it rise in luminance as I stood on the bank of Hager Lake. I stared across the sheen of water at the decrepit campsite utilities. The odds were high that my happiest moment concerning this lake had taken place in that shed near the restrooms. I found humor in the notion that, even as an adult, I'd never fostered a liking for beer.

The shed was still there, worsened over the years of damp weather and inattention. The doorframe had settled to the left, giving the entire structure a look of crooked lassitude, of being improper, in disrepair, no place for a person. I remembered it having been just big enough to fit a small car, but as I approached, a grown man, it was much smaller, and more of an abandoned utility closet. There was a sign posted near the entrance that I didn't remember being there, and after reading the old, wood-burned message, I was certain the sign hadn't been posted there in my youth.

"Don't Wake the Mother," I read aloud. Beneath this in small letters were the words: 'Colossal Latrodectus'. I stopped walking and stood there, blinking and re-reading the sign several times. What was 'Latrodectus'? Was this a joke for tourists? I knew what colossal meant. Was the sign claiming there was a giant hole inside, or other disrepair? Had the shed been used for some sort of weird exhibit and I'd find a big, floppy, rubber bat or other such novelty hanging inside to frighten me? I noticed a small carving near the bottom of the sign then, and peered closer. It was a crude, knife-carved sketch of a spider. When riding the connotations of the message on the sign, this awkward little carving was creepier than anything I'd seen in some time.

The evening had found its dusk, and I couldn't see into the shed very well. I wished there were other people nearby, camping or fishing, so I wouldn't feel so fidgety and worried. I also wished I'd brought a flashlight, and perhaps—worst fears realized—a club or handgun of some kind. I kept thinking of the word 'Latrodectus'. It sounded like the name of an abdominal muscle, or some piece of cartilage beneath the shoulder blades. I imagined the angry surgeon at P. Morris Medical Center explaining an operation to me: "Once we lift the pelvic conjoined ambula, we'll have a look at the Latrodectus and iliopsic plates, so I'll need you to keep in close with the hemostat..."

I neared the mouth of the shed, nervous and chewing the inside of my cheek to a rich texture. It was probably a gag, some youthful prank or a shoddy attempt at frightening the unguarded by a camp attendant or some such person. I had a breath and shook the foolish warning sign from my thoughts. With a frown, I entered into the shed. Despite my efforts to assuage my worry, I still found myself ducking my head as I entered, looking quickly at the ceiling and walls. _Nothing._ What an ass I was.

The smell of the shed was like that of wood clogged in a throat, and it crept behind my face and into the lungs through the distressed use of my nostrils. The wood was half-rotted by the sporadic shifts in weather I remembered Hager Lake being prone to. I scanned about the floor and discovered a cloth near the corner that looked to be draped over a rounded object. I thought _Latrodectus,_ then shook it from my mind and bent before the cloth. After a moment of extending my hand, I withdrew it, shivered, and instead used my foot to tap on the object, which seemed to be firm.

I flicked the cloth off with my shoe and there it was... the jar. It looked identical to the facsimile I had carried until the night previous, and appeared to be filled with the same cooking oil. There was something inside of it however, resting against the glass in the thick, amber oil. I picked up the jar, being careful of my hold, and examined. There was a small spider in it, obviously drowned, black, and recognizable as the poisonous variety of the infamous Black Widow. The red hourglass on its abdomen was indication, and it seemed perfectly splayed on the side of the jar. I held the jar upright and watched it slowly drift to the bottom and lay flat.

What did it mean? My treasure was supposed to be inside this jar. I had long supposed it would be something rare and of monetary value, then, the Red Dragon had alluded it was more than that, and represented a way of life, my future, my success in the world. I had thought it might be an ancient trinket then, old coins, or a diagram of some great invention, proof of God, or something that would predict the future...anything. My thoughts had been abuzz on it for some time, and I had transformed it in my mind into a personal holy grail. But now, I was confronted with a dead spider in a jar of cooking oil, left in a dank shed near a rural lake. What did it mean?

A rustling sound outside the shed caused me alarm; the word 'Latrodectus' flashed in my mind and I gave a childish yelp. I spun in a momentary surprise. There was a strange swishing noise and I began scrambling and hopping awkwardly out of the shed, my nerves afire before I even saw the dog-sized, horrid thing.

### ***

I slammed into the door of Ilya's car with my chest and shoulders, the climax of my terrified, blood-hard sprint through the dim woodland trail at a speed that was near Olympic. I couldn't breathe and my stomach had tightened close to the point of vomiting. I threw open the door and, after clambering inside on my hands and knees, I twisted over and grabbed at the handle of the still open door.

"Please god..." I moaned, leaning forward, hand leaving the interior of the large car. My fingers closed on the smooth texture of the door handle just as the colossal spider bull-charged me. With a squeal, I yanked the handle while swinging my other hand toward the door's lock. The door came slamming back into my face and my hand fell on the lock. The beastly arachnid struck the door and I felt the car tremor as I bashed my hand against the keys already in the ignition. I clutched and twisted. The car lugged. I watched as the gigantic Black Widow began to clever itself around the front of the car.

The engine caught and I whined, putting the vehicle in reverse. The spider jaunted toward the grill as I threw on the headlights, backing out in a panicked spin. The animal had vaulted after me up the trail to the parking area at a rate that hadn't allowed me room for thought. The spider had scurried over the dirt like a terrible machine, gaining and breaking the distance between us. Minutes had passed as a horse's heart in my chest pumped me forward, just ahead of the vowelish, uncontrollable grunts that rolled from my shaking lips. The fucking thing kept gaining, quietly scampering forward and then dropping back, twelve feet behind me, then a mere four, then eleven feet behind, then three...arcing itself back and forth across the trail, zigzagging after me in a manner that was so patient and methodical, I had to wonder if it had already caught me. Then gravel. Straight stretch. Flat terrain. Car.

With the doors locked and Ilya's car grinding into the road backward, I flung the lever to 'Drive' and stamped the pedal. My legs felt weak and no amount of pressure against the accelerator felt to be enough. The doors had locked with such slowness. The car had taken eternity to back around. The wheels weren't turning fast enough. I was advancing a single frame at a time and the resolution of the world was expatiating with every strike of my heart. I was alone and prey. I was a warm bag of flies. The arachnid sidled up near the car with a deft series of leg motions and was rearing left and right, circling and pouncing at Ilya's rusty, whale of a car. It moved across the road as I did, alongside the driver's side, staring over at me while its legs wheeled about. I struck the horn as the beast struck my door again.

"F-fuck you!" I shouted as the car spit gravel behind, picking up momentum. It was happening. The car was going, I was getting away, and my flight was succeeding. Dexterous, the colossal Latrodectus skittered toward the driver's side door again and I groaned in dismay. Was it smart enough to try breaking through the window? I leaned my head away and the spider disappeared beneath my line of sight. The car picked up momentum and I heard a scraping noise near my feet. I glanced down and witnessed a hideous bundle of forelimbs and an abominable, piercing face jerking up through the hole in the floorboards. The creature was climbing into the car between my feet.

I screamed at a lofty pitch and began kicking at the wretched thing, my body exhausted, my mouth howling. I began hopping from the seat off my ass-cheeks, my hips and knees colliding with the steering wheel repeatedly. I flung myself about on the seat, feebly stamping down at the hideous bouquet of legs, fangs, and the dark cluster of cold, groping eyes.

### Twenty-Three

Parked along the rural edge of Highway 495, on the outskirts of Boston, I stared at my treasure with a look of both disarray and machination. What I held was nothing, just another jar of oil, this one with a dead spider in it. I could only assume that the monstrous horror I had encountered at the lake, the beast I had finally managed, after nearly a mile of panicked, shrill screaming and feeble kicking, to dislodge from the floorboard hole of the car, was its mother or guardian of sorts. I also assumed 'Latrodectus' was the family or genus of spiders that these both belonged to as Black Widows. I had undergone such strange trials, such obstinate treatment, in a mind gone mad in a world gone mean, and after attending these with earnest, all I had procured was a jar of cooking oil and a dead, preserved spider. There had to be more. It was too cruel and unfair that this could be all there was.

I carefully unscrewed the lid, holding the jar upright and snug in my hand. After a moment, I lifted the lid and examined the underside...nothing. I set it aside; just oil, just a dead spider. Why? I felt cheated, wounded, and the victim of torturing spin artists in the various dragons that had coaxed me into believing this was somehow the answer to my life's upset nature. I leaned my head forward and sniffed for scent. Plain vegetable oil, and without a trace of it even having been used to cook with at some point. A hairy fist in my id socked my consciousness with such force that it continued through my brainpan and launched any trace of emotion I had left from my body like scattershot. The jar was a hoax, or I was, or both of us.

Peering in, I muttered an obscenity to myself and sighed. Then, to my interest, the small, drowned and preserved Black Widow at the bottom of the jar began moving its legs, alive. I pulled my head back and held the jar up, my other hand flicking on the dome-light. The thing wasn't dead. It was moving around in useless motions, hindered by the oil and in obvious turmoil. This baffled me and lifted my nerves into worry again. I glanced in my rear view to make sure all was still clear and that the spider's larger counterpart hadn't somehow caught up with me. When I discerned I was alone, I set the lid back on and began screwing it down. As I did so, the spider ceased its functioning, appearing dead again. I stared in at the lifeless, drowned arachnid with a kind of pity, and then removed the lid again...life. The spider began moving its joints, aimless, trying to move but only wiggling its helpless legs.

What a disturbing lot in life to be trapped in a jar, to be suspended in viscous stupidity, unable to live free, and somehow caught up in the same nightmare world I was, at the whims of my mind and the madness that surrounded me. It was as if the thing had to drown forever. A thought occurred to me that this small arachnid was a physical metaphor of sorts. The spider might be memory, or a representation of sanity, a facsimile. Perhaps I was supposed to notice and free it from the oil. Or else kill it. Then again, the fact that it was able to stay alive beyond the throes of demise and immobility proved that it was no ordinary creature, and thus it was probable that killing the spider could be rash, as well as irreversible.

"What are you?" I asked, watching the small, poisonous arachnid go through the motions of crawling while forced to remain still and impotent in a void, floating in the amber oil, surrounded by glass walls. Its mandibles moved and it became more active.

The car horn sounded. No, it was a light that flashed in the car. Wait, no...it was...

"Oh god," I mumbled as an instant migraine tore through my forehead. It was more than a headache. It was in my neck, my shoulders. My eyes began to fall into rapid blinking without having garnered my permission. The pain wrote its signature across my brain with something sharp. Dear hell, had my head split in two? The throbbing headache erupted behind my ears then and sweltered over my mind in a matter of moments. Was this a new sort of tic or fit? I opened my mouth and groaned, squinting, it hurt so bad. I could sense the spider squirming in the oil, impossible and alive, and I watched as it slowly tilted downward. I could see the red hourglass on its abdomen and for a moment, there was a sputter of shadow in the car that couldn't have come from the old, dim dome-light. I felt to be surrounded in fuzz. No, cloth. There was a layer of something on me, around me, invisible or unreal.

"Where..." I began but the onset migraine began chipping away at the foundation of my skull, lobbing a mist of pain forward, through my face, into the field-scented night. I grew hot, my scalp burned, and I felt like someone was trying to pull my eyes out through the back of my head with vibrating tugs of string. Even my teeth ached.

Then it was clear. I was in a jar. The oil filled my body and slugged through my heart. I moved my arms and tried to swim. An hourglass on my stomach told me the time. The oil filled my ears, mouth, gut and mind. I looked out through the glass and saw the man holding me aloft. He was my brother. Percy. Twenty-six years old. I was the man in the jar. Had I always been this? Was the world thinner beyond my space? Did I see what everyone else saw? The hourglass tacked off my increments of life, red sands falling over time. I felt them go, one grain, then another. Percy grinned into the clear jar and watched my useless motions.

His skin was painted red and fire trickled from his nostrils, watching me writhe as I drowned in the mucous-like oil. He was the Red Dragon, and I knew why he'd left me, why he'd attacked me and disappeared. It wasn't because I'd forgotten him, as the Black Dragon had told me; it was because I _remembered_ him. Percy hadn't been in my life for years, then, he was. I had remembered him so much that he entered my life, resurrected from his boyhood death. Percy, my older brother, in my new life, because I'd found a place for him in it.

Who was I? Was I God? Did I make miracles occur? I had made a dragon out of a man, and let it haunt me. I had slipped and lost my bearing, reached out for help, and just when I'd regained my direction, forgotten that what I'd reached for didn't exist. Through this little crack in my mind, my brother had entered, and then simply stuck around for a time, hanging out. The Black Dragon had lied to me about Percy. Did the beast find no difference between these abstracts of lies and truths? Could he ascertain no difference between forgetting and remembering, and whichever I was doing? I felt the pressure of the amber liquid on my legs and arms, saturating me and keeping me docile. Was my mind waking up inside its own nightmare, or was I finally going to sleep within a dream? There was another flash of shadows, cast by a bright sudden light. Percy was gone.

The Blue Dragon peered into the jar, scrutinizing me with sadness. I wanted to speak to her but my lungs had filled with oil. My throat clogged and I began growing numb. She leaned in and I saw her cluster of eyes, her fangs, her motherly body. She had hair that I had once run my fingers through, and cheeks I'd kissed. When had my mother died? When had she become a spider? In life, her weight had shifted more and more into a dangerous allotment. There were opinions all around her, from everyone, and then...just like they said, she grew sick. Inwardly sick. Liver and heart sick. Outside the jar, I watched as she smiled, tenderly pressing on the glass before me, filling my view with her thumbprint. There was a small hole in the thumb and when she removed it, a slight, red smudge was left on the glass.

Diabetes; she had pricked her thumb often. The trouble was diabetes that had come on from being obese. She had grown, she had become sick. She couldn't get smaller again. It had been her weight that killed her. No, her weight hurting her liver, which then did the killing. I remembered. I'd brought her into my life like Percy. I'd put her in the refrigerator to cool...to freeze; to store in the place where meat went. My poor mother. The last time she'd seen me, I was but nine years old, in Stoughton. I had a stupid haircut that was popular with trashy kids at the time, and I acted like it was all normal business, dying in a hospital from fatness. Whenever my mother hugged me, I was enveloped in heat from her expanded limbs and hangs of skin. She just ran hot, always.

It was clear: I'd pulled my memories in like a vortex, to keep me going when I slipped. But when had I lost it? What had happened? How much of my life was recovery, and how much of it the mad swamp I had created? The world I knew was the world I'd always known, but there were pockets in it that seemed to have opened over the years, strange, unlikely pits that were of lesser reason. I had lived among them, in my own way, outside, undisclosed, beaten. Was I even me?

At that moment—my thoughts tilting atop a plane of realization—I begat an ominous question. What or who was the Black Dragon? Percy had dissipated away from the jar, as had my mother now, and another figure drew in close. I watched it as my vision blurred, and I began phasing in and out of consciousness. It was as if falling asleep at the wheel, then jerking awake. How much time had passed? Where was I now? The jar filled with the shadow of it. I stared and began to choke. He peered in maliciously, grinning and thumping the glass with his fingers. He was angry. As my eyes rolled back, my mind unable to handle the suffocation of the oil any longer, he began shaking the jar. The oil crushed me and the turbulence of the slow-to-react oil ripped me to pieces.

I gasped and there was air. My hands lunged forward and grabbed the wheel as the tires shuddered, violent alongside the grassy highway embankment. I was driving much too fast for the road. I choked and struck the brake, feeling my body wrench forward against the seatbelt. My face struck the steering column of Ilya's car. I barked in pain and dropped back into my seat. I breathed and groaned. Had I fallen asleep? Had I started the car and then driven while unconscious? Was a part of me still in the jar? I looked down and found the object lying on the passenger side floor, unopened and still.

If you're lost on a road and have no indication of where you are, you can only look for signs and direction. If you eventually find a road-sign that says the next town is 20 miles off, you go there. You don't know where you are, or the lay of its boundaries, so you function with the knowledge you have at hand. Where are you? Nowhere, but that would only be true for the next 20 miles. You're location was relative to the approaching town, until you learned more. Was I mentally deformed? Was I lost? Was I in hell? No, I was X number of metaphors from reason. I could do nothing but follow them.

Feeling my face and wincing at the tenderness of having struck it so hard, I continued breathing through my mouth, feeling as if I hadn't done so for several minutes. I thought about the Black Dragon, right then living in my apartment and taking over my home and life, dwelling above the protest of me, free of it because he wasn't me. He was free of everything because I needed answers he had, while I had to be a part of the world, while I had to hang from balconies, get chased by grotesque impossibilities, and deal with the unsavory dilemma of being me. I was tired of it. He had all the power in our relationship.

I was nauseated by wondering. It was shit. I didn't want to guess and ponder any more. The questions I had were too passive and only made me feel I was falling into someone else's sick, bizarre mode. I wanted to know, and the jar had opened up my head to me, even if for only a moment. I knew more than I had the day previous, yet understood my situation less. The treasure inside was myself. While the center of my life still possessed no sane tether, I knew it was time to out the Black Dragon for whomever or whatever he really was. I bet my sundry on my father, Joe. Was the Black Dragon what I'd made of my poor father?

That the Black Dragon might be my father had a symmetry in my predicament. It seemed reasonable, given what I'd done with my other two family members. However, a nagging thought kept me from believing my father was the dragon. While it made sense the awful creature could be him, the fact remained that my father had never died. I'd known him my entire life, and he'd never died. I had to question if his strange disappearance last night was a metaphor for death at all. Although I had no satisfactory assurance that my recent interactions with my father were real, or that they had been with a realistic facsimile of my father, I still couldn't believe he was dead. There simply was no basis for it in my memory. While I had forgotten Percy's death, and then roused him by remembering him, this didn't seem possible with my father. After being drawn into the jar, my memory seemed to have cleared considerably. My father had never died.

The night cauterized me in the car as my focus drew into a fine, exacting point. I had to confront the Black Dragon. Would he beat me as he had before? Would he still be able to harm me if I managed to discern who or what he was? I only knew that I had something important at my side, backing me, an ally of uncertain form. Whether the jar was designed to help me confront the dragon, or simply an aid of some kind to help me retain myself, I couldn't but believe it had changed the tides of my predicament, that it had altered me and was still shifting the balance of confusion in my mind. I looked at the black speck of myself, the small, drowned spider in the jar on the passenger floorboards of Ilya's car.

"I'm on to you," I said.

### Twenty-Four

I'd never seen so many people in one neighborhood in my life. It was as if I had entered a massive amphitheater for an all day rock show. I couldn't see where the crowd began or ended. I stepped from Ilya's car, making sure to lock the door behind me, roughly twelve blocks from my apartment. That's the closest I could find a place to park. The street-sides were clogged with cars and trucks. I saw various trickles of protestors, even at ten blocks out, filtering from the direction of my apartment and getting into various vehicles. There were others getting out of their cars and walking near to me. The epicenter of this parade-like conglomeration was my apartment. I walked to the heart of the throng.

"BURNING PIG FOR A BURNING BEAR!" they were chanting into the night outside my apartment. I stood with anxiety amid hordes, thousands of people all surrounding the structure of my building and present for a handful of blocks out. It was standing room only for two blocks, and very populated for the next three.

"Dear god...they want me dead," I muttered with dread, my panic rising again. I found myself thankful my off-road accident had bashed my face against the steering column of Ilya's car. I hoped my face would be damaged enough to keep me unrecognizable for another spell. It didn't seem possible I'd be able to get to my building, but I had to, somehow. Among the crazed hippies, there was now what looked to be a blue collar population, off work a few hours and still around, milling between the loose dogs and squatters. There were even several men in nice suits to be found, shoulder to shoulder with the peaceniks and punk misfits. It seemed I'd managed to bring the diverse together. Ilya had created a melting pot of comradeship around my negligent slaying of an attacking animal. People were bonding and feeling alive...to hate me. I'd caused this. Maybe I _was_ God, or rather, his sinister counterpart. This was most assuredly a great miracle or trick, as well as a viper's nest of despisal and a puddle of human gasoline just waiting for a spark.

A flame shot up nearby and I saw that there were now performers here and there, in small circles, some roped off. There was a fire-breather blowing plumes of flame into the sky. People cheered. Others chanted. Dogs barked. Cell-phones rang. I heard another chant begin with Ilya's voice through a loudspeaker. I followed it to him.

He was rallying with consternation, speaking with his diaphragm, pumping his fist in the air for emphasis. He led the chant a few more times and then saw me. After finishing the next line, he handed the microphone to another man at his side.

"Hey, there he is! Bring her back in one piece?" Ilya asked, jogging up to me and putting his arm around my shoulders.

"Pretty much," I replied, being able to summon little more.

He began leading me, one nudged person at a time, toward the center of the crowd, which now seemed to have completely covered the sidewalks and streets. He brought me to where the corner intersection of 83rd and my street, Farsante had been only days before. Now, it was a mass of people interspersed with various booths and stands serving an assortment of wondrous food and vegan delights. I looked at one man with horns either glued or inserted in his scalp serving some sort of baked, beige glop. His sign read 'Fresh Hundefutter' and he gave heaping portions of this on large, grease-stained paper plates. On nearly every booth was scrawled or printed the word 'Organic'. Most had flyers up describing what had happened to Cookie the panda bear, and a map of Boston that pointed to key locations for the protest's planning. My neighborhood wasn't the only location being utilized, it seemed. They had several different headquarters in Boston now, all of them with places to sleep and donation-received food for protestors who had traveled.

"We've got it set, now. Shit, Hausen attracted a shitload of good people. This is like a full-fledged festival right now. It's like fuckin' Woodstock, except we don't have bands. Well, yet. I got a lead on some anarcho-punk bands that might set up tomorrow night, but I gotta get back to 'em, first. Hey, you fill my car up with gas after?"

"No," I responded, looking at three Hawaiian men dressed in red uniforms, doing backflips off of one another and landing in interesting poses. They were an acrobatic performance troupe of some kind. Ilya looked at me amused, then slowly frowned.

"Mike said you almost fell and died, man. At a play or something," he came out with.

"It was a good play," I said, not wanting to talk about my predicament. Ilya gave a grunt.

"Man, are you wasted? You look wasted."

"It's okay. It's fine," I said, dazed. My adrenalin keg had emptied. I felt like I'd been cliff-diving for the last hour. The road had hypnotized me somewhat, and it was only with luck that I parked near the protest without drifting into the crowd behind the wheel of Ilya's car, feeling the large vehicle thump over those knocked down, shoved off their feet, and laid to rest beneath my phased sense of being. I held the brown bag with the jar in my hands. Coming home to this gigantic celebration of my suffering was more than I could fathom. I'd gone from terrified to out-of-body experience, from a state of utter shock to a vast and newly-reorganized mob of shouting people in the Cake, all of them joined together to hate me. My brain was muck.

"If you say so. Anyway, there's the Man," he said, pointing to an area behind some of the booths. On a metal hauling trailer was the facsimile of me...my scarecrow. It didn't look much like me, either before or after I'd begun smashing my face into another shape. The grotesque thing was wearing a cop uniform and giving the sieg heil salute, and though it was a scarecrow, the inside of it was a metal frame with wire mesh around it. Of course it had a rubber pig nose strapped on the face.

"Wouldn't straw burn better?" I asked.

"There won't be much difference, not with the amount of fuel we're gonna pour on it. Besides, a metal frame means we can dress it up again tomorrow and have another go of it, if we want. The cop uniform came in a bundle of five, so, we could burn this fucker all week."

"The real police really haven't shown up to tell you not to do this?" I asked, still amazed that this was all being tolerated by law enforcement. Well, not tolerated, but being ignored due to mutual despisal of me.

"Cops? I've run into three of 'em here in the crowd. They come down after they get off work to protest with us. They hate how this guy makes them look."

"The pig nose doesn't anger them?"

"Well, I haven't asked."

"Christ, this is a cultural phenomenon," I said before swallowing hard.

"Totally. So anyway, we're primed. I got guys ready to pull the Man out into the street in front of the killer's window, and we're gonna light it up. Channel nine showed up but left, they'll be back in a few minutes. And there's word that NBC and CNN are en route, because of Hausen and Senator Loftis. Oh shit, yeah, Loftis is gonna be here, or at least he promised he'd make an appearance, so long as there's no physical violence between now and the day after tomorrow. I don't know what his stance is, though. He might be coming down to stir up trouble with us."

"A senator?" Was the situation becoming political? I hoped so. That meant attention, and attention meant scrutiny, and scrutiny meant the end of these assholes ruining my already intumescent life.

"Yeah, but either way, I wouldn't want to be _this_ jackass anytime soon," Ilya said, nodding up at my apartment.

"I wouldn't want to be him either," I conceded. This was true.

It seemed tower-like and important, my apartment building. It looked as if it would have to house a holy man, or demon, there was so much dense activity around it. The low-rent building was now as if a mosque someone was bound to climb and ascend from. Hadn't anyone become suspicious that the sinister panda-killing man hadn't exited the apartment in almost a week? Did they really believe there was someone in there? I worried that the Black Dragon might have been making appearances in the window, stirring them and propagating more anger. He had already urinated down onto some protesters once.

Ilya led me over to the flatbed trailer with my destructible likeness on it. They had the height wrong. The scarecrow made me out to be seven feet tall with size 16 shoes. It was a large symbol, likely due to some people being unable to get in close, especially once the fire began. I supposed the necessity of over-sizing it for visibility was in control of the dimensions. It certainly served a purpose of making me seem more monstrous and frightening, at any rate. It was demonizing.

"Man, let me ask you something," I said to Ilya. He was nudging one of the trailer's tires, testing it for sturdiness. He seemed to be following a sort of mental checklist with the scarecrow and trailer, taking much caution in putting on the demonstration, in burning my facsimile.

"What's up?" he replied.

"If this guy came out, right now...just came down the stairs and exited the building and walked right up to you, what would your reaction be?" I asked.

"The murderer? What do you mean?"

"I mean, would you deck him? Swear at him? Lecture him? What would happen if he was standing in front of you?" I inquired. Ilya thought this over.

"Well," he came out with, "I think I'd interview him in front of everyone. Show him what he's done." Had I been wrong to let this escalate? There had been no way of knowing that the protest would reach this level, but perhaps I should have simply talked to the protestors that first morning and settled all of this.

"You'd interview him? That's it?"

"What do you want me to say? That he'd have to call a plumber to remove my foot from his ass?" Ilya responded, getting a kick out of himself.

"I'm just wondering, is all. So, let's say he did, and you interviewed him, and he agreed with everything you said, admitted he was totally wrong, you know, felt really bad, and kind of just repented about the whole thing. I mean, if he saw the light or whatever. What would happen?" I probed. This seemed like my next plan of action, from how Ilya was responding. It was so obvious, that I had trouble believing I hadn't come up with it at an earlier time: I'd just come out and say hello and let them get their yelling and judgments out of the way. I'd come down from the tree and let the tiger take its bite.

"Then I _would_ kick his ass. He'd be patronizing us. That guy would end up getting jumped by half this crowd," he replied, sour. I watched as two men walked past, large and muscular, tattooed, angry, swearing as if it was their first language. The crowd might attack me? The ENTIRE crowd? The two passing men seemed like the worst sort of people to get punched by, and they'd just be the beginning.

There was nothing I could do. If I exposed myself, I was in for a humiliating public defamation, worse than I'd already received because they might beat the blood from my veins after shouting me half-deaf, then there'd still be another round of protest. If I 'saw the light', I'd get beaten. If I stayed hidden and didn't come out of the apartment (that they knew of), who knew to what level this could escalate? I had to assume that sooner or later, with enough people present, the National Guard would have to step in. With the pressure of CNN and NBC arriving, a senator, certainly there would be those outside of Boston who wouldn't give a rat's ass about Cookie the Panda, and would demand action that this dilemma be resolved, that my rights not be stamped into the ground, and that I and my neighbors not be tortured any longer. The world would come to its senses sooner or later, wouldn't it? Was I to stay the course? Part of me felt I should make a run for it, leave town and never return. The matter of obtaining my sanity kept me where I was, however. I had little choice but act and dodge as I could.

"How's it hangin'?" I heard from behind me. I recognized Hausen's voice. He was referring to my near-fatal accident with the balcony of The Wendy playhouse. He came up alongside me and gave me a nudge with his fist against my shoulder.

"That's funny," I said, trying to make it seem as if I thought it was.

"How you feelin'?" he asked, empathetic. He looked to hold a genuine care for my being.

"I'm okay. Not dead," I said, indicating more than he could know.

"Well, there you go. It's hard losing someone, but you do it a day at a time. I know; I lost my mother last year. I'm so sorry, man."

"I'm all right. Thanks." I said, uncomfortable.

"Sometimes 'all right' is all you get. Truly, people pray for less." That statement struck against a curious bit of knowledge in my mind, which happened to be desperately seeking out a change in subject.

"Mike, can I ask you something personal, off-topic?"

"Sure, man."

"Do you really make the movie crew pray with you each day before you'll go on?" I asked. Hausen grunted.

"That. Well, yeah, it was just for one movie. I was way too into my beliefs back then, and I did it back when I still believed in God."

"Oh." What a huge, stunning thing to say so casually.

"That was a long time ago."

"Just something I heard. Sorry."

"No, it's fine. Doesn't matter. So listen, I have some interesting news that you'll want to hear, maybe good, maybe bad, but I don't know how you'll receive it, so, I wanted to run it by you before you do the honor," he said. Hausen's frown at my question had slowly risen into a feigned smile with uncertain eyes.

"The honor?" I asked. What new piece of ceremony was this? Hausen piqued at this, surprised.

"The honor. Like when there's a birthday and somebody 'does the honors', you know, getting to be the one who cuts the cake."

"I know what it means, but what honor?"

"You're gonna light up the Man, remember? Cool, right?" he said, smiling. He was amped about this, but still held that uncertainty I'd noted. The constant flood of people seemed to be energizing him, while I seemed to be making him nervous. I glanced over at the giant scarecrow of myself.

"I have to light it?!"

"Rock and roll. You didn't know?"

"No."

"Oh, well, Ilya and I wanted you to have the honor. It's no problem, we got a torch and everything. But listen, back to the interesting predicament. I wanted to talk to you about something that's...See, I don't know what you'll think of it, is the thing. Andy Leftwich called me this morning, asked if while I was in town, I could fill in the role of Edward for your dad. I know that could...well, conceivably bother you, so I declined until talking to you about it."

"You're going to take over my dad's part?" I asked, shocked.

"If you say it's okay...and only if. At this point, it's a few days but... well, I'd volunteer to stay in town through the entire run." I looked up at him with anger behind my face, in my breath. What a pompous invader he'd become. He'd shown up at the protest, a catalyst to a larger scene, ruining my life even more, then saving it, then befriending me, while unknowingly hating me, and now he wanted to hop into my father's shoes in the performance of _The Skull Finders._ I wanted to hug him and kick his teeth out at the same time.

"Oh, I see. No problem," he backpedaled, noting my swollen expression. I felt a strange sensation in my chest, and eased into a different logic. This man had done no wrong to me, none that he knew of. I couldn't blame him for my current state, as the real culprits were myself and bad luck. Denying Hausen the right to perform in the play that had made him famous seemed like too much responsibility for me. Who was I to tell him he couldn't? The only reason I had the power to decline him permission was because he respected me. Other than my father, he was the only person I knew that did.

"No, wait..." I said, closing my eyes and thinking of calm scenes, "You know what? It's fine. Go ahead. I stuttered for a second, but it would be great for you to play the old man, after having played the young man. I get it. And my dad would be pleased," I said.

"You sure?" he questioned with caution.

"Go ahead. He's gone and they're gonna fill the role somehow; it should be you, if you want it."

"Thank you. Man, thank you," he said, smiling again. A glance at Ilya brought him no reaction however. Ilya didn't seem to hold any interest in Hausen other than as a figure to empower his demonstration and protest.

A thought spudded in me and I felt its urge grow in size. The thought created a shock of hope that rose up my spine like an elevator. This thought struck my brain and sent a wave of realization through my face, into the air, into his ear in the form of a question:

"Mike...what happened to my dad?"

"What?" I didn't need the Black Dragon for this. Hausen could answer my question. He'd known my father only briefly, but he'd known him. Surely, no one else had seen my father vaporize into loose-leaf papers and ink-puddles. What had truly happened, and when? How had my father gone away, for real? Was he dead, or had I just assumed?

"What happened to him?" I repeated. Hausen shook his head, taken aback.

"Uh...you don't... I'm confused," he said.

"Just say what happened to him, clear and plain. I want to hear it from someone other than myself; the details." Hausen lifted his eyebrows, a slight alarm in his eyes.

"Uh, okay man. Well, you're dad had an arrest last night. We all talked for awhile on the way, and you gave him a letter or something, and we were going out to eat and he wasn't hungry, so he left. You came with us on the walk for awhile. Then, you left too. I...I got a call from Andy Leftwich this morning, like I said, and he told me your dad had a heart attack walking home. You didn't... Are you telling me nobody told you how he died?" Hausen was aghast.

"No, no, I knew what happened. It's just for therapy. It helped me to hear someone else say it," I fabricated. He thought this over and shrugged, a warm look overcoming him. Hausen slowly nodded.

"I think I understand. Did I help out at all?"

"Yeah, that was nice of you; thanks." _A heart attack? His body lying on the sidewalk? A poem in his hand?_ Had I dreamed it once? My memory sparked on what Hausen had told me, and I had images for it. I remembered an unclear series of events that didn't seem real. Had I hallucinated his reaction to the breaking jar...had I imagined the buzzing fly? How long after my father's death had I kept him alongside me in my mind?

I should have been weeping, having lost my father, but I still didn't believe he was truly gone. My father seemed achingly real to me, but his disappearance and demise did not. I still had them check-marked in the 'Maybe not Real' box. What he'd told me about the jar and where to find it, long after he supposedly left, had come true. This meant that either my hallucinations were real, or I was completely alone, and the world may as well have been a sick fantasy. Neither possibility made sense of my situation, nor explained the Black Dragon, who had appeared before my father's supposed death. I refused to believe any of it. By negating my emotions and urges, for even a moment, I had learned I was capable of snubbing anything, no matter how plausible.

"They're here. Go time," Ilya said a few feet off, before reaching over and putting his hand on my shoulder.

"Sorry to hear about your dad," he added, uncomfortable but genuine.

Several people began pulling the trailer out toward the street, including one of the muscular men I'd seen earlier. I watched as people parted for this strange procession, as if it were the remnant of some somber ritual. My hideous facsimile was drawn into the street before my apartment building, in view of my window. There were people cheering and I saw what seemed to be several news crews about half a block off, camera-men perched on vans. I could only assume there were accompanying reporters, but I couldn't see them through the crowd. Was this getting national exposure?

"Well, we got the news, we got the fire. You feelin' up to this?" Hausen asked.

"What the hell, sure." I replied.

"Then let's roast us a piggy," he said, clapping me on the back. Ilya held a torch in his hand and began lighting it. Once the torch caught, he told everyone to stand clear, and handed it to me. The crowd grew quiet. I stood there, holding the flaming torch, looking up at the disturbingly inhuman doll of myself raised up on poles. It had a pagan vibe, yet bore a resemblance to the crucifixion. The fabricated version of me was disfigured, bones made of steel and mesh, the uniform of a cop tight on its metal frame, a uniform identical to the one I'd worn, but only once, and for virtually no reason. It was just another passing job, but one that had somehow caught and exploded me into the eyes of the public, naked and disgusting as I was. The scarecrow turned its head and looked back at me.

"Do it!" Ilya shouted, excited. Several punks next to the trailer began splashing a clear, thin liquid on the facsimile of me. It stood tall on the trailer, simply watching me with sadness. It understood. I could see the chemical fumes in the air. Hausen pat my chest and gave a little jump of excitement. I stepped forward and the punks backed off quickly. I was given more than enough room. The crowd was silent as I approached myself. Was this a paradox? Was one hoax meeting another, two facsimiles staring at one another with vitriol? One of us stood, rigidly placed with our head bolted to the sky. One of us was crooked and weak, and hobbled up with a flame like a nasty little cretin. The torch was a rolled up newspaper... The irony.

"Go man," Ilya said.

"Kick ass," Hausen added. I looked up at my apartment window and saw the creature behind the glass, safe in my home. The Black Dragon stood there, ominous, three stories up and staring down as I waited in the crowd of diverse, pop-culture meliorists. His body was encased in fury. He knew. He knew everything. I stepped up to the scarecrow of myself and sniffed my nose, wanting to cry. Couldn't someone pity me? Anyone? Was I that alone?

"I hate you," I said to the chemical-soaked me, and flipped the torch onto the trailer.

A volatile flash of fire burst out and upward, an anathemizing, roiling ball of orange heat. It unfolded into the night, leaving smaller licks of flame to spiral up, engulfing the Man. I stood beside my blazing, monster self, staring up at yet another demon in my home. My apartment's facade flickered vivid in the bloom of ardent combustion. The Black Dragon's eyes narrowed into mordant slits as my face lit like a comet into the Sun.

Twenty-Five

It was a gauntlet I couldn't manage with my usual disguise. Now that the protest had reached a manic and labyrinthine proportion, there was a variety of people that had ceased leaving at night. The vendors closed up their booths and removed anything valuable, but the booths were left behind until morning. There were sleeping bags all over the grass beside the building, and tents cropped up like bad acne. A few resourceful people had erected a handful of camping cots, and there was even a hammock affixed to the two trees beside the convenience store a block down the street. During my first attempt at returning to my apartment that night, at one in the morning, I'd even seen a bed on the sidewalk complete with a twin-sized mattress some joker had set up and was sleeping in. There were several drumfires and I noticed numerous people still awake, doing everything from eating vegan hot dogs on sticks to passing live bongs around their group. I heard an ambitious couple having cold, muffled sex behind the dumpster.

I couldn't re-adopt my original face, as I had no control over the bruising, swelling, and slight burns that had taken over my appearance. Even if I could somehow go back to the way I'd looked when I'd burned the panda, if I was seen going into my building, I'd be caught and...well, I couldn't be certain what would happen to me. If I entered the building as my protest self, someone was bound to recognize me and become suspicious, or worse, think I was pulling some covert assault on the panda killer and want to accompany me. It was with this dilemma I hatched the need of a third identity, and one for which I needed props.

The all-night convenience store down the street from my house didn't have what I required, so I had to use Ilya's car again. I drove to a 24-hour coffee shop that I knew sold t-shirts and the like. One white sweatshirt later, I convinced a young man out front, while smoking near him, to sell me a thrift-store cowboy hat he wore in exchange for my buying his next refill of coffee. Then, it was off to the gas station to buy chewing tobacco and superglue. I didn't have the money after this to fill Ilya's tank, as I was supposed to, but after getting into my apartment, I could pilfer my change stash if needed. Money had become very scarce for me, and I was nearly out. Having discovered I was working on a volunteer basis while employed at the protest, I'd need another job soon, as well.

The chewing tobacco was moist and continually seeped a thick substance around my mouth and down my chin. The raw tobacco caused an insufferable itching wherever I affixed it, and the superglue I had used to adhere it around my mouth and chin had caused my face to feel tight and uncomfortable. This irritation was easier to put up with than beating my face in again, and I was beginning to suspect that my features and face would be irretrievable if I damaged them any more than I had. For the short time I needed a new look, I could tolerate the raw itching and dampness.

Back at the sleeping protest, with my disguise in place, I stepped over a woman that was snoring in a blanket, and made my way toward the front entrance of my apartment building. With any luck, the white _Mocha Dabbles_ sweatshirt, cowboy hat, and handlebar mustache made of minty, swampy tobacco strands, in the dark of the early morning, would be enough of a costume to get me into the building unrecognized. I held the paper sack in my hand with the jar in it, and continued stepping over sleeping protestors. A dog woke and watched me, but did nothing as I slipped into the building.

My head rocked back and strands of tobacco popped from my face. A tooth struck the back of my throat and made me gag before it rolled forward and fell from my open mouth onto the floor. He held the jar in his hand, tossing it in the air, catching it, his actions slipshod and taunting. I noticed my apartment seemed altered. Some of the furniture had been moved, and there were stacks of _The Tatterdemalion_ in random places. It was as if my apartment had been taken over to run distribution for the mag, which had been deceased for years.

"You're shit," I said to the Black Dragon, who now was dressed in my usual clothes. One of my cigarettes burned in an ashtray, waiting for his return, and I noticed my laptop was open on the kitchen table and that the dragon had been viewing some sort of adult site. As I tried to get up, he put his bare foot on my ass and shoved, collapsing me on my chest again. I felt him pull open the top of my back pocket and remove my wallet.

"I need a line of credit," he said, mischievous. I coughed on the floor and felt my ribs aching from the initial strike that had downed me upon entering my apartment. He slid my wallet into his back pocket and knelt. I began kicking when I discovered he was trying to untie one of my shoes.

"You're not me," I said angrily, stamping my heel back into his crouched groin. He wobbled back and stood, surprised but laughing.

"Hoo, you're all woke up tonight!" he said, making fists again.

"I know you're not real," I said, trying to get to my feet. He simply came forward and shoved my forehead. My head tilted back hard and I felt a crackling sensation in my neck. I twisted and fell on my side. I'd never learned how to fight with someone. I'd tried wrestling in high school, for a day before concluding I didn't enjoy the consummate lack of personal space involved. I'd been decked a few times in my life, but never had it in me to return the gesture, much less the prowess or temper.

"Not real," I repeated, my hand clutching the back of my neck, which had adopted a sharp, squelching pain when I tilted my head down too far.

"Still hurts, though," he said, unimpressed. The Black Dragon then nudged my head to the side. He braced his knee on my shoulder and attempted to spit in my ear. The rope of saliva drizzled onto my temple and I smudged it with my hand, trying to wipe the spit off.

"Tell me what you are," I ordered. My conviction was so used to beatings and injury that these things had ceased affecting my drive.

"You havin' fun down there with your new buddies?" he asked, smiling.

"The gig's up. I know who the others were," I said.

"Oh really? Little spider tell ya?" he codded, holding up the jar. The tiny arachnid inside drifted from the Black Dragon's grasp of it. He began laughing then; a deep and gutful laugh that reverberated through my apartment.

"You meet mom out there at your little pussy lake? That's my wife," he said, speaking of the giant Latrodectus that had chased me down, and who I'd fought off when trying to leave the lake.

"No she's not. I know you're not my father, so cut the shit," I said. He had his foot in the air and kept stomping it toward me in a teasing fashion, not making contact, just on the verge, kicking at me close, making me deflect and dodge incessantly.

"I'm gonna getcha...gonna getcha..." he said, jerking his foot around as if about to stomp my face back.

"What are you?" I asked again, angry, knocking his foot away.

"No, you got one thing right. I ain't never been your daddy. I just shoot it in your mother sometimes. That old shit daddy of yours couldn't satisfy a big bitch like that, so I step in and hit it right. You're mother writhes for me."

"What the fuck are you?" I repeated. He spit hard at my ear and it struck my face. I wiped it off.

"You know who I am. Ask the right question."

"Fuck you. Who are you?"

"I'm Ingleman. I'm here to cause you pain."

"You're Ingleman? The others told me they were keeping you away."

"What can I say? You remembered me when you forgot them. Boom. Instant gratification, pussy."

The instep of his bare right foot careened with the underside of my jaw and the back of my head struck the wall with such force that I went blind for several moments.

"YOU HAVE NO TIME, BITCH!" he screamed at me, "While you piss away your days down there with your little asshole friends, I'm takin' over. ME. You can't stop it, you can't even think about it. All you can do is vanish, writing shitty poetry, goin' on your little road-trips, losin' all your marbles, one by one. And whatever you _don't_ forget, heh, I'm just gonna take."

The doorknob was just above my head. I was slumped against the door of my apartment, tobacco ripped from my face and leaving small tears and gashes where the superglue had been roughed off by the dragon's beating. The mint that had seeped from the moist chaw stung in my wounds. I slowly sat up against the door. I had enough to go on. Any more and I feared I'd simply die.

My brother had died when I was a child, and before that, so had my mother. Then, somewhere between ten-years-old and a year ago, the world had changed. I'd snapped, or it had simply kicked me out, and discovering how and why was everything to me. I had questions, but I wasn't going to get any more answers this way, and so focused on filling the largest void in my mysterious existence. In this, I was left with a single question for which I needed answer, in order to begin piecing my world back together beyond the dragon's grasp, which was anywhere outside of my apartment.

"Why does the mail come in, but not go out?" I mumbled, my mouth bloody and my lips throbbing. It felt like fist-sized leeches were attached at my temples. If I knew why the mail had changed, and how, I'd know what the dragons intended for me. The first two had been adamant I write poetry with them. They coddled me, counseled, chose the magazines. The Black Dragon had continued this, but with more violence. What was it about poetry that mattered to these disgusting creations in my life? The reasoning had to have something to do with the mail; the bizarre function of my sending poetry into the world, magazine submissions that were but half real. I surmised learning the truth behind the mail's impossibility was the key to discovering why the dragons had come to me, why I had created them, how to destroy the one I now faced.

"Huh! The mailman isn't reliable enough, right? You got a piss-ant 'friend' handling _your_ mail," he said, flipping the jar in his hand.

"A friend," I muttered. I had a friend?

"But then, what kind of friend only ever brings you bad news?" the dragon asked, grinning.

"A shitty one," I said, my head wobbling back and forth against the door. I lifted my hand, the doorknob above me, waiting. It was a velvet rope. It was the ignition of Ilya's car. It was a burning newspaper. Some things simply saved your life.

"I'll be keeping this," the Black Dragon said, holding the jar of oil with my spider inside. My hand grasped the doorknob and turned.

"Now get out of my apartment," the dragon said as the door opened with my leaning weight. I flopped backward into the hall, pulling my legs from the apartment. He stepped forward, holding my jar out as if to taunt me, then he tossed my cowboy hat to me. I watched as he grabbed the doorknob. After spitting high into the air, he closed the door with a grin. The strand of spittle spun end over end before landing on my chest.

I collapsed, lying on my back in the hallway. My body was wrecked. I couldn't handle another beating by the Black Dragon. This was it; I wouldn't be able to return to my apartment. The situation was, for lack of another way of thinking, exile for me. My confrontation with him had failed to produce enough reasoning, enough truth. Once again, my actions and their repercussions had only caused more clouding, and this time, I'd lost the jar. I'd lost a version of myself, only hours after burning another one out front.

I gained my strength and walked my hands up the wall, arresting myself onto my feet. The hallway was lit and warm, quite juxtaposed to what I knew it would be like outside. It would be cold, dark, and I'd be surrounded by my sleeping enemies. Worst of all, there was nothing I could do about it. I'd lost. My brother was realized. My mother was dead. My father had disappeared from my life and I had just discovered I no longer had a place to live. I'd even lost the jar I'd been trying to obtain for so long.

Ingleman. The devourer I'd been warned about by the red and blue dragons, the one who would supposedly eat me. How could I have known he would find me; that he would have started out guiding me? That he would be one of the dragons I only knew to obey and blindly trust?

"Hey man, what the fuck is your problem?" I heard come at me from the bottom of the stairs. It was a good question and much larger than the speaker may have intended. I navigated the stairs with care, holding the handrail. It was Chet, my neighbor from 3B. He was the first neighbor I'd seen in months.

"Hi Chet," I mumbled in a daze, "Yeah, I have a lot of problems. By any chance have you seen anyone messing with my mail?" I had a friend and I wanted to know who it was. Perhaps my neighbor had seen something.

"You're mail means dick to me," he said, seeming to be baffled at my topic. I reached the bottom of the stairs then and Chet rubbed his eyes, agitated.

"Did you tell the cops I grow my own shit?" he asked, aggravated. I had to think about this a moment. The notion that I had ever spoken to cops, or been one, or even killed a panda bear, seemed so alien and trivial anymore, though it was apparent they weren't and they hadn't occurred very long ago. My simple act of flicking a lighter beneath some newspaper had caused a vigil of thousands to burn my metallic twin before my own home...or what had been my home.

"I...I guess I did, Chet. I was joking, sort of...I'm sorry," I said. I had used his name with the police, yes. I had told them he grew pot. I'd done it because I was in trouble, and had tried to buy my way out of it. Chet's face contorted into a mess of twisting features.

"Motherfu...you know they raided my fucking LIFE? I'm screwed now. I wake up and I got cops in my face, goin' through all my shit. They wrecked my T.V., dumped all my goddamn trash out, they even ripped up the fuckin' seats in my car. What did I ever do to you, you cheap shit?" he asked, furious. It didn't sound to be rhetorical in pose. I slowly swayed my open mouth in the air, groping for any miserable words I could utter.

"Got an answer or what?" he barked. I swallowed and took a breath.

"Chet, I have no reason. I did it. I said your name. You didn't do anything to me. You're a good neighbor," I confessed, sighing and pathetic, holding my cowboy hat.

"They called my goddamn FOREMAN, dickhead. I got kicked off my crew, you know that? I lost my job!" Chet approached me, then. I opened my mouth to answer but then said nothing. What could I say? _Yes, Chet in 3B, I blathered your name to the cops to try and buy my way out of getting in trouble for igniting an endangered species of Asian bear at the public zoo. This problem inadvertently ended up causing you and I to not be able to live peaceably in our homes, because of the throngs of people outside of our building that scowl at the very notice of movement near the front doors. I gave the cops your name because I failed as a cop. All those people out front these dozen days are my fault, too. Sorry you lost your job and weed, but if you're on the lookout, you could come to the employment office with me in the morning. They have jobs listed and I've been offered weed out front before._ Truly, what could I say? I had no excuse, defense, or advice that I could explain clearly at that moment.

"I'm sorry," I said of my deplorable effect on the world.

Chet hauled back and socked me in the neck. I stumbled backward and my spine stuttered against the stairs. My hands were automatic in clutching my throat as I made a gasping, hoarse inhalation noise.

"I ain't got any weed left, either, shithead," he said, shaking his body in disgust and walking back to his apartment. With my eyes wide, as if gasping for the air that my mouth and nose couldn't draw, I tried to bring my tongue back into my mouth. It had pushed from my choking head and my face had grown hot. The pulse beneath my sternum pounded and my lungs ached for air. As Chet reached his apartment, he looked at his hand and then up at me, a befouled and loathsome expression crossing his face.

"You got shit all over me," He said, flicking his fist toward the carpet, flecks of sticky, blood-soaked chewing tobacco flinging from his knuckles to the ground. Then he went into his apartment and slammed the door in disgust. I remained there, my mouth in a grimace, trying to breathe. My hands and feet went numb and there was a clicking disturbance in my chest. Several seconds passed before my throat shot open and I reverse-screamed, dragging a massive allotment of air into my pounding lungs. My tongue drew back into my mouth and I gagged, then breathed again. What else could go wrong tonight? Panting, I slumped there, returning to stasis. The stairs had dented my back.

Slow, I staggered my way through the building and to the front entrance. I discovered then that something else could very much go wrong that night. As I exited the building with my pulsing face and bloody, chew-stained white sweatshirt, I saw Hausen. He was standing on the sidewalk looking up at my apartment building with what appeared to be a home camera. His focus shifted when the front door to the building opened and he turned and zoomed in on me, filming. I was an unwitting actor for an actor. There was an awkward moment where I wanted to hide my face, but it was too late. I watched his own face slowly rise above the camera. He glanced up at my apartment, then back down at me. I was a battered, filthy, unexplainable mess...a tatterdemalion. I was the panda killer, the loser, the liar. A look of hurt crossed his face and he lowered the camera, staring at me. I watched his hands come out, his shoulders giving a lamentable shrug.

"Why?" the gesture asked. I turned and ran as fast as my body would then let me, away from him. I made my way around and over sleeping protestors, sprinting block after block. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Would Hausen alert everyone? He'd certainly inform Ilya. It seemed my days as a protestor against myself were over, and my new friends were now gone, as well. That left me with but one friend, the mail friend, the last piece of gristle I had on my side, and I didn't even know who or what it was.

Hausen's expression and gesture haunted me. He'd seemed so let down, so hurt. I'd cheated him out of knowing someone. I'd infiltrated his sensibility and then crushed it, no matter how innocent or sinister my intentions were. He had met my father. He had become emotionally linked to me through my father's demise. He had saved my life. He was involved in the play that had launched his career again, and that might just cause his comeback, and my awful taint was atop it all. _Why?_ he had asked with his slumping posture and devastated eyes. It was simple, to the point, and a question that I could answer with utter clarity: Because I was a burden and pariah to all who knew me, and the wage of my very proximity was sadness.

### Twenty-Six

Referring to myself as out-of-sorts was an understatement so severe, it could have been derisory. My face had been battered so much in the last weeks that it only bore a cursory resemblance to itself. I couldn't remember what I looked like anymore. It had left me, my face, and I wasn't certain that any relaxing heal-time would ever bring it back. I'd lost my appearance, my identity, but I hadn't lost those who looked for it, who spit at it. There was little chance I would be able to return to my apartment, which had been overtaken by the Black Dragon. His face had changed as well, having smoothed somewhat. His build had grown skinnier, and he only fit in my clothes in a childish and simple way.

The dragon had also taken my wallet. I worried that my apartment might not confine him for much longer. With my credit cards and his want of shoes, I began to suspect he had aspirations of leaving the apartment. It seemed he wanted to be me, but better. He wanted to go out and do things. He wanted to live like a person. His gradual change of himself and my home indicated he had no aspirations of vanishing back into my subconscious like the previous dragons.

The restroom was bright and I had winced when first entering it. The panel lighting coated me in a stark, exacerbating light, exhibiting my blemishes well. I stood before a running sink and began cleaning myself up, examining my annulled face, looking for hints of who I was anymore. I found nothing but mess and debris that wasn't easy to dislodge. The superglue had to be pinched, along with my skin, and then moved from side to side to unseat its chemical bond with my chin and philtrum. The chewing tobacco had become clotted and stiff, having dried with the matting of blood that had leaked from my lips and nose. It came off easily, but the glue affixing it did not. As I worked, my face became more irritated and raw.

I'd lost my cowboy hat running from the Cake, and the white sweatshirt was stained around the neck and shoulders, with red droplets dotted on the chest, stomach, and sleeve-ends. The sweatshirt had to go. Beneath this, there was a plain t-shirt, so I wasn't topless, at least. A tear ran down my cheek as I looked at myself in the mirror, finding that I was unable to make eye-contact at first. The reflection was one of dire lowness. I looked nothing like what I thought I was. It was like hearing my voice on tape for the first time, and realizing I didn't sound to others as I did in my own head. This creature in the mirror was a blight and I hated the idea that he was running around with me inside him.

"Who are you?" I muttered at the man before me. He just stood there crying.

Cleaned and composed as best I could manage, I left the restroom of the employment office. It was nearly six in the morning, and the Black Flower was already seated at the front of her roped off queue. It had been kind of her to let me in early. They hadn't opened the office yet, but she'd let me in to clean myself up under the guise of empathy. I had lied and told her I was mugged, and that my attackers had spit tobacco on me after shoving me to the ground. I said they'd taken my wallet, which had, in truth, been taken from me earlier, but not by dark-alley, ranch-hand muggers.

"It's on, if you want to start looking," the Black Flower said to me from behind her window. I sat down in front of the job-database machine and struck a key. I hadn't slept yet, was hungry, and felt like I'd been dragged on a rope a mile down a pebbly, garbage-strewn beach by a truck I was somehow also driving, and not well. The night had worn into my eyes, leaving traces of wearisome debris in my mind. Other than my own death, was there any further loss I could achieve? Was I finally at the bottom of the well? I supposed there could be worse places. I wasn't starving or paralyzed yet.

I found the section. Miscellaneous. The screen, as warped as ever, lit out on several paths that would tree-root me into the bulk of listings that section contained. I noticed the police didn't have a listing anymore. I must have disappointed them to such lengths that I ruined it for anyone else. There wasn't a single footprint of them in the database for anyone to follow and apply. Out of curiosity, I tried to find the surgeon listing, and discovered it, too, had been taken down. Had I disenfranchised these popular listings from posting at the employment office anymore? Had I fouled things up that badly with my unfortunate failures and clumsy, flawed nature? I had to imagine the protestor positions would be taken down any moment, as soon as Ilya made a call. He was certain to have heard about my transgression by now, and was most likely feeling his back for the clichéd knife. The Miscellaneous section was less miscellaneous because of me. There weren't but a handful of jobs listed.

What I needed was something that would pay me, so I could find a new place to live and start getting all my troubles of late behind me. I'd lost the jar, I'd lost my apartment, my father... I needed something to work, for once. Me. I needed a wage and a place to live, to get my head together and move on. That had become my focus: _Move on, quickly, and don't let this madness catch up with you._

Getting out of Boston would have been amazing, and seemed a necessity. I began looking through the handful of listings for anything with the keyword 'travel'. There were three. I frowned at 'Christian Outreach now accepting!' No matter how much traveling it would give me, I couldn't have managed a faith-based job like that. I wasn't a religious man, in the traditional sense. If there were gods, they had garden-hose beat me off their property long ago. The second job that offered travel as one of its benefits was a short-haul truck-driver position. I'd never enjoyed driving. It was an occasional necessity, but I wouldn't want to do it all day. I found a positive vibe in the third job listing, and the amount of travel it offered was astounding. I would be so far from Boston, for even a small while, that there was nothing that could follow me. I could be as a new man, even if for a small amount of time. I hit the worn 'Print' key.

"My machine isn't up yet. I can't log in until we're officially open," she said to me, lifting a cup of coffee and sipping it. Her lips left a brownish ring on the rim. It occurred to me then that black women must have an entirely different color range of lipstick they kept to. The pink and bright reds I'd seen on Caucasians might not fly on darker lips like the Black Flower's. How much difference was there? Did she need special shampoo? Someone probably marketed special shampoo for black people hair, knowing capitalism, but did it work? Was it crucial? Did a black woman need conditioner, or was her curly hair of such strong fiber that there was no need to 'condition' it? If afro-picks had been invented, there must have been a whole range of products that catered to the more coarse and curly nature of a black person's hair. Was it racist to even wonder these things? I lived in a melting pot nation that expected me to understand numerous races, yet a nation that didn't prefer I gain this understanding by asking questions. It was desired of me that I cherish the differences in various races in a sort of spectral celebration of diversity, but it was thought undesirable to bring this up when they were around.

I mused over the idea of creating a phone service wherein operators of various races would be on hand to answer simple questions, without the pretense of social racism getting in the way. This could be a very positive, objective service, designed to help alleviate negativity and racism in general. I could simply pick up my telephone and call 1-800-Black-Man, or Dial-a-Pacific-Islander, and ask any questions I had without feeling like a horrible human being, without seeming like a terrible bigot. My even thinking this seemed horrendously racist, but if such a service existed, I'd use it, and needing a job, I would easily sign up for the position of American White Guy. I could answer questions on the telephone all day. I'd be helping the world. What a great job that could be: _Yes, ma'am, we do feel guilty about what happened to the indigenous people when our ancestors showed up here, and no, we're not oversexed; that one is mostly a rumor based on Hollywood films that portray white male culture in the U.S. in a confrontational, copulatory light, and it isn't very accurate. It's just to energize a movie more. And no, most of us don't enjoy golf._

"Is it okay if I stand here until the machine is up? Or would you rather I go somewhere else for a few minutes?" I asked, tired.

"Uh, whatever you want. It's no skin off my back," she replied. What an odd phrase. I wondered where it came from, 'no skin off my back'. Was it related to keel-hauling in the old world, where a problem at sea could get you flung off the front of the ship, dragged beneath the hull, in abrasive seawater, the flesh raked from your back by your slide across barnacles? Or did it have slave connotations, being whipped or beaten on the back? _No skin off my back..._ In the case of the latter, her use of it would be sad and surreal.

"I hate to ask, but you wouldn't happen to smoke, would you?" I asked then. She looked up at me with an eyebrow slightly raised, then blinked slowly.

"You need a cigarette?" she asked, only marginally annoyed.

"If you have one. I'd be grateful."

"Well, don't be. They're generic and stale. I'm down to one a week," she said, lifting a purse from the floor and setting it on her counter space. She reached in and pulled out a plastic baggy with eight cigarettes in it. Why a baggy and not the box they came in?

"One a week...how do you do it?" I asked. This wasn't small talk for me. It was legitimate curiosity, even envy. I wanted to know how someone could cut themselves down to a mere one cigarette in a week. I couldn't have done that.

"Just have one a week, that's how," she said.

"Aren't you worried they'll break in that baggy?" I asked then. She looked at it with a kind of odd expression, then extracted a cigarette and handed it to me.

"Not really," she finally said. I thanked her and went outside to smoke, waiting for her machine to become active.

What made a woman act the way she did, any woman, not just the Black Flower? My mother had expressions I'd never seen on another woman. What made them? At what point in her childhood had she learned that a slight tweak of the left side of her mouth, combined with a furrowed right brow and an almost unrecognizable half-roll of the eyes meant 'I don't agree with what you're saying, but I'll go along with it to make things easier'? When had the Black Flower adopted her barely stuck out lower lip, the raise of her brow's center, and turn of the head with her eyes going the other way? It meant 'You're a little crazy, but okay, I guess I get it.' I'd never seen that look on another woman, either. Did a black person have a different set of expressions than a white person if they were from the same culture and town? I'd never noticed before, either way. I began wondering if I had any unique expressions for which I was unaware. I had to think gluing tobacco chaw to my face and bleeding this much in public was unique, though this was in no manner a natural trait.

She was right, the cigarette was very stale. There was an acrid burn in my esophagus from the inner-purse, perfume fragrances that had saturated the tobacco of her cigarette, and my neighbor's fist having earlier slammed into my throat. I smoked it slow, with small inhalations to keep my gag reflex down and deter any coughing, which would have been awful in my current state. I finished the cigarette, stamped it out on the concrete and made my way back into the sterile employment office, cognizant of how much my hands and lower arms now smelled of early morning air and smoke.

I approached the counter again, withdrawing the folded job printout from my pocket. She looked over at me and then around to see if any other office employees were near. None were. She seemed tired, and I gauged she was the sort of person who did her morning preening and such in the car on the way to work. She seemed to have woken up maybe a half-hour before.

"Up and running?" I asked, referring to her computer.

"Mmm hmm. Let's get you a job," she said in monotone. She must have had a hundred bored phrases she had adopted over the years of communicating in the minimum with jobless, hungry people; people that needed her, but not the true her. People that wanted a referral, that didn't want a job but had to have one, people of the great gray life. I slid the blue sheet over and she examined it. It would be nice to get out of Boston. So nice.

"I'd like to be an astronaut," I said.

"Astronaut," she stated in a tone that meant 'are you serious?' I nodded, my neck feeling a little tight.

"Yeah, beam me up," I responded. That wasn't funny and I wished I hadn't said it. The Black Flower cleared her throat and looked around again, then glanced at me, then the blue sheet.

"There's nobody here yet, so can I talk frank with you for a second?" she asked. I swallowed. This might not be good. Was I going to get a lecture about having cost the employment office some of their listings? Was she going to tell me to stop wasting my time, like my father had told me, and stay away from the employment office?

"Okay, sure," I said, nervous. She sighed.

"Listen, I've seen a lot of dudes come through here. Every day, you know?" she started.

"Yes."

"Some guys, they come in, they get their job, and they don't come back. I don't see them again, or maybe in a few years. They just walk out, hit the interview, and it sticks. They keep it going."

"I get it, sure."

"But then, there are other guys who come in over and over. Nothing works. They got bad luck, or they screw it up, but they come back. I've seen guys go through every job we got that they're qualified for, and not keep a one."

"That's sad," I said.

"Ya think?" she replied, looking at me hard. I didn't know what else to say. I felt like a culture of foul-smelling enzymes in a Petri dish being scrutinized by bespectacled, superior beings. _Wait, was it wrong to compare a black person to a superior being?_ It inferred there were other people that weren't as superior, that were... _in_ ferior.

"I'm one of those guys, right?" I asked, nodding. I could see where this was going. This was a 'buck-up' speech.

"Man, I see you come in job after job, but I don't think you're like those other guys. I can tell. You don't pick the easy jobs, is why. You pick the trouble jobs. The professional jobs." _Did I? Were those the sorts of jobs I'd been obtaining?_ While I'd failed every job I had attempted, there was clarity in what she was telling me. It did seem true that none of the jobs had been simple.

"Oh...I guess I do. I never thought about it."

There should have been an award for someone who could get a difficult-to-snag job. Did the young ladder-climbers who worked hard to make a position, even as a simple assistant in a law firm, by sacrificing half a life and most of their morals, get a trophy beyond the job? Yes, some received plaques and official certificates of welcome, but what about the person that pumped gas, and that slowly made the rise to the next level, becoming manager of a gas station? There was no award, and only a minimal pay-raise. There should have been an official city plaque, at least, for that person, maybe a gift-certificate to one of those small, expensive import stores.

I began wondering about the idea of an everyman directory, a book delivered like the annual telephone directory. It would be a registry of publicly gathered information on those around you, full of names, sectioned by area of town and business. Gossip would be prohibited in the directory, but facts and interests would be prime. I imagined how wonderful it would be to pull into a gas station and, while the tank was being filled, learn more about the person pumping the fuel. I could read 'Jake' on the employee's nametag and then look him up under the gas station's listing in my directory, right then and there.

I might read that the employee's last name was Richards, that he played guitar on the side and had a cover band that played at The Bullrush Tavern on the last Thursday of each month. I could read that he'd grown up in Maine, and became a Boston resident in the early '90s. A man of many prospects, Jake was also available for some occasional brush removal, if one were to inquire. After reading these things in the directory, there would be a short statement made by the resident himself, a quote about his view on some particular thing, followed by any relevant online address. Social networking services like this existed online in droves, but not in the real world. Not where people really lived amongst one another. I'd make great use of a directory like that. What a way to get to know the people around you without having to push yourself on them, and vice versa.

I could learn more about the Black Flower with a directory like this, or simply read about the others around me, feel more confident about my place, or connected to where I lived. Did I like poetry? Who else in in the seven surrounding blocks liked poetry? Maybe the man at the bus-stop one block over, every morning at 7:30 sharp. Maybe I would strike up a conversation with him. I began wondering what my own listing would contain. One might read that I'd lived in Boston since the age of ten, that I had worked in many fields. I wrote poetry and preferred not to drive much. My outlook on life was confused and deterring, but I was certainly approachable to most, and looking for a relationship. Under the credits and history section, it might be listed that I was the inventor of the entire Social Directory, itself, for which my listing was appearing, and that I was also the progenitor of the controversial 1-800-Black-Man service.

"I've seen this before. You're the kind of dude that can pull through it, I know. You just gotta knuckle down, man, you know? _Make... something... stick._ Get a job and hold onto it. Lock your head around it. Keep that thing. You wanna get paid, right?" she asked.

"Yes, I definitely want to get paid," I said, as if pointing at something red while on a game show and stating, for the win, "Right there? That's red."

"Definitely?" she asked.

"Well yeah, definitely," I repeated. She leaned forward then with a gleam in her eye. It was the look of an improvising comedian who had just realized a great punchline before a tipping crowd. She geared into it.

"Then be definite," she said, giving me, for the first time in our knowing of one another's existence, a smile. It was huge, and I could discern from the way it wrinkled her cheeks, uncharacteristic, that she didn't do it often. I didn't respond, thinking this over. Her advice was deceptive, which was the mark of all advice that contained a wise summary, but it was also too simple and didn't take into account that some jobs were, at the very hub, awful. She did have a strong point, however.

"I'm referring you on this one, Mr. Astronaut. You'll get hazard pay for this, too. Know why?"

"Because it's hazardous?"

"So be careful out there," she added, jumping her hand atop the keyboard. After a moment, she stood and went to the industrial printer. My referral issued from it with the speed of a catheter removal, and on the clicks and whirs of officious time. When she walked back to me, her eyes for one brief moment on my crotch again, I chuckled inside. There was no confusing it. She didn't find me repugnant or dislikeable.

"There you go. You meet with Gary Aulden, a trainer at the Exploration Center on Holgate. You know where it is?" she asked.

"Yeah, that's the science center. They have exhibits for kids," I said, remembering going there when I was younger, with my father. They'd had a strange white room in which you and other kids could stand, and every thirty seconds or so, there would be a flash from one of the walls, and your shadow would appear on the opposite wall, but then stay until the next flash. You could look at your shadow and really examine it without having to hold still. The general fun of it was in making poses.

"That's the one. Give this to the receptionist and she'll show you where to go."

"You've worked here a long time?" I asked out of nowhere. It just popped into my skull and came out of my mouth, with a raised inflection at the end to denote a question. This was more like small talk, but the unnecessary nature of it made the question seem more important than it was.

"I suppose I have."

"How long?"

"Well, I guess it'll be nine years in October."

"Do they treat you well?" I asked. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows.

"We're not hiring, if that's what you're asking." She was being funny, which looked good on her.

"I'll tell you, you might see a lot of people like me come and go here, but I come in all the time, and all I ever see is you, working, day in and day out. You always give me the referral. You've never denied me even once. I hope they pay you what your worth," I said, then backed up a step or two, turned, and began walking out. I was charming. Was it possible I could even be flirtatious? I looked back at her as I exited the doors, and for a single moment, saw her looking at me in a way that was unlike anything I could ever associate with an office. Her head was tilted slightly and she was deep in thought for what I determined to be a sudden inflection of poignancy, and it was all about me.

### Twenty-Seven

The receptionist, a rather icy and struggling-to-subdue-her-bitterness sort of older woman, had unlocked the Personnel door near an exhibit of how a nuclear reaction occurs and what it does. I met Gary Aulden once inside, caught him muttering to a vending machine that had run out of his preferred snack. I'd met him twice before, at the employment office. He claimed he was not the man I knew, but Gary Aulden was the spitting image of Jerry Alder, the overweight man I'd met twice in the employment office lines. He was the bumbling set-painter that had buddied up to me in line while getting a job with Trimark.

He was pleased that I offered such surprise at meeting him, but then went on to explain that he was not whoever I seemed to think he was. I offered dodgy questions around the subject of set-painting and received only confusion from him. I asked if he had a twin brother. He didn't. He was Gary Aulden, Space Exploration Center trainer and an astronaut with 24 zero-gravity missions to his name. He stated as a matter of pride, when describing his qualifications to train, that he'd orbited the Earth a grand total of 153 times now, and nearly twice that if you counted rotations that fell just shy of complete. I supposed I didn't.

"You look just like someone I met a few weeks ago. Even your name is similar," I said, still unable to shake the eeriness of meeting him. Were people moving around on me? Changing character when I wasn't around? The surgeon I had worked with had popped up in my life a second time, though as an unemployed man. I thought him shady and up to something, but now I was beginning to wonder if there were simply two of him. I had assumed the policeman I'd worked with, and later discovered in my father's play, to be the same man, Gonzalez, but was it possible they were different people? The same now happened with Jerry Alder, set-painter, who I was re-meeting as Gary Aulden, astronaut. Were people being cast for multiple roles in my life? If Shakespeare was right, and all of life was truly a stage, and all the people merely actors, this whole cheap production needed more extras.

"Well, it's good to know I'm not the only ferociously attractive man about town," he said with a half-grin. It was clear he didn't take things too officiously, and had no problems joking about himself. That was a nice trait in a trainer of any job. The last time I'd undergone orientation with a nice guy in charge had been as a 'hospitality attendant', which was code for the position of wiping the bottoms of Alzheimers-addled residents in a care center, three years back. He had later fired me in a friendly and understanding way.

"So, how does my position as a space explorer work? I get a lot of fact-heavy information, then some simulator time?" I asked, trying to be amusing. I really had no idea how any of it functioned. There were kids out in the center, passing through the exhibits that had a greater understanding of space exploration than I did.

"Well, 'exploration' is just a general term. We don't really explore anything. That's for better funded and more adventurous missions; national pride kind of stuff. We stick close by and mainly work as machinist/mechanics," he replied. I was worried by this. I had once lied my way into a machinist job. It nearly cost me my arm when my sleeve became caught in a cantankerous old lathe's inner workings. It had nearly dragged me in. I imagined there would be much larger and more dangerous machines here.

"The job description didn't mention that," I said, still trying to sound optimistic, though it would have been obvious I'd been knocked to the side by his statement. What did I know about fixing machinery? I was awful with technological widgets. It was a great affirmation of my worth as a human being the first time I went a month without my laptop crashing and having to be reformatted.

"Well, there's so much going on with modern space travel that it would be impossible for one guy to know even half of it. It takes hundreds of people to manage a successful space flight. By machinist and mechanic I mean the point of a mission. We go up, repair something, and come back. What we repair is usually complicated and hard to get to, but in essence nothing too crazy. Tab 'A' goes in Slot 'B' that type of stuff, just really expensive tabs and slots, and some accurate tools designed to handle any kind of environment we can dish out. If you can fix a VCR or lawnmower, you can pull off the repairs we gotta make. It's the 'being in space' part that requires the most training." This was disconcerting, despite that it was designed to comfort me. I had no clue as to how one might go about repairing a VCR or lawnmower.

"I'm anxious to start," I lied, "how much training is provided to prepare me for space flight?" Gary put his hand over his mouth and gave a slight cough.

"Excuse me, haven't been feeling well."

"There's a bug going around," I said automatic. It was the response most humans gave when encountering another seasonally sick human being.

"Well, today's a special day. We got a call at 0400 hours from Fultech Communications for a job that needs to go down today; sooner the better. They got a satellite that left its geocentric orbit and the tilt is disrupting, so their feed is getting scrambled. Lot of cable television subscribers in the world, and that's a lot of complaints coming down the pipe. People don't get to see their televised explosions and boobies, they freak, right?"

"I guess," I replied.

"There you go. So, I got it from up high we're gonna have to forego the usual conditioning and go with a specialized one. We're calling it 'Perspective Focus' training, and you're the guinea pig, friend."

_Guinea pig?_ I hated the very notion of whatever was happening. What was it about the 'sink-or-swim' approach to employment? The very notion allowed that some—even if a small portion of the applicants—would 'sink', when it was obvious employers wanted 'swim'. Why couldn't an employer cut the inevitable losses by training in a way that prepared you for what was coming? In a job as a line-cook, long ago, my manager had simply stuck me behind a counter and told me to do what the guy next to me did. I followed this bit of instruction, and at the end of the night, the guy next to me was fired, too. As a temporary valet at the community center during an awards ceremony, I was informed by my upper to "Place the cars in the order we set out for first arrivals and luxury models", but when I explained that I had no knowledge of this order, and hadn't been shown it yet, his response was, "Oh. That sucks. Just park 'em wherever, I guess." Fired! I held a strong dislike of my brief stint as a pizza delivery 'agent', due to becoming lost during a delivery that was to be made to a residence off my delivery map. When I called in to explain I couldn't find the house, my manager had simply ordered I find it, and then hung up. A good amount of the jobs I'd either lost or quit could have remedied these dilemmas, or at least made them less inevitable, by simply telling me what they wanted, and how the job worked, and then answering the question if I had one.

"So, we're going up 1300. Gonna have us a little calf roundup with a two ton hunk of wires and circuits, and we're gonna reintroduce it to its native orbit."

"And that's happening today?" I asked, feeling the constriction in my chest announce with due certainty that my nerves now scorned me.

"That's the window we got if we want to rendezvous with the stray. Well, and get paid for the job, you follow?"

"I'm going with you?" I asked, knowing the awful answer.

"Yup, the two of us. Hey, no worries; easiest thing in the world. Or off it, I guess. High five," he said, holding his hand up. The milk in my mind turned. I lifted my hand and gently nudged it at his.

"Yup, we're the cable guy," he said, jovial.

### ***

Nothing. Forever. That was the only way I could justify what I saw. It was as if sticking your face under water in the middle of the Atlantic and trying to see the floor, except if you knew for a fact that there wasn't one. Ever. A human being had trouble imagining infinity, and philosophers throughout time had pondered and tried to resolve this odd notion of 'forever' in various themes and ways of thought. I wondered what they would have concluded if they were, at that moment, in my large, airtight, bulky space-boots. I was looking down the barrel of infinity, with tremor, and there was nothing to see. The lack went on until I couldn't know, and then beyond it, forever. And that was all.

"Gary... I have to stop. I need more training before I can do this," I said, shaking. My arms lifted and lowered by my urges still, and I could control my body as if in a pool of thin water, but for the first time in my life, it made no difference with my placement in my surroundings. I could walk all I wanted, but not move. I could look in any direction, but find no landmark. There was no land. There was no habitat. There was empty space and a sad little man stuck in it, alone, rendered viably impotent to motion. My head and torso tilted forward then, and I couldn't help but try to move my arms and legs to control my drift. It was fruitless. I was a powerless 98.6 degree doll in a vain little suit.

"All right, man. I hear you. You want to take a break?" I heard him through the headset, from his more comfortable position in the shuttle bay entry, strapped to the wall.

"Please yes," I stammered, feeling my feet drift back in a way that should have indicated falling on my face, but I just awkwardly floated, as if perpetually falling and being unable to do anything about it, even feel it. No matter where I looked or how I turned, I felt upside down. I was extremely cognizant of the fluids in my bladder and stomach, which I could feel moving inside of me for once. With no gravity, my urine, still yet to be released, continually drifted against the walls and ceiling of my bladder, making me feel at times that I had to urinate excruciatingly bad. A slight flex of my stomach and a few moments of time, however, and I didn't have to go anymore. It was discomforting and alien. My stomach acid was a different story. I had come down with a touch of heartburn the instant we entered zero gravity and this had not gone away. I felt sick to my stomach, which at that moment was like having swallowed a washing-machine paddle that kept churning and churning my guts.

"Okay, look to your right, and then up a little," he replied. I did, though up was a confusing term in my current situation. I saw the Earth, a magnificent orb of color and cloud. It didn't look like a place I could ever go, or could have ever come from. It was so far away, so unbelievably distant, yet overcame most of my view. The Earth was colossal, beautiful, vivid, and frightening. It may as well have been a piece of graphic art hanging in a museum that you could look at and discuss, but never directly touch. I wanted to reach behind me and find my tether, then pull myself back to the shuttle, but I worried it might come loose and I'd suffocate in the nothing after hours of disorienting horror.

"Okay, I'm looking," I said, nauseated and shivering. Despite the controlled environment of my suit, which was more expensive than everything I'd ever owned in my life combined, it was still quite cold. My mind was playing tricks on me, as well. It felt like ants had foraged into my suit, and every now and then, one would move beneath the band of my underwear, crawling where I could not scratch. My feet tingled from my augmented blood flow, which, without the gravity I was accustomed, made my circulation go awry and caused my extremities to numb. My pulse couldn't slow down; neither from the gravity it was used to operating with, nor my aching anxiety. My heart was fine on the lub, and working overtime on the dub. The wrench tied to my wrist drifted up and struck my glass view-port. I gasped.

"All right, you see the planet?" he asked.

"Yes," I answered. How could I not see it?

"Break room's over there," Gary chuckled, "Have a nice walk." My stomach reeled and I slowly licked my mouth, which had become moist and itchy. True to his earlier statement, when we'd first put on the suits, the helmet didn't fog. No matter how frightened and hyperventilatory my breathing became, the plastic sheen would not fog. He didn't say anything about what would happen if I threw up in it, though.

"I'm serious, I feel sick." I whined, voice low. The wrench once again drifted toward my view-port, but I turned my head and it gave a slight bounce across the left ear area. It was not the amazing, space-age, high-tech tool Gary had led me to believe I'd be using, but a crescent wrench trailing my wrist on a length of bungee cord.

"You should know that burning up on re-entry automatically voids you from getting Employee of the Month," he continued, finding himself to be quite humorous. I was already angry at him for being fat, which annulled his responsibility with the mission. I'd learned that his weight made him a second-tier astronaut, and a 'Bay Specialist', which meant he stayed in the bay of the shuttle while some other shmo drifted aimless in the vacuum of space, making repairs and whatnot. According to protocol, he was disqualified from external repairs because he couldn't pass the weight screen anymore. Most of his orbits and his space log time was actually him just sitting all fat in the shuttle while another guy did the work.

I collided with the satellite, but at what speed I had no idea. It seemed as if I'd barely moved, yet the satellite had grown larger and larger until I struck it. On Earth, I'd have to say either it or I was moving at around forty miles an hour, but wouldn't that have injured me? It was nerve-wracking.

"Make your way around the aim-foils...you see the two panels out to the side?" I heard Gary's voice through my headset.

"What part of this is the side?" I asked. It was a mass and I was upside down, or it was, or both. Sides indicated direction. There wasn't one that I could recognize.

"Okay man, I hear you. From Africa on Earth, diagonally down toward your right foot. Right in the middle is a large, plastic screen, you see it? There are two smaller screens flanking it." I looked at Africa on the planet, then my foot in space, and looked roughly between these two points. He was right, there it was.

"It's dark green?" I asked.

"That's it. I can see it here from the shuttle. Climb down beneath it, 'beneath' being the side opposite the side you're on. Just go where you can't yet see, and there's gonna be an access panel there. You'll see four hexagonal downs that keep the panel in place, and you're gonna need to ablate those. The panel downs have to be removed one at a time, due to the tools we have." I awkwardly groped my huge gloves over the satellite, which let me go forward as I grabbed and pulled at it. I felt like a half-paralyzed wasp groping its way over a discarded apple.

"The satellite's turning when I pull...god, is that okay?" I asked, breathing hard and feeling my adrenalin pick up.

"God says that's fine." I heard Gary say. What a schmuck he was. I reached the panel he spoke of and examined it. ' _Hexagonal downs_ ' _?_ ' _One at a time because of our tools_ '? They were simple, metal nuts. That was it; four black-painted nuts holding down the sheet-metal panel. I'd made more intricate things in beginner's metal shop, my sophomore year in high school. I had a crescent wrench to remove the nuts. ' _One at a time_ ' meant that I was a human being with two hands and one wrench. What a senseless thing to give as advice. Who was the Space Exploration Center Committee bilking for this inflated and gigantic girth of terminology? How much did they draw to buy this crescent wrench, which I noticed had the brand name ground off, but which had obviously come from a thrift store somewhere in Boston.

I learned that removing the nuts was difficult. I had no leverage, and they were on tight. When I tried to put more muscle into it, I simply succeeded in twisting my body away from the satellite. I had to hook my foot in a small enclave on the satellite's surface, and then use my leg and stomach muscles to steady myself while putting my lower back into leveraging against the wrench. Using a crescent wrench by tightening your legs and abdomen was peculiar, but worked. It was the only time in my life for which removing a nut from a bolt could cause my ass-cheeks to clench and numb.

After removing the bolt, cursing at the unruly amount of time it took, but thankful for even having something to focus on in the awful void of space, I encountered a stumbling block. I'd managed to unscrew the nut, and had three left, but nowhere to put them.

"Uh Gary, I got one off," I said.

"Good, you removed the first of the downs. Three left," he said.

"Yeah, the 'downs'. Listen, where do I put it while I take off the others? I don't have any pockets," I said.

"Just hold onto them," he said, simple.

"That's sort of-" I began but ceased immediately. I tilted my head back and groped around for the nut, which had left my hand and was drifting off into space. I lost track of it, then saw it again.

"Shit..." I muttered, trying to get my hand around the nut. The angle was wrong, and I was trying to grab something above my head but for which my shoulders simply couldn't give me an angle to. Space movement was obnoxious.

"Problem?" I heard.

"Uh, I lost one of the nuts," I told him, giving up.

"What?! Don't! We don't have spares up here and if we leave the satellite missing a piece, even a down, we don't get paid. If we don't tell them and leave it, we can even get sued later."

"Well, I can't see it," I said, "the fucking things are painted black."

"This is a billion dollar company. Find the part," he said, strong. I cursed in my mind and had no choice but to let go of the satellite to adjust my view. With my hands opened and my body adrift, I arched my back and brought my arms around, turning away from the satellite and using my foot against it to spin. It was my only sure footing in existence. I saw the nut then, or at least the silhouette of its hexagonal edge. I reached my hand out and captured it. There was a moment where the nut seemed to bounce out, but my fingers caged it back into my hand, and I enveloped it in a fist.

"Okay. I got the nut. You guys should put pockets on these suits," I said, trying to turn around again, back to the satellite.

"That's not a bad...wait, what the hell is _that_?" I heard through the headset. Gary sounded shocked.

"Huh? What is it?" I asked, worried. Had he seen threads unraveling from my suit? A nuclear mushroom cloud blooming in the middle of Europe? A terrifying alien life-form attaching itself to the top of my space helmet?

"Get back here. There's something out there. Get back to the shuttle," Gary rushed. I could hear him breathing into his own suit heavily.

"What, like a meteor?! Where?" I panicked, kicking and trying to grasp at the satellite. The machine was taunting me by maintaining a placement just out of reach. When my fingers nicked it, they actually only pushed me away an inch.

"Jesus christ! It's a man! Behind you! It's a fucking man!" I heard him shout. I desperately found a nook for my hand in a small glass node of the satellite and pulled myself over it, turning as I did so, enough to get a look behind me. The vacuum of space sprawled out for eternity and an object was streaking toward the satellite, toward me.

The Black Dragon's eyes were afire. He shot toward me at an incredible speed. I drew a hard breath, my eyes wide. Before I could maneuver my body around, he careened into my side. The satellite swiveled behind me and dragged us over in rotation. My feet swung up and I flipped up and over the satellite's exterior. I collided with it on the other side, grasping a fibrous bundle of wires in a plastic sheath. It was spinning toward the shuttle at a slow speed. The Black Dragon let go of me and shot back, away and out of view. I heard Gary curse and the shuttle bay doors began to close.

"Ga...Gary..." I tried to communicate, but I couldn't breathe. The wind had been knocked out of me in the collision. He was leaving me. Gary was closing the bay doors and leaving me.

I flailed my legs and tried to breathe. The Black Dragon came into view again, launching forward at me, his anger propelling him like a gale. There was a shrieking sound through my headset, a strange, electronic feedback. I couldn't hear Gary then but he certainly had to be seeing the satellite and myself tumbling toward him. I watched the Moon gyrate past my field of vision, then the Earth, both revolving through my field of vision as I spun. I clutched the satellite with whatever strength I could muster in my bulky, suited, ineffective fingers, as it rotated over and over.

"YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY FROM ME?" I heard explode in my headset, fuzzing out the speakers. The inevitable had occurred; the dragon had escaped the apartment. I caught my breath finally and gurgled, kicking my feet at his hurtling approach. His clothing, which had been mine until recently, tore away from him, having frozen and shattered from his jaggedly moving body. I slowly turned and, timing myself with care, shoved away from the satellite, into empty space, drifting toward the shuttle. My aim was off, but I was at least heading toward the tail end of it.

"Please...please..." I muttered, waving my unpostured body and reaching my arms out with little reasoning.

The Black Dragon careened into my back and I watched the shuttle spin away, my limbs wiggling uselessly and my heart slamming the blood through my body, panicked, adrenalized, terrified. He manhandled me around, face to face as we hurtled away from the shuttle at an incredible speed, and mashed his face against the outside of my helmet view-port.

"THIS IS YOUR HELL, NOT MINE. AND I WANT IT. ALL OF IT." Then he jerked me over end again, my legs trailing my back's direction, and I watched, upside down, as he hauled back and socked his fist into my chest. It felt like I'd been struck by a speeding planet. My heart stopped and my lungs ceased operation. I rotated, screaming in my mind, tumbling over and over again, my velocity taking me from the shuttle at a rate I could not gauge. I saw the shuttle disappear in the distance as I flipped, again and again. My body began shutting down, my legs grew cold. I was a doll in the sea, a doomed character in an awful script...a spider in a jar of oil.

In the phasing of my eyesight, from dim to bright and back again, with a view of the great, spinning blankness of the universe, I watched the moon grow small, the Earth diminish. I sailed away from my home at a velocity I couldn't register, but knew had to be tremendous. The dragon had done it. He'd killed me, scratched me from the books. I was doomed to what may as well have been Hell, and now he'd have my life on Earth. He'd leave the apartment behind. He'd survive, and I would not. It was over, my life, and my quest for the jar, for sanity, for understanding... my quest to simply live a normal life was at an end as well. The blow had been dealt, the stakes assuaged, the ending achieved. I'd lost, and now I had nothing left but to run out of air and suffocate in the maddening void.

Alone and cold, I spun off into the black. As my vision clouded and my flesh grew numb, the only creature in my entire view of the universe was my helpless, shitty, dying self.

### Twenty-Eight

I was aware of itch. There were minute movements, sensations I could register, but where? In me...no, about me. I felt a softness approach and taste my arms, and then there were ants. I had eyes and I opened them. Was I dead? Had I dissolved in a vacuum of death, my head swirling into the infinite nothing? I sat up and blinked. I was on a level plane, a floor, and it was grassy. The small green blades itched against my face. There was grass everywhere. I saw a tree, and beyond it... cars?

I stood, brushing the ants off of my arm and feeling the breeze against my chest and stomach, stimulating the hairs. I was in a park, and from the look of the people staring at me, and the sparse traffic behind them, the park was a public one. Where was the shuttle? Where was Gary, or the Black Dragon?

"What are you supposed to be?" I heard from a man among the watchers. I was in Boston again. I was downtown in the park. I looked down and took inventory of myself. My body was streaked in grass imprints, from lying on the ground for some time, and the shredded, burnt remains of my spacesuit still clung to my body in places. My space helmet was lying near me, melted in spots and the view-port was shattered. I felt my face. It stung in an unmerciful and smashed-in way. Had I reentered Earth's atmosphere in nothing but a spacesuit? Was it God that had saved me? Had I plummeted to Earth like a faulty satellite and been allowed to burn red, allowed to speed at terminal velocity into the world again, and live through it?

"Hey, you hear me? You're freakin' out my kids," the man said. He had two little boys beside him, one of which held his father's hand in a sad way, staring at me as if I had just stolen his bike. I blinked and looked about, seeing the growing group of people that had stopped to watch me. The angry father shook his head and gestured toward me, speaking to a woman nearby.

I began walking the other way. I didn't know what to say to these people. I had no understanding of how I had come to be in downtown Boston. I remembered space, horrible, freezing space.

"That's right, buddy. Get outta here," the man voiced after. I turned to him, trying to rummage an apology of sorts. What I saw when I turned around sent every fiber of my mind into a wracking worry. I had never seen anything resembling this, not even in movies. There were huge blotches of _nothing_ in the skies and backdrop of Boston, just blackness. Had I fallen out of one of these? Is that how I had come back from the vastness of space? My breath quickened and I watched as a fog of straight black rolled up the street and toward the park. The mass cast over itself, devouring the street and structures near it, and seemed to be coming at me.

"Get away," I mumbled to the people watching me, as the black cloud of space closed on them. They wouldn't have heard me.

"Get away!" I said louder, hypnotized by the horrific sight. The blackness encroached on the edge of the park, effusing forward as if millions of hungry particles absorbing everything they came in contact with. Was it space? Cold space? Had I somehow brought it back with me? The man with the kids said something to another man a few feet from him and then both shrugged.

"GET AWAY!" I shouted. They stood there, looking at me. The man with the kids flipped me off, then held his hands out, challenging, promising trouble if I continued my current behavior. I watched in panic as the monstrous black cloud roiled forward and, with a machine-like motion, enveloped over them. They diffused into it. They were gone...simply gone. The ground was vanishing as if an aperture of light had been cranked shut. A tree disappeared, the sky was being drawn into it, everything absorbed into the awful black. I began rushing away from this horror. When my space-boots—which weren't connected to my lower suit anymore—folded out from under me and wobbled off my feet, I sped. I ran barefoot with lightning in my veins. The black continued at me, devouring the park, taking the grass, brush, soil, people...all of it. I screamed as well as I could while at a full sprint.

There was a man in a pickup truck at the other edge of the park watching this. I ran for him, shouting for him to start the truck. After a look over my shoulder, I knew that the blackness wasn't gaining on me, I could outrun it, but for how long? What nightmare was this? This pestilence would eat me, destroy me, and every person and thing between us. Even the sunlight disappeared at its edges. The air itself didn't seem to survive it, as there was no breeze or movement of leaves near its devouring mass. It was killing everything and taking it all in, like a mobile, billowing black hole.

"Start the fucking truck!" I shouted. I ran toward the man and his vehicle. The truck started as I approached. I ran alongside it, to the passenger door. The man inside gave me a panicked look as I jerked the door handle and, while I climbed into the cab, he simply jumped out and ran into the park, shouting at me over his shoulder. Was he insane? The black pounced at him and his hat flew off, onto the ground. He simply dissolved inside the blackness. It continued reeling forward and absorbed the hat, the concrete path, birds flying into and near it. I scrambled into the driver's seat and put the clutch in reverse. I heard cars honking at me as I accelerated backward. The truck then jarred and there was a metallic mangling noise. I'd backed into a fire hydrant at a strong speed. With no time to pay it notice, I shoved it into drive and shot down Nagle Avenue, beside the park, and toward the highway.

The blackness was disappearing in the rearview mirror. This fog of absence couldn't go nearly as fast as I could, it seemed. Getting my breath back, I shouted without vernacular form in the cab of the truck, letting my dread out as much as I could. Was this really happening? Space had followed me. The dragon had to have caused this, and now it was destroying Boston, moving block to block and digesting all it came into contact with. There were several clouds of black in my distant view, and one of them was then spreading across the sky, slow, methodically absorbing all that it neared with its bulbous expansion. When looking into this mass, there was nothing to see. Another infinity.

"This isn't about me," I said to myself, trying to remain calm, "We're all dying down here. We're all screwed." The truck shuddered as I rounded an intersection at a swift speed and I let myself slow the vehicle to small degree. The black couldn't catch me if I ran, and in a vehicle, it was fast to vanish behind. I'd accomplished an inadvertent grand theft, but didn't see that this mattered with the current situation. The world was going through the end of time, or some such apocalypse, and a stolen vehicle was the least of my worries.

I stopped at a red light, unable to run it through the heavy cross-traffic. I kept a steady gaze in my rearview, watching. I seemed to have ditched the black spatial blight for the moment. At the green, I made a right onto 49th and gasped. Two blocks down, there was more blackness, creeping toward me and hogging up everything before it. I watched as The Wendy bent into its shapeless maw and effused into the black. I turned the truck around, manic, vehicles honking at me as the black overtook them. I floored the accelerator and sped in the other direction. Was this an extension of the Black Dragon? Is this what happened when he escaped the apartment?

My father's apartment was a good 25 blocks away, and I had to save him from this. If he was still alive, as I suspected, I couldn't leave him to this black vapor of death anymore than I'd stay for it. I was leaving Boston, right then, and stopping for my pop on the way. There was no sense in anything anymore, and I had to operate on urge alone.

It was gone, all of it. I was 10 blocks from my father's apartment when I saw, down the hill, the voluminous teem of black space thriving in the air. Where the ground should have been had become an absence of physicality. It wasn't just my father's apartment that was gone; it was the miles of land on the other side of it. Miles.

"Oh Jesus...dad." I muttered, tears in my eyes. It was over. If he'd been alive, he was gone now. Wiping the wetness from my cheeks, I sniffed my nose and again checked the rearview mirror.

I yelped and hit the accelerator. The mass was right behind me, silently groping forward at the tailgate. The truck sped forward and another shove of black came toward me from a side street. Ahead of me, it tendriled into the intersection, dissolving vehicles, the median, and swirling through and over whole buildings, making black, taking all. I hit the brake and spun sideways. There was a powerful cease of movement that sent my head hard into the driver's side window. I squinted and held my head, the truck idle, having struck the concrete divider. The black loomed closer. I opened the door.

_Was it cognizant? Did it want me? Was it smart enough to trap me as it had?_ I slowly stepped from the truck, surrounded. The sun went out above me as the black descended; a hideous amalgamation of darkness and nothing, nonexistence and the end. As I stepped away from the truck, the black engulfed it, hungry, emphatic, spiraling toward me. The black masses encircled me close and came together, joining and feeding inward, closer. I had but a handful of paved feet left on which to live. These diminished more and more and I could feel a hideous sensation of cold encroaching into me. It was the most absolute thing I could imagine. I took a breath and held it as the wave of space flooded past me, over me, beneath me, into me. I was going. I had survived the vacuum of space by some lop-eared miracle, and it was angry, and had come down to retrieve me. The blackness moved in the way an ovation swept over a crowd. There was nothing left for me but to be crushed, along with everything in existence, beaten down into a quantum singularity, or I'd simply cease to be.

### ***

Warmth, thought, and my father's performance at The Wendy to a cheering crowd... the universe was ovation; I heard it clearly. My brother's wife had her arms around me, to the envy of other men near. What a good wife she had made. Her breasts were against my chest and hair across my chin; what an excellent hug. I could smell the hair, model hair, clean and adulterated, a niceness of human hair that I ran through with my hands, burning.

There was ovation.

Hands banging together,

cupping the air into smashes and pops,

my father bowing, roses being thrown,

my body tumbling from the balcony,

my body into a row

of seats,

back broken, the air dragged from lungs

by grandiloquent smashes of hands,

copulating the room in noise,

in a risky change of tension,

bang bang bang.

Michael Hausen, a tower, a misunderstanding,

is tying a rope around my nape,

asking me pulling me

into the panda cage.

Cheering.

Shouting.

Heckling. My father repeating

his callback line again and again.

_Let it ride_.

The panda ripping at my leg, fiery, a warmth

like life, as burning literary magazines

fell from damp sky blue, going the street

in a risky change of format.

The Black Flower twirls

beneath the flaming papers,

a cigarette in her hand, the pages flapping

all the air from the world,

a sort of protest, the burning cigarette,

the turning

of the mind.

Her black breasts carving life

into encroaching machines.

My lungs full of smoke.

A clean, adulterated

suffocation.

What an excellent hug.

The Black Dragon's eyes appear,

above me in the dim as I float

slowly through

slowly,

mouse in the vacuum.

Gary Aulden drifts near, his suit coated in soot

and moisture, a pen in his hand,

a referral weighing down the other.

The ominous, giant eyes.

The Black Dragon

cupped to smashes, peering

down on me with venom and despisal.

I become aware of a strength, a certainty.

Something exists. Something existed.

Me.

No, there's more.

I feel someone. I felt someone.

Her limb on my shoulder.

My body drifted over to see.

What an excellent hug.

"Are you my friend?" I asked in the black, sobbing. The giant Latrodectus focused its horrid eyes on mine, its fangs drawn open, the points extruded. There was light behind me, I could feel it. I could see the creature flit its mouth and then it pulled me in close and bit me. The fangs reaved painfully into my head, rupturing the upper half of my skull, bulging my eyes, carving my mind in two. Ovation.

"Where are you?" I heard a soft voice ask in my own mind. It was her. The Latrodectus. The Blue Dragon. My mother.

"I'm in the Black Dragon's black," I answered. A pinion by which my psyche was attached to me rotated. I felt to be vomited from an enclave into yet more darkness. My senses phased over on themselves. I smelled light. I could taste smooth. I saw murmurs.

"You're still you, son," she said. Was there so much a 'you' as an anti-'you'? I felt to be more affixed to what I was not, to what was real. I felt a hand pat my shoulder, Michael Hausen's hand, and a blitz of disgust filled my mind.

"Dad and I lost Percy," I said, "and then I lost dad."

"Your brother isn't lost, he's just gone. Do you remember? A truck?" she asked. I remembered. He'd been struck by an old pickup, which had taken his life when I was a boy. I smelled perfume then, leather, a purse, the black woman flower. I was suffocating in a bag, there were cigarettes to help.

"It's why I'm mad. I know," I said. I felt the fangs sink deeper into my mind. My thoughts fed back like a surge of static on a radio. The balcony lifted back into place and my father stood up rigid.

"No. Percy only made you sad. It was the dragon that hurt your mind. It was him," my mother said.

"What does Ingleman want from me? Why is he hurting me?" I asked as my stomach spat from its crest and slid into the spider's abdomen, joining it. The poison pumped from the fangs and flowed through my skull, rising under my tongue, leaking from my nostrils like searing treacle. I was in the park. The grass was screaming.

"I can't tell you. I was gone then. You have to ask the beast," she told me.

"I'll never get to him."

"Use your friend. Can't you feel him? His life is in you. He's never left you," my mother apprized.

"Who is my friend, mom? Who would ever be my friend?" I asked. A sensation of fire left my mind, burning animals, burning me. I was metal mesh in a costume. I was retch in a surgical mask.

"The man who knows poetry. The man who knows you. The man to whom all submissions lead."

"Who is he?"

"Your father loves you very much." Flower petals fell on the stage and Sam, as Adam, reeled back, having misunderstood the kiss.

"Is dad in heaven? Are you in heaven?" I asked, my heart grinding like a misdirected clutch. There was no answer. I felt the fangs retract and the legs lift from my body. I floated, an abnormality, in the universe, my organs within me again, my sense of body restored and whole. I could feel him behind me. My friend. My dad. I turned, standing on solid ground in the black. My father chuckled and ran a hand through his white hair, his cane at his side. My mother was gone. Hands came together hard, bang bang bang. Someone threw roses.

"What happened to me?" I asked in Hell, or was it a prime bliss? My father looked out into the vacuum, alternating from youth to old age, and he pondered for a moment. He nodded like a pen swirling cursive.

"Good question. So keep it up. Questions like that. That's the thing," he said.

"I'm bent. I'm done, dad."

"Bullshit. And turn off the faucet, huh?" he said, nudging a tear from my cheek with his index knuckle. I saw his wedding ring glint and spin. I tried to stop crying.

"Why is he doing this to me? Who _is_ Ingleman? Why do people keep recurring as other people? What's real? What's happening?" I pleaded. The Black Flower undulated in her clothing, a planet, a black sun, a crowd of heads speaking roses.

"Ah jeez, the mouth opens and it won't stop, kid. You never could keep it simple."

"Who is he?" I asked. I needed the referral for anything to work.

"Listen, Ingleman is him...Your antagonist. You have to confront him at the end."

"He's not real," I said. Ingleman was space. He was surgery. He was Trimark and traffic cops.

"He'll always be real because you've kept him that way. And as for people becoming other people... shit, you're a poet. That's a writer, isn't it?"

"What?" Confusion figured me in angles and ratios.

"Writer's revise, son; you know as well as I do. You're never satisfied so you revise too much. What else can I say? I've been an editor for a long time, kid, and if you move things around too much, on page or in the world, you'll lose track sooner or later." my father explained.

"Were you taking my mail?" I asked then.

"No, you sent it to me."

"Do you edit _Ploughshares?_ Or _The New Criterion?_ "

"They're all _The Tatterdemalion_. For you, they're all the same mag. I'm the editor, son. I'll always be the editor."

"I want to leave everything. Can I just die? Can I leave?" I asked, still fighting back the chokes of misery in me. Squatter dogs sniffed at my groin and shit on the sidewalk beside vagrant vendors selling peaceful, exotic fad-meals.

"Your monster will never let you go. You know that. It's the end-time, son. You have to confront it."

"What has he done to me? What does he want to do?"

"Listen to your mother. You have to ask the beast if you want to hear about the beast. I'm here to help you. I'm your friend. It was just us for a long time, remember?"

"I remember... the Bachelors." My father smiled then, amused.

"Yeah, the Bachelors! Remember? We took it on, the whole thing. And we did fine. After your mother passed on, after what happened to Percy... we felt like shit, but we handled it, didn't we?" he asked.

"You and me," I said. Blood brothers.

"That's right. We handled it. You handled it. Maybe you turned off for awhile, but you're on again, and you're going to handle it."

"What do I do? I'm gone. I've been eaten up. Everything was," I said. My father sighed and then took my hand, squeezing it dearly. A facsimile of him stood on a stage, stepping back from me and telling me to 'let it ride'.

"You want to go home? You want to finish this?" my father asked.

"Yeah, dad, I do," I said.

"Then get a hold on yourself and stop dodging. Confused? Want to know what's real? Try stating the obvious," he said then.

"State the obvious." I repeated. My father stood there, watching me, no longer speaking. He expected so much, he always did. He was the editor.

"I...I want to go home." He looked at my lips moving, then, he lowered his head. It wasn't enough. I wasn't good enough, ever.

"C'mon. Work," he said.

"I don't understand," I replied, choking up again. He exploded into papers, drifted down the night streets of Boston, then reformed, the human referral.

"Real. Obvious. They hold freakin' hands. Quit jerkin' around and stare into it. Try explaining to yourself, truly, what's real," he said.

"What's obvious..." I phrased, pondering it. The black blossomed around me in a sheen of hindrance. I felt my imagination spark like a cough from a small machine. My father waited. I looked into the black with what I thought were my eyes and focused on it, rummaging in my mind for the obvious, for the simple, dull, boring reality of the world.

"People walk on the ground," I said. I grew dizzy then as my body cascaded with a level plane that gave a little when my bare feet found it.

"There you go," he said. I was to stop jerking, go through staring, then, state the obvious. Creation was a nervous tic.

"The sky is up. Sunlight comes through it," I added. The light I felt became visible. I could see the ground, my hands, an azure ceiling far above me lifting my thoughts into a delineating bliss.

"Now make your way home," my father told me, turning and walking off into the black.

"There's me," I said, "and I have clothes on. I'm wearing shoes. The air makes wind, and the wind makes breezes." My shirt lifted and blew lightly about me. I felt the soles of shoes encase my soft, cool feet. I watched my father as he walked away, his head held high, proud, and pleased with his boy. I needed to recreate the world of this morning, the world of last night, the world before the black. I had to make things up. The world was like a piece of writing. It was obvious as clapping hands.

"There's buildings and streets, there's people. There's Boston," I said. The city faded in around him and I saw his cane jab the concrete sidewalk with each step as he made his way down 49th, toward The Wendy.

"I'm hated. There's protest," I said, sour, watching citizens with hateful signs appear, dotting the various streets before me, all the way to where my apartment would be. I wore a tourist's shirt which read, in an arching, outline font: _Find the World in Boston_.

"I have a home," I said, knowing it was true.

My father had reached the edge of the block, about thirty feet from me when I called after him. He turned around, attentive, and looked at me. A swift current in my mind had carried me to higher perches, and my thoughts had uncovered a long twisted bough.

"Dad, when you...when I started writing..." I trailed off, looking at him.

"Go ahead," he assured. People milled on the Boston streets. Traffic went past. I heard the siren of an ambulance in the far distance.

"Just...how come I never got to be in your magazine? I kept giving you poems, but why wouldn't you print me?" I asked, a deep root tapped and my consternation seeping up like warm sap. My father sighed and looked down at his feet.

"We're all monsters, son. We just don't know what kind."

### Twenty-Nine

"There's yesterday's world today," I stated. I could hear construction, the horn from a ship in the harbor, and I watched as a squirrel jaunted behind a trashcan near the edge of the median. Cars moved in file down various avenues.

"On your left," I heard as a bike messenger streaked past on that side of me. It was the world I knew. It was my Boston, whether it welcomed me or not. The black infinity was still present, and continually moved over what I'd created, taking back Boston, people, animals, the air. I could keep it free of me, but I didn't know for how long I could function this way. I'd have to sleep sooner or later, and when I did, the black would be most certain to overcome me. It had to end. For my father, for my mother and Percy to rest in peace, whether it be in the ground or in my mind, and for myself, no matter how much or little I might have deserved it, for my sanity...it had to end. I made toward my apartment at a sprint, keeping off the blackness as if waving away the swarm of all flies.

At McKenzie and 85th Street, I passed several protesters that recognized me. I was sprinting at top speed toward Farsante, my street, the wind surging against my chest and face. One of them turned to the others as I passed.

"Isn't that the guy we're..."

"Your hair is brown," I said, moving on, keeping the black from enveloping us. It had begun looking for me again, in patches, weakly present but still a threat. I hit my street and began wading through protestors, shoving people aside, squeezing between others at a fast walk, my mouth moving and words coming out as people commented on my small shoves and nudges.

"Hey, watch what-"

"The Earth is round," I said.

"Excuse you," someone voiced.

"Iguanas are reptiles," I returned, moving among the tide of human resentment. It was nearing dusk, and in the twilight, I could see my facsimile burning on the lawn beside the building again. There were people cheering and I nudged through a small group of women that had parted in the slight. I saw Ilya near my burning effigy, talking to those near and angrily gesturing at the metal me.

"Slow it down, pal," someone said to me.

"Pants have legs," I answered. I was leaving a wake of puzzled individuals as I made my way forward to the doors of my building. It wasn't until I had but twelve feet to maneuver when it happened.

"Hey! I got him! It's him!" I heard behind me as a hand grabbed at the back of my shirt. Those near turned in the direction, saw the man grasping at my arms and back. It dawned on them. I jerked away from him, and as they began to move in, I threw my arms up and shouted for all to hear.

"A MENU SHOWS YOU WHAT TO ORDER." They seemed to pause at this, stunned by my shout and the nonsensical words that had ridden it. I used this moment to lunge forward, knocking several people either out of the way, or down to the ground; I didn't look back to see where they ended up. I heard the crowd churning, people yelling. I heard distant running, like a herd. It grew closer. The crowd began moving in at my apartment, at me, the epicenter of the angry world.

I dove to the door, slamming back a rather fat man who's 20oz coffee exploded against his chest and mine. He fell backward, his arms up, confused and bewildered as I stepped on his chest, continuing to the door. I grasped the handle and yanked the door open, trying to slide through as several pairs of hands struck my back and grappled at me. I fell inside, kicking in a panic at the door until it closed. I heard the seal lock and watched as dozens of hands began pressing the call buttons of various residents, trying to be buzzed in through the front door. I made it quickly to the stairs. The door to 3B opened and Chet looked out at me, then at the horde of individuals at the door.

"Blood is red," I said, streaking past him. There was an electronic hum and the door unlatched, swinging open almost to the instant. Chet gasped and then ducked back inside his apartment, closing his door in a hurry. The sound of his deadbolt engaging was drowned out by the raucous yelling of people.

I couldn't breathe, but managed to stumble onto the landing at the top of the stairs and to my apartment door. Behind and below, I could hear the building filling with protestors...no, rioters. They were a mob in chase, and destructive, and this mass of arms and legs and slogans and jeers could no longer carry the title of 'protest'. They'd protested, and I'd shit all over them, and now they were going to wreck everything around. I swallowed and opened my door as several sets of feet pounded up the stairs. I spun inside and shut the door, affixing my deadbolt and chain quickly. I was inside, they were outside, and for the moment, no matter how brief, the two worlds were apart. I'd escaped from a great nothing, which meant everything was about to happen.

He was sitting in a chair, reading an old copy of _The Tatterdemalion_. There were heaps of them in my apartment now. They had converged on the remnants of my oven and nearly buried it. There must have been eight-thousand copies in stacks, toppled heaps, and in miscellaneous piles, shoved beneath furniture, towering beside the windows, leaning against the television and entombing my apartment's smaller articles. My apartment had undergone more changes and now resembled my father's place more than mine. The dragon looked up at me over the copy and slowly closed it, calm, setting it on his lap. He was wearing the reading glasses I'd stopped using last year.

"Look at you. All grown up," the Black Dragon said, flinging his right wrist. His dice scattered against my feet, making me step back. He had an ashtray on his lap, cigarette between his fingers. He was even beginning to look like me.

"I came here to end this," I responded, trying to expand, adrenalize. Getting to my apartment had been like an extended football drill, and after nudging aside so many people and sprinting for so long, then scampering up the flights of stairs, I simply didn't have the endorphins primed for whatever was about to happen.

"Good coincidence; so did I," he said. Without looking at the blackness behind him, the dragon tossed the ashtray decisively over his shoulder and straight through the window. The shattering dropped jagged cuts of glass inside and outside the frame, and the black mass began seeping in. It crawled over the walls and salamandered across the floor in small streams; he never took his eyes off me. I heard people beating on my door, and someone at the base of my apartment was shouting up with a loudspeaker:

"LIAR! MURDERER!" Ilya repeated again and again. The black mass tendriled across the ceiling in its own, foraging way.

"I like you," the Black Dragon said, his lips curling, "I like you so much, I'm gonna _be_ you. But there's this thing I need."

"Yeah, what's that?" I asked, winding my shaken hands into fists.

"Ah see, I gotta know my name," he said, cold. I tried to power any strength I had into my upper body, my arms, the fists.

"Ingleman," I offered, spiteful.

"My real name," he rephrased.

"Go fuck yourself," I suggested. He laughed, then soured, rotating his shoulders to loosen them.

"Then we know the route," he said stepping forward. I moved at him, cutting him off in mid step, and struck his face hard with my right fist. He backpedaled a moment and I came in. His arms flung around me and we tumbled into a stack of _The Tatterdemalion_. It collapsed and spilled magazines down atop us. I felt a powerful collision with my stomach and grunted. His knee came back, leaving me in a groan as I hauled back and struck his mouth with my fist again. I primed back for another when his hands began ripping at my stomach and sides, tearing the skin deeply. I curled. His claws had come out and he was trying to gore me. I jerked and then hit him again and again, straddled atop him and socking his head against the floor.

There was a broiling sensation on my left side then and I kicked my legs in pain, fumbling off him and away toward the kitchen on my back. I was wet from my armpit to my hip and the blood was heavy. He'd sliced into me deep and tore open a huge gash down my ribs. I squinted, my side shrieking into my thoughts. I couldn't take another wound like that. Grappling with him was no good.

The Black Dragon was on his feet fast and jaunted forward. I groped backward on the floor and caught a glimpse of his smile as he brought his boot under my jaw. I felt my head pop and a dull throbbing began in my feet, warmly traveling up my legs and back, spreading through me like an injection of anesthetic. I felt like I was going to pass out, and lifted my arms weakly against him. The Black Dragon kicked my hands aside, knelt down on his haunches and roughly turned my head to the side. He spit in my ear.

"Give me your name," he said again, not winded at all. It was a losing struggle for me. I could do nothing against him.

"I don't-"

"Give me your name," he repeated. The spit was hot in my ear, muffling the sound and creeping over my lobe.

"Fuck you." He stood then and lifted his foot above my head and held it there, about to stomp, staring down at me.

"Your name," he said, stern. When I didn't answer, I saw him shake his head and lift his foot a notch higher, to stomp on my head. I grabbed a breath and then watched as the unexpected happened. There was a line that appeared in the air, coming from the wall, and it arced through the apartment and crashed against the Black Dragon's face. It was a black line, no, dark red...rosewood. The Black Dragon hobbled backward, clutching his nose. I heard him yelp in pain. Looking over, I saw who I hoped would be there.

"Dad," I said, my heart brimming. He looked down at me.

"Break the jar," He said, simple, with a slight lift of his head. I scanned the room for it and then watched as the Black Dragon returned to his bearings. He scowled.

"Works for me. You ready, old man?" he said, rising tall. My father lifted his cane and let it rest in his other hand.

"Don't pick on my kid," he replied. I located the jar, which was on the counter near the sink. It was sitting in a puddle of what appeared to be urine. The dragon moved toward my father. I turned and lifted to my knees as I heard the commotion begin. Without turning to look, I made it to the sink, stood on my fatigued legs, and grasped the jar. I turned fast and saw the dragon atop my father, pinning him to the floor with one hand and slapping his face to the side with the other. My father was gurgling and gasping. This ceased when both noticed I held the jar.

"Put it down," The Black Dragon said then, watching me, pausing before the next swing.

"Break it," my father muttered. The dragon shot a knee into his jaw and I heard a crumbling sound.

"Grow up, both of you," the dragon said with distaste.

"Just break it." I heard, this time from the closet off the living room. I heard the door unlatch and open. The dragon shook his head, amused and irritated. I knew this second voice. Percy stepped into the entryway to the kitchen. He looked at me, my torn open side, then at dad on the ground in the dragon's grip. After this momentary pause, the dragon swung a fist back at him but Percy dodged it before rushing down with immediacy. He crashed onto the dragon's back. The monster anticipated this and turned, grabbing him. I held the jar up and looked into it, at the small black life in the bottom of it, all but dead to reality. It was me in there. I was the spider. What would happen if I broke it? Was it suicide? Was it the end?

"Don't answer..." I heard from the floor. My father lay there, an old man, feebly waving his hand in the air and clutching his side. To his right, Percy was behind the Black Dragon, choking him in a neck-lock, squeezing, his teeth showing as he strained to choke the beast.

"Don't answer it," Percy agreed, grunting. The phone rang then. Everyone in the apartment grew still for a moment.

"You can't," I heard my father mumble.

"You don't know who's on the other end," Percy said, louder, straining but losing his choke-hold on the dragon.

"Break the jar. Now," my mother's voice said as the refrigerator door slowly opened. I watched as she slid out, her flesh rolling onto the floor. She gave a look of menace to my enemy. The Black Dragon muscled himself up onto his feet, dragging Percy up with him, and then threw Percy off toward the television. He then jumped a small distance, moving quickly for my mother.

"Mom!" I shouted. In one deft movement, the dragon reached her and slashed the side of my mother's face with his clawed hand, while managing to grab my throat with the other. My mother flopped limp without a sound. Percy tried to stand and the phone stopped ringing.

"Break it," Percy said, groping for breath. The dragon's grip on my throat tightened, cutting me off from speech. I grit my teeth and twisted my body, flinging the jar across the kitchen and against the wall. There was a shattering sound and the world filled with oil. It rivered through the apartment, the pressure astounding. I was still, afloat in it, thickly breathing it into me, out of me. The dragon was gone, my family was gone. The oil washed through them and dissolved them.

The world focused and I stood, dry, a child on the steps of the little house I lived in with my dad. A small Tonka bulldozer, dented and long-used rested on its side in the yard. I was bored of my toys and had even grown bored of breaking them. As the day lit my new neighborhood with the stun of Summer heat, I sat on the porch trying to decide what I wanted to do with my time.

I didn't like Boston. We'd moved from one side of Stoughton to another, and then mom died, and just when I was starting to make friends in the new neighborhood, dad wanted to move again. I didn't know anything about Boston, except that it was larger. Why we'd moved from Stoughton seemed silly. Dad had a job back there, too. Now, he didn't like his new job, and he was always preoccupied with a magazine he was making. We didn't need to move. The truth was that he felt too sad in Stoughton, because that's where mom's liver failed, in the hospital.

"What a stupid shirt," the little girl said to me. I was about two blocks from my house in the small suburban neighborhood. She was ugly, had big cheeks and a puffy mouth. I looked down at my shirt, which I'd always thought was neat.

"You don't like cookies?" I asked, amused.

"Not on my shirt. That's stupid. A shirt with a cookie on it is for babies," she said, proud of not being what she considered a baby. In her hands was a stuffed animal. A bulky, worn panda bear. I laughed.

"I thought only babies liked teddy bears. It's okay, though, I collect pictures of dragons," I replied.

"I'm not a baby. I'll tell my dad and he'll kick you," she said.

"I don't even know you," I answered, "so anyway, what's your doll's name?"

"Maybe 'Retard', like you," she said, kicking a rock toward me. What a mean little girl. I took her panda bear and threw it on the roof of the nearest house. When she started crying, I felt awful, but decided it best to follow up on the path I'd taken in being hostile.

"Think about that next time, little bitch," I said, sounding far crueler than I'd meant to. When you acted a certain way, you had to keep acting that way. You couldn't change unless people wanted you to. If you did something mean to someone, you had to say something mean after, otherwise you made no sense. It was like acting.

After leaving the little girl behind, I walked several blocks, looking at the houses and seeing all the different kinds of dogs and decorations people had. One lady had the body of a car buried in her lawn, with flowers growing out of the engine and roof. It was cool. Then, I saw a boy. No, a man, but young; a high-schooler, trying to do skateboard tricks. I had a skateboard at home, so I went over to him and watched. He was annoyed instantly.

"You're that kid who's brother got run down last week," he said, idle, "Dude, get outta here."

"I just wanted to see your trick," I said. He frowned.

"It's a heelflip. I did a hundred of 'em before you showed up. You're bad luck," he said. His skin was a strong, shining black, damp from the repeated attempts at doing heelflips, and his hair was very short. I'd never really talked to a black kid before.

"Do you have a brother?" I asked.

"Nope," he replied without care.

"My brother was older than me. He was a grownup," I said.

"Whatever, man," he replied. I stood there watching him attempt the trick. He was getting annoyed with me watching and kept fouling up, swearing.

"So, I was the leader of a skateboard club in Stoughton," I came up with, lying.

"Huh?" he replied, almost landing the heelflip.

"That's where I'm from. We had this skateboard club? But I was the best one, so I was the leader." Sometimes I just made things up. I didn't know why, but I noticed other people did it too, even my new teacher at school.

"Liar," he said, frowning. At that point, his eyes glanced up and he gave me a look, watching my shoulders, then, looking at my legs.

"It's true. But I...I wasn't the leader actually. I was just the best one," I said, altering my lie. Everyone believed the second version of a lie, I'd found, the version where you admit some of it's not true, lying about why you lied. Then he looked at me in a weird place, before returning his attention to the skateboard and trying the heelflip, ignoring me. After landing the trick, he sighed and seemed pleased with himself. He nudged the board with his foot toward me.

"We got a real skateboard club," he said.

"You do?"

"If you're the best one, then show me how high you can ollie." The board pressed against my foot then. I looked down at it, not wanting to try.

"See? I knew you were lyin'. Don't lie to make friends; that's just stupid."

"You have a skateboard club, though?" I asked. I'd always wanted to skate in a club.

"Pff. Yeah, sure. Some guys came out and took pictures of us bustin' our tricks out in a half pipe."

"Really?" I asked. How amazing.

"For real. It was in Pro Skate Club Magazine. I got it in my backyard."

"Are you kidding? You were in a real magazine?" I asked. That was incredible. My father had a magazine he'd been making for other people to write in, but it didn't look much like a good magazine. It wasn't in color, for one, and there were no photographs, just drawings. Being in a real magazine sounded like the coolest thing ever. How lucky I was to have stumbled across this young man, as I had aspirations with my skateboard. I was going to be a pro one day. He picked up his board and looked around.

"So like, you can be in the club, but I'm the leader. You can't forget it," he said.

"Okay," I agreed, pleased. He rubbed his eyes a moment and then gave a glance around the neighborhood, looking for people. There wasn't anyone else around, however.

"All right, c'mon. You gotta go through initiation first," he said, matter-of-fact.

"What's initiation?" I asked as my feet came out from under me. My jaw struck the Sun and grated down the edge of the countertop. I crumpled onto the floor in my apartment. Ingleman backed up and stared at me. There were magazines everywhere and three bodies piled up near the far wall. I knew them.

"What's happening?" I gasped, fending off one of his kicks. I heard pounding on the front door, the voice below through the loudspeaker deriding me.

"LIAR! PHONEY!" Ilya voiced through the air, the walls, into my apartment from below. The Black Dragon stared down at me, his eyebrow raised in bored judgment.

"You had yourself a device, straight to the flashback, right? I don't like it," he said, snorting and kicking at me again. My poor family...they'd tried to protect me, but he'd hurt all three of them. I welled tears.

"What's wrong? Family gone?" he taunted me. The phone rang. The dragon took notice of this with trepidation, then a slow smile crossed his face and he looked back at me on the ground. Who was on the other end of the call? Had it been the same person all this time? Was it another friend?

"Feel like picking up the phone? Reach out and touch someone?" the dragon baited. If he wanted me to pick up and my family hadn't, my choice was simple. I wasn't going near the phone.

"Get out of my head," I said, growing angry. He wasn't real. None of it was real. In effect, he'd killed nothing. He'd only overpowered memories of my family. I saw the puddle of oil from the busted jar, spreading across the floor toward me. The black mass that had infiltrated my apartment swirled about the puddle, but couldn't seem to devour it. The phone, after a third ring, stopped.

"Fantasy time's over. Time to give it up," The Black Dragon said. I looked up at the beast with narrow eyes. I couldn't give in. Just as I didn't know how to defeat him, I didn't know how to give in, either. I was trapped being the beaten me. The dragon snorted and knelt down, grabbing my shirt.

The front door burst open. I could hear the rioters outside my door gain in volume as they began pushing through into the apartment. The dragon stood. My eyes caught Michael Hausen as he stumbled in. He looked about and saw me on the floor. Rioters entered the apartment around him and began kicking over piles of magazines, throwing objects, shouting. Hausen watched me as I sat shaking. I was crumpled against my lower cupboards. Then his gaze shifted up to the Black Dragon. He stared, confused.

"Mike..." I muttered. Hausen stood still, looking at the Black Dragon in a stupor, more shocked than anything. He slowly brought his eyes back to me.

"Mike, run," I managed, my gut aching from the kicks and claw-tears I'd sustained. His eyes squinted a moment, as if clearing something in his mind, and then his expression changed. It seemed resolved and concluded.

"Don't. Run," I said louder. I saw the puddle of cooking oil moving in tired ebbs across the room, having pooled near my leg. Michael Hausen looked the Black Dragon over a moment, swallowed, and with a look of dismal consternation, went for him.

"MIKE DON'T!" I shouted, slamming my hand down into the oil. My apartment burst into a torrent of screams and riotous mayhem. Bodies flew back against the walls and charred, their ashes swirling into the air like a maelstrom of oil and black, eddying, human debris. The dragon twisted over and my head snapped back. My vision charged with a kind of amber static. It subsided in an occlusion of shapes that burned into suburbia. I followed the quiet young boy around his house. The house was larger than mine, and had been repainted somewhat recently.

"Will your parents be mad if I go in your backyard?" I asked.

"They're not even home," he said.

"How many people are in the club?" We entered the spacious back yard. There was a large shed in one corner with the door ajar, and he led me toward it.

"Fifty," he said. Fifty members was huge. I'd meet so many kids in this club. It occurred to me that he was probably exaggerating, though. I would have bet the club contained more like twenty.

"Does everyone pass initiation? Is it a skateboard trick?" I asked him.

"Go inside. You'll see," he said, waiting outside the door to the shed. I entered the gloomy room. There was a heavy mustiness in the wood of the shed, and I could smell baking grass from the heat's reaction with the mower bag in the corner. On a shelf, next to a vice clamp, was a broken rotary telephone and a jelly jar with a thick, yellow liquid in it.

"Check this out," he said, lifting the jar and showing it to me. There was a dead spider in it.

"What is that?" I asked, mortified.

"It's oil from my mom's kitchen. I got spiders I collect, cuz since we moved here I seen they have weird ones all over the place, so I catch 'em and drown 'em in this oil. They don't shrivel up in it. They stay normal," he said. I looked into the jar. The spider was black with a red hourglass on its abdomen, and was dead near the bottom.

"That's a Black Widow," he went on, "They kill people. They're poisonous. My mom screamed cuz she found one last year, so I found this one behind the shed in the woodpile and I killed it," he said, proudly.

"Where did you live before here?" I asked him, looking at the horribly suspended insect in the jar. What a strange thing to do.

"I'm from Inglewood," he said with some defense.

"Where's that?"

"Pff. Man, Inglewood's in Russia," he told me.

"Really?" I found this fascinating. I'd never met a Russian.

"No, what are you stupid?" he replied. I lowered my head and looked back at the dead spider in the jar.

"Where does the club meet?" I asked, returning to my inquiry about who I assumed would be my new friends. I hadn't made any since we'd moved to Boston.

"Nowhere; it's secret. There's no talk about it. We're just in it. Look over there." he said, pointing at the far end of the old, wooden work table. I looked over and saw several tools laying near the back wall, on the table.

"My dad can fix anything," he said, "those are his. I been tryin' to fix this phone, cuz he says if I fix it I can have it in my room. I don't know how to fix it, though. One time I fell on my board, and my nose was busted, and he got his hand on my nose, and he fixed it. Snap! Stopped hurtin', back to normal and everything. He healed me." I pondered this and looked at the old, rusty tools against the wall.

"What's your dad's job?" I inquired. He shrugged.

"He's a teacher at college. He does math."

"I want to be an architect," I said, big.

"That's lame. You should get an important job. I'm gonna be an MC."

"Architect is an important job. What's an MC?"

"Dude, you need to get a doctor job. Or be a cop, carry a gun, keep the peace. Shit, you could be a spy. Or one of the astronauts. Go to space."

"Those are cool. What's an MC?" I repeated.

"Like a DJ. Spin records. Rap."

"I don't know what that is," I said.

"Who cares what you know?" he stated more than asked. I looked at the telephone on the dingy shelf. It looked like the wire had been torn out of the talking part.

"What's your name, anyway?" I asked. He held his hand out and made a gesture I didn't recognize.

"InZpire." he said.

"Inspire?"

"InZpire. Not a suh, with a zuh. A capital Z. Here, listen: What, you think you be checkin' me? That's the name. What's the name? InZpire, eatin' up MCs. Tell him how it go. How it go? I be startin' up an empire. InZpire," he said, musically.

"Is that a song?" I asked.

"That's my own shit. I rap," he said, boastful.

"Like on TV," I said. He took the jar from me, frustrated. Then he kept staring at me. There was a long moment in which I felt small and puzzled, and then I looked away. I became aware then of a dense bolt of pain shooting down my neck and back. I stuttered and thought to speak, but a clinking sensation shot my teeth together. I saw an orange shade lift and waver. He stood over me, angry. Had I gone to sleep? No, I'd fallen. He'd hit me with his ugly jar of oil. I started whining and crying when I realized he'd hit me. He unscrewed the lid of the jar and began pouring the oil out on me. I saw the spider fall on me too and batted at it to get it away. What was wrong with him? He knelt down then and grabbed my head, spit in my ear.

"Quit that noise! You wanna be in the club or not?" he asked.

"I want to go home," I said, upset.

"Not yet. Just wait. What's your name anyway?" he responded, nervously turning me over on my stomach.

"I'm not telling you," I said, "Leave me alone. I want to go home." I began sobbing. The broken telephone was swept off the counter. It came down next to my head, nearly hitting me.

"Go ahead, then. Call your mommy if you can't deal," he teased.

"My mom's dead," I responded, sadly.

"Liar," he said for the second time since I'd met him. He tugged hard at the back of my jeans then.

"Leave me alone," I repeated.

"Just initiation..." he said, unfocused and quiet. There was a deafening sound. An explosion. The roof lifted off. The floor came up. The Black Dragon careened into the cupboards beside me, moaning. I rolled away slowly and took in my apartment. There were people in it, ransacking everything. Magazines toppled from the stacks and cascaded across the floor, a man was kicking around the remnants of my oven. Someone jogged out the front door, knocking people aside and holding my television. The Black Dragon took a breath and grunted as hands clamped down on him and hoisted him up. I panted and followed with my eyes.

It was Michael Hausen, powerfully beating my enemy. The dragon's head crashed into the sink basin as Hausen shoved it down and then jerked him back, which sent the beast stumbling awkwardly to the far wall. He bounced against the counter in a hunching gesture and slumped there, laying on the floor, weak and pathetic, quietly staring at me.

"Found yourself a hero, huh trick?" he said to me across the room, bitter and tired, his head resting on the burnt, moist linoleum. Hausen knelt down beside me.

"Later, explain to me what the fuck _that_ thing is," he said of the dragon. His hand extended and I slowly took it. For the second time in my life, Michael Hausen had come through, had saved my life. I was going to thank him when there was a swift brush of air against my face. I leaned back and caught the sight of Hausen's head sailing through the air and into a corner of my kitchen. His headless body collapsed before me. I let go of his hand. The Black Dragon remained, standing behind where Hausen had stood only moments ago. He looked battered and weak, but he still looked stronger than me.

"Are we done yet? You got any more fuckin' heroes I can cut down?" he wheezed. I inched my foot into the oil and made my way to my feet, a young boy creeping home, bleeding and hurt, to the safety of my room, the safety of my place. I had a broken telephone in my hands, which a horrible young man had made me take as a present. My father was at work. I couldn't tell him...ever.

The sun set and I laid on the couch in our living room, watching Michael Hausen defeat villains and stop terrorists on television. He was so confident. He saved the day. In time, I fell asleep with the phone on my chest.

"We done yet?" the young man asked me, panting in my kitchen as I stood before him, clear. The protestors were gone, the magazines were gone. It was my clean, immaculate apartment, and there were only the two of us.

"I remember you now." I said. The young man looked at me uncertainly, an uneasiness in his eyes.

"The leader of a fake skateboard club. The liar. The kid from Inglewood," I said, boiling inside. He stepped backward, blinking and looking around the room for balance.

"You hurt me. You piece of shit...my mom died, my brother died, and then you hurt me." I stared a hole in him, my thoughts clearer than they'd been in as long as I could remember, which, at that crucial moment, was very far back.

"You heartless fuck," I stated. The dragon was a young man, a molester, and smaller than me. The realization of what he had done to me filtered through my sinews and bloodstream, into my mind, into the world. He continued backing up, a look of fear on his face.

"You want a name? It's InZpire. That's your stupid fucking name." He took a breath and pulled his arms in, as if he believed I'd spring on him any second. The phone rang. He looked at it, then at me. I cocked my head, puzzled.

"You...you sick freak. You're just...you're just some goddamn child molester in my memory," I stated. He frowned and began to look panicked. I had him. It was done.

"It's not madness, it's memory. And I know. I know everything. Spiders in jars. Spilled oil. You're a diseased, rancid, awful fucking memory in my head. Just some sick, faulty memory that thought it could run my life." He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

"It's over," I told him. He stood there, measly, beaten, and pathetic. In disgust, I simply left him standing there and moved to my phone. He watched for a moment, lost and hapless. I knew who was on the other end now. I knew him, finally. In a single, last effort, the dragon, the young man, flailed toward me as I answered the ringing telephone. My enemy was nothing, and was gone in an instant. I stood alone.

"I'm here," I greeted, the plastic pressed against my dry, waiting ear.

"My phone's broken," my ten-year-old self responded.

"I know. It doesn't matter."

"I don't feel good. I can't tell anyone."

"You can tell me anything," I said quietly.

### EPILOGUE

After sleep, and with the procession of city noises gently pulling me from soft dreams, I had a pleasant and enlightening conversation with my father. We spoke for almost an hour, and he was adjusting to his new apartment well enough. His magazine, having never been retired, was going well, and he was excited with the prospect of soon adding a translation section to the magazines newer, online format. Our conversation had been sporadic, at first, but after a short time we relaxed into a more usual tone. He'd been worried about me, never answering my phone or returning his calls, never answering his letters or emails, never acknowledging if I was receiving my subscription copies of his mag, or even stopping in at the magazine's blog. While holding the rosewood cane I'd bought, a birthday present for an imaginary version of him, it seemed, I apologized for worrying him, and explained I'd been away. This was in many ways true.

Of course I remembered everything finally, and as coerced by my madness I had been, there was a part of my mind that understood my last year with him had been a fantasy. I'd been interacting with Joe, my father, the facsimile; a fake dad that had stayed in Boston, who I'd kept near me, tried to make old, attempting to take my rightful place as a man in my family. It had failed, and with repercussions I had yet to fully unearth.

He was back in Stoughton, where he'd moved a year ago, about the time the Red Dragon, my brother Percy, arrived to comfort me. My father had grown tired of Boston. The bustle was too predictable to matter to him, and the hustle was obnoxious in the shapes of absorbed, momentous young people. My father was in no play and hadn't spoken to me in a year. We talked about mom for some time, and touched down on Percy, what had happened to him so long ago. I mentioned 'the Bachelors', out of humor, and my father was pleased by the reference. Though we had caught up to some extent, there was little I could explain to him of my actual last few months. I kept the details of my recent life inside me, where they belonged. Michael Hausen had been a case of fan adoration from my wretched childhood, a hero with provocative attributes, perhaps even a father figure... Ilya was a ghost amalgamation of people I had known when younger...when I had been more fiery.

Few of my recent happenings involved real people, which frightened me. I could only dread what possible things I had done in front of people that didn't know me. Had I stolen a truck? Who's car had I really driven to Hager Lake, if I'd even gone there? Had some poor child watched me sprinting up the path and screaming about a giant spider? Had my neighbors overheard me fighting with heraldic creatures that didn't exist? My neck was still sore, and I could only wonder for what reason Chet had actually punched me. Maybe I'd called the police on him in a moment of utter mental desertion. While I needed time to separate the real from the unreal in my life, there were certain tangents for which I was not prepared to tell others, and especially not off-the-cuff with my worrying father, so my fright had to remain inside, where I could take it down bit by bit. The medication in my cupboard would help this, now that I was taking it again.

The day was overcast, but there was little wind and the walk felt good. My neighborhood, quiet as it was, offered me no hellos nor waves from passing neighbors or local residents. No doubt I'd frightened these people of late. There had been no protest, but a simple dilemma in my mind I had latched onto and given form. It manifest as hordes of people angry at me, but the truth of it was that my neighborhood had been as relaxed and quiet as ever. My running about, shouting, chanting protest jeers, watching things on fire that weren't there...it was all fabrication. It was metaphor come to life, but only in my mind. I had needed to be hated to push myself, to find the pinhole in my subconscious that would let me in on what I'd forgotten, what I'd blocked. My mind had done this to me to save itself.

I felt myself again, which was something I hadn't felt in so long that I had to wonder who I really was. My life had been turned like a screw into my thoughts, or else my mind had been snapped over life's knee like a plank of wood. Walking to the employment office, with no fear, with no panic or worry, was a source of repentance for me. I felt as if I was making right by simply being usual.

She was real. There was still surprise left for me, it seemed. I had been realizing, with the onset of my better memory, that the majority of my last year, and especially the previous few months, had been more fiction that fact. It was as if I had taken out my mind, chewed it like a piece of gum until I'd sapped any flavor it had, and then twisted it back into my head. I half-expected everything to turn out fake. Certainly I'd killed no panda. It seemed illogical I'd ever been an officer of the law. So it was with odd surprise when I discovered the Black Flower alive and real, behind her counter and slowly handling the long line in the state employment office branch. I had assumed she, as with every other detail of the recent jobs I'd occupied in the fictional, would turn out to be a figment. The Black Flower was quite real, I discovered.

I sat down and perused. There was no Miscellaneous section of job listings. As I ambled over listings, moving down a tier when my interest rose, I found something for which I was qualified and that imparted I was in possession of the proper experience. Fuel Attendant. It was a simple gas station job, and probably the first job I'd actually had in a year. I wondered how I had supported myself through this time, how I'd purchased things and paid my rent. The answers seemed simple enough, but brought on more questions. How much had I stolen? How much had I charged? Only time, the mail, and my slow uncovering would tell me.

In my observation of myself, refreshed just this morning and with a critical eye, I found that there was no amount of my recent oddity that I could defend with any amount of justification. Was I still mad? It was possible. Was I the same man I was a year ago? There was potential. It was in scavenging my memory and the events of the past few months that I began reaching my conclusions on the place I lived, and on how I did so. Like mixing epoxy, there were two containers of memories: One certain, from a more distant past, and one contrived and nonsensical. The latter of these were, perceptually, both the sharpest and vaguest memories. I had to dab these separate heads of mine from two worlds at one another, swirling and mixing them until they cohered and bonded, until I had the start of the truth.

After the passing of my mother, my father had moved us to Boston, and shortly thereafter, the tragedy of my brother's death occurred. After this, with the world about me gyrating into a sadness a boy my age was not prepared to handle, I was raped. There was no other way to explain it, other than stating the obvious. I'd been raped by a young man, years older than me, and then forgotten by everyone. My father worked, and when home, spent his years in _The Tatterdemalion_ , rejecting poets, accepting poets, putting out calls for black and white art, and later, full-color prints. His world was isolated and lovely, and it was only through subsequent attempts to enter it that I lost my will to understand my father.

I wrote poems because I loved to do it, and each one I wrote was a small world of mine. I was graded harshly in school. I had no friends. It didn't help that I spoke less and less through the four years of high school. I had trouble with insomnia, and disliked those around me with an increasing throttle. It was an evolution that I submit my poems for publication, again and again, to _The Tatterdemalion_. It was where my father lived, and it seemed important. My father, though we lived in the same house and sat within mere feet of each other most nights, mailed me the preformatted, photocopied rejections. My poetry submissions to him never went out, but his rejections always came in. I may as well have been a naive stranger across the country writing about the usual. I sometimes wondered if he even realized his own son was the poet being rejected.

I stepped into line with my printout and waited with patience for those ahead of me to move forward. I worried about meeting the Black Flower again. How mad had I come off in my subsequent visits to the employment office? Were those visitations even real? They seemed real, but the jobs I'd obtained couldn't have happened. It occurred to me that I didn't even know her name.

It was my father that suggested I seek help. That I have a professional look into my head and figure out why I was so depressed in my late teens. I didn't bother getting a license, or want a car. I lost things in various places and didn't have an urge to want them back. I read entire books and then forgot what I'd read within hours of closing the covers. Drugs. They gave me anti-depressants. Then, anti-psychotics. With the advent of my new, even quieter, intoxicated-to-peace self, I moved out and on. I drove. I worked. Sometimes I ate more pills than I was supposed to. Sometimes I became righteous drunk. Sometimes I'd run out of medication and wait too long to fulfill my prescription. My father always noticed. My father always suggested I uncover professional insight, no matter the form, whatever the means. Over the years, his parenting had turned me into a groping, worried sort of man. Anxiety began. That was given pills, too.

I stepped up to the counter and set my printout down before her. She drew it to her and read, her other hand moving to her keyboard automatically. I'd been a fuel attendant before, but back then they'd called my position 'Pump Attendant'. Through all the miniscule, base-tier jobs I'd been hired for, my father had maintained his role as an editor of his lit mag. He didn't fail it ever. The issues came out, the poets were printed, the art was collected, the layout done... I'd lose a job and see an issue come out. I'd get another job, lose it, and an issue would come out. It was an incessant reminder that my father did well, and I did not.

"You have six months experience?" the Black Flower asked. My worry over being thought racist had subsided to great extent. The reasons were clear, and I wasn't so foolish as to let my sense of reality become skewered again with past emotions, no matter how traumatic. I could hate what happened to me, I could look on it with contempt and spit at it, cry over it, beat myself down inside, but I wasn't going to let it warp what I thought was real. Not again, or ever.

"Yes, I have the experience." I noticed her arm then. There was no tattoo. I'd fantasized it. I felt foolish and tragically dopey. She looked up at me for a moment, then, gave a small smile.

"I didn't think you'd pull off that astronaut job," she said. I stuttered in my head. This couldn't be correct. That job had been a figment. There was no astronaut job. Gary Aulden was most likely my engineered character, taken from someone I'd seen working at a convenience store, or walking through the park. I didn't know how to respond.

"Uh no. No, I couldn't handle that job," I said, confused.

"Astronaut," she shook her head with humor, "you know, after you left last time, I almost accidentally put that under 'job description' in your records. That would have been funny."

"Yeah, huh." I responded, even more puzzled.

"Somehow I don't think the state would have found it funny, though."

"No, I guess not," I chuckled, false.

"So we got Fuel Attendant this time, huh? What are you gonna call this one?"

"What will I call it?"

"How about 'Circus Ringmaster', or maybe 'FBI Agent'?" she joked. I caught it. I understood. She thought my madness was cute. She thought I'd been being funny. What a bizarre arrangement.

"Let's do 'Poet'," I answered, intrigued with her, with myself, with everything.

"Okay, Mr. Poet, you show up at the Lippy's 'poet' Station and Car Wash on Dorne and Mill, you know where that is?"

"Yes."

"It's for 1pm, Friday. Clean shaven, light clothes, and they ask that you bring ten dollars for a nametag and cap fee. They supply a cap but you gotta pay for it. You'd look good in a cap." She was a flirt. How had I not noticed? Maybe this was a first for her.

"I love caps," I said. She smiled.

"I'll refer you on this one, but hey, remember what I said," she responded, lowering her voice, "try and keep it for awhile, okay? This job ain't so hard." Then she scrunched her nose in a childish sort of way. It was as if we were in junior high, and she'd just explained that she didn't like spicy food, wrinkling her nose, a slight shake of her chin, a nearly impalpable smile.

"You're amazing," I said then. It was true. I'd even been suspicious of it when mad, and now I could see it plainly.

"Oh, thank you," she said, awkward. My statement wasn't the sort that was easily responded to. It was a bolt-from-the-blue compliment. Most human beings both loved and dreaded them.

"I like you," I added, stating the obvious. I heard several intrigued grunts about me and realized that there were quite a few people in the employment office who had heard this and were now donating their attention. Her eyes had widened to small degree and she looked down at her desk, rooting for the thought that would help her inform me I was out of place. It didn't arrive. She looked at her computer screen for a moment, then up at me, making a contact of eyes that drew me in like smoke to a ceiling fan. The office bent in close and the floor held my feet with a warm and steady care. I felt my bruised mouth lift for the first time in years into a true, unforced, wholly natural smile.

"I like you too, Ron," she said.

### About the Author

Ray Succre lives on the southern Oregon coast, U.S., with his wife and son. He has been writing for fifteen years, his poetry having appeared in hundreds of journals and magazines spanning numerous countries. He began writing novels in 2007. _Tatterdemalion_ (Originally in print through Cauliay, and still available in that format) was his first published book.

### Also by the Author:

Novels

_Amphisbaena_ (Cauliay)

_A Fine Young Day_ (Capacity Press)

_Thank You and Good Night_ (Capacity Press)

Poetry

_Other Cruel Things_ (Differentia Press)

