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The Future Memoirs of a Zone Nine Zombie

By Robert Trainor

Copyright 2020

By Robert Trainor

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

## PREFACE

##

There will be those who will attempt to discount the following novel as a ridiculous fantasy based on a number of logical fallacies that run counter to the modern system of knowledge that we so obsessively embrace. However, for those of us seeking something more than the usual soft-shoe dance of the modern novel, it will become obvious that I am not the one who should be accused of writing a fantasy.

It is no lie to say that many years ago, I lived in Zone Nine. And since I lived there, I have the right to describe it in any way that I see fit. If you wish to read a pleasant fairy tale with no real substance to it, you should stop here, but if you're seeking a truth that transcends all the modern varieties of accepted nonsense, then you might be interested in this novel.

Zone Nine is the last and final place before one is swept away into oblivion. Here, many, if not most, are overwhelmed by the vicious realities that permeate our so-called culture, and they are heard from no more. A few manage to escape, but it has proven to be a most difficult and dangerous task. When you are actually trapped in a terrifying abyss; when all means of escape have failed; when death is all around you—then what are you going to do?

This is a very unusual memoir of my time in Zone Nine. Eventually, I was able to escape thanks to an idea that was given to me. This idea, which is actually a fact of existence, opened the door to the power within me, and it is absolutely certain that same power exists in you. However, a truth so absolute is not as simple as you might think and cannot be approached unless one sees that this truth is the only possible way out of the incredible dangers that we face, both personally and collectively. People don't like absolutes, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And this idea—this fact—is as absolute as absolute can be.

And so, even though I know it isn't fashionable in a novel to talk about the basis of our existence, especially when the ideas presented have nothing to do with religion or science, it would be impossible to write this book without entering into realms that you may not be familiar with. Granted, there are a number of quirky dystopian disguises in the first half of this book that tone down and sometimes obscure the basic underlying idea that is inherent in the plot, but in the end, you will be shown a path into a different world that is based on the reinterpretation of everything that your senses perceive.

Who so walketh in this telepathic land

Does so at their own command

Who so liveth in this land

Shall be bound to truths that seem like sleight of hand

## CHAPTER ONE: THE LAND OF THE ZOMBIES

The following passage is an excerpt from a book that was written by a sociology professor named Charles Albert Watson. His book was published in 2017 but received very little publicity and sold less than a thousand copies. What Professor Watson did was to make a prediction as to what American society, and to some extent the modern world, would look like in 2040. His book was entitled The Future of Class Warfare and the Demise of the Common Man, and it contains many controversial opinions that are perhaps exaggerations. But it is difficult to argue with the basic premise of his book, which portrays a society where wealth has become the principal measure of a person's worth and influence.

Professor Watson divided the society of 2040 into nine zones; in the old days, these zones would have been called classes, but since there are only three classes—the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class—the professor felt that a new method of categorizing the various levels of society would better describe what would exist in the future. It is important to note that he predicts a massive stock market crash that will occur in sporadic waves between 2027 and 2032 and that this crash will be the impetus that creates a new world order that is based almost entirely on money. This new world order, which Professor Watson calls the Tyranny of the Plutocrats, will create vast chasms between the rich and the poor—this chasm exists today, of course, but the chasm that will exist in 2040 will dwarf the wealth disparities that exist in 2020..

I am not one who likes to quote other people because I have my own story to tell, and I don't particularly enjoy injecting academics into an autobiographical novel that was written by someone who at one time lived in a much earlier version of Zone Nine, but it would be impossible to appreciate this tale without a clear understanding of the zones that have, in a shadowy kind of way, made up our world for a very long time. I grant you that in 2020, there aren't any physical signs that delineate the demarcations between the zones, but anyone who has even a slight understanding of the modern world should be able to understand what Professor Watson is talking about. These zones have existed since at least the Industrial Revolution in the 1880's, and the venomous shadows that lurked in 1880 are becoming terrifying monsters that have attained a life of their own.

At any rate, the professor predicts that this country, for legal and financial purposes, will officially be divided into nine zones by 2034, and while the government will refer to the zones by their numbers, Professor Watson thought it more appropriate to attach descriptive designations to them that more properly described their inhabitants. Generally, the zones were determined by the average amount of income that its inhabitants earned, although in the cases of Zones Six and Seven, cultural factors played a significant role. It's also important to mention that Professor Watson theorized that each zone, while still under the nominal control of the national government, would develop their own forms of local government—governments that varied from the very autocratic to the worst kind of lawless anarchy. These zonal governments had the power to enforce their own laws and punish citizens who violated those laws—up to and including the execution of the lawbreakers.

Professor Watson also theorized that guns would play a much more significant role by 2040 and that there would be large areas in the major cities, especially in Zone Nine, where the rule of law, while non-existent in any traditional sense, would be maintained by various individuals and gangs who possessed the necessary firepower to subdue those that they felt were undesirable.

With various edits, here is the introduction to The Future of Class Warfare and the Demise of the Common Man by Charles Albert Watson:

Zone One is ruled and occupied by the dragons—a very small group of fabulously wealthy people, the multi-billionaires, who live in colossal mansions that are located in the most scenic parts of the country. Anyone below Zone Three who ventures to tread into Zone One without a legitimate excuse will be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing, which will carry, for a Zone One intrusion, a minimum sentence of five years at one of the large national penitentiaries that will be built in various swamps and deserts throughout the country. The hundred-million-dollar mansions of the dragons are surrounded by numerous defense mechanisms, including moats, guard dogs, and electrified fences. This is the zone where the "movers and shakers" live, and their influence on society through the power of their vast wealth will be enormous. Unfortunately, a characteristic of the dragon culture is that even though a great show is made of creating charitable institutions and donating to them, the principal interest of a dragon will always be the maintenance and expansion of his or her wealth.

Zone Two is populated by the vultures. These people are also fabulously rich and will have at least five billion dollars in assets. However, the vultures are those who have not yet reached the thirty- billion-dollar mark, which is a requirement for admission to Zone One. Almost without exception, the residents of Zone Two will have made their money in the stock market where they will have been fortunate enough to escape the various crashes that plague this barbaric system of (so-called) investment. Thus, the typical vultures will ride the up markets to somewhere near their peaks and then sell their stocks when the market begins to plunge. Once the market nears a low, the vultures will not miss their opportunity to profit on the financial dead flesh—a euphemism for the ordinary investor who has, financially speaking, been turned into a carcass in the broiling heat of another major market meltdown.

The sharks rule in Zone Three—these people are multi-millionaires and have a bit of an attitude since, on occasion, they have to associate with people who live in Zones Four, Five, and Six. Mostly, the inhabitants of Zone Three are successful businessmen who make their money, gangster style, by orchestrating buyouts of smaller businesses, which are then swallowed up whole by the usual swarm of conglomerates with which the sharks are associated. Naturally, it isn't necessary to threaten the smaller businesses at gunpoint—the standard method that the sharks employ is to open a store that sells similar products next to the targeted store and then sell those products at half price until the victim store goes belly up with a loud financial belch. Very genteel—at least compared to 1890. Another characteristic of Zone Three people is that they produce most of our politicians nowadays. They are certainly well-equipped for the task as these people have long been recognized as the acknowledged masters of graft, bribery, vote fixing, and the wide variety of swindles that are so common among those who have been elected to office.

Zone Four is inhabited by the Prima Donnas. These people are independently wealthy, sometimes through an inheritance, but other than their wealth, they don't have a great deal going for them. It's true that many of them hold high-paying jobs in the educational or medical fields and have made their fortunes as professors, college presidents, doctors, and surgeons. But although the inhabitants of Zone Four have fat bank accounts, they are looked down upon by those in Zones One to Three. For one thing, the Prima Donnas' pretensions to knowledge are more than a little annoying to those who have thousand-dollar bills bulging out of their pockets. Zone Four people also like to participate in the political process and will run for various offices, but they usually encounter rough seas because they are a little too honest to succeed in an arena that is nothing but a spectacular smorgasbord of corruption.

The Orphans live in Zone Five. Most of them aren't actually orphans, of course, but they are termed orphans because they are caught between the rich and the poor. Here, in this Zone, are the first people who carry debt, whether it is credit card debt or a mortgage. The bank accounts of the orphans can hardly be called obscene or even moderately hefty, but they often live in fancy neighborhoods where the houses sell for well over a half million dollars. Usually, the orphans have made their money through high-paying jobs in the business world where they can be found as executives and small business owners. However, the Prima Donnas laugh at the absurd strivings of the orphans to gain admittance to Zone Four, and those in the lower zones feel that the orphans are pitiful wretches who have sold their souls for a little bit of status. Thus, they have lived as orphans—ostracized from any real respect by those above and below them.

Zone Six is inhabited by the misfits. This is the zone that contains what might be called traditional people who have a strong belief in religion and attend church on a regular basis. Because churches are now mostly seen as thoroughly antiquated relics of an outmoded belief system, the people who inhabit this zone have a great deal of difficulty adapting to the general agnosticism of the times. Sometimes, to be fair, the pompous assertions of science go well beyond agnosticism and trumpet a kind of violent and sociopathic atheism where Darwin's deceptively dangerous philosophy of the survival of the fittest now holds sway over the vast majority of the populace. (According to the professor, the pandemic-like proliferation of guns when combined with the murderous philosophy inherent in the survival of the fittest are hardly a recipe for a sane society, and I would not be one to argue with him on this point.)

Economically, the inhabitants of Zone Six are disadvantaged by their unwillingness to adapt to modern society, and although they are not destitute because they are hard workers and mostly frugal spenders, these folks are rather short of money and very short on exerting any real influence either culturally or economically. As they live out their lives in the festering swamp of suburbia, they tend to make a lot of noise about the corrupt society that exists around them, but it's a case of preaching to the choir because despite all appearances to the contrary, the members of the other zones pay them little to no attention.

The lowlifes live in Zone Seven. These people are often young, intelligent, and quite liberal, but due to automation, they have been unable to find well-paying jobs that correspond to their expensive education. Here, there are people who have graduated from college and are now car mechanics, waiters and waitresses, cab drivers, and a whole host of other jobs that basically have no future. Chief car mechanic? It's not much to shoot for, and the inhabitants of Zone Seven have a reputation for fatalism, laziness, and drug use. This would, however, be genteel drug use—marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms, for instance. For the most part, cocaine is avoided, along with the semi-medicinal drugs like oxycodone, all of which are seen as being too dangerous. The lowlifes are considered by others to be intellectual lightweights, but this zone of society has, in the past, produced a number of popular musicians and novelists. Because of their very modest incomes, the lowlifes usually live in apartments or rundown condos.

The untouchables live in Zone Eight. For those who are not familiar with the word, it comes from the caste system in India where it was the lowest ranking of all the castes. The word is meant quite literally—no one in the upper castes was allowed to touch an untouchable, and it was even thought that by looking at these people, it would bring bad luck into a person's life. Horrors! Here, in our esteemed but ethically bankrupt society, those in Zone Eight are the ones who work at the most menial and low-paying jobs. Dishwashers, janitors, and garbage collectors are all members of Zone Eight. Since they are paid minimum wage—if that—these people live in low-rent apartments and often have to find another untouchable to share the rent. Naturally, this group has almost no association with the members of other zones unless their work activities bring them into contact with someone from a higher zone.

Zone Nine is inhabited by the zombies. This is where all the homeless people live, and by 2040, we can expect their numbers to swell dramatically until, by current estimates, twenty percent of the population will reside in Zone Nine. Besides the homeless, Zone Nine will contain a fairly significant number of people who are living in dwellings that have been declared unfit for human habitation. Although it won't be talked about much in the other zones, a person who enters this zone rarely reemerges because it's extremely difficult to find any employment, and thus, there is no real opportunity to earn money, which is the usual means of escape from Zone Nine. Within this zone, we can expect rampant lawlessness, and whatever law exists will be maintained by those inhabitants who have the necessary firepower to do so. Murder will be a very prominent fact of life in Zone Nine, and we can expect that by 2040, the average life span of those in this zone will be only six years from the time that the person entered Zone Nine. However, in the more violent areas of Zone Nine, it is likely that the average inhabitant will only survive for a couple of years. Many areas of Zone Nine are likely to be entirely abandoned by the police departments who supposedly have jurisdiction over them because of the extensive fatalities that members of law enforcement will have suffered in their attempt to maintain even minimum standards of law and order.

The residents of Zone Nine are called zombies because of all the murders that will occur in this zone. The few people who manage to escape from Zone Nine (to become untouchables or lowlifes) will make it known that the streets of Zone Nine seem to be stalked by zombies—the disembodied spirits of those who have been slaughtered for one reason or another. The escapees will talk of mysterious sounds, mostly moans and wails, that permeate through certain areas of Zone Nine around midnight. Perhaps these accounts will be the result of overworked imaginations or those who are seeking to capitalize on first-person accounts of their time in Zone Nine, but in any event, the name zombie will forever be attached to Zone Nine.

Naturally, the dragons in Zone One who are the real rulers of this idiotic system--sometimes called a country or a culture—will be careful to keep the ongoing daily shootings and massacres in Zone Nine a closely guarded secret. It isn't, after all, good publicity for a society that incessantly prides itself on its supposed adherence to all the antiquated constitutional platitudes that the ruling class trumpets as evidence that the country is the finest example of government known to mankind. So tourists to the country, and there will be many, are sure to be carefully shielded from the mushrooming atrocities that affect those in Zone Nine and will be housed in hotels that have been built in Zone Four—the place where all the prima donnas live.

## CHAPTER TWO: THE ANTHEM OF THE UNTOUCHABLES

##

I happened to read Class Warfare and the Demise of the Common Man because a friend of mine had stolen the book from a college bookstore. I didn't bother wading through the whole of this ponderous and somewhat pretentious tome, but I was struck by the professor's classification of the zones. I had long been a member of the 2011-2015 version of Zone Eight and would shortly, by an unfortunate set of circumstances, end up in Zone Nine. Later, after I escaped from Zone Nine to Zone Seven, I spent some time thinking about Professor Watson's book. Psychologically, I had been severely scarred by my time in Zone Nine, but since I lived there in 2016, I didn't experience the full-blown horror show that the professor envisioned would occur by 2040. However, my time in Zone Nine was traumatic enough that I initially suffered from recurring nightmares and waves of intense and almost paralyzing anxiety.

By the time I had lived in Zone Seven for a few months, I was beginning to feel better. By now, I was living with a woman named Audrey, who worked part-time as a teacher at a school for developmentally disabled kids. She was quite sympathetic to me, and when I told her that I was considering writing about my time in Zone Nine, she encouraged me to do so. I was still angry about the things that I had witnessed and experienced during my time there, and Audrey was the one who came up with the idea of writing a kind of borderline fantasy that was based on my time in Zone Nine. (She also gave me permission to express my feelings as I experienced them at the time. Because almost everyone who lives in Zone Nine develops a hard and sarcastic edge, the truthful expression of my feelings meant that I would sometimes have to portray Audrey in a negative light. For that I apologize, but she and I are close enough nowadays that we can look at the past and not be bothered by how we felt about each other at the time.)

The best thing about writing a selective fantasy of my time in Zone Nine was that I wouldn't have to relive, second by second, everything that I had seen and heard, but rather, I could avoid, if I chose to do so, certain things and events that still troubled me. And then, when I was walking around one fall day, I came up with the idea that I would simply transpose the general trend of my experiences in the Zone Nine of 2016 into Professor Watson's 2040 version. Except now, of course, instead of living in the quaint but horrific nastiness of what used to be called the ghetto, I would have descended into the monstrous nightmare of Zone Nine.

I know there will be many who will say that what I depict is impossible, but when you say that, it means that you have never experienced what it is like to live in Zone Nine today—in 2020. My friends, Zone Nine exists today and is all around us—just ask the chronically homeless. But as surely as the sun sets in the west, the barbarism of today will soon be replaced by widespread atrocities that are only beginning to become conceivable. And so, without further ado, here are The Future Memoirs of a Zone Nine Zombie.

There are two reasons why funerals are dismal events. The first reason is obvious—it's almost always depressing when someone "passes away." My mother always used that expression when someone died, but where I come from, we don't bother with polite language, so we'll just say something like "The old geezer finally croaked."

The second reason funerals are dismal events is that everyone is so phony that it's enough to make you wish you weren't a member of the human race. No one really wants to be there, but you have to attend the rotten ceremony or else some people will say a lot of nasty things about you. "Her own son wouldn't even come to her funeral!" But I don't see that it really makes any difference whether or not I go to the funeral. Mom's still as dead as a doornail even if I'm out with some friends of mine doing what we usually do when we're looking to have a good time—chugging down bottles of cheap wine in a dark deserted alley as we pass around a joint.

Mom's flat on her back in a casket, and I'm stoned out of my mind. It's actually hard to say who's got it better between my Mom and me. Her problems are definitely over (she had a _lot_ of problems, one of which was me), and my problems haven't really gone away even though hashish fries my mind to the point where I can't feel much of anything. There's no way I can think straight when I'm zonked out on hash, and when you have a lot of problems that can be a good thing.

My biggest problem is usually this: Where am I going to come up with the rent money? Man, I do a lot of scrambling around during the last week of a month. Sometimes, although I probably shouldn't admit it, I'll go into bars around eleven o'clock or so—just when people are starting to get smashed on boilermakers—and clean out some woman's handbag. Gotta make the rent, baby!

It's a tough way to make a living, but those landlord dudes in Zone Eight don't cut a guy like me much slack—in fact, they don't cut me any slack at all. Naturally, if I was a woman who was twenty and was lucky enough to be built right, I could go out and find a rich guy who would take care of all the financial hassles, but as we all know, you have to play the hand that you've been dealt. It certainly wasn't my fault that I reached twenty-three looking like a picture-perfect representation of the "rabble."

Of course, by now, you're undoubtedly thinking that I'm some kind of lazy bum who's gobbling up welfare checks that are funded by your "hard-earned" tax dollar. However, that isn't the least bit true because what I am is a garbage collector—one of those guys who rides around in a big stupid-looking white truck; you know, the trucks that have a pole on the back where some loser guy is hanging on so that he can jump out, grab a barrel of gross junk, and dump it into the truck.

So how is it, you might ask, that I have trouble making the rent? First of all, I have to feed my body—right? It's tough to go around all day without eating, so just like everyone else, I like to chow down three or four times a day. With the kind of work I do where I'm not sitting around all day gawking at a computer and pretending that I'm doing something extremely important, I get hungry a lot, and sometimes, when I'm out on a garbage run with my sidekick, Jimi Stones, we'll rumble into a fast food joint and act like a couple of wolves who are devouring our prey.

And then, besides feeding my body, I also have to feed my head. That's a classy way of saying that I like to do drugs although I do limit myself to marijuana and hashish. It's just so cool to blow your mind out on some really good ganja, but the cost of the stuff puts a severe strain on my garbage-boy budget, which sometimes necessitates ripping off the money in a woman's purse. What's the big crime with that? You get to do your crime, like rip people off for twenty-five dollars an hour while you do your nowhere job, and I get to feel good while I pick up all your idiotic garbage. Seems like a fair deal to me, but I don't suppose many people would agree my attitude because the general theory is that the untouchables from Zone Eight are filthy derelicts who deserve nothing but contempt. It's so easy to blame losers like me for all the troubles in the world, but we don't have anything to do with what's really going on. We're just convenient punching bags, but at least I don't try to dress up and pretend that I'm something that I'm not. Yes sir and yes ma'am—I am one of the untouchables.

## CHAPTER THREE: MY SO-CALLED LOVE LIFE

##

Every time I start to get stressed out, and I get stressed out a lot, I walk down to the beach and lie at the edge of the water. Actually, I'll be about half in the water unless a big wave breaks in front of me, and then, maybe, the water from the wave will wash up over me. It always amazes me, no matter whether it's ninety degrees, how cold the water from the ocean feels. Chilling out!

I don't wear no fancy clothes to the beach or nothing—just sneakers, jeans, and a tee shirt. And as I lay there getting sopped, I often get to wondering what the point of life is and where we all came from and where we're actually going. I don't think anybody really knows the answers to those questions, actually, and that seems strange to me.

When I get cooler, which is what the salt water does to me, I seem to think better. "OK," I'll say to myself, "let's look at this scene objectively and try to come up with some answers. Here I am lying on a beach, and I know what my name is and all that, but how did I get here?" Of course I walked down to the beach from my grubby third-world apartment, but I'm not talking about that. I don't know how many times lately I've been sitting somewhere and it suddenly occurs to me that...it feels like I've been parachuted into some place that I don't really have a clue about. Like I'll be at this party where everyone is drinking vodka and smoking weed, and I'll look around and say to myself, "Man, who are these people and how did I get here?" I know most people don't ask themselves questions like that—I guess they just take everything for granted and think that because they're alive, it doesn't matter where they came from. But if you ever ask that question of yourself, even once, it can begin to become a little haunting. Maybe spooky is a better word.

I mean there's the official way of thinking—your mother and father went to bed and had unprotected sex because they had drunk themselves silly, and that's where you came from. Or maybe Mom and Dad were married in a church and had you all planned out, somewhat like buying a new car, and then, nine months later, you arrived with a sweet little baby face that everyone adored because no one ever has the nerve to say that a baby looks kind of weird, like a very old person who doesn't have any memory left and has to be spoon fed boiled-up applesauce all the time.

Naturally, I don't remember those days—it wasn't until I was about ten that I began to realize that I was I and that everyone else was someone else. And then, unfortunately, I grew up, shuffled my way through three years of high school until I was kicked out, and finally, after a lot of dumpster diving, I got a job at a hotshot ice cream place where I was one of the dumbbell scoopers.

That job was OK--at least until I got fired by my brain-dead Zone Six mutant manager. Even though I only got paid thirteen dollars an hour at the ice cream dump, I was able to get a second-floor apartment in the slums of Vomit City, and it was cool to come home and be the king of my own wretched two-room castle. And on Saturday and Sunday, when I didn't work, I could stroll down to Primo Grounds, a seedy little coffee shop that only charged a dollar and a half for some primo watered-down coffee. But you got a free refill, so by the time I was getting near the end of my second cup, I was starting to blast off the launch pad. Revving up! It was the best part of the day as the coffee turned on all the cylinders in my brain, and everything would suddenly seem to click together and start humming like a dynamo. Those first five or ten minutes on coffee, those minutes when the buzz really starts to kick in and you feel like you're the strongest or smartest person in the universe. Those were great times for me to kick back and consider my never ending question: How did I get here? Sometimes, it felt like life was a dream, and I had just been dropped down by some bizarre celestial parachute into whatever scene I was apparently a part of.

Everyone else in the coffee shop appeared relatively normal except for the usual wing nuts who were probably mentally ill or something. Otherwise, if it was a Saturday and not some God-awful work day, people would be talking and chatting in an aimless, pleasant kind of way as if they were passengers on a cruise ship that was taking them to some place just this side of paradise. And me, Shane Stevens, would be kicking back and observing everyone and trying to figure out what the score was.

It was around here that I would usually become distracted from my philosophical contemplations. Sooner or later, my eyes would drift out through the large plate glass window of Primo, and I would see some gorgeous woman walking by. It was very rare when a woman like that would step into a cheesy dive like Primo, so if you wanted to feed your eyes with the real sweet stuff of life, you could only satisfy your hunger by window gazing.

To tell you the truth, I usually made an attempt to keep my eyes away from the window. It was just too painful to see all these hot Zone Seven chicks strolling by who would send my imagination into sexual cartwheels. Girls! Man, how I hungered to be with one of them in my "bedroom." I put bedroom in quotation marks because I didn't really have a bed—just a mattress on the floor. Neither did I have any furniture in my mattress room except one old beaten-up chair that I had found on the street outside my apartment.

A few girls would walk by who looked like they might be in my league—not too hot to look at and their clothes had certainly seen better days, which meant they probably lived in Zone Seven or Zone Eight. I saw a lot of women with ripped jeans, but it wasn't meant to be a fashion statement and was more like an advertisement for poverty and degradation. Naturally, although I was in their league, these women didn't inspire me although there were some days when I thought that I could go for just about anything.

As time passed, I began to fall by the wayside in the great mating game. The chicks I wanted, I couldn't have, and the chicks I maybe could have had, I didn't want. But then, from out of the blue, I did meet someone, and she wasn't half bad at all. I'd been going to this bar called Steamrollers most every night because a lot of decent women came in there, and one night, I struck up a conversation with a woman named Loren Fisk. She was fairly tall, with brown hair, and she was built fairly well. There hadn't been any available seats at the bar, and as it happened, we were standing next to each other while we waited for a seat. She was the one who started the conversation—I had assumed that she didn't want to have anything to do with me, but when a woman starts a conversation with me, I kind of get excited. Maybe she was just passing the time, but it was also possible that she was looking for something more than a free drink.

Anyways, much to my surprise, we went back to her place that night. It was kind of weird, actually, because she had a roommate who was sleeping about twenty feet from us in this large one-bedroom apartment. Loren, who'd had quite a few drinks, whispered in my ear that her roommate had to leave early in the morning, and then she zonked out. I spent most of the night tossing and turning as my fantasy wheels nearly spun off the rails. And guess what? When morning came around and Loren's roommate had vamoosed out of the place, my fantasies became realities—a couple of times over.

But there were a lot of things that weren't so great in our relationship. For one thing, she was obsessed with her homework. Homework! Are you kidding me? How could it possibly have happened that I had hooked up with a woman who thought homework was important? It was like a bad joke from a washed-up comedian. Loren was going to a community college where she was taking a course that required her to read a lot of fancy books that were written a couple of hundred years ago by some English dudes and ladies who had long since passed their prime as far as I was concerned. Mothball City. And so there were some nights when she'd phone me and tell me that she couldn't see me because she had to finish reading one of her precious books. Besides that, she was taking a course in botany, and the one time that I had glanced at some pages in her textbook, I had come away thinking that botany was nothing but a prestigious form of insanity. I'm not attempting to run a crusade against books, but that doesn't mean I have to swallow all the prima donna stuff that people go crazy over because they think that it will lead them somewhere. I suppose, to be fair, it will lead you somewhere, but it's nowhere I would ever want to go.

And then there was Loren's roommate, the obnoxious and seemingly ever-present birdbrain who was always hovering around us like a persistent fly that you desperately wanted to swat into oblivion. Janice was her name, and Loren seemed to think she was some mastermind who had unlocked the final secret to the universe. Janice liked to meditate, and supposedly, while she was meditating, she left her body and contacted other people. This contact would be on the astral plane, of course. That would have been bad enough, but what was much worse was that Janice had developed an unfavorable opinion of me. It must have been because of my looks, or maybe it was my attitude, but most likely, it was because I lived in Zone Eight, and the two of them lived in Zone Seven. So I always tried to avoid Janice like the plague, and I never really said anything to her except for the usual stupidities that people utter to other people whom they couldn't care less about. Things like the weather or the traffic or the stupid mayor of our city who was a running joke since he looked like a hippopotamus and was fending off all sorts of lawsuits because he was using his own construction company to build a new mall on the outskirts of our pathetic beat-up little metropolis that would never in a million years make it into the top ten thousand cities of our sorry gun-infested excuse for a country.

Finally, one day when Loren and I were down on the beach around twilight on a warm night in late May, I received my termination notice. The water was still too cold to swim in, so we had found a secluded spot on the beach, and after playing a really fun round of beach-blanket bingo, I was sipping on my third beer (after toking up on my second joint) when Loren said, "You know, Shane, I don't think we're very good for each other."

Her voice sounded serious, but I had a difficult time taking her seriously after what had just transpired under the blanket. Maybe...was she going to complain about my performance or something? "What's the matter?" I said, in a disinterested tone.

"It's just that you're always drugged out, and I don't think you really want to make anything out of your life. I'm beginning to think that you'd be satisfied to live in Zone Eight until the day you die."

"That's not true," I said. "I'm just biding my time until something good comes along. What are you trying to do? I thought we were having a great time down here tonight."

"It's just that I've been thinking about things lately, Shane."

I might have known! For the last couple of weeks, I'd been getting kind of sweet on Loren, and there had even been days when I thought that maybe she and I should shack up together. And now this...whatever it was.

Loren didn't smoke, but she did like alcohol, and while she was finishing off a beer, I stared at the sky wondering what was going to happen next. "Shane," she said, a few moments after she had finished her beer, "I hate to say it, but you're kind of boring."

Boring? Me? What was she talking about? Laid back—yes, but no one had ever called me boring before. "What do you want me to do?" I said, sarcastically. "Handstands?"

"No, but let's face it—you don't have much of a life intellectually."

I felt like saying, "Pardon me for being so stupid," but all I said was "I don't even know what that means."

"There's nothing that really interests you or inspires you. You're like someone who's floating in the ocean and drifting with the tide. You're not really interested in politics or art or even music, and if someone asked me what you were interested in, I wouldn't have a clue as to what I could tell them. I've never seen you read a book—when was the last time you read one?"

"A few years ago, but I had a bad experience and gave up the habit. It was just this stupid dead-end novel by some guy who was trying to show off what a great writer he was. Actually, the book won a whole bunch of awards, but that just proves it was an awful book."

"Where did you ever come up with the idea that a book is awful because it's won an award?" said Loren.

"It's just something I've noticed—as soon as people start showering rewards on someone, it's practically a sure sign that the person is totally bogus."

"That's a ridiculous thing to say, Shane. So why didn't you like the book?"

"It was about four hundred pages long, and I read the first fifty pages or so before I threw it away. I mean, like nothing happened—it could all have been condensed down to three or four fairly short paragraphs."

"Maybe," said Loren, "you'd like action books."

"Where people run around shooting at each other and someone gets murdered? That sounds kind of moronic to me."

"I don't know, Shane...what kind of goals do you have? Are you just going to be satisfied to lie on the beach, drink beer, and make love for the rest of your life?"

Not a bad goal, I thought to myself. "What am I supposed to want to do?" I said.

"Don't you have any desire to do something better with your life?" said Loren.

"Actually, now that you mention it, there is one thing that I would like to do."

"And what's that?"

"Someday," I said, "I'd like to figure out where all this came from, and what I'm doing here."

"Say what?"

I waved my hand out to the ocean and said, "Don't you ever wonder where this world came from?"

"Oh no," said Loren in a disgusted tone, "don't tell me that you're starting to believe in God. I thought you told me that God was imaginary."

"I think God is a word that people made up because they couldn't figure out how the world was created. So to cover up their ignorance, they said that God created the world. But that doesn't mean anything to me. I'd really like to know how it was created and how I got here."

"You should stop smoking the weed, Shane. It's doing bad things to your mind because what you need to do is drop all these silly little questions and concentrate on something practical."

"Loren, what is it with you? Can't you just let things be without trying to twist them into something that isn't?"

Loren laughed. "You do say the strangest things, Shane, but I'm beginning to think that Janice is right."

As far as I was concerned, Janice hadn't been right since the day she took her first breath, so I knew that something bad was coming. "And what does Janice think?" I said.

"Listen, Shane, I know I've been criticizing you a lot lately, but this isn't all about you. A couple of days ago, Janice and I had a long talk, and she told me that she doesn't think I'm ready for a serious relationship. She's two years older than me, so she has a lot more experience than I do, and—"

"Two years?" I said in a scoffing tone. "She's not exactly your grandmother."

"Shane, please don't get upset—just listen to me. Janice has a lot of experience with relationships—she may be only two years older than me, but she's already had three serious relationships with men."

"Wow!" I said in a mocking tone that Loren must have missed.

"Yes, three, and what she's learned is that when you're twenty-two like I am, it's much too early to commit yourself to a serious relationship. She knows about this stuff, Shane, and what she thinks is that a person should wait until they're in their late twenties or even thirty before they...you know, before they go gangbusters over each other."

At that moment, I was so sick of her nonsense that I actually felt like throwing up. "So what are you saying?" I said.

Loren sighed. "Shane," she said in a soft voice, "I'm sorry if this hurts you, but I think from now on, we should just be friends. It isn't that I've found someone else or anything but—"

That was enough for me. Jumping up, I walked away from her as fast as I could before I really lost my temper. "Shane!" she said plaintively, "Don't be this way."

Turning around, I yelled back at her, "You know what? I think we should just be nothing. Get lost!"

## CHAPTER FOUR: GARBAGE BOY BLUES

##

Mostly, I don't want to talk about my past except that there are some things that can't be avoided. I've never been a goal setter or wanted to achieve anything because it seems like succeeding means that I have to be a hypocrite. I can remember this day when I was working at the ice cream place, and these two people had a gigantic fight over who was going to be promoted to the chief scooper position. "Yes sir, mister, I'm the chief scooper at this ugly dump that's populated by demented weasels." It's amazing how far people can sink when they start taking life seriously. Backbiting and gossip were never my strong suit, and I also have trouble following rules and regulations. That's why I got fired at the ice cream place. I was always handing out free cones to people who looked like they were down and out, so I guess that makes me into a very tiny version of Robin Hood. But come on! Some woman walks into the place and she's dragging a screaming three-year-old whose clothes are all dirty. And the kid has some stupid water pistol that he's pointing at his Mom, but when she tries to wrestle it out of his hand, he squirts her in the face. "That's it!" yells Mom. "You're not getting any ice cream." Mom has definitely seen better days—she's obviously underweight and under-washed and her jeans are ripped and undoubtedly Dad has gone AWOL for the duration.

And that's exactly who cost me my job because the hotshot manager of the shop happened to be watching when I walked up to Mom and handed her a free cone of chocolate ice cream. Of course, technically, the manager was within his rights. He'd already warned me about handing out free cones. "Shane, you're beginning to get a reputation," he had said to me in a stern voice. And it wasn't like the ice cream was mine or anything—it's nice to give people stuff, but when it isn't your stuff to give, then there's no reason to go around patting yourself on the back because you've developed some glorified image where you've become a crusader for truth and justice. It was just that the woman looked so down and out that it almost broke my heart.

I don't know why I'm going off about this—there are five billion sad stories in this world, and a mother dragging around a squalling brat who's pissing into her face with a water pistol isn't anything special. Kind of penny ante, if you stop to think about it. Last night, I saw this program on the tube about a whole family who got gunned down by the deranged ex-husband. A wife, a grandmother, three children, and a friend of one of the children. I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be killed with a gun. I mean, what happens? You're standing there like a helpless lamb silently begging this monster not to shoot, and then he pulls the trigger and the bullet hits you in the stomach before it passes straight through you. BAM! So many changes in such a short period of time. And what if the bullet hits you in the head? How can you go from existence to non-existence in a split second?

All in all, I think guns are the most horrible thing on the earth, but it's not like I want to get political and start arguing about anything because this is supposed to be a novel. And "they"—whoever "they" are—don't allow any kind of preaching or sermonizing in a novel. Politicians are allowed to sermonize for hours on end, but any writer who is caught doing something like that is immediately tossed into the rubbish pin where he is incinerated alive by some blistering one-star reviews. Instead, the gods of the literary world, sometimes known as professors, go for character development, semi-idiotic plots, and a whole bunch of other irrelevant stuff that isn't much more than academically approved drivel—even if the drivelers are quite famous and have made millions of dollars.

And besides, people can only take so much. It's a rare person who can sit down after dinner and read about what it feels like to be shot in the stomach. And here you thought that acid indigestion was about the worst thing that can happen to you—at least on the normal nights, the nights when you've decided to pack it in and not go down to some greasy bar that's crawling with guns and a roving lunatic who is just itching to blow someone's head off. And now, for crying out loud, you're sitting on your dilapidated couch and listening to a description about some guy who's vomiting blood and choking to death because the bullet hit him broadside.

As you can see, I have now committed the cardinal sin of digressing, and "they" don't like that. It's important, I suppose, to stay on topic, but sometimes, with a really great writer like Salinger, the topic isn't exactly going to walk up to you and slap you in the face and say, "Hi! I'm the topic, and this is point one." It's just so boring and standard issue to be that way. And since I write pseudo-mysteries sometimes, it's only natural that the topic should be a mystery.

Anyways, after my brief stint at the ice cream palace (as it liked to call itself), I scrounged around for a month before I found a job at the local garbage company. Being the new guy on the totem pole, my function was to hang on to the pole at the back of the truck and hop off when we reached the garbage barrels of one of our customers. I would then lift these barrels up high enough so that what was in them could be dumped into the back of the truck. It's true that about a third of the customers had special barrels so that two mechanical prongs could lift these barrels and empty them into the truck, but even then, I'd usually have to hop off the truck to line the barrels up with the prongs.

Of course, strictly speaking, it wasn't a glamorous job. We get a lot of drizzly cool days in this part of the country, and on those days, I'd be looking like a grungy, gunky, stinking mess by noon. But, as I've often been told, every job has its drawbacks, so I shouldn't cop an attitude and walk around with a chip on my shoulder. However, it's hard not to let out a few squawks when you're getting paid a measly twelve dollars an hour for manhandling garbage. The good news is that once you've lasted a year at Goodman's Trash Hauling Inc., you receive a twenty-five cent an hour raise, and if you make it to three years, you get another twenty-five cents. Experience counts!

I hate to talk about things like this because I know how touchy people are, but garbage boys are like the untouchables. That's me! Back in the real old days in our highly esteemed country, the slaves used to be the untouchables, but that kind of nonsense has been outlawed. Notice how perfect the word untouchable is: Garbage boys, for instance, are not the kind of people that you would want to touch, especially after they come home from their eight-hour garbage run. No way! Just like the slaves—no one was rushing out to touch them or give them hugs.

I suppose, by now, you're probably getting fed up with my Zone Eight complaints and are saying something like, "Won't this guy ever stop? If he'd just gone out and got an education, he could sit in an office, make eighty grand a year, and play with a computer all day."

Which brings me to the whole college dream world where the paying customers are force-fed the self-serving idea that they deserve more money than those who do manual labor because their high-flying jobs are essential to the betterment of mankind. But answer me this: If all the professors in this world went on strike for a year, would you miss them? But what if all the garbage boys went on strike for a year? They'd be calling out the National Guard real quick, because, man oh man, we sure can't live in a modern city with a month's worth of garbage piled up all over the place as it rots and festers and turns into hovels and food stores for gigantic ornery rats that look like the cinematic stars of your worst imaginable nightmare.

Me and Jimi Stones had worked the same garbage truck for about a year when the whole thing went down. He was the driver, while I hung onto the pole at the back. That's because he had seniority, but he wasn't the kind of guy who was about to pull rank and give you some snotty lecture about the best way to pick up the garbage barrels and dump them into the trunk. Jimi's real name was Jayson, but he was a Jimi Hendrix fanatic, so he had everyone call him Jimi.

I hadn't known much about Hendrix until I met Jimi—just that he was some cool dude who had a lot of hit songs back in the sixties. But my Jimi kept a small tape player in the front of the truck, and sometimes, I'd get into the truck and we'd cruise through town on the fumes of another psychedelic rock song by the original Jimi.

My Jimi looked a lot like the old Jimi. Black, same kind of mustache and hair style—all you have to do is go to Google images and type in Jimi Hendrix to see what Jimi Stones looked like. He even wore the same fancy vests, and I guess he had spent some time listening to Hendrix talk because he had Jimi's voice down pretty good. Stones wasn't Jimi's real last name—he had just tacked that on because he also liked the Rolling Stones.

Me? As I've said, my name is Shane, and I'm just a scruffy twenty-three-year-old white guy who dropped out of high school when I was sixteen because I didn't see any sense in it. My father had disappeared (probably murdered in a drug deal gone bad) when I was eight, and my mother was a speed freak who lived on meth, donuts, and coffee until she had a heart attack and died when I was nineteen. "I hope you ain't fixin on going to college," she told me about a dozen times during my high school career. "Because that there riff is nothing but rich man's hogwash." Back when she was alive, I didn't really love my mother, but I did kind of like her. She always looked you in the eye, and she had great drug connections. Sometimes, when she wasn't hard up for cash, she'd even front me some weed or hash, and I was always appreciative of that.

Anyways, to stay on point and keep everyone happy, Jimi and I would drive around town totally stoned as we listened to an old rock anthem like Purple Haze. I'd quote it to you because it's a fabulous song, but I'd probably get sued by some idiotic lemonhead in a three-hundred-dollar suit.

We were running late one September morning because we'd pulled off the road to do some hashish and had gotten ourselves fried. Man, that stuff is something else. "Oh wow," Jimi kept saying as we sat there getting stoned out of our minds, "I think I'm like sinking into the universe." For me, it was like my vision had crossed and everything was coming in sideways. Hard to explain, and I couldn't really think straight. My mind kept repeating something it had heard in a commercial I had seen on TV the night before. "If your erection lasts more than four hours..." but that was all I could remember. So what was I supposed to do, I wondered, if the stupid thing hung in there for more than four hours? Call my girlfriend? If only I had one. And then, like sometimes happens when I'm way over the line on grade-A hash, I began to get an attack of the giggles.

"What you laughing about, man?" said Jimi.

"I'm thinking that I could use some kind of chick right about now," I said.

"There's one," said Jimi as he pointed to a superhot babe in tight jeans who was walking across the park.

"She's too hot for me," I said. "When you ride the back of a garbage truck, you can't be shooting for the stars."

"Garbage Boy Blues," said Jimi. "What a cool tune that would be. Let's see...give me another toke on the pipe—I can feel a Hendrix song coming on." Jimi took a toke and closed his eyes for a few seconds. And then, to the tune of Purple Haze, he came out with, "Garbage boy...he ain't feelin right...garbage boy, he's a little uptight...garbage boy is gonna need some love tonight..." Jimi interrupted himself to take out his air guitar and came out with a great riff, and then he closed out the song with, "Garbage boy is riding tall but he stills feels kind of small...garbage boy is just waiting for that call...but the line never brings any kind of ring...Garbage boy, you should have known...when you chase a hot chick you're gonna fall."

Finally, after another ten minutes, we got our act together, and I hopped out of the cab of the truck and grabbed onto the pole at the back. Jimi was really barreling around the streets and practically doing wheelies as we went through all these curvy roads in Dorchester Heights. That's where all the fat-cat rich people live. The real super-ritzy houses of Zone Four prima donnas. The kind of neighborhood that I feel like I should apologize for being in. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but we got lost after we came off the turnpike. Honestly, we were heading for the slums on the east side, but we took a wrong turn and ended up in the Heights. So sorry—we'll just head downhill, and that should get us back on track."

We had stopped in front of this fancy house that had a garage that was bigger than some houses, and I had just hopped off the pole when a barefooted woman in a bathrobe came running out the front door. "Help!" she shrieked. "He's going to kill me." She was running straight towards me, but I was so stoned that I just kind of froze in my tracks. I mean how many times does a woman in a bathrobe from a ritzy neighborhood run towards a garbage boy? That sort of stuff wasn't in my one-page mimeographed training manual. Jimi, of course, was completely tuned out to the whole scene and had turned his tape player way up. All I could hear from the front end of the truck was Get off My Cloud by the Stones. Meanwhile, the woman was now only a few feet from me. And what a beautiful woman she was! Her long straight blond hair; her exquisite face; her excellent figure. I suppose I should have been focusing on the fact that she was obviously terrified and in fear for her life, but like a lot of garbage boys, I'm kind of sex-starved and lonely, so I tend to analyze everything from a selfish perspective. Like: Do I have a chance with this woman?

In this case, the answer was clearly no, but while I was trying to adjust to that obvious fact, a guy came out of the house, and I could see that he had a gun in his hand. The woman had now reached where I was standing and grabbed me by my arms. "Take me with you," she said in a hysterical voice. By now the guy had reached us, and as I jerked the woman towards the pole at the back of the truck, I tried to stop him from chasing her. The guy with the gun was just a scrawny little jerk, so at that moment, I had kind of forgotten about the gun, but now as he pointed it in my direction, I reached out and tried to twist the gun out of his hand. He couldn't have been more than a foot away from me when I heard the sound of a gunshot.

BAM. The sound shocked me, but what was much worse was that I felt a stinging pain like fire near my stomach. It almost felt like I had been hit by a baseball bat, and as I staggered back and grabbed at my stomach, I could feel that my grubby garbage shirt was wet. Gasping, I fell backwards onto the ground and looked at my hand, which was now covered in blood. I couldn't think hardly, but I was going through an awful lot of bad changes. Feeling weak and cold and dizzy.

The woman was screaming her brains out now. "Oh my God, Carl, you've shot him," she said.

"And you're next," he said.

Just then, I heard another shot, but what happened after that, I only found out later because with a strange kind of darkness closing in over me, I passed out into I knew not where.

## CHAPTER FIVE: THE LIFE OF A GLORIFIED VEGETABLE

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed and had tubes stuck in me all over the place. Even worse than that, I had an air tube crammed down my throat. There was also a stupid-looking nurse sitting in a chair about five feet from me. Man, it seemed like a nightmare, and in the nightmare, I was terribly thirsty, but all I could do was let out a feeble grunt. But then I must have passed out because when I woke up, there was a different nurse as well as a couple of doctors in the room. I managed to stay conscious for about five minutes before I lost consciousness again.

I ended up staying in the hospital for four weeks. The doctors told me that I was lucky—I had lost a lot of blood because the bullet had grazed an artery, so for a couple of days, it was kind of touch and go as far as my survival went. I'd also lost my spleen, which might make me more likely to suffer from a bacterial infection in the future. They'd also had to operate on me a second time to clear out an infection that was in my intestines, but by the end of my third week in the hospital, I was beginning to feel somewhat better. Nothing great, but the breathing tube had been out of my mouth for a week, and I could walk around a little.

It wasn't until I had been in the hospital for ten days that I had my first visitor. Since I was an only child and both my mother and father were dead, I didn't have any real relatives to speak of, and as far as friends went, I only had the guys I hung out with at bars and back alleys. So it wasn't all that surprising that I was left alone in my hospital bed to contemplate my rather dismal reality. For some reason, I couldn't get my mind off the rent money that was...what day was it, anyways? I finally figured out that I had been shot on the twenty-fifth, so how was I ever going to make the rent payment? I usually paid the landlord a week late because I never seemed to be able to come up with the money on time, but now, with my being out of action for a long, long time, what was I going to do? I had about a hundred bucks hidden under my mattress, plus I thought I had about thirty dollars in my wallet—assuming that no one in the hospital had cleaned it out for their vending machine money. I kept telling myself that I'd have to ask a nurse where my wallet was, but when I finally got the chance to ask one of the wretched battleaxes, she just shrugged her shoulders and said that she had no idea where it was and that it might have got lost in the shuffle.

But even if my wallet turned up, that meant I had only one hundred and thirty dollars. There'd be a paycheck coming to me, but since I had been shot on a Monday, the check would only include Friday and Monday. Maybe, if I was lucky, they'd pay me for all of Monday, but it was possible that they'd only pay me up to the time I got shot, which was around 10 A.M. Why bother paying someone if he got shot before he did his work? Either way, I wasn't going to get a whole lot of money from the grubby bozos who ran the garbage place—maybe, at best, one hundred and fifty dollars. On top of my one hundred and thirty dollars, that left me over five hundred dollars short on the rent. And naturally, since I'd been late with my rent payments so many times, I'd been warned by the landlord that he wasn't going to cut me much slack, so I knew that I probably wouldn't have a place to go to when they released me from the hospital. And the homeless were required, by law, to go to Zone Nine, which from everything I had ever heard was a wasteland of guns and murders.

It was a pretty bleak prospect, especially since the hundred dollars under my mattress was sure to end up in the landlord's pocket. The spoils of war and all that. So what was I going to do? In the first few days in the hospital, as I oozed in and out of consciousness, I figured I might be able to stay with Jimi, but sometime during the first week that I was there, I received a very nasty shock when the police came by and talked to me. They wanted to hear my take on what had happened, but I couldn't tell them all that much because I had passed out of the scene so quickly. However, I was total unprepared when they told me that I was the only one who had survived—both Jimi and the woman had been murdered, and the guy who had shot us all had committed suicide when the cops closed in on him.

It must have been because I was so weak and felt really terrible that the news of Jimi's death hit me so hard. For about three days, I was devastated. The guy had always been so upbeat and funny, and now, just like that, he was dead. Apparently, he had stepped out of the truck to see what was going on, and the guy had shot him right through the heart. The cops told me that the shooter was a war veteran who suffered from PTSD—as if that mattered. For days, I couldn't stop thinking about Jimi and what he must have gone through in his final seconds. I even had a nightmare about it where he was bleeding to death in front of me and kept asking me to help him as the blood poured, just poured, out of his mouth. But in the dream, I was paralyzed and couldn't move, and all I could do was watch him bleed to death. So horrible—I can't even begin to tell you.

Not counting the cops, my first real visitor was Loren. I hadn't seen her in about three months, and I was still angry at her for having dumped me, but obviously, beggars can't be choosers, and in my pitiful shot-up state, I welcomed whatever human companionship came my way. The first time Loren came, I still had the breathing tube in my mouth, and she held my hand for a while before she left. It would have been nice except that she spent almost the whole time she was there crying. At that point, when I was feeling so lousy that I really felt like I might die, I wanted to tell her to save her tears for the funeral. Not that I would have had a funeral, of course, unless you count being dumped into a pauper's grave at midnight a funeral. Or maybe the hospital has a furnace down in the basement where they chuck all the flotsam and jetsam.

Once the tube was gone, Loren started coming back about three times a week. It was very nice of her, actually, because it did get quite lonely in the hospital. My only other contacts with humanity were a bunch of hardcore nurses who looked like they might punch you in the lower regions if you said anything even mildly inappropriate. For some reason, I had this vision or idea that nurses were hot creatures who were secretly longing for at least a little bit of action. A wink or something a little bit sexy would have gone a long ways with me. The first nurse I ever saw in there, Bertha Van Houten, would have been enough to give anyone a fright. She must have been almost sixty and had this nasty guttural voice, and when she moved me around on the bed, I was subject to some very rough and impersonal handling. I wanted to squawk, but since they had cleverly jammed the air tube down my throat and shot me up with about five different painkillers, I wasn't much more than a glorified vegetable.

And neither were the rest of the nurses all that much better. It was so bad that I began to wonder if third-world refuse like me got the really rotten nurses, while the hotshot guys who drove a Mercedes around and lived in Zone Three or Four and had made their fortunes by swindling people out of their life's savings with some sort of nasty Ponzi scheme were given the starlets of the nursing world. If one of those rich dudes ever got Bertha Van Houten for a nurse, he probably would have sued the hospital for ten million bucks. Actually, to be fair, there was one nurse who worked the night shift who was kind of cute in a sterile don't-touch-me way, but she always looked at me like I was a smelly piece of fish. As far as the doctors went, they were straight out of your favorite repeating nightmare. Tall and thin with bulging eyes and peculiar purple lips.

About a week before I was released, Loren began to question me about what I was going to do after I got booted out of the hospital. Usually, people can't wait to leave, but I was starting to dread the day when they told me that I had to vamoose.

"Shane," said Loren, who was sitting near my bed and holding my hand, "what are you going to do after you get out of here? One of the nurses told me that it won't be long before they release you. You're not going to be able to work, are you?"

"No, it still hurts when I stand up and walk around, and I couldn't possibly lift much of anything."

"So what do you plan to do? Everyone needs money."

A startling economic revelation from my ex-sweetheart. "I have no idea, Loren. I haven't been able to think about it because I've been kind of depressed lately."

"I don't suppose you have any money saved up?"

"A hundred dollars is about it, and I figure my landlord has probably already evicted me from my crummy apartment so that he can rent it to some other loser."

"Don't talk that way about yourself, Shane. Believe it or not, you have a lot to offer the world."

The Queen of Homespun Platitudes was on a roll. I kept my mouth shut, but it was hard for me not to ask her why, if I had so much to offer the world, she had dumped me for what amounted to a baloney sandwich.

"So did he give you an eviction notice?" said Loren.

That was the trouble with Loren—she didn't know much of anything except for the things that existed in her fairy-castle Zone Seven world of aspiring lowlifes.

"He doesn't need an eviction notice, Loren, because he can do whatever he wants. I'm in bad enough shape without having some of his hired thugs beat my brains in. Where I live, if the landlord tells you to leave, you'd better be gone in twenty-four hours." That's what people don't understand—when you're living in Zone Eight and are, by definition, an untouchable, the eviction notices are actually death threats, or if you're lucky, it might only be a severe mauling.

"Shane—"

"And even if I went completely crazy and found some dingbat lawyer who could convince some babbling idiot of a judge to take my side, the landlord would just burn down the place and collect the insurance money. That happened to a couple of guys I know not so long ago."

"You're just so negative, Shane. What's the landlord going to do—throw you out on the street because you were shot? Nobody does that."

Not in your cushy Zone Seven world, baby, but in my world, all things are possible and none of those things are good. "Let's talk about something else," I said.

"No, Shane, I want to know what you're going to do. You don't look so hot to me, and I'm afraid of what will happen to you if you end up living on the streets."

"I wish I could tell you what I'm planning to do," I said, "but at the present time, I have absolutely no idea."

"Don't you have any friends?"

I was beginning to realize that Loren was suffering from a guilty conscience. If she'd been living alone, she probably would have taken me in for a month or so, but the almighty Janice didn't even let her have a pet. "Sure, I have some friends," I said, "but they haven't come around—no guy that I know is going to visit me here. It's almost worse than jail what with all the croaking people and basket cases they have wandering around here. I hope to God I never got old if this place is what my future looks like."

"How about Bo Taggert?" said Loren. "Didn't you used to hang around with him a lot?"

"I haven't seen him in over a year."

"Maybe you could stay where he lives. I'd let you stay with me, but Janice—"

"Sure, I know all about it," I said. "She's one of those supposedly open-minded people who wouldn't dream of associating with someone who lives in Zone Eight. It's amazing how many people are like that."

"That's not true," said Loren. "One of her brothers lives in Zone Eight, and she goes to see him most every Christmas. Please don't be jealous, Shane. You have to understand that Janice is actually the best friend I've ever had in my life—I'd do anything for her."

"Loren, I'm exhausted—all this medicine they give me puts me to sleep after an hour, so..."

I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep. The last thing I needed was to hear about Ms. Janice, the throw-up queen in my irrelevant going-nowhere life. I suppose some people will think I have a bad attitude and am deserving of my fate, but when you're nearly shot to death as you're trying to pick up a lousy barrel of some rich person's rubbish, it can't get too much worse than that.

## CHAPTER SIX: BLACKWOOD STREET

A couple of days later, Bo Taggert appeared in my room. He was a tall, fairly muscular guy with dark blond hair that fell to his shoulders. His real name was Boden, but everyone always called him Bo. He and I were the same age and had been in many of the same classes at high school. Although he was constantly in trouble, mostly from drinking too much, he had been able to graduate, but he never went to college or anything like that and had driven a cab for a while before he dropped out of the workingman's world. Later, someone I met in a bar one night told me that Bo had taken up residence, as a homeless person, in Zone Nine. I had been so disgusted with Loren that I hadn't even told her that her brainstorm of me living with Bo wasn't very appealing since he was probably living in an abandoned cellar or something even worse.

"Hey," he said to me, "how are you doing?"

By this time, I was starting to get back to normal. I knew Bo was kind of an amateur intellectual, so I said, "It depends on what your reference point is. If you're using the day before I got shot, I feel awful; if you're using last week, I feel good."

"Loren phoned me yesterday, and she told me that you weren't doing so well."

"There's another reference point," I said. "Loren comes around here a lot, but when she starts yapping about that imbecilic roommate of hers, I feel like disappearing."

"When I was talking to her on the phone, she said that she liked you but didn't think that she could live with you."

"That was because Janice poisoned her mind and turned her against me. Loren and Janice would sell their souls to become orphans—you know, those Zone Five snobs who wander around complaining about the Lowlifes and the Untouchables."

"A lot of people are like that," said Bo. "By the way, did you hear that I hooked up with Michelle McKenzie? I guess you know her—she told me that she thinks she met you at Steamrollers a couple of times."

"Michelle? Isn't she about twenty years too old for you?"

"What? She's only forty-two, and she does know some tricks that the younger babes haven't learned yet."

"What happened to her?" I said, in a joking way. "I thought she was going places. How did she ever sink to your level?"

"Michelle dropped out of the world about three years ago after she read some books by a weird woman whose name I can't remember. Nowadays, she's convinced that everything we see is an illusion. Or...I don't even know what she thinks anymore because I only pretend to listen to her when she starts talking about the occult and all sorts of other things that nobody in their right mind would put any faith in. Believing in God is bad enough, but when someone brings in all this weird paranormal stuff, I just phase out of the whole scene."

"Wasn't she an artist?" I said.

"She used to be, but now she's working on some kind of experimental novel. Most days, she's perfectly happy if she can get stoned out of her mind and doze off for a couple of hours. As far as her writing goes, it's all abstract and experimental stuff, so I don't have a clue as to whether it's any good or not. She keeps telling me that she's writing an anti-novel, but when she tries to explain to me what an anti-novel is, I can't understand it."

"So what brings you to this rotten dump?" I said. "You're not the type of person I would expect to see in a hospital."

"When I was talking to Loren yesterday, she said that you were going to need a place to stay when you get out of here. Is that true?"

"I think so. My landlord has probably already evicted me or is at least in the process of doing so, and given my current bedridden condition, I'm not exactly a cash cow. I only have about a hundred bucks to my name."

"OK," said Bo in a breezy way. Turning from me, he went over and looked out the window for maybe a half minute. Finally, coming back towards me, he said, "Maybe you should consider moving into my setup."

"Your setup?" I wondered whether that would be in the back of a dumpster or a cellar that had a foot of rancid water in it.

"You do know that I live in Zone Nine—right?"

"Someone told me a while ago that you were living there," I said. Just the mention of Zone Nine was frightening to me—the land of the zombies or zombie world, as it was frequently called.

"I've got a fairly big apartment over on Blackwood Street. Know where that is?"

"You've got an apartment? I thought everyone in Zone Nine was homeless."

"Shane, you're really out of touch when you say stuff like that. There's a lot of homeless people in Zone Nine, of course, but most of us have found places to live."

"So what's this place like?" I said.

"I only took it because it was forty dollars a month. It's definitely a very rough area, so you should be prepared for that."

"Forty dollars a month!" I said. "What kind of an apartment is it? A tarpaper shack in the middle of the dump?"

"Shane, you're so clueless that I feel like I'm talking to a baby. The forty dollars a month is not really rent. It's more like a holding fee that is paid to the gang who controls that area of Zone Nine. I think of it as protection money, but that's kind of a joke because there's no protection if you go out at night, so if I do have to go out then, I always carry a gun. It's the kind of place where you shoot first and learn to disappear fast."

"Don't you have a landlord?"

"No, they all got shot to death or decided to vanish before they were shot to death."

"It sounds totally crazy," I said. "Why do you live there?"

"Because I can't find a job in Zone Eight, and even if I could, who would want to work a rotten Zone Eight job? I know you hauled garbage around for years, but I could never do anything like that. So the choice is to become homeless, which means that you'll automatically end up in Zone Nine, or you can do what I did, which is to move there voluntarily. I was lucky because I knew a guy who lived on Blackwood Street, and he arranged the whole thing for me. I say I knew him because he was shot to death about three weeks ago."

"Man," I said, "it sounds like a scary place to live."

"I should get out of there for Michelle's sake, but as you know, I'm about the laziest guy in town, so I think I'm going to be there for a while. The apartment is fairly big—it's got four bedrooms in it, and one of them is empty."

"What's the fine print?" I said. "Do I have to do everybody's dishes or something?"

"No fine print, buddy. I know it's not a great offer, but at least you're better off than Jimi. What a tragedy. He was one of the coolest dudes I ever met—whenever I needed to score drugs, he always found some for me."

"I think about him a lot," I said. "I keep having these thoughts where I'd like to revenge Jimi's death, but the guy who shot us all committed suicide, so I can't even do that."

"Practically the whole world is turning into a war zone," said Bo. "It's mostly OK if you live in some ritzy mansion in Zone Three or Four, but down here in Zone Nine, it's turning into a free-fire zone."

"Sometimes," I said, "you're not even safe in Zone Four—that's where I got shot. It's getting to the point where you have to face the fact that you could be hit by a bullet at any second."

"Buddy, Zone Nine is not anything like Zone Four. Yesterday, for instance, two guys got shot to death about a half mile from Blackwood Street."

"Black guys?" I said.

"No, one of them was white and the other was Puerto Rican—guns are an equal opportunity killer in my neighborhood."

Two days later, I moved into Bo's apartment on Blackwood Street. As I had suspected when I returned to my old apartment, I found a piece of plywood over my door, and when I phoned my landlord's rental agency, a woman told me that all my property had been seized and would be returned to me when I made my final rent payment. As for the deposit, that was being confiscated because I had not "maintained the apartment in the condition in which I received it." I wanted to stuff the phone down the woman's throat, but since that was a physical impossibility, I merely said, in a polite tone, "I guess it did go from a hovel to a dump while I lived there, but that's because I couldn't find any wire to strangle you with." I didn't need these Zone Six misfits anymore, so there was no reason for me not to mouth off a little bit. Of course, I could have filed some sort of legal complaint about being ripped off, but I would have had to find a lawyer or some such hideous being, and in the end, I wouldn't have received a dime. You're living in the ultimate dream world if you think an untouchable has a chance in court.

I'd developed a bit of a limp on the side I was shot, so I was a mostly pathetic sight when I showed up at my new place. Loren had bought me some clothes as a birthday present—she made a special point of telling me that the clothes were a birthday present even though my birthday was three weeks away. I guess she didn't want me to think that she was buying me a gift for no reason since that might have implied, in her mind, that we were something more than friends. "I get it!" I felt like shouting at her. No need to rub it in, sweetcakes, because if I wasn't so utterly desperate, the feeling would be mutual.

Nobody was at Bo's apartment, and the door was locked when I got there around noon, so I had to wander up and down the street for a while. And let me tell you, Blackwood Street was quite a street. It was fairly long, perhaps a half mile, and ended with a chain link fence beyond which were four sets of railroad tracks. Bo's apartment was on the second floor of the last building on the left, so it didn't take me long to realize that we would have some train music as a kind of constant companion. During the forty minutes that I was waiting for Bo to show up, three large freight trains came rumbling by—they were so loud that the ground shook as they passed. Instinctively, I started walking back down the street towards the far end where it connected with Regent Street, which eventually led out to Washington Boulevard, a monstrous six-lane road that went into the heart of the city.

I had talked with Bo the previous afternoon, and he had promised to meet me at twelve, but it was almost one before he showed up. "Hey, Shane!" he yelled to me when he saw me. I was relieved to see him because I didn't feel at all comfortable walking around in a neighborhood like this. It wasn't, for instance, a place where you would take your mother, your daughter, or anybody else that you cared about unless you were trying to figure out a way to get them off life support. At one point, while I was walking up towards Regent Street, an old black Cadillac had stopped about fifty feet away from me. From out of the car, three black kids about eighteen walked up to the entrance of an apartment and began banging on the door. I couldn't see who opened the door, but seconds later, the three kids were dragging another black guy down to their car. "I'm telling you," said the guy who was being dragged, "I'll get the money by ten o'clock tonight." By now, the kids had forced him up against the car, and one of them put a gun to his head. "I'm fixin to blow your head off."

That was enough for me—just to my right, I saw an alley that didn't look like a dead end, and I ducked down into it. About a half minute later, I heard the Cadillac take off, and when I came out of the alley, I could see that the guy who had been threatened was bleeding from his nose and mouth as he staggered up the stairs to his apartment.

"Quite the neighborhood you got," I said to Shane as we walked towards his apartment.

"It's not so bad if you're packing some heat," said Bo, with his charming wink as he patted the pocket of his jacket. "And trust me, brother—I'm not afraid to use it."

"Have you ever had to?" I said. I was used to rotten living conditions, but I was beginning to think that Blackwood Street was a little bit beyond my pay grade.

"Just a couple of times or so, but they were only meant as warning shots. Word gets around though—when I walk down the street, people usually steer clear of me. The trouble is that my gun isn't going to help me much if we have a drive-by. We had one of those a couple of weeks ago where some loco cruised down Regent Street and was taking potshots at people. Outside of a mother and her four-year-old kid, everyone survived."

"Man," I said, with a kind of nervous laugh, "I can't say that I like what I'm hearing."

"Don't let it get to you," said Bo. "If you start worrying about things like that, you'll never make it around here. So you don't own a gun?"

"No, I don't own anything except the clothes on my back and one hundred dollars."

"We're going to have to get you a gun, Shane—it's like suicide to walk around here at night without one. I might be able to get one cheap when I do my next drug deal."

We had reached Bo's apartment, and I followed him up a winding staircase that led to the second floor of the four-story building. Inside, there was a small bedroom just to the right of the front door; a common space directly in front of us that was about ten feet by twelve feet; to the left was a fairly long corridor that had three bedrooms on the right-hand side—my bedroom would be the middle one, and it was furnished with an empty milk crate and a mattress. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom and just to the right of that was a small kitchen. Small, small, small—everything in the apartment, except Bo and Michelle's bedroom, was small. Their bedroom was perhaps fifteen feet by twelve feet, while mine was about ten by eight. Not exactly luxury standards, but who was I to complain?

It wasn't long before I met the three other occupants of the apartment. On my first evening there, I wandered into the front room and found David Snell, who was a college student and lived in the bedroom to the right of the front door. He was sitting on a beat-up couch and reading something that looked like a textbook. David was of medium height, with light red hair and green eyes. He was wearing an old sport coat, white shirt, and blue jeans, and he seemed way too dignified to be living in this area of town. After I sat down near him on the couch, he leaned over towards me, and in a quiet conspiratorial voice, he said, "Has Bo told you some horror stories about Blackwood Street yet?"

"A couple."

"Try to take them with a grain of salt because he tends to exaggerate—he's got a very vivid imagination."

"Do you go out around here at night?" I said.

David started to laugh. "Well, no, I wouldn't recommend that unless you have a gun, but in the daytime, there isn't much to worry about as long as you mind your own business."

"How did you meet Bo?" I said.

"I was friends with one of Michelle's friends, and we all kind of hooked up at a bar one night."

Just then, Michelle walked into the room, and I guess the best way I can describe her is that she was a crafty looking woman, with wide-set green eyes and straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She was fairly short, around five foot three, and she gave off an impression of gentle indifference—as if she would have preferred to be by herself. Coming up to me, she held out her hand and introduced herself. After I told her that we had met at Steamrollers, she seemed surprised. "You look different now," she said.

"It's probably because I've lost a lot of weight."

Michelle took a seat in an old raggedy stuffed chair and said, "So what's your story, Shane? I know you have one because everybody who comes to Zone Nine has a story."

What was I to say? Despite the fact that Michelle was a woman of only average attractiveness, there was something I found alluring about her. Instinctively, I wanted to impress her, regardless of whether Bo was her boyfriend, but my biography was a little weak: Dropped out of high school, got fired at my scooper job, and then got shot at my garbage boy job. A real high flyer with heavy aspirations! I decided to go for the sympathy vote. "Actually," I said, "I just got shot and was in the hospital for about a month."

"You got shot?" said Michelle. "Where? Here on Blackwood Street?"

"No, it was in the other end of town—up on the hill where all the Zone Four prima donnas live."

"Who shot you?"

"Some deranged guy who was in one of those endless Mideast wars."

Michelle gave me a puzzled look. "What were you doing up on the hill?"

My whole seedy life was about to be exposed. It's one thing to be riding shotgun with Jimi Stones as you listen to a Hendrix song like Are You Experienced, but it's quite another thing to make this kind of life sound glamorous to a woman who didn't look like she had done much manual labor in her life. The glory of the streets can only go so far in certain circles.

"Believe it or not," I said, "I worked for a garbage company and was picking up the guy's garbage when I was shot."

"That is a pretty bad story," said Michelle, who looked slightly appalled.

"Who paid for the hospital bill?" said Dave.

"I have no idea," I said. "Somebody else must have picked up the tab because I don't have hardly any money."

"You didn't have a gun on you?" said Michelle.

"No, I was working my job, and besides, I don't even own a gun."

"You don't own a gun?" said Michelle in a flabbergasted tone. "God, even Saint Dave owns a gun. He was always so snooty and pure about how he didn't need to have a gun to survive around here, but when those three guys got shot to death on Regent Street in broad daylight about a month ago, Mr. Dave was down at the gun shop the next morning."

Dave looked a little uncomfortable now that he had been exposed. "Michelle, that shooting was not in broad daylight. In fact--"

"It happened at six o'clock, which is at least an hour before sunset," said Michelle.

"That's not what I heard," said Dave. "I know somebody who lives on Regent Street, and he told me they got shot about eight o'clock, which would have been about thirty minutes after sundown."

Michelle winked at me. "Nowadays, Shane, I call him Cowboy Dave. Be careful when you're around him—as you can tell by looking at him, he's the kind of guy who will shoot first and ask questions later."

"Michelle," said Dave, "I don't even take my gun with me when I go to class."

"What about the day before yesterday? Are you going to tell me I was hallucinating when I saw you put a gun into your backpack about an hour before you left here at ten-thirty?"

"How did you see that?" said Dave.

"My cowboy friend!" said Michelle to me. "Dave, next time you should shut your bedroom door if you don't want me to know that you're switching into Wild Bill Hickok mode. So why did you bring the gun with you if you were leaving here before noon?"

"Because I was planning to go over to Cheryl's house for dinner, and I figured I wouldn't be back until ten."

"They let you bring a gun into your classes at college?" I said.

Michelle and Dave looked at each other in amazement. "He must be living in 2020," said Dave.

"Or maybe," said Michelle, "he fell asleep for twenty years in the hospital, and now he's pulling a Rip Van Winkle on us."

"How should I know about this stuff?" I said. "It's not like I ever set foot in a college. All the learning I ever got, I got on the street."

"And it shows!" said Bo, who had suddenly appeared and was leaning against the doorframe. "What's this I heard about Rip Van Winkle?"

"Believe it or not," said Michelle, "Shane doesn't seem to realize that you can carry a gun onto a college campus."

"I think he was just jerking us around," said Dave. "Everybody knows that guns are now strongly recommended for students at all college campuses."

"That was actually the first thing they talked to us about when I took a night course last year," said Michelle. "They had some long-nosed dork from security who told us that we should consider ourselves at risk if we didn't carry a gun on campus. He even gave us a brochure that showed us the preferred gun and holster. I didn't bother with the holster, of course, because it really detracted from my appearance, but I did take the gun out of my handbag once in a while just to let people know that I was playing in the big leagues. There had been three or four shootings on campus in the year before I got there, so it only made sense to take precautions."

"Michelle, the fact is that you don't really have to take a gun on campus," said Dave. "Not unless it's a night class—otherwise, you're just being paranoid."

"What about that professor who was gunned down in his classroom last month--wasn't it right around noon that it happened?"

"Michelle," said Dave, "he was a professor, so that doesn't really count. Obviously it counted for him, but if you're a professor, that comes with the territory. They make a lot of money, and every few months or so, one of them takes a bullet. But it's not like professors are shooting students, so there's really nothing to worry about."

"What about that professor out west who shot up his whole classroom?" said Bo.

From behind Bo, a tall lanky guy with sandy blond hair appeared, and he turned out to be the other occupant of the apartment. He was introduced to me as Wily Fox, which turned out to be a shorter version of his real name—William Foxwood.

"Wily is a nihilistic philosopher," said Bo to me. "A master of the paranoid arts, and a man who has immersed himself in some of the more profoundly negative possibilities that exist in this world."

"It's such a waste of time to think that way," said Michelle, with a smirk. "Wily, as long as we're all together, would it bother you very much if I asked you something?"

"Whatever you like," he said in a gracious tone.

"Alright—do you know who Jane Roberts is?"

"Never heard of her," said Wily.

"Then I'm a little puzzled as to what you actually know."

"Michelle," said Wily, "what I know I didn't learn from anybody else—I figured it out by myself. I know you like to read books by bygone authors who have supposedly figured out the key to life, but I'm on another plane entirely."

"Ah, that sounds so good," said Michelle, with a contemptuous laugh, "but you're only displaying how ignorant you are."

Looking at me, Bo said, "Isn't it comical to watch these so-called philosophers argue? The two of them spin out their words, and I think they even believe what they say, but like all the other philosophy in this world, it's just ends up being a meaningless trek to nowhere."

"The know-nothing speaks," said Michelle. "Anyways, Bo, since you love practical things so much, have you found us another gun yet?"

"I'm working on it, Michelle."

"You're working on it! How long do we have to go around trying to fit our schedules around your gun? I'm telling you—one of these times, there's going to be a mix-up, and one of us will be coming down Blackwood Street at ten o'clock at night without a gun. And one thing is for sure--it's not going to be me because if you insist that we get along with just one gun, the one who's getting along without it is going to be you. I don't mean to threaten you, but it's pathetic to be living with a guy in Zone Nine who can't even supply his woman with a functioning gun. And here's one more thing that you should consider—if you expect me to hole up in this dive of an apartment for twenty-three hours a day like Wily does, you can forget it. I need fresh air to survive, and the air in here smells like rotten formaldehyde."

"Michelle, be patient, will you?" said Bo. "It's going to take another couple of weeks because the first person I have to get a gun for is Shane."

"Shane? Are you crazy? What is he—more important to you than me?"

"Of course you're more important," said Bo. "But—"

"Maybe you should go to bed with him instead of me. Because if you're giving him a gun before you give one to me, then he's obviously more important to you."

"Michelle," said Bo, "you and I can work around it for another couple of weeks, but Shane would be a dead duck on Blackwood Street if he didn't have a gun. Just look at him!"

Michelle stared at me speculatively. "You're right—he does look kind of weak and pathetic."

"Weak doesn't even begin to describe it," said Bo. "He's so thin that it looks like the backdraft from the trains might finish him off. And I'm sure you know what happens to people like that around here—they get rolled in about ten seconds. About his only hope is that they wouldn't feel the need to shoot him because he doesn't look like he could lift ten pounds without having some kind of internal accident. Even so, there's a new gang on Washington Boulevard, and I've heard that they're shooting people on sight before they roll them."

"But who would be tempted to roll Shane?" said Michelle. "What's the best you could hope for? Five dollars and some spare change?"

"Five dollars is a fortune to some of the people around here," said Bo. "And also, you have to take into account that Shane doesn't look like he has a friend in the world, so if some guy stuffed a few bullets into him, he wouldn't have to be afraid of retaliation."

"Nobody retaliates around here," said Dave. "If you see a dead body, you just step around it because it's par for the course. And anyways, who would you retaliate against if someone shot Michelle to death? There'd be ten thousand suspects, so the only thing you could do is have her corpse picked up and then pay for a proper cremation."

"Just get me my own gun, Bo," said Michelle. "I'm tired of playing who's-got-the-gun today with you. I know it's wretched that we have to think about things like this, but that's the world we live in, so we have to adjust to it."

"What's your take on all this gun violence that goes on in the world nowadays?" said Dave to Wily. "You've usually got something interesting to say."

"To put it very simply," said Wily, "I think we're all on the Titanic. But I'm not talking about the part of the cruise where everything was la-di-da. And I'm also not talking about the part where the iceberg had just hit the ship. I'm talking about the part when the boat really started to list and all the lifeboats had pulled away. By that time, if you had any serious thoughts to think, you had better get right to them because once the list gets to a certain point, you'll be like a person who is trying to flee from a tiger and is about two seconds away from having his head chomped off."

Michele laughed. "It's good to have an optimist amongst us."

"Lots of people scoff at my pessimism," said Wily, "but then, a month later, when I look around, most of the people who scoffed at me have had their heads chomped off."

## CHAPTER SEVEN: THE ONE TRUTH THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

##

Michelle and I began hanging out together some. Dave hardly spent any time at the apartment, and Wily rarely ventured out of his room where he apparently spent a lot of his abundant free time playing video games and reading the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. Meanwhile, Bo frequently ran around doing all his wheeling and dealing; mostly, he undercut the brain-dead government by selling small amounts of marijuana and hash at reasonable prices—something that the government seemed unwilling to do. Cocaine was where the real money was at, but Bo was quite skittish about the people who were attracted to it.

About a week after I moved in, Bo was able to locate a pistol, which he gave to me—much to Michelle's annoyance, who talked to me about her frustration. "You'd think Bo would want to protect his girlfriend. He likes to pretend that we're sharing his gun, but he lets me use it about twice a week. Do you think that I could borrow your gun if I need to go out at night and you're planning on staying here?" She gave me that cute and winsome smile of hers and accentuated it with a minor but provocative tweak of her body language.

"OK," I said, "but where do you go at night without Bo?"

"There's a writer's group that meets once a week—it's on the corner of Regent Street and Washington Boulevard, and it would simply be suicide to attempt to get back from there at ten o'clock at night without a gun. In fact, one of the writers who used to go there was kidnapped after she left a meeting—this was about two months ago--and they only found her body last week."

"What happened to her?" I said.

"What do you think happened?" said Michelle, in an astonished tone.

"Shot to death?" I said.

"Is there any other way? It's like a murder a minute around this neighborhood—last year, the cops totally abandoned us after some loco lured a bunch of them down here on a phony domestic abuse call and shot five of them to death with an assault rifle. I guess the cops who died had wives and children and things like that, so a lot of people were upset."

"Did they ever catch the guy?" I said.

"I don't think so—I know they burned down the building he lived in, but I never heard whether he was inside when it happened. But let's stop talking about this stuff—it's too depressing to be thinking about guns and murders all day long."

"Sometimes, I can't help it," I said. "Have you ever thought about what it must be like to be shot in the head? I was only shot in the stomach, and that was plenty bad enough."

Michelle laughed. "I know what you mean, Shane. It's like I'll be walking down the street when I suddenly realize that this might be the last conscious moment in my life. Over on Waverly Street, which is about a mile from here, there was a sniper who spent a couple of months last year killing about thirty people before someone finally caught up to him and shot him about fifteen times with an assault rifle. Back then, the people on Waverly Street were really stuck between a rock and a hard spot—if they went out in the day, the sniper might get them, and if they went out at night, they might be murdered by any one of the lunatics that roam around this area. I had a good friend who lived over there—I tried to convince her to move here, but she said that somebody would eventually find the sniper and kill him. She was right about that but not before the guy put a bullet into her head and ended her life."

Michelle had been right—it was better not to talk about all this gun and murder stuff. Who wouldn't get depressed? "What do you say, Michelle? Do you feel like walking down to the coffee shop on Regent Street and getting a cup of java—there's nothing like a good afternoon buzz."

"Sure," she said. "But you better bring your gun--I know it's only two o'clock, but why not play it safe? I don't want people thinking we're a couple of airheads out for a stroll. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, takes a stroll in this area of town. You can save that for the poets and the rock stars. Bo gave you a holster, didn't he?"

"He did—it's in my bedroom."

"Just make sure the gun's loaded, Shane—there's nothing more pathetic than pulling an unloaded gun out of your holster."

It was a fairly chilly but pleasant September afternoon, and the late summer sun occasionally found its way between the rows of apartment buildings and the ever-present veneer of smog that hovered over the city. The smog was supposed to be a health hazard, but Bo claimed that once you got used to the oily aroma/stench, it was kind of like smoking a couple of oil-soaked cigarettes a day. "Of course," said Bo in his usual sarcastic way, "if you're one of those washed-up oldsters that we see creeping around here every once in a great while, it could be the fifty-pound brick that broke the camel's back." Bo then went into a long digression about some old duffer he had met who was telling him what it was like back in the 1990's. According to this guy, who coughed incessantly and called himself Tyrone the Great, Blackwood Street had just been an ordinary big-city slum that was filled with mostly honest but poor people. "Now," according to Tyrone, "it's been taken over by cocaine gangsters, murderers, and psychotic animals."

At this time of day, two-thirty, there weren't all that many people on the street. Just a few drunken ragamuffins and other forms of riff-raff who were dressed in filthy rags—they seemed so bedraggled and drunk that they almost made me feel elegant. Michelle seemed to be in a merry mood and was singing a very old song from the sixties—Angel of the Morning. It was a sweet song—kind of a miniature biography of a young woman who decides to spend the night with a guy and is determined not to regret it. I'd quote it to you, but the ugly lawyer lemonheads in the zillion-dollar suits would pounce on me if they ever heard I was doing something like that. It's truly amazing—if you're a musician, you can rip off the music and the words of a song and play it in front of millions of people, but if you're an author, the lemonheads will come after you and try to soak you for every penny you have because you had the nerve to put a few words from some song into page fifty-seven of your ninety-nine-cent novel. And it isn't like the people who will sue you are the ones who wrote the song or even represent the one who wrote the song—they're usually just ugly Zone Three sharks who like to make their living by torturing other people financially. Somebody should be arrested and dealt with harshly, but that somebody isn't me.

Anyways, to get back on point, Angel of the Morning was, I thought, kind of a provocative song for Michelle to be singing in front of a guy that you weren't sleeping with. If I'd been fifty years old, it probably wouldn't have been a problem, but when you're a sexually starving twenty-three-year-old guy who sometimes feels like a volcano about to explode, it can be a little challenging to hear a woman sing such a lustful song.

The coffee shop was mostly empty—probably because you were required to pay a dollar for your brew, and most people couldn't quite swing that. I was trying to clutch on to my last fifty dollars, but since I was with a woman, I gallantly tossed away two dollars on two brews, and Michelle and I sat at a small table near the back of the place. The sun filtered in through the large plate glass windows at the front of the shop and glanced across the floor in a bright and inviting way.

"Don't you just love the feeling that coffee gives you?" said Michelle. "Sometimes, when I'm really flying high on this stuff, I feel like I'm right on the verge."

"On the verge of what?" I said.

"The verge of discovering what life is all about."

"I've thought about things like that," I said. "Like the question for me is how did I get here?"

"You mean like...what do you mean?"

Michelle was looking at me in an inquisitive, friendly way. Sometimes, I thought she was rather plain, but there were other times, like now, when I felt really attracted to her. There was something about her age that interested me—it seemed like she was a person who had been through many experiences in her life and knew things that someone my age had no understanding of.

"OK," I said, "let's take where we are now. I'm sitting here in a rundown coffee shop talking to you, and I think most people would just look at it scientifically. You know—I'm here because I walked into this place with you. But to me, it's more like a movie that I'm watching, and it's running on the big screen. So everything I see is like something that was put together by somebody else, and I'm just watching it."

"You don't feel that you have anything to do with putting the movie together?" said Michelle.

"It doesn't seem that way," I said.

"I don't really agree with that, Shane. I think the one who watches the movie is the one who created the movie."

I wasn't quite sure that I understood what she was saying because it seemed impossible. "How can that be?" I said. "When I say movie, I'm talking about a movie that shows everything I've ever experienced in my life. There's no way that I created that movie." And then, making a joke of it, I said, "And if I somehow did create that movie, I'd have to say it was a lousy creation."

"I don't quite understand all the ins and outs of it," said Michelle, "but the rumor I've heard is that you create the world you see."

"Then what about the universe?" I said. "Was that also created by me?"

Michelle sipped on her coffee for a few seconds before she said anything. "I don't know everything, Shane, but I do hear a lot of rumors from some of my sources."

"What sources?"

Winking at me, Michelle said, "I'm sorry, Shane, but I think it's best not to reveal my sources—at least until we know each other better. That would be like a magician showing someone how he pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Bo always makes fun of me when I talk about things like this, but that's because he only believes in the scientific version of reality. That'll be the day when I fall for that malarkey. Science is good as far as it goes, but the problem is that it doesn't go very far. So in Bo's version of events, we were born into the world we live in and have to get the most out of it before we're either shot to death or die from some disease. Bo is quite proud of the fact that he doesn't believe in God, but deep down he's like almost everyone else and basically believes that he was dumped into a world that was created by some other Being. But I'm saying that the whole thing, from beginning to end and from top to bottom, was created by the one who observes it. Do you really want to hear about this? I know it sounds nutty, but when you add up all the facts and all the atrocities and all the wars, it's the only thing that makes sense."

"I'm interested, Michelle, but I don't see how it's possible."

"OK," said Michelle, "I'll try to explain this to you, but it's difficult." Michelle, who was sitting across from me came around the table and sat down next to me. "Alright, Shane, look out towards the street and tell me what you see."

After briefly glancing at Michelle and her sweet but somewhat melancholy face, I looked out through the window at the front of the shop and said, "I see a city street with an occasional car going by. There are a few people walking past the shop—that guy with the red hat and purple pants is hard to miss. The sun is out, and I like the way the light reflects into the shop."

"Here's what I see," said Michelle. "I see the tables between us and the window and the two people who are sitting over near the window and look like they're having some kind of lover's chat. Another thing I notice are all the paintings on the walls. I wouldn't think a place like this would have much in the way of art, but some of the paintings, especially the landscapes, are really good."

Michelle stopped and said, "I wasn't trying to be different than you. That is actually what I saw, and it's completely different than what you saw."

"So what's the significance of that?" I said.

"It demonstrates one of the most fundamental principles of existence. And the principle is this: You see what you are. This is actually fairly obvious. If you put a billionaire, the president, and me in this room, we are all going to see entirely different things because the hidden truth is that we can only observe what we already are. Or already know. You, for instance, didn't even see the paintings—probably because art doesn't mean much of anything to you."

"OK," I said, "but some things will appear the same to both of us. If, for instance, we both look at the brown table over there, we'll both see a brown table."

"That's because we both know what a table is. It's all registered in our brain, and so when we look at a table, the knowledge we have inside recognizes the table as a table. But to a three-year-old baby, the table wouldn't be a table at all but something entirely different. It's a fact, Shane—when you observe anything outside yourself, it must already exist inside yourself in some way, shape, or form, or you wouldn't recognize it."

I tried to think about this some, but I had to contend with the fact that Michelle was staring directly into my eyes, and also, it really distracted me that her leg was brushing up against mine under the table. Just then, she got up and moved back to where she had been sitting before. Once she was seated, she finished her coffee and said, "So the way I look at it, Shane, is that the movie you observe, which are all the events of your life, must have originated from within yourself because otherwise, you would never recognize anything that you see. If you still don't believe me, what do you think an American Indian from 1300 would see if he was in a room full of computers?"

"They'd probably just be lights and pieces of plastic to him," I said.

"Not even pieces of plastic," said Michelle, "because plastic wasn't invented until 1900 or so."

"But just because you're able to recognize something doesn't mean that you created it."

Michelle laughed and then finished her coffee. "Maybe so, maybe no, but I'll tell you something, Shane: I've heard a ton of rumors lately that all point in the same direction, and what these rumors are telling me is that each individual creates the events of their life. There are no accidents or coincidences or anything like that."

"So you're saying that when I got shot, I created that?"

"I know it's a hard thing to accept," said Michelle, "but it's the only explanation that makes sense. Otherwise—"

"Michelle!" said a woman with long straight blond hair who had walked up to the table. "It must be three months since I last saw you, so naturally, I figured that you had either moved away or been shot to death. It's so good to see you!"

"Sit down, Samantha—this is my friend Shane—he's only been living in Zone Nine for about a month, so he's basically like a newborn baby."

Samantha looked at me and smiled. "You need to put on some weight," she said.

"Shane was shot a little while back, and he's still recovering," said Michelle.

"I'm so sorry to hear that," said Samantha. "We've already had two shooting deaths in my neighborhood in the past week. Sometimes, I lie awake and wonder what it's like to be shot. Do you feel like talking about what happened to you, Shane?"

"I didn't remain conscious for very long. It kind of felt like someone had stuck a knife through me, and then I started bleeding like crazy. Everything turned grey and dark, and I passed out."

"Did you think you were dying?" said Samantha.

"I didn't really have much time to think at all. I felt scared because I knew that something really bad had happened to me, but other than that, I don't remember much."

"You're lucky that you made it," said Samantha. "How is it that you didn't bleed to death? It takes forever to get 911 to respond to a shooting."

"It didn't happen here," I said. "It happened in Zone Four."

"You lived in Zone Four?" said Samantha, who appeared to be shocked.

"No, I was picking up the guy's garbage when he shot me."

"Now I've heard everything," said Samantha. "Just when you think the last horror story is about as bad as it will ever get, you hear one that's worse. Why did he shoot you?"

"He was a psycho who was chasing his wife, and I was caught in the crossfire."

"Keep your spirits up," said Samantha. "I know that's a hard thing to do around here, but it's the only hope." Reaching into her purse, Samantha took out a gun and laid it on the table. "It also helps to have one of these little metal jackasses in your purse. But besides the gun, I never go anywhere without a Seth book. Which reminds me--Michelle, do you have any Seth books that I can borrow? They used to have quite a few at the library, but I think they've all been ripped off."

"I can give you a couple, but I'd really like them back because I keep reading them over and over again."

"The one I have," said Samantha, "I've read four times."

"Which one is that?" said Samantha.

" _Seth Speaks_ —it's the first Seth book." Samantha looked at me and said, "Have you read any of the Seth books, Shane?"

"I've never heard of him," I said. "Why is he so important to you?"

Samantha looked at me in amazement. "You really don't know anything, do you? Alright, to cut to the chase, what Seth can do is show you how to power out of this reality. He is like...what is he like, Michelle?"

"He is like the raw untamed power of the mind—a mind that is completely free of everything except the power that created the universe."

Turning towards Samantha, I said, "Michelle has been telling me that everything I observe is something that I created. Is that what this Seth guy believes?"

"Believes? Shane, Seth isn't like reading a book in catechism class—it doesn't have anything to do with belief. But to answer your question—of course you create your own reality. That's fairly elementary. Anybody who's spent an hour reading Seth knows that much."

"But," I said, "it's quite a leap from saying that I create my own reality to saying that I create everything I observe—up to and including the universe."

"I hate to say it, Shane," said Samantha, "but you're a weakling. Don't be offended—the whole world is populated by weaklings. Some of them are vicious and some of them are kind, but if you don't realize that you create your own reality—from the first day to the last—then what power do you have?"

"That's the truth," said Michelle. "Because when you don't understand that you create your own reality, then you must believe that someone else created it. And since you would then believe that you're at the mercy of this someone else, whether it be God or man or nature or a random force, then you are, naturally, a weakling."

"But if I believe that I created the sun," I said, "wouldn't I just be suffering from a massive and idiotic illusion? Obviously, I didn't create the sun."

Samantha laughed. "You'll have to get him up to speed, Michelle—otherwise, he'll never last more than a couple of months around here."

Turning to me, Samantha put her hand on top of my arm, looked into my eyes, and said, "My dear man, you have no idea of the extent of your powers."

"In actual fact," said Michelle to me, "you have the power that people have generally handed over to God. You are the God of the universe you create, and the realization of that brings tremendous power."

I decided not to say anything—it was better to let them live in their fantasy world and not burst their bubble.

"OK, Michelle," said Samantha, "I have to go, but let's meet down here tomorrow around noon so that you can give me the Seth books."

After Samantha left, Michelle and I refilled our coffee cups. When we were back at our table, Michelle said, "Shane, I don't think you understand where you're living and what the challenges are. Zone Nine isn't like some big homeless camp that has been infested by guns. Granted, that's part of it, but it can be a lot more than that if you want it to be."

I wasn't much interested in what she was saying, but to keep the conversation going, I said, "I don't understand why you're living in Zone Nine, Michelle. It seems to me that a person like you could do a whole lot better in another zone."

"What you don't understand, Shane, is that Zone Nine is where it's at. This is where all the real discoveries are being made. Seth, for instance, is the greatest discovery of humanity. When—"

"Who is this guy Seth?" I said. "What's his last name? Is he like some guy who lives around here?"

"Oh my God," said Michelle, "I've completely forgotten how ignorant people can be. I can't believe that you've never heard of Seth--no wonder the world is in so much trouble. Anyways, to answer your question, Seth is a being who is no longer focused in physical reality. He was discovered or made himself known to a woman named Jane Roberts. Everything he said to her was written down by her husband, and she wrote many books that are transcriptions of what Seth said to her. These books came out in the seventies and eighties when she was fairly well known, but then she was brushed aside by the world. Naturally! Because, really, what Seth says puts an end to so many things that are important to the people who live in the other zones. However, here in Zone Nine among the intellectuals and spiritualists, Seth reigns supreme."

I had no idea what to say—it all sounded kind of strange and cultish to me.

"Shane, I think you're confused because you don't understand that Zone Nine isn't so much a physical place as it is a set of circumstances that surround an individual. For instance, if you live in Zone One and your doctor tells you that you have terminal cancer and can expect to die in six months, then the circumstances that have surrounded you in Zone One disappear, and you are now surrounded by circumstances that are no different than those that exist in Zone Nine. You still have your fancy house and your billions of dollars, but you are actually nothing but a Zone Nine zombie. Or maybe you're a young mother with three small children and your boyfriend has just put a gun to your head and is threatening to pull the trigger because he thinks you stole his beer money so the kids could have something to eat. For this woman, it doesn't matter what zone she lives in when that happens because when the gun is put to your head and you may be a second away from being obliterated, you immediately become a zombie who's living in Zone Nine.

"What very few of us realize is that we're all essentially living in Zone Nine because every one of us has a death sentence hanging over our heads. This is where Jane Roberts comes in—in a sense, she commutes your death sentence, while at the same time opening up the gates that have prevented us from understanding reality.

"So to make a long story short," said Michelle, "I've abandoned the world. That's what Zone Nine is all about—everyone here has abandoned the world. Some of us are murderers; some are nihilists who have totally rejected everything that society has to offer; others are artists and writers. There are, although you probably don't realize it, a few relatively famous authors who live in Zone Nine, but naturally, to ensure their survival, they keep a low profile. However, there's another group of people who live here, and for lack of a better word, they have become philosophers. There's nothing like the constant fear of death to make you face reality and attempt to unravel its secrets. I know you said that you want to discover where you came from and all that, but if you're going to find the answer to a question like that, you really have to be able to study reality and see how it works."

"I wouldn't disagree with that," I said, "but when I listen to you and Samantha, it sounds almost like you're members of a cult."

"That is such a nonsensical thing to say, Shane. Listen, didn't I prove to you that you see what you already are?"

"I suppose," I said.

"You suppose? Look, Shane, maybe you don't really want to know about all this stuff—I'm beginning to wonder how serious you are."

"Michelle, I agree with you that each one of us sees those things that interest us. If I'm not interested in something, then I probably won't see it unless I trip over it. But I think it's a long, long leap from that idea to the idea that I created the things I see. To be honest with you, I think it's impossible."

Michelle placed her hands around her coffee cup and stared at it for a full thirty seconds. Finally, looking up at me, she said, "So then you don't believe that you create your own reality?"

"To some extent I think I do—if I'm depressed, I'll certainly experience a different reality than if I'm not depressed. But to say that this coffee shop and the road outside the shop were created by me seems like nonsense."

"Shane—"

"How is that possible—tell me!"

Abruptly, Michelle seemed disinterested in me. "Never mind," she said in a soft voice. "It's nowhere as difficult as you think it is--once you know the underlying secret. Maybe we can discuss it some other day or night when the time is right. Meanwhile, it's going to be of great benefit to you if you keep repeating to yourself that you create your own reality because that is the one truth that you need to know when you're living in this world. "

## CHAPTER EIGHT: PANIC CITY

##

Later that night, when I was alone with Bo, I talked to him about my conversation with Michelle. "Your girlfriend has some strange ideas," I said.

"What did she tell you?" said Bo. "I know she's read a lot of books by some crazy woman who thought she was talking to a man, but it's best if you don't take her too seriously. She can really spin out the words and dazzle you with some fancy ideas, but I think a lot of what she comes up with is meant as a kind of prank."

"She told me that she thinks we create everything that we see."

Bo took a long hit off a joint he had rolled and passed it to me. "That would be a fascinating idea if it were true, but alas, we are hemmed in by all these things that were put here by other people. Like the dumbbell TV and the walls and the weather and the infernal Zones that have trapped us all in their various realities."

"To me, existence seems totally meaningless," I said.

Bo clapped himself on his head with his hand and said, "He's finally figured it out! Buddy, when they invented the gun, everything from that point on has been meaningless."

"Bo, we agree that we lead meaningless lives, but I don't think guns have all that much to do with it. I think they're more a symptom of meaninglessness than a cause of it."

"Shane, once the gun became God Almighty, the whole world changed."

"The world was just as meaningless before guns were invented," I said. "I don't like guns any more than you do, but the world has always been a meaningless place."

"You think so?" said Bo.

"Of course--look at things like the Black Plague, which wiped out about half of civilization. People were dropping like flies—where's the meaning in that?"

"That's a good point," said Bo. "I suppose, to be fair about it, guns are just the modern-day stand-in for the plague. It almost seems like we, as humans, are being stalked by some force."

Just then, Wily walked into the room. "Yes," he said, "we are being stalked, and the weird thing about it is that the stalker is God. God supposedly created everything so he must have created the gun. Nobody likes to acknowledge that."

"It's really quite comical," said Bo. "God's like this over-the-top pleasant fantasy that everyone accepts until, one day, somebody walks up to you and stuffs a bullet into your head."

"And so," said Wily, "now that God is more or less dead, I guess we've all reached the point where we're like sailors who are drowning and are fighting to clutch onto some rotten piece of wood that's floating in the water and will supposedly save us from total extinction. Nobody has any morals when something like that happens. It's just Panic City. And that's what this earth has become—Panic City. Like it or not, the Titanic is going down. And when it does, there won't even be a toothpick to cling onto."

"I'd still like to know why I was born here," I said. My everlasting question, which no one had ever been able to answer.

"It was undoubtedly an unlucky break," said Bo, with a laugh. "Imagine if you knew what planet earth was like before you were hatched, and the Big Guy told you that your ticket had been punched for Zone Nine in this dismal wreck of a world. Shane, all I can say is that you must have done something really terrible to deserve such a fate."

"Sounds like you believe in God," I said. I was just trying to annoy Bo because I knew how much animosity he felt towards the God concept.

"Shane," said Wily, "God is just a catastrophe that the Zone Six people invented. It's so obvious what happened—way back when, like ten thousand or fifty thousand years ago, people began to develop a sense of self-consciousness. And when they did, it all seemed incredibly frightening to them because—"

"For one thing," I said, "they would have wondered, just like I always have, where they came from and how they got here."

"Exactly!" said Wily. "And then, especially in those faraway days when the life expectancy was probably thirty or thirty-five, they would have been around people who were constantly dying. And when a person dies, it isn't such a pleasant sight—not after three or four days."

"Decomposition would then be like a symbol," I said.

"Exactly!" said Wily again. "You're not as stupid as you look, Shane. So now, these ancient people not only had no idea where they came from, but also, based on the symbol of decomposition, it would have appeared to them that their future was like something out of a really bad horror movie."

"So is it because of the cruelty of existence that you think there's no God?" I said to him.

"No, that's not the reason," said Wily. "It's because someone, way back when—for his own purposes and reasons—came up with a theory that freed you from death. And naturally, what with death being such a horrible spectacle, people seized on the idea. And these people with the theories began to call themselves priests or shamans or whatever it is—supposedly, they had some kind of insider knowledge about the whole thing, and if you kissed their rings and massaged their toes, then you would eventually enter heaven. It's so silly, if you look at it objectively. God is just our good luck charm, the rock we rub because we feel like motherless children and think that our lucky rock will save us. But still...was that a gunshot?"

"It sure sounded like one," I said, "and it seemed real close."

We were sitting in the front room, and Bo got up out of his chair and looked out the window. "Someone has shot Dave," he said, in an agitated voice. "Get your gun, Shane—he's lying on the front steps. Hurry up," he shouted as I dashed into my room and retrieved the 22 caliber pistol that Bo had given me. Meanwhile, Wily dashed back to his room and locked the door.

By the time I reached the front door of our apartment, Bo had his gun in his hand, but as we were running down the stairs to the first floor, we heard two more gunshots. Seconds later, we cautiously pushed the front door to the building open and found Dave crumpled in a heap on the stone steps that led up to the door. Looking around, with our guns drawn, we couldn't see anyone else, but in another couple of seconds, a car that was parked about seventy feet up the street suddenly bolted away.

"Get down!" yelled Bo. A second after I fell onto the steps a couple of gunshots rang out from the car and went whizzing over my head. Meanwhile, Bo had made it to the bottom of the stairs and had taken cover behind the cement steps. As soon as he reached there, he began shooting at the car as it roared down the street. But he must not have done any damage to anyone in the car because it made it down to the end of Blackwood Street and then turned onto Regent.

Somebody from two apartments down opened their door slightly and yelled out, "What's going on? I'm trying to sleep, so why don't you take your gunfight somewhere else?"

Slowly, I got to my feet and peered down at Bo who was kneeling over Dave. "He's gone, Shane; there's no point in trying to do anything for him. I was always worried about him—he just thought he was above and beyond guns. And now look what's happened to him."

## CHAPTER NINE: EVERYBODY KNOWS

##

The next morning, Bo, Michelle, and I sat in the front room as we held our own spontaneous grieving session for our recently departed roommate. "Dave was really a good guy," said Bo, "but he never should have been living on Blackwood Street. I know it's hard to believe, but last night, I found his gun in his zipped-up backpack."

"You can't be serious," said Michelle. "That's like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the gun. Or maybe only three, but whatever it is, you'd have to call it the height of stupidity."

"You want to hear the best part?" said Bo. "The gun was unloaded."

"Oh for God's sake," said Michelle in exasperation. "What kind of a lunatic was he? It's one thing to have ideals, but it's crazy to walk around with an unloaded gun--even in the daytime. I must have told him that twenty times."

"Dave always thought he was above guns and looked down on them as instruments of evil," said Bo. "He even has pamphlets in his room that were written by some of those anti-gun crusaders who were making a lot of waves about twenty years ago."

"Talk about a lost cause," said Michelle. "Everyone past the age of seven knows that guns rule."

Wily now appeared and sat down opposite me on a milk crate. "I think we're all doomed," he said.

"Of course we are," said Bo. "I've known that for a long time."

"But I think the end is coming a lot quicker than any of us imagined," said Wiley. "I always thought I would live to be forty, but surviving eleven more years of Blackwood Street isn't going to happen for me or any of the rest of us. We've just become the cannon fodder for all the rotten ideas that hold this pathetic society together."

"No doubt about that," said Bo. "The dragons in Zone One just sit up there, hand us guns, and hope we all kill each other off. Who's going to stand up to a gun? The people who aren't quite with it bow down and pray to God, but everyone in Zone Nine bows down to the gun."

"Dave did the ultimate bow-down last night," said Michelle.

"It's just another corpse for the graveyard," said Bo. "If I had any money, I'd buy some graveyard stocks."

"I can give you a tip on the best graveyard stock," said Wily.

"What's that?" said Bo.

"Planet earth—nowadays, it's the poster boy for graveyard stocks."

"Stand up to be shot down—that's the name of the game," said Michelle. "I wish I was living in a different world where people were at least half sane, but what are you going to do? There's no stopping progress, and the way we measure progress around here is by how many rounds your gun can fire in ten seconds."

"Everybody knows," said Wily.

"Everybody knows what?" I said.

"Everybody knows the game is fixed; everybody knows that the deck is rigged; everybody knows that millions are being slaughtered each year by guns; everybody knows that the ship is going down; everybody knows the end is near."

"Wily is such a cheerful guy," said Michelle.

"Everybody knows that I'm right," said Wiley.

"If only Dave hadn't been one of those crazy idealists," said Bo. "Man, if I was coming down Blackwood Street at ten o'clock at night, I'd have my gun loaded and cocked, and you can bet your boots that anybody who came within fifty feet of me would see it. If people want to play with my head, they're going to eat some lead."

"Bo always talks so tough," said Michelle to me, "but I've been with him when we've come down Blackwood Street at night, and Bo certainly wasn't waving his gun around—in fact, it was still in his holster."

"That was last year!" said Bo, who seemed quite annoyed by Michelle's accusation. "Nowadays, I'd shoot an eighty-year-old grandmother if she came tottering up to me with her walker."

"That's just common sense," said Michelle. "Last week, when I was at the writer's group, someone told me that their boyfriend had been beaten to a pulp by a guy who was disguised as an old woman. He was even wearing one of those old-fashioned woman's bonnets that they used to wear a couple of hundred years ago."

"He probably swiped the bonnet from a museum," said Bo. "But it does go to show you that it's impossible to be too careful around here."

"Did the police ever come down here last night?" I said.

"Police?" said Bo. "I haven't seen them in over a year. They don't want to get shot up any more than you do. I kept trying to call 911 to see if someone would pick up Dave's body, but all I got for an hour was a busy signal. Finally, when I got through, they told me that they didn't accept calls at night where the incident was anywhere between Washington Boulevard and Route 89."

"That's five miles," said Michelle.

"More like six," said Bo. "Finally, around eight this morning, someone came and picked up the mess that used to be Dave."

"So his body is gone?" said Michelle. "I don't think I'm really in the mood to see him all sprawled out on the front steps with his blood and guts all over the place."

"He's gone," said Bo, "but there are still a lot of bloodstains out there—I almost slipped on the goo when I was coming up the steps last night, but at least his body is gone."

"It's so strange," said Michelle. "I wonder where he went to?"

"If no one claims him," said Bo, "he'll probably end up in the public crematorium. Or maybe they just toss the Zone Nine refuse into a pit behind the huge graveyard that's near the sewer plant—I don't really have any idea."

"No," said Michelle, "what I meant is I wonder where his spirit went—or his consciousness if you prefer that word because I know you don't like words that remind you of religion. Not that I blame you—who could possibly believe in religion when they're constantly tripping over bullet-ridden bodies?"

"Michelle," said Bo, "whether you like to admit it or not, Dave's consciousness was permanently extinguished last night. Poof! Or I should say BANG! And just like that, his consciousness was no more—it's the same thing as blowing out a candle."

"What do you think, Shane?" said Michelle.

"I think it's a complicated question."

"Let me uncomplicate it for you," said Bo. "Once you stop breathing, you are no more. Everybody who says something different is just hoping for something different. It's hard for people to face the truth of what goes on around here because it's kind of depressing to think that just because you didn't have your gun drawn, you ended up being blasted to bits by a psycho. And it's definitely very depressing to think that the psycho is superior to you in every way because he's still living and breathing and thinking."

"That's the trouble with men," said Michelle. "They always look at things competitively. This guy is living and this guy is dead, so the living guy must be superior to the dead guy. Who actually knows what this existence is all about? It's like a gigantic murder mystery, and sometimes I wonder who is really pulling the trigger. And even more importantly, I would really like to know why they're pulling the trigger."

"What in the world is she talking about?" said Bo.

"I kind of agree with Michelle," I said. "The thing I've never been able to figure out is how I got here, and I should at least be able to know that much. For instance—how could I have been spawned out of non-existence? In other words, how does nothing turn into something?"

"Haven't you ever heard of the sperm and the egg?" said Bo.

"You're just evading my point. You can't even physically see those things, and from out of those microscopic particles comes my consciousness. It doesn't make any sense to me, if you want to know the truth."

"He's right," said Michelle. "The whole thing is a complete mystery to me although I have heard some very interesting rumors lately. But since you'd just scoff at them, Bo, because you like to pretend that you know everything, I'm going to keep those rumors to myself."

Wily stood up, and just as he was leaving the room, he said, "The only rumor I've heard for the last umpteen years is that we're all on the Titanic—everyone from Zone One to Zone Nine. And the other rumor I've heard is that the end is coming a lot sooner than you think."

Later that day, there was a big ruckus in the apartment when Michelle moved out of the bedroom she shared with Bo and moved into Dave's bedroom. I was happy to see her move out of Bo's room, of course, but the fight between Bo and Michelle was a bit scary. Michelle had made up her mind that she didn't want to sleep on a dead man's mattress, so she was demanding that the mattresses in Bo's room and Dave's room be switched.

Bo was infuriated that Michelle was moving out of his bedroom, and he put up some major resistance when Michelle tried to switch the mattresses. Bo had given Michelle Dave's gun, which turned out to be a mistake because at one point, they had their guns pointed at each other. Amidst all the yelling and the screaming and the threats, Wily and I disappeared into our bedrooms, and for ten minutes, it sounded like a couple of small elephants were battling in the corridor as the mattress in Bo's room was dragged back and forth in the corridor outside my bedroom. That was bad enough, but when I heard the sound of a gunshot, I decided I had to do something.

Grabbing my gun, I opened my bedroom door a sliver and saw Bo on the floor as Michelle disappeared into Dave's room with Bo's mattress. For a moment, I thought Bo had been shot, but he quickly rose to his knees and grabbed his gun. "I can't believe it," he said. "She actually took a shot at me—that's why I dove onto the floor. It's lucky I did because I think the bullet came within three or four inches of my head."

"No way!" said Michelle who had opened the door to her bedroom. "If I had been aiming at you, you'd have taken one right between the eyes. Shane, come here and drag Dave's mattress out into the corridor so Bo can deal with it. I'd do it, but Bo would probably take a shot at me."

I decided to do as I was told, and after I had dragged the mattress down to Bo's room, the combatants seemed to settle down. "I'm sorry if I scared you, Bo," said Michelle who was standing near the door to her room. "And listen, just because I'm moving out of your room, that doesn't mean we can't still share some good times together in your bedroom. I just need a little space for a while."

Naturally, it was Wily who put an exclamation mark on the whole ridiculous scene. Opening his door wide enough so that he could stick his head out into the corridor, he shouted out, "You're all a bunch of loons!"

Just another day in paradise, I muttered to myself as I went into my room and tried to calculate my current odds of making it with Michelle. It was certainly a plus that she had moved out of Bo's bedroom, but I certainly didn't like the part where she had told him that they could still have some good times in his bedroom.

However, on the very next day, all my sexual calculations were at least temporarily thrown out the window when something completely unexpected happened. And, amusingly enough, it involved someone actually being thrown out a window. Of course, it wasn't at all amusing to the person who plummeted to her death.

## CHAPTER TEN: RIGHT OUT THE WINDOW—HEAD FIRST

##

I was sitting in the front room and attempting to read a book that I had found lying around when I heard a knock on our front door. When you live on Blackwood Street, knocks on the front door could easily spell doom. Bo had told me about some naïve college kid who lived on Regent Street--he had opened his door when someone came a knocking, and three guys had come charging in with hammers and beat him to death before they cleaned out the place. Bo had installed a peephole on the door so that we could see out into the corridor, and I cautiously crept over towards the door to see who it was. I'd been living on Blackwood Street for five weeks, and not surprisingly, we had never had anyone knock at our door. I say not surprisingly because things were so bad in our "neck of the woods" that some people shot visitors on sight—assuming, of course, that they were strangers. And when I say they shot them, I don't mean they opened the door first; rather, they just shot them through the door. I don't know how many times I have to say it in one way or another, but Blackwood Street wasn't located in a quaint suburban Zone Four neighborhood of prima donnas where mothers wheeled their babies around in two-hundred-dollar baby carriages. Try that one on Blackwood Street and someone will shoot you and your baby with an assault rifle and make off with the bullet-ridden carriage, which they can then pawn for five bucks and a free beer.

So who was it that was standing at our front door? Before discovering the answer to that question, I went down to my room and retrieved my gun, and only then, with my gun drawn, did I peer through the peephole. Talk about a surprise! What could possibly have motivated her to tread into zombie land?

"Loren!" I said, as I opened the door. "How are you?"

"My God, Shane—put the gun down!" She began to retreat from me as quickly as she could. "It's OK, Loren—I didn't know who it was. You can't be too cautious around here or you'll end up on a slab in the morgue. Come on in—I haven't seen you in ages."

I pointed the gun down towards the floor, showed her into our common area, and put the gun on a table near the couch. Loren took a seat at the other end of our wretched beaten-up couch, which had probably been built forty years ago.

The first thing I noticed was that Loren didn't look so hot. Her long brown hair was a tangled mess, and she had a scratch that ran from beneath her left eye down almost to her mouth. The scratch must have been recent because there was still some dried blood on it. Besides that, the sleeve on Loren's blouse was ripped, and now that I thought about it, she hadn't arrived with either her coat or her handbag. It was a fairly chilly day in early October, and if she didn't have any money on her, then she must have walked to Blackwood Street, which was about five miles from where she lived with Janice.

"What happened?" I said to her.

Loren was sniffling, and she seemed out of breath. In a low voice that I could barely hear, she said, "Janice and I had a big fight."

There was a part of me that wanted to laugh because I couldn't help but remember all the times she had rubbed my face in Janice's supposed wisdom. Loren and I had always had a good relationship until the almighty Janice had stuck her ugly snout into it, and now, apparently, Janice didn't rate all that high in Loren's world. I mean, if she had come staggering over to Zone Nine to cry on her ex-boyfriend's shoulder, then something must have gone mighty wrong in Loren's little world.

Naturally, however, I played it cool. "What was the fight about?" I said.

"It was—she tricked me; she just flat-out tricked me."

"Tricked you?" I said. Loren was obviously having some difficulty in talking about whatever had happened.

"Yes—that's about the nastiest thing that anyone has ever done to me."

"I don't get it, Loren—I thought the two of you were best friends."

"So did I, but...she knew it all along—that's the worst part."

"Knew what?" Man, this was like pulling teeth with a tiny pair of dollar-store pliers.

"It was all very cleverly done—I have to admit that," said Loren. "First this, then that, and I never suspected anything. Foolish, foolish me—but how could I have known?"

I wondered what they could have fought about. Taking a stab at it because I was really curious as to what had happened, I said, "Did it have something to do with money?"

After wiping her mouth with the torn sleeve of her blouse, Loren said, "Partly—that was like the first part. The whole thing started about a week ago when she told me that her parents hadn't sent her the money for the rent to our apartment. They always send it in plenty of time, but Janice said there had been some kind of mix-up at the bank, so she asked me if I could front her the rent payment, which was twelve hundred dollars."

"That's a lot of money," I said. "Did you have the twelve hundred dollars to give her?"

"See, that's what should have made me suspicious," said Loren. "Because, just the week before, I'd told her that I had twelve hundred dollars in the bank—it was money that my parents had sent me a while back. Actually, they sent me fifteen hundred dollars, but I had spent some of it on Janice."

"Did you ever pay her any rent?"

Loren stared down at her hands for a few seconds. "No," she said, "but that still doesn't justify what she did to me. Her parents are orphans who live in Zone Five, so they have plenty of money, and I always told Janice that once I graduated from college and got a job, I would pay my fair share of the rent."

This was the first I had heard of this arrangement, and now I could understand why Janice didn't like me. Not only did she have Loren freeloading off her, but she was probably afraid that I would jump on the bandwagon.

"Shane, that twelve hundred dollars was all the money I had in this world because my parents have fallen on hard times--a couple of months ago, I got a letter from my mother who told me that they wouldn't be able to send me any more money."

"So I guess...what happened? Did Janice not give you back the money?"

"It's worse than that, Shane—much worse."

It was obvious that Loren was extremely reluctant to talk about what had happened, but it was hard for me to imagine what could be worse than being ripped off for twelve hundred bucks. "But she didn't give you back the money—right?"

"No, she made it conditional," said Loren.

"That's kind of nasty," I said. "What were the conditions?"

"The condition was...what she wanted—what I had to do to get the money back was to have a relationship with her."

It took a couple of seconds before I realized what she was talking about. "A sexual relationship?"

"Yes," she said softly.

Whoa! I knew how Loren felt about that kind of deal because there had been this one time, just after we made love, when she went off on this lesbian who had made a pass at her. And when I say she "went off," I mean that I had never seen her so angry. Like, according to her, she had wanted to "split this woman's head open."

"What did you say to Janice?" I said. It was almost like I was egging her on because, in my depressing little life, hearing some bad news about Janice would undoubtedly be the highlight of my month. But little did I know how bad the bad news was going to be.

"You understand what was happening?" said Loren, in a pleading tone. "She was trying to blackmail me into sex. She knew how much I needed that money; she knew exactly what she was doing to me. And then, to like rub salt into my wound, she said that she had already gotten the rent money from her parents and that it was time for me to pay up for all the time I had spent living there without paying rent."

Loren was breathing in a weird way—taking air in and spitting it out spasmodically in short, rapid breaths. "And I just completely lost it, Shane--I wasn't even in control of myself anymore. I kept screaming at her to give me my money back, but all she did was laugh in my face and tell me not to be so upset. 'You know what?' she said to me. 'I've been wanting to get you into my bed for a long time. To feel your naked body underneath me as—'

"That was enough for me, Shane. I'd never felt so much rage in my life, and I came straight at her. Like there's any woman on this earth who could bribe me into her bed. No way! Never! I mean not in a million years! Got it?"

Loren was staring at me in a challenging way as if I was a woman who was thinking of propositioning her. "Of course," I said. "I know how you feel about that."

"It's a whole lot more than a feeling—I'll tell you that. And I just snapped, Shane. We were like wrestling in the middle of the room—she wasn't as strong as me, but she was much stronger than I thought she would be. And what happened—I swear to God this is what actually happened—is that I lost my balance, and Janice took advantage of that and was able to drag me towards her bed. But then I used her own momentum against her, and I gave her a gigantic shove just as we neared the foot of her bed."

Loren seemed unwilling to go on, so after about twenty seconds, I said, "So she fell?"

Loren sighed. "I regret it now—or maybe I don't. Actually, I don't know what I feel. Because...just beyond the foot of Janice's bed was a window, and since I had shoved her so hard, she went through the window head first and fell the three stories to the ground. Actually, she landed on the asphalt pavement of the parking lot, and when I looked out through the shattered window, it sure looked to me like Janice was dead. Her head was bent way to the side, and there was a lot of blood on the pavement. Tell me the truth, Shane—did I murder her, or was I justified in what I did?"

Janice was no friend of mine, and I wasn't about to show any pity towards her. "Loren, you didn't intend to throw her through the window, did you?"

"No, of course not—it was just something that happened, and if she hadn't dragged me over to that corner of the room, then it would have just been a bad fight."

"So you should forget about it," I said, in a breezy way. Already, I was beginning to see an opportunity for myself. That would be a sexual opportunity, of course.

"I wish I could forget about it," said Loren, "but I think this is something that is going to haunt me for years. All I wanted was my money back—I never intended to harm her physically. But what am I going to do now? I don't have any money at all, and I obviously have no place to stay. My parents would probably take me in, but the cops would be at their door in about two seconds, and then I could be charged with murder. How would you like to have something like that hanging over your head?"

"Why don't you stay here, Loren? One of the great things about Zone Nine—maybe the only great thing—is that you don't have to worry about the cops."

"But someday, they'll find out I'm living here."

"Loren, in Zone Nine, there are no cops—they never set foot into this zone because they'll be shot on sight."

"Really?" said Loren, in a tone of disbelief.

"Really and truly," I said.

"But how would I ever be able to pay the rent?"

"We don't have rent either—at least not here. Besides, you'd be sleeping in my bedroom because we don't have an extra bedroom right now."

Loren frowned, and after a few moments, she said, "I see." Her tone was dismissive and cold.

"Do you not want to have a relationship with me?" I said.

Loren stood up and walked back and forth across the room a few times before she sat down. "Shane, are you...this is...with Janice, I couldn't get my money back unless I went to bed with her, and now, with you, it looks like you're offering me a place to sleep as long as I satisfy you. Is that what you're talking about?"

It was a difficult question for me to answer since it was obvious that I was going to have to lie unless I wanted to risk the possibility of being tossed out the window. "Loren, why wouldn't you want to have a relationship with me? Didn't we hit it off before Janice got in the middle of it all?"

"Shane, it's not that I dislike you, but your proposal is a bit bald. Do you have two beds in your bedroom by any chance?"

"All I have is a mattress—that's the way it goes in Zone Nine. Maybe we could find something for you to sleep on although I have no idea of what it might be. All I have is a couple of sheets and a blanket, and I can't very well give them up."

"I can't believe that you would say this stuff to me after what I just went through with Janice. I guess it's not so much that I mind sleeping with you as it is the principal of the thing. I may be down and out, but I'm not a whore."

I felt like telling her to take it or leave it, but I decided to soft pedal the whole thing. "Look," I said, "if it bothers you that much, we can sleep with our clothes on."

"Right! That'll last about an hour before I feel your hand sliding up my thigh."

I almost laughed because what she said was undoubtedly true.

"What if I slept out here?" said Loren.

"No, Bo doesn't permit stuff like that. He says that if people start sleeping in this room, the whole place will turn into a flophouse. But listen, don't you miss the times we had before we broke up?"

"They were OK, I guess. It's just...I think I'm all tired out on relationships. It seems like everyone's only goal is to rip my pants off. Remember that day on the beach when you told me that you'd like to know where you came from and how you got here?"

"Sure, I remember that."

"For me, it's more like I feel I've been dumped into a cage that's filled with sex-crazed animals. You have no way of knowing this, but about three weeks ago, I was raped as I was walking across campus just after it got dark. I thought for sure the guy was going to kill me—he had his hands around my throat and he had a knife and...I can't talk about it, Shane—I just can't talk about it."

Obviously, I should have sympathized with Loren more than I had, but it wasn't until now that I felt any real sympathy. "How about if you sleep on the mattress, and I'll sleep on the floor?"

"Maybe—I don't know," said Loren. "That seems unfair to you--is the mattress big enough for two people?"

"It's queen-sized, so two people can fit on it without much trouble."

"OK, Shane—let's go for it. I understand what's going to happen, but you're right—we did have some good times. You know, now that I think about it, when Janice told me that she didn't think I should have a sexual relationship until I was thirty, she was probably just trying to pry me away from you."

"That's undoubtedly true," I said.

"Just don't expect too much from me right now, Shane—I feel kind of shattered. First, I was raped and then I murdered my roommate and then I ended up in Zone Nine with hardly even the shirt on my back. And now—there's no other way to say this—I'm totally at your mercy."

## CHAPTER ELEVEN: MONSTERS

##

With Janice now residing in the cemetery and permanently out of the way, Loren and I began to feel some real affection for each other—maybe we weren't soul mates, but we got along well enough to sleep together every night, with benefits, and we often hung around with each other during the day. Loren didn't dare to appear at her college classes since they were in Zone Seven, which was well-populated by cops. However, it wasn't long before she found a job as a waitress at a rundown diner in Zone Eight that was located about four miles from Blackwood Street. Her hours were from ten to two four days a week, so it wasn't like suicide for her to walk to the diner. Even so, I always went with her because I felt it was just too chancy for her to walk down the streets of Zone Nine without at least some kind of protection.

At first, when I told her that I would walk with her to the diner, she thought I was being ridiculous "Shane, you're too paranoid sometimes. Nothing is going to happen to me. Besides, what are you going to do while I'm working?"

"There's a library about a mile from the diner, so I'll just hang out there. You always wanted me to read some books, so here's your chance."

"You really don't have to go with me, Shane."

But Loren quickly changed her mind about having me tag along with her when, on our very first trip to the diner, she saw a guy get shot to death in front of his apartment on Regent Street. He had come out to talk to a couple of people in a car, and he had only spoken to them for a few seconds when he was shot repeatedly. Loren and I had been about a hundred feet away from the car when it happened, and I pulled her into a narrow alley that was near us. Just after we reached the alley, the car drove by, and the guys inside it began firing at three or four people who were walking on the sidewalk near us. Two of them were hit and crumpled to the pavement. Loren gasped, and since I had become used to the human slaughter that was going on around me constantly, I couldn't resist a cynical joke. "Loren, those two who got shot aren't really people anymore, so there's nothing to be upset about. What we call them now are statistics."

"That isn't funny, Shane," said Loren in a stern but quavering voice. "I'm sure they belonged to families and had people who loved them. Don't you think we should do something for them?"

"Those days are over, Loren."

"What days?"

"The days of being a good Samaritan. About the only reward you get for that nowadays is a free bullet to the head. Anyone who's lived in Zone Nine for a while knows that the only way to survive is to keep low and be ready to crawl for the exits. In some of the zones, they have yoga classes and nice stuff like that, but in Zone Nine, the only class that would make any sense is a crawling class."

That afternoon, as we returned from the diner, Loren noticed a fairly large billboard, maybe forty feet by twenty feet, that was posted on top of an abandoned convenience store that had all its windows shot out.

"Look at that billboard," said Loren, in an astonished tone.

The billboard was a fairly simple one—in white lettering on a black background were the words: GUNS ARE NOT PLAYTHINGS—PLEASE USE THEM RESPONSIBLY. Beneath the lettering was a picture of a baby who was being held by her mother, but it wasn't possible to see their faces because both faces were riddled with bullet holes. And then, beneath the picture of the mother and baby had been written, in white paint, "Two less mouths to feed."

"That's awful," said Loren. "What is the matter with people around here?"

"It's just because of guns," I said. "The people themselves aren't actually bad, but when you have a gun in your hand, a lot of evil thoughts can go through your mind. And so, when someone does something that you don't like, the power of the gun takes over and you put a bullet into them."

"You talk as if guns have a mind of their own," said Loren.

"Actually, I think they do. Michelle and I were talking about that a few days ago, and her theory is that it's like thought transference."

"Thought transference?" said Loren. "What's that?"

"She thinks that machines, especially metal ones, carry the intention of the one who created them. And that this intention is transferred to the person who possesses the machine and that eventually, it warps the mind of the user."

"That's kind of far out, Shane—I don't think I believe that."

"Loren, if we didn't have any guns on planet earth, how many murders do you think there would be?"

"Obviously, there wouldn't hardly be any murders, but that doesn't mean guns are responsible."

I couldn't stop laughing—it was just too absurd.

"What are you laughing about, Shane? I don't think what we're talking about is all that funny."

I managed to stop laughing before I said, "Loren, what if a nuclear bomb blew up a city of five million people and left only a couple of thousand maimed survivors—would you blame the man who set the bomb off or would you blame the bomb? I mean, in actuality, who really killed five million people—a man or a bomb?"

Loren thought about this for some seconds. Finally, she said, "I kind of see your point. I suppose it would be like if your husband gave your kid a gun and he shot some other kid with it. I'm sure, in that case, I would be talking to my husband and wanting to know why he gave my kid a gun."

"That's what I'm saying—because without the gun, what could the kid have done? Theoretically, very theoretically, guns might be alright if we had the intelligence to use them correctly, but I doubt even that's true because they're just weapons of evil. All they do is kill people, so it makes no sense to have them around. In other words, if we were stupid enough to invent guns, then it stands to reason that we're far too stupid to use them."

About a week after the day when we had seen the billboard, Loren and I were returning from the diner and had just turned onto Regent Street when we passed a street musician who was playing an old folk song called There but for Fortune. Written by Phil Ochs and popularized by Joan Baez, it was a rather sweet, sad, and dismal song about how those who lead unfortunate lives are randomly assigned their fates by a cruel and heartless social order. Just barely hidden within that idea is another idea--that those of us who lead fortunate lives have just lucked out. It isn't because we're noble or great or religious—it's just the luck of the draw. I'd quote the song to you, but the lemonheads would freak out and scalp me. Even so, if you'd like to know the words to this song, you can easily find them online. Isn't it so very strange that you can sing the words of a song that was written by someone else in front of ten thousand people and post the words online where a billion people can read them, but God help you if you put them in a book. And, most ironically, I'm sure that Phil Ochs wouldn't mind because he died in 1976.

The homeless woman who was singing There but for Fortune obviously hadn't washed in days. And even though it wasn't particularly cold out, maybe in the mid-sixties, the woman, who wore no jacket, was shivering.

"Shane," said Loren, as we passed by her, "I know you don't have much money, but you've got to give her some."

I was already feeling guilty for not having left her something, so I went back and dropped a dollar in her basket. As I did so, she continued to sing, but she acknowledged me with a friendly wink.

When I returned to Loren, she said, "It's just so awful what's going on in the world right now."

"It's pretty much the same as it's always been," I said. "For centuries, we've had people who have figured out how to grab all the money. You know—predators disguised as businessmen or presidents or just your ordinary average person who is always seeking some sort of angle to rip someone off."

"Yes, I know that," said Loren, "but it's getting worse and worse all the time. I can't help but wonder where it's all heading to."

We walked along in a gloomy, reflective silence for another minute, but our silence was interrupted by the sound of gunshots that were coming from behind us. Whirling around, I saw two guys with guns who were standing over the body of the street musician we had just passed. I guess, for good luck, they pumped another couple of bullets into her before they grabbed her basket—a basket that didn't have more than two or three dollars in it because I had seen what was in the basket when I put my dollar bill into it.

The two guys ran off in the opposite direction, which was fortunate because Loren was having a meltdown. I had to restrain her from running back to the woman, but I knew there was nothing we could do for her—she'd been shot five or six times at point blank range.

Loren was sobbing hysterically, and I had to practically carry her down the rest of Regent Street. Finally, when we reached the café where I had gone with Michelle, I took her inside and ordered us both a coffee. Loren's face was bloated with tears, and I really couldn't blame her. Shooting that woman had been like shooting a defenseless baby. So hideous—and so totally unnecessary. If those guys had needed the woman's three dollars that much, they could have just taken it without shooting her. What was she going to do? Fight them for it with a gun pointed at her heart? It was just slaughter for slaughter's sake—something those two murderers could laugh about when they were getting wasted on booze and drugs.

"This is such a sick and twisted world," said Loren, who had finally stopped crying. "If a woman like that can be gunned down, then there isn't a single person alive who should feel safe."

"No one is immune," I said. "Everyone's life is in jeopardy whether it be from a gun or a nuclear bomb, which is just another type of gun—only it can fire five million rounds in a second."

"And the worst part of it all," said Loren, "is that if you wrote a book about what was going on around here, no one would believe it. They'd just give you a lot of sass about how you were making things up because you were an anti-gun nut."

"That's true," I said. "Everyone thinks that it can't happen here, but in reality, it's happening everywhere. Go two cities over and you'll find someone murdered because they had the wrong color skin; go three states over and you'll find someone murdered because they looked like they might have two dollars in their pocket; go four countries over and you'll find someone murdered because he looked at another person cross-eyed."

"Monsters," said Loren. "Everywhere you go, there are monsters. Billions of them—and they're called guns."

## CHAPTER TWELVE: THE SHADOW AND THE STAIN

##

I couldn't quite figure Michelle out. She said she still loved Bo and told me that she snuck down to his room at night sometimes. There were even a couple of times when she told me that their sex life was fantastic, but she sure spent a lot of time with me. Supposedly, according to her, I was an intellectual, but I never thought of myself that way although in comparison to Bo, I suppose I was kind of "brainy." Brainy was Michelle's word, and there had been three or four times when she had told me that I was one of the brainiest guys she had ever met. Naturally, being a normal guy, I wasn't much interested in my brains when I was around her and had a hard time taking my mind off Michelle's body. So tempting! But even though she liked being with me, she was careful to avoid flirting with me—at least as far as I could tell. Still, it seemed to me that she might be testing me out—like she was tired of her old car and was taking another one out for a test drive. I mean, really, why would she spend so much time with me? I knew why I was hanging around with her, and it wasn't because of her brains. Although, now that I think about it, there is no doubt that I was attracted to parts of her otherworldly philosophy.

And so, much as I regret to say it, my mind was calculating how and when Michelle and I could be alone in the apartment. I didn't have to worry about Wily because he almost always holed up in his room, and I figured that if Michelle and I hooked up in her room, which was at least twenty feet from Wily's room, he wouldn't notice it as long as we didn't go really bonkers over each other and make all sorts of weird noises.

Of course, it would mean not walking with Loren to the diner, but now that she had been thoroughly indoctrinated to the perils that existed in our neighborhood, I could let her use my gun and that would offer her roughly the same amount of protection as if I was walking with her. Not quite, of course, because since she was a woman, there would be those who would see her as being vulnerable. But I couldn't be her bodyguard forever, so my conscience was mostly clear on that point.

Unfortunately, my little plot to be alone with Michelle blew up in my face. It all started out in a promising way when Bo left early in the morning and said that he wouldn't be back until five o'clock or so. Meanwhile, Wily had come down with the flu or some such thing and was only leaving his room for trips to the bathroom where we could hear him heaving up his innards. Loren had to work that day from ten o'clock to two o'clock, so I told her that I wouldn't be able to come with her since I had some things I needed to do. Thankfully, she didn't ask me what those things were because I hadn't quite figured out what excuse I was going to give her. Although I tried to persuade Loren to take my gun with her, she refused to do so. "I'll be alright, Shane. Even if I work a little bit past two, I'll be back by three-thirty at the latest, so there's nothing to worry about."

Just before she left, I talked to her again about taking the gun, but she said that it would only make her nervous and that she'd spend the whole day wondering if the thing would go off in her purse somehow. By now, I felt some real affection for Loren, and I realized that what I was doing was wrong. It wasn't so much that I wasn't walking with her to the diner as it was my motive for not doing so. Slimy was probably not too strong a word, but perhaps I only feel that way because of what happened afterwards.

Once Loren left, the coast was clear, but much to my annoyance, Michelle, who was usually finding ways and means of conversing with me, spent most of the day in her room. The one time she had come out, I had followed her around like a lovesick puppy dog—from the common room to the kitchen and then back to the common room. But it didn't much matter where we were—she seemed distracted and wasn't very interested in anything I had to say. "I'm sorry," she said to me as she headed back to her bedroom, "but I'm reading something so interesting that I can hardly think about anything else. Jane Roberts will do that to you sometimes." That left me snarling on the couch where I sat around moping at my wretched luck with women. Dumped for a book—it wasn't the first time!

After a while, I began to rationalize the whole thing away. Michelle's no-show was exactly what I deserved. Now that my little sexual plot had failed, I was able to look at it objectively, and it wasn't hard for me to see it was a nasty plot that completely ignored Loren's feelings and all the good times she had been showing me lately in my bedroom. It was now that I really began to get down on myself. What was the matter with me? It was so impractical to be lusting after Michelle—she wasn't even all that good looking, but I seemed to have this irresistible longing for her. Some nights, after Loren and I would finally fall asleep, I would lie awake and think about Michelle and imagine what it would be like to make love to her. So impractical, so silly, so pathetic.

The afternoon rolled on as I dealt with my regrets and apologies—I wouldn't be able to apologize to Loren in "real" life, of course, but in my mind, the apologies just kept coming. Actually, my remorse was perhaps a little over the top because, despite my best efforts, nothing had happened with Michelle. In a way it had all turned out for the best because now I knew who my real girlfriend was, and I was determined not to let myself wander away from Loren again. She deserved better than that, and to be honest, she deserved better than me, but since I was lucky enough to be her guy, I made a vow to end my infatuation with Michelle. Or at least attempt to because I wasn't exactly a master at resisting sexual temptation.

Suddenly, during my dreary reverie, I looked at the clock on the wall and a bolt of fear passed through me. Four o'clock! And Loren had said that she would be back by three-thirty at the latest. It's almost impossible for me to describe what went through my mind during the next few hours. Just the most hideous feelings of guilt that you can possibly imagine—all I could think of was the possibility, the very real possibility, that Loren had been shot to death. And if that was what had happened to her, the blame, no matter how I tried to justify her death to myself, would fall one hundred percent on my shoulders.

For about fifteen minutes, I skittered around the apartment as I mumbled a lot of senseless things to myself. As each minute passed, it became more and more obvious to me that something had happened to Loren. Nobody in the apartment, including Loren, had a cell phone because they were way out of our price range, so the only thing I could think of to do was to go out and search for her.

Grabbing my gun, I hurtled out the front door and walked the four miles to the diner. Once there, I went inside and talked to a couple of people who said that Loren had been there until about two-fifteen. After downing a cup of coffee, I then began the long trek back to Blackwood Street. This time, I took a slightly different route—actually, before I got back to the apartment around midnight, I explored and re-explored a number of longshot possibilities as well as going over and over the route she probably would have taken. I had a flashlight with me, and I used it to peer down countless alleys as I continued my desperate search for Loren.

It was all hopeless, of course. I knew I was just trying to assuage my conscience, which was gnawing my heart out. Something had happened to Loren, and when you live in Zone Nine and something happens to you, that "something" is never good. Undoubtedly, her body would never be found, and just as I had told her once after we saw two people being shot to death, she would cease to be a person and turn into a statistic—or in my case, a memory.

It took me a couple of weeks to mostly get over Loren's death. Michelle was very sympathetic to me and tried to tell me that Loren might still be alive, but I had lived in Zone Nine long enough to know that wasn't even a remote possibility. Her home was on Blackwood Street, and since she had nowhere else to go except Zone Nine because of what had happened to Janice, I felt certain that she was dead. And also, she and I had really developed a strong affection for each other, so the possibility that she had run away from me for some reason connected to our relationship was not even close to being a realistic possibility. The fact is that when you disappear in Zone Nine, you've become a statistic.

Meanwhile, because of Loren's death, I wasn't as attracted to Michelle as I had been before. I still liked her and all that, and we had some fantastic conversations, but I had ceased to have any real sexual interest in her. I don't know if she noticed any difference in me, but it was impossible for me to desire her—I knew that I was the one who had caused Loren's death and that Michelle, even though she didn't have anything to do with it, was directly connected to the whole thing. So when I looked at or thought about Michelle, I immediately felt the shadow and the stain of Loren's death pass through me.

## CHAPTER THIRTEEN: "IT"S BECAUSE WE LIVE IN THE DARK AGES."

##

Despite all the negative feelings I had developed after Loren's death, the trauma of her loss wasn't enough to keep me from spending time with Michelle. There was just something about her, some indefinable quality, that I found almost impossible to resist. Maybe it had something to do with her obvious intelligence and unique way of looking at things. For the most part, she exuded a sense of self-confidence and genuinely seemed to believe that she was the author of her own reality. Obviously, if you believe in an idea like that, it will increase your own sense of personal power.

To me, it almost seemed like Michelle had some kind of insider knowledge about how existence operated, particularly as it related to human beings. As I had found out at the coffee shop, she had a lot of bizarre theories about life—imagine, for a moment, that you seriously believed or felt that everything a person perceived, up to and including the universe, was created by the one who perceived it. This was such a wild and amazing idea that sometimes, especially when I was outdoors, I would imagine that everything I saw was created by myself. In dreams, which Michelle talked about often, we obviously do create everything that we perceive, but there is almost nobody who feels that this power to create a dream reality extends into ordinary daily life. But if, in fact, we do create our own reality, then it obviously meant that I should visualize, in my mind, only positive events—not an easy thing to do when you're living in Zone Nine.

About a week after Loren disappeared, I talked to Michelle about the day I had been shot. Had I really created that in my mind before it had happened? And then it had simply manifested itself before my eyes?

Michelle seemed to think so, and she gave me quite a long and impassioned answer when I questioned her about it. "Shane, once you start making exceptions to the laws that govern physical manifestations, then the whole thing falls apart. You either create your own reality, or you don't create your reality. There are no maybes or buts. You have to take your pick, and if you choose the side where you believe that you don't create your reality, then you are accepting the fact that you're completely powerless and are simply a pawn in the hands of fate. I don't see how anybody could live with that idea in their mind, but almost everyone does. And for those who say it's impossible for a human being to create their own reality, it happens every night in dreams, which are actually on-going previews of the events that take place in physical reality. No one says that you can't create your own reality in dreams—it's just that everybody is hung up on all the illusions that science has created where there is an intense obsession with so-called objective facts and the admission to evidence of only those things that the senses can perceive. And so, because of these scientific prejudices, we're bound to a world where the real answers to the origin of our lives remains hidden because, obviously, the physical arose out of the non-physical, which is another way of saying that the facts science worships arose out of the non-facts that science despises. Science certainly has its practical uses, but in terms of revelatory knowledge it's a hundred times more blind than it is revelatory. And neither, of course, does religion have any insight into these things because it presupposes from the start that you are not the creator of your own reality."

Michelle had mentioned the writer's group a few times to me, and now that Dave had been shot to death on our front steps and Loren had disappeared, both of us were extremely paranoid about venturing out after dark, so Michelle asked me to go with her as her "bodyguard." I wasn't really interested in writing or books or the literary world, but since there wasn't much else to do at night in our little cubbyhole at the end of Blackwood Street, I decided to accompany her. Naturally, when we left the house, we both took our guns, and once we were all holstered up, we set off for a meeting room that was located on the corner of Regent Street and Washington Boulevard.

It wasn't a very long walk—perhaps a mile—but it was definitely spooky even though it was only a little before seven o'clock. Dusk was falling, and there were only a few people out on Regent Street, but everybody avoided coming near anyone else. Three or four times, as we walked down the sidewalk beside the road, Michelle and I crossed the street when we saw a stranger approaching us. You could certainly make out a case that eighty percent of the population was harmless, but that roving bloodthirsty twenty percent could make a real ugly mess out of you in about two seconds flat. Michelle was quite nervous and kept her gun drawn and pointed straight in front of her whenever she felt the least bit threatened, so naturally, people were also going to great lengths to avoid us as we skittered down Regent Street. From off in the distance came the sound of gunshots, but that was probably just a bunch of punks who lived on the other side of the railroad tracks and were showing off by shooting at billboards and parked cars and stupid stuff like that.

The writer's group met on the ground floor of a dingy, ramshackle three-story building that was called Dunbars. Once upon a time, the bottom floor had been a storefront, while the upper two floors had been apartments, but after the city declared the area to be part of Zone Nine, the place had been abandoned years ago by whoever owned it. It was true that the police would still venture into Zone Nine every once in a while, but they were always accompanied by armored fighting vehicles, and it was always in the daytime. These appearances, which were becoming increasingly rare, were almost always connected to gang violence. Gang violence isn't really the right term—perhaps gang wars is a better way to describe it, with each side being armed with assault rifles and even hand grenades. The two biggest gangs on the western side of Zone Nine, the Nazi and the Neo-Nazi, had been carrying on a running gun battle for years—ever since the leader of the Nazi had been shot to death by a Neo-Nazi, along with forty-four other people, at a heavy metal concert.

Since the bottom floor of Dunbars wasn't divided into rooms but was a large open space with two long counters that ran near one of the walls, the homeless people who lived (swarmed) in the area had taken to the rooms upstairs and used the back entrance to gain access to the second and third floors. Meanwhile, the bottom floor had been taken over by a number of groups that met there at irregular times and intervals. Among the many groups who habituated the place were a biker gang that idolized Hitler; a political group that had become notorious for advocating that cars be banned from the city; two heavy metal groups that created an enormous racket along with some eerie threats of violence and universal destruction; and a right-wing group that was in favor of the government providing all citizens with assault rifles. (It was now estimated that around twenty-five percent of the population between eighteen and eighty were in possession of assault rifles, but unfortunately, these guns were still a bit pricy in a land where unemployment was running at thirty percent.)

When Michelle and I arrived at Dunbars, there were four people seated at a large table in the middle of the room. Since one of the persons at the table, along with myself, was new to the group, the leader, whose name was Sherry, thought it would be best if we all gave a little biography of ourselves.

The first to say anything was Dalia, a young woman in her early twenties who had frizzy red hair and large black-rimmed eyeglasses. She was wearing a short red skirt, yellow blouse, and blue tennis sneakers. "In my opinion," she said, "writers have failed us because they refuse to offer themselves to the reader. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to know the author in any meaningful way because the personality and true feelings of the author remain buried under the guise of characters, plots, and reams of God-awful descriptions. So in my writing, what I try to do is avoid all that and bring the reader to the very core of my being—to the center of the volcano where the very source of life is clamoring for expression. Thus, I always write in the first person and consider the third person to be an abomination used by those who are determined to protect themselves from exposure. I could say more, but I think that covers my ideas about writing."

"Bill?" said Sherry to a guy who was probably about thirty. He had a long beard, a pony tail, and bright blue eyes. "I'm more interested in writing a trashy best seller," he said. "I know that doesn't sound very ambitious, but it's more difficult than you might think. The key word here is trashy because unless your novel is trashy in a kind of semi-sophisticated and cute way, it will never become a best seller. Unfortunately, for some of us, it can be quite difficult to descend from our literary dreams and begin kowtowing to the tawdry world of the quick fix, the ludicrous plot, and the hopelessly idiotic ending. The best-seller type of novel also requires a writer who has not yet rebelled against all the idiotic maxims that have been so enthusiastically praised by the academics and literary critics. Maxims like not using adverbs or adjectives and the preposterous notion of showing, not telling. For this reason, I am trying to write a virtual carbon copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. This novel may seem like the drunken ravings of an antisocial despot, but when you look at the number of sales, it remains as the alpha and the omega of all published novels. Who can ever forget the first sentence of that masterpiece: 'If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'

"Now, I ask you," continued Bill, "how can you possibly do better than that for the first sentence of a novel? Once you have a sentence like that, you could write the rest of the novel in your sleep."

Next up was Julia, a much older woman who was in her late fifties and had greying hair and spoke in a soft and pleasant voice. "I think I understand what Dalia is saying, but unfortunately, if I were to write about what was going on inside me, it would be quite boring because not many people want to read about my plans for house cleaning or trips to the corner store to buy milk for my cat. What happened to me is that after my husband of thirty-five years died of cancer, I began to imagine things, and for some reason, the first thing I imagined was that my husband was communicating with me. It was a really strange experience when this first happened, and I don't know whether anybody here will believe me, but I was sitting at my kitchen table with a dear friend of mine when I felt there was a presence in the room. My friend and I were talking about how the world was going downhill faster than a runaway freight train that was being driven by a drunken engineer, but I had difficulty paying any attention to the conversation because all of a sudden, the table began to tilt to one side, and then, to my complete amazement, it began to hop up and down. I'm convinced my husband was behind this because while the table was hopping up and down, I heard his voice, and I'll always remember what he said: 'Julia, I told you that death isn't the end of everything.'"

Julia paused, took out a Kleenex, and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry, but every time I remember this, I begin to cry. I don't know why, but I do. Nobody believes me, of course, and all my friends except the woman who was with me when this happened think I'm cracking up. But if you look table-tilting up on Wikipedia, you'll see that this has happened to many people. And I know for a fact that this happened to Jane Roberts quite a few times."

"Who is Jane Roberts?" said Sherry.

"My God, Sherry doesn't know who Jane Roberts is," said Julia. "Michelle, I'm sure you know who Jane Roberts is—right?"

"Of course, nobody can have even an elementary understanding of the universe and human life unless they've read a few books by Jane Roberts."

"That's the trouble with the modern world," said Dahlia. "Somebody like Jane Roberts comes along and she gets swept under the rug by the religious misfits and the scientific know-it-alls who think they have the answer to everything."

"It's not only the religious misfits and scientific know-it-alls," said Michelle. "It's the whole lot of them—from Zone One to Zone Nine. It amazes me that when someone like Jane Roberts actually explains the universe to us, we become determined to suppress her."

"It's because we live in the Dark Ages," said Julia. "And because we do, all sorts of nonsense is elevated to must-read status. But when you get right down to it, all you really need to understand your role in the universe are a few books by Jane."

"What Jane Roberts experienced," said Dahlia, "is the most incredible set of phenomena that any person has ever experienced. She had so many different types of trances and altered experiences of consciousness, and her husband wrote down every word she said. She is truly where it's at. Some things in _The_ _Early Sessions_ books are enough to stretch your mind into another dimension entirely."

"When I was younger," said Julia, "I read _The Nature of Personal Reality_ seventeen times, and it's a five-hundred page book."

"How about _The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher_?" said Michelle. "That's the one where she channeled William James."

"I should check her out," said Sherry.

"Check her out?" said Dahlia. "This isn't like optional reading when you're bored with some overrated classic or have become fed up with the vomit they call best sellers. The fact is, and I don't care how many people hate me for saying it, Jane Roberts is mandatory reading because otherwise, you'll never encounter the key that unlocks the secret to this universe."

"So what is this key?" said Sherry, in a skeptical tone.

"You expect me to paraphrase Jane Roberts?," said Dahlia. "There is no short cut—you have to read some of her books."

"And what will happen to me if I do that?" said Sherry.

"For the first time in your life," said Michelle, "you will understand why you are here—it's not for the reason that you think."

## CHAPTER FOURTEEN: "YOU ARE NOW IN THE LAND OF KINGDOM COME."

##

After the writer's meeting was over, Michelle and I drew our guns and walked slowly out of the building. It was almost ten o'clock, and it was impossible to be too cautious. Michelle walked slightly in front of me as we began the trek back to Blackwood Street. It was a strange journey—Regent Street was eerily quiet, and I couldn't get over the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. A couple of times cars drove past us, but we had seen them coming and had been able to duck down an alley to avoid being shot. Drive-by shootings had now become almost a fad as various gun gangs had contests to see how many people they could kill in a week, so we were taking no chances. Locally, this practice of shooting innocent people from cars was known as Live Target Practice. Rumor had it that there were two prizes awarded in this macabre event—the first was for the number of victims one produced, and the second prize was awarded for the kill rate per bullet. This second prize gave a veneer of sportsmanship to the contest since it required good marksmanship, but problems had developed in verifying the results, and it was well known that some of the shooters were underreporting the number of bullets they had used during their murderous sorties. Another problem was the difficulty in determining whether a victim had been killed or was merely wounded—even worse, it was now common knowledge that some of the people who had supposedly been shot had simply fallen to the ground before being hit by the obnoxious little metal missiles that were being fired at them. In our crass and ugly neighborhood, the smart ones had become experts at playing dead, and as a result, that could really mess up the integrity of the statistics that the drive-by shooters kept. Alas, everyone does indeed have a problem!

Turning onto Blackwood Street, we could hear the sporadic sound of gunshots, but they were coming from the other side of the railroad tracks that lay just behind our apartment. This was so common that none of us in the apartment ever stood up in our rooms at night since the windows in the bedrooms faced the railroad tracks. Rather, when we entered or left our rooms, we would crawl since that placed us below the level of the windows where we would be protected by solid walls of brick. Bo and Michelle had finally gotten tired of crawling, and after their window had been shot out one night, they placed a sheet of heavy metal over their bedroom window—they had also placed a sheet of heavy metal over the window in the kitchen.

We had just turned onto Blackwood Street when we could see Wily who was running straight towards us. Barefoot and dressed in only his ragged flannel pajamas, his hair was flying out in all directions. To me, he looked somewhat like a mad scientist who was fleeing from a volcano. "Wily," said Michelle, "what are you—"

But Wily never so much as acknowledged us as he went running by at a full gallop. "Run for your life!" he screamed when he reached Regent Street. Michelle and I looked at each other—the question in both of our minds was obvious: Should we retreat or go forward? Just then, we heard a number of gunshots coming from the direction towards which Wily had been running. Turning around, we saw Wily staggering down the street before another couple of shots seemed to finish him off as he collapsed to the pavement. Seconds later, a car ran over his body, which was followed in another ten seconds by a big truck. From where we were standing, I could see all the gory evidence of his demise, but I'll spare you the decapitation details.

Pulling out her gun, Michelle pointed to our apartment and said, "We've got to get inside, Shane." I also had my gun drawn, and we were especially cautious as we ran up the stone steps at the front of the building and crept up the dark staircase to our second-story apartment. Finally, we reached the door to our place, but something was on the floor blocking our way. "Oh no, no, no," I heard Michelle say. Walking around her, I managed to open the door to our apartment, and after flipping the light switch near the door, I turned and saw Michelle who was on one knee beside Bo, who had been shot a number of times and was obviously dead.

"What are we going to do with his body?" said Michelle, who was nowhere near as upset as I thought she would be.

"We'll have to get rid of him somehow," I said.

"We can't possibly leave him here," said Michelle in a determined tone. "If we do, it's going to attract a lot of attention, and people might think that we're defenseless. I've heard of some cases where they'll just shoot their way into an apartment if they think that you can't defend yourself."

"Why don't we throw him out the window in my bedroom?"

"I guess it's the best that we can do," said Michelle. "It obviously doesn't matter to Bo what we do with his body because nothing matters to him anymore."

The two of us each took one of Bo's arms and dragged him inside the apartment and brought him down the corridor to my bedroom. I moved the mattress to the side so that it wouldn't get Bo's blood all over it, and once we had opened the window, we were able to lift Bo up and after wrestling a bit with his body, we gave him a shove. Unfortunately, there was a chain link fence about two feet from the building, and Bo ended up being impaled on the thing, but there wasn't much that Michelle or I could do about that. There certainly wasn't any point in leaving the apartment and walking down the side of the building until we reached Bo and could then push him over the fence so that he would be lying a few feet from the railroad tracks. When you're dead, you're dead, and it doesn't matter whether you're impaled on a fence or are lying on the ground, so it made absolutely no sense to run the gauntlet to the fence in some heroic attempt to give a dead person a slightly better burial. The optics of a dead man impaled on a chain link fence were, of course, terrible, but optics don't mean much of anything to the dead. Besides, I don't think Michelle even saw that Bo was impaled on the fence, so the less said, the better.

Afterwards the two of us went out to the kitchen. Even though it was nearly ten o'clock, Michelle was in the mood for coffee. I wanted to crash out, but Michelle was obviously in the mood to talk, so I opened up one of Bo's beers and sat down at the kitchen table with Michelle, who seemed to be rather hyper.

"It's a sad world that we've created, Shane. People are dying everywhere for no reason, and no one seems to be able to stop it. So listen—I have a hard time believing it, but do you really know nothing about Jane Roberts?"

"I never heard of her until I met you. Is she still alive?"

"No, she died back in the 1980's. Some people downgrade her because of the way she died, but that's just a lot of Zone Six garbage. I don't know how else to say it, but over the last few months, I've begun to realize that she's the way out."

"The way out of what?" I said.

"The way out of everything. Alright, Shane, I'll try to explain it to you, but if you want to understand reality, you can't be stuck in the old patterns of thought. Obviously, if you look around, you can see that the old patterns of thought are leading us nowhere. Here in Zone Nine that's particularly obvious, But the whole world, from Zone One to Zone Nine is in chaos; our only consolation is that the Zones, like everything else in this world—and I do mean _everything_ else—are just fancy hallucinations."

"You're not going to tell me that this is all a dream, are you?"

"Actually, I think it is a type of dream, but the reason I feel that way is because it's the only thing that makes sense. Our nighttime dreams, if you look at them carefully, are actually the clue that proves this world is false. What, for instance, was your last dream about?"

"It was kind of spooky," I said. "I dreamed that I was being chased down Washington Boulevard by a man who had a gun, but then I got hit by a car. As soon as I got hit by the car, I woke up."

"And everything in the dream seemed real—right? I mean, you weren't telling yourself that it was all a dream, were you?"

"No, it seemed like it was actually happening."

"So who is this one who dreams?" said Michelle.

"I don't understand the question," I said. "I guess I'm the one who dreams."

"But this dreamer is considerably different than the person who lives during the day. The nighttime dreamer is actually a different part of your being who has its own view of existence, and that view of existence is free from the laws of physical reality. In real life, if you want to go to Paris, you have to get the plane ticket and pack your luggage and all that kind of stuff before you even take the long plane ride over. But the dreamer can get there immediately because the dreamer is free of physical laws."

"But you're not actually going to Paris," I said. "You're just imagining it."

"Who says? When you're in the middle of a dream isn't it just as real as anything you experience in physical reality? Come on, Shane—think this through with me. My point is that to the dreamer within you, physical laws are stumbling blocks that occur when the conscious mind becomes obsessed with physical reality and comes to the conclusion that only daily life is real and that dreams are just irrelevant fantasies. But just as the conscious mind belittles the dreaming mind, so too does the dreaming mind belittle the conscious mind because it knows and experiences an existence that is entirely free from physical laws."

"But what difference does all this make?" I said. "In the morning I wake up, and my reality remains unchanged."

"So you're saying that if you dreamed that somebody had painted the walls in your room blue and you woke up and they were the same color as when you went to sleep, then your dream was just a kind of hallucination?"

"Yes, of course," I said.

"But who's to say that what you perceive with your waking consciousness isn't the hallucination? As we said, when you're dreaming at night, the dream seems very real, so objectively, the fact that your waking perceptions seem real doesn't mean much."

I looked at Michelle and smiled. It was such a strange and abstract conversation that couldn't really lead anywhere. Even if, somehow, she was right and physical life was a dream type of illusion, there was no way to prove it.

"What's so funny?" said Michelle.

"I don't really see what all this is leading up to, Michelle. No matter what kind of dreams I have tonight, I'm still going to wake up in the morning and have to face the same reality that existed when I went to sleep."

"You're missing the point, Shane. Remember that day when you asked me how it was possible for a person to create the universe that they perceived?

"I remember—we were in the coffee shop."

"So I'm giving you the answer to that question. What I'm saying is that physical existence is nothing but a hallucination that was created out of the dream world. Sometimes, even usually, the hallucination is shared with others, so we have mass hallucinations where we all agree that a road is a road and a house is a house. But basically, everything that comes to us through our senses is a hallucination. I like the word hallucination better than illusion because it's a much stronger word. In other words, Shane, we hallucinate physical reality."

"Michelle, don't you think that the death of Bo is more than a hallucination?"

"It's all or nothing, Shane. Either everything we experience in waking life is a hallucination, or everything is real. The basic premise is this: Physical reality is also a dream in which we create events by hallucinating them into existence. That's why you are the creator of your own reality—from each and every breath you take to the creation of the farthest star in the universe. You can, in dreams, hallucinate anything—I'm sure everyone would agree to that."

"So Bo getting shot to death was just part of a dream I created?"

"A dream that he and you and anybody else who was in contact with him created. But his so-called death is part of a vast hallucination that is held together by minds that have been hypnotized by negative thoughts and mistaken assumptions."

"Michelle, if we create our own reality, then why is there such a thing as death? I don't want to die, and you don't want to die, so why are we going to die?"

"It's simply the death of a particular dream, a dream that has manifested itself as a physical life. The physical, because it's based on a hallucination, always comes to an end. This is just another way of saying that hallucinations are not real. So what happens is you have a dream where you hallucinate yourself into a physical body, but eventually, you abandon the hallucination. Death is essentially a mirage created out of a negative belief—the negative belief being that we are nothing more than physical creatures whose existence is dependent on the hallucination that is called the body."

Michelle refilled her coffee cup before she began talking again. Me? I wasn't all that convinced by what Michelle had said. It was difficult for me to get Bo's bullet-ridden body out of my mind, and it was also difficult for me to forget the sight of Bo hanging lifelessly on the chain-link fence by the railroad tracks. True, I could hope that his death was a hallucination, but I knew that when tomorrow morning came around, he would still be impaled on the fence.

But Michelle wasn't finished, and she continued talking in an animated way. "Shane, let's go back for a minute and look at an interesting feature of dreams and our relation to them. It's amazing how we invariably interpret nighttime dreams symbolically, while we interpret waking life as a succession of actual physical events. I'll give you an example: The other night, I dreamed I walked into my bedroom, and there on the dresser was a small dinosaur. The dinosaur was probably only eight inches high, and it was simply a skeleton of the dinosaur—it had no flesh, and its mouth was open and I could see all these ferocious looking teeth. Now, if you had a dream like that, how would you interpret it?"

I thought about this for some seconds before I said, "I would say that the dinosaur represented a frightening person from my past, but because the dinosaur was so small and had no flesh on it, then it would seem that the dream was telling me that the threat had died."

"Very good!" said Michelle. "I hadn't thought of that. But you do see, don't you, how you made the dinosaur into a symbol for something else?"

"Yes, I think the things that occur in our dreams are almost always symbols for something else."

"OK, Shane, I lied to you. Actually, I saw the dinosaur in our bedroom one afternoon while I was wide awake. It turned out that Bo had found it somewhere. But when I saw the dinosaur, it struck me then what a powerful symbol it was. However, that's not the way we look at things and events in physical life--if we see a squirrel get run over by a car in physical life, we look at that far differently than if we see a squirrel get run over in a dream. In fact, when you look at it, you can see that the dreaming life—the nighttime dreaming life—is a far richer and more dynamic experience than the daytime life. The reason for that is because we take only a superficial interest in almost all the things that happen to us in the daytime. If we drive down a road and see a group of men in black shirts digging a ditch, it means nothing to us, but when the same thing happens in a dream, we wonder what all the symbols in the dream mean. We never look at waking life as being a collection of self-generated symbols—all we see are facts, facts, facts. But in reality, the so-called facts are simply symbols and should be interpreted that way."

"Even this conversation?"

"There are no exceptions, Shane—everything our senses perceive is a symbol of a much deeper reality that the senses can't perceive. So what is this world? First of all, it's a mass dream that is shared, to some extent, by all who live here. But this mass dream is a very special kind of dream—it's a nightmare. Obviously!!! Nightmare presidents, nightmare wars, nightmare guns, nightmare pollution, nightmare weapons that can destroy the world at the push of a button. You savvy?"

Yes, I did savvy. The nightmare boss, the nightmare relationship, the cancer nightmare, and the mother of all nightmares—death. A week ago, I dreamed that some demon named Adolf rounded up six million people, put them into large metal chambers, and gassed them all to death. And then there was the nightmare I had where fifty million people died in a world war not so long ago, and I could see row upon row of people being machine-gunned to death.

Sometimes, I have dreams where I'm on a plane that can't pull out of a dive and smashes into the ground at five hundred miles an hour. Nightmare dreams! Like where the suicidal guy deliberately crosses the median of the expressway and slams into a car that has a father and three of his little children in it, and they're all incinerated to death. And in these dreams, it's like I'm actually there.

Or maybe it's the nightmare of the three mothers and six children who were all massacred in Mexico by another lunatic with a gun. Or maybe the nightmare—and I dreamed they showed this on TV—is a graphic depiction of fifty-eight people being shot to death in Las Vegas by a maniac who had twenty-four guns.

The serial killer nightmare; the parent beating their child to death nightmare; the nightmare of being told that you have Alzheimer's and will be nothing but a babbling idiot in three or four years; the nightmare of finding out that your child was murdered; the nightmare of discovering that your significant other is having an affair; the tornado nightmare that levels hundreds of houses and kills two hundred people.

"Shane, this world has to be a nightmare. Nothing else makes the least bit of sense. Somehow or other, we descended into a nightmare--the worst nightmare imaginable. So if we want to maintain our sanity, it's essential not to opt into the nightmare and believe that it's real. From where this nightmare originated, I do not know, but we are given the power to change the nightmare when we realize that we create our own reality. We are not trapped in the nightmare unless we choose to be—we have the power to exit the dream. The knowledge that we create our own reality begins to shatter the nightmare, which is really a very fragile construction of mental cobwebs that, like any nightmare, can dissipate suddenly."

"So all these guns that surround us are illusions from some dream that I created?"

"Shane, I think the word dream is confusing you. It's a deceptive word because it implies an imaginary reality. We say we dream at night, and we assume that it's an imaginary reality, so when I say that daytime reality is also a type of dream, you might think I am saying our daytime lives are imaginary. This is not true because to be immersed in any type of dream is to be immersed in a reality. What we don't understand is the nature of this reality, which is based on inner desires and expectations. These desires and expectations create the objects and events that we experience. The reason I call all physical things hallucinations is because we don't understand the origin of the world we experience. We assume that this world is created by some outside agency, but in reality, it is created by the perceiver of the reality. This confusion as to who creates the hallucinations we perceive leads to the strongly held belief, based on supposed scientific facts, that we have no power to control our experience and that the events we perceive have no essential relation to the perceiver. In other words, contrary to what we have always assumed, the truth is that the perceiver is the creator of the perception—no matter what that perception is. When you realize that, you begin to escape from the nightmare because now, you have the power to change reality."

"Michelle, how can that be true? It doesn't make any sense to say something like that. I never asked to be born into a world of ten billion guns, and I certainly never created them."

"Shane—wake up! Don't roll over and die on me. Don't say that you're helpless and there's nothing that you can do about your life because you don't have any power to change things. The most essential thing to remember is that the nightmare operates within oneself. So the way out is to remember the antidote to the poisons that exist in our own personal and collective nightmares. And the antidote, the thing that frees us from this nightmare and all its deadly effects is the knowledge that we can alter the dream in any way—and at any second--because we create every single moment of our own reality. To put it another way, every thought has a result, which also means that every result has a thought."

"So if I thought about someone giving me a million dollars, then that would happen?"

Michelle smiled. "The last defense of the doubters—on the one hand, everyone realizes that physical existence is a complicated subject, but on the other hand, people like to reduce the idea that you create your own reality to a simple joke that would only be suitable for morons. The problem is that this nightmare we're trapped in is a deep mental construction that has existed for many thousands, if not millions, of years, so in one sense, it isn't likely that it could be changed in a day."

"Why not?" I said. "Haven't you told me many times that we either create our own reality, or we don't create our own reality? If we do, then why can't I materialize a million dollars?"

"Shane, a superficial thought like being handed a million dollars is not motivated by any real wish to obtain a million dollars—it's simply an attempt to disprove everything I've said. You will get what you concentrate upon, and what you concentrate upon you will get. But a casual tossed-out thought is not meaningful and will not produce tangible results. When you say something like that, you are not understanding the central issue, which is this: The knowledge, or at least the belief, that you create your own reality obviously negates the belief that you do not create your own reality. And once you do understand that you create your own reality, you automatically begin to establish a pathway into your inner self, and it is this inner self, the self who manifests itself in dreams at night, who creates your reality. Unfortunately, you don't really believe that you create your own reality, so the pathway hasn't been established. Once that pathway has been established, you will never ask me a question like the million-dollar one you just asked me because you will understand that your true desires can never be encompassed by such shallow goals and aspirations."

That night, while I was sleeping, I could see Jimi Stones walking towards me through a field of white and yellow flowers. "Hey dude," he said, "you are now in the land of kingdom come."

"Say what?" I said.

"Purple Haze is my name," said Jimi. "Lately, my world just ain't the same. Could be tripping in the deep blue sea. Man, I ain't never felt so free."

## CHAPTER FIFTEEN: "WE ARE GOING TO MAKE A LIFE OF IT TOGETHER."

Two days after Bo's death, Michelle disappeared. The day before her disappearance, she had hardly come out of her room, but by that point, I was too depressed to care what she did. It was fairly obvious that she didn't want to have a sexual relationship with me, and although I would hardly have refused her if she had come on to me, I wasn't all that enthusiastic about having a relationship with her. She was too old, and I just didn't feel there were any sexual vibes between us. It was true that we were now like the last two people on a desert island, so maybe...but then she disappeared and that brought an end to those thoughts.

Unlike Loren, at least Michelle was probably still alive somewhere because she had taken almost all of her stuff with her. She had left the door to her room open, and when I went in and took a look around, I discovered that her Jane Roberts' books, along with all of the notebooks she was writing her novel in were gone. One thing she hadn't left was a goodbye note and that bothered me some, but after a couple of days, I had reached the point where I couldn't care less about Michelle and all her otherworldly wisdom.

"You create your own reality." What a laugh. I guess, if that was true, I wanted to be the king of my castle because that's what I now was—everybody else was either dead or gone, and I could do whatever I wanted to do. Which was drink. I spent a whole week feeling sorry for myself as I polished off a fifth of vodka a day—I found the vodka in a closet in Bo's bedroom. There were about forty fifths in there—he must have picked them up as part of one of his drug deals.

"To the victor belongs the spoils!" I shouted to no one in particular. It was, really, such a rotten life, and I kept making it worse because I couldn't stop thinking about Loren. No matter what, I couldn't get my mind off her—if only she had been here with me, we could have figured something out. It's so much easier with two people than it is with one—unless, of course, the other person is a nitwit. Sometimes, I've noticed, it seems like you can't figure out the solution to your problems unless there's a "someone else" in your life. Someone who knows and understands you and all the rest of that hokey nonsense. But still, the hokey nonsense is sometimes true, and I guess it was because of my loneliness and all the alcohol I was drinking that I ended up crying myself to sleep night after night after night.

Finally, on the eighth day, I became afraid that I was drinking myself to death, and I ended up pouring all of the remaining vodka in Bo's closet down the toilet. I could have poured it down the sink drain in the kitchen, but the toilet seemed like a better alternative to me. It felt good! But then, afterwards, I went into a big mopey depression. What in the world was I going to do? Walk down the middle of Blackwood Street at midnight and hope that the first shot hit me in the head? Or maybe, if I went to the other extreme, I could become a productive member of society.

That one cracked me up, and I spent a whole day telling myself that, one day, after overcoming stupendous odds, I would find my rightful niche and earn my merit badge as a productive member of society. But what would I produce? Problems, problems—everybody has a problem.

It was around noon on the next day when I heard the knock on the door. A terrible fright went through me—it seemed, somehow, like the knock of doom. I was such a useless soul, and it was beyond obvious that I lived in a useless apartment on a useless street in a useless town in a useless world, so it only made sense that I would be turned into refuse. "Sorry, sir, but you've been officially categorized as refuse, so we don't have any more use for you. We've got a special bullet that's designed for refuse like you, and if all goes well, society will shortly have one less mouth to feed."

At least my gallows humor hadn't deserted me so that was something to be thankful for. Even so, I wondered how much further I could sink before I hit rock bottom. Such a grim and stupid life. But still, the knocking continued, so I grabbed my gun and went over to the door and peered through the peephole. And that's when I got the shock of my life.

"Loren!" I said, in astonishment, as I opened the door.

She smiled at me and said, "May I come in?"

"Of course," I said, as I stood aside and let her pass. A whole bunch of feelings were going through me—it sounds totally stupid, but it felt like I had just been forgiven for all my sins. Because, on top of the fact that she wasn't dead, the Loren I was looking at now was not the Loren I had seen the last time she came knocking on the door. She was dressed in new blue jeans, a crimson blouse, and a stylish blue windbreaker, which were all topped with an elegant black beret. What in the world had happened to her? I had envisioned her rotting away in a dumpster somewhere, but it now appeared that she had been taken out for a shopping trip to an expensive store that catered to fashion-conscious women.

We sat down on the couch, and Loren took my hand in hers. "I'm so sorry, Shane. I'm so very, very sorry. Believe me, from the bottom of my heart, I've spent a lot of time regretting what I did, but...well, how are you, anyways?"

I wondered what she felt so badly about but all I said was "Not so good. Wily and Bo were both shot to death after you disappeared, and Michelle vanished about ten days ago. I think she might be OK, but I don't really know."

"Wily and Bo are both dead? That's awful!"

"It just comes with the territory—after a while, you get used to it."

"So you're living here alone?" said Loren.

"Ya, it's been kind of rough, and then...I've been so worried about you. I just figured that you had been shot or something. You don't know how much I've been thinking about you lately, Loren."

She smiled. "Please don't call me Loren anymore. I have a new name now—instead of Loren Fisk, I've become Audrey Buchannan. I don't really like the name Buchannan, but I didn't have a choice—I'll explain all that to you later."

"So what happened to you after you left here?"

Loren sighed. "Please don't hold this against me, Shane. Somebody offered me a way out of here and...you know how it is on Blackwood Street—I felt like I didn't have a choice."

This conversation was beginning to remind me of the conversation Loren and I had when she was attempting to tell me that she had thrown Janice out the window. "I'm not quite following this, Loren."

"I'm Audrey, Shane—sorry, you'll have to get used to my new name if you want to hang around with me. It's important."

"OK, Audrey, but where did you go? The day you disappeared I went to the diner and they said you left a little after two. I spent the next eight hours or so hunting around for you. I can't even begin to tell you how guilty I felt for not walking to the diner with you that day. I still feel lots of guilt about that."

"I was hoping my disappearance wouldn't bother you, but I guess that was a very unrealistic hope. In a way, what I did was very selfish, but...alright, Shane, I'm going to tell you what happened, but please don't hate me for what I did. Do you think you can do that?"

"It would help if I knew what you did, but you don't have to worry--about the only thing I feel is a tremendous sense of relief that you're still alive."

"It was just an opportunity that I couldn't pass up," said Audrey.

"And the opportunity was?" Man, when Loren, now Audrey, felt nervous about something, she wasn't one to start blurting out things.

"It happened while I was working at the diner that day. It's lucky you didn't come with me or I don't think any of this would have come to pass. Just before I was supposed to leave, my brother, whom I hadn't seen in about four years, came into the place. He had been coming back from Chicago on some kind of business trip, and he needed a cup of coffee because he had been driving since six o'clock that morning. Over the years, we had completely lost touch with each other, but as soon as he saw me, he gave me a big greeting and asked me how I was doing. He still thought I was living with Janice in Zone Seven, so he was really appalled when I told him I was living in Zone Nine."

"I didn't even know that you had a brother."

"I hardly did either because we were never that close," said Loren. "But we sat down at a table for about a half hour, and finally, after I told him what a horror show it was to live on Blackwood Street, he offered to let me stay at his place. It was then that I told him about Janice and how I was in trouble with the law, but he said he could fix that by getting me a new identity. And so here I am as Audrey Buchannan. I really dislike that last name—it's so anti-poetic, but I can't mess around with it. The old Audrey is dead, and I've been fixed up with her social security number, driver's license, and everything else I need so that I can be Audrey. I even have a birth certificate proving that's who I am."

"So you must be doing pretty well over there in...what zone does your brother live in?"

"Zone Seven, but it's a really fantastic neighborhood, and he makes lots of money for someone who lives in that area. You'll see how much different it is when you get there."

"When I get there?"

"Shane, I'm hoping you'll come with me—this time, I'd like to be the one who's offering to share my mattress."

"You want to live with me?" I said, in astonishment. "I don't really have a lot to offer anyone."

"Hush! You foolish man—you've never really understood how much people like you. I know Bo did, and look at you and Michelle—didn't you have all those fabulous conversations with her? If she hadn't been almost twice our ages, I would have been jealous of her. I'm telling you, Shane—people really do like you. All you have to do is stop being so down on yourself."

"I guess so," I said. Try as I might, it was difficult for me to view myself in a positive light. But maybe my attitude was just the result of all the vodka I had drunk lately along with the fact that everyone I had been living with had been shot to death or had disappeared.

"So you'll come with me?" said Audrey.

A free ticket from Zone Nine to Zone Seven was not something that I was about to pass up. And neither was I about to take a pass on Loren, now Audrey. I owed her so much—she had no idea. "Of course," I said. "I just hope I can live up to what you see in me."

"Shane, Shane, Shane. What a hopeless boy you are. Don't you worry about anything—we are going to make a life of it together. I've made up my mind about that, so don't argue with me. And listen—I would have come over here sooner, but I wanted to make sure that my brother and his wife were totally cool with you living with them. It's a fairly big place, and we'll have our own bedroom. You'll like my brother and his wife—they're both very kind and don't have a snotty bone in their bodies. However, just to let you know—I did tell them you were living in Zone Eight because...well, you know, people have a lot of negative feelings when it comes to Zone Nine. So let's get going—I borrowed my brother's car, and I don't see any sense hanging around here."

"OK, I'm with you on that. I'll start packing up—it won't take me long. I've got about twenty things that I can stuff in a garbage bag, and then I'll be good to go."

"Just don't bring your gun, Shane—I mean you can't bring your gun."

"I can't? Why not?"

"We live in a gun-free zone. We're in the middle of an area that's about two miles square where no guns are permitted. I'm sure some people sneak them in, but my brother and his wife would totally freak out if they knew you had a gun. Besides, you don't need a gun—I've been there for a month now, and there hasn't been a shooting death yet."

"What happens if the cops discover you have a gun? It's not like I want to have a gun—I'm just curious."

"They'll seize it and destroy it, and you might get evicted from the neighborhood."

"They can do that legally?"

"Shane, it's just like all the other zones—there are hundreds of local governments that operate independently of the national laws."

"So it's safe to walk around at night without a gun?" It was still hard for me to believe that such a reality existed.

"Get used to it, Shane—you're going to be living a new life from now on."

## CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE DEEPEST DREAM IS TRANSLATED INTO PHYSICAL REALITY

It took me at least a month to adjust to my new home. The whole thing was very surreal—I had to be reminded about twenty times that it was safe to go outdoors after dark and that most of the residents of the enclave where I lived, which was called New Town, didn't even carry pepper spray on them. The idea to abolish guns in New Town had arisen after the third largest mass shooting in modern history had occurred on Main Street. On that bloody day, in June of 2036, two hundred and forty-eight people had been massacred by four men. Only one of the men had survived, and at his trial, he stated that the motive for the shooting was that he and his three fellow travelers had been trying to break the world record for mass shootings, which at that time was two hundred and thirty-four.

But all that was past history now as I began to settle into my new environment. Audrey had gone back to school—because of her name change, she had lost all her credits, but she had the unusual advantage of having taken most of her courses before. Meanwhile, her brother hooked me up with a company that did restorations and renovations on the older houses in the area, of which there were many. My hourly wage, as a carpenter's helper, was eighteen dollars an hour, and although I had to pay more attention to detail than when I was a garbage boy, the work seemed easy to me.

Secretly, when we were alone, I often called Audrey Loren—she would always be Loren to me. The name seemed to fit her better, somehow, and I knew, as a joke, that I could always provoke her when I called her Ms. Buchannan. But man, all kidding aside, was that woman ever good to me, and the two of us were surfing something that Loren called the "lover's wave." Eventually, when she graduated from college, we planned to move into our own place and start a family together.

One spring night, when Loren was at a night class, I went out for a walk. I still had trouble adjusting to my new Zone Seven life and was continually keeping my eye out for alleys that I could duck into when the gunfire began erupting. Sometimes, I would even cross the street when I saw what appeared to be a dubious character approaching me. Old habits die hard!

Just by chance, I came across an outdoor café that sold both beer and marijuana. It was a pleasant night with the temperature in the low sixties, but I was still nervous about sitting outside, so I went into the place and ordered a beer. Most of the tables inside were taken, but I saw an empty one near the back of the shop. I was about halfway there when someone said, "Shane!"

I knew that voice immediately. "Michelle," I said, "how are you doing?" She had a notebook in front of her—it looked like she was doing a sketch of the cafe. No one was sitting with her, so I sat across from her at a small table.

"I'm doing great," she said. "I'm sorry I left Blackwood Street so abruptly, but I just couldn't take it anymore."

"I know the feeling," I said, as I smiled at her. It was almost like we were two war veterans who had survived an ambush in the jungle. I could feel a kind of camaraderie that went well beyond ordinary friendship.

"So I guess you don't live on Blackwood Street anymore?" said Michelle.

"No—the strangest thing happened. About ten days after you left, Loren showed up, and—"

"I knew it!" said Michelle. "I never thought she had died—she was too much of a survivor."

"She's calling herself Audrey nowadays because she's living with her brother about a mile from here and she doesn't want the cops to find her because of that thing that happened with her roommate."

"And you're living with her?"

"Ya, I'm going the whole Zone Seven route. Nice house to live in; a great woman to sleep with; and a good-paying job as a carpenter."

"That's kind of what happened to me," said Michelle. "When I left Blackwood Street, I just headed for Zone Seven, and once I got here, I threw myself on the first available guy who didn't look like a total jerk. Turned out I made a good choice. The guy is about my age, has lots of money, and keeps telling me how lucky he was to find me."

"Amazing," I said. "Whoever would have thought that we would both escape from Blackwood Street? It's so strange, almost unbelievable, to walk around at night and not hear gunshots."

With a pleasant wink, Michelle said, "Sometimes, Shane, dreams do come true."

"I guess so, although I think the life I'm living now is more than I could possibly have dreamed of."

"The dreamer knows no boundaries," said Michelle, with an amused smile. "So what do you think, Shane? Do we create our own reality, or is that just a fantasy of mine?"

She was such a fanatic about that idea. "Like I said, Michelle, I never imagined living this kind of life—it just seemed to kind of happen."

"Man, you are a stubborn one," said Michelle. "So what are you saying? That everything you have now was handed to you by some mysterious force?"

"I don't know, really."

"Because if you're saying it was handed to you, that seems kind of egotistical—like God looked down on you, Shane Stevens, and smiled. And I guess when he looked down on Bo and Wily, he frowned." Michelle started laughing and said, "It's so absurd to think that way. It's just some kind of perverse false modesty that makes you believe that."

"But Michelle, I never imagined, not even once, living the way that I do now."

"You're taking it all too literally, Shane. It isn't necessary to sit down and imagine anything specifically—it's more like the deepest wish, the deepest dream is translated into physical reality. Look at Wily and Bo—Wily was always predicting that he would die within a short period of time, and Bo was like a sailor cast adrift in a violent sea. He never understood his own power or his own ability to save himself, so he basically gave up. But people like you and me and Loren are survivors, and we all knew that we couldn't survive on Blackwood Street. So in the end, you and Loren shared a dream, and it all came true."

"You talk such a good game, Michelle—and I don't mean that in a negative way."

"Take my advice, Shane: You have all the power within you that was formerly assigned to God. And with that power, you can obviously create your own reality. Even if you don't totally believe that, you should live as if that idea is true because...oh, it's so obvious—so very, very obvious."

Afterwards, when I was walking home, I decided that Michelle was right: You do create your own reality. Because, when I looked at my life carefully, nothing else made sense.

This is one of many books of mine that I have written over the past fifteen years. I would like to emphasize that my novels are _very_ dissimilar from one another and have all sorts of different plots, themes, and attitudes. I've written a number of murder mysteries, two love stories, a gothic tale, a trial of a police officer for murder, a couple of unusual fantasies, a story about a homeless guy, a trial of a young guy who thinks that he's discovered the secret to life, a locked-room mystery, a book about a psychiatrist and a troubled woman, a tale about a student/teacher relationship, two satires, an unreliable narrator mystery, a number of courtroom dramas, and two novels that are essentially political, sexual, and social commentaries.
