 
## From Poets to Protagonists

### Fiction from the Hudson Valley Poetry Scene

### Featuring the Poets as Main Characters

By

Harvey Havel

Copyright © 2009 by Harvey Havel

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Books by Harvey Havel:

_Noble McCloud_ (1999)

_The Imam_ (2000)

_Freedom of Association_ (2006)

_From Poets to Protagonist_ s (2009)

_Harvey Havel's Blog, Essays_ (2011)

_Stories from the Fall of the Empire_ (2011)

_Two Tickets to Memphis_ (2012)

_Mother, A Memoir_ (2013)

_Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt_ (2014)

_The Orphan of Mecca, Book One_ (2016)

_The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two_ (2016)

_The Orphan of Mecca, Book Three_ (2016)

_An Adjunct Down_ (2016)

_The Thruway Killers_ (2017)
PREFACE

Writing about the very people you know and love has never been easy for any writer, let alone this humble one who has had the high honor and privilege of being a part of The Hudson Valley Poetry Scene for the past several years. This work, I admit, will not do any of the poets featured herein their due justice when we take their incredible gifts and incredible talents into consideration. And stumbling upon this fine community of poets was certainly not easy, as in my early years as a writer, when I was both bruised and battered by my many attempts to make it in the New York City area as a big-time fiction writer, did I find the most fascinating group of artists just across the Jersey border to the north—in the rapidly developing suburbs of Orange County, New York.

The timing of meeting and getting to know these poets in the summer of 2005 couldn't have come at a more desperate time in my life. I had failed as a young man in ways that I never even thought were remotely possible. I was so filled and consumed by such a loneliness and desperation from an intense urban isolation and longing in Manhattan that I thought my life would be a short and tragic one. Neither finding an audience for my work nor any writers who believed in me as an artist was only the starting point to what became a continuous downward spiral. I thought I had lost it all as I continued to roam the streets of Manhattan in search, not only for the fame and glory of being a writer, but quite simply for a connection with anyone who would even like me as a person or would talk to me as any human being would.

I wound up in Hackensack, New Jersey, as I was unable to afford the fast-paced lifestyle and all-around exclusivity that New York City demanded of its artists, and it was there, through a part-time job serving as an assistant to a disabled man, did I meet George Nitti. Through knowing George—a very talented writer, poet, and screen actor in his own right—I landed my first legitimate job as a composition instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, and after we both learned that we had a lot in common as writers, George took me on as a roommate at his spacious home in Chester, New York.

I remember well my first time meeting with a group of young, extremely talented poets whom George had invited for dinner and drinks one night on his wide, stone-flagged patio behind his home. I would learn to follow these poets for the next several years, and what's more, these poets— Robert Milby, Bonnie Law, Christopher Wheeling, Marina Mati, and Ken Van Rennselaer among them—practically welcomed me at the gates, accepted me with open arms, took me in, and turned my entire life upside down by allowing this sole fiction writer among them to feature his prose at almost every blasted coffee house, library, and cultural center up and down the Hudson Valley.

Since that time, I have moved on to a more sobering teaching position up here in Albany, and being in Albany is like being in another world. I miss these poets terribly, as I don't get to see them as much anymore, as I do live close by but not nearly as close enough. But my love for them still overflows with gratitude for what they did for me, whether they are conscious of the many gifts they imparted or not. Yes, as poets they do tend to struggle more so than any group of people I have ever met. They are constantly being beaten down by bills they can never pay, broken cars they can never fix, marriages they can never keep, lovers and soul-mates they can never rightfully have, books they can't for the life of them publish, and places that they'd love to escape to but simply can't afford. But I realize now, in my casual reflection of those threadbare times we shared together, that these poets don't need these finer things in life. They seem to have each other and their own artistic merits and endeavors to guide them clear through to those celestial destinations that only poets of such high talent and caliber can intimately know.

The work herein does not represent an accurate depiction of what these poets are like. This collection was never meant to do that. But rather these stories try to place some singular quality of their multi-faceted characters within the context and action of short, fallible narratives that serve more to accentuate the stories themselves and not to emphasize any shortcomings that may be misconstrued as being a part of their personalities, personal histories, or qualities as people. Above all, this is a work of fiction, and what's printed here, even though it involves these poets, is only fiction and far from fact.

Again, it is not so easy to write about the people a now-humbled writer has come to know and love, but my hope is that they forgive me for anything I have written that might cast them in any light that does not flatter them— because I may not be so flattering from time to time for the sake of these stories—not because these Hudson Valley poets aren't some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.
WILLAM SEATON

PATRICIA SEATON

GEORGE NITTI

Dusk had befallen the village of Goshen. The moans of a saxophone and the brushing of a cymbal spilled from twin speakers from within Bill and Patricia Seaton's living room onto an otherwise silent side-street like soft, undulating waves. Their oversized Victorian home, tucked away within a row of tall hedges and a couple of knotted elms, hid the laughter and the din of conversation that flourished on their porch outside. Bill looked upon his porch proudly, as it had been the latest addition to a home that he and his wife had spent many years rebuilding. They had both worked very hard in their later years to restore the home's siding, which had chipped and peeled, and the wide deck that wrapped around it became a testament to the comfortable niche they had made after many years of tumult and uncertainty as fierce intellectuals and dedicated artisans. The floodlights hovering above them lent considerable shadow to the nooks and quiet corners of the porch where their artist-friends mingled and sipped at their wine. Their faces were hidden from the full gaze a daytime party would have revealed, as this was, after all, a special occasion. Bill Seaton was finally retiring from his position as visiting teacher at the state correctional facility the next town over. He could now settle more deeply into his work as a poet, his daughters college-bound and the mortgage on their large ornamented home recently paid-off in full.

And the guests there that celebrated his many years as a civil servant were an odd assortment of old-guard lefties from his days on the San Francisco poetry scene, local artists who spent their sober evenings at coffee houses, and proprietors from local grassroots businesses who had just entered the world of dollars and cents. Even a few family members had made the long trek to Goshen from as far away as Illinois and Florida. With Patricia by his side, he stood chomping on celery sticks beneath the glow of the lights.

He discussed prison life with George Nitti, who had recently bought a stake in the Baby Grand Bookstore in nearby Warwick. Bill wore a pair of tan, thick-whaled corduroys and a buttoned Oxford shirt, starched white. The curls of his whitening hair frizzed along his scalp with a gravity all their own, and his white beard hung upon the lower half of his face like a lush throwback to the calm, ancient evenings he spent hiking the upstate hinterlands, his wire-rimmed spectacles hinting at a royalty that had somehow interrupted his tenure as the radical reformer for whom he was so well known for many years.

In fact, his interest in social justice began in the farmlands of rural Illinois as he traveled southwest, hitch-hiking the entire way to San Francisco. Once there, he met Patricia for the first time. Luckily they had had enough foresight to flee from the ever-repopulating city by the bay before the world's camera focused its full attentions on the dharma bums, sages, and mystics that wandered lazily through its hippified streets like decorated juggernauts. He saw all of these faces in front of him now returned to life, their dignities restored, as though every one of them had straightened the wrinkles and creases of their older age and dyed their hair their natural colors again. A return to youth, perhaps, but this time they did it more responsibly.

He remembered how several of his close friends fell to the excesses that soon followed this explosion of counter-culture, and many of them never quite returned from their forays into alternative living and the ever-expanding mind. Bill was much too genuine to have been sucked up by the rampant commercialism that replaced this wholesome drift into utopia, but when the ideas seemed to fade and the logic of their dogma succumbed to the raw, narrowing eyes of the money-making machine, they hit the road and took their thoughts and beliefs elsewhere.

Yet the streets and alleyways of San Francisco had taught their swollen hearts to imagine, and both Bill and Patricia held onto this cultural currency that would have otherwise rendered their lives barren.

Before the influx of acid tabs and electric guitars and the Rolling Stones, there had been a commitment to equality and an old roll-up-your-sleeves and turning-swords-into-ploughshares motif whose time had finally re-emerged. It all seemed a bit fantastic and somewhat naïve to think that any age could tumble beyond its limits, but he saw this era manifested in the people merging into one another on his porch like swirling eddies in a slow-moving creek. He saw their presence as sublime, as he carefully looked beyond George's shoulder and glanced at the camaraderie that so reminded him of his younger years. He knew just then that satisfaction took its own, mellow time to arrive, and he had mellowed slowly amidst the relentless pull of what became the all-too-easy and the all-too-quick, as even by his own standards his society had derailed and barreled headlong into a synthetic, artificial, and apocalyptic dead-end without noticing its vain reflection as it passed by its mirror.

"All things return," he said to George, who cupped the stem of his wine glass. "Just because the world is pretty much soulless now, doesn't mean it remains that way."

"But these are criminals," retorted George. "They knew what the rules were, and they broke them. They either raped poor, innocent girls or killed their victims in cold blood. You have to consider that."

"But you're not looking at the reasons behind these acts," said Bill. "These prisoners never even had a chance. They come from broken homes and a society that cheats them out of every chance they get. I doubt that many people ever consider their hardships. I'm not saying they're charity cases by any means, because they are convicted felons, murderers, and rapists. I'm not disputing that. But society's answer is always to lock up this permanent underclass and throw away the keys. That's not much of a solution. And meanwhile they build prison after prison. Where will it end?"

"So you're saying that I have to watch as a guilty man gets a lesser sentence, just because he's under-privileged? I think that's incredibly risky."

"It's society's job to rehabilitate these prisoners. I don't like what they've done either, but unless you give these people decent jobs, enough food, and adequate shelter, you have no right locking them up."

"And who's supposed to pay for all this rehabilitation?" asked George. "The next thing you know they'll be wanting painting lessons, acting lessons, and undergraduate degrees from the penal system. Why not aerobics?"

"If you think that our government pays these people more than a token for the brutality it has inflicted on them compared to those who are already privileged enough to be deemed 'law-abiding,' then I think you are operating under some kind of cruel delusion."

Bill's voice steadily rose as he said this, and by the end of his argument a crowd had surrounded them and had absorbed every word. On one of the daytime talk shows or on one of the twenty-four hour news channels this would have been seen as a moronic victory, but both George and Bill knew that no one won or lost here, nor should either of them win or lose. Their points jousted from different locations, and both worlds carried valid gripes about the other. Nevertheless, Bill had attracted attention again for an older brand of politics that crested many moons ago, and he considered whether or not his politics were relevant in an age awash in money and interest rates and big corporate mergers. He was, after all, comfortable and settled, whereas George needed accomplishment and solubility and understood the value of a dollar. It was the strangest binary contraption—this point and counterpoint—as though pro and con explained away the most controversial subjects of the day.

No one really won or lost an argument any more, he considered. The people at the party staring at them seemed neither to agree nor disagree with the positions they took. They just wanted to see which way the tide turned or found what they said interesting. Bill sheepishly pointed out, however, that it's usually hard to gauge where anyone sided on these 'issues du jour.' Nevertheless, his life had been built around the volumes of poetry and prose he ingested as well as the journals and magazines he poured over in quiet libraries, and his opinions on things rarely altered course. He needed his beliefs, just as George needed his. But Bill thought he was in the right, and the crescendo that kicked in at the end of this jousting must have implied a stronger belief than mere argument for argument's sake.

The party-goers once again scattered into the quiet corners of the household. Their debate had ended quite suddenly. The mixing of politics and art had always been dangerous, but it's the inevitable plight of man to debate things that would have normally allowed more polite men to suffer. Women, on the other hand, were somehow the opposite. They were more practical in their approach, as there were many of these joyous life-appreciators within his gang of old friends. The crowd watching them slowly slinked away and filled up on more wine and hors d'oeurves. Nothing douses a party more than politics, but Bill understood it to be a necessary evil that bound a man to his own purpose. Patricia, on the other hand, to her grateful relief, quickly caught Bill by the shirt sleeve as the wailing of the saxophone and the rat-tat-tat of the snare drum continued.

On the next morning, after the last of the travelers had departed, Bill woke up on the early side and felt able enough to put in his second-to-last day of teaching at the prison. He buckled his beige leather briefcase containing a few stories he had wanted his students to read. He had become used to the prison, and maneuvering through its metal cages and security checkpoints became second nature to him. He drove along 17 from Goshen and parked his car near the long chain-linked fence that had razor wire coiled along its length. The courtyard beyond the fence was as silent as a Gulag before an execution. A loose basketball waded in a puddle at the center of cracked asphalt. A watchtower manned by a guard wearing aviator sunglasses seemed casually menacing.

The walls of the first corridor he passed through were painted lime green, and his shoes squeaked along the polished linoleum. Already he heard the slams of cell doors and the jangling of keys. Voices that echoed were telegraphed from deep within the concrete core of the building. The air was moist and cool, as though he were floating through a sunken cave, the security guards motioning for him to step forward through the metal detectors after flashing his state identification card. The procedure was as innocuous as an airport's, but further down the long tunnel a more formidable set of thick, bullet-proof barriers separated the convict-packed common areas from the rest of the upstanding citizenry on its other side. Beyond these barriers loomed even more jangling of keys and convict voices that bounced off the walls. The hum of flickering fluorescent lights were protected in wire-mesh encasings, if only to prevent the convicts from reaching up and smashing them. The prisoners themselves, milling about like bored teenagers in orange jumpsuits, sat on warped stackable chairs and gazed into a boxed-in television set tuned to one meaningless channel. _Divorce_ _Court_ , then _Jerry_ _Springer_ , then a dumbed-down game show droned in their ears.

Bill's duties educating the juvenile drug-pushers, gang members, and other felons stuck in this maximum security wing at least kept their minds and speech agile enough so that if any of their basic skills in this regard had failed, his pedagogy would deliver doses of serenity like prescribed medication. The prisoners' faces were melancholy, and their stares as blank as their empty jail cells. On occasion they shuffled from seat to seat, as though that alone were the only activity available to stave off an anxious boredom. No wonder inmates fought and played territorial games of socio-political chess among various gangland factions that ordered shanks one minute and the comforts of filterless tobacco the next. This was hardly the environment George Nitti had referred to when he asked who'd be paying for their rehabilitation. George didn't know how time dribbled from these rusted water fountains like liquid goop, the walls damp and sweating with stubborn mildew and poisonous lead, the prison guards with batons and guns more like traffic cops ushering prisoners from one area to the next. The prison hummed like a machine that really didn't go anywhere, as though occupying themselves was a mere guise to prevent the undercurrent of idleness from exploding into a riot. As long as everyone looked like they did something to pass the time, the guards eased up a bit and the tension of metal-against-metal was sublimated within the far reaches of a criminal's mind.

Bill walked along the television area bidding quiet greetings to the prisoners who watched the glowing box suspended in the air by steady chains, the volume barely audible. He walked into a classroom on the side of the main area where jump-suited prisoners sat around an oval table waiting for him. He was a little on the late side, but several of the prisoners were happy enough that he still showed up to his job after many years of faithful service. George Nitti's assessment of their criminality still reverberated in his ears, as a couple of them didn't seem too pleased to be there at all. The prisoners were mostly black and Latino, the type of convicts who fell through the cracks of young adulthood by dealing drugs or getting angry enough at a streetwalker to rape her, and while this would normally be unsettling to anyone who had to rub shoulders with this muscled collection of men, Bill was at ease with them. He modulated his speech to slow and quiet. He was definitely non-authoritarian with them, as there was nothing these prisoners hated more than authority.

Over the years Bill had trained himself to see their good parts and tailor his discussions to these good parts rather than to thump upon their continuous disenfranchisement within a system that couldn't absorb them. Within the classroom his talk, then, was slow, deliberate, and methodical, his delivery smooth, upbeat, and sometimes entertaining. He saved his politics for his end-of-the-summer parties and instead let the prisoners do most of the talking. There was, however, a new prisoner in the class who looked at him meanly and had an attitude about him, suggesting that Bill ought to avoid him as much as possible, at least for the first few days. New prisoners sometimes took months to settle in, and he tried to avoid the bitter rub of confrontation as he passed around copies of the latest short stories. Yet he could feel the tension of this one prisoner—a large, muscular black man from the mean streets of the Bronx, just transferred in from Riker's Island. Bill tread along the perimeter of the oval desk ever so softly, as he had been so used to doing.

One of the short stories he handed out, Richard Wright's masterpiece "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," was to be the topic of discussion that morning. All of the prisoners took about twenty minutes or so to read the story in front of them—all of them except this one prisoner who simply stared back at Bill with dark, menacing eyes, as though he had something against him personally. Bill had rarely found himself in situations like this, but he made sure not to make a fuss over it. Some prisoners took time, he remembered, and this prisoner was no exception. And yet something about his harrowing stare pinned him into a submission much like a wrestler pins his opponent to a mat. He couldn't help but be distracted by this convict, as the rest of the class worked quietly and flawlessly reading the story, only that this one man represented the bane of imperfection of what would have otherwise been a dynamic process that operated flawlessly. As the minute hand on the clock above the table swept around its dial, the clock itself fiercely guarded in an iron face-mask all the same, Bill couldn't help but be sucked in by the demonic gaze of this prisoner who made him out to be the enemy and the object of his frustrations, as though his defiance carried with it its own terrible form of abuse and torture.

The prisoner's defiance had probably targeted an innocent man, as they had all targeted the most innocent of creatures and ate these lambs whole like the wolves they had become. For a moment, Bill no longer felt so sorry for these caged animals, their criminality as insidious as this black man's stare, the glare of his eyes challenging him to assert his authority, which he seldom showed to anyone. He could be tough if he wanted to, but he was too much of a seasoned professional to resort to such childish power struggles. This wasn't the hot grind of an inner-city street, and yet he wanted to teach the prisoner a lesson not to fuck with him as the prisoner had done to his many other victims. Bill walked up to the convict and stared at him point-blank, like a dean of students at a reformatory, and said:

"Is there a problem?"

The convict eyeballed him back, and for a moment Bill thought the convict may just get up out of his chair and confront him physically. Hot bursts of fear and adrenaline pumped through his system, as the convict may have reacted at any moment. The confrontation, however, was necessary. If only Bill didn't have to take things so personally with this prisoner. But the laws of the street demanded that he deal effectively with anyone who tried to buck his authority, especially in a place where a display of manhood and guts marked the difference between living and dying.

The convict, after peeling his eyes away from Bill's, must have recognized that he was in a different place other than Riker's Island. He lowered his gaze while flashing a snide grin, as though he had only toyed with Bill to judge his ferocity and his street credibility, so to speak. Bill, who waited on the other end of his grin, breathed hot and heavy after the convict submitted to the rawness of his authority, but he felt guilty about it after they discussed the story and he dismissed the class for the last time.

Bill returned to his Goshen home later that evening after a trafficky ride along 17. Upon sitting down for dinner, he remarked to Patricia that he had had a good day. He didn't explain it any other way. From his home in Goshen the prison system seemed a million miles away from him, and in a day or so, that's exactly how far away it would be.
BILL PERRY

SARAH MORR

You will always be a mystery to me. When I asked if you'd like to go to the Corner Stage that night, you just stared at me and smiled knowingly. Perhaps you didn't want to go out that night, especially with someone as socially awkward as I. What would we do there together but sit in silence, as I try to hold your hand in the darkness? You've always known how shy I can be, as though a part of me can't put together a conversation worth listening to. You know that about me—how I cringe in public places, how I save my love for you only in the most private of moments. And when we're out in public, I hide my love, thinking it too inappropriate for anyone to see. When I'm out of the house, I like to blend in, like a mouse that scurries for shelter, always wary of being the object of public consumption. So if I take you to the Corner Stage tonight, you already know that I will be hiding under a soft skin of shadow that renders me invisible to the collection of faces who sit in the comfortable den of plush sofas facing the small stage. Since we're in public, you sense my fear yet still try to make small talk. But I remain as resolute as a stone in a river, your words washing over me as though they were spoken in a dialect I can't comprehend. And yet you smile at me, thinking that I'm some small child unable to absorb the stares and curiosities of others. But I should know better than to let you pay so much attention to my foolish disposition for remaining ever-so-small. We take a seat in the middle of the crowd at the Corner Stage anyway.

Within a few moments I am saved by Sarah Morr who gracefully takes the stage, acoustic guitar and all, and so you and I still sit and hide in the darkness as her voice, sonorous as it is, sings verses that match my honest feelings for you, her lyrics able to express what I am unable to express. Her guitar is deep blue, and somehow we swim in her words, as though they were somehow meant for us. We sit and watch her elegance from below, wondering where she had found the depth of her experience. I take your hand in mine, the only display the crowd will get from the two of us, and your hand feels like it belongs there, your fingers finding a home within the pool of my palm. And maybe this is the most man you'll get out of me tonight, as Sarah Morr, silk bandana wrapped around spiked hair, glitters in the spotlight, her arms strumming another tune as though she plays it for ourselves alone.

Now that Sarah is the object of public consumption, I'm thinking that I can tickle your soft arms with the grace of my fingernails, as no one can see us. It's safe to show my love for you when she's singing. I no longer have to hide how I feel about you, and I'm sorry that I've put us in a closet or, better yet, a dark box where the sunlight can't shine. My reticence is really an expression of words, I tell you, as though my love for you is too great for common speech or small-talk, which is why I'm so quiet this evening and why I am now able to place my hand on your thigh and touch you in places that would have otherwise been forbidden, had we not been under the auspices of Sarah's singing. I touch you in places like your knee, for instance, or maybe I pretend to yawn and put my arm around your shoulders, moving closer to you, as we were meant to be this close, you and I. The night permits this indiscretion, and slowly I am surrendering to the possibility that we were truly meant for each other. But I dare not kiss you, as Sarah Morr has just finished her set. I suppose we're not by ourselves yet, and I hesitate to show you how I need you and will always need you, especially when I'm most often sitting at home and you're out in the world being the social woman you were meant to be, enjoying the company of others and loving them in some imperceptible way, as I am more prone to avoiding them and hiding from them. I'm too acquainted with darkness to shake a person's hand and actually mean it. But from within the shadows of the Corner Stage you know me better than that. You know I'm taking things much too seriously for such a young man, even though my heart aches for you greater still, even though my arm is wrapped around your porcelain shoulders. You then chide me for taking love so seriously, because you notice Bill Perry emerge from the corner of your eye. He has been sitting at the bar in his blue dungarees and opaque sunglasses, his eyes needing shade from the spotlights on the stage.

Maybe you're right. It's time to loosen up and not dote too much on how I've madly fallen for you. I can't seem to let go of how attached my heart has become. You smile and clap as Bill Perry takes the stage with his band of music-makers, all of them dressed casually, the Corner Stage their comfortable home. And as he belts out a blues tune that scorches the midnight air, and as the patrons at the bar escort their dates to the front of the stage where they begin to dance to the tones of his guitar, I wonder too if we should join in, perhaps give in a little bit, and let ourselves go a little bit, if only for a short while. But I sit and wait patiently, like a bird on a branch waiting to fly. The music, it seems, takes me higher, especially when he does an extended version of that James Brown tune. I sit there stunned by Bill Perry's signature talent—how he's able to move people on the dance floor these patrons have slowly carved out in front of the stage. What an immense power this must be, because who really needs to think about love when we can show it by dancing to an electrified guitar and the band that keeps his beat?

At this point, I'm thinking that my rigidity and shyness are too selfish for a night as tonight. Perhaps I get carried away by my own narcissistic fears that somehow I'm the one who'll suffer if I ever reveal my love for you and release it from the maze of my restricted heart. And maybe my love for you ought to be celebrated, as these people who shake and jive in front of the stage are celebrating the depth of their love for each other.

I'm sorry for making you sit in the shadows for so long. Normally I wouldn't have such nerve, but my feet! They seem to be tapping all on their own, the circus of guitar, bass, and drum beats arousing what little courage I have, because all one really needs is a little courage at a time like this. I'm finally off my contemplating ass, and I reach out my hand for yours. I lead you to where a throng of people are shaking and writhing to this one remarkable number, and slowly, like a slave breaking his chains, I shake and writhe as though I've lost all of my senses. And as I take you in my arms, I can see that you're smiling.
BONNIE LAW

In the spring we planted a small garden. It wasn't anything too elaborate or ostentatious, just a few flowerbeds of violets, daisies, and tulips that hugged the outer-rim of our cabin by the lake. When summer came, these flowers had grown knee-high and covered the edges of our home with crisp, bright color. It lent our home an uncertain legitimacy among the other lakeside cabins where the sons and daughters of our neighbors scampered along a narrow dock jutting out into the water and flung their pink bodies over planks of mossy wood. The resounding splashes of lake that leapt up from the surface reminded us that perhaps we should someday have children of our own. But this was my line of thinking more than hers.

She seemed content working in the garden, snipping away at the overgrowth of flowers that had encroached too quickly on the flatness of the lawn, and I couldn't really tell if she were content with the love I had given her or not. And even though we had spent seven years together, our love grew as tired as the joints between our bones did, and maybe she thought of leaving me once the brittle air of autumn swept through the valley and rendered the lake too frigid to swim in. This was a possibility I had feared for some time now, and to ask her to expound upon her feelings towards me after all of this time together only pointed to my naiveté. On issues of importance, especially love, a woman never tells you what she thinks, which is why, I suppose, I took matters into my own hands, because, yes, I distrusted her, and my suspicions festered slowly in my own heart like a degenerative disease.

I could no longer tell why she had grown so indifferent towards me, as her love in our earlier years overflowed with a passion that shone upon me like a sunrise, and gradually that light had been dimmed by time. We had learned everything there was to learn about each other and had shared a level of closeness whereby the only direction left had to be our own exclusive separation. Although we tried to find the higher plane of love, much like that mythical jet stream that carries a relationship along its current for the rest of a couple's life, somehow we fell short of arriving and instead dangled mid-air on our slow decent earthwards, almost like an aborted mission without a good enough explanation as to why it had ended. Nevertheless, I loved her with a zeal most men in my circumstance would readily shy away from, and my intense passion for her no longer inspired a reciprocity of feeling. She had grown quiet and distant and busied herself with her gardening, and for the last couple of weeks up here on the lake, we've hardly said a word to each other. I've demanded explanations from her before, but this time the explanations I seek have to be mined discreetly.

You see, my wife is also a poet, and luckily she keeps her latest work in a folder between a couple of musty chapbooks in the guest room. It was then that this terrible idea had suddenly popped into my head that perhaps I should start searching for clues in the pages she had penned. She kept her latest work in a desk drawer in the room adjacent to our bedroom. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would awake with a start from some self-involved dream and search along our warm sheets for the soft of her body, only to discover that she had retreated into this poet's den of hers to write. Lately she had been spending a lot of time in there, and if she ever found out that I was snooping around or rummaging through her papers, perhaps she would finally summon the nerve to leave me once and for all. I waited until she drove into town to launch my full investigation, as she usually took a couple of hours to do the grocery shopping.

The room itself had a huge lakeside window surrounded by yellow birch trees that shaded the lake but still permitted a good view of it. Her desk, made of sanded Puritan wood, edged up against this window and had fittingly inspired many of her poems about nature, as that comprised the bulk of her published work. She used nature as a metaphor to emphasize certain quirks that are found in our own human relationships, and I, for one, had been a loyal and devoted fan of her work and often wondered why she wrote very little about the events shaping our world, or at the very least, what she thought about me and our relationship. Poems of this more personal sort, which usually demanded more concreteness and directedness, hardly ever found their way into her chapbooks, as though her nature poems were an awkward defense that hid her true feelings, or her true capabilities, as a poet beneath the surface of a crafty, almost shape-shifting intellect. She keenly observed her emotions but hardly ever expressed them, or so I had thought, until I finally found a manila folder tucked away into the far corner of her desk drawer. Admittedly, I expected more of the same work and secretly hoped that she shied away from anything too revealing. But my heard leapt when I pulled out an undiscovered cache of poetry all devoted to love and love-making.

These poems, hidden from me on purpose, I suppose, were stacked an inch thick and probably hadn't been seen by anyone before. I always knew Bonnie had her secrets, but what I had found nearly crushed me. One of her poems read,

"At the bar, between sets

While you were telling me

How you saw Twisted Sister 15 years ago

Before they were discovered, and how

You had a nervous breakdown at 20

Because of a crazy girlfriend

"I was thinking about running my fingers

Through your shiny black curls

Feeling their softness

Imagining our warm bodies

Together."

Needless to say, this poem wasn't about me. I've never seen the rock band Twisted Sister in my life, and I haven't had any crazy girlfriends yet, (although they're all crazy, aren't they?) And I have straight blonde hair, not black curly hair. To top off the betrayal, she imagined sleeping with this guy. What I had suspected all along had pervaded my marriage, and a burning at the pit of me swallowed my heart due to the loss of my wife's fidelity. Perhaps I didn't tell her I loved her enough, or maybe we had spent too many worthless evenings avoiding each other, but I never expected her to go this far. The rest of her poem read,

"How I would lay my palm

In the hollow of your belly

The rhythm of your breath

Our lips lightly touching

How my tongue would love

To travel your curves

Sweet and gentle

The way I would."

I thumbed through several pages more, and I noticed how most of these poems were like this. And my heart gave way at the thought of her loving another man and picturing this man lying with her, and maybe I should take the gun off the top shelf and hunt him down, perhaps kill the man in cold blood. Yet I still wasn't sure. This was poetry after all, and I knew enough about poetry not to confuse the poet herself with the speaker in the poem. Perhaps Bonnie had her own internal world where she fiercely imagined such episodes with a man she had never met before. She was both intelligent and highly imaginative when it came to her work, so I couldn't go off the deep end just yet. I needed a plan or something to prove that this other man in our bed really existed.

When Bonnie returned from the grocery store late that afternoon, a row of brown paper bags in her arms, I said that I had been called away on urgent business.

"But we're on vacation," she said. "You don't work during the summer."

"I know, but this is an urgent matter. I'll be back in a few days."

"I don't know if I like the idea of staying here all by myself."

I walked up to her and held her by the shoulders. I hadn't been this close to her in several days. Our bed had become two separate halves of what ought to have been a unified whole. Knowing what I knew, being so close to her made me feel awkward, as though I didn't belong so close to her anymore. I kissed her on the cheek, and said, "you'll be fine. You can even call me on my cell if you need to."

"If you have to go, you have to go," she said. "I guess I could use the time for my writing. An empty house won't be so bad. I guess I'll be productive."

"Yes, I bet you will be," I said, checking the hazel in her eyes.

I packed a few clothes and left the cabin knowing full-well that I would return very soon, just to check up on her. I also took the gun, because I would be a stranger in a town that sat like a welt between low mountains and the pristine beauty of the lake. The town had always been an eyesore, and vacationers who visited from elsewhere usually stayed away from it. But I revved up the Jag and sailed into town with the top down. I found a room at the local inn and parked myself there for what may have been several days of melancholy over the potential loss of my wife. I found the room comfortable and large enough to pace in, as I had a long night of waiting ahead of me.

The Inn itself, a throwback to old New England colonialism, also had a small watering hole-cum-restaurant, and luckily for me they were still serving dinner. I marched down a creaky set of stairs from my room on the second floor and ordered a cold pint of beer. I hadn't had a beer in a long while, considering that I had vowed not too long ago to give up my drinking habit. The beer, however, tasted cold and bitter in my mouth, the carbonation on my tongue like cold, frothy surf. I couldn't deny that the drink, along with the peanuts they served in small fingerbowls, satisfied an appetite that would have normally been voracious so early in the evening.

There was a benefit in being away from Bonnie, I thought, and its dividends came as soon as I took that first sip of beer. A weight within me had lifted, or better yet, a wall that had been closing me in had finally ruptured and had given way to a wider, deeper space, albeit a dark one. I couldn't deny that my first flight into freedom felt as good as any night chained to my cabin sofa. The distance between us had made vacationing up at the lake unbearable, and a quick glance into the television screen above the bar, advertising a nymph along the beach with nothing but a string bikini on, almost lured me into leaving the country for a while. But I was wiser than that. A quick getaway wouldn't repair my marriage any quicker, and things had to be settled before I could leave. We're assuming here that Bonnie did sleep with this other man. I searched my heart deeply and knew this to be a fact. I couldn't trust her nomadic heart anymore.

As I finished my first, and also my last, pint of beer, a familiar face loomed just beyond the saloon doors. I didn't want to say hello to him, but our eyes met, and he smiled in salutation. Suddenly I remembered him. It was Walt MacDougal, the local handyman who often worked on the cabins up at the lake. I didn't feel like talking to anyone, let alone him, but there was no one else in the place, and the television served up its uninterrupted spasms of attention deficiency, and so I called Walt MacDougal over to the bar. He wore a loose-fitting pair of faded carpenter's jeans and a T-shirt splotched over with dried paint. Bonnie had told me that he also painted artistically and recently had an opening at the town's gallery that catered to us wealthy folk on the lake. He wore a scraggly beard and on his head sat a baseball cap with a perfectly curved brim. After college he never quite made it all the way through to the working world.

"Hey, Mr. Law," he called to me from the bar's entrance. He seemed as giddy as a school kid and practically skipped to where I sat at the bar, holding his hand out for me to shake it.

"Hello, Walt," I said glumly.

"What brings you into town?" he asked.

"I'm officially on a business trip," I said, "so I thought I'd pop by for a drink."

"Y'know that roof of yours needs fixin'. We found that sag in it the last time I was over."

"I know. I haven't gotten around to calling you yet. Give me a little time, and we'll have you over."

"Is this your first time here? I would have never expected you of all people to be in a place like this."

"I'm on a business trip. I'm on my way out of town."

"For how long?"

"A couple of days."

"Because I can go over and have that sag fixed."

"It won't be necessary, but thanks anyway."

"Okay. Well, I better get going. Maybe you'll visit here more often."

"Probably not, Walt, but good seeing you."

He then skipped out of the bar as quickly as he entered it, and I returned to drinking what remained of my beer before heading back to my room upstairs.

I tried to wait for at least twenty-four hours, but a jumpy nervousness attacked me from all sides. I tried sleeping and even contemplated having another pint downstairs, but my own thoughts kept me anxious and flipping in my bed like a caught fish. I soon decided, while watching the late local news, that I would check in on Bonnie later that night, and so I waited patiently, hoping to rid myself of the harrowing uncertainty.

Of course, a small part of me hoped that she was seeing another man, just so I could exact a debilitating revenge for seven soulless years of her icy indifference and deception. But only a small part of me wanted this. The rest of me wanted things to move on as usual, and perhaps we might be able to rekindle whatever sparks of passion the cruel passing of time had doused. Yet such ideas of reconciliation were fleeting, as I only imagined my revenge, or at least catching her openly with this curly-haired, Twisted Sister delinquent. What gave her the right to make me feel so ridiculous? Did she actually think I would have never found out about her tryst with some muscle-headed moron who didn't know how precise and exacting my revenge could be? And above all I imagined her face when I accuse her of being unfaithful, and if that stranger happens to be someone I know, why I'd gut his innards with a butcher's knife and eat the entrails with my burnt morning toast. But these were only fleeting thoughts climbing deftly along my growing web of worry. I knew I was being a bit presumptuous, but I could not deny my feelings any longer. Her poetry had cast me into a darkness that only her renewed devotion and love could dispel.

I had dressed in black trousers and a black shirt. I went down to the car and checked the chambers of the revolver that I had slipped into the glove compartment. The gun was loaded, and I readied myself for moving like an assassin through the thick forest behind our cabin. The nighttime brought a chill with it, and as I sped to the lake, my pulse quickening with each torturous mile I traveled, I brushed away thoughts of ramming my car right through the windows of our charming living room. But I parked the Jag quietly to the side of the lane that spun around the cabin's entrance, and carefully I shut off the lights and the ignition to find myself engulfed in an eerie darkness and a silence that deafened what would have normally been a pleasant evening of shrilling crickets and strange furry rodents scurrying along the forest floor. My feet broke the branches underfoot. Each snap and break of brittle wood was like a cold injection into my nervous system. I came upon one of the many birch trees that marked the immediate perimeter of the property and leaned against its gaunt trunk to peer into our bedroom window.

The old candles I had bought her for her birthday a couple of years ago were all alight. They illumined the interior of our bedroom. And when I moved in closer for a better view, I saw Walt MacDougal's flexed backside moving in and out of my wife's supine body on the bed, her legs wrapped tightly around him, the creaking and rocking of the mattress crying into the rolls of forest beyond our bedroom.

I watched their frolicking for several minutes, their nude bodies writhing amidst a flurry of tangled sheets. The soft outlines of their flesh were two symmetrical halves that swayed like the sound-waves of a corrosive melody playing repeatedly in my ears, as I could not escape the sound of their bodies plunging into each other. It was as potently damaging as claps of thunder on the first days of spring. And after they had finished their tirade, they held each other in the glow of the candlelight. I still waited for Bonnie to blow out the candles before brandishing my gun. I had been reduced to some perverted voyeur spying on the indiscretions of my wife, and I clutched the cool weight of the revolver as though my entire self-worth as a man depended on it. I could have fired at them from outside, but no, I wanted them to see my cold blue eyes and recognize their treachery before I blew their brains out. I waited until they fell asleep and sat shivering in the woods for an hour or so.

I then maneuvered around the cabin in the darkness, walking softly and bending back the spiny branches that slapped at my body. Most of the lights were out save for the kitchen, and I tiptoed into the living room with my gun cocked and ready. The door creaked open when I entered the bedroom, but it did not stir them. Cautiously I tread upon the soft carpet and stood above them as their bodies entwined rose and fell, their breathing calm and satisfied. My wife's bare arms and legs were tangled in his body, and I envied how comfortable they looked together. I nudged the barrel of my revolver against the back of Bonnie's head which was face-down in the pillows, her porcelain back a succulent slab of flesh that I still desired for myself. But just then her breathing was cut short, and I immediately retracted my revolver and stepped back from the bed. She moaned in her sleep and turned over, nestling even closer to the side of Walt MacDougal's chiseled body. The moonlight melting through the window illumined her face and neck, and I realized just then how much I really loved her and what a shame it would be to mutilate such an exquisite beauty.

I must have stood beside the shadowy bed for hours deciding whether or not I should do away with her. She had been, perhaps, the only woman in my entire life I genuinely related to, and I remember the happier times of our younger years when our love bloomed and seemed destined to endure. She looked just as lovely now as she did back then, the memories of our wedding day bathed in an eternal purity, only to have decayed years later. And I remembered her in that wedding dress, a gift from her mother, her visage like an angel descending upon this barren earth....

I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. I still loved her, and even though she had wounded me like a primordial animal sacrificed in the wilderness, I could not bear the consequences of living without her. I calmly un-cocked the revolver and tiptoed out of our cabin the same way I came in. Back at the inn, I wrestled with the decision I had made to spare both of their lives. It amazed me how every human being had the capacity to kill another, no matter what one's size or shape was, or the color of one's skin, male or female. We can somehow be very dangerous when we want to be—from those who express their most violent fantasies to those who exude the external tact of fake reticence and charm. Guns are only a medium, a vessel if you will, for our innate capacity to kill. Take away guns and we would maim, as it is we ourselves who are the true weapons operating in our lives, not these material objects that dispose of human life more efficiently than our bare hands otherwise would.

I awoke the next morning with a start. I had overslept. I ran my head under warm water and shaved the stubble off my cheeks with a dull razor. I wanted to return to the cabin. I wanted to patch things up with my wife in order to continue our marriage, so that I wouldn't have to kill her.

She sat on the living room couch when I had arrived, reading a book of poetry. She ran up to me and kissed me on my dried, cracked lips.

"Back so soon?" she asked me, her eyes as bright as a rabbit's.

"I cut my trip short," I said. "I wanted to be with you."

"Awww, honey, you didn't have to do that."

"Yes, I did. I had to tell you that I'm still in love with you after all these years."

"That's so sweet," she said while turning away.

"I know we've had our problems, Bonnie, and I'm here telling you that we'll work it out. I promise we will."

"Awww, sweetie. I am happy, and I'm still in love with you too. Why would you ever think of these things? We have a great life together."

She drifted into my arms just then, and I held her close to me, our lips locking for a moment, maybe two.

"I get confused sometimes, Bonnie, that's all. I want you to be happy. This is the one thing that I want from life, for you to be happy."

"I am happy, sweetie—really I am. Listen, how about we picnic down at the lake this afternoon? You'd like that wouldn't you?"

"Yes. I'd like that very much," I said.

"Good. I'll prepare a basket for us. I picked out a nice bottle of wine too."

As she prepared our lunch in the kitchen, she suddenly called out,

"Oh, and honey, Walt MacDougal phoned this morning."

"Oh? He did, did he?"

"Yes. He says he wants to fix the sag in our roof once and for all. He said it would be a little expensive, but I told him to go ahead and do it. I hope you don't mind."

"Not at all, my dearest," I said ever so softly. "Walt MacDougal has always been a great help to us."
CHRISTOPHER WHEELING

KEVIN LARKIN ANGIOLI

He couldn't explain why so many scientific minds so often turned to poetry.

"I mean my father's an accountant for Chirssakes," he said to his comrade of the day, a young undergraduate named Kevin Angioli, who attended SUNY New Paltz.

They were at a college bar along the strip drinking beer. Loud music blasted from overhanging speakers, and the darkness of the bar only accentuated its cold, damp interior, the air conditioners turned up to full throttle, the bar suddenly becoming quite crowded without the heat one would normally expect when young, hormonal-throbbing bodies were packed too tightly together. These people talked about what exactly? Christopher couldn't say.

"But you're a poet," said Kevin in his usual optimistic chord. "All this shit's meaningless compared to that."

Kevin had always been an idealist but more the kind that caroused with a cadre of practical jokers.

"I still need to make money, though," said Christopher. "Money, schmoney. Follow your heart. It's the only way out of here alive."

Kevin then downed a double-shot of whiskey and went flying into the crowd to talk to a couple of women he recognized. He left Christopher by himself with a half-pint of beer to go, his head swimming near delirium. It amused him after a while how so many of these people clamored around him and slurred their speech in the same exact way, and yet how alone he felt all the same, as though a strange light had shone from above and isolated him from the collective tug of orgiastic partying that took place almost every Friday at this same location. Christopher, after all, was more prone to thought than speech, his emotions hanging like museum watercolors on the inside of him, his reserve a staple defense against anything that didn't make perfect, rational sense, as numbers sometimes did. Nevertheless, a brilliant young poet he was, and for this solitary mission in life he had to forgive the shallow talk of others and contemplate shit that kneeled before an older age.

The students surrounding him talked about meaningless things, as all interactions with women had to stay close to the surface. They discussed what party so-and-so went to, the latest movie that captured so-and-so's attention, the small talk, in other words, that sealed off a man's depth as though he had to hide his intellect while in the company of this cheery throng of polished apples ready for corporate America. It made perfect sense to him, and yet it made no sense at all. The women and men colliding together could very well have been bald sopranos trading chirps of language just to hear themselves talk, or perhaps just to size each other up before they took each other to bed. And Christopher was a decent-looking young man yet so very grave with all of this poetry hanging around his neck like bulbs of stale garlic. Social graces were not his forte, but, man, could he put together words on a page. Unfortunately, the many young girls holding their drinks, like bourgeois glamour queens in front of industrial film cameras, just didn't get it, and Christopher at the bar, drinking as any poet half-mad would, couldn't help but feel the bite of his own gravity, sinking him into the low lull of the underworld—a place, coincidentally, where there was nothing to do but drink and contemplate and perhaps strategize on how he would rejoin the living. Behind him he saw Kevin Angioli entertaining the girls. Their bodies were shapely and warm but not as inviting as he would have liked. It wasn't the fear of talking to them that most challenged him, however. It was, in fact, the fear of the empty, narrow space he would undoubtedly move into when words did not reveal themselves as readily as streams of thought did. And those sweeping moments of awkwardness would salt their overall impressions, albeit false ones, that the women didn't find Christopher to be all that interesting, no matter how improbable this may have seemed. That empty space—if one could isolate it or even bottle it—could destroy worlds, and to avoid it, one had to brainstorm complete conversations before they actually happened. Women, after all, don't want to start out kissing. First they talk, and the more entertaining the talk, the more exponential their interest. Perhaps Christopher imagined kissing the woman who now playfully flirted with his pal on the other side of the room and at the same time thought conversation a bit too ridiculous, because of the fruitless effort it took to arrive at the desired outcome, which was to win the girl's heart.

Perhaps Christopher wanted the outcome too quickly and disliked the humiliating process of it, as though every word of a woman's conversation molded him until she alone became satisfied with the product? Whatever the case may have been, Kevin made the women laugh and giggle in his presence. Kevin was brazen enough to carry on like a New Age lunatic in front of them, and his speech must have sounded inviting, his thick eyelashes batting over a pair of pregnable blue eyes as he invited the girls to join his circus. This, Christopher decided, is what he needed—to learn from this guy—much like a reticent Kerouac learned from an extroverted Neal Cassidy—as Kevin was a man who may have trumped modern maturity by employing the manipulations of a teenager always on the verge of getting laid for the first time.

He didn't remember how he got home from the bar too well. He remembered getting into Kevin's car, and that's when he blacked-out, which shut off all of his circuits. He awoke in his bed on the second floor of his parent's house fully clothed, the answering machine blinking with several messages. His parents, luckily, had usually left him to his own devices and did not overprotect him from the cheap thrills his nights out on the town afforded him, even though they had lectured him every once in a while about not driving drunk and gave him a slew of other emergency instructions, should he ever need them. By and by though, Christopher had always been a responsible bloke and took their advice seriously. And the messages blinking at him on the machine could only be from Kevin, last night's provocateur.

"Hey man, the girls want to go out again," said Kevin on the machine. "They liked you, and they want you to come. Give me a ring back as soon as you get this."

Kevin had left a second message saying the same, only Christopher was too hung-over to deal with the prospect of seeing two lovely women that evening. The sunshine casting its light into his bed sent a communiqué of responsibility and the hardships of the working world to contend with, now that he had been out of SUNY New Paltz for a couple of years. Waking up just to go to a bar all over again didn't sit well with him, but he would do so, because the idea of being in the presence of these women enchanted him more than having to look for a summer job. He checked the wall clock for the time. To his astonishment it was nearly four in the afternoon, the sunlight weakening steadily.

He met Kevin and the girls after a quick breakfast at the local convenience store. A compact breakfast sandwich, complete with eggs, a sausage patty, and a slice of cheese, couldn't have been any easier. He liked the compactness of the food, even though it was priced much higher than what he could have made at home. The bar tonight, however, wouldn't be so easy to digest. They would hang out at their regular watering hole, a place called _Bacchus_ , which was one of many bars girdling the main strip of road that ran through the center of New Paltz. The strip, in fact, had already been teeming with cars with their windows rolled down, an amalgam of hip-hop and pop rock emptying into the street. When Christopher arrived on the scene, it seemed like it would be a night like any other, and yet a hint of excitement had welled within him—the type of expectation that whispered softly into his ears that he may in fact get lucky if he didn't appear so stiff and withdrawn as he did the night before. He was still a bit hung-over, but the eager swill of booze would replace such discomfort. He entered the bar with a radar's precision, scoping the place out for signs of Kevin and the two girls he had reeled in. He spotted them at a table laughing at a joke Kevin had just made, a full pitcher of beer glimmering in all of its golden splendor at the center of the table.

When he pulled up a chair, the two women smiled at him, and Kevin flashed a mischievous grin that said his entire orchestra had been playing on cue and the desired outcome of the night would be achieved. Yes, after too many years of moping from bar to bar, it would finally be achieved, this final solution to the end of all of his insecurities and fears, his reticence and reserve.

"Christopher! These are my two friends, Lucy and Lizzie."

"Pleasure to meet you, ladies," he said, pouring himself a full glass of beer. "How long were you guys waiting?"

"Not long. We were just discussing the Karma Sutra."

"The Karma—what?"

"Oh come on now, Christopher. You've heard of the Karma Sutra, haven't you?"

"I've heard of it, but I've never studied it or anything like that," he chuckled nervously.

"Well," said Kevin, "these lovely young women have agreed to give the both of us a lesson on it tonight, isn't that right?"

The two women smiled coyly, but they confirmed that they were more than willing to experiment with their newfound knowledge. The woman who had been automatically paired with Christopher placed her hand on his. It was a sign of solidarity, should Christopher go along with the plan. She was a little on the plump side, now that he could see her properly, but she was attractive all the same. Kevin, sitting directly opposite him, would take the young, Hollywood starlet on his side, and together they would delve into the private mysteries of the South Asian sex manual. Christopher could only pour himself another drink after he downed his first. He needed to get rid of his smarts and his intellect in order to be with these women, his thoughts churning, as the easy, carefree sex he would have had been massaging his hands in the form of a woman, and she stared at him with eyes that hungered and therefore betrayed her initial shyness.

At this point Christopher wanted to do the honorable thing, and that involved actually talking to the woman who would soon be his sex partner. If he stayed silent, it wouldn't have altered the outcome of the evening any, but he reasoned that if he talked just a little bit, got to know her just a little bit, he may win her heart, as that was the prize beyond whatever sex they would soon have. But his conversation drew blanks, as though his ability to talk as freely and uninhibitedly as Kevin caught him focusing on Kevin and the other girl instead of the girl on his arm.

"What's your name, by the way," he asked the girl massaging his hand, after searching Kevin for clues.

"It's Lizzie," she said.

"Well, Lizzie, what do you do?"

"I'm a student here at SUNY."

"Oh. Well, what are you studying?"

"Astrology."

"Astrology? SUNY has an astrology department?"

"I hope so. It's why I came to study here."

"But I don't think SUNY has an astrology department. I think you mean the other one."

"Which is?"

"You mean to study 'astronomy,' not astrology. Astronomy and astrology are two very different things. You should know the difference before you get into it."

"But I have my heart set on astrology."

"Yeah, but they're different."

The conversation soon veered into Christopher's scholarly discourse comparing and contrasting astrology and astronomy, and by the time he was finished, all of them looked at him as though he were a creature from outer-space himself. Even Kevin with his thick, effete eyelashes hung his mouth agape at his friend who was now satisfied that his lecture on astronomy touched upon all of the finer points.

"You're probably at the wrong school for what you really want to study," said Christopher to his girl, who by this time had her entire universe shattered by this man.

"But that's why I came to school here," she said, on the verge of tears. "My mother is an astrologist, and she saved all of her life savings for me to come here. So is my aunt."

"It's considered a pseudo-science in these parts," said Christopher, "but that doesn't make it any less real. Hey,

I'm all for it."

And then an uncomfortable silence gripped the table. More partygoers had entered the bar, but their table was still as silent as a vacant parking lot. Christopher even thought he saw a tear or two escaping from the girl's eyes. "I think we better get going," said Kevin's girl after what seemed like an endless silence.

"Don't leave. Please," begged Kevin suddenly.

"I'll call you later," she said, and before the two young men knew it, the two girls had vacated the premises, leaving them alone to finish what remained of the beer.

"Women," said Christopher declaratively. "Sometimes they're so fickle. They run hot, and then they run cold."

Shortly thereafter, Kevin was pulled away by a couple of other women he knew, and once again Christopher sat by himself at the table, a white light hovering above him and isolating him from the rest of the throng. He looked to where Kevin entertained the new women at the end of the bar and continued to search for clues. He didn't regret the conversation with the girl who had just left, however. In the end, the truth would be kinder to her than a mountain of lies spewed from the lips of the next man who tried to get her in the sack. He couldn't exactly say why the women had left, though. He had only presented the facts, and perhaps there was something about the truth they secretly disliked. But Christopher would never lie to a girl, and this may or may not have been the problem. His integrity rested upon truth, which is also why the women always seemed to get away.
WILL NIXON

After four years of living in Hoboken, Will Nixon surmised that he actually liked living there and was too hesitant to vacate the apartment he and his wife had shared. His marriage of ten years had recently collapsed, his wounds still fresh from a court battle that had dragged on for several weeks. She got most of it, by the way—the apartment, the car, the art they collected, and all the furniture. Will was left with a used television set and a savings bond that could have bought another used television set but not much else.

At first they decided to settle their divorce amicably, but when irreconcilable issues over who would get what tipped their dispute into full discord, their venom injected even more poison into the all-out battle, rendering Will hurt, drained, and lifeless, especially on account of the lawyer his now ex-wife had hired, as he happened to be his best friend from the law firm he worked at and also the man who slept with her during their beleaguered marriage. For someone as soft-spoken and good-hearted as Will, nearby New York City certainly did a tap dance on his soul, stomping it out like the heavy blanket suffocating a fire. But rather than hold any spite or hatred towards his ex-wife and the lawyer/adulterer who had suddenly moved in with her, he considered instead that it was simply time to get the last of his stuff—the news clippings, the picture frames, and a few CDs—and load what few items he had into his old VW wagon and head upstate, which was a totally new direction for a man who had been forced to change course. Steering the boat that carried him had never come easily, especially when no one served as his compass any longer. He closed the hatch, got in the car, and simply sped off, never to return to the city that nurtured the likes of Sinatra and Stephen Foster.

He had an apartment rented in Woodstock, a place where he could finally work on his poetry instead of slaving away on telephones all day, the suit he wore at the firm as stiff as a corpse and all the money he had saved up to buy a house with his then bride-to-be spent on lawyers' fees and wasted on court charges. Their first years of marriage were nights of imported champagne, Baccarat crystal, custom-made tuxedoes, diamond earrings, and gold cufflinks. It seemed a far cry from the person he had been reduced to, as his take on how the divorce went still found him pessimistic and cynical.

The lawyer who screwed him over also happened to be the best man at his wedding, and he was the closest thing Will had ever come to knowing a real-life playboy. Will had remained hard-working and responsible, though, while his friend seduced half of the young paralegals in the office pool. His friend also matched his climb up the corporate ladder every step of the way. Will lived somewhat vicariously at times but saved all of his love for his wife, until, of course, she turned as cold as an iceberg over a period of several months. Her coldness pierced him gradually, like an icicle into the heart, as her cheating eyes revealed another woman entirely, someone he hardly knew anymore, as she had changed her shape to fit the interloper who joined them for dinner almost every weekend with some new bimbo on his arm, their looks as unreal as the magazine covers they could have been on, her teeth bleached by white sand, their suntanned skins a result from recent visits to uncharted islands down in the Caribbean. It was amazing how this playboy best man got around, how his silk Italian suits and Rolex watches carried women away. He didn't have to try as hard as Will did to get the things he wanted. That's not to say that Will harbored any kind of jealousy towards him, but at times, especially when he came over for dinner, he realized how easily the world succumbed to this man—a Richard Corey in the flesh with his slicked-back hair and Satanic grin, his wallet always padded with the latest platinum credit card. In fact, it became an ongoing bet between him and his wife to see whom he would show up to dinner with next, or better yet, what new automobile he would boast about, or what exotic vacation he planned. Will and his wife were always too responsible for this slick corporate type, but Will had been friends with him ever since law school. He helped him struggle with his final exams. He even took him to his family's place up in Vermont when he broke up with one of his many teenage sweethearts.

He thought about his ex-best-friend as he drove along the Thruway, passed Harriman, and into the bucolic Catskills. His wife actually never showed any outward affection for his best friend, at least as far as Will could tell. In fact, his wife hardly said anything to him when they had him over. At first she begrudgingly accepted him, and their friendship over the course of a couple of years seemed to be a quiet one with the occasional stare back and forth over the rims of their wine glasses, the silverware always clinking to the new dish she served on the family china. Will even wanted them to be closer, but apparently this must have been too much of an irony for them when the central figure in their lives had been sealing his own doom all along. They had to act separate and indifferent towards each other, if only to hide their lovemaking when Will had to stay late preparing briefs for long afternoons in court. Will even remembered trying so hard to pour passion into his work—more passion, at least, than his best man ever showed with his.

And as he worked longer hours, his wife's coldness infiltrated their bedroom. It started with arguments over the silliest of things, like leaving the plates in the sink or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning—the little stabs and jabs that flayed him layer by layer. When he lost a major case that had gone to trial, his wife didn't talk to him for a week straight and turned him away when he made any sort of overture. It was like adding a killing to a routine death, and what made it all the more difficult, in his opinion, was her sudden announcement that she didn't want to have children and wanted, eventually, to move out of their Hoboken townhouse to be closer to her parents in Connecticut.

"I'm just not ready," she said in bed late one evening. "Let's wait a while."

"I thought we talked about this," he said, propping himself up on a pillow in the darkness.

"There's too much going on right now. I want to make the move to Litchfield, and you're always at the office, and my mother is sick. Maybe this is not the time."

"Then when will it be the right time?" he demanded to know. "We should have a child—the sooner, the better."

"I don't know," she said. "I'm just in a different space right now. I can't say anything more than that."

And their conversations continued like this for at least twice a week for several months straight. He couldn't figure out what had besieged his wife. He remembered how they had been so completely in love, but then what had been so strong and solid broke like a twig, as though something foreign had chipped away at their foundation and left a desiccated leaf in its place, only to be stomped on and crushed by the boot-heel of his best friend.

When the divorce proceedings started, he still didn't know why she was leaving him. The litany of reasons she gave in the courtroom hid the other, more sensitive reasons that only she knew about and wouldn't reveal to anyone. She concealed her motives and feigned loving him, right up to the point when his best friend served him the divorce papers. She had prepared for it well in advance. She had arranged the entire fiasco, and Will, being unprepared, lost everything to her.

While driving at the base of the mountains, the hot anger that should have been vented during the divorce bled through the folds of his consciousness, his foot weighing heavily on the accelerator, the car's engine revving higher. His anger was a bludgeoning afterthought, and as the car gained speed and passed by the other old clunkers in the middle lane, he became oblivious to the road and only hurtled towards his overdue revenge. He built up a list of terrible things to say to his ex-wife just to hurt her in some way, just to let her know how mendacious and treacherous she turned out to be. He would one day dance on her grave for the hell she put him through, and in the middle of the highway, he slowed the car down and made an illegal U-turn at a break in the road, his tires burning up the blacktop. He then headed back towards Hoboken, evading capture by the State Police. He floored the car for what must have been a half-hour of silent rage, his list of insults growing and turning more bitter with every mile.

By the time he made it to the previous exit, however, his rage had simmered and cooled. He slowed the car down and moved to the shoulder of the road where he held his head in his hands and wondered where the strange conniption had come from. The pleasant Will Nixon had resurfaced—the one who said that it was better living without her, better that he bury his old life in the streets of New Jersey, and advance into a new one replete with what mattered to him most—his art, wondrous nature, and solitude, as the decaying cities could never provide these fundamental elements of a good man's life. And perhaps she did spit on his heart, and maybe his best friend did betray him like the Judas he was, but as the cars flew by him, he recognized that he didn't need his wife anymore, no matter how deeply she had burrowed into his heart.

As he shifted the car into drive, he couldn't help but notice the police cruiser that had crept up softly behind him, its lights flashing and its siren suddenly making yet another example of him.
DONALD LEV

'Does anyone ever dream anymore?' he asked himself as his cab turned a corner on East 10th Street and headed south on Second Avenue. On his left stood the old Jewish deli that had been in operation since the beginning of time—and when you drive a cab for a living, time becomes an entirely different creature. At times he had too much of it on his hands, and then suddenly he finds a customer and discovers that he's rushing in the middle of traffic to the airports out in Long Island, or the train station— always the train station—up on 34th Street. But as of late the city seemed so still that he really had to wonder where his fate was leading him, as his questions loomed a bit more profoundly when all his customers headed back to their homes after rush hour and a quiet calm froze the streets like a third-world curfew.

The profundities of existence usually hit him at three in the morning. Most of the shops in the village were closed, and his customers were mainly late-night revelers, down and out junkies, or husbands who had been kicked out of their townhouses and had to spend the night in one of the many tiny hotel rooms that charged them five-star prices. It always seemed a bit unusual to be headed in no particular direction and traveling somewhere all the same, and on occasion he would get a customer who added reality to an otherwise illusory station in life, but these customers were few for a man who slept during the day and worked all night.

The city had been slow to make something substantive out of the night economy, and yet the night lent him a peace he could never find during daylight hours. For starters, the streets were nearly empty, and he rolled down his window to let the cool twilight tousle his hair. He cherished the cool air as his cab drifted up and down the slanted side-streets of Greenwich Village free from obstruction. No one beeped their horns at this hour. The streets were tranquil, and he might as well search for customers around the bars and night clubs. He liked to call this side of reality 'the night side,' and for most people the night side meant partying all night, dancing until sunrise, or joining a Bohemian rave that lasted a full week. But the excitement usually tapered off by four in the morning. With the fresh air close to his skin and a serenity that came with the greater space beyond the front hood of his taxi, he knew daytime to be the crazier of the two worlds. In the daytime, people overachieved, as opposed to the night side, which certainly paid less, but afforded the liberty of silence. Night itself, to differentiate it from loneliness, became Donald's best companion and fit his curmudgeonly sides like a waterbed that formed to his body. The streets became his streets, and the world became his world, as the night side resurrected the illusion of control as opposed to the chaos sunlight brought with it.

Perhaps that's what he wanted—a little more control over pestering uncertainties, the freedom to change lanes if he so desired, the comfort of knowing that the unruliness of the universe existed outside of him and not within him, as his cab always became a blanket that protected him from the nightmare of frenetic activity. And his nightmares were stress, confusion, and dark visions. Staying awake all night usually dispelled them. He could actually see the darkness, as though it were its own separate entity. It was an odd position to be in, certainly, and many thought him strange and aloof for his allegiance to the night side, but somehow the separation of the two sides, both day and night, was needed.

And when the sky turned light and pinkish, he knew his time was up, and after a buttered muffin and a pint of orange juice from a Korean grocer he had gotten to know over the years, he parked his cab near his apartment and stumbled up to bed, his shades drawn and his air conditioner on full-blast. When he awoke, an endless tangle of cars and trucks clogged the streets, their horn blares, squealing brakes, and rumbling exhausts serving as his alarm clock. Once again he would face the city alone, and he made sure to pinch himself from time to time to remind himself that he wasn't dreaming anymore. He ran his stiff body under cold water. A cab driver still needed to be alert. He put on what he wore yesterday along with a baseball cap that tamed his hair, and out the door he went. His cab remained untouched and ever-yellow as it sat on a side street like an abandoned carcass. Before long, he cruised the lower end of Manhattan, from the East Village to the financial district, and made good money ferrying passengers to happy hour. A few of his passengers worried him a bit, but generally it was a safe night. No one had attacked him in his cab for several years, and his sense of security came from a small handgun that he stored in the glove compartment, just below the yellowing placard that displayed his license. Carrying a gun just came with the territory. Luckily, he never had the need to use the gun, but if he had to, he would. Cab drivers were easy targets. He made sure the plexiglass barrier separating him and his passengers was closed all the way and locked with a bolt.

It wasn't until midnight that a touch of loneliness finally settled in and his thoughts once again waxed more philosophical. The city streetlights and traffic signals became points along an ever-darkening axis, and hot neon bursts of beer and liquor brands illumined the otherwise sullen shop windows in front of which stray bits of litter swirled in the vortexes of slight breezes. After circling the lower end of Manhattan a couple of times, he finally picked up a young, very well-dressed gentleman who flagged him down outside of a brownstone on East 4th Street. Donald couldn't help but notice the small book he carried under his arm. It was a slim volume of verse by a poet he had never heard of, as he could barely discern the print on the book's cover.

Donald dabbled in poetry in his younger years, and he still wrote a poem from time to time, usually after his shift or when the inspiration struck him. He unbolted the plexiglass barrier and slid open the divide in an effort to talk to this young man about his poetry.

Whenever he had the opportunity to engage in intelligent conversation he did so, as the kid seemed to be straight out of NYU, the place Donald could have attended as young man out of high school. But Donald couldn't afford such a school, and so he banged out his degree at City College uptown—the poor man's Harvard, they used to call it. And even though he stopped writing poetry several years ago, the possibility of discussing the current state of poetic affairs with a kid who looked like he was at the center of it all immediately piqued his curiosity.

The poets he had at one time consorted with were generally a bunch of ragged rebellious-types who lived in old tenements in the outer-boroughs. They were a queer and colorful lot who railed against injustices by supporting union strikes and squatter's rights, an end to all war that had profit as its underlying motive, the protection of the city's most vulnerable, and higher pay for those slaving away at minimum wage. They were the first to sign up for a rally and the last to land full-time desk jobs. They usually lived on the margins and found solace in ranting and raving about the high costs of rent and gun violence in the ghettos. They sat in jazz clubs and inhaled thick, blue smoke until their lungs were charred straight through, and they often longed for better worlds where life was easier and less steeped in the frenetic paranoia that continually stalked and haunted the lives of their loved-ones.

It seemed a bit odd, then, that this kid with a book of poems under his arm had dressed in a silk suit with a pair of silver cufflinks the size of dollar coins at his wrists. He also wore French cologne that overpowered the otherwise dank mustiness of the cab. Donald had become so used to the scent of his own cab that the cologne smelled unnatural and synthetic against the funky earthiness of what remained. He had given rides to many of the city's young people before, especially when the clubs closed down for the night, but he never expected to find a poet so elegantly dressed sitting in his cab. Nevertheless, he was interested in him, but only at first. The kid told him where to go, and after a few minutes of cruising up Third Avenue, Donald said to him, "I see you have a book of poems there," as he checked him out in the rearview mirror.

"Oh, this?" said the kid. "A friend of mine wrote it. She just had a book signing at the Barnes and Noble on 84th Street."

"Wow. That's got to be exciting."

"Not really," said the kid. "I've been to about a dozen this month. They get boring after a while. Why? Do you read poetry?"

"I dabble a bit. And you?"

"I'm a poet, yes."

"Anything published?"

"My collection of poems was just published by a major publishing house a few months ago, in fact."

"A major publishing house? Sounds like you hit the jackpot."

"I could have stayed on Wall Street, but who wants to manage a hedge fund all day—am I right, or am I right?"

Donald cracked a smile, albeit a fake one.

"Being a poet is so much more exciting," said the kid. "I never thought of it as exciting before," said Donald. "Who the hell wants to work in some high rise? There's

a party almost every night in this damned town."

"How did you get into poetry of all things, if you don't mind my asking."

"I know a bunch of people in the business. My uncle, in fact, worked at a publishing house in midtown, and he introduced me to a lot of literary types. Their kids and I played together all during grade school. I guess I just fell into it."

"And now you're a poet."

"More like a socialite."

"What do you mean by that, if you don't mind my asking."

"It's just a pig-fuck is what I'm saying. Do you know how many drugs these people take?"

"You mean poets in general?"

"No, I mean the poets in the city. Man, it might as well be Studio 54, but don't call it poetry."

"A lot of parties, huh?"

"You got that right. All of these upper-crust women straight out of these sister schools, all of them wanting to be poets. Can you imagine? Promise them a book deal, and they'll marry you the next day."

"I guess the world of poetry has changed."

"Oh, it hasn't changed one bit. It's still the same pig-fuck it always was. With writers it's even worse. Everyone's out for themselves. Paint it with a spray can and call it art. That's the way this town works."

"It's not at all that way," said Donald. "There are more serious poets out there who work on their poetry."

"Yeah, but who wants to be them," sniggered the kid. "They usually don't have a chance in hell of making it out from the rock they've been hiding under. I mean, can you imagine slaving away on poetry all day? Or imagine being a novelist. Imagine having to work at it with no end in sight, and meanwhile, you're putting a second mortgage on the house to write a book no one will ever read? It's much more predetermined than that is what I'm trying to tell you. It's cream that rises to the top, not hard work. These days you have to be camera-ready."

"I must be getting older," smiled Don.

"C'mon. It has always been this way. All of my friends are in publishing, and they tell me these wild stories."

"Like what?"

"A good friend of mine owns a mid-sized press with an office near Union Square. He does poetry mostly, and prose just on occasion."

"Someone I'd like to know."

"Nah, not really. He's really a dork. But anyway, so this guy's going to a club one night to celebrate his dad's death—he got a lot of money out of it, by the way—and he hires a limo to take him. Little does he know that when he gets in the limo, there's a woman in the back seat waiting for him. He's never seen this woman in his life, but she's wearing next to nothing. So he does what anyone with a hard-on would do—he gets in."

"What does this have to do with poetry?"

"I'm getting to that. It turns out that the woman in the back seat had a friend who knew of this guy. She knew he was in the publishing business. She paid the limo company a thousand bucks to let one of her friends drive the limo that night. So the two of them went to pick-up this guy, and boom! An instant match with her legs spread wide open in the back seat. Turns out the girl screwed his brains out, and in return she gets a book deal to publish her poetry. A true story, I shit you not."

"Yeah, but that doesn't happen in these big writing schools, does it?"

"Then you haven't been to a writing program as of late. These older professors chase these young starlets around their desks. And in the end, they get published. It's just the way things work. I mean, anyone can write a fucking poem. Hell, my dead grandmother can do that. But these days you have to look good and do a little something under the table if you want to get ahead. It's just like any other business as far as I'm concerned. And it helps if you have a lot of money. If you don't, you're screwed."

"Well, everyone gets what they deserve in the end."

"Not really, my friend. There are a lot of corrupt mother-fuckers in the po' biz. All of these grants and awards and stupid contests are all rigged. Friends just promote friends. It's all who you know these days, not what you know."

"I'm sure things have changed," said Donald, wanting to end the conversation.

"But don't give up, they say. Keep submitting—keep pumping the stuff out."

"Sometimes a poet has to fail a few times before—"

"Before what? It fails again? You, my friend, don't know how things work in this town."

"Well, I know a little bit. You still have to have talent, don't you?"

"Talent is invented. Flood the market with one particular type of writing, something the chicks like and wet themselves over, and that becomes the talent these writers and poets emulate. It's all about bitches and money, in other words. It's always been that way. All of this art crap plays second fiddle to what's at the core."

Don was never one to disagree openly with someone he just met for the first time, and so he mumbled a few words of bitterness, unintelligible even to him, and continued driving up Third Avenue into the reaches of the upper East side. The conversation with this kid had saddened him, and in his usual self-effacing manner, he nodded along with more of the kid's insights on the state of American poetry. By the time the kid had finished his shtick, he couldn't prevent his own apocalyptic visions of the world from resurfacing. Poetry, after all, was sacred to him. It had always been sacred, and the poets he knew struggled with their craft and went to readings and studied the old masters and attended workshops. They took jobs like driving a cab in the middle of the night to pay for their habit. They barely made rent and usually went without. Could it be that his past, which had been steeped in poetry and writing, had been nothing but a sham—that working hard at something never held a candle to working smarter at something?

"It's quite a dope show," said the kid, rolling up his friend's chapbook in his fist. "The arts is the greatest of all dope shows. Not to sound patronizing, but if you're working hard on it, maybe you're moving in the wrong direction. No one cares about the arts anymore, or how it's presented. It's about what they can get out of you that matters. Poetry is the last thing they want."

The kid smiled when he said this, and Donald continued driving uptown. The buildings turned into heavy skyscrapers, flood lights illuminating the august facades of Park Avenue's most elegant buildings. It was a far cry from the low-lying brownstones of the Lower East Side, as the avenue seemed awash in corporate dollars.

"What do you really want is what I'm trying to ask you. All of this can be yours if you want it to be. You just need to accept certain facts—about the way the world works."

"And you would know all about that?"

"I know a lot more than you think. No one likes being poor, Don. You just have to open yourself up to the possibility that you may have erred in thinking that things ought to be fair and just. The world of literature is no different than a john fucking a whore. The question is, where were you when everyone else got a taste and feel of her?"

"I was working on my craft."

"Your craft? Like it's your craft to begin with, like you're actually working on something," snapped the kid, his face getting redder, his teeth showing. "Stop lying to yourself. You're a rat in a maze just like everyone else is. You're looking for a way out. I can show you how it works, Don. I can get you on the inside. You wouldn't be writing poetry anymore. Poets would be writing about you. You no longer have to be a dish rag on some octogenarian's bar. What I would give you is knowledge—the knowledge of how things really work, so you can finally learn to see."

"I may be getting old, but I'm not naïve," said Donald in retort.

"You're far from naïve," said the kid, his tongue forked and his skin scaling. He now talked with a lisp.

"No one ever said you were naïve. You know war is just a game just as well as I do. You're only human, Don—flesh and blood, bone and skin. You still have a chance. You just never had the guts to take what is rightfully yours."

"I'm happy with what I have. I'm grateful for the life I've lived."

"Is that why you drive an empty cab in the middle of the night in some of the most wanton neighborhoods in the city? When was the last time you actually picked up a passenger?"

"I don't know," he stammered. "You're confusing me."

"The heart is much more than love, Donald. It's also hunger. You just have to stop trying so hard and give in to what nature intended you to become."

"Get out," he whispered.

"We're a lot alike, you and I. Why would I be here if that weren't the case? Drop the load you're carrying is all I'm asking. You have a great talent that needs to be cultivated, as I have cultivated all great talents. You would be one of the finest I've ever molded. No one can change war. No one can end death and destruction. No one can live up to a set of standards that are mythical. You can't eschew the real hunger boiling in your blood. There are certain things about reality that can't be changed, and it has always been that way. The question is, do you fold underneath the weight of it like the weakling an unjust God wants you to be, or do you rise up, show your teeth, fight fire with fire, and overthrow that which has made you a sycophant, a mediocre shell of a man wandering the earth, a man without means?

"Let me help you, Don, and I'll show you a world you'd never want to leave, filled with pleasures and riches beyond what you even thought possible."

Donald checked his rearview mirror again, and by this time what was once a well-dressed young man behind him had coiled his body in the back seat, his forked tongue intermittently probing the damp of the cab, his once-pale skin checkered into wet, slick scales like a tiled mosaic. His fangs were sharp and dripped blood.

"Don't try anymore, Donald. Yield to what you were meant to be."

The snake slithered through the plexiglass divide, its scaly body inching its way up Donald's thigh, its slick tail refracting the glow of midtown's finest corporate headquarters and stately collegiate clubs. The snake's tail wrapped itself around his throat, and just before his chest heaved and his windpipe collapsed, he heard a loud siren blare from behind the cab along with a brilliant hot light that forced the snake to look behind him before it sank its fangs deep into his neck. The siren and the light broke Donald from his spell, and quite suddenly he found himself alone in his taxi, straddling a lane on Park Avenue, tiny beads of rain-water dotting his windshield.

He quickly looked behind him only to find a back seat that was dark and empty. The motor hummed softly as he stood idle at a red light, his foot loosely on the brake. The car behind him honked his horn again and finally passed by him. Upon awakening, Donald put the taxi in gear and made a U-turn on the avenue.

He couldn't say what brought him to the middle of the city at the start of a thundershower, but it was way passed his bedtime, and perhaps instead of staying awake all night he should get some sleep and wake up earlier in the morning. He considered that rising early, when the sun stretched its fingers into the sky, was the way it was meant to be. He also understood that these strange apparitions that tested him night after night would surely continue. He hadn't written a poem in years, and maybe, now that he planned to make a friend out of the sunlight, he'd return to work the old fashioned way and write a poem that gave more, as opposed to tomes of contemporary verse that only took away and filled the turgid egos of vain and misguided men.
INGEBORG

A man's life is never over, even when he thinks it's over. Being a headmaster at a small boarding school in the suburbs just north of Danbury, Connecticut, was never the destiny I envisioned for myself when I returned from the war in '48. I was in the air force back then, and they sent our squadron up almost every day to dogfight the Luftwaffe over the dense, cloudy skies of Dresden.

We were a fierce bunch. We had high morals, barrel chests, and jutting chins, and I've never before served with people finer than the men who routinely put their lives on the line to defeat the most fearsome bunch of Nazi fascists in the European theater. I remember, on our last mission, they let us paint calendar girls on the hulls of our planes, and never before did we rejoice as mightily as we did just to make it to the ground alive and in one piece. A bloody war it was, and I had prayed almost daily for a safe return to the mainland, where my wife and two-year-old son, always wondering when their father would return, monitored our progress on _Voice_ _of_ _America_. The old war footage these kids see on the history channels are mostly true—we did believe in what we were doing, and the men in our outfit did die honorably. War will always be the bane of humanity. There isn't a single man in uniform that doesn't know that. But what we did over Dresden made us worthy of wearing the small patch of flag on our uniforms. Good men died, sure, but we believed in what we were doing, and we never let fallacies of intellect convince us otherwise.

Even though we all had longed for the day when we were flown back home, the end of the war hit us like an alien world does an astronaut. War and flying planes, you see, was in our blood, and after the fall of Berlin, we came home to a simpler, more tranquil life that didn't suit many of us. There's something about being in danger that pumped our hearts and enlarged our veins, and when it's taken away, it's like cutting off our circulation. Even though we were scared fighting the Nazis, (as only a fool or a liar would tell you otherwise), we adapted to the fear and grew into it like a tree testing the soil. Fear nurtured us, and when bereft of it, there's nothing but invitation for discomfort in its place.

After I returned home to Connecticut after seven straight years of flying aircraft this way and that, I plumb didn't know what to do with myself. I hardly knew my wife either. Sure we wrote letters back and forth, but living with her and the kid was like bearing the idiosyncrasies of strangers in a strange house, in a strange land, where old soldiers tried hard to live normal, steady lives in the factories and the office buildings that housewives filled in our absence. Certainly there were plenty of jobs available, as the women who subbed for us returned to their families. And the country, it seemed, started all over again. We all swore that World War II would be the last war we'd ever fight, the last war our children would have to hear about on the radio. For a while the war was all we paid attention to, and when it ended, the world changed. Most people we knew, from what I can recall, were left satisfied with the outcome of the conflict. I, however, had a hard time getting motivated to do much else but reminisce about darting over those grey-laden skies. While I was overseas, my wife purchased a small farm up in the hills of Litchfield County, and so I went directly there after my discharge. My son was now eight years old, and my wife looked no older than when I'd left her. It's as though Maryanne was in a constant state of waiting, and waiting for me to return made her the most patient person I have ever known.

Our home was a rustic, colonial barn overlooking an old frog pond surrounded by tall evergreens. It was the prefect place to put my feet up on the recliner and do what with myself, I wasn't sure. My wife caught me snoozing in my robe and slippers one morning (like most mornings) and snoring like the belly of a B-2 bomber. I hadn't shaved at all, and naturally, she worried about what I'd take up next.

"Have you been to town yet, Charlie?" she used to say as she cleared away yesterday's newspapers. "It's a real nice day out. A walk into town might do you some good."

Bless her heart, I thought to myself. There's nothing like married life when your wife truly wants the best for you.

"I haven't been up that way yet," I said, pushing my face further into the plush of the recliner.

The way she picked up the sections of the morning paper scattered around the recliner and slapped them together alerted me to her fierce concern.

"Still looking in the classifieds, eh?" she asked. "What about that job managing the diner in town?"

"I'd probably drink all of the coffee before the customers do," I said.

"And what about the job at the shoe store?"

"Honey, I've shot down Nazi dare-devils over Germany. I think I'm a little too overqualified for a job sizing up people's feet."

"Y'know, I talked to Phil McGee down the road."

"He's the math teacher, right?"

"Yes. There's that old boys school up by Sanford Road, and he said that they have an opening for a math teacher."

"Math teacher? I should be teaching Aviation."

"Honey," she said calmly, "the war ended six months ago. If you don't get up and do something, you're going to rot in that chair. You've touched the ceiling of something, and that's fine, but now you've got to come back down to earth and live an ordinary life. There's no other way around it."

She was right. My head had been in the clouds quite enough, and I was indeed 'rotting,' in my recliner, as she so boldly put it. For those six months after returning from Europe, I could think of nothing buy flying over Germany and knocking out Nazi targets. These memories were both my glory and my burden. The statement is certainly true that when you touch the sky, there's nowhere left to go but down. It's certainly a truism in my book.

I listened to my wife from that day forward. I needed something more than my memories, no matter how freshly they were emblazoned in my mind. I went to teach math to middle school kids at the small boarding school a few miles up the road. My wife said I should wear a bowtie on my first day, and also a blue blazer. And I was nervous, certainly—not because of the kids or my method of educating them—but more because of my place in the ordinary world. Civilians, generally, are more mellow and calm. I had to learn to live in peace, I suppose, and I was a little afraid of it. I wanted to be tested more and more, to be challenged every single day, just like my squadron had challenged me, and instead I found myself teaching decimals and fractions to bunch of bratty seventh graders. The subject didn't even allow me to break off into my own stories of my exploits over Europe. The numbers on the blackboard were hard and unmerciful in that regard, and so for the first few years I trudged through it. And just after my first year of teaching at the school, my dear and lovely wife fell sick to cancer.

If anyone wonders about what a woman does for a man's life, then I can attest that I found my true fortune with Maryanne. Sometimes we would talk about nothing at all, or about our home, let's say, or about how the Wilsons down the road had bought an acre more of land, or how the drapes needed cleaning. These were simple things and simple thoughts we exchanged, and when she talked I found nothing but beauty in her voice, as though she belonged to another world and another sensibility that was uniquely foreign to me, but a world of gardens, flowers, and perfume nonetheless. We were complete opposites, as I had relied on my bravado to move me through most of my adversities, while she inhabited a land that was soft and beautiful, so beautiful in fact that a man couldn't even stand in it without swooning. Yet she opened her gardens to me, and I protected them, never telling anyone about them, not even my own son. And for the gates she opened, I could only lie down and stretch in her soft, pillowy lawns beneath her fragrant ferns and thank God almighty that after so many years far apart she had still remained my wife. I didn't need any other women, because I had found love with her. She allowed me to dwell in her most sacred heart, and I knew I could dwell there for an eternity.

She died in the early morning on the last day of spring, and the flowers wept at her passing. From then on I could hardly lift myself out of bed let alone teach math classes to a bunch of noisy seventh-graders who were all geared-up for their entrance into adulthood. I was an adult already, and I didn't envy them. I felt like Maryanne's death carved a hollow at the center of me, and I became a shell of a man just going through the motions of existence while pretending to enjoy myself.

My depression lasted for several years, as my bowties were never as straight, my food never as flavorful, and my talent as a teacher never as fulfilling as when my wife walked with me. My colleagues at the school, after having noticed my complete and utter bereavement, even tried to fix me up with other women, but nothing ever worked. Our farmhouse soon fell into disrepair, and even though I paid the bills every month, the weeds in the grass overtook our once-charming front lawn, and the plants all died. Sure I had my son to live for, but he soon left for college wishing me the best, and I just fell into the routine of waking up every morning in my family's absence, shaving my coarse beard, looking into the mirror, and noticing how gray I had gotten, and wondering why life, even at its greatest point, was so meaningless to the core. I told no one about my condition, but it was soon like wandering consciously through an unconscious dream. The people who inhabited my daily life became objects that I had to manipulate or maneuver around, my body like a heavy carcass feeding from what little remained of my healthy mind. I was in mourning, certainly, but there was never a time-keeper involved. My plaintive cries for my wife were certainly heard in the few long years after her passing, but they weren't responded to.

And in its place rested a short fuse and a cutting cynicism that I had tried my best to keep at bay. I went from being depressed to being outwardly angry, and most of my young students carried the weight of this newfound anger that was both selfish and acute in its deliverance. My anger was neither a replay of my time at war nor a cry of righteous indignation after having lost Maryanne. It came from somewhere within my primordial being, and it had never been so ruthlessly expressed, especially toward the young and rambunctious variety in the school classroom.

Instead of living within my own present time, I took a giant step backwards. I did not teach anymore but ruled the kids with a bureaucrat's precision, as math claimed to be an exact science anyway, and the few kids who stepped out of line by saying something meaningless or by passing notes through the insurgent network of old-boy's-club desks were immediately rooted out and sent to stand outside in the snowy cold. To the young kid who always answered the question incorrectly I stood tall over him, my bowtie intact, and I barked uncontrollably, sending tears rolling down his chubby face. I carried a ruler and began to rap their bare knuckles, begging the Gods to stop my slow and torturous demise. I threw my eraser in the direction of one student who was caught chatting it up in the back row with another student. My determination to keep the class well-disciplined and ready for conflict upended any other motive to stimulate their developing brains, and fairly soon the class bent to my fascism and not a peep was heard for a week straight.

This normally would have pleased me, but because they bowed too easily to my oppression, I became angrier still, the math problems even more complicated and grotesque. But with our collective movement to a higher state of consciousness almost sealed, I decided to ease my grip, until the boy who sat in the front row had the audacity to fidget restlessly in his seat. He tapped his pencil on the desk like some kind of drummer for the new rock and roll garbage these kids listened to. My response was both swift and severe. When the kid started fidgeting again, I picked up the heavy math textbook from my desk, closed it calmly, and threw it full-force at the kid's big fat head. When tears flowed down his swelling crimson cheeks, I knew then that I needed help. The devil had somehow taken me, and I had done wrong by this young lamb who only wanted to feel human again.

But at first I had no regrets about hurling the textbook at his angelic, blubbery face, for at first I thought the kid was violating me, not anyone else, but me alone. He trespassed on my leadership and my talents to take these kids to a higher plane of consciousness through the medium of mathematics. He had always been trouble, this fidgeting kid. After all, he was the only one there on scholarship. He behaved like a clown, and every teacher in the school wanted something done about him. And so it was up to me to deliver the punishment, and suddenly I became the bad guy. But there was purpose in bruising his face. The other students in the class saw it, and they stayed silent after I had committed the deed. Strangely enough, though, the deed itself was what brought us back to the realities of a simple seventh-grade math class instead of the space cadets I had made of the children. The fidgeting kid, in other words, was right to have tapped on the desk with his pencil, and it was then that I learned the error of my ways. Finally I had been cast down to earth, as my wife had once wanted, by a God who didn't appreciate my brand of fascism. And an honest and ever-wise and ever-vigilant God he was, because, as human beings, we can never trust our own minds for very long. I had hurt my students rather than helped them through the most basic of quadratic functions. It's the basic things that puzzle me—not the more advanced algebra and calculus I had been feeding them.

I immediately exited the classroom after hurling the book at the student. I made a bee-line for the administration building at the center of the green campus, the blankness of its lawns moaning with an urgency I hadn't heard or seen since I had first returned from the war. I rushed into the headmaster's office without making any appointment whatsoever and told him what I had done to the young boy. His empathy emboldened me to seek treatment with a psychologist who came to the school twice a week, mostly to counsel the students. The headmaster said that I should apologize to the student and take him out for ice cream downtown. The kid, I had learned while sitting with him, was more of an adult than I was. Restlessness had been his syndrome, he told me, and he forgave me after finishing off a hot-fudge sundae. He sensed my shame, and then my anger over my shame.

I had problems, ever since Maryanne had died. I didn't have an outlet for my soul anymore, and my soul needed a professional healer rather than a man of the cloth separated by a screen. And throwing the book at the kid was a part of my weakness. I no longer wanted to be weak, I suppose.

I remember her name today just like she had mentioned it when I had first met her.

Rita! Rita! Rita!

She had rented a small studio in town, and a livery service ferried students from the school to her door, although this time I was the one in the livery van talking sparingly to the driver about life at the school. Actually the student I threw the book at had more reason to be there than I did, as the situation seemed like the most absurd irony, but I had admitted to such weaknesses and was prepared to deal with them. I think the livery driver talked of rain that afternoon.

When Rita opened her office door, I had never before seen a woman so glamorous. From what I had heard, she studied with Freud's disciples in Germany before emigrating to the United States. When she arrived, the flower-power generation blossomed, and this movement turned the Freudian movement upside down. The culture had become a lot looser and more forgiving of the indiscretions of youth, and from her long, luxurious blonde hair and inviting eyes as blue as black-forest lakes, I could tell that she looked glamorously beautiful in anything she wore, and even though it was a very low point for Sigmund Freud and his followers, Rita readily adapted to the changing times by wearing a pair of bell-bottomed jeans and a white Native American blouse that ran down to her thighs. Her beauty struck me as peculiar, however, because rarely did we get these glamorous types so far into these hidden Connecticut communities, this despite widespread popular belief that the glamorous ones have always passed through here from time to time. After all, our residents were all New England farmers at one point, and the rocky landscape slowly wound up in our blood. But Rita—she belonged in Hollywood or Cannes. Her German accent seemed so exotic to me and not at all as barbaric as the fascists had made it sound. She invited me into her office without judging me, and on account of her hospitality I lay on her couch and opened up about what had taken place among myself, my math textbook, and the student who had become the object of my ire.

"It's what we call being anally retentive," she said softly. "You work in an environment that demands perfection out of these students, so it's no surprise that you threw your textbook at the boy. He represented your father, or so our philosophy of the mind gives us reason to believe."

"My father?" I asked nervously. "What does he have to do with this?"

"Your father always wanted you to do great things, while your mother probably overprotected you as an infant from the wild dreams he created for you."

"This is true, but why would I throw a book at the boy?"

"You may have some feelings about your father you

have yet to articulate."

"Well, my father died many years ago."

"And so his faults have been bottled up inside of you."

"I guess so. I don't notice it at all."

"It's in your subconscious, so it's quite natural that you don't notice these things consciously."

"I see. So I guess I should talk to you about my father?" I didn't feel too comfortable talking about him with someone I hardly knew, but my father was really the grand maestro of my younger years—this was before he left my mother and stranded us with nothing but a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge and old copies of the newspapers he read. His leaving was gradual. At first he left for a couple of days a week, then for a couple of weeks a month, and finally he left for months at a time. My mother truly loved him, and so did I, because when the money rolled in from whatever new business venture that grabbed his attention, our lives never seemed better.

We lived in a grand house at one point, and these were easily our best years. But slowly the money stopped rolling in, and he never told me about his business dealings but instead furnished me with anything I wanted in lieu of the more practical discussions we were supposed to have. He's the one who put all of these dreams of fighting the Germans and living well as the best revenge into me, because these things alone were the best substitutes for losing his entire fortune and status in life. He lifted my head up into the clouds, and for a time it delayed my development, because instead of learning anything in school, he bought me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it, and perhaps, while young, I got a bit too carried away thinking that I'd accomplish great things in my life. I learned how to fear the ordinary and strive for the spectacular.

Rita almost wept when she heard my tale. She laid her hand on mine and gently stroked it, letting me know that she truly empathized with my pain. And her hand felt good in mine, and her smile swept over me like sun-heavy clouds on the most abundant of spring days. I didn't exactly fall for her just then, as memories of my past marriage still filled the empty passageways of my heart, but my heart was ready, and after having a few short sessions with her, I asked her to dinner. To my delighted surprise, she accepted my invitation while telling me that I had a right to feel my own pain in the face of such grand ironies and paradoxes in life.

So when I returned home after a routine session, I donned a crisp, blue, buttoned-down Oxford shirt that felt cool against my skin. I tied a crimson red bowtie to my neck after having splashed a palm-full of skin bracer to the nicks and scrapes of my freshly-shaven face. I massaged an aloe-based moisturizer into my great-white face, and soon my skin felt as light and as airy as a cool Malibu breeze at dusk, all because Rita accepted the invitation to dine with me.

Going out with Rita restored me to the man I once was— not the same man who fought the Nazis—but the younger bachelor who thrived on charming the stockings off of women long before my marriage to Maryanne. And, yes, I had finally been restored to a former self I thought I had lost along the way.

At the restaurant, first came the saxophone, mellow and smooth, and soon afterwards a thump of bass with the sharp snaps of a snare drum. These were the sounds of my youth, and they carried me when I met her. She stood near the restaurant's entrance wearing a black evening dress that hugged her curves like a negligee. She wore a strand of shimmering pearls around her neck, and her blonde skin glowed with all of the richness of life and the possibilities of youth. I could actually feel my own heart pumping again, as though my entire body had been restored by being near her. I would have normally been crippled by my own awkward anxieties had she not slipped her hand through my arm, and together we strode through the restaurant and sat at a table next to the jukebox, of all things. Somehow I had forgotten the reality of the era we were in, and the jukebox reminded me that it was 1971 and not the Golden Age of Hollywood when the big band played in front of the studio audience. I was, after all, a teacher, and Rita a young psychologist innocent enough to be my daughter. But at the place we went to, no one peeked at us, and no one stared, and my graying hair didn't really matter to anyone. Neither did my memories of times more certain and stable.

It's true that Rita belonged to a younger generation whose hopes and dreams had crossed paths with a cruel war in Vietnam, and while I did want to know of her thoughts on the matter, I didn't feel the need to interrupt our short evening together with such serious talk. The goal had always been to preserve the joy in my life, ever since I fought overseas, and sure this joy had been disrupted, but the only way to escape from the rut of this disruption was to fill it with more joy, even though my face twitched when I smiled at her. We had nothing but my inner-being to discuss, and so I shied away from anything problematic and unsavory and instead concentrated on what was going right with the world. I can sincerely say that I felt like the luckiest man on earth while around her. And I asked her how she felt about living in the States rather than in Germany.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said curtly.

I didn't know that I had touched such a tender nerve, and I apologized for the question.

"Okay, maybe I do," she said, "just a little bit, but I don't expect you to understand any of it."

Her accent was warm and tender, and also a little frail. "I feel like a woman who is always being taken advantage of," she said next. "What do you mean?"

"It's my nature, and I'm sick and tired of it."

"But you live well, don't you?"

"I've been so lonely, and I don't belong anywhere."

"Oh come now," I said, taking her hand in mine. "You are a beautiful and talented therapist. You live amongst good people—"

"I know, but for some reason I feel as though I'm always giving too much. I know it sounds, oh how do you say it?, strange, but I've always felt that everyone feeds from me, and in return I have a nice place to live, and on paper everything is nice, but I can't bring myself to trust anyone. I am the product of American occupation."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"My parents—they lived in Dresden during the war. And since then, I've come to see Americans as occupiers. They are people who flow into my heart, but they occupy it all the same. It's the American army that occupies West Germany."

"But we're not occupiers. I would hate for you to see us that way. We're liberators. We freed Germany from the fascists who killed and tortured for dominance and power."

"I don't think Americans are all that different."

"No, Rita," I said sternly. "We're liberators."

"Well I find it difficult to tell the difference," she said. She picked at her salad, and I soon realized, as she stared down into her plate, that even though we had freed Germany from the blunt, iron hands of the fascists many years ago, we also had looked after our own interests as well. War does have to be profitable, no matter for what cause armies fight, and perhaps what came after the fall of the Third Reich—the split between East and West Berlin—was what she meant by foreign occupation, as though America somehow had occupied a part of her psychology, and her suppressed German parts needed more expression.

"I find German women to be some of the most beautiful in the world," I said politely.

"Thanks for saying that, but is it true?"

"I'm sorry. What I meant was that I find you to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. It's both the German and the American in you."

"I'm actually a lot more American now," she laughed. "See! I know you have it in you."

"I just find it hard to reconcile the two, especially with my accent and all."

"You're accent is just fine by me," I said, "but the longer you stay here, the more American it will become. You shouldn't be so self-conscious about it."

"You know something? You're absolutely right. Let's break free of this," and it was then that she did the unthinkable.

While the restaurant did have a jukebox near our table, the diners were people who spent more time listening to Chopin and Beethoven than the new rock and roll crap that had been making its way all across the country. Rita pumped two quarters into the machine, and suddenly the quiet and elegant restaurant filled with the alarming sounds of harsh amplified guitars and thuds of heavy bass chords. "C'mon," she said to me, as she stood up from the table and took my hand. "Let's rock and roll!"

And while I can't say that the new music appealed to me at all, because they were sounds so laced with promiscuity and darkness that my heart almost gave way, I can say that in an open space between two tables, Rita and I made a dance floor where a space of light hung over us, and together we danced to the whines and cries of flaming guitars and hard drum beats. And quite suddenly I had found the real truth of the matter. It was she who had liberated me, not the other way around—her Black Sabbath tunes and all. And we danced until the whole restaurant danced with us.

Yes, I said to myself. This music is the worst I've ever heard, but I've finally found someone to dance with for the rest of my days. Rita will forever be young in my eyes.
KEN VAN RENSSELAER

The specialists at Langley had a big problem on their hands just then. The head of the entire operation, a sober, middle-aged bureaucrat named Pete McPhee, who had been transferred in from the Pentagon several months ago to work on intelligence operations in and around Baghdad, sat with his elbows propped on a heavy mahogany desk awkwardly trying to massage away hours of stress from his temples. Seated across from him was the stern, steely-faced assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Colonel Roger Ailmont, who had been shuttling back and forth from the Pentagon for the last twenty-four hours. Both men couldn't hide their own fatigue from each other. The cool dark of McPhee's office, where a rust-colored club-leather sofa had served as his makeshift bed and thick trails of smoke from a couple of Cuban cigars flown in from Guantanamo that very morning hovered like a shroud over the median of the room, lulled them into a daze rather than allowed them to stay alert and focused on what had just transpired. The situation they oversaw in Baghdad had gone from bad to worse in a matter of a few short hours.

McPhee brought out a rock-crystal decanter filled with his best fifteen-year-old scotch and poured Ailmont a glass. He slid it over his desk, hoping that Ailmont arrived from the Pentagon with some good news. The lights underneath a small bar at the edge of the room brought to life the crystal he had stored there. The bar refracted prismatic shafts of light that stretched along an adjacent wall like diamonds. In his fatigue McPhee stared into this design hoping to find a hidden message in it. But his fatigue, and also his frustration, at not being able to deal with a crisis before the media got a hold of it swelled with each passing moment.

"I don't have very good news for you," said Roger Ailmont, finally doffing his cap and letting it fall to his desk. "He let one of the women go, because she's pregnant. The rest he's holding in a bombed-out apartment building just north of Baghdad."

"How many hostages?" asked McPhee.

"Well, he still has four from the State Department, and from what was reported, he has two contractors in there too. Three women and three men."

"He's got a machine gun, has he?"

"A Kalishnikov rifle and a bomb strapped to his chest."

"And all he wants is to speak with General Allandro?"

"Apparently the insurgent met General Allandro back in the '80s when we worked with the Afghanis. The insurgent was the main liaison between his fighters and our men. General Allandro served as our liaison from our side. The two had worked together, in other words."

"And we've told him that General Allandro is infirm, haven't we?" asked McPhee, sipping his scotch and grinding his teeth.

"We've told him this a number of times by radio. The nut case just doesn't believe it. He's insisting we get some kind of code from Allandro."

"And how are we supposed to do that when the General's in a wheelchair and on an intravenous drip?"

"That's where the problem is."

McPhee sighed deeply and asked, "what does the insurgent want from Allandro?"

"We've been trying to figure that out. We think back in the early days Allandro's men furnished the freedom fighters with a dirty bomb we were going to use against the Russians. The insurgent must now have access to that weapon and needs the code from Allandro to trigger it. When we left Kabul, we left the bomb there but Allandro took the code with him. The insurgent could trigger the bomb from anywhere if he gets that code. We don't know where the weapon is exactly. He could feasibly trigger it in Baghdad against our own battalions."

"And the General is the only one who knows the code?"

"Yes."

"Then give the Habib a fake code for Chrissakes!"

"We can't do that," said Ailmont carefully. "Usually Arab codes are embedded within bits and pieces of Qur'anic text. If the insurgent gets one whiff that we're dicking him around, he'll detonate the explosives at his chest and off all the hostages. We need the right code, in other words."

"Shit. And I assume you've contacted the General?"

"Yeah. The General is at a psych facility in upstate New York. We flew our best doctors up there last night, but we haven't made any progress yet. Once we get the right Arabic text surrounding the code, we can radio in a fake code to the Habib."

"We're not going to cure the General, Ailmont. These doctors can't do anything."

"They're the best psychiatrists we've got. They know their pills."

"How long have they been up there with the General?"

"A day. Maybe two. So far, we can't get a word out of him."

"Don't give the General any more pills," said McPhee, almost whispering.

The two of them sat in silence for a time. The designs along the wall no longer fascinated McPhee, but he still relentlessly analyzed them for clues in keeping with his habits. Intelligence, after all, had always been a mystical art of which most present day analysts had little knowledge and were generally talentless. No wonder the Agency sank slowly into the quick-sands of irrelevance and inefficiency. Since the Cold War they had grown a bit too fat and a bit too lazy. They abandoned mysticism for money and acquired power while ignoring their own self-respect. At least the war in Iraq reawakened everyone at Langley to good intelligence work. Yet McPhee, still staring into the prism on the wall, tiptoed on the same mystical edge the Soviets had once had. And within one of the shadows of light shaped like a finely cut diamond above him, lightning struck. McPhee had seized upon an idea that thundered through his thinking.

"I may have a solution to this," he announced to Ailmont while finishing off his scotch.

"What is it," asked Ailmont, jumping from his seat. "Psy-ops. The old guys."

"Psy-ops? What about psy-ops?"

"What was Psy-ops before this damn war started?"

"They were disbanded. Congress didn't foot the bill anymore."

"And before that?" smiled McPhee mischievously.

"The Cold War. Their work was inconclusive. Except I do remember that there was this one guy in psy-ops back in the early days who really had his shit together. What was his name?" asked Ailmont, snapping his fingers.

"Van Renssel. Ken Van Renssel."

"Holy shit," said Ailmont. "Now I remember. It _was_ Ken Van Renssel. Everyone knew he had it. But he left the Agency in disgust and swore he'd never return. Maybe we should think about someone else."

"No one is nearly as good as Van Rennsel."

"Yeah, but he also hates your guts. What makes you think he can fish the code out of the General?"

"He may hate my guts after all these years, but I know exactly where to push his buttons."

"What should I tell the Secretary?"

"Tell him that I'm on my way to New York right now and tell him that we've found a way out of this."

"We don't have much time."

"I know that, damnit. Just give me twenty-four hours. Stall the terrorist for now. We'll get those hostages out of there."

"I hope you know what you're doing."

McPhee looked him dead in the eye and said, "you're damn right I know what I'm doing."

"Twenty-four hours," said Ailmont. "That's all we have."

It was midnight by the time McPhee ended his meeting with Ailmont. A black government sedan transported him from the gates of Langley to Ronald Reagan airport. An unmarked jet took him over the nighttime skyline of Washington D.C. Below him, the thick strips of rush-hour avenues were clogged with cars. He sat in a plush recliner looking out of the window as the lights of the city grew small and dim. His assistant had packed everything he needed in his briefcase, the most important item being the thick manila folder filled with information on Ken Van Renssel.

He read over the file meticulously, only that the Agency stopped keeping track of Van Renssel in 1990. An impressive man to say the least. Many who worked with him during the experiments in the mid-80's knew him as a genius, and they respected his powers. He was perhaps the only one candidate who possessed such a gift, and if the Agency had had enough money to keep him, Van Renssel would have probably been running the Agency by now. But Van Renssel, as his pals called him, was different from the rest. As McPhee remembered, he came to the Agency because he had nowhere else to go. After all, where does a man go when he has the power to communicate with the metaphysical world? Where does a man go when his advanced intellect begins to frighten the men in the white lab coats who initially tested him? Van Renssel came in voluntarily, even though he hated what the Agency represented. His capabilities were as prodigious as Gulliver's size was to the Lilliputians.

McPhee remembered his long, stringy hair, prematurely graying, and also his closely-cropped beard that told everyone who indoctrinated him into the program that he had wisdom beyond his years. And by turning himself in to the Agency Van Renssel made a deal with the devil back then. It was the only way to protect him from the slow madness that flared all around him. His girlfriend came in with him for comfort and to relieve whatever mental pains had gripped him as a result of his abilities. She was just as beautiful then as she was now. McPhee fingered a photograph of her and his two toddler sons that he kept in his wallet.

McPhee had stolen her from Van Renssel by offering her financial stability instead of intellectual integrity, and by leaving Van Renssel she had the chance to be in a normal relationship like most of the women she knew. She saw a way out of Van Renssel's mental hold on her and walked right into McPhee's arms. McPhee often wondered if his wife thought about her old boyfriend, now that he had taken his place. He knew she still loved him in her secret heart, but at least McPhee's income and good-repute kept her floating in the most influential social circles on the Beltway—the type of circles where first wives and their entourages got together and picked out nail polish or promoted legislation for warning labels on rap and heavy metal CDs. She liked it better on the inside, figured McPhee, and those Washington ballroom dances weren't too bad for her either. McPhee had single-handedly transformed a scared but caring tree-hugger of a girl into one of the most powerful insiders on the Washington social scene. Sure she liked it better, and screw Van Renssel anyway. His wife was never meant for a life in the monasteries of high intellect—which is where McPhee headed in order to catch up with the man whose wife he had stolen.

Two agents up in New York had been dispatched to the location, and they radioed their coordinates once they found Van Renssel. Apparently, Van Renssel had been on permanent retreat at a Buddhist temple about two hours northwest of Manhattan. While McPhee would have rather confronted him alone at his residence, finding Van Renssel at the temple was a miracle in itself, considering the man seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth after funding had been terminated for the psy-ops experiments. After Langley, Van Renssel simply returned to his one-bedroom in Middletown, only to wind up with the Buddhists several years later.

On the next morning, after a restless sleep in Port Jervis, McPhee found himself driving along a winding road deep into the countryside of New York. He made a turn onto an unpaved path that led to a wide property that had once been a farm. A dilapidated barn with warped graying planks weathered with rusted nails sat at the bottom of a hill. Tall birches surrounded the immediate area, and rolling hills of evergreen forest edged up into an overcast sky in the distance. It was cold and damp with piles of snow dotting an otherwise muddy green lawn. The path he drove on ended at a Buddhist temple at the top of a knoll. The temple itself was a magnificent structure that seemed a bit out of place considering the remnants of farm that had occupied the land before it. A set of stone stairs fed into an open foyer of carved granite. The interior walls of the temple were composed of blocks of layered limestone that were cemented together. These layers jutted out an inch or two out into the cold air and also within each open foyer, as there were several of them. A pair of heavy wooden doors guarded whatever hid within. Thick stone columns ran up the sides of each foyer, and the doors at first seemed like they were permanently locked, much like the doors to a museum that only opens at particular hours, or a church that never opens when one needs it, or a gate to an ancient castle that has been dead-bolted from within. McPhee tugged on the door, and surprisingly it opened with an ease that startled him.

Once inside, two narrow rooms on either side of him, carpeted with tan rugs and encased by glass doors, housed a small bookshop and a café, both of which were empty. To his astonishment, this small inner-lining of the temple opened into a vast room with burgundy carpeting stretching wall to wall. And there in front of a shrine filled with colorful idols and a large, oversized statue of Buddha in the middle sat a sea of a hundred bald heads of all colors chanting something foreign in unison.

There was something that gave way in McPhee's heart when he beheld the monks before him. It wasn't fear exactly, but something that flashed through him and forced him to wear a more diplomatic façade. He thought he'd be able to control the situation prior to his arrival, but apparently summoning Van Renssel from the sea of chanting monks wasn't going to be easy. Below the shrine itself, where idols of colorful spiritual warriors sat next to the great bronzed Buddha encased in gold-trimmed glass, a thin, reedy Asian man in orange garb and a blood-red sash led the monks in the chanting. Their collective hum became a steady, smooth, and subtle vibration that seemed to lift the sturdy walls of the room, as though they actually tried to move the temple to another plane of existence.

And what an awe-inspiring temple it was. McPhee looked above him and noticed that the temple was actually an octagonal pavilion supported by wooden pillars and encased in a single-level square exterior, or an octagon within a square. The slanted sides of the ceiling, as he scanned the length of it from the bottom of the structure to the top, ended at a small glass dome suspended above the monks. Within this dome, he spotted what he believed to be the Wheel of Dharma, which seemed stuck against the sides of yet another octagonal dome. So if he were to look down at the design of the temple from high above it, he would see a wooden wheel within an octagonal temple that was stuck within a square fortress.

McPhee thought it quite marvelous. But he wasn't there to advance his architectural knowledge, even though he admired how the Wheel of Dharma, with its eight wooden spokes, radiated its power outward and seemed suspended in the air above him. Sunlight passed through the glass of the dome, and he could have found answers to millions of riddles if he were to remain there. The temple seemed to be a code in itself that only the most enlightened of monks could reach. Mystery-laden drawings of an assortment of Buddha's most ancient disciples, as well as other multi-headed and multi-armed deities with bight colors painted on their faces, were honored within the teak picture frames that hung proudly on the walls. And still the monks continued with their chanting. Somewhere in the sea of bald heads sat Ken Van Renssel, cross-legged and chanting along with them.

The teacher leading the prayers at the head of the room quickly noticed McPhee, and within a few moments he left his place and calmly walked around the sea of bald heads and approached him. By the time the teacher stood toe-to-toe with him, he could easily make out the deeply etched wrinkles in his face and skin that had been delicately worn by time. Since this teacher dealt with a common Westerner who came to the temple to learn from him, he seemed acutely aware of what McPhee wanted. McPhee, who had never taken the art of meditation seriously, smirked as the tall, reedy teacher bowed before him. His bow was meticulous, and so the teacher led McPhee to the outer-square of the temple.

It wasn't long before another monk, white in complexion and slender in build, joined them on the same pathway through the sea of shining-headed monks and to the outer rim of the temple. McPhee hardly recognized this second monk as the man he once knew, but while showing the teacher his government badge and identifying himself, the second monk stood before him. His head was completely shaved, and his beard was like fine thread circling his upper lip and protruding from his chin. And then there were his eyes. McPhee shuddered when he caught sight of their blue/green color burning through him like a pair of laser beams. These eyes exuded neither anger nor irritation at being interrupted from prayer. His eyes couldn't be characterized or defined.

Van Renssel glared at him in many ways at once. A shiver ran along McPhee's spine, causing him to stammer in front of the teacher as McPhee put his badge back into the side pocket of his suit.

"Geshe, I will handle this from here," said Van Renssel calmly.

The teacher bowed and returned to his place in the temple.

"Follow me," said Van Renssel to McPhee, as they both left the temple and stood outside of it in the brisk wintry air.

McPhee remembered Van Renssel to be a somewhat scrawny but brash thinker who served the Agency well when he first arrived. He was now well-built. The Buddhists had nourished him well.

"There really is no escape, is there my old friend?" said McPhee, staring him straight in the face.

"I recognize you from a former life, which is why I'm standing here."

"It always comes back to us, Van Renssel. It was in times of madness that we gave you your sanity. When you were down, we were the ones who taught you to stand straight."

"No. I did that on my own."

"You were the one who ran away."

"I don't cooperate with evil and destruction," said Van Renssel, his jaws tightening.

"You're not experienced enough yet to know the difference between good and evil. You left just when the greatest treasures were within your reach."

"Just another carrot dangling from a stick," he said, his face as frozen as black ice, his blue/green eyes steady and unshakable. "And besides, I don't know who you are. You are part of the past, not the present."

"So now you're time traveling, is that it? Listen, I know why you left, and I'm glad that you did. You have built a new life with these people, and that's fine. I'm not here to disturb that."

"Then why are you here?"

"I need your help," said McPhee.

"The last time I offered you help, you bit my hand, used whatever advances I had made for a dumb war that still hasn't ended. And you stole my fiancé. Give me one damn reason why I should help you now."

"Lives are at stake, Van Renssel. Innocent lives."

"I've heard it all before. It's like a toy doll you pull with a string. Why don't you save that for some new Operations Officer who's wet behind the ears? You'll get better results. I mean who do you want to kill next?"

McPhee noticed that Van Renssel normally would have shouted these words. His quietude impressed him. From a man continually on the edge of madness, Van Renssel had found discipline and worked every square inch of his mind to arrive at a state of peace and tranquility that most of the guys in the old psy-ops program could only dream of. It was amazing to behold, and McPhee cared enough about him that he kept the boat they rocked in balance and at ease. He thought he'd have to use the picture of his wife just to get some emotion out of him, but apparently the man had changed. He was almost friendly.

McPhee told him of the situation with the hostages in Baghdad and also how he needed the code from General Allandro.

"My place is here," said Van Renssel, looking up to the overcast sky. "You just can't let people go, can you?"

"After this, you'll never hear from me again," said McPhee.

"That's what you told me at Langley back in '81."

"I mean it this time. I'd have you back here in an hour."

"Tell me something first," he said pausing, still staring into the white sky. "Does your wife ever mention me?"

"We have two kids, and no, she never mentioned you again."

"I'll speak with this Allandro for only five minutes. We won't say a word to each other. I'll just look into his eyes, and then you will have your code."

"It's still that easy, eh?"

"Nothing is ever easy," said Van Renssel. "Not a damned thing."
PHILLIP LEVINE

LAURA LUDWIG LONSHEIN

The Colony Café sits as a heavy cement fortress alongside a narrow road that leads away from the village of Woodstock and into hidden residential areas where thick bushes and tall trees camouflage quaint clapboard houses. Along the front of the sturdy building, its outer walls painted bright white, a narrow stone-flagged patio runs perpendicular to the front entrance. Potted plants conceal a row of weak wooden benches where the poets who frequent the place smoke cigarettes and chat idly about the latest news or perhaps the latest philosophical trends. Beyond the threshold of the front entrance, which is supported by a heavy oak doorframe, there is a spacious shaded foyer that is arrested by a wall with two heavy doors on either side of it—one leading to the bar and the other one leading to the tables and chairs at the center of a wide hall that includes the bar as well. Flyers, leaflets, pamphlets, and postcards, advertising book releases, musical events, and art openings, cover a large oak table in front of the wall. A baby grand piano, silenced by a heavy cloth, sits quietly against stained-glass windows that permit pastel light to bathe a floor of smooth-cut stone. On the other side of the wall that separates the foyer from the main hall, a mammoth fieldstone fireplace suggests that the winters are too cold in Woodstock for anyone to go without the much-needed heat the fire brings. Directly above the fireplace, a second floor balcony hugs the perimeter of the entire hall. Its floorboards are weak, as the poets' footsteps can be heard traversing them, as they are most likely headed to the separate restrooms at the farthest corners of the building. Various canvas-and-oil paintings are hung upon the white empty spaces of wall, and if a poet were to stand at the building's center, underneath its vaulted cathedral ceilings, he or she would be able to see two floors of artwork simultaneously, all of it designed by local painters and sculptors. Even though the café's façade is strong and thick, the creaks and breaks that its visitors encounter as they walk up its worn staircase reveal the building's antique age.

So I walk into the place quietly, even though I had already broken a tremendous silence. At the far end of the hall, Phil Levine and Laura Ludwig Lonshein stand on a raised platform against the backdrop of black curtain. They read from a script, while the audience, a few inches below them, drink coffee and pints of beer, and pay rapt attention.

Phil is actually a very nice guy—he's going through a tough divorce as a matter of fact, with a wife whom I hear has stunning good-looks. And Laura, who is married, I believe, has focused on her plays for so long now. Phil hosts the readings at the Colony and is also the poetry editor for _The_ _Chronogram_ , which is the arts magazine for the Hudson Valley. I read a good article in there once by a woman-journalist who traveled into Pakistan unarmed and interviewed Baluchistani rebels who were busy fighting the light-skinned Punjabi authorities off of their ancestral lands. The magazine is definitely New Age—a lot of stuff about yoga and holistic healing, at least that's what I get from its advertising. I do look at the poetry and books sections from time to time. How a poet or novelist gets in there I can't imagine, but I hear some of the local poets have been trying their luck for years. It's not that easy making it into print anymore. Just like any other industry, a writer these days needs connections. I'd say Phil Levine is well-connected in this regard. Laura's probably connected too, although through some strange clandestine tangent.

The spotlights above them shine upon their bodies, which seem to be supported by microphone stands that act as skeletal bones holding up their flesh. Laura reads her oddball play, which she has been reading on the circuit for some time now, but as Phil Levine reads his lines, the play takes on an entirely different dimension. It turns into something worthy of the highest art, not only by dint of Phil's acting ability, but also through Laura's complex dialogue. It just works, and I'm not sure how many people in the audience see that, but I'm sure many of them do see it. The combination actually works so well, it's as if the play, as it is presented, ushers in a small evolution—because if Laura had read the play on her own, I'm not sure if I'd have been able to pay such close attention to it. Hell, when I'm reading my own work on stage, I can hardly pay attention to what I'm reading.

Phil, by the way, has worked on Wall Street before, at least that's what he mentioned to me in passing. He left life in the fast lane for a life as an artist. There are benefits to living an artist's life. Whether one believes it or not, being so lowly does have its benefits. There's more freedom on the lower end. An artist, it seems, doesn't have to play by the rules so much as the normal workaday person. Social conventions can be tucked away, only to be pulled out again when the artist reconnects with folks from the upper tier, if he's lucky enough get back there that is. It is a system after all. Whether it's fair or not depends on the individual. But Phil seems like the type of guy who has seen the inner-sanctum of American excess. Laura seems like someone who is continually craving it. They're just like every artist in that regard, but usually there are two things artists can't seem to handle: failure _and_ success. But you put these two artists together, and for some reason their work has greater effect. It's uncanny. One would have never thought that the two would make a good team. I suppose playwrights do need actors, and vice-versa.

A writer used to be able to live solely on the lips of his or her readers, but in this day and age, merely being read is not enough. One needs a bank account too. One can't let himself go as the old-time writers were so used to doing. There's always some marketing strategy involved, always some ridiculous game to be played, some image to uphold and protect, and perhaps we get too carried away by these things. We become other people because of these concerns. But Phil and Laura seem to have stayed true in a way. They found a groove to dig out their art from the trenches of blank pages and otherwise hollow characters. I'd speculate, however, that if Phil and Laura took their show on the road, as some sort of dynamic duo, and if they were to rise to the cream of the art world, then maybe they wouldn't be as happy as they are now, acting on the Colony's stage. Perhaps they wouldn't be as comfortable. Like most people, they'd want to see what the other side is like, but eventually they'd long for their old lives again, or the places where they first found their grooves. Not that anyone actually likes to make the long journey through wealth and culture only to return, rock-bottom, to where they came from. But it's the nature of things to climb up, and then slide all the way back down. Hell, even to find access to the ladder takes a code no one rightly knows. The worst thing to do, I'd imagine, is to get to the top of any sort of world and then kill and maim to stay there. Who'd want to live at such a high altitude anyway? Water finds its own level, and maybe that's how it should be. There's no outsmarting it, actually. An artist could peek and poke through the fissures of the walls that bar him from the lands of milk and honey, but to squeeze through there, the person has to be as thin and as flat as a razor.

Phil and Laura certainly aren't razors, and I figure that this performance at the Colony can't be recreated, or re-lived, or re-enacted. It's simply a moment in time that has me wondering whether or not the two could actually make it through the cracks in the wall, not as razors, but as they jointly appear on the stage, breathing life into a work of art I probably wouldn't have otherwise listened to.

Maybe as poets and writers we've gotten too far ahead of ourselves. Perhaps it was wrong of me to have started out on the burnt-trail of ambition so blindly. Luckily I'm way over that hump, and also over the rut I've been digging myself into. Hopefully I won't ever have to return to those places of hardship and hyper-neediness again. Their performance finds me in a kind of stasis: a place where I'm comfortable absorbing their art and yet freed of the predatory machine I had once become, shifting around from reading to reading, dissecting words until there aren't any more scalpels or fangs left to dissect them.

I do wonder how Phil's divorce is going. And with Laura, I hope her husband takes good care of her, because she seems like the type of woman who needs a good husband in case she falls off the deep end. Phil still has youth in his bones, the kind that must tell him every now and then that a lot more's in store. Laura seems a bit more settled, although she works the readings as steadily as ever. She talks very quickly and seems like she's carried away by sub-currents of anxiety. She stumbles over the rapidity of her words that seem to prick and prod like pointed darts would. Phil prefers the demeanor of a gentle and welcoming Buddha upon first meeting him, but I'm sure there's a little struggle and angst in there somewhere. When it comes to their art, though, I'm sure they have both struggled, as there's always this inexorable tug to be somewhere other than where we really are. Actually, it's the human condition. Sure I'd like to be on a raft somewhere, close to a beach, floating on waves, the hot sun cooking my skin, the women in bikinis smiling at me from the shore. But on the beach I can make out a stage along the sand, and there, to my surprise, are Laura and Phil performing the same play they read from now. Laura's clever words beam out at me, the champagne uncorked, and their collaboration the talk of the town.

And pretty soon I see their cartoon caricatures on the front cover of the _New_ _Yorker_ , paired with equally glowing reviews. Or the two are reading from Laura's script on some metropolitan stage, surrounded by friends and friends of friends who wear tuxedoes and elegant evening dresses, nibbling on cheese and sucking back wine, debating whether or not Laura meant to show the inner-workings of a writer's neurosis, or whether or not Phil's acting stayed true to the piece. Their limousines are lined up in front of the theater, the photographers' cameras flicker and whir, blanching out the otherwise incandescent city streets, the women on the rich men's arms, born from estates in the Hamptons or the country clubs of New England, and Phil finds one of these women to settle down with, and Laura decides to have a child and live on Park Avenue, hob-knobbing with other playwrights and screenwriters—their kids off to Harvard eventually, and Phil's kids off to Yale, as that's where all the talented presumably go. And for several generations they continue this trend, until their children find art-making a chore to be stored away until a time in the far-distant future, when their great-great grandchildren unwrap their presents at Christmastime and find to their astonishment that their parents have given them a true rarity—a video of their great-great grandparents, performing on stage in a creaking, hollowed-out fortress way back in the year 2007, a place where artists of this sort continue to thrive and to live freely, as they were so dedicated to doing back then.
ROBERT MILBY

TED GILL

JANE GILL

The members of the High Council, dressed in black satin robes and stiff white collars, sat around an opaque crystal table that hovered above the floor of J. Edgar Hoover's prison cell. When their hologram appeared, Hoover initially thought the Council would actually release him from Penal Colony 23, which orbited just beyond Venus' corrosive atmosphere, and then show him mercy by returning him to his home on planet Mars. He had been cited for good behavior after thirty-five years of solitary confinement, as he had been floating in deep space for what seemed like an eternity of corporeal isolation. He might as well have been dead for so many years. But no one really dies.

Human beings are recycled and then sent to whatever planet they wish to go, but Hoover's case differed from the hordes of people who were routinely recycled every year. The High Council, being the supreme authority on such matters, directed traffic as to who got to go where after their lives expired. The reason for Hoover's suspension in deep space for so long, however, came down to the High Council's indecision over where to send him after he had expired on Earth in 1971. They really had no idea where to put the man. His case was a special one, because if they sent him to Mars, which they did for a short time, he might have created the same conditions that had existed during his stay on Earth. This could upset the balance of power within the fledgling Solar System Federation and derail the High Council's attempts to forge a steady, yet tenuous union among the planets instead of keeping them isolated and ignorant of each other. Hoover would only disrupt this balance if they permitted his return to Mars.

When he had stayed on Mars briefly after his death on Earth, he had already moved through the Martian state apparatus efficiently, until Martian Command notified the High Council of his numerous coup attempts and also his unfair treatment of Martian idealists who wanted relief from the Command's growing interference in their private affairs. Luckily the High Council discovered Hoover's plan to root out the progressives who had already worked their way through the power structure with both patience and good will. The Council immediately pulled Hoover from Mars and sent him to reflect quietly on his immortal flaws while a prisoner at 23. He had remained on 23 ever since.

After thirty-five years at the Penal Colony, his loneliness and intense boredom picked away at his fiery resolve, as he was much weaker now than he ever had been. He hoped the Council would see that he was a man so weak and broken enough to resettle on Mars peacefully and not stir up any more trouble for the Martian Command. Granted that Hoover had gained too much power during his life on Earth, and then again on Mars, but he was a changed man now who wouldn't succumb to the temptations of power. He thought of every rational argument in the cosmic regulation code to avoid being abandoned by the High Council for an eternity—his view of Venus so sickening that it nauseated him every time he passed by the large windows of his cell.

The five members of the High Council hovering above him, however, didn't look too happy to be there. For years they held debates and planetary hearings on what should be done with J. Edgar Hoover. They loomed over him like giants as their tall bodies cast shadows over his frail frame. He stood with his head bowed when their hologram appeared. Deference towards authority was usually his best defense when they decided to stop by.

"You're up for review, J. Edgar, and this council is still undecided about what to do with you," said the giant at the center of the crystal table. "We must do something, but we certainly can't recycle you, because you've tried to take over ever government we've supported, on both Earth and Mars. Another replica of you would still have your genetic remnants, and we can't tolerate even the slightest risk that you may again become the incorrigible tyrant you once were. So we believe recycling is out of the question at this time."

"But if you don't recycle me, then you must send me back to Mars," pleaded Hoover. "Anything less would be inhumane treatment."

"Funny how you should be the one telling us about inhumane treatment," said one of the other members, a female specimen from Venus. "We're not even confident that we can keep you orbiting Venus in this contraption we've put you in without your getting into trouble."

"But you have kept me here for thirty-five years. I have not made a sound, not a peep. My behavior has been exemplary."

"That's only because you don't have any humanoids to sink your teeth into," said another member.

"But you can't just leave me here. I have changed, honestly I have. I'm not the man I used to be is what I'm saying. I want to live peacefully, and I want to help this new Solar System Federation grow, as you've worked so hard on it. If you return me to Mars, all I'll need is a little underground cave out in the red desert sands, and I swear that you'll never hear one word from me again. I won't reproduce, I won't work, and I certainly won't cause your council any more trouble."

"We are not sending you back to Mars!" thundered the council member in the middle, pounding his fist upon the hard crystal surface of the table. "Get that out of your head."

And as the central figure of the Council glowered at Hoover, one of the members at the end of the table floated to the center and whispered something into his honor's ear. Hoover thought he had crossed the line by mentioning Mars, so he kept quiet and small as they conferred amongst themselves.

"My colleague here tells me that it would be a violation of the High Council's code of ethics to keep you here at 23 and not recycle you within an appropriate period of time, which is why he has suggested an alternate route that we should consider."

"Anything," said Hoover, tears welling in his eyes. "We all think that this alternate route is a bit unusual, but you are an unusual case, and so we must try it if we are to resolve where you should go next. Have you ever heard of the space-time continuum before?"

"I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is exactly."

"The space-time continuum," said the council member, "is the pathway we use to communicate important data to the inhabitants of our solar system across time and space—in order to serve, preserve, and protect the delicate balance of power among the planets. It has taken thousands of years to achieve this balance, and we achieve it by imputing purposeful thoughts within the collective minds of every group or community that experiences life, whether that life is on Mars, Earth, Venus, or even Saturn. We believe the space-time continuum is a very important factor in maintaining the peace, especially when it comes to both the internal affairs of each planet as well as the delicate relationships formed among several planets at once. What the honorable member to my right has suggested may indeed be the solution we're looking for in your case."

"By all means," said Hoover, "I am open to any of your suggestions."

"What the Council proposes is a test of sorts."

"A test?"

"Yes. We want to see if the change that you referred to earlier has really taken place. We want to determine whether or not you've reformed your old tyrannical ways and committed to the health and prosperity of our Solar System Federation."

"I've changed, I tell you! I'm a changed man after languishing here for so long."

"We'll see how much you've changed by putting you on a little mission for us. Through the space-time continuum we propose to send your complete consciousness, less your physical body, of course, back through time to period of near conflict on Earth—yes, to your old stomping grounds, we know. We will place your full consciousness into a human being who is nearing older age and will be recycled sooner than the average earthling. And once you take this man's place, albeit temporarily, you must convince a younger man he socializes with to forfeit his rebellious ways—not by force or any sort of power struggle—but by being, oh, what do they call it? Being his friend. You must demonstrate to the young man that life is too precious to be thinking about politics all the time. You alone will be responsible for reforming his errant thoughts and positioning him to live a life of peace, calm, and tranquility. And this will certainly be a great test for you, because this young man represents everything you so willingly chose to destroy during your time on Earth."

"Destroy? I'm not capable of destroying anyone anymore. You have stripped me of every last prospect of will, every shred of self-respect, and I stand here before you a changed man who only wants to do good unto others. This is what I want: to help humanity, the poor and the sick, the suffering and the depraved. Looking upon this lovely blue planet of Venus has guided me in a completely new direction. I have changed, I tell you. I have changed, and there is nothing that I'd like more than to restore this young man's faith in the power of good government, a government that looks after its citizens no matter what their political persuasions are—whether it's a red commie or a black-booted fascist, I am there to serve and protect the human race, so that in time our solar system can unite and live in peace, calm, and tranquility. I am through with politics. Never again shall I set foot in the political arena, as only the highest of you can govern, not a simple, humble man like myself. I will change this young man by showing him the ways of the wisest of you, and I will do it delicately through being 'his friend,' as you say I should. I will not fail."

"No, you will not fail," said the center member, "I can assure you of that. Because if you do fail, we will pull you out of there faster than you can say 'communist conspiracy.' You will then be sentenced to Pluto for an eternity where you will wander upon its sub-arctic surface of jagged rock and deep ravines and never again see another living thing. Do we make ourselves clear?"

"Oh yes, my most highest member of the Council, you certainly do. I will not fail. By the time I'm done with this young man of yours he will be forever changed by my constant vigilance and guidance."

"And what of government, J. Edgar? Would you have us believe that you won't try to worm your way into civic affairs somehow and take revenge against those whom you once considered to be your enemies?"

"Government? I don't even know what government is anymore. I hardly remember anything about Earth. The sooner I'm back from Earth, the better, as I would appreciate any just reward for a successful mission."

"Well, if you do succeed, we'll give you asylum on a planet most suitable, but first thing's first. First you must convince us that you've steered this young man away from politics, as this is our primary concern, and you must do so delicately. Second, you must be a friend to him as the earthlings so like to call each other."

"It's as good as done," he said. "When do I enter the old man's consciousness?"

"You will know when it's time."

"But when do I leave 23?"

"You will know," thundered the middle member.

And before he knew it, the hologram of the High Council had dissolved, and he was alone again gazing over the thick cloud-cover of Venus. As he stared into the white miasmic clouds from his cell, he ground his teeth and spit on the floor to spite such a view. Never before had a planet represented the pains and frustrations of being imprisoned in deep space. Should he succeed, he vowed he would return and one day live to see Venus destroyed. He could taste the salt of freedom on his lips, and with a careful combination of his need to be 'friendly' along with subtle resentment, he lay on his cot and drifted off into slumber, not knowing when the authorities would execute the High Council's order.

His curiosity, however, didn't outlast how tired and worn his short, portly body had become, how his muscles had atrophied and his mind slowed from thousands of evenings with nothing to do but pace back and forth and gaze upon the blue fluffy planet surrounded by billions of twinkling stars. He'd give anything to be beamed out of the galaxy, far away from Penal Colony 23, away from the cruelty of the High Council and their foolish idealism. The Federation, he predicted, would never stand united as the Council wanted. Human beings, in all of their ever- evolving forms, would never yield power to the hot-blooded Martian or the equivocating women of Venus. But should the current affairs of the Federation matter to him now? They didn't matter as much as this one mission. Once again he would arrive on Earth, and the first thing he'd do is hire a black Cadillac limousine to take him straight to Pennsylvania Avenue, if only to reclaim those white wooden pillars and charming presidential gardens so familiar in their fragrances...

_And_ _as_ _he_ _slept_ _and_ _dreamt,_ _he_ _saw_ _himself_ _sleeping_ _in_ _his_ _cot,_ _as_ _though_ _he_ _had_ _been_ _given_ _some_ _sort_ _of_ _second_ _sight_ _to_ _view_ _his_ _body_ _as_ _it_ _slept._ _His_ _body_ _lifts_ _itself_ _from_ _the_ _cot_ _and_ _walks_ _to_ _the_ _large,_ _thick_ _windows_ _where_ _Venus_ _spins_ _on_ _her_ _axis._ _He_ _leans_ _against_ _the_ _glass,_ _and_ _in_ _just_ _a_ _moment's_ _flicker,_ _he_ _walks_ _through_ _the_ _window_ _until_ _he_ _finds_ _himself_ _floating_ _in_ _space,_ _hovering_ _in_ _the_ _blackness_ _between_ _Penal_ _Colony_ _23_ _and_ _the_ _blue/green_ _glow_ _of_ _the_ _female_ _planet._ _He_ _is_ _amazed_ _at_ _how_ _free_ _and_ _liberated_ _he_ _feels,_ _as_ _though_ _the_ _muscles_ _that_ _had_ _atrophied_ _are_ _slowly_ _beginning_ _to_ _take_ _healthier_ _shape,_ _and_ _his_ _mind_ _once_ _riddled_ _with_ _forgetfulness_ _and_ _blank_ _simplicity_ _regains_ _its_ _former_ _composure._ _But_ _as_ _he_ _floats_ _beyond_ _the_ _Penal_ _Colony,_ _the_ _background_ _of_ _pitch_ _black_ _space_ _gradually_ _fades._

_He_ _is_ _now_ _on_ _some_ _sort_ _of_ _precipice_ _gazing_ _over_ _a_ _deeply_ _gutted_ _canyon._ _Close_ _above_ _him_ _are_ _what_ _appear_ _to_ _be_ _flashing_ _pulses_ _of_ _electric_ _light,_ _almost_ _like_ _electrical_ _circuits_ _or_ _veins_ _that_ _are_ _merging_ _into_ _one_ _another_ _like_ _a_ _sinewy river._ _These_ _circuits_ _above_ _him,_ _flashing_ _and_ _throbbing_ _randomly,_ _cover_ _the_ _sky_ _as_ _a_ _bright_ _canopy._ _He_ _is_ _amazed_ _by_ _the_ _pulses_ _and_ _throbs_ _above_ _him,_ _until_ _suddenly_ _the_ _precipice_ _he_ _is_ _on_ _elevates_ _him_ _closer_ _and_ _closer_ _to_ _the_ _ceiling_ _of_ _the_ _circuits_ _above,_ _like_ _a_ _lift_ _bringing_ _him_ _closer_ _and_ _closer_ _to_ _the_ _multi-colored_ _channels_ _that_ _cover_ _the_ _sky._ _As_ _he_ _approaches,_ _he_ _calls_ _out_ _for_ _help,_ _but_ _no_ _one_ _responds,_ _until_ _he_ _is_ _slowly_ _squeezed_ _between_ _what_ _lifts_ _him_ _and_ _the_ _ceiling_ _of_ _flashing_ _circuits._

_The_ _bright,_ _flashing_ _colors_ _nearly_ _blind_ _him,_ _as_ _he_ _breaks_ _through_ _one_ _of_ _the_ _pulsating_ _channels_ _and_ _tumbles_ _into_ _it_ _head_ _first_ _as_ _though_ _he_ _is_ _caught_ _by_ _a_ _strong_ _current._ _The_ _channel_ _then_ _transforms_ _into_ _a_ _kaleidoscopic_ _wormhole,_ _as_ _he_ _travels_ _through_ _the_ _tube_ _faster_ _than_ _the_ _speed_ _of_ _sound._ _He_ _yells_ _and_ _screams,_ _but_ _there_ _isn't_ _a_ _High_ _Council_ _or_ _any_ _sort_ _of_ _authoritative_ _body_ _to_ _help_ _him_ _now_ _as_ _he_ _careens_ _up,_ _plummets_ _down,_ _and_ _swirls_ _through_ _the_ _narrow_ _hole_ _until_ _he_ _loses_ _consciousness_ _altogether..._

He awoke in the pitch-black darkness, his body feeling a bit worn and more fatigued than it usually felt. He noticed that his muscles were not in the same places. They had elongated beneath his skin. He was also much taller. Even his face seemed different, as it was more spread out, his cheekbones a bit higher and his nose a bit longer. And as he bit down on his mouth, his teeth were more sensitive and in a different configuration than he was normally used to. But his body lay supine on a mattress in the middle of this darkness, and as he projected his arm to the left of him, he felt a bulge lying next to his body. Not knowing what was beside him, he soon heard heavy breathing, the bulge next to him rising and falling rhythmically. With his elbow he nudged this bulge beside him. He heard movement and a moan. He nudged it again, his entire body feeling awkward and exhausted, as though he had been reborn into another creature with this sighing, breathing entity lying an arm's length away. After he nudged it for the third time, he heard a voice from underneath the covers.

"Ted, can't you go to sleep?"

And the entity changed positions underneath the cold linen sheets.

"Ted?" said Hoover. "Who's Ted?"

An arm emerged from the bulge beside him and turned on the light. He then looked towards what was once a bulge in the darkness. It was now an older woman staring right back at him.

"AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!" was his only response. He leapt out of bed and fell to the floor.

"Ted, what on earth are you doing?" said the woman, her head looking down upon him as he struggled to get up. "Ted?" she said again, "are you alright? What has gotten into you?"

"Who the hell are you?" yelled Hoover, his eyes popping out of their sockets.

"Oh, not this again," she said as she rolled on her back and reached for the light.

"No, wait—don't turn off the light," he yelled.

The woman sighed, rolled back to where she was, and peered down upon what was formerly the consciousness of Ted Gill of Goshen, New York.

"Is there something you want to talk about?" she said, "because I need my rest. You have a reading tomorrow night, and you need your rest too."

"Oh, my God," said Hoover within the body of another man, someone named Ted.

He sprang up from the floor and ran to the bathroom, its door ajar. He immediately found a mirror and looked deeply into it, and there he saw another man entirely— this man named Ted, his skin pinkish pale and his vision a bit blurry, his hair thinning over his scalp, and his teeth made of harder, denser bone. And he was also tired, so very fatigued, as though he needed much more sleep.

"Are you alright in there?" called out the strange woman.

"Just a second," he called back.

His boney fingers probed the flesh of his face. Hoover was no longer within his own body. This he knew. His back was straighter, and he was a bit taller. His eyes were blue, and his once ruddy, bulbous flesh had been replaced with soft, weathered skin. His joints ached, and as he finally realized what had happened, he returned to the bedroom and lay down next to whom he assumed to be his wife. The woman then shut off the light.

"Oh, goodnight, Ted."

And for what seemed like several hours, Hoover lay rigidly next to her and waited patiently until morning. He couldn't believe what the High Council could do. What immense powers they had indeed! At first he thought he had dreamt all of this, but as his feet brushed against the cool linen of the bed, he knew his new body and his same old mind were as real as the springs in the mattress jabbing him in the back. The Council never said how he was supposed to return to deep space, as this was his concern now that he had been sent to Earth. But he figured all would be revealed in time. Life on Earth had never come with an instruction manual, so for the most part he'd have to use his own wits to find the young man the Council spoke of. And as he lay there, he remembered how he had only one real friend on his last visit to Earth. He had made him Associate Director of the FBI, Hoover being the first in command. He missed Clyde Tolson just then—how strong and tall he was, how gallant in his manners and how forgiving he could be, almost like a child in his arms. But those days were over. Never again would he tempt the authority of the High Council. Never again would he get sidetracked by any affairs of state. He vowed to stick to the mission at all costs, if only to make it out of Earth's orbit, not by being punished, but praised for his work. And although he was exhausted, he stayed awake through the night wondering about this strange crone sleeping next to him.

He got up a few times to check his new looks in the bathroom mirror, but overall Hoover had molded into his new shape without much of a problem. He waited for dawn patiently, and when its rosy fingers streaked across the sky, he knew that he had finally returned to the place he had once ruled with an iron fist. Without waking the woman, he donned Ted Gill's clothes and stepped out into the cool dawn. A light wind greeted him, and the birds in the trees chirped excitedly as the new day broke. He breathed in the air in heavy sighs. He couldn't deny that so many years on 23 all led to this singularly surreal moment of joy and bliss. He felt joy in his lungs and bliss in his blood, his mind finally focused on the mission after lying awake all night. But then he heard movement from within the household. He remembered he shared his bed with someone he hardly knew.

"Ted, do you want coffee?"

Hoover walked inside, found the kitchen, and took a seat at the small square table in the corner. The woman poured him a cup of black coffee. He looked around the kitchen for clues as to what her name might be, but there were only photographs of their recent wedding posted to the refrigerator door.

"Did you get any sleep last night?" she asked. "I got a few hours," he said unconvincingly.

"You were awake all night. I know it. Otherwise you wouldn't have forgotten to give me my morning kiss."

Hoover bristled at the thought of this, but he obliged her with a peck on the cheek and a long hug of sorts that reminded him of early childhood with his mother. There were also several gadgets and electronic devices he had never seen before—like the microwave and the cordless telephone. He dared not ask the woman about these items. He'd learn of them soon enough. He also reminded himself that almost forty years had passed since he lived on Earth. Things would certainly be different.

"You wouldn't know where the newspaper is, would you?"

The woman rolled her eyes at him.

"I'll get it," she said. "It's out on the porch."

The coffee, by the way, tasted as though the beans were shipped to their doorstep that very morning. If they had coffee like this at FBI headquarters back in the sixties, the agents would have never complained as much. And when the woman dropped the morning paper in front of him, he almost spilled his coffee upon seeing the pictures on the front page, which were now in full color. He immediately tore into the paper, reading every line of irrelevant articles just to absorb all the information he could get. He made a note of the local politicians and the district's elected officials in Washington. He scarcely believed that the former head of the CIA's son had become President of the United States. This he saw as a miraculous absurdity. He also couldn't believe that the nation fought yet another overseas war.

'Just like the last one,' he thought to himself. Certainly he yearned to have the FBI returned to his strict command, but he remembered so suddenly that he was not on Earth to toy with government. In fact, what he read in the paper proved to be totally irrelevant to his mission. He sipped at his coffee and also felt a little saddened by this new existence he had taken on. A man bereft of power was no man at all. He bit his lower lip and held in the pains of being a normal and everyday person— so ordinary and sad for a man of his stature. But it sure beat staring at Venus. Maybe things weren't as bad as they seemed.

It took him a few hours of lounging in doors to acclimate to his new surroundings. And when the woman spoke of a poetry reading later that night, he cringed at the thought of attending one. He could have sat around all day and finished off all of the potent coffee, but when the woman he now lived with turned on the big screen television, the sight and sound of it almost gave him a heart attack. He still didn't know her name, although he did check the roll-top desk where this Ted kept most of his files. But the television took him away from the mission for a spell. He couldn't believe how many channels had come to Earth. He simply tuned it to the 24-hour news channel and watched the wide screen unblinkingly. It seemed that these handsome newsmen and entertainment-ready newswomen, whom he thought would have otherwise been Vegas showgirls or tarts on the Sunset Strip, delivered way too much information for a simple American public to digest, almost as though it were the type of disinformation he had used in the Bureau to spread false and malicious rumors about the initiatives and policies of his enemies. He couldn't make sense of the news at first, because all of it lacked analysis, and some of the stories sounded like they were nifty combinations of what would have normally come from a Hollywood movie set as well as the clever propagandists he once knew in government.

'At least the men are handsome,' was all he could think about this unrelenting chatterbox.

He turned it off by late afternoon, and luckily the woman he hardly knew had left him to his own devices. His mind bled from so much news, such that he was tired and irritable by the end of the day. The woman, he figured, had fallen back asleep in the bedroom, but as the sun dipped behind trees that towered over his front yard, she sprang back to life and tried to get him to eat something. "You're skinny enough as it is," she called from the kitchen.

But Hoover didn't feel like eating. Neither did he feel like attending a poetry reading. He refused the woman's food, which she carefully laid out on the dining room table, and just when he thought he was free and clear of what seemed to be her persistent nagging, he heard a slight knock at the door, which he answered immediately.

Beyond the threshold of the doorway outside stood a young man with longish brown locks that reached his shoulders. He noticed his wide and prominent forehead underneath an Irish tweed cap. A pair of small oval spectacles slipped from his pinched nose. He was as short as Hoover was, and his cap would have been better suited for the winter months than for summer. He had a stocky frame and generally seemed like someone from nineteenth century Dublin.

"Hello, sir!" said the young man in a mock-Irish brogue. "Who are you?" asked Hoover.

"Why many people call me the fine poet Robert Milby, but you, sir, can call me anything you like."

"I think Robert will be fine."

The young man entered the house and kissed the woman Hoover now stayed with.

"Jane, you look lovely this evening," which was a reprisal of his mock-Irish accent.

The young man seemed to be very happy about something, but it was more the intensity of his speech that most defined him. Hoover was actually glad that he arrived, as he finally discovered what the name of the woman was—a simple name, this Jane. Milby took a seat on the sofa after fawning over Hoover's new wife. Robert carried a briefcase with an odd assortment of politically-tinged bumper stickers on it and also a black duffel bag filled to the hilt with books of poetry, which he emptied onto the nearest table. He doffed his cap revealing hair that was parted in the middle. Hoover first pegged Milby as some sort of Irish hippie, but he knew not to rush to judgment so quickly. He asked Jane to make some coffee for him, and she obliged him. Milby then directed his talk to him, as though it seemed like the young man could have been talking to anyone, as his palaver was sophisticated enough to be generically directed at anyone within earshot.

"We have a bunch of readings coming up, Ted, and you and Jane should definitely come to them," this time in his normal American voice.

He then rattled off a list of dates and locations that flew over Hoover's head like an airplane would. He was more confused by this overload of information than his comprehension allowed.

"I just wanted you to know that I'm fighting to get you featured up in Woodstock. It'll take a little time, but Ted, you deserve to be featured up in Woodstock. All of those poets up there need to hear your work, and by the way, they need new poets up there too. But I also just wanted to say that my new book is being released soon, and I want you to come to my featured reading up in Beacon. Edna St. Vincent Millay's birthday's tomorrow, so I'm definitely reading tonight. On Monday it's Edgar Allen Poe's birthday. You should hear my poem about Poe, by the way. I think I read it to you the other day, Ted. He was such a tortured soul. These younger poets won't even go near Poe, because they're all mind-controlled, Ted. All of them are like little robots programmed by the elite and the one-world government. It's sad, so very sad. And meanwhile the Bushies are blowing up children in Iraq, and these mind-controlled, bourgeois women are just sucking the propaganda in, as they watch their MTV or whatever corporate television show their controlled by. Oh, believe me, Ted, I can tell you some things about Dick Cheney. It's all one-world government. Are you with me? Because I do care about you and Jane..."

Milby went on like this for several minutes, drifting from one topic to the next in what seemed to be an extended political rant. There were times during this rant that Hoover felt a nerve or two pinch inside of him. Milby talked so quickly and so intensely that Hoover couldn't get a word in edgewise. He simply looked at him as a stunned child would as Milby's voice became a channel that hopped around from one topic to the next as though there were no barriers or boundaries between them. It was remarkable, but at the same time his talked hinted of illegality, as it made him think too much in the shortest of time-spans. He didn't even know when he would pause.

"...Let's keep all of this in the vault, Ted," he said, finally, after Jane brought him a cup of coffee. "Oh, yes, Sir Gill, there's a lot going on that no one wants to talk about."

Breathless at the rapidity of his speech, Hoover simply stared back at him as though he had been struck dumb by a lightning bolt. He didn't know where to begin addressing some of the things he said, as his energies had been drained just trying to keep pace with the speed of his discourse. He was thankful the coffee had arrived, as it gave him time to dissect some of the things he said. Words like 'propaganda' and 'one world government,' and especially this war in Iraq, as he had read about in the paper, all seemed like the type of seditious rhetoric that he used to be so good at dismantling as FBI chief. Yet his head still spun from Milby's rant, and just when he thought it was over, Milby finished the coffee and went ahead in much of the same manner, his words like ticking bombs that stored in the flesh of his sensitive brain. His words were potent enough to drive someone as mad as Hoover to tears of helplessness—until it was time for Hoover and Robert to leave, of course.

"Ted, aren't you forgetting something?" said Jane at the front door.

"What am I forgetting?" asked Hoover who looked to Milby for a hint.

"Well, go on, Ted. Kiss the woman," said Robert. Begrudgingly, he gave Jane a peck on the mouth, and within a few minutes, Milby and Hoover drove along a darkening road that led farther north of Goshen. Milby continued to talk of politics, especially the war in Iraq and how the current administration was as close to evil as evil could get. His talk was as intense and persistent as before, thereby creating a magnetic pull around him as though Milby were the center of all things and Hoover a grain of stardust that orbited him. Milby must have went on for more than a half-hour until he finally decided to listen to a cassette tape he fished from his jacket pocket. Hoover hoped for Texas swing, but instead the voice of what seemed to be a train-hopping hobo, accompanied by a drizzle of piano, blared from the car's stereo system.

"Now this is music. It's Tom Waits. Don't you love it?" Hoover again ground his teeth and kept his anger and discomfort under strict control. One false move, and he'd be sent to Pluto. Hoover stepped on the gas and drove quickly up the back roads of Orange County, as this was the only attempt he could muster to avoid the music they listened to, an impossible attempt at escape. After a time he yearned for complete silence. But such a hope didn't transpire, as the hoarse voice of Tom Waits, suddenly applied to what Milby referred to as a love song, grated his musical sensibilities. By the time they reached the coffee shop where the reading was to take place, he had had enough of Robert Milby and wanted him executed. Yet he didn't say anything to him that would indicate this. He simply tucked his frustrations into the folds of his ever-growing hatred of mankind in general and played along as though the ride upstate were an enjoyable excursion.

The coffee shop itself, situated on a corner block of a sleepy town and abutting a singular road that ran through the center of it, was lightly peopled by the time they walked in. Retirees and old hippies made up a good part of the audience. Hoover hoped for a young teenage boy or two, but he only surveyed the graying of what was once a generation immersed in youthful oblivion. This was good in one respect but bad in another—bad, because he'd have to sit through two hours of nonsensical poetry in an audience that could barely walk without some sort of help—and good, because the rebellion on Earth had actually fizzled out, thereby rendering his time at the helm of law enforcement as something purposeful. A few people walked up to him and shook his hand, which he begrudgingly permitted. Other than that, Hoover sat by himself as he watched Robert Milby engage in conversation with almost every person there, even the young sweetheart behind the counter who poured him yet another cup of coffee. How one man could withstand so much coffee he didn't know, but coffee worked as fuel for Robert, or at least served as a generator that sucked in everyone around the periphery of his voice.

On the whole, while Hoover found Milby's company to be dreadful, he did notice how his methods of pulling people in may have worked wonders, should he ever turn to legitimate politics. He had never before seen a young man talk so much. Yet the real leap from tolerating Robert before the start of the reading to wanting to strangle him by the end of it came when Robert himself took center stage and read his own work to the brave few who were assembled there. Prior to Robert's reading, the other poems were tame inquiries into nature and philosophy, and perhaps a poem or two criticizing government benignly. The poetry, in fact, almost put Hoover to sleep, as the verses he heard were smooth and sonorous and too incomprehensible to him to matter very much. He drifted in and out of polished lines that were clever in their construction. But when Robert stood in front of the gathering and read from a poem he called "Camp Casey: Ode to Cindy Sheehan", Hoover could do nothing but squirm in his seat like a frying fish. Milby belted out such lines as,

The King and Queen's princesses are noble.

In the midst of drunken frat parties, debutant balls,

Ivy League affiliations, the King's daughters

Have not signed up for the honor of depleted uranium,

Abu Graib, or a massacre in Fallujah.

Milby then read another poem where he again applied his sedition as thickly as frosting on a wedding cake.

Babies and children attacked by cowardly,

Conniving men in suits and uniforms with

Executioner medals...Demons are never buried

For long in the fiery history books, or by the

Amnesia of omission.

As each line progressed, so did the intensity of his delivery, until he had expended all of his anger and hatred towards the current administration and what he considered to be a dastardly war fought by the most corruptible of men. He left the stage to an applause that thundered from the quaint bunch that had heard him, and Hoover understood right then and there that he must indeed kill Robert Milby in order to serve his country and preserve the same bubble of ignorance most of America's populace apathetically lived in. It was the only way. But what of the consequences of such an act?

He thought about an eternity of imprisonment on Pluto as they both drove back to Goshen. The roads were pitch-black, save for a restaurant and gas station or two dotting the eerie landscape. On the ride back Robert continued to bemoan the state of the world, his talk spiced with alarm and a heart that bled for those innocently killed in Iraq. Hoover simply sat quietly as they drove, absorbing Milby's talk like a giant sponge on the verge of being squeezed.

"You're awfully quiet tonight, Ted," said Robert. "Is everything alright?"

He asked this several times as they finally reached Ted Gill's Goshen home.

"Everything is fine," said Hoover. "Just fine."

They entered the home quietly, but then they noticed that Jane was still awake. She had waited up for them.

"Hello, Jane," said Robert on his way in. "You mind if I make some coffee?"

Perhaps it was something about the way Robert asked for coffee that pushed Hoover over the edge just then. Perhaps it was the audacity of the request after a night of his endless accusations and insults towards the things Hoover thought sacred. Nevertheless, when Robert asked for another cup, Hoover puffed with a rage that blinded him to the consequences of attacking the young man outright. When he could control his anger no more, Hoover leapt upon Robert and forced him to the floor. He sat on top of him and gripped his two boney hands around his neck. Jane hardly said a word at Hoover's outbreak. She simply marched into the kitchen, selected the heavy iron skillet sitting on the stove, returned to the living room where the two of them struggled on the carpet, and banged J. Edgar Hoover over the head with the blunt object. It sounded as though a large gong had been struck, as Ted Gill's body, limp and pale, collapsed onto Robert's.

"My God, Jane, what's gotten into him?!" cried Robert, buried beneath his body.

But then Ted's body shook and convulsed. Robert pushed him off as Ted repeated over and over again, "don't you put the blame on me. Don't you put the blame on me. Don't you put the blame on me..."

Jane rushed to the kitchen and returned with a cold glass of water, which she poured on him. Ted Gill, suddenly drenched and reawakened from an incredible journey, simply sat up and put his glasses back on so that he could see better. He looked to them both.

"Jane? Robert?" he asked quietly. "What happened? Where was I?"

"Oh, Ted," said Jane rushing to his side, "it's that damned High Council. They needed you again."

"I hope I didn't do anything to offend you guys," said Robert.

J. Edgar Hoover, after being pulled from Ted Gill's body, found himself in yet another wormhole, his body slipping out of Earth's atmosphere and riding what seemed to be a kaleidoscopic wave further out into the solar system. While traveling for an extended period of time through the wormhole, however, he noticed that the air had grown very cold and the sides of the wormhole had darkened as though it had lost nearly all of its prior energy. It was then that time slowed, and he blacked out quite suddenly.

When he regained consciousness, the side of his face felt cold and numb. There was darkness all around him. He picked himself up from the icy ground and realized suddenly that he had been transported to another planet. He quickly turned around and noticed how the sun seemed like a weak flame within a sky of twinkling stars. He had finally arrived on Pluto, his guttural scream falling upon deaf ears that were light-years away from anything remotely human.
ROBERTA GOULD

TERESA MARTA COSTA

She was never one to investigate coincidences, but Roberta Gould walked into her neighborhood deli on the anniversary of her friend's death and swore she stood face-to-face with an exact replica of her friend slicing and serving deli meats to a crowd of cranky patrons. The woman's hair was of the same dirty-blonde hue, and her chestnut eyes possessed the same watery surfaces as the lake they used to swim in during the warm summer months up in Sullivan County. And yet she couldn't mistake the woman's uncanny resemblance to her friend whom she suddenly missed with sentimental abandon, considering that her friend had passed away almost ten years ago. Roberta should have long been over her death by now. Sure the counter woman was a much younger version of her friend, and perhaps it was something about Roberta's own perspective that skewed her vision, but there was nothing she could do but stare into her features as the rest of her body leaned over the display cases to service the next customer. This customer, a heavy-set woman who wanted a half-pound of bologna, told Roberta to get in line like everyone else. Roberta took this as her cue to leave the store, which she did as nonchalantly as possible. Who the hell needed deli meat anyway?

She exited into the cool autumnal air, hoping to be rid of these ghosts. Actually, the feeling of the crisp air on her face did do her some good. She had come upon a mystery whereby other people's lives and their bodies, perhaps clones of themselves, were somehow being reproduced after being transferred to earth, and controlled, nonetheless, by a central authority that oversaw all of this genetic manipulation. At least this was her operating theory on the way the universe worked, now that she saw her old friend brought back to life within a body that was a spitting image of her. For the life of her, Roberta couldn't figure out why she of all people had been granted access to these subtle messages. They usually began as synchronous coincidences, until her curiosity took charge and a decipherable pattern emerged from within the reality she moved through. It always seemed to happen this way, and whether she just happened to be ultra-sensitive to these patterns of mystical activity, she couldn't say.

But she had been noticing the patterns almost daily, and she thought for a brief moment that she may be losing her mind. Her highs and lows during the day, for example, was one such pattern she pulled out of a haystack of them. She noticed that her day had peaks and valleys to them, almost like moods that found her either happy or sad, confident or insecure. She considered that a slope or a parabola represented this pattern well enough such that she could draw it on a Cartesian plane until several parabolas were linked together to form a wavelength, or a series of highs and lows, as represented in Calculus by the variables _cosin_ and _sin_. Given that her moods could be represented by mathematical equations, much of what she saw within her governing reality, then, was also represented by these same mathematical equations. So the clouds in the sky were not clouds at all but complex equations that resulted in the image of the clouds above her. Reality, then, was not really reality. Instead, it was a symbolic representation of a much more powerful reality that hid truth like a veil that hides a bride's face. The sky became a curtain that hid this truth, and this truth could be expressed through Calculus and not the puffy white accumulations the sky was made of.

She wrote a poem about this once, a really short one, and she had never been very good at math in school, but she definitely found a deeper appreciation for the discipline, now that she understood that things were never what they seemed to be. But sometimes the pattern recognition played a more palpable role, and after she left the deli where she had seen her best friend occupy the body of a deli counter-woman, she almost fainted on the sidewalk when a second, more mysterious pattern took hold.

Roberta had been politically active in her younger years and knew of the major issues of the day, which included those that sided or went against environmental protections and alternative fuels. She cast a wary eye in the direction of the avenue and found that four cars, one behind the other, waited at a red light. On each car, a bumper or window sticker, or both, advertised environmental causes that were previously in vogue. And these cars, she noticed, were all European cars—Volvo, Saab, BMW, and Audi—each of them displaying their bumper and window stickers proudly. It was an odd pattern but a pattern nonetheless that was immediately confirmed as she moved to the next block and found another set of four cars, all of them American-made, that displayed bumper and window stickers supporting the troops and the mostly Republican causes that surfaced just after 9/11. These were yellow ribbons with patriotic inscriptions, a Bush-Cheney election sticker, a flag with 'Freedom isn't Free' printed on it, and another from the U.S. Naval Academy. Roberta hardly believed that such a pattern lay in front of her so conspicuously.

Once she detected a pattern, she then set her mind towards deciphering it into a message that would explain its _raison_ _d'etre_. She usually found this interpretive stage quite difficult, but due to her training as a poet penning verse that had a more subtle impact on her readers as opposed to a more overt effect, she had no trouble translating the pattern. Her conclusion was simple: that there would be another terrorist attack in the United States, only this time it would involve a nuclear device detonated in both New York City and Los Angeles, wiping out both coasts and ushering in a nuclear ice age that would last a hundred years.

Certainly this had been prophesized many times before, especially by those opposed to the war on terror as well as the hordes of irresponsible pundits on progressive radio stations. In fact, nuclear annihilation had become the rallying call for massive protests at the tail end of the Cold War. So mutually-assured destruction was nothing new, and perhaps she did walk in a march or two back in the early eighties to support the cause. But after noticing that the pattern of cars ended at a colossal accident involving a truck and a motorcycle up ahead that snarled the avenue in stand-still traffic, she knew right away that the world was ending and that she had better escape to survive the apocalypse.

She then came upon the third stage of pattern recognition, as sirens blared down the long stretch of avenue, the cars involved in the pattern swerving to the side of the road and allowing a couple of ambulances and a long fire truck to squeeze by. This third stage involved checking the validity of the message against the evidence provided by newsmakers and experts in the field. Did the message make sense, in other words, much like a solution to a math problem has to make sense in order to be correct? She called this third stage 'message verification,' as it came after pattern recognition and pattern translation. Given that the threat of a terrorist bombing had been played up by almost every news station in the country, and given that the pattern ended with the deaths of both the truck driver and the motorcyclist whose bodies the ambulances now carted away, she reasonably concluded that the message sent to her through the pattern was indeed a valid and authentic message that ought to be taken seriously. The final stage in all of this— a reaction to the valid message—depended on her sensitivity level to the message, or more simply put, how afraid she was of knowing that terrorists would actually detonate a nuclear device in two major cities. Her fear demanded an immediate response to the message, such as high-tailing it out of the country and taking anyone she could with her.

But what would her friends think, she considered. Well, she could convince her friends to leave the country as well. She was a well-known poet after all, and America certainly wasn't the place it used to be, especially with the crackdown on free speech and all art in general. Although she had survived another northeast winter and had arrived at a gentle spring, she still felt the need to be closer to the sun and the warmth that it radiated. Such a warmth penetrated the skin and felt like being enveloped by a strange mystical security blanket, and the last time she really felt secure was down in Mexico where she had visited relatives a few years ago. She was fluent in Spanish, and she would be able to survive down there with what little savings she had left. Land was cheap and so was the Mexican peso relative to the dollar. Mexico City, it seemed, became the perfect spot to avoid a nuclear holocaust in the States.

Convincing her friends, however, loomed as a real challenge. They may think her bold prophesy a sign of illness or the type of stubborn lunacy poets usually face when they've written verse for most of their lives. It all depended on how she approached them. She couldn't, let's say, sneak up behind them, grab them by the shoulders, and yell into their ears that two twin bombs would simultaneously hit the most populous areas in the nation, could she? No. She needed subtlety and tact to deliver the medicine of this prophesy, hopefully, with a spoonful of sugar. And they would believe her, because the message was authentic, and the accident in the middle of the avenue had scared her like it had so many times before.

After she canvassed the scene of the accident, she went home. Roberta lived in a two-story walk-up adjacent to the town's only park. She turned on the television, and almost immediately the news featured a story on Iran's uranium enrichment program. She picked up a magazine lying on her coffee table only to find the deformed children of Chernobyl's meltdown featured on the cover page. She tried to watch a movie only to find Robert Zemeckis' _Back_ _to_ _the_ _Future_ on the television screen, where a car that travels through time needs plutonium and a lightning bolt to return a time traveler to present day. She must have flipped through a hundred channels that afternoon, and the message of the coming apocalypse was not only clear but also persistent, like a stubborn rash that itched a soft patch of skin to death. There seemed to be no escape from the message, as though she alone were chosen to receive it. Noah had his ark. And Roberta finally phoned in a rental car for herself and a companion, yet to be named, for the drive down to Mexico City. Perhaps she could tell her friends that she wanted to take a very special someone on vacation.

She would break the news about her visions when the tan dust and dirt of the rubble-strewn Mexico City alleyways drifted across her open-toed sandals and fell upon her skin like layers of a Latin shroud. She figured that their time in Mexico City would be a somber time filled with the type of angst and longing that expatriates sometimes feel for their homeland. Being away from America, at first, would be a gift of sorts, like opening a box of fine treasure that would give her an initial thrill but would fail to nourish them as only a homeland could. And meanwhile the bombs would drop, and she would have arrived in Mexico way before the mass exodus of refugees of every stripe and color who sail out of California and the Northeast with their eyes burned out and their limbs dangling from their tendons as though they had bathed in a deleterious acid. It was only a matter of time.

Just then she heard a knock at the door. When she opened it, she discovered Teresa Marta Costa in a pink sundress and loud doo-wop sunshades that wrapped around her eyes. She didn't expect Teresa to show up so early, as they usually shared their poetry for later in the evening when it was safe to uncork a bottle of chilled Spanish wine and turn up the Flamenco music Roberta had bought while on a short vacation overseas. But it was the middle of the afternoon, and there wasn't a moment to spare.

"Come in. Quickly," said Roberta, rushing Teresa into the living room and sitting her down on a love seat that had been the sight of numerous transgressions and flights of mischief over the years.

"What is it?" asked Teresa in her hipster, San Fernando Valley accent that she never outgrew.

"I have a lot to tell you," said Roberta, her voice rising slightly above a hoarse, scratchy whisper.

"Are you alright?"

"Not really, no. What I'm about to tell you needs to be told to everyone we know before it's too late. If we prepare for it now, we'll avoid the traffic down to Mexico later."

"Whoa. Wait a minute. What about Mexico?"

"Teresa, you have to believe me. Haven't I always been a person who is of sound mind and body?"

"On occasion, sure."

"C'mon. Be serious. This is very serious stuff we're dealing with."

"Who's 'we?' Don't drag me into this."

"We're all being dragged into this. Don't you see what's happening all around you?"

"That you've taken the brown acid when you should have taken the purple?"

"Is everything a joke to you? I need you to be serious, Teresa. Please. For the sake of humanity."

Teresa lifted her head to the ceiling and breathed a deep, heavy sigh.

"Fine," she said finally, "you're ruining a perfectly whimsical and carefree day for me, I should have you know. I could be having my nails done right now."

Roberta kneeled beside her and put her hand in hers. "What I'm about to tell you probably won't make any sense to you, at least not right away."

"Why start making sense now?"

"Teresa, I learned something this morning that will alter the course of existence and all life on this planet as we know it."

"Okay. Please do tell."

"We're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust sometime in the very near future."

Roberta closed her eyes tightly when she said this, as though Teresa herself were also a time bomb that would explode in hysterics upon hearing this news.

"You can open your eyes," said Teresa, "and besides, everyone knows another bomb's going to go off anyway. It's not like it's anything new."

"But it's going to happen soon."

"Yeah. Soon."

"Well, shouldn't we head south if this will happen soon?"

"It's not going to happen today," she said. "We can't do anything anyway, if it does happen."

"I don't think you understand. This is really happening, and it may happen tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes. I thought we'd head down to Mexico City. I know a few people there we can stay with."

"Mexico City? Maybe we should think about Cancun."

"This is no time for jokes. Pack your bags, because we're heading south. I've never been so certain in my life. And yeah, it really stinks that the world has to end, but at least we're here to say goodbye to all of this. We'll start a new life in Mexico City."

"Sometimes, Roberta, I don't know what to think about you. Well, we'll be back in couple of weeks anyway, right?"

"Whatever," she said, grimacing and sighing aloud. Roberta rented a Ford Mustang convertible shortly after they had packed their bags. The end of the world seemed like the perfect occasion to drive a Mustang. They filled the trunk with all of their baggage. Teresa even made sure to take her swimsuit and snorkeling equipment. The trunk, in fact, was overloaded with Roberta's bags. They had to tie down the trunk with a bungee chord, the Mustang looking more like an old-fashioned cabriolet that bounced and jostled along the pot-holed roads of Sullivan County. Luckily, none of their bags fell out as they surrendered to the emptiness of the southbound Thruway.

"Wow," said Teresa, "this is just like _Thelma_ _and_ _Louise_."

The sun dissolved below the horizon into an orange-reddish orb. It slowly descended below the low mountains that sprang up along the Hudson River, its light reflecting off the slow, rippling currents of water that pushed cargo barges, tug boats, and oil tankers up towards the Great Lakes region.

When they drove far enough south and passed the great city, the tall skyscrapers outlined like silhouettes in the ever-darkening sky, a sudden flash of scalding white neon struck the earth's atmosphere. The land not-so-far behind them caved in and a fiery mushroom cloud blinded them and sucked up all of New York City into the sky, their rearview mirror melting as they drove.

"I never knew getting a suntan would be this easy," said Teresa, reclining back in the passenger's seat.

"I knew I was right," said Roberta at the wheel. "I just knew it."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harvey Havel is a short-story writer and novelist. He is formerly a writing instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. He also taught writing and literature at the College of St. Rose in Albany as well as SUNY Albany.

Copies of his books and short stories may be purchased at most of the major online book retailers.
