 
THE TERROR{blist}

A short story by

cseanmcgee

The Terror{blist}

Copyright© Cian Sean McGee

CSM PUBLISHING

'The Free Art Collection"

Published at Smashwords

Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil 2013

First Edition

All rights reserved. This FREE ART ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, the reader is not charged to access it and the downloader or sharer does not attempt to assume any part of the work as their own. Free art, just a writer's voice and your conscious ear.

Cover Design: C. Sean McGee

Interior layout: C. Sean McGee

Author Foto: Carla Raiter

This novella was written under the influence of

KMFDM – NIHIL

for keli, nenagh and tomás

# CHAPTER ZERO

"Do you feel bored often?"

"Yeah I guess."

"Well, how often? All the time, most of the time, sometimes, hardly ever, never?"

"Well, it depends really?"

"But for the sake of this test, we'll just say...?"

"Maybe a few times a week, maybe once a day."

The Doctor looked estranged. That response wasn't sitting on his chart. The boy was speaking outside of context. He was surely delusional but as much as The Doctor scanned over his page, he couldn't find mild delusion as a common symptom of depression.

"Stick to the script," he thought. "So, we can say, most of the time then?"

Gavin looked bored right now. He was sitting slumped in the chair, leaning his arms on his legs and hanging his head like a dead weight over the edge of his knees.

"It depends," he said.

"Well, that's not an answer Gavin. You have to choose one of the five responses."

"But it depends. I mean, if I have to do boring things then of course I'm gonna get bored and if I don't, well, then I don't get bored."

"How often do you do boring things? All the time, most of the time, sometimes, hardly ever or never?'

"I mean, my job it sucks and even television kinda sucks now. There's never anything good on and they just keep repeating that episode that nobody likes."

"So all the time then. Interesting."

"So wait, the depression makes me do boring things that make me bored or the boring things make me bored and that makes me depressed?"

"That's a very pessimistic way of looking at things? Have you always felt hopeless? How often would you say you feel hopeless? All the time, most of the time, sometimes, hardly ever, never?"

"I... well."

"Ok, well I'm gonna go ahead and just tick most of the time here. Now, do you ever feel sad when other people are happy?"

Gavin thought about his brother and when he had proposed to his fiancée at Gavin's birthday dinner. Everyone was so happy that night. They took all of the spoil away from Gavin and put all of their doting adoration to his brother and Fernanda, his stupid fiancée. His face scrunched and crumbled as he thought about that night and probably he didn't know or he thought he was keeping a secret of it by saying nothing but The Doctor could read plainly, the expression on his face.

"Interesting," he said, ticking a box. "Now, would you say you ever feel sad for no reason?"

"There's always a reason to be sad."

"Really, so you'd say that you find reasons in most things to be sad? So would you say that you feel sad all of the time, most of the time, sometimes, hardly ever, never?"

"That's not what I said. What I meant was that if someone is sad then there has to be a reason. Like your cat died or some stupid TV show ended or something."

"But you do feel sad then?"

"Well yeah, I mean everyone does. Just look at the television. All they show is some war or plague or some famine and you can't do anything about it and they make you want to, but there's nothing you can do except feel sad. And you don't ever hear about AIDS anymore. It's still there you know, like in Africa and everywhere, it's still this really big thing, but nobody cares about it anymore."

"Does that make you sad, that people have AIDS?"

"Yeah I guess. I mean, it bugs me more that people stopped giving a shit."

"And do you think about that a lot, death?"

"I suppose."

"Ok, so I'll just go ahead and tick most of the time then."

The Doctor put down his file. Gavin tried to peek, but he couldn't see. His then eyes drifted to the prescription pad on The Doctor's lap. The handwriting was so neat but as neat as it was, it was illegible. It just looked like a whole bunch of wavy circles and Gavin remarked to himself silently at how they all looked like little nooses swirling off the ends of every word.

"So you do have depression but don't worry, though depression is a deadly condition you shouldn't fret, if we start treatment right away, we can have you on the road to betterment in no time."

"How long is this road? And what is no time? Why do your answers get to be ambiguous?"

"So we're gonna start you on Ciprimil, 100mg," said The Doctor, ignoring his doubt. "And from there we will see what sort of results we get."

"We'll see? You're not expecting the drugs to work."

"Well, each person is different and requires different individual treatment."

"And it can only be cured with drugs? You're sure, there's nothing else I can do?"

"Sorry, you're confused; by different treatment we mean different drugs. But yes, drugs are the only way to contain your depression. And pretty soon, you won't be feeling sad anymore and you won't be feeling bored at your job or while watching television, everything will be back to normal. And that confusion should clear up too."

"Wouldn't it be easier to just stop doing boring things? You know, change my job, maybe stop watching television? Who knows, take up tennis?" Gavin said in a mocking laugh.

The Doctor looked annoyed by his attempt at humour.

"Things aren't boring Gavin, you just see them that way. This is a condition of depression. You need to take your medication and then you can continue doing the same things except you will feel a different appreciation for them. You won't be so negative all the time and bringing other people down."

"So wait, are you curing my depression or my boredom?

"Just take the medication."

The piece of coloured paper zipped as The Doctor ripped it away from the pad. Gavin noticed how The Doctor's fingers sort of trembled as he outstretched his hand, holding the coloured prescription out for him to take. It wasn't a lot. It was real subtle. He wouldn't have noticed it had he, not the confidence issue making it so difficult for him to look people in the eyes when they spoke. Probably none of his others patients noticed. Probably he didn't either. It wasn't like his hand was thrashing about in some fit, it was just this subtle tremor like when you blow the steam off the lip of a hot coffee and a tiny bit of breath skims against the top and the coffee ripples lightly; not a lot, just enough so more steam comes back to the surface.

He thought it was odd though that The Doctor's hand only tremored now and not earlier when he'd greeted him or when he rested his hand on the seat's backrest waiting for Gavin to sit down, or when he listened to Gavin poorly describing how he felt or even when he was ticking all of those boxes and flicking the top of the pen so that it clicked all the way through the consult like he was counting the seconds without looking at the clock. They did, though, only tremor, the second that he held out the prescription.

Strange.

Gavin looked at his own hands as he left the office. He held them out in front of his face with his palms facing upwards. They were so still. He tried thinking about things that he thought might stress them to shake or to tremble. But it didn't really work because nothing really bothered him, not enough to tremble his hands anyway. He wondered then, what the doctor was thinking while he was holding out that prescription.

Gavin handed the receptionist the receipt for the consult.

"That'll be three hundred dollars. How would you like to pay; in one installment, in two installments, in three installments, in four installments, in..."

Her mouth opened and closed like a back door, unhinged and molested by a strong breeze and a 'could-care-less' attitude towards keeping it shut. Her eyes, though, like fleshy barnacles, fixed themselves to Gavin's constantly dropping stare. It was as if there were two of her; one was listing every possible box that could be ticked; throwing bails of sinking words from the bow of her thwarting tongue while the other was fighting to keep the shades above her eyes drawn for fear that a single blink might be enough for her to find her vessel shipwrecked on the isle of exhaustion.

"I'll just pay it in one," said Gavin.

"And how would you like to pay; in cash, cheque, card? And will that be credit or debit. We don't work with any insurance carriers and we don't offer receipts, sorry. Oh and do you have a parking receipt?"

"Yes," said Gavin reaching into his wallet.

"Yeah, we don't validate parking either. I was supposed to tell you earlier. There's usually a sing here on the counter."

"You mean this one here that says you don't validate parking?" said Gavin, pointing to the sign.

"Oh, that's it. So how would you like to pay?"

"Credit," said Gavin.

He handed her the card. He wanted to tell her to be careful because it was just one rough handling away from snapping in two. He couldn't explain it. He seemed to be the only guy whose cards always broke in half from carrying them in his wallet. I mean, what was he doing wrong? Was there a special way that he was supposed to sit that nobody had taught him? Should he have been flexing his other cheek to balance it out? It wasn't the type of thing you'd ask a stranger.

As The Receptionist forced the card into the machine, the split at the bottom cracked that little bit more and the card bent back in her hands. Gavin thought it would snap then and there. It didn't though; by some freak chance or maybe due to the universe's apathy towards events like these; events that to Gavin were tantamount to proof of the cynical and mocking conspiracy orchestrating his preposterous life.

The Receptionist gave him the kind of look that said; "I would never in my life, ever, even if I were drunk, sober, stoned, in a coma, on crack or even dead; never, ever, ever, want to have sex with you."

That was how Gavin understood her stare. And he knew it was because of the card. She saw it and she probably made assumptions about him straight away; girls did that sort of thing. But what was she assuming? That, Gavin, didn't know. What do girls think? He wanted to tell her that she was pretty. He wanted to tell her that he wasn't broke, just because his card was nearly snapping. And he wanted to tell her to be careful because if it broke, he wouldn't be able to get another one, on account of not having a job and he was lucky he got this card because the bank messed up and accidentally sent him one when they were meant to revoke his overdraft. Someone must have made a typo or something and it worked in his favour.

He said nothing, though.

"Denied," said The Receptionist. "Got another card?"

He didn't.

"Can you try it again? There is credit on there" he said.

Worse than having a nearly broken card was having a nearly broken card with no credit on it. The Receptionist gave him another one of those 'not-on-your-life' kind of stares when he lifted his head in a polite smile to which he quickly returned his shameful eyes to the table where her fingers tapped on the buttons of the mouse.

While she tried the card again, Gavin gritted his teeth, watching her yank out the card and shove it back in as if she were stuffing a disparate pair of socks into a half closed drawer. Gavin winced, but the card didn't break.

He noticed she was wearing a name tag and lifted his sight to read it. He never really used people's names when he spoke to them, but he'd seen other people doing it and those types of people always seemed lucky, like good things were drawn to them. So why not? He adjusted his stare and focused on the badge, but he couldn't make out her name. It was one of those silver badges and her name was printed in grey or silver too and the way the light was hitting her, it made her badge reflect like a mirror. So Gavin had to squint his eyes so that he could better see through the glare. And as much and he squinted and strained and as close as he leaned to her chest, he just couldn't make out her name.

"Ahem," she said, clearing her throat. "Get a good look?"

She looked angry and maybe she should have been, had he in fact been leering at her breasts and not at the silver name tag clipped to them. Gavin felt every prostrating eye arresting his regard from the rows of seats behind him. It was impossible not to feel the whipping tisk of their disapproval and knowing that their eyes were as wide as an open range with not a flicker of their lashes to dampen their outrage or concern.

"I wasn't looking at... I was just..."

"Approved," she said, ripping the card from the machine and handing it to Gavin in two pieces.

She threw the two pieces onto the table and she didn't even apologise. Gavin took the two pieces of his card and carefully put them into his wallet. He hoped they wouldn't become four. The Receptionist had a mean stare. Gavin wanted to tell her that he was sorry and that he wasn't looking at her breasts and that maybe she should have her name on a plaque or on something that sits on the table in front of her and people can look at a tag on a cup or on the table to find out her name and not at her breasts.

"Thank you," he said politely.

# CHAPTER ONE

It was a sunny day. It was, in no way, as shadowed and as frosting as it was inside Gavin's head. There was not a cloud in sight and birds were chirping and up real high, a long vapour trail painted the path of excess and splendor across the sky. Gavin sat waiting for the bus and he stared up into the sky and he watched the white line slowly being erased and eroded from the blue canvas.

Gavin had never travelled before, not even in his imagination. Depression had a way of limiting the mileage of his dreamed escapes and painting them with an elaborately dull stroke. He always imagined those other people as being somewhat important and in going somewhere special, but he could never imagine himself as being one amongst them. He could never put himself on that plane, not unless it was crashing to the earth.

There are some things that a man does without any conscious debate. Things like scratching the tip of his nose or pulling on the ends of his beard into a pristine point, things that, like blinking, don't amount to much more than a disregarding reflex, nothing at all that should define the character of the man or the virtue of his intentions.

For Gavin, this unconscionable act, this nervous twitch if that it could be called, was thinking about death. And not death as in other people dying or the unjustly suffering of other less deserving people at the whim of maniacal intention or godlike societal or corporate machinations \- the popular rhetorical villains that most people hinged themselves to. Gavin thought not only of death but of dying. He thought about himself dying, in many, many ways.

In most of his imaginings, he posed himself as the unlikely hero, finding, in the worst chance, the only good thing that could come from his fated depression. He would imagine that he was seated on the back of the bus and as it sped along the avenue; its poor suspension had it rattling and bouncing over the tiniest little cracks in the bitumen.

He'd always be seated on the middle of the bus but with his head resting against the stained glass; his fingers pulling his long fringe out from beneath his eyes so his plain and worn expression could wane against the gallant and worrisome hope and expectation of the people driving in their cars and lining outside of the bus to let themselves onboard. And he hoped that someone could see, in his muted stare, the desperate words that he had no tongue to string together.

But as he'd list his eyes outside of the dirty glass, feeling impotent to his effect on the world, the spine of his attention would sever with the panicked musings of passengers, unable to contain their fright as a no good, down and out, such and such would appear from the thick of the crowd waving a pistol in the air. He'd look skittish and eremitic; not nearly the qualities one would want in a man with a gun in tight confines, scratching that solitary itch on a crowded and jittery old bus.

Gavin wouldn't have seen him get on. Nobody would have. That was just how god strummed its chord, permitting, on the most average of days, an invisible note to be bridged into a calamitous and unfortunate song.

And every time he imagined that bus ride, its crescendo built into the same trepid surprise and the people would scream and they'd shout and the no good such and such, he'd wave his gun like a biblical wand, making his path through the huddled and scuttled mass, pointing his reverie into the sunken pride and weakened vice of every man, woman and child, taking their money, their watches, their cell phones and their humanity.

And they wouldn't have heard; not the frightened people nor the screaming maniac, none of them, they wouldn't have heard the sound of hissing from a broken main somewhere in Gavin's mind. They wouldn't have heard it before it had stopped when he was just a plain expression staring through the smudges and smears of stained bus window. And they wouldn't have heard either, the sound of his voice as it spoke unto himself for the first time, without having to shout over an irking hiss.

He'd stand up, without much agenda and put himself in the middle of the aisle. The no good such and such would turn in his direction and his tongue would stick out like a maestro's baton, conducting his vile shouting and cursing and spitting. He'd rush up the aisle from the front of the bus and his arms would shake and his veins would stretch from his skin like a rousing soul into a new born child.

And he'd scream and he'd shout and the people, they would ooh and they would ahhh and Gavin, he'd look unaffected and so barely attended with his hands outstretched in martyred demeanour and when the no good such and such would shoot him once and twice and then shoot him three times more and he wouldn't believe that Gavin hadn't fallen.

And the bus would halt. And silence would dance around the panted breathing of one and all. The no good such and such would have spent his fuel. He would be on his knees and his eyes would be glazed in remorse. And the others, they would not set upon him, not yet. They would watch in the same reservation at their bloodied hero who had fallen to the floor.

And in his last breath, Gavin would be able to see the lines of calenture drawn around every person, those lines that were etched beneath thick scratchy shading of life's supposed languor.

And life was beautiful.

He had many of these imaginings. Some involved buses while others played out as masked gunmen invaded his local supermarket and they would play in the same deference as he would fall to the floor in a hail of bullets while the girl he could never tell that he loved, rushed to his dying side and rested his breaking head on her soft lap so that the tears she cried, ran down the curves in his cheek as if they were his own.

The boredom and predictability of Gavin's world barely gave him the conditions for any extravagance in his life or meaning in his death. As the bus rode along towards the city centre, he stared out of the window and he played through his heroic imaginings and he thought about dying in a way that made him feel that life could be special, that his depression could have some explicable purpose.

The bus stopped about four or five blocks from work. Gavin hated his job. Well, he didn't hate it. There was little other than his own ability to speak to that girl at the checkout that he actually hated. It was just another part of his life that he was ambivalently obligated to participate in.

Those last five blocks or so were loud and colourful and shouty and so busy and rude. Most people talked about how friendly they were, how they would invite anyone into their house and how they'd make a friend of the most invisible and unconscious stranger. People always talked imaginary wells of themselves but in truth, when time and space were pressing and when their heated rush had them barely tied to their own shadow and no nearer to the burden of responsibility, those same people were rude, pushing, shoving, racist, classist, sexist, spacist, timist, monstrosities of apathy.

Gavin didn't warm to having to barge his way through the pointing elbows and prodding cases, but he had no choice. He didn't hate it, but he'd have preferred a mount of other adjectively uninteresting tasks or leisurely spills than having to tide with these idiots and their important manner.

About a block from work, he passed a line of gingerly youth, standing side by side but with their voices graining against one another to compete for the momentary passing of distracting concentration and shuffling loafers.

Normally Gavin wouldn't stop. He'd keep his eyes trained upon something that always kept itself ahead of him so that his eyes didn't wander into the catching and selling stares of buskers and zealots and beggarly beggars because once they got his attention, they clinged like a wounded puppy to his most weakened vice, the tender fabric of his empathetic reserve that, even in the height of his depression and though bankrupt to his own plight, would shiver and quiver in polite response to the quims and qualms of well-intentioned and poorly taken individuals, regardless of their true intention or in how he would hate himself for not knowing how to say no.

Today, maybe because he was making changes and trying to undo his pattern, he decided to stop. And the first person he saw was a pretty girl. She would have been prettier were her face not crimpled and worn with spent desperation and collated anger as her voice went unattended as to her, it just seemed so improbable that people didn't care about her particular plight in the same manner as she.

Gavin stopped and he turned and he waited for her to speak, but she ignored him. She had her head turned at a youngish man in a pin striped suit powering his way down the sidewalk, talking through a phone pressed against his rising shoulder to his ear and texting with each of his other hands as if each of his appendages had a mind and obligation of its own. When the girl's voice spluttered, she turned her spiting face which looked like a bruised tomato and saw Gavin standing almost inappropriately, waiting for her to speak.

"What do you want?" she said.

"Well, what are you doing? Maybe I can help or something?"

"I'm taking signatures, for our cause," she said.

She was speaking to Gavin, but her words had hardly the impact as her gaze did, looking over his shoulder at the people passing him by.

"What's your cause?" asked Gavin

The girl looked allayed.

"We're bringing attention to the plight of dolphins that are being needlessly slaughtered in Japanese bays every day."

Gavin liked dolphins. He'd never met one before, but they were nobody ever had a bad thing to say about one. This sounded like something good, something for him to believe in. his face lit up and he said, "What can I do?"

"Sign here."

"No, I wanna help. Is there something more I can do, like is there a boat I can go on and we'll dress up like pirates and we'll attack the butchers before they kill the dolphins and we'll set them free and..."

"Just sign here."

She shoved a clip board into his stomach. She wasn't even looking at him. Her script rolled off her tongue like a child's spit over a freeway bridge.

"But I wanna do something to help."

"We don't wanna help," she said. "We just want to create awareness."

"But I wanna do something. Can I give you money?"

"If you want to donate, you can go to our webpage. But if you really want to help, you can go to our social network and click like and forward our message and get your friends to like our page too. If we can just get to a million likes..."

Her attention waned again and Gavin felt frustrated. He had never given a second to anything other than his own depressive imaginings, but he wanted to do something, he wanted to make a change; in his life and in the world. He wanted to do something that mattered.

The girl pushed him aside and she started shouting at the suited men walking past. Gavin looked at himself. He wasn't in a suit, but he was dressed in suited attire, somewhat. He had on black slacks and a collared shirt and even an oddly fitting tie. He looked the part of the lated worker but like everything in his life, he was still outside of a common definition. He was a made up word that nobody was willing to use.

There were a lot of people lined up though and Gavin ignored that first girl and made his way down the line. The next girl was shouting just the same and she was trying to look through and around Gavin as he stopped before her.

"I'll listen," said Gavin.

"That's great," she said. "It's just, you're in my way."

"But I want to help. I'll do anything. If you teach me, I'll do what you're doing so you can be free to do other things. I'm not scared of giving everything up, not anymore. If you want, I can shave off all my hair and tattoo something on my forehead. I'll do anything. I just want something to believe in" said Gavin.

"Just sign here," said the girl.

Gavin looked deflated. He didn't want to sign something, he wanted to do something.

"Isn't there something I can do?"

"Just sign here," she said.

"But I want to do something more, you know, change the world."

"This is how we change the world, signing petitions, forwarding messages, clicking like on stuff. This is activism."

"But who does the things? Can I join them?"

"No-one does anything. God. We're raising awareness. There are more important things in this world than what you want to do, ok? Now sign the petition or get lost."

"What's it for?"

"It's for the dolphins, to raise awareness for the dolphins which are being fished and herded into brutal killing shores."

"Oh, like her," said Gavin, pointing at the other girl.

"No" shouted the girl. "Are you stupid? Our cause is to raise awareness of dolphins being herded in open waters. Their cause is for dolphins being brutally murdered in killing shores. They're completely different. Listen it's obvious you don't get it so just beat it."

She ripped the clip board away and starting pushing it past Gavin, to the people walking around and behind him. Gavin walked away and he looked at each boy and girl along the line and they were all shoving their boards and none of them were bring attended and they all shouted, "Like my cause" and all they wanted was a tick on a box and they didn't want money and they didn't want any real help, they just wanted someone to like what they thought was important.

Gavin walked down the line and there were scores them shouting into the sea of jaded workers all vying to ignore the shabby youths' political plights. Gavin looked at each one and he tried to garner their attention but they pushed his away and he felt that veil of rejection, slipping over his untouchable skin.

Then he saw her, the first girl and beside her, the second girl. And they were neither at the start of the line nor were they at the end of the line. They were somewhere in the middle and they shouting about different causes, neither dolphin in the open sea nor dolphin in the bloodied killing shores.

"Aren't you that other girl?" asked Gavin.

She tried to brush him off, looking and shouting over his shoulder.

"Our government is spending unnecessary monies on sporting events when they should be investing in education and health" she shouted, out into the open air.

"What about the dolphins?" asked Gavin.

She looked at him. She had no idea who he was or what he was talking about.

"What are you on about?" she said.

"That was you, just a minute ago at the start of the line. You were raising awareness for dolphins being slaughtered in killing shores. It was you. Have you changed causes already?" he said, adamant.

"Just sign here," she said. "And click like on our social network."

"But what is your cause?"

"We're raising awareness for the abuse of government spending on lavish sporting events when not enough is spent on health and education."

"I get it," said Gavin.

"What?"

"Well, when we were kids, my dad took us all to Disney. We couldn't afford it. He got a loan or something. But at the time, we were still having problems with the normal bills and stuff and we didn't go to the best school either and I'm pretty sure my dentist was wasn't a dentist, if you know what I mean."

"What are you on about? That's completely different."

"Well, not really. I mean, the government spends on something it can't afford cause it wants to make everyone happy even though they've been doing a pretty ordinary job at paying the bills and stuff. The same as dad."

"That's not even remotely close."

"You know what we did?"

"No, get lost. And remember to click like on our social network" she said, pushing Gavin away.

Gavin walked down along the line and with each person, he encountered the same indifference. He wanted to help, he really did. He didn't just want to help though, he wanted to douse himself in their ideals and before the whole world and before his mother, his father and his brother and his stupid fiancée, to set fire to and make ash of all of his wasted potential and to be remembered, in his sacrifice, on magnets and memes for the rest of time.

He passed, on the last block, a great many people protesting this and protesting that and every time that he stopped and bid his ear, he was looked past and ushered off on his way. And when he tried to understand, when he took their plight and painted his own analogy, they mocked him and took offense to his genuine interest.

It seemed that they had no word for a ready ear. Their tongues twisted and twirled their words like small skipping stones that hardly even carved a dent in the attention of the insolent and disagreeing ears that rolled on by.

Their voices shouted against and over one another. They each had their account of a wrong and they were trained only in the fervid shouting at passersby that they had no script and no hushed tone to deal with a depressed young man who wanted nothing more than to hear what else they had to say.

At the end of the line was a well presented pair. They might have been mistaken for lovers were it not for the placard they were holding. It was bold and to the point. It read, 'Only Jesus Has The Answer'.

Gavin paused for a second. He paused in his thoughts but not in his stride. It was quite a statement. It really left them nowhere to go, limited any possible interaction.

As he passed, one of them, the preppy one, obviously sensed his dwindling despair and thought to pounce upon it before it learned to feed itself.

"Do you have a second?" shouted The Preppy Man.

Gavin shrugged his shoulders. The Preppy Man looked confused. Like the others, he wasn't expecting anyone to actually stop. And Gavin hardly wore a confronting sneer or a brotherly smile. He looked as one does when does when looking for their other shoe in a room full of clutter.

"Can I talk to you about our lord and saviour Jesus Christ?"

Gavin shrugged again.

"Do you have god in your heart? Do you know the path of Jesus Christ?"

His friend, obviously not his lover, The Preppy Girl, smiled.

Gavin shrugged.

"What's your name?" asked The Preppy Man.

Gavin shrugged.

The Preppy Man's expression turned sour.

"You don't know your own name?"

"Is that a question or a rhetorical insinuation?" asked Gavin.

"It's a question," said The Preppy Man in a snotty tone.

"Well, in that case..."

Gavin shrugged again.

"What the hell is your problem" shouted The Preppy Girl.

Gavin shrugged once more.

The Preppy Man was set to explode.

"Do you know what you are?" he said.

Gavin shrugged again. He pointed to their placard and walked away. The Preppy Girl was shouting out something and though her words were tinged in wholesomeness, her intention was anything but.

Gavin hated religious nuts. They spent their wholes lives scaring the crap out of people just so they could convert them and then they could go off and do the same to other people. And they never actually did anything once they were converted except for scaring the crap out of other people and then convert them.

Like Cancer.

His dad did it once, scare him that is, for a greater good. He told him about the monsters under his bed and then came in every night to shoo them away. He got to act like a hero for a while. But one day he got lazy and stopped coming in. Gavin would shout out that the monsters were creeping out from under his blankets and that their sticky paws were almost at his twitching toes, but his dad just shouted out from the sofa that they weren't there and they were just in his head.

In his head?

Oh no!

# CHAPTER TWO

Gavin knew all about conversion through fear. It was what his job entailed. He was a telemarketer and he hated what he did. He hated the people had had to do it with. He hated what he had to wear. He hated the stupid things they'd make him say. He hated his boss. He hated his peers. He hated the company cheer. He hated the group motto. He hated everything about the job no less than he hated how good he was at it.

"You're late."

Gavin didn't bother looking to where the words were coming from. He already knew who was sitting on the far side of those words; which mouth had flung them off their tongue like bloodied bait to a swiftly moving current.

"I said you're late. You were supposed to log in, three minutes ago."

The words were raining down with the chipper spirit and light drizzle that happened whenever The Brother spoke. He couldn't raise his temper more than a smidgen of a degree without speaking with a scolded tongue; hissing and spitting through his words.

"There's a team meeting in eleven minutes."

Gavin tried to shake off his reality, but he couldn't. It clinged to him like the musky smell of presaged death from an old man's arid pores. He ignored his brother and went about flicking switches and unconsciously opening a host of programs in his computer.

He could already feel a wave of self-loathing lapping at his feet and its sea, building to wash upon his conscious shore. More than this job or what was tied to it, Gavin hated himself. He hated himself most days and he hated himself as he lay down to sleep and managed, even in his pre-dreams, to find a way to reduce himself to some title of mockery or insult. But it was here, at this desk where he fanaticized most about suicide.

"Alright guys" shouted The Brother over the manic buzz of hundreds of pleas from around the floor as table by table, desperation attended, in its human skin, the art of manipulation. "Listen, today is a special day. We have a new promotion that I'm gonna tell you guys about and you're gonna love this. The customers are gonna love it. It's just gonna be massive. It really is."

He carried on like that for maybe another ten to fifteen minutes, dancing around an otherwise brittle and emberless fire, avoiding the obvious questions by trying to ignite the spark in each and every one of his sales team so that they could take this pile of crap, whatever it was, and sell it to financially delinquent pensioners and bored housewives.

"So tell us, Gavin, what's the trick?"

They were looking at him.

All of them were.

He had been dreaming about wheeling his chair over to the far window, the one next to the pretty brunette who was always listening to Jeff Buckley and he was sure was hooked on either heroin or horse tranquilizers. In his daydream, nobody noticed him get up and wheel his chair through the maze of cubicles and nobody even blinked when he lifted it up over his head and swung wildly at the glassed wall. They noticed though when it smashed and the gusting wind blew hundreds of tiny shards back in their direction. They noticed too; when he stepped towards the edge and dove off into his sweet descent. And the smokers below had just enough time to jump out of his way so that the blood that splashed up didn't dirty their lapels.

But now everyone was looking at him and he wasn't bloody, broken and bruised and lying still; dying but not dead, on a pavement ten stories below. He was sitting on his chair and everyone had swiveled theirs around so that they were all staring at him. And they all looked so expectant and so god damn thrilled.

He's done it.

He had ignited their fires.

"I gotta go to the bathroom," said Gavin.

He didn't wait for approval. He kicked his chair aside and stormed off the floor and down the stairwell to the bathroom. All the stalls were full. That didn't matter, though. He wasn't there to evacuate, not his lunch away. He just needed to throw some water on his face, for some chemical reaction to occur within his mind so that the idea of suicide remained as it should be, some kind of an exit as opposed to what it now seemed, as some kind of invitation.

There were people having sex in the first stall, someone negotiating a poorly cooked chicken in the second and what sounded like a cursing madman, unable to find his vein in the third. Gavin splashed some water on his face and stormed back out.

In the stairwell, he lit a cigarette and as he dragged back, he travelled with the smoke inside of himself. He went back along his tongue where the salted chips and hard candy had cut and blistered his gums. He went down his throat and into his lungs, passing, along the insides of his neck, the years of frustration and venting expression that he had swallowed for the sake of doing good; meeting targets, making friends, maintaining a career, making it matter, living by example and not upsetting, his mother and father. Every bit of his repression had left its mark; from the ground and hollowed cavities in his teeth to the ulcers that scarred and bled and burned in the back of his throat and in the pit of his stomach.

He could see it all.

"Hey, you can't smoke in here" shouted a voice from the exit, far below.

Gavin looked over the railing. At the bottom of the stairs, leaning in from an open door stood The Security Guard. He wasn't coming up any time soon so Gavin sat back on the stair and he watched the smoke drifting up from the tip of the cigarette into the stale musky air.

He finished his cigarette and threw the butt over the edge. The Security Guard was still cursing away down below. He had maybe made his way up two flights and he wasn't so much shouting or throwing his words as he was, eschewing them at the foot of every desperate and panted breath. It sounded less like breathing and more like air spilling from a punctured tube.

"You reek," said The Brother.

Gavin didn't acknowledge him. He sat down at his desk; slumped in his chair, and while waiting for a customer to drop in on his line, he listened to music and flipped through images of nearly naked women in a magazine that someone had left on his desk.

"She's hot."

It was That Girl. She was kind of like every other girl only she sat beside him and she made a friend out of their company. She was pretty and she was really smart too though she wore naivety as an accessory, I guess, so that she could fit in; probably so she didn't make her boyfriend feel like an inane jerk, more than his own musings every could.

Gavin used to like her. Like every girl he met, he grew infatuated. When he first saw her, he thought only about seeing her naked. After some time though that changed. He still liked her and though they flirted harmoniously, he knew, as he had learned from every of his infatuations, that she found in him a friend, but she sought in another; her affliction, her lover.

"I wish I had her body," said That Girl.

Gavin didn't need to look at her or the magazine. There would have been no comparison. That Girl's beauty was like incense. She had a sexiness that lingered long after she had left your sight. It was the intelligent and subtle tinge of aroma that affected every next thing that you did.

But Gavin couldn't tell her how beautiful she was. He hadn't the courage to scare her away or to have her closer than she already was.

"She's not that pretty," he said.

What he meant to say was, you're far prettier.

"Hey, can I tell you something? It's kind a weird" said That Girl.

This was about how every conversation started, with something weird.

"So I did something, a surprise for my stupid boyfriend."

She used the adjective stupid whenever she referred to that other guy.

"What did you do?"

Gavin had no idea what a beautiful and smart girl would do to surprise her stupid boyfriend. He knew what he would do to surprise her, though if he was ever her stupid boyfriend. It wouldn't be something big and expensive, but it would be a lot of small things like remembering important things about her and what she liked; things like her favourite flower or a song she really liked or maybe a memory from her childhood that was really important. And he wouldn't just give those things to her wrapped in some two dollar paper so she just ripped off the wrapping and gave him the thankyou that he wanted all along. No. he'd be subtle. He'd sneak in early and he'd leave the flowers at reception so that when she walked past, whatever problem or annoying thing she was thinking about before she arrived got washed away as the bright reds and yellows and blues coloured the greyness in her eyes and the sweet scent of spring, weathered the autumn of her soul, that struggle she bore in every day and in every other guy that she dated, that browned and cracked and picked away at her petals.

What he wouldn't do would be to pull out her chair at a restaurant or open doors for her and be brutish and patronizing in his cavalry like most guys did. They'd be chivalrous to the point of absurdity like a car that can go from zero to ironic in half a second. Inasmuch as he would want her to stumble across; incidentally, the gifts that he had laid for her, he wanted her to, to find him in that fated manner.

"So I shaved myself, you know," she said, pointing below the table. "Down there."

Gavin tried to think of something other than the picture she was painting and he had no idea at all of what to say.

"My pee went everywhere," she said.

Gavin smiled and That Girl started snorting and laughing. This was what she had meant by weird.

"That's neat," said Gavin, all of a sudden remembering his second grade teacher, an angry Yugoslav with a penchant for racist jokes and forcing children of all denominations to say morning prayers.

It didn't work.

"It feels so weird."

As she was saying it, she was squirming in her seat and the insult of their friendship just became all the more apparent. Could she really be this naïve?

"And whenever I do a pee," she said, "it goes in all directions. I hope my stupid boyfriend likes it."

"I hope he fucking dies," Gavin thought.

"It's my birthday," she said.

"Really?" said Gavin.

He knew, though. She said it the first time he saw her when they were in training. She said it and he never forgot.

"My stupid boyfriend didn't remember."

"So you did the... You know, the surprise, for him even though he forgets your birthday?"

"I know, he's a jerk."

Gavin sighed.

The phone clicked.

Information poured on his screen.

"Hi, this is Gavin calling from BestYet telecommunication services. Am I speaking to Ms. Delaware?"

"This is she?"

She sounded defensive. They all did at first.

"Ms. Delaware... You don't mind if I call you Tracy do you?"

"That's fine," she said. "What do you want?"

"Listen I know you're busy and time is money but listen, if I can save you money then in the end, I'm saving you time."

"Go on," she said.

As he spoke, Gavin flicked through an assortment of green screens seeing numbers and words and digits and markers and as his subconscious ran on an automated charm, his conscious mind sorted through the facts and built a profile of Tracy. He found out her desires, how she likes to spend her time; seeing what sites she visits when she's in need of being entertained and he could see, from the calls she made to a fortune line, that she was the type of woman who found reason through her aboding fears. And he found, on the last page, her aboding fear.

"So Tracy," he said, using a tone more like an oncologist or a seasoned pilot. "I see your daughter has just turned sixteen. That's amazing. You must be so proud. I don't have any kids, not at the moment, but I want to have a whole bunch. I don't think I could deal with them growing up, though. It must be tough, this growing independence you know, from the moment she's born, every stage of her development has her nearing your heart but furthering herself from your touch. I think for me, that would be the hardest thing, having to let them go."

"Well, it's nature. I mean it's not easy. She was an adorable baby. Never cried you know, not even a wince. It was tough, though, you're right. When she stopped feeding I felt like I'd lost my little girl and every day it just seemed like she was getting another inch away from me. It's the way it is, though. One minute they're quiet and still and they're poking their little finger into your mouth when they feed and the next, they're asking to borrow your car keys."

"Oh, so she's driving?"

"She just got her permit."

"She has a car and she doesn't have a cell phone?"

"Well, we can't afford a cell phone for her, not a post-paid plan anyway. It's just so expensive. And she doesn't need one anyway. The phone is for just in case I need to contact her. So I can always reach her. Her credits work fine for that."

"But what if she needs to reach you?"

"Well, she has her friends with her. If she has no credit, she can use one of their phones or she can reverse charge if she really wants."

"Picture this. It's late, Stephanie had just dropped off her friend and she's on her way back home and it's raining really heavy, like last night, and she doesn't see the cat at first up ahead but when it darts across the road, she swerves to miss it but she has no idea that the car would slip and slide the way it does. She tries to correct, but the wheel rips from her hands. And she pulls them over her face as the car clips a curb and rolls down an embankment. It's dark, it's raining heavy, her emergency lights are blinking but where the car is wrapped around a tree at the bottom of a steep hill, it'll be a while before anyone notices the accident at all. She reaches for her phone to call her mother. Not ask for help or to send an ambulance because she knows it's too late. She wants only, in her last breath, to tell you that she loves you. And her shaking hand holds the cell while her twitching thumb struggles to press every button. She finds the contacts and she finds your name; 'mum'. She presses the button and inside she is cold and her blood is freezing. She can't feel her injuries, but she knows they're bad. She pulls the phone up to her ear and she waits, hoping to hear your voice so that if she should die, then she wouldn't die alone. But all she hears is the beeping sound of a phone with no credit. And you've never been further from her than you were at that second. Could you live with that?"

She might have had a cold. She might have, but she didn't. The sniffling on the other end of the line was from the tears that she was trying to hold back. How could she? How could she leave her daughter to die alone at the bottom of a ditch?

How could she?

"Tell me about your best plans," she said.

They all marveled; That Girl, The Brother and everyone else who was standing around and within an earshot. Gavin put her on the most expensive plan. The cheapest was out of her budget so what harm could come from being further out of one's budget. It's what he was taught how to do. It was in no way, what he wanted to do.

The Brother clapped his hands. He was gathering everyone's attention and he was about to speak but Gavin put down his headset and he deleted his private files from the computer before he turned to his brother and venom in his eye.

"I quit," he said.

The Brother looked stern and offended.

"You can't quit. Don't be a fool. I won't accept your resignation. Listen that was great, exactly the type of selling that inspires the heart and soul of this company. You should be proud. Here, you can wear the red ribbon."

He was holding a sash or something. It was red and the best salesperson got to wear it for the day while they made calls. It would make him the envy of all in the office to be seen wearing the sash.

"Fuck your sash. I quit. Fuck this job and fuck you. You think that was good? Scaring that woman into being contracted into something she can't afford? We're fucking criminals. This job is sick."

"Please stop using that language. I'm not going to fire you, but I think we can make a suitable action plan to create new challenges that help to..."

"Go. Fuck. Yourself."

The whole floor oohed and aahed.

"Gavin, you're embarrassing me," The Brother said, leaning and whispering into Gavin's ear.

"Fine," he said.

They had an internal messaging system. It linked every computer not only on every floor but in every branch in the entire country. It was a quick way of instant communication and it made the internal practices more efficient but for what Gavin was about to do, it was a wonder that nobody had thought of it before.

A red button flashed on every screen on every computer on every floor in every building in every city of their entire country and every flashing red button was marked urgent and everyone read, in the entire company, the same venting expression that Gavin had scraped from his ulcerated throat.

'BestYet management couldn't organize a cheap fuck in a discount brothel'.

In a second, about the time it took for him to pack his bag and to wink at That Girl, every manager loaded their nerving looks and peeked over their computers while directors barged their heads out of the cracks in their doors.

Gavin left the floor and for the first time, it was oh so quiet. He left without saying a word and without much fight or debate. He felt light and free and he wished he could continue, to sharpen his words and cut through every polite ideal and tear the whole to shreds.

Before he left the floor, Gavin took from inside his bag, a single flowering stem and he placed it inside a small glass that was sitting on the reception's table. He wondered if she would notice it. He wondered if at all that she cared. He hoped she would. It was better to imagine the cat alive and to leave the box sealed than to have to lather one's stomach with more residual self-loathing.

Before getting on the bus, Gavin passed a tennis club. He had never played tennis before in his life. He thought, "why not?" The door was open so he popped his head in. He saw a bunch of guys and girls on the courts and they were smashing the balls around like they were experts and they would probably attest to just being average. Gavin felt embarrassed and silly just looking. Then a guy came up to him. He looked kind of manic, but in a welcoming way and he had a t-shirt with a picture of The Mona Lisa and it had the word 'Nihil' underneath.

"You want a free lesson?" he asked.

"I don't think so," said Gavin.

# CHAPTER THREE

What was he thinking? You couldn't just walk into a place like that and learn. He'd look like an idiot and he could be sure that everyone in there, especially at this time - in the middle of the day – was at the very least, really good serving the ball and hitting it back. He'd just make a fool of himself and ruin the game for everyone else.

Tennis wouldn't suppress the rage he felt inside. There was nowhere for him to go now except headstrong into a terrible outcome, whatever that may be.

On the sidewalk, the sounds of buzzing cars and shuffling feet and cursing bystanders echoed inside his head and his thoughts circled and spun out of control. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bottle of pills he'd received from the doctor.

He looked at the label. His head was spinning so that the letters all mumbled and jumbled around one another and he was sure, even if they settled and his mind was somewhat clear, there were so many letters that no sane person would ever be able to say the name of this drug.

The bottle said for him to take one and a half tablets in the morning and one more table at night. After a week or two, apparently, he would start to feel some relief, that the heaviness and warmth that scolded his mind and tempered at the tips of his fingers would settle and the drugs would re-climate his thoughts and his feelings and he wouldn't have to dream about other people getting hurt by accident or himself, in a very public place, taking his own life.

What on Earth would he think about then?

Ever since he was a boy, the piece of missing information, the irregular void in the puzzle of thought, reason and existence, to him, would be so much grander than anyone else that he knew or brushed past on the street.

Most people; when they didn't have all the information, when they only had one or two parts of a puzzle like their lover's face and how they feel when they are around and the fact they have been around long enough to assume that this wasn't in fact, just a thing, most people, being sane and all, they would think the worst about that missing piece of the puzzle; it's late, they haven't called, their all alone and where is their partner now?

For most people, that missing puzzle was filled with fear so their brain would imagine the worst outcome to heighten the grill of their paranoia. Like the child tucked firmly into their blankets, when the light are off, one piece of the puzzle is removed and for the child, that piece is filled with absolute fear that beneath their bed, scratching away at the under of their bums and backs, lies the most horrid creature imaginable, sniggering in the back of their thoughts as it lies in wait, hungering to ensnare them.

Gavin had much of the same logic. His doctor said it was like a wire was shorting out and he was receiving too much of this and too much of that and when there was something he didn't know, when in his mind he was imaging what that empty puzzle piece might be, his brain would misfire and provide him an overdose of nor-adrenaline and something as simple as misplacing his keys would be construed as being trapped beneath a collapsed building, unable to breath and unsure if help would ever come.

And the drugs would make that better.

Gavin flipped the lid off with his thumb. He saw it flick past his sight and land somewhere in the gutter beside him. He didn't bother turning to see where that might be. His eyes were drawn upon the little circles inside the small cylinder and as he thought about his mother's car exploding – not because he wanted it to, but because it would upset him if it did – he threw the container to his mouth and he let the small pills all roll over his tongue and barge their way down the back of his throat. He had to shake the bottle to get the last.

He wondered then how long it would take for the drugs to work, now that he had consumed fifty of them. Would he feel better by the time he reached the corner? And would he be different then, not in how he thought, but in how others thought of him. Would he have to exclaim then, that he was different, that the drugs had taken effect? And how would he do it? Would he take a stance in line with all the others whose voices charade the ideals that made them feel so good as to always be able to look around, past or through him? And if the drugs came into effect, would they be able to see him?

Gavin stumbled along the sidewalk with people parting the biblical tide as he approached. And they, the people on the street, they saw a manic beast, dressed in a man's clothing. This beast was foaming at the mouth, hunched over and gripping at its stomach and grumbling and groaning in a conspicuous gurgle as he or it swayed from one side of the path to the other with the monster's eyes, like its well intentions, clawing at the pavement and dragging his frail huddled mass in their direction.

Gavin's stomach was turning over on itself. He could feel horrid pains in his stomach as if his muscles were melting. He was dying, he knew it. He'd always imagined death being this silent and poetic closing scene where not a word was spoken but a single tear that shed from the girl that he loved and it carried down her cheek unto her chin where it morphed into her fraught expression and splashed upon his bloodied lip.

This was nothing like that. His bones were searing and it felt like someone was staggering along with him, gyring some imaginary handle that stuck out from his side – like a rotisserie - yanking and grinding his insides around and around so that the skin of his weakened soul came to a crisp and brown finish.

"You don't look good there buddy."

Gavin reached his hand out and grabbed their leg just to steady himself. He had no idea of what he was grabbing, whether it was a leg of some tall dark stranger or a heavy set post, plated into the earth. It was just a reaction when he heard the man speak.

"Did you take something? I'm a friend, it's ok, I'm here to help you."

The Tall Dark Stranger unclenched Gavin's hand and took the empty bottle from it.

"Relax. I'm gonna do something. It's gonna feel like a real bastard version of New Year's in your head, just for a minute or two. I'll be quick. Just don't bite off my finger."

The Tall Dark Stranger held Gavin in a headlock, keeping his body from contorting and swiveling out of control. With his left hand cusped around his chin, he could hold Gavin's mouth open and stop him from biting down. With his right hand, he pushed two fingers deep into Gavin's throat, all the way, till they slipped over the groove of his tongue and down into his esophagus.

Gavin convulsed and The Tall Dark Stranger tore away his fingers. He held Gavin steady while his stomach surged and he vomited, on the pavement by his feet, on his shoes and on a driver whose curiosity had him lower his window before he could comprehend what was about to happen.

The Driver stopped his car and he got out, wiping his arm clean and shouting an abusive tirade at Gavin, whose mind had exploded and was outside of any reason whatsoever. He was, at this moment, a dying star, his protons escaping in all directions as his core surged outwards and there was nothing he could do and there was no way that he could defend himself, not from the likes of the oaf who was running at him now with his arms swinging, ready to beat down on Gavin who – detached from his conscious settings – was not a man as other men are men, he was his stomach, convulsing and spitting out of his mouth. He was every muscle, wrenching and pulling and turning in all directions. He was not his thoughts. Not here, not now. He was awash in the tide of his expulsion.

"I'm gonna fucking kill you" shouted The Driver.

Gavin couldn't see but beside him, The Driver had his hand raised to strike down on the back of his head. It wasn't the rage of having been vomited on that disparaged The Driver, it having been vomited on in front of other people; in front of women who would hardly desire him and other men, whose pointing mockery would reduce him, without the need for heated debate, to that of a lesser man.

The Driver sought to strike down on the back of Gavin's head but he was stopped, something catching his wrist and twisting and turning and then The Driver was on his back and he was weeping and desperately negotiating his way back into his car.

The Driver gathered the remnants of his masculinity and drove away. He said nothing as he rushed to lock the doors and he fumbled away at the keys. He said nothing too, as the engine started and the cars behind him beeped and pressed him to go on ahead. But when there was good enough distance, when the reflection in his mirror was small enough to be outrun but large enough to be heard, he lowered his window and he stuck out his finger and shouted, like a hungry hungry hippo, expletive remarks, insults deriding the sick junkie and his tall dark villainous friend. And in that second, he found once again, the fount of his pride and he drove away, enraged and masculinized once again, thank god.

When the bus pulled up, Gavin had stopped vomiting but he didn't look well. The Bus Driver took one look at him and shook his head.

"Do I look like a fucking ambulance?" he said.

Gavin swayed back and forth, but he was held up from falling to his knees by The Tall Dark Stranger by his side. He lifted his head and he could see The Bus Driver scrunching up his mouth like he was picking some dried beef from between his teeth except he wasn't being mannerly, he was building a mouthful of spit to hurl at Gavin and The Tall Dark Stranger as he pushed on his handle and closed the doors.

"Go back to your own country" shouted The Bus Driver as he stuck up his middle finger at the two men as the bus drove away.

"Asshole," said Gavin.

He didn't so much say it as words did, drop from his tongue like a celebratory ribbon.

"It's ok," said The Tall Dark Stranger. "I'll call a friend. She can come and pick us up. Do you have somewhere that you need to be?"

Gavin shook his head.

He had nowhere to go.

"Good," said The Tall Dark Stranger, without a hint of conspiracy in his tone.

When the car pulled up, Gavin's vision was improving but not entirely. His mind was still clouded. His stomach felt pained and sore. He imagined that this was what exercise would be like and if that were true, what idiot would put themselves through such barberry?

Gain sat in the back next to a beautiful girl whose hair was so incredibly straight. It amazed him when he looked in her direction. There was not a fatigued line on her head whatsoever.

"Hi, I'm المغرر, pleased to meet you."

She sounded so learned, her voice, aged and cultured so that it spoke like no girl he had ever heard before. But for the life of him, he would not be able to pronounce her name.

"I'm Gavin," he said.

He felt like an idiot.

The rest of the ride, he said nothing. He'd look in her direction and when he did, she would return his glance with a common smile and her eyes, they spoke like a philosopher's tongue of a reason she had for every smirk and every contented smile.

Gavin felt nervous.

He had no idea what to say.

So he looked away and then he looked back again and when she turned with her forgiving eyes and smiled at him, he quickly coiled his sight back to the head rest at his front and the nerves in his belly now were just as afflicting as the fire he had just expulsed.

"Where are we going?" asked Gavin.

The Beautiful Girl reached her hand over to his, sensing his concern.

"Destiny," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

# CHAPTER FOUR

"What are these for exactly?"

"They're mood stabilizers. They're supposed to iron out the creases in my head or something. I don't know really. I wasn't really listening. I didn't think it mattered all that much."

"These are some serious drugs, they do some serious harm; could really fuck up your head. I think that matters, don't you?"

The Tall Dark Stranger had turned and was looking through the gaps of the two front seats. He had the plastic container in his hands and its weak bond hardly fought back against the man's crushing grasp, splintering the plastic into long shards.

"You don't need this rubbish. You're not sick" he said.

"Then what's wrong with me?" asked Gavin.

"Nothing. There's nothing wrong with you Gavin. You're healthy and deranged, just like everybody else."

"He said I was depressed. My mum thinks I'm crazy. My dad says I'm lazy and riding his coat tail. My brother says I'm like a child, not retarded, just that I never grew up, that I don't take any of this seriously."

"Your brother is an idiot. Children and adults are peeled from the same fruit, it's just the adult's effect is worsened through age. The child is light and fanciful, his good and even his foul intentions are honest, sweet and springing. The adult is heavy and guiling; he will bottle your tears with his good intentions and when you thirst for remorse, will sell you salvation with a bitter, salted sting. The child is like the grape juice. His passing is in all occasions and will leave you only with the sting of buoyant youth on the cracks of your aging lips whereas the man, he is a bitter heavy wine, too much of his company and your stomach will turn, he will lead you into a begging attrition and he'll mark you with an oasis of droughted and prolonged suffering. And worse yet, he'll call that a good time."

Gavin stared out the window and watched the rows of houses zipping past and marveled at the graffiti tagged all over their walls. On the houses, it was understandable that a couple of kids could climb up a wall and hang on for dear life as they sprayed roughly with their other hand. But one building had him in awe. It was maybe twenty stories. Its roof disappeared off into the low hanging fog and drizzle. And there was not a ladder or a holding of any kind for anyone to climb up to the heights that they had. In the furthest regions, up by the forming of clouds, were letters that were as strange as the words that he could not read, but that wasn't as important as how those markings got there in the first place.

"Do think anyone died tagging those walls?"

They all looked to their left, following Gavin's trance. Most were as still as he. Maybe they hadn't paid much consideration before. Maybe they just didn't know.

"Would you understand their meaning better, if they had?" asked The Tall Dark Stranger.

"I dunno. I don't think it's that important what they say."

"Is it something you would like to do?"

"It'd be nice to be heard, you know?"

"You know a baby's first cry when it's born?" said The Tall Dark Stranger.

They all nodded.

"Everyone gets so relieved and they start to cry and you'll never seem them really, as happy as they can be, outside of that moment. Not really happy, you know, like a string being wound from happiness and sadness that gets wound so it's perfectly in tune. Anyway, the baby, it doesn't really say anything. It just cries, but never in its life will it ever be as clear in its message as it was that moment. Cause its voice, its cry, its song, whatever; it was dressed against life and death."

"I want that," said Gavin.

"You want to speak against the backdrop of death?"

"I don't wanna say anything. I'm not smart like that. I just wanna scream or shout or something. And I wanna be heard."

"I felt that once," said The Beautiful Girl. "My father, before he died, he apologised. It felt like you just described. He'd said it a thousand times before it's just, knowing he was about to die, I guess it sounded more like I wanted it to hear."

"Why was he sorry," asked Gavin.

"I can only imagine," said The Beautiful Girl.

"And do you?'

"What? Imagine? No. It would serve me no wellness to turn a thousand stones in search of an old man's curse. If it was something that I had been a part of but for the headache of age, I couldn't remember but unto which, under a spell of irony, I somehow found through my excoriating curiosity, what favour would an old forgotten apology serve me then? If in what I found - what truth I might have forgotten or never known – if that needless thing of which had him speak had my heart bleeding for an apology, what good could come from hearing one spoken in my own voice as my mind tried to form a memory? I would never be able to hear the apology as it was meant to be; shackled to the post of an old man's deathbed. So no, I don't imagine. But his apology was beautiful. It weighed as much as the hurt he must have done."

"And what would you say?" asked The Tall Dark Stranger.

He was looking at Gavin unblinkingly through the mirror in his lowered visor.

"I dunno. Stop; maybe."

"Stop what?"

"Everything. I dunno. Everything that people do."

"People don't do anything, not anymore," said The Beautiful Girl.

"What do you mean?" asked Gavin.

"Well, you look at the world we live in today. With this new technology, nobody is committed to anything anymore, not even to themselves. It's like mankind is emancipated from itself, you know. And now with computers and this stupid digital fucking world, people are emancipated from their own conscious selves. Like with computers, people create an external self that they can consciously gauge and manipulate, mainly because they can't work within their own. That's why we have computers you know. Our own irrationality of our own selves had our fears inspire the development of a more logical an accessible version of ourselves. And now, with this digital world that is built around everyone's new conscious selves, people don't actually live anymore. As long as they are absorbed in their aborted consciousness, they don't actually do anything. And everything is fleeting and momentary. Their beliefs, their grievances, their loves, their friendships, everything. The technology is so fast now that if you want something, you click a button and you receive it. So, you can almost get something at the exact second you desire it. Where is the work ethic? Where is the just reward, you know? Where I'm from, when you desire something, it becomes a treasure or some kind of a destination but you have to lay every brick along that path yourself and it takes time, no matter what the desire. It could be a new car, it could be a new CD, it could be fresh water or some salt, to lather on a bloodied carcass to keep the meat from spoiling, whatever. But you have to work to earn your treasure and when you get it when you reach your destination, your feet might be sore but your mind will be light and you'll have accumulated no greater interest than the satisfaction of accomplishment. First deserve, then desire. But now, with these technologies, these people, they desire and they receive and if what they get is not even remotely close to their repugnant tastes then they are so quick to just abandon it and desire again and they act like they never wanted it in the first place. And it's not just the things they consume; it's the things they so call believe. They like this and they like that not for the arduous giving of their selves, but for the immediate reward and title that would come from having liked this or having liked that and they will call this activism, the passing of notes when one billion fools are folding their own and none of them are opened and none of them are read, they just passed from hand to hand. They call themselves more humane because they observe life through a fractured lens on these social networks and through these news programs. I was in a car accident once, man years ago, on a highway not far from here. My car slid on some oil and hit against a wall. I think I slid across three or four lanes. I can't remember too much. I do remember though the feeling that something was about to hit my car. I didn't feel scared. My mind I guess knew what was happening and it gave me an overdose of endorphin so I felt completely relaxed. Everything washed out of my mind. Every thought and every fear. That's what happens before you're about to die, you find peace. And so a truck travelling behind be smashed into my car and sent it flying into three more in front of me who had stopped to help. Now the crash wasn't so much as bad as having to see through the bonnet which was wrapped around my waist, the hours of traffic passing by my car at a snail's pace, with their windows down, their mouths agape and their cellular phones filming my tragedy. I guess it gave them a glimpse of their own mortality. You know something interesting though?"

Gavin shook his head, he didn't know.

"That section of road was renowned for accidents. My crash, as serious as it was, was just a passing incident, another tally of predictability. Interesting enough, though, there was this sign, just beside where my car came to rest, untouched by the accident mind you, and it read 'I Can't Believe It's Not Chicken – Next Exit'. I remember seeing that giant billboard. It was on a kind of slant because the car was on its side and my head was trapped between the handbrake and what was once a dashboard. Anyway, I had to squint, because of the blood that kept spilling from a cut in my head into my eye. But I remember thinking, 'what is it?' you know, if it's not chicken. Anyway, when the fire rescue finally got me from the wreckage and put me in the ambulance, they were doing all this work pumping on my chest and shoving tubes down my nose and into my stomach but I remember, clear as day, when we passed the next exit, there was a crappy little restaurant sitting on a hill at the off ramp and it was packed, cars beeping their horns and lining up all the way back onto the highway. And I wonder if I hadn't of crashed my car, whether all those people would have known about that place or not. It's the only way you can get people's attention these days, pour some oil on the road, cause a pileup and everyone will be trolling past your message. Accidents, the news, whatever. People watch so that they can peer into another person's sadness or tragedy so they can feel empathetic for a moment and then look at their children or their friends or their lovers with adoring and fragile eyes and remember why it is that they loved them to begin with. People get content so easy and just forget the things that it takes tragedy to remember. Life and love should always be treated as if it might wane as if tomorrow it might never lie beside you again. You know, the only time that people think that way?"

Gavin shook his head again. He didn't know.

"Bringing an egg from the fridge to the pan."

He was thinking something way off.

"They hold it with the utmost care, tenderness and fragility. Even when they crack that egg, they don't break it bullishly. They crack the egg with poetic grace as if their hand were just touching upon the shell and orchestrating its birth into the bowl. Why can't people put that much attention into what matters? Why can't they feel how much life and love they have in their heart without having to invent some tragedy to almost divorce themselves from it?"

She was looking at Gavin with impassioned eyes and though he might have fretted to once before, he found himself looking nowhere but into them. And he felt the postponing of his fear and insignificance as her captive eyes made a wanting prisoner of him. And when she made her point, she leaned towards him and touched her gentle hand on the back of his and when she did, his skin electrified and tickled and the hairs all down his neck and back all stood on their ends and he could feel each one of them, reaching out and catching her breath as from behind every word, it wisped off her tongue. And he wondered if it were true - these things that she was saying - then how he felt right now, he would never be encouraged to feel again, not unless some tragedy were to put a ransom on her tongue. How sad then for to absolve oneself in love, one must condition themselves so that they are immune to its senses until that is, that love returns to its fragility.

"And when that feeling wanes, when love becomes as apparent as a worn callous on their working hands, they will look again and again and again. Every time they peer through the window or through the paper or at the overturned car, at the baby thrown from a seventeen story window, at the school ravaged by a lone gunman or at the travesty of war and its portrait of disparity, they feel kindly and impassionate and giving, more than they normally feel. They want to help, for the first time, someone other than themselves. But what they don't realize is that they are in fact only helping themselves. They do it for the dopamine and the endorphin, nothing more. And in the end, they buy the chicken, they travel to Disney, they update their profiles and they buy that thing, whatever the hell it is, that thing they can't afford. They're fucking junkies. They say they support this or that, but they only support their own addiction. Getting high on someone else's tragedy. Someone has to put an end to it" said The Beautiful Girl.

Gavin shook his head. He agreed with every word and her hand was on his.

The car stopped in front of a large gate. They were in some kind of industrial complex. Gavin had no idea where. He had never seen this part of town. And he was more enticed and attracted by The Beautiful Girl's accented words that he paid no mind to where they might be and in the distance, to a roller door rattling as it coiled back up towards the roof and from behind it, the armed men who motioned towards their car, opening the gate and ushering them through.

"Where are we?" asked Gavin.

His fingers were secretly curling over the handle of the door, trying to clasp strong enough so that he could rip open the door with one hand, unshackle himself with the other and then dive from the moving car and skid along the dusted and pebbled path and somehow find his feet and scurry on through the dust swept up in his escape.

The Beautiful Girl reached her hand over and rested it upon his. It quelled his desire to run and though it didn't stop his heart beating rampantly, it did entice it into staying inside his chest long enough to get some kind of response.

"We're here," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

Gavin took his time getting out of the car. They were inside an old hangar maybe. It could have been anything. It was a giant metal shed and the roof was so high that he was sure that there were clouds forming somewhere below the lighting fixtures.

"This way" shouted The Tall Dark Stranger.

"Come with me," said The Beautiful Girl, taking Gavin's nervous hand.

They both climbed up a small ladder that lead to a loading bay and then followed The Tall Dark Stranger through a red rusted door into a massive room,

Gavin stood in awe.

"Welcome to The Camp," said The Beautiful Girl.

She looked out over the sprawl of busying activity like it was something she herself had made with her own hands. And she wore, in her eyes, the look of a proud mother, busy spending her child's upon her child's achievement.

"Is this...."

Gavin looked to the left and to the right. He couldn't finish his own words at first. He knew the answer was being spelled out before him; he just needed to hear it being spoken.

"Are you..."

The Beautiful Girl took both of his hands in one of hers and she drew her other across his face. Gavin had never felt the touch of a woman. He felt weak and naked. He felt exposed and expendable. He felt as if he might explode.

"This is where we train. It is where we build our knowledge. It is where, as humans, as lovers of life and one another, we come together, with one belief, one thought, one purpose" she said.

"You're..."

To his right, there was a massive set of monkey bars that stretched over and a pool of murky water that may or may not have been housing some kind of sea monster or urchin or floating prophylactic. On one side, men in shadowy uniformed appearance braced themselves to test their agility as, before them, other men bound from bar to bar, swinging above whatever horror lurked in the murky depths below.

To his left was a massive pile of sand and dirt with a net of mesh and razor wire sitting just inches from the backs and necks of the same uniformed men who crawled on their bellies with their weapons out before them, digging themselves further into the sand to scour their way through the obstacle.

"You're terrorists," said Gavin.

As he said the words, he waited for what he thought might be a charging fist from a near direction. He was expecting The Tall Dark Stranger or any one of the other hundreds of armed men to swipe at him with their trained assault and reduce him to begging for his life. Instead, The Beautiful Girl smiled. She said, "Yes, we are terrorists" and she pressed her body firmly against his and while one hand gently stroked the line of his chin, the other pressed against his chest and ran down his body and cusped between his legs.

Her eyes were like a watchman's rifle. There was nowhere he could run but in truth, there was nowhere else he would rather be. He had never felt this sensation of fear and exhilaration, both pulling at the same string of his being. The Beautiful Girl pressed her lips against his and Gavin felt a small fire envelope his insides.

"المغرر" shouted a man from a sofa at the end of the room.

The Beautiful Girl peeled her lips away from Gavin and stared at him smiling.

"I want you to meet someone," she said.

She could have said anything at that point.

"Ok," he said.

The two walked over to the far end of the warehouse. They passed the sandpit and the murky water and they passed the range of targets all lined up with uniformed men no longer practicing their aim, now running about with their knees jumping up high to their chest and their weapons held high above their heads.

They were terrorists alright.

It was just like he had seen on television.

They were joined by The Tall Dark Stranger before they reached the sofa.

"Sir, everything is on plan for today's strike," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

"Who is this?"

The Tall Dark Stranger looked to Gavin and invited him forwards without breaking his strained appearance.

"His name is Gavin. Like all grand twists of fate, he found himself in our company and I think there is none more fitting than he deserves. Gavin" he said, ushering his hand and inviting him to face the man sitting on the sofa. "This is, The Leader."

Gavin extended his hand, but it was brushed back by The Tall Dark Stranger. The Leader looked at him, for just a second and then went back to playing his video game. Gavin looked to The Tall Dark Stranger and then to The Beautiful Girl. He had no idea of what had just transpired.

How the hell was he supposed to feel?

What the hell just happened?

Did he fuck it up?

"The Leader is a man of few words, but he is a man of great thought of which conspires into a great act. He is but the life for which we all owe our sense of fragility. He gives what in turn he aims for us to take away" said The Beautiful Girl.

"Is that Call of Duty?" asked Gavin.

The Tall Dark Stranger rested his hands on Gavin's shoulders.

"Very few people have had the honour that has been graced upon you. Of all these men and women who will fight and die to honour the ideas of our great leader, you are but a select few who have had such debated converse with the supreme one."

Gavin smiled. He had never really felt like a right fit in anything in his life, not until now.

"Did he like me?" asked Gavin.

The Beautiful Girl kissed him headstrong on the lips. He almost tripped backwards.

"Everyone does," she said. "Especially me."

Gavin blushed.

"Do you have what it takes?" said The Tall Dark Stranger.

"To do what?" asked Gavin.

"To be a terrorist."

Gavin was silent for a second.

He looked at the men crossing the murky water.

He could do that.

He looked at the men crawling under the razor wire.

He could do that.

He looked at the men running with a gun above their heads.

And he could do that too.

Then he looked at The Beautiful Girl.

And he'd do whatever she thought was cool.

Then he looked back at The Tall Dark Stranger.

Stronger.

Determined.

Diligent.

Brave.

Confident.

Like a man.

"Yes," he said. "I have what it takes."

"Good. I knew it all along" said The Tall Dark Stranger. "We need someone like you Gavin. No. Not someone like you. Gavin" he said, pausing and resting his hand on Gavin's shoulder while The Beautiful Girl tickled the inside of his palm. "We need you."

Gavin smiled again.

"What can I do?"

"Your work," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

"I was fired," said Gavin.

"Can you still get access?"

"I don't know. They took my access and it's pretty...."

"What? You can get in?"

"My hero" whispered The Beautiful Girl into Gavin's ear, her other hand riding somewhere down his crotch.

"I mean. I'm not sure. But my brother. He works there. I could get his pass key and..."

The Tall Dark Stranger cut him off.

"Are you sure?"

"..."

"I mean, are you certain?"

"Yes," said Gavin, getting a word in. "I can get his key. What do you want...? I mean, what can I do?"

"You're going to deliver something, to the place where you worked."

"Free humanity from the slaving binds of automation," said The Beautiful Girl, herself now writhing against Gavin's body.

"What am I delivering?" asked Gavin.

"There is no greater title than a man can attest than being a martyr and more so, a terrorist. Eternity is what takes us into our deaths" said The Tall Dark Stranger.

"What does he mean?" said Gavin, looking at The Beautiful Girl.

"Shhh," she said.

As Gavin turned to The Tall Dark Stranger, The Beautiful Girl fell to her knees and undid the rusted clips on Gavin's belt. She smiled conniving as he looked down in estranged wonder.

"Listen," she said, unzipping his trousers and pulling his underwear down to his ankles.

Gavin's head burst with fire. He felt every molecule in his body dancing about and he felt every nerve, tingling as the finest breaths of air, tickled his skin. His face turned a bright red as he looked back to The Tall Dark Stranger and while The Beautiful Girl pleasured him, he listened.

"A man can live for a moment and be a good man but in his life, he will amount to nothing, just simply dissolve in the expected turn of events. But some men are remembered for an eternity by an act unto which they give themselves and from this, they earn their infinite title. The Martyr. The Terrorist. The Son of God. Would Jesus have not allowed his own persecution, would he have not allowed his own brother to have to have had to betray him had he not known that for an eternity, he would be rewarded with the infinite guilt and suffering of mankind? That for an eternity, he would live as a man god. Title is the most important thing that exists. We have no idea of death or infinity or heaven but what we do know is that after our death, our names and our title can be sung throughout history and we shall be forgotten if it is that we are sung about."

"But what about Judas?"

"What about Judas?"

"He is remembered at the betrayer, as the villain but... Well, he is the real Jesus Christ, I mean, the real martyr anyway. He sacrificed the eternity of his name so that he could help his brother to attain his sufferance, his persecution and his infinite title. That doesn't seem like..."

"Shhh," said The Beautiful Girl, pausing for a second.

"Sorry, trying to shift my focus."

"Who are you?"

"Gavin."

"No, who are you? What have you done? If you die tomorrow, how long until it is that it seems that you never were?"

Gavin had no friends. He had no job now. He had no hobbies. He had no girlfriend. He wasn't even invited to his high school reunion. He didn't keep in touch with people from work and he was pretty sure that outside of his mother and father and maybe his brother, nobody would ever notice that he had lived or as a result of it, died.

"Judas died knowing he would be the villain, but he also died for the love of his brother in his heart. It was the burden of that love that cast him to tie a knot around his own neck, but his suffering had to be real. For his brother to return unto the kingdom unto which he could truly rule, he could not walk alone, he could not give himself in, he had to be betrayed, he had to die upon the cross; there had to be suffering, there was no other course than for him to portray that role. But it was his love of the ideal that ensured this martyr went into death, not as the layman's villain, but as the catalyst of eternal religious thought, that without him and without his action, the evolution of idea and of science would remain in dogged regression and it was that thought alone, which quelled the pain he might otherwise have been plagued to endure. What do you want to be? A rock star? A writer? A nobody? Or do you wanna be a terrorist?"

The name sounded so strong and so masculine. He was in no way big or formed. He was nothing like the man he was speaking to or the men who ran about the warehouse in scripted exercise. He was scrawny. He had arms like straggling spaghetti and his face was sunken like a deserted and creviced moon. He looked hardly like the man that he imagined himself one day growing into being.

He had never felt like a man.

When he walked into a gym once, he left after a minute or two. The other men looked like they had been training since they were conceived. Their arms were the size of tree trunks and their legs where these monstrous flexing things and just one of their bulging veins along would be bigger and stronger than his entire body. When he walked into that gym, he felt less of a man and he walked out just one minute later vowing never to return and to dive himself into some self-loathing and degrading ideal that would distract from his less than masculine appeal.

His never dressed like other men dressed. When he wore a suit, his hanged loose on his body. He looked lost inside like he didn't belong. And he could tell that other men didn't see him as a threat and he could tell, with the way they turned their repelling stares that no woman saw in him, something for them to desire or to bed with and with him, to one day raise a child.

"I wanna be a man," he said.

"المغرر, give us a second."

"Ok," she said, wiping her mouth.

"Let me show you something," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

Gavin lifted his pants quickly. He did so looking around the room feeling a thousand terrorizing stares all looking at him and probably laughing because theirs was bigger.

"You see those men," he said, pointing out to the end of the warehouse where a group of men all dressed in sheathes of colour, all loaded arsenals to their chests.

"Yes," said Gavin.

"Today, they will be remembered for an eternity. They will go to war. They will attack a target of the east side of town. By the evening, their faces will be on every news channel on every station in every city in every country across the entire world. They will be more than famous. They will be infamous. They will live as martyrs for us in our brotherhood but for the entirety of mankind, they will live forever as Terrorists. Look at them. Look at the joy on their faces. Finally, they will attain what is rightfully theirs."

"Are they scared?"

"Why should they feel fear? Our minds are a puzzle. When a piece of that puzzle is missing, when there is some information of which we do not know, our minds invent the worst. They invent that so we go on our search for information. It is the core of survival and the catalyst of learning. But some pieces have no resolution and so we must carve our own. Some think of an afterlife, of an eternity that awaits and rewards their giving; like Judas. Some think of their title, of the infamy they will have and of their names being read aloud on television sets and in history classes as a reward of their giving; like Jesus. Do you have faith?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you believe in god?"

"I don't know."

"Do you fear god?"

"No."

"Then you are not Jewish. Do you love god?"

"No."

"Then you are not Christian."

"Do you accept god?"

"What does that mean?"

"It means you submit to his reverence like a mother does to her body when she gives birth to her child. To accept god means to love and to fear god in the same tone."

"No."

"Then you are not a Muslim."

"I'm an atheist."

"Well, that's kind of tricky. There's no such thing. To disprove or to disbelieve in god is to assume the idea of god as an opposite to the ideal; therefore, by incorporating god into your ideal, you assume that god exists. Atheism became the intellectualized devil so to speak and is in every right, infeasible without its opposite. It's like believing in 'up' and saying that 'down' does not exist. So if in fact you are an atheist, we can assume that in heightened fright, you will secretly and quietly assume a thought of either god existing or its polar, god not existing. Both in their right are the same thought as both access the same function in the human brain to tickle the god receptors that release endorphins and make the idea of death seem bearable and without unnecessary panic."

"And what about a Nihilist?"

"The faceless god. All belief and non-belief are but the same. They are just words that can fill that void in one's mind, the one without resolution, the one whose fright is ever so heightened. What will yours be? Will you think of heaven? Or will you listen to the echo of your name?"

"I wanna be Jesus."

"We all want to be Jesus."

"I'll do it. Tomorrow. I'll do it. What do I have to deliver?"

"Yourself," said The Tall Dark Stranger.

Gavin watched the men strapping black vests on loaded with explosives. They looked so fucking cool. He wanted to feel like they looked.

"You know what really turns me on?" said The Beautiful Girl.

Gavin had no idea.

But he wanted to know.

"Suicide bombers," she said.

# CHAPTER FIVE

The Tall Dark Stranger had several remote controls in his hands and he was pointing at several television screens. Gavin stood watching as the screens flickered while beside him, The Beautiful Girl draped herself over his body and whispered subjectively into his ear in regards to things of which she desired and of which she sought in a man, things that she had never expressed to another man before this day; a feeling of which Gavin had somehow invoked from her spiritual centre and of which left her without control; liberated in her surrender.

"Media is what gives us our power. Before it, we had no stage unto which we could elevate our message. Now, a thousand news channels, a hundred thousand papers and a hundred million blogs, they take something finite and minuscule and under the layers of evaluation, they make it perfect and whole. The people love us. They love what we do. They need their villain, but their villain cannot be like themselves. They need to believe in monsters, that these beings came from a nether world, from somewhere unto which they themselves could never be cast or their seed, from within it, never sprout. For goodness is in all and acts of disaster, of tragedy, of reckoning, it is only by the hands of monsters and devils and upon just accountancy, God. And so they invent immortality and politicize the Devil. Because none would ever believe that everyone is indeed sick and one stress away from taking up arms and acting out in god-like endeavor. None would want to believe so one moves to address these common disturbances with supernatural title, elevating man to infamy. The Lone Gunman. He is not George, the unappealing neighbour whose shabby dress hints towards his flailing virility; completely uninspiring and without sexual, physical or economic threat whatsoever. He is not George because George is anyone and George is everyone. He is spoken about as having been quiet and uneventful, as having had no close friends and no real interests whatsoever. And these tags, they will become the markers of social derangement, boxes to tick for a therapist, or a doctor or mother and father, or a worried and loyal citizen, unsure if the quiet man on their street, hardly engaging in their societal orgy, might instead be planning to harvest some catastrophe in his idle and conspiring hands. If George had just hanged himself, nothing would have come from his life or his death. But by walking into work with his hands heavied by an arsenal of artillery, George became something important for the people, he became the villain that retracted them back onto the fragility of their beliefs, those ideas and thoughts and blessings that like their lovers or like their children, they had taken for granted and set aside for the wishing away of dull and labored days and assumption that nothing ever changes so that one can address the frayed and tattered ends of their relationships and their existences tomorrow or down the line, after that thing. George becomes The Lone Gunman and The Lone Gunman, for a week or two, ignites the empathy and compassion in the hearts of billions and singes the frayed and picked at ends of the tapestry of their lives. Without tragedy, humans are rude and begging and stealing and corrupting and lying and deceiving and manipulating and thieving and strangling and perverting and procrastinating and complaining and completely self-gratifying things. But with tragedy, they are compassionate and caring and wholesome and giving and collective. They are the extension of their hearts. The human's soul only alights when another's has been shrouded in dark. Humans love compassion, but it is not something they can attest to in their own monotonous lives. They need some catalyst. They need a God or a Devil or Lone Gunman or a Terrorist to make them feel loved and clement and caring and humane. We are, in every right, The Judas. Without us, the world will suckle itself into aridity. We bring forth the evening rains. We moisten the breast of humanity. Just as Jesus would have eventually aged and have been forgotten and divorced from divinity without Judas, so too would humanity slip away from its compassion and belief with you. But the media has given us a greater title that time had given to Judas. We have become greater men. We have become indomitable. Their title for us is a strength beyond strength. It is unyielding. It is a sound that when spoken, cracks upon one's teeth like ice upon a crushing and rising tide. We inherit a title above and beyond all mortal men, the attention of an angel but of whose hands touches closer than any God or Devil ever could. We are The Terrorist. We are men. The name alone draws hair upon our chests. It makes our penises longer and thicker. It makes our testicles rounder and of solid brass. It makes other men wish they could be us and makes all earthly women, scenting our virility, wish that they could bed with us. We are Terrorists. We are sex. We are violence. We are life. We are death. And it is the media, our disciple, which casts us in this light. It is our bible."

The Tall Dark Stranger handed Gavin a black vest. It was loaded with explosives and from the tips of those silver canisters were a host of red and green wires that all ran to a single buttoned control that he held in his hand.

Gavin's hands were shaking, but not with fear. They trembled with excitement. He thought in his mind of himself being idolized on the television screen like all those others being portrayed before him. He wondered if he should have a photo taken on the way home, before he did this act; something better than the photos that his mother kept at home. Those ones were always so forced and they never caught him on a forgiving and sexualizing angle. His work photo too would not suffice. It made him look like a caricature of himself, hardly the image he imagined of himself playing out on the screen.

"Those terrorists," said Gavin. "They all look like...."

"Terrorists," said The Tall Dark Stranger. "Don't worry. Most of us, in our old lives, are enshrouded with emasculating imagery and photos. We have our own studio here; you will do a shoot on your way out. We'll email you tonight with the photo that will be given to all media worldwide so that you can bask in your infamy in your imagination if ever you feel any doubt about what you are proposed to do. I promise you, you will look fucking tough and rugged and sexy. But we'll give you that little something that makes you different from everyone else. It's a Photoshop thing. You'll see."

"I..."

The Tall dark Stranger helped Gavin into the vest.

It fit him perfectly.

"Today you stop being Gavin. Today, you become a Terrorist."

Gavin looked at himself in the mirror. He seemed taller all of a sudden. His arms seemed bigger as if they could wrestle a black bear. The line of his jaw seemed more defined and stronger. His chin was less of a shortened stump as it was a chiseled block of 'don't-fuck-with-me' and what was once a dent in his jeans now looked like a manly bulge.

He was a man.

He was sex.

He was violence.

He was a Terrorist.

"That looks so hot on you," said The Beautiful Girl.

She whispered into his ear and Gavin's cheeked burned red. His knees buckled under her exclamation and he almost tripped the button on the vest's control.

"I'm gonna do so much fucked up shit to you when you're done. That's how hot you look and how horny you make me."

"Even the thing with the monkey?" said Gavin in nervous elation.

"Especially the monkey," she said.

"Remember," said The Tall Dark Stranger, "you must dress in manly colour. Black. There is nothing more masculine than black. And you must wear a workman's boots. Because there is nothing more masculine than a man sweating over his tools. Black jeans, a black shirt and black boots. It gives me a hard on just thinking about it. If at all you get worried or you doubt anything, think of the image of yourself being immortalized as a man. Think of that and you can accomplish anything. Now I'm going to put on some videos of our past terrorists so you can see other men doing manly things and while you watch, المغرر here will suck on your penis. Any questions?"

If he had one, it vanished the moment she started. That same sense of exhilaration and corporal abandon swept over his conscious mind like a tsunami, tearing up the sediment of his logic and reason and smashing down every wall of argument and discourse that might have been built in his mind so that he was awash with ecstasy while he watched footage of men; real men, blowing themselves up and being paraded on television as Martyrs and Terrorists.

And he didn't watch with fright or dread or disgust. He watched each screen and he watched each manly man, blowing themself apart and orchestrating their reckoning upon the town or a school or a bus or a crowded thoroughfare and when he watched, the only feeling he had was of the impulse and desire to expulse his sexual ferocity and when he did finally explode, when his every sense erupted, he knew there was nothing else that he would want to do as much as this.

Gavin looked at The Beautiful Girl.

He wanted to bed with her.

He wanted to tell her that he loved her.

He wanted her to do that again.

And again.

And again.

"Are you... are we..." he stuttered.

"Shhh," she said smiling, putting her finger over his trembling lips.

"Can we... Can I..."

"When you're done. We will sleep together. But yes" she said, kissing behind his ear. "We are..."

Gavin smiled as he walked towards the photo booth, melting into blissful content.

"Say cheese," said The Bearded Man.

# CHAPTER SIX

Gavin walked differently. He had always hunched his back and kind of retarded his head into the gouge in his shoulder blades. His feet would always sweep along behind him and as such, the slouch in his step would wear through the soles in his shoes.

Not today.

Walking down the street, he felt taller. He felt taller because, in his mind, he imagined himself taller. He felt bigger. And it might have been because of the vest he was wearing and the explosives that were strapped to it but in truth, it was because, in his mind, he imagined himself bigger.

And in his mind he imagined himself more alluring; of sexual potency. And as he walked down the street, his imagination must have been casing a scent because dragging along in his shadow, were the turned expressions of wonder and awe from men and women who passed him and were drawn into the wake of his passing, unable to stop themselves from casting their stare, like a desperate and wormless hook.

Gavin imagined in his mind, not the thought of death or what dying might actually be like. No. He thought about a particular newsreader that he loved to watch on television. She was a specific and unusual kind of beautiful. She was older than most of the reporters, but her age didn't spoil her splendor or her allure. And her eyes, they were so big. Not like most girls' eyes. They were glacial, but they weren't at all cold. They were the kind of eyes that entrapped you and had you boldly listen as you remained at the command of her tongue. And it could have been a makeup trick or maybe she was an alien.

But every night, Gavin watched as she evangelized over landslides and mortars and murder and rape and terror and torture and anger and hate; and bombings and stabbings and football and wars and the nightly soap opera and the pop culture whores and she was so beautiful that nobody else in the world would ever compare to her. She was so beautiful that Gavin hoped there would never be a world without suffering so that he should never spend a night without throwing himself into her trapping gaze and list with her fanciful stories.

He imagined as he walked through the now diverging mass on the sidewalk, the newsreader speaking his name and as she mouthed the word terrorist, it almost looked like she was blowing him a kiss.

He passed his old work and he looked at the building with a certain regard for he knew something that they did not. And The Security Guard sitting behind his desk, he gave Gavin his usual discerning stare. Not because he saw in him the future of his intention, but because he imagined in his mind, that Gavin and whoever was walking past was laughing at him in mocking secrecy. Laughing about his weight. Laughing about his splotchy face. Laughing at how he panted each time that he leaned to pick up a pen. Laughing at how, like a blind man, there were parts of him that he probably only knew from touch and laughing too, because quite surely, it was only he who could prove that those parts were even there. And so The Security Guard, he looked through a disapproving lens and though his eyes were stern, it was upon himself that his consternation drew the highest acclaim.

Gavin then passed, as he made his way to the bus stop, the tennis club and there, at the front door, was the same spiky haired man in the same provoking t-shirt and Gavin looked at the word Nihil and he thought then that maybe there was some truth in this, that nothing at all had any significance outside of what was taught and therefore, nothing was real and nothing existed, nothing at all was nothing and all.

He went back to his dreaming and he imagined his mother and father being pestered by the media, hounded as to how their son could have risen so tall under the roof that they had built. How could they have missed it? What else could they have done?

And as the reporters talked of the collateral effect, the changes that would come into place, the coming together of people, and the abandon of common disregard and squabbling dissent, Gavin smiled knowing that without him, without this violent act, none of these good things would have been given a life.

"And where were you all day?"

It was his mother. She wasn't really expecting any kind of answer. Nothing that came out of his mouth would be what she would deem appropriate. It was obvious that she knew. His brother would have already told her by now. Little mama's boy probably called her right after he stormed out.

"Your father is not happy," she said.

That was true. Though it seemed it didn't need to be pointed out. The man was never happy. His life was a bourdon. He hated his job. His marriage had withered into pleasant company and his children, the extent of his seed, had grown into bitter disappointment. His father was not happy, ever.

"Where did you get that jacket? That's not yours. I don't remember buying that for you. Did you buy that? When did you buy it? Is it new? God look at the arms. It's too long. Look it sits to shabby on your body. Oh, that's a terrible jacket. You see, this is why you're better off buying clothes with your mum. You can't see what I can see and it just looks like you're trying to hide something under there. A jacket should sit properly. Here let me just tuck..."

With her knitting hands, she pulled at the bottom of the jacket, trying to see how low it would sit. Underneath, Gavin could feel the vest shiting under her poking about and he could feel the red and green wires, scratching against his skin.

"No" shouted Gavin, squirming away from his mother's pecking hands. "Stop it. God, do you have to be so embarrassing?"

"Embarrassing? Is that what I am? Oh, Jesus...I'm sorry then. Sorry for being an embarrassment" she said, her hand pulling up over her mouth and tears streaming from her eyes. "If that's how you feel then so be it."

Her voice cackled.

"I'm just trying to do what's right for you. It's not easy you know, being a mother. It's all, mum I want this and mum I need that and mum drop me here and mum take me there and only when it bloody suits you. The rest of the time I'm a bloody embarrassment."

"I didn't mean it like that mum it's just."

"No, it's ok son. The damage is done. You're right, I am. I mean, what kind of fool would take all this shite for so long and still wake up early every morning to crisp your y-fronts in the dryer for fifteen minutes so you're little fella can be all warm when you get up. I am the idiot."

"You're not an idiot."

"Who's not an idiot?"

His father came stamping out of his bedroom. His feet slapped against the wooden boards like drunken farmer's open palm on a stubborn mule's ass.

"Nobody," said The Mother.

"Dinner ready yet?"

He was picking his underwear from his buttocks with one hand while the other fished up his right nostril.

"I was just getting started."

"Well then, don't dilly daddle all bloody day. I'm starvin. Now, what's this I hear about you getting fired?" The Father said.

All of a sudden, the vest seemed so heavy and his mother was right, the arms of the jacket seemed so absurdly long. He felt like he was shrinking into himself and the sound of his father's snorting whistle from his nose as he breathed, etched away the image of greatness in his mind.

"Well? What the fuck did you do this time?"

"It wasn't me."

"No, it's never you. It's always somebody else fault. You're the fucking angel in all of this. Out there doin the world a fucking favour. So what are you gonna do now? Huh?"

Gavin hated this. His father's words were like an axe splitting into his reason and not cutting it in half entirely, just cutting and ripping threads from his confidence, splinter by splinter. And he knew it was coming. It always did. And here is was.

"How long do I have to support you? Huh? While you treat life like some kind of vacation, moving between this and moving between that. You know when I was your age, I was already married to your mum, I had a house and we were about to have your brother. What have you got to show for yourself? What have you done that's special? You just sit around her moping all day long. Watching television. Reading your stupid books. I'm paying for this you know. This extravagant life of doing jack shit. It's on my back. Where's my fucking thank you, huh? What are you gonna do now?" he said.

Gavin pressed his hand against his heart. Though it might have looked as if he were pained by some thread in his being or some sting in his soul, he was, in fact, clasping at the buttons on the control which was tucked into the left breast of his black suicide vest.

What was he going to do?

"You'll see," said Gavin.

"What does that mean? I'll see? I'll see my arse. You'll see. You'll see the back of my fucking hand if you don't get out there and find another job. There'll be no horsin around this time. I'll give you two weeks to find a job. If you don't, you're out on your arse. I'm tired of carrying you and your dreams. You need to grow up and earn a pair. You can't have your mum heating up your bloody underwear all your fucking life. You gotta be a man at some time."

"I've got something planned ok."

"Something, what?"

"I can't say. Not yet. It's something big, though. Bigger than selling friggin mobiles plans."

"And what's wrong with selling mobile plans?"

And then in walked the good son.

"Seriously. You were good at your job. But you had to go bloody crazy. Now I have management on my bum asking me why my brother had to flip the lid under my command. You know, they're thinking of implementing an action plan for this? Because of you?"

"Oh hunny, an action plan, is that serious?

"It's an action plan, of course, it's serious. It's not a procrastination plan."

The Brother laughed out loud. He held one hand over his stomach to assume maybe that his laughter was an inch from bursting from his stomach and he held one hand over his mouth so as not to show his teeth when he smiled. His laughter sounded like an old man's dying cough.

"You are such a devil," said The Mother.

"It is serious, though, mother," he said, ironing out the crease in his humour. "An action plan is not to be taken lightly and this could greatly affect my chance of being promoted to upper lower middle management."

"Oohh, that sounds important."

"It is, mother. It's very important. At least someone in this family takes responsibility seriously."

"That's exactly what I said. He needs to grow up and stop acting like a child."

"You need to stop treating him like a child."

"I've given him two weeks."

The Brother looked at Gavin. He wore the same disapproving look that he wore his whole life. It seemed that he disapproved of everything. It seemed more so that he disapproved of himself.

"That is a wonderful suit," said The Mother.

"It's striking," said The Father.

"It is beautiful isn't it," said The Brother. "I bought it yesterday. I paid one thousand."

"One thousand. On a suit? Would you ever?"

"It's the price of success mother. One must look as if he has earned his riches and he must spend those riches so that he knows their weight when he calls for them back."

"That's right," said the Father, "I told you before. You gotta look the part. That's all that's important. If you look the part then all the other pieces will just line up for ya. Now you look at the get up of this one here" he said, hinting at Gavin.

"Where did you get that god awful jacket?" asked The Brother.

Gavin squeezed his hand on the control. He could feel the button pressing in. He wanted so much to press it all the way, for the bombs to explode, to ignite everyone in the room. He couldn't do that, though. This was not how it would end.

If he were just to kill his family. It would be reported as a tragedy. The media, they would focus on his depression and they would interview his doctor and all the people of whom had never seen him smile and they would all grieve over the innocent death and waste of life, but they would label him as poor and weak and sad and disheveled and his name would be embroiled in fickle sympathy and it would be forgotten.

No.

Not here.

Not now.

Not this way.

His death would be great. It would be translated into a thousand tongues and he would be spoken about in both disgust and reverie but unto the course of existence and mankind, his life and his death would enact some great change and, therefore, his death would bring about purpose and outcome. And his family would feel less than empowered as the world looked for some kindly genetic to blame.

"Seriously though Gavin. You could be something if you just applied yourself."

"Listen to him. He knows what he's talking about" said The Father.

"Look at me. I am about to be promoted to upper lower middle management. I have a great one bedroom apartment not far from the city. I have my own car and I have a beautiful wife."

"Yeah, but your job is shit, your apartment's a joke, your car's a piece of crap and well.... You're gay. You get that don't you? You are gay."

"What? That's absurd."

"Shut your mouth Gavin. What a disgusting thing to say. Your brother is not gay. He is married to a beautiful woman, right?" shouted The Father looking to The Brother and The Mother.

"That's right," said The Mother. "He's not gay. This is... this is not the kind of talk you have in a household. Please. Can we talk about something else? Who wants sausages?"

"He does' said Gavin, hinting at his brother.

"I am not gay" shouted The Brother. "In fact, Fernanda is pregnant. So there. If I was gay, then how would you explain that?"

"Fern is A-Sexual."

"Mother, I'm not gay. I'm not. That's just stupid. That's like so disgusting to even think of. Another man. I like vaginas."

"Son please" shouted The Mother.

"You see? He's not gay. He likes vaginas. I like vaginas too" said The Father.

"Boys please" pleaded The Mother.

"Oh look at her. I'd bang her in a heartbeat" said The Father.

The news had started. Gavin's favourite newsreader was talking about an explosion downtown. It was the terrorists he had met today; they had done their act, now they would be glorified in infamy.

"Would you do her?" asked The Father.

The Brother looked uneasy as if he were mouthing words in a tongue he had neither heard nor spoken before. It looked as if his manhood were a leather that he had not worn in and of which; he found no comfort in wearing.

"Yes. I would do her very good" he said.

"Shhh," said Gavin.

The Newsreader crossed to a reporter on the scene who was walking around the destruction and she was approaching witnesses that were reaching across yellow tape with their hands outstretched, begging to be on television.

"What did you see?" asked The Reporter.

"There were two of them and they looked really funny. They had on pink tutus and they had fluffy pink slippers and they were dancing together in circles and I think they even kissed, you know, before they, went bang" said The Witness.

"And this seems to be the crux of the information we are recieivng that in fact there were two Terror{blists} involved in this dance and in accordance with other acts of Terror{blism} around the world in the past two days, they have been coordinated in their dress and feminine behavior, of such the world has not seen before. Both men were said to be dressed from head to toe in pink garments. We have received reports that they were wearing some kind of ballet apparel but not men's ballet; it seems they were dressed in women's leotards and women's pink tutus. We are not sure what this is supposed to signify but, needless to say, this appears to be some kind of feminine tribal dance. We are receiving confirmation of similar effeminate displays worldwide from Fallujah to Palestine, Istanbul and even in Spain."

"So we can confirm that this was another Terror{blist} incident?" asked The Newsreader.

"Yes. This seems to be the case. Witnesses said they danced compassionately and tenderly together before the explosion and they had never seen before, in bearded men, such feminine grace. I only wish I could have been there to experience it myself."

"Tell me, were there any wounded by the shrapnel?" asked The Newsreader.

"No. There were no casualties and no wounded" said The Reporter, even though behind her, men worked quickly and tirelessly courting large plastic bags in groups of two and three from beneath the rubble and into awaiting vans.

"Yes, there were no wounded. The only injuries here were the masculine pride of these two men. Tell me," The Reporter said, pointing the microphone at a witness, "were you scared?"

"Oh not at all. It was wonderful. Really fantastic. The bit at the end, when they kissed, just before the explosion, my god!! It was pure emotion. Amazing, really. I loved it, every bit of it."

"So there you have it. Another case of Terror{blism} where the art of dance and man on man romanticism unravels like a patchwork of extravagance and extraordinaire. Back to you in the studio."

"Well, that just looked wonderful. And I must say, it is sad that we are seeing less and less Terror{blism}. It seems as if the past days, the fad or fashion of killing oneself to choreographed dancing and impassioned gay spring has waned. It is a terrible thing indeed. One can only hope for more."

"What the hell was that?" asked Gavin.

"Terror{blism}. Don't you know?" said The Brother.

"It's like a play of words or something."

"What do you mean?"

"They started this thing in Ireland and it kind of spread everywhere overnight. The media, they're not reporting violence anymore. And stuff like terrorism, they changed the names and they don't talk about what happened, they only make fun of it and say that the people who blew themselves up were doing all sorts of weird stuff. It's hilarious."

"But what about the people who died?"

"Well, reporting them won't bring them back to life now will it?" said The Father.

"But that's the point of the news. They have to report what happens. The people deserve the right to be informed."

"It was this weird philosopher writer guy, had this daft idea of changing the wording or something related to violence in the news. I mean, he had a point. By reading the paper and seeing all those bad things, it didn't make them any better. I mean does staring at a video of a starving kid in Africa make him any less hungry? No. It just fools me into feeling guilty when I eat my burger. Now, I'm sure that given a stay in our country, he would have eaten that burger. So you know, instead of thinking about people in worse conditions, the media is encouraging us to enjoy and make the most of our own situation or well planes predicaments and well... live. It would be horrible you know, being hungry and seeing someone with a burger and instead of watching that burger being eaten and living vicariously through fantasy and dreaming, having to see that burger spoil as that person lowers their window and gazes at you in some repellant empathy. You know, if it was me I'd say eat the fuckin burger."

"Suicide bombings have dropped over two thousand percent in two days. It's amazing the effect it had. Who would have thought?"

Gavin's hand was still clenched on the control, but now his heart was beating rampantly. He tried to focus his mind on the image of himself inspired by the might of his action. But when he stepped inside his head, when he listened to The Newsreader in his thoughts, he saw himself being plastered on an imaginary television dressed, not head to toe in indomitable black with a razor-like stare and a manly sexual demeanour. Instead, he saw himself with a black vest and a look of shame dressing his face as he crouched over his sunken body with his hands clasping his exposed, small and oddly shaped testicles, as a cold breeze dimpled his skin and picked up and swiveled the pink tutu that was draped around his waist.

And when she mouthed the word Terror{blist}, she had to do so around a manic grin that even her professionalism could not bucker to restrain.

His heart pounded.

His breath shortened.

It was cold and stabbing.

His hand let go of the control.

This had to be a mistake.

# CHAPTER SEVEN

"Honey, are you ok?" asked The Mother.

Gavin said nothing.

"I must be the depression" she whispered to The Father.

"Change the channel" shouted Gavin.

"I will do no such thing," The Father said.

Gavin lurched forwards and ripped the remote from his father's hands, flicking through channel after channel, from station to station and from newsreader to newsreader and on every channel, he was greeted with the same image; two men dressed from head to toe in pink apparel being branded as Terror{blists}.

What did that even mean?

"It makes sense though you know," said The Brother. "You spend that much time with other men in close quarters; you're bound to develop feelings. Uh, that's what I've heard."

"Swinging on monkey bars, crawling through sand. Pretty gay if you ask me."

"It's not gay. It's a brotherhood and it's pronounced Terror. They're saying it all wrong. They weren't wearing pink. I saw them. They had black pants and black boots and black shirts. They looked mean and tough and manly. They were nothing like they're saying here."

"What? You're saying the news is wrong now?"

"No, I'm not saying the news is wrong I'm just saying, that's not what happened."

"Well, it's on every channel. You know what they're calling it?" asked The Father, looking over at The Brother.

"Terror{blism}," said The Brother.

"Yeah I know that, but the uprising, the, you know, the explosion of new romantics."

"What?"

"The Sissy Fountain."

'That's poignant."

"It is, isn't it?"

Gavin threw the remote on the ground. The back flung off and slid along the floor and the batteries exploded from their jacket and scattered underneath the sofa. The control itself burst into a hundred pieces, each one shattering into a hundred more. The Brother looked at Gavin with his famed disapproving stare. The Father too turned in displacement.

"That was kind of gay," he said.

"Fuck this" shouted Gavin, storming out of the house.

As he passed his brother's car, he remembered the key. Without it, he wouldn't be able to enter the building. He quietly opened the car door and slipped his hand into his brother's man purse. There were so many useless things that he kept inside; what he called 'just-in-casers'. He found the key card and slipped it into his pocket and then he was off.

As he stormed down the road, he didn't notice the canisters on his chest roughly banging against one another. He didn't at all care. His mind was on fire his eyes were like two placating suns and on any other day, he might have looked like a raging inferno, trouble on legs and people would part like the splitting of hairs in a heavy wind. And they would bury their heads and they would anchor their eyes until his stampeding feet had long since left them behind and only then would they let go of their baited breaths and lift their sights once more to the greets of other gentle passersby.

Not today.

Today, as Gavin stormed down the street with a low grumble baying from the pit of his stomach, people stopped and they turned and they raised their stares and they raised their smiles and when he passed, they raised their applause. They felt no threat in his merry demeanour, only the thrill of anticipation as they followed his every step, hoping to all god that he would at any moment, break out in dance or in song.

"Get the fuck out of my way" shouted Gavin at a gawking bystander.

"Thank you" The Bystander shouted. "But I don't swing that way. Good for you, though" he shouted again as Gavin stormed down the road, the angrier he got, apparently the merrier and brightly and splendiferous he seemed.

On the bus, he reached for his phone. He had two numbers. One of which was an automatic detonator for the explosives dressed upon his body. The other was for the girl who promised to bed with him when he had become a man.

He looked at the two numbers and large flooding beads of sweat formed over his eyes.

Which was which? He paid no thought. He punched the numbers of the first number into his phone. His heart beat so fast. He hadn't imagined dying here, on a crowded bus, only blocks from his real target.

The phone rang.

The vest, it started to rumble.

Panic drew across his chest.

What had he done?

"Hi, you've called المغرر, I can't come to the phone right now but if you'd like to leave a message, I'll get right back to you. If you want, you can try my other number at...."

"Fucking message bank" he mumbled. "Shit, what's her name. What the fuck is her name? Hey, uh, ahem, it's me, Gavin. Listen I need to speak to you urgently. I just watched the news, all of them and... it's not like you said. They lied. They said nobody was injured, but I could see them carrying bodies off in the background. And they said they were wearing pink, but I know, I saw them, they were wearing black. And they didn't call them Terrorists. They called them Terrible or something like that. Terror{blists}, that's it, Terror{blists}. I'm trying to do what you said, I'm trying to imagine to get rid of my fear, but it's not working. I can't do it. Not if they're gonna do the same thing with me. I can't go through with it. Please call me back."

Gavin hung up the phone. His hands were sweating. His head felt like it might explode before his hands could even touch the controls. He thought about المغرر and then he thought about the violence and the explosions and the martyrdom and a feeling engorged his loins. He felt warm and encased in sex. He felt capable of anything. He dialed المغرر again.

"Hey, it's me. I'm gonna do it. I love you. I can't wait to see you."

He hung up the phone and put it in his jeans pocket. His eyes were trained and focused and they glimmered like a sharpened knife. As he stared off in an unflinching stare, a group of passengers looked in his direction, giggling and smirking.

Fear crept upon his mind as he exited the bus. Now, the jacket seemed so heavy. The control had slipped from its restraint and was sliding down the inside of his shirt. He could feel his rising stomach, pressing the one button. For every step that he took, he felt as if he could not take one more. It was like the ground was molten and the soles of his shoes were fusing to the pavement.

"I am a man," he thought. "I am a terrorist. I incite fear and I enact change. Men want to be me, and women want to be mine. I am a man. I am a man. I am a man. I am a man. I and a man. I in a man. Eye on a man."

He backed against a wall and heaved over himself trying to catch his breath. As he stood upright, finding some assurance in his mind, he looked to see a group of girls passing him with mocking smirks and behind them, a well-dressed young man came closer in his passing and offered Gavin a winking expression.

There was nothing he could do to excuse his fear. He didn't want to be remembered as anything less than the man he already was. What point would it be if the point were not his own?

Gavin unzipped the jacket.

He threw it to the floor.

He stood in the afternoon light with the black vest and its wires exposed.

The control hanged on a black cord and banged his knee.

Strangers walking by all stopped.

Some took out their cameras.

Most were drawn with a look of glee.

"It's a Terror{blist}," said one.

"Oh I do hope there's dancing," said another.

Gavin took the control in his hands.

He ran his thumb over the red button.

He wished he could erase the day.

"Dance, dance, dance" the crowd chanted.

Was he bored or was he depressed?

Gavin walked into the tennis club.

The man in the Nihil shirt was standing behind the counter.

"What can I do you for?" he said.

"Is the first lesson still free?" asked Gavin.

"Sure is," The Nihil Man said. "But you can't play in loafers."

Gavin looked down at his feet.

He felt enraged.

His finger tickled the red button.

"Hey, no stress, you can borrow a pair," said The Nihil Man

husband, father, son, brother, philosopher, artist, writer, teacher, recluse

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Utopian Circus (CITY b00k 011)

Heaven is Full of Arseholes

Coffee and Sugar

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Rock Book Volume I: The Boy from the County Hell

Rock Book Volume II: Dark Side of the Moon

Alex and The Gruff (a tale of horror)

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