

High White Sound

a novel

hannah herchenbach

Copyright 2010 Hannah Herchenbach

Smashwords edition

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dedication

For all my friends who are my family,  
and all my family, who are my friends

for comfort

These are the times that try men's souls.

Thomas Paine

I sit in one of the dives  
On Fifty-Second Street  
Uncertain and afraid  
As the clever hopes expire  
Of a low dishonest decade

WH Auden, 'September 1, 1939'

Table of Contents

Prologue

i The City

One. The Friends

Two. The Visit

Three. The Party

Four. The Wish

ii The Island

Five. The Detour

Six. The Kids

Seven. Taken Away

Eight. Then

Nine. And

Ten. So

Eleven. Next

Twelve. Home

Thirteen. The Show

Fourteen. Until

Fifteen. Then

iii The Fall

Sixteen. Taken Away

Seventeen. The Kids

Eighteen. The Detour

Nineteen. The Wish

Twenty. The Party

Twenty-One. The Visit

Twenty-Two. The Friends

Epilogue

prologue

At least once, every ordinary person wakes up on an otherwise perfectly normal morning with a simple but troubling thought: How did I get here? It happened to me earlier today, when I was stirred from my nap in the grass atop this hill by a deafening tear. I sat up to find a seal with the tatters of what had been my white dress in his mouth. It was my only article of clothing, and I am now uncertain as to what to wear.

While the incident wasn't terribly unusual, it nevertheless reminded me that I have been out on this island for years with no real purpose, roaming as if in search of something I never knew I had lost. Some consider spending one's days on remote hilltops and abandoned beaches without a single thought for the preservation of one's future a tragic waste of time, a complete loss of potential, or worst yet – an absolute failure.

But the view is so nice I find it hard to leave. At sunset black dolphins leap from the waves, and at night you can make out shadows of yellow penguins moving in groups across the sand under the glow of the moon.

So what does it matter that I'm hidden out here at the end of the world, whiling my youth away? People who glorify youth have got it all wrong. After all, it was the innocents who led me to run screaming out here in the first place. It was only chance that I escaped a similar fate – though in some ways I haven't really escaped it at all – for it is now, in the folly of my youth, that I am about to kill something I love.

But to explain what I'm doing out here, with my typewriter on a mountain in the rain, with my torn white dress blowing in the wind, would require going back to the other side of the world, back to a time of innocence when everyone was guilty, back to the dawn of that summer when all that I knew about the world blew apart.

I have but one aid to serve my memory – this vial of ambrosia by my side, for it was the night I found the bottle that it all began. Gold flakes circle and swirl through the amber liquid like falling snow, and as I gaze in rapture at their dizzy patterns, in an instant it all comes rushing back. New York.

part one

the city

One. The Friends

When you find yourself at a fancy party where you know no one and feel like a fool, sometimes the only way to make sense of the sea of waistcoats is to imagine that you are at the circus. Ringmasters in top hats sit at the bar with ballerinas in diamonds. A trained bear in a white tie and tails balances atop a stool, his fat paws gripping the bar for support. In the corner a midget strokes his spiral mustache and puffs on a dated Cuban. The figures glide through golden liquid and bend in champagne bubbles. I had been admiring the glittering little world between my fingers for God knows how long when a voice broke into my reverie.

"Any chance you might actually drink that, Addison? Or are you just going to stare at it all night?" The images slid off the glass. Behind the flute a girl in crushed velvet arched an eyebrow.

"Of course I'm going to drink it," I replied, tipping the glass into a potted fern.

"You are a waste of alcohol, young lady."

"Then I should fit in around here."

A dark green Dom Perignon bottle wandered by in limp hands. In one deft move Katrina acquired it and procured two refills.

"Besides, it was running low on bubbles." I raised the flute and peered back into my carbonated world. "It's like a carnival in here through this thing."

"Mark my words, it's quite a scene outside it as well." Girls spun in ball gowns under rusting chandeliers. Boys with ruffled hair and loosened ties roamed the halls clutching bottle necks and tattered books. A pair of legs buckled underneath a growing tower of coats.

"Another year," Katrina declared, "another crop of baby-faced masochists, lined up to get a piece of their own self-worth handed back to them."

Fraternities as most of America knows them are an uncommon sight in New York. But this was not your average fraternity. The fabled little brownstone had a corner address on Riverside, near the tenured professors at Columbia and the brown park where Kerouac was once said to have buried a body.

Past the ornate wooden doors there are three criteria for admission: You have to be smart. You have to be beautiful. You have to be filthy rich.

But given enough of the third, the first two don't matter. Dumb kids fly into the Ivy League on the wings of legacy all the time, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but money talks. The society required funds to sponsor their fabled parties, which were held on birthdays, holidays and always on Thursdays, where acquaintances and hangers-on from the college populace could glide through in elegant attire and supply window dressing in exchange for liquors and mixers of their choosing.

Tonight was such a gathering. Our second year had ended under torrents of rain and the Katrina and I felt like a last hurrah. So we pinned ourselves up, pulled on some basic black and stumbled on stilettos down the cobblestone path that cut through the wrought iron campus, leading lost souls back into the jaws of the outside world.

"The ability to make money is a gift from God," I read on the wall. "And here I was, thinking he was dead."

In spite of all the glitz I was haunted by visions of the one person I would rather forget. He was under the low light at the end of the bar. In a dark blazer brooding in front of the fire. Slumped in a blue velvet armchair.

The aftermath of love is a curious thing. Once you've got it, so it is believed, the hard part is over – even The Beatles thought so. He called me a princess. And treated me like one, as far as fairy tales go. But fairy tales never tell the whole story, and fulfillment in the arms of another is a Victorian myth that burns virgin hearts.

I loved him. Or so I thought. But what was once a quiet and stable affection had over time matured into boredom. I saw my life pan out as a series of long nights deflecting dim, well-meaning questions from his family – when are you going to get married, then when are you going to have a baby, and another, and so forever on.

Like a relic of my past in the Midwest, he was snipped out of the picture with one long and sad final phone call that spring. And the fabled glowing-ember sunset we always saw ourselves walking towards burst into flames. That night I lay down and cried for the loss of my white knight. A childhood of Christian dreams and fairy tales left me unprepared for this feeling. Of loving someone, but not wanting them.

"He wasn't good for you anyway," Katrina remarked, watching my fallen face. "That boy was always a bit simple for my liking. Which probably means he was too simple for yours too, had you been willing to admit it."

My eyes softened. "He was sweet."

"Sure he was." Katrina snapped a lighter at her cigarette. "But was he the man of your dreams?"

The smoke slithered between the iron spires of the stairwell and curled upwards until it broke around two slender feet wrapped in gold chains. A blue satin dress framed a crystal necklace under a halo of blonde hair. Candlelight danced in her frosted eyes.

"Addison!" Rose's feet glided down the stairs with an indelible grace that came from years of ballet.

"Easy there," I cautioned as Rose balanced on the last step. "Lose a shoe and you may give some poor guy a Prince Charming complex."

Rose was a bowl of sunshine from New Orleans, her muscles lean from years of running free. On most sunny days I could find her on the library steps, basking in the warmth of the afternoon, as if she were still napping with the alligators and drinking forties with policemen outside the funk bars on Broom Street. We lived together before she crossed over to the shadows of the society.

She wrapped her arms around Katrina. "What do you think of the party?"

"It's unusual," Katrina replied as we watched a boy stumble by in a top hat and a cane swing out to rap his bottom as he passed. An eyebrow twitched slightly as she thought of something brilliant and diplomatically chose to hold it back.

"Doesn't Rose look like a mermaid?" I purred, stroking her hair. "An absolute mermaid."

"Have you talked to many people at this party?" Rose plucked an open bottle of red wine off a passing silver tray and tipped it towards Katrina's glass. Her voice sunk a few octaves. "They are a bit intense."

"Just observing mostly." Katrina clinked her glass. "I don't know any of these people, and I don't think I care to either."

"That's a good idea."

"How goes dance?" I asked Rose.

Rose shook her head. "It was good, but I'm not really bothering with that anymore. My parents said I should major in something more practical."

"Practical?" Katrina sputtered. "You go to a liberal arts school, for God's sake. Impracticality is practically the point." She lit another cigarette. "I need to figure out what to do with a talent for philosophy. Philosophy! I don't know if it could be any less useful. Outside of armchairs, that is."

"Aren't you a bit too bleeding-heart liberal to be a smoker?" mused Rose.

"In theory you're right," Katrina conceded, disappearing behind a growing white cloud. "But I find them a modern necessity."

Rose turned. "Are you doing anything interesting for the summer?"

My face lit up. "I'm staying in the city."

Rose wrinkled her nose. "With the garbage?"

"Oh yes."

"Why?"

"I have an internship at a consulting firm downtown. Which is going to be pretty miserable," I admitted. "I'm only doing it because my mother would kill me otherwise."

Rose gave me an odd look. "Do you always do what your mother says?"

"Yes."

"She's a very scary lady," Katrina agreed.

"That's not such a bad trait to have," Rose admitted. "After all, someone has to keep people in line." She stretched her arms and cracked her knuckles. "And that's exactly what I'm going to do."

"You're going to be a bouncer?"

Rose slitted her eyes. "I'm going to law school."

"Why?"

"Imagine the salary."

I peered into the bottom of my glass. "Imagine the drudgery."

Rose cocked her head and rolled a bare shoulder up, like young girls do when they know they are being good for their parents. "I figure I may give it a go. My father has been talking lots about his connections at Yale Law. It seems like the obvious choice." She sighed. "It's not like I know what I would do otherwise."

"What about poetry?"

"I love poetry," she conceded. "But it's not like I could do anything with it."

As my gaze drifted over the faceless sea, I caught sight of a boy with soft cheeks in a white suit, his thumbs tucked into fat black suspenders.

"Alex!" I cried. Alex was one of my oldest friends from school. Born in Montana, he was a small-town karate champ who skipped three grades. A freshman at fifteen, he wore a robe of a thousand colors to Lit Hum every day. During our all-night study sessions he would break up the tension by beating out rhythms and rapping Kierkegaard on an acoustic guitar that he had found in the tunnels under campus. "What are you doing here?"

Alex blinked. "I'm in the society."

"You've been kidnapped!"

Alex beamed. "I went willingly."

Betrayed! I cast a look about the place. "Why?"

"Connections." He pointed a finger across the room. "That kid over there is the son of a senator. He's the only reason I'm working at the Democratic National Convention over the summer."

"That's wonderful."

"I'm really excited," he said. "It's going to set up my career. The man running it does interviews for Morgan Stanley."

My face fell. "Setting up interviews two years in advance? That's getting in the game early."

He grinned. "Tell me about it. Come November everyone is going to wish they were me."

"I must be ahead of the game – I wish I was you already," I deadpanned. "Isn't that like a thousand hours of desk work a week?"

Alex gave me a quizzical look. "I don't want to be doing it when I'm fifty." He held up the bottle. "What's your poison?"

"Nothing thank you – I'm not much of a drinker."

"That's right. I remember you being a bit of a teetotaler."

My cheeks flushed hot. "That's not true!"

"Oh yeah?" Alex laughed. "Do you still spend all weekend in the library?"

"No," I lied.

"You better get ready. College is going to be over before you know it. You can't stay in a library forever – though I know you'd try. What's your major?"

"History and English." I stifled a cough. There wasn't much real world about it. "And yours?"

He stared as if I had grown horns. "Economics, of course. We have to start figuring out what we're going to do in the real world." His pouted lips slid into an easy grin. "And a six figure salary on graduation sounds good to me."

"Isn't that like selling your youth to the devil in a vial?"

"Perhaps," he agreed. "But in return I get a very pretty yacht when I'm thirty."

"Wow. Hasn't anyone heard of social responsibility?"

"I have a social responsibility," he replied, refilling his glass, "to get as drunk as possible."

"I'm getting sick of that major," Katrina said as Alex swayed his way back into the crowd. "Economics," she mocked. "Economics, naturally. My uncle has a firm on Wall Street. It's as if everyone here thinks the world ends at the Hudson River."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good education must be in want of a fortune."

Katrina clicked her tongue in disapproval. "God is dead."

"History is at its end."

Katrina turned to me. "Money is the measure of all things."

I shook my head. "It can only be the end of the world, ahead."

It was the end of something. It was the end of life as I knew it. And from where I was standing, it was the end of sanity. Where were we? What was this place of self-indulgence, where the kids put on airs of retired old men at sixty? And wrapped themselves up in tuxedos like dumb penguins and drank bourbon whiskey?

"The trick is to keep drinking," Katrina advised. "What do you do when faced with wretched excess?" she whooped. "Drink it down!"

I leaned over for a quick sniff of the champagne and wrinkled my nose. "Dude. This smells repulsive."

Katrina nearly choked on the olive she had plucked off a passing tray. "Are you actually considering drinking?"

I shook my head. "I almost feel like I know too much. Reality is depressing." I spun the golden carousel in my fingers. "But when I'm holding this, the world is beautiful." Light glinted off diamonds and shot through the glass, exploding like white spiders across the stained wood paneling. I grinned.

"I can't believe it," Katrina insisted. "The princess of the Ivy League. Drinking!"

My eyebrows raised. "The princess?"

Katrina solemnly nodded. "In all my days, you have been the most innocent thing I have ever seen. Nineteen years old and not a drop to drink."

One could say I lived my life on the visible side of things. If a stranger were to crawl inside my mind intent on living out hedonistic fantasies, he would be disappointed to find me merely sketching out charcoal dreams. Or working at the roller rink. Twisting to Sam Cooke when I thought no one was looking. Or lost in my guitar with my headphones on. That's what growing up in the Midwest does. You find your own fun.

But things no longer added up. My life had turned from a well-mapped out plan featuring engagement, marriage and raising a family into a cloudy white haze. Now here I was, on the eve of twenty and without God or man. I eyed Katrina's glass. "It can't be that bad."

"The princess is a dying breed," Katrina mused. "And it's a wonderful thing." She slapped my back. "Welcome to the land of illogic. And keep up the drinking."

"To the end of the war!" I raised my glass.

Katrina slammed hers against it. "The war will never end."

At nineteen you already know everything and will not let anyone tell you otherwise, but I had never been more certain of that fact than that night, as I slowly got drunk for the first time. Several rounds later I found myself wondering why I was still in this dark and ugly place with wolves in Armani.

"No one ever laughs here," I mused, staring after a kid swaggering down the hall in an oversized red coat like Vanderbilt after buying up all the railroads. The appeal of the alcohol was sinking along with my spirits. It was more difficult to control than I'd suspected.

My eyes cast up at the shelves filled with empty jars high above the bar. "An empty bottle for every sold soul." Katrina examined the bottom of her glass.

"Katrina." I grabbed at her dress. "We're surrounded."

Katrina whipped her head around. "By what?"

"Pirates," I said low enough for no one to hear. "They've taken our maidens. They've taken our friends. It is our moral duty to seek vengeance by commandeering their possessions."

Katrina pointed to a slender bottle at the end of the shelf. "Look at that one. Is it made of gold?"

I grabbed it when no one was looking.

"Crack it open," Katrina whooped.

"No! This one stays full. 'How I love thee, Ambrosia,'" I read drunkenly from the label. "'For you speak the truth.'"

I turned and walked straight into the chest of an acquaintance from class.

"Dave!" I shouted with too much enthusiasm.

"ADDISON!" His eyes widened. "I never see you at these things!"

"Oh, these things, those things." I gestured with my glass, sloshing wine onto his blazer for emphasis. "There are just so many things around these days, it's hard to keep track of them all."

"Yeah right. I don't think I've seen you out once in your life."

"That's not true." I distinctly remembered once taking a trip with him to the Brooklyn promenade. In fact, I based my decision to never see him again on the memory of him sweeping an arm out over the view of downtown Manhattan and boasting, "One day, it will all be mine." Anyway. "What have you been up to since freshman year?"

"COCAINE!" he cried with joy.

"Wow."

Dave grabbed me by the neck. "Isn't this place AMAZING?" He began pointing across the room with the arm hooked around my neck. "His dad is the head of General Motors. The one in blue's grandfather owns ninety percent of Rhode Island. And the one next to him is suing his own family for a billion dollars."

I nodded to the kid in the red coat. "Is that the son of Captain Hook?"

"Close. Have you heard of Jack Abramoff?"

Yes. Anyone who read the New York Times had. One of the biggest players in Congress, despite having never held a political seat. He had seen to it that most of the money allocated towards the war went into the pockets of businessmen who had contributed generously towards the last election.

"That's his son?" I guessed.

"Oh yes," Dave said. "Come on." He pulled me over by the neck. "I'll introduce you."

We came in at the end of some discussion about stocks.

"What's going on with your portfolio?" Pentheus asked as we slowed to a halt.

I shook my head. "Don't have one."

An odd look crossed his face. "What are you, a Communist?"

"I'm a History major."

Pentheus's lips pursed into a polite smile. "If I didn't get into Economics I'd kill myself."

This would require another drink. My eyes slitted in happiness at the scarlet liquid cascading into my glass. "Well, that hardly seems rational."

"Negatory. It's absolutely necessary." Pentheus nodded at Dave. "We're going to start the next Enron."

Bankrupting America. At least he was dreaming big. I downed the wine and signaled for more. "I admire your ambitions, but is corporate felony really something you should be so open about?"

Pentheus sighed. "Everyone always focuses on the negatives."

"No one ever intends to commit grand scale larceny," Dave insisted, with an oversized laugh that suggested he had already put similar plans into place. "This is just about introducing new kinds of stocks." His fingers danced in front of glinting eyes.

"What's the product?"

"I can tell you in three years"—his lips slid into a confident grin—"when it's the biggest commodity in the world."

The Ivy League was the first of many rungs of achievement that scaled up well into adulthood for the ambitious and unbridled. These included, but were not limited to, law school, Wall Street, a corner office, a trophy wife, a 30-foot yacht, an Upper East Side address, the occasional stab at politics, and a large string of donations to the beloved alma mater, handed with a firm handshake and flashing bulbs to a grinning President. And after that – one hell of a party for their thirtieth.

"That's very impressive," I conceded. "Thanks to people like you maybe we'll someday pay back China."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Pentheus said good-naturedly. "Our company is established in Zug."

"So that's the latest tax haven." I stroked my chin and contemplated world domination. It sounded boring. The world wasn't in such great shape to steal these days. "If only I cared about money." If only I cared about anything.

I craned my liberated neck around the room. Where had Katrina gone?

Dave grinned and stroked his glass of bourbon with a loving finger. He closed his eyes and inhaled strongly. As his eyelids flashed upwards he breathed, "How can you not care about money?"

"You obviously haven't met my mother," I offered, glancing over his shoulder. "She is the epitome of everything wealth can do to a person."

Pentheus's eyes glowed with lime sincerity. "If you earn enough to put her in a nursing home," he soothed, "you'll never have to see her again."

At last I spotted Katrina in the corner with the philosophy drunks bombing Grey Goose. I spotted someone I had met once and waved frantically.

"Yegad – that is NOT what Kant said!" I heard Katrina's voice cry over the crowd. "Whoever gave you that idea was doing some lousy exegesis."

Pentheus raised his glass. "Are you enjoying our little party?"

"Oh, it's all right," I said slowly. "But you know what this place is missing?" I dropped my voice to a whisper. "Horses."

Dave arched an eyebrow. "Come again?"

"White ones. They're so majestic." A gleam appeared in Pentheus's left eye.

Katrina swayed her way back to my side. "Who's with the what now?"

"The ball gown girls could have them on reins and lead them from room to room."

Pentheus rapped his cane on the floor. "Say, now that's my kind of scale!"

Dave frowned at Katrina. "Is Addison drunk?"

"Addison's like this normally," Katrina admitted. "But to answer your question, yes."

There was no stopping me now. I was on a roll. "Imagine it. It's the kind of extravagance this place deserves. Wild stallions galloping through the hallways. Just missing the trays of caviar."

"Don't mind Addison." Katrina fanned a hand in my face. It was time for a quick exit. "She's doesn't know what she's saying. It's past her bedtime. She's on her way to the Sandman. And death. Good night."

"Why do you have to go around insulting people?" Katrina scolded as she dragged me away under her arm.

"There goes a girl with a vision!" Pentheus could be heard declaring from the abandoned room.

"Just as in a moment you rose," I hollered as we slithered down the brownstone steps in the rain, "so too will you be brought low!" Katrina supported my sinking weight with precariously angled stilettos. "I don't feel good," I groaned.

"Alcohol is far less fun when you're vomiting it back up," she agreed. "But don't worry. You'll get used to it. I would hold your hair all summer if I weren't going to be in Rochester."

The world began to spin. "Katrina," I moaned, sinking down to the sidewalk. "How did I get here?"

Katrina looked confused. "We walked."

back

Two. The Visit

It didn't surprise me that the kids were mad. After all, it takes a certain kind of madness to want to be in New York – and mine centered on that quintessentially American itch for perfection that had dominated my upbringing since birth. When I was eight, my father told me something that had stuck with me ever since. "Out of all my children," he confessed, "if any are going to be successful, it will be you. But it doesn't come easy," he warned. "First, you find something you love. Second, do it better than anyone else. Last – and this is what everyone forgets," he groaned, "spend less money than you earn. If you follow these three steps – and stay disciplined – the rest will fall into place."

In the Midwest, these words got me whatever I wanted. Honors, awards, scholarships – I saw the American Dream as a speeding bullet all around me. It was about being bigger, better, stronger, smarter, and quicker – and I was able and willing to play the game harder than anyone else. Discipline came easily – living in the middle of nowhere creates a hell of a work ethic. It was a fairly easy system to play – keep your head down, work hard, get out of here.

And so, at the end of high school, with the whole world in front of me, I found myself drawn to the siren call of New York. I imagined it to be a place where all that I had read about only in books came alive, where excitement and opportunity awaited around every corner, where everything was so full of promise it seemed plausible that people would break out into song on street corners and crowds sashay down Broadway in spontaneous choreography. How could they not? You could do anything in New York.

I was seventeen when the proud towers fell and I came to New York anyway. A certain kind of kid showed up in the city that year – one with a harder edge. No one in my family wanted me to leave, but once I had my heart set on the East no one could talk me out of it – it was where I would seek out my destiny. I had only visited once, and briefly at that, but with a few quick looks about the place – the infinite gaze down Amsterdam Avenue, the sun glistening off the lake near the weeping willows in the park, the vast manicured grounds at Columbia – I knew that I had found a home. It was as if the rising landscape of glistening silver stallions were a physical promise that I too one day could rise to such greatness. So I applied to the best school in the city and I got in. It was the ticket to my liberation. I had a plan. I was going to triple major in history and economics and political science. I was to tear the greatest city in the world apart. I was going straight to the top through hard work and sweat just like I had back in the Midwest.

But when I got there New York wasn't what I expected. The people on top weren't there because they earned it. Instead it was all connections, all locked up tight like an impassable ship. My summer job on Wall Street was no different. I was only there because a neighbor had gone to school with the head of the firm. No resume, no interview, nothing – I was in.

The office was full of classmates of mine whose dreams of designing great buildings or digging in Africa I had heard many times, but they had since given all of that up to rise in this world instead. Now, instead of the sense of promise and exuberance I used to feel while strolling downtown amongst the buildings, I thought only of my classmates, a bothersome look frozen in their eyes, fastening their thousand dollar suits one button at a time.

This wasn't hard work. This was appalling. Hobbes set his state on four legs: reason, the awe of authority, selfishness and the fear of death – and this place had only one left. It was bizarre to see the white-collar hustlers at eighteen, their eyes old and steely beneath soft teenage flesh, on a race after power that ceased only in death. And I saw businessmen too in the subway, with a lost boy's eyes, leather briefcase gripped in one hand, hair clipped, jaw firm staring dead ahead, as if saying to himself over and over again, "This is who I am." And I thought that he could be any businessman anywhere though it wasn't hard to look into his eyes and see the boy inside of five and ten.

And I had seen the heartbreak of those who moved with their dreams to the city. For there are two kinds of people in New York. There are those who hustled without rest or mercy and would eat each other alive in their bloodthirsty rise, and there are those who get stepped on and left behind. I saw them along 125th, cluttered on the city edge, shuffling out of step, heads down, gaze out – a throbbing mass of forgotten atoms, each unique in their solace. And the Apollo heavy in the distance, its neon sign dead. It was as if its energy had drained out along with the night, leaving the bleak sprawl of Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard the only lasting image in the afternoon sun. They had grown up and got on.

My thousands of dreams of the city, and faith that it led to a place where everything was important and I could work my way towards something that mattered were falling. The image I had built for myself was crumbling. I simply wanted to forget about everything. In the throes of my malaise I went from hardly touching alcohol to drinking almost every night. It quieted my head. For the first time in my life I wanted nothing but silence.

There was little practical about any of this – and my parents were rather practical people – so I decided to keep the news as far away from them as possible. It would have worked too, had it not been for Grace.

***

I awoke one unusually hot morning that summer to the rhythm of a ringing phone and sensed trouble.

"Addison!" The name drooled out of the receiver in sweet dulcet tones. "When are you coming home?"

"Christmas," I lied to my cousin. The delicate civilities I managed with Grace relied heavily on white lies regarding my whereabouts.

"But I haven't seen you in ages!" Grace squealed.

"I haven't seen anyone," I replied. Which was true.

"I still can't believe you broke up with Dan." Ah, Dan. There he was again. "I just always thought you two would get married."

"I'm lucky, son," Dan's father once told him. "I got one of the last good ones. A woman who still wants to stay at home and raise a family. A good Christian mother." He shook his head sadly. "There aren't many of them left in this world." Yet still there was Grace.

I tried to change the subject and her voice lowered to a whisper. "His dad got fired." Thousands of miles away in a clean white bedroom I could see her eyes fixed hard on the mirror and the red lipstick arcing back and forth. A cupid bow pout in harmony red. Perfect. "His poor mother now works at the pharmacy to make ends meet. Isn't that horrible?" The sincerity of her remark was punctuated by the sound of her compact snapping shut.

Then Grace's breath grew heavy and I knew we were getting close to the reason for her call. "You won't have to wait until next Christmas for a piece of home. I'm coming to New York in two weeks!"

I had several apprehensions about my cousin's visit, which only increased when I first saw Grace approaching down the street closely followed by five trotting kids all grinning their cornfed mouths a little too broad. Grace ran down the street at first – then slowed in her final steps, planted stilted kisses on my cheeks, and straightened and stepped back.

"I can't believe I'm actually here!"

My eyes darted around at the ducklings now crowded behind Grace.

"Hi," I offered. Grace glanced around as if she was just remembering their presence.

"Oh! You wouldn't believe what happened to my friends. They were all supposed to stay on 54th Street, but they got the dates mixed. Now the girl is upstate!" Her cupid bow lips sank. Then in a flash she brightened back. "Isn't it lucky that we can all stay with you?"

"I don't have room for all these people," I sputtered in protest.

"It's okay. I'll just have everyone stay in the room I'm sleeping in. Don't you worry about us." I tried to glare, but Grace was busy fixing her hair in a storefront. "I hear there is this place in New York where you can drink margaritas the size of your head!"

"Margaritas!" A rumble of approving noises erupted from the figures alongside her.

Grace cast her eyes back and smiled faintly at the support. "It would be wonderful."

"Sure." If I appeased them early, perhaps they would leave sooner. "What's the name?"

"I can't seem to remember." Grace wrinkled her lily white nose as her shoulders shrugged. It was adorable when she was five. Then she brightened. "But you'll be able to find it, Addison. I'm sure of it. You can do anything."

Our departure was held up by several dozen small bathroom trips, each one promised to be the last, which left pools of congealed hairspray and an even layer of fine powder across the length of our cracked and yellow tiled bathroom floor.

Grace stood in front of the mirror like a Victorian hourglass, applying liberal amounts of powder to her face.

"I can't wait to see your church," Grace cooed as she pinned an artificial flower in her hair. "What time are we going tomorrow?"

I forgot we had to do this. I took a deep breath. "Oh right," I said slowly. "You know, I don't really go to church... much... anymore."

Grace's head whipped around, her mouth frozen. "Addison, that's terrible!"

"Well," I shrugged. "I'm feeling pretty anti-Catholic these days."

"Anti-Catholic?" Her tongue bounced off the word in disbelief. "What's the Pope ever done to you?"

"Organised religion just – " Grace had turned and was already rapt in another conversation. "Attracts a certain breed," I finished to no one.

By the time the girls determined themselves sufficiently painted the sky was black. We spilled out past the iron gates and tumbled into the subway. The 1 roared and slung its way down the rails to 50th Street, the Texas crew shouting and falling and gripping tight. They spilled out the exit buzzing with energy and exalted the muggy night.

"Oh, New York!" Grace cried, as if the dirty trembling ride was a giant kiss from the city, a secret perversion all her own.

For a while I attempted to match their stride as they scurried across the street, but somehow they always quickly fell back three lengths or so, leaving me to drag them along the sidewalk like a pack of tangled dogs.

The place was a tourist junkhole in Times Square. I had a strong urge to point the chattering group in the general direction of downtown and vanish, but the risk of Bad Things was irrevocably great. Their collective naïveté danced along the borders of their throbbing mass like a glowing halo. I took them to the courtyard of a concrete alley.

"Sorry guys, we are no longer serving dinner," the waiter said behind clasped hands. "But I can serve you drinks, if you would like."

"Oh!" Grace cried, as if it were the furthest thing from her mind. "Yes, that will be fine."

The waiter's smile was thin like ice. "Sure thing. I'll just need to see some IDs."

I casually flipped my fake ID across the table in one practiced move. I waited for similar cards to come flying across the table from deep-seated Texas pockets and purses, but there was only silence. Grace stared straight ahead, her face rigid.

"You don't have ID?"

"We forgot them," Grace said, turning suddenly towards the waiter.

The waiter arched an immaculate eyebrow. "I can't serve you drinks without ID."

"But we never get carded in Dallas!" The high notes of desperation in her voice swept upwards on the summer wind and twisted it round the fire escapes dangling off broken buildings.

Finally the waiter let out a long, exasperated breath. "Why don't you go around and each tell me your age." Each lie tumbled out a whispered prayer. He turned and stalked back to the kitchen.

"So far so good!" Grace insisted once he had left. "Now, tell me all about your adventures, Addison. What have you been doing lately? I have so much FUN when I'm with you!" There was nothing I was doing lately that Grace would have approved. I said I was keeping to my job.

Grace eagerly leaned forwards. "Did you hear what happened to Ruth?" Ruth was a Mormon neighbor who had been pushed into a marriage after falling pregnant last year. "She's getting a divorce. The poor girl. You know what her husband said to her? 'I love you like a sister.' Like a SISTER." Grace shook her head in sorrow. "I can't believe it."

I feigned extreme interest in the grotesque neon drinks to maintain my ability to drift in and out of the conversation.

"And your grandfather is bringing that girlfriend of his along to the Fourth of July," Grace was saying as I faded back in. "Only two months after the death of his wife."

"It's just because he's lazy," her friend said. "She cooks for him, and cleans his house."

"She's like a glorified maid," Grace marveled.

"Oh, I'm sure she does more than a maid."

"Don't you dare put that image in my head."

Several mango margaritas later my head began to hurt.

"You know who always makes me laugh?" Someone said a name I hadn't heard for a long time. He was an old friend from high school, one of the few that went through Opus Dei and managed to stay sane.

"He was in my Ethics class. Always talking. But I could never even take him seriously, because – " she pressed three manicured fingernails to her forehead – "he was always wearing these cheap silver dog tags around his neck." She leaned into Grace and the two erupted into giggles.

I stared into my drink. Each word dripping from the honey voice made me feel worse. "He wouldn't even take them off when he went swimming. He must have thought they were the coolest thing." Her Tiffany earrings jangled as she swung her blonde hair. "What a freak."

I slammed my drink down and the table jumped. The tequila was taking effect. "Do you know why he wears those?" I asked slowly.

She offered a condescending smile. "Were they a gift from his dog?"

"Did you ever think to ask?"

"No," she started, although her voice had grown more still. "It's just jewelry."

"It's not just jewelry," I corrected her. "They were on his dad when he died." The words drifted out over the quiet air. Faces grew solemn behind brightly colored straws. The girl was staring intently at her drink. I excused myself and vomited. When I returned, everyone was ready to leave.

Over the next few days heavy clouds split open over the city and flooded the streets with gray rain. I spent most of my days inside, so it was all the same to me, but the guests were growing irritable. I returned to my apartment after a late night at work to find them gathered in the dark around the television, their eyes vacant in the iridescent glow. In my room Grace was lying facedown on the bed. When she picked up her head I saw that her eyes were stained with tears.

"What's the matter?"

Grace lifted the bottle of Ambrosia. "I found this under your bed."

"So? You drink now too."

"It's one thing to drink when you're out having a good time with your friends, Addison," she sighed. "It's another to be hiding bottles–"

"It's not even opened," I pointed out.

"This one isn't." She shook the bottle in her fist. "Why are you back so late? Where were you? Out at a bar?"

My silence was interpreted as an admission of guilt.

"I have to tell your parents," she moaned. "I can't stand by and watch you throw away your future importing bottles from..." She turned the bottle. "New Zealand? What did this cost you, Addison?"

"Grace," I said, exasperated. "You are taking this way too far."

"What if..." Her lips quivered. "What if I do nothing, and you drop out and end up pregnant like Ainsleigh?"

I nearly fell off the bed when I heard my sister's name. "What?"

"Didn't your mother tell you? She's gone. Ran off to New Mexico."

"But... why?"

"No one knows." Grace wiped her eyes and looked up. The alcoholic sorrows that had completely taken her only moments before had morphed into pure indignation. "You know what she said when she left?" Then her voice lilted into a sing-song that sounded nothing like Ainsleigh. "'I've been eating from the silver spoon my entire life. I want to eat from the wooden spoon because I made it myself.'" Her cupid bow lips curled into a snarl. "Can you believe that? Two weeks before finals too." She clucked her tongue. "What a waste of money."

After Grace went to sleep I called Katrina down to our favorite lounge. During the year we would stay up all night composing songs on the piano and feeding candy to the guards as their eyes settled near shut on the late night shift. Katrina hunched over the grand piano searching for a melody while I paced in dizzy circles around the black casing.

"Pregnant!" I howled. "Yesterday my sister was sweet and twenty, and now she is pregnant? Does no one tell me anything in this family?"

"Maybe they would if you called home more often."

"That's entirely besides the point." I sat in a huff on the bench next to one of the chinchillas we had brought down for some late night exercise. The startled chinchilla vaulted the keyboard and disappeared into the piano's inner workings. Katrina lurched after it.

"All my life I have followed straight in Ainsleigh's steps." I plucked listlessly at the untuned strings on my electric guitar. "Every award, every class, everything she ever did, I did too. I have always had this sense that whatever she does, I'm destined for the same."

"That is completely ridiculous," Katrina replied from inside the piano.

"My parents are going to see it that way. Once Grace tells them I'm an alcoholic, they're going to cut me off at the knees."

Katrina was only a pair of legs. "They can't be that bad."

"They are," I insisted. "To them, everything is a competition to be the best. Last time they were in New York, instead of taking cabs, they took separate bicycle rickshaws and made the guys race."

"Oh my God." Katrina resurfaced clutched the indignant ball of fur, her brow furrowed in sympathy. "Surely they would be slightly more sane with their daughters."

"Or worse. The house of Atreus has nothing on us. What makes a parent, anyway? They didn't raise me. My mother never had time for us as kids. I saw my piano teacher more than I ever saw her."

"You poor thing!"

I shrugged. "I learned to play the piano didn't it? I got something."

"What about your father?"

"He was always off traveling." I waved a hand.

"To where?"

"Who knows? I asked him about it once and he said, 'I put a roof over your head. That's all you need to know.'" I took a seat by Katrina and we started trading off the swing.

"I don't think either of my parents really know how to raise kids," I continued. Any time a normal parent would show some degree of affection they just buy us things."

"Whoa – affection as a commodity," Katrina mused. "Someone should wire Pentheus in Zug."

"At least your parents are still married," Katrina conceded. "I find that somewhat refreshing." Katrina was the child of a love affair between a philosophy professor and his prize student that slow burned into marriage before crashing into a rocky divorce. As a consequence, she felt she had the market cornered on family dysfunction.

"It's not refreshing at all," I protested. "It's smothering. I have a sneaking suspicion my parents hate each other, but are too comfortable with their lives to ever divorce. Every time I'm in that house I feel the life drain out of me. And I have to go back for the Fourth of July."

"Why?"

"Big party," I replied. "Big." My heart filled with sorrow. "I don't want to go."

"I'll come with you," Katrina offered. "Why not? I've never been to Illinois."

"I don't think you realize what you're getting into."

"It'll be fun," she insisted. "Chicago is supposed to be beautiful."

"Katrina," I reminded her. "Freedom Woods is not Chicago."

back

Three. The Party

Thirty miles northwest of Chicago, Freedom Woods' motto was 'By Endurance We Conquer,' and it was working – the town had survived industrialization, a depression and two wars. The place really took off in the suburban sprawl that crawled out of the Second City fringe following World War II. In the fifty years since a few major factories settled in and the town morphed into an endless landscape of neon signs and supermarkets. Storefronts that used to house the tailor, butcher and shoesmith now boasted rows of coffee chains and sub shops. Fashionable mothers strode proudly through and everyone else walked around dazed, as if wondering how or why they had ended up there.

If you're ever going to visit, the best time is for the Fourth of July. Everyone goes hog wild. Streams of red, blue, and gold billow all over town and everyone's got a smile. Most of my friends back East dismissed stuff like that as blind patriotism, but I still respected it somehow. I liked to think it meant people still believed in the spirit of the country, even when it was low.

Outside 1945 Victory Lane the manicured lawns were clean as money. An inflated pink castle hummed meditatively before a thatched forest background. Dew glistened from the diamond shapes in the netted black thread of the volleyball net.

If one was to judge the inhabitants by the size of the American flag draped across the roof, one would imagine it to be the residence of the governor, or some other political dignitary in a red state. But such was not the case. Instead, beyond the golden door, my father pulled the brown tired gloves from his weathered hands, one finger at a time. He had set everything up on his own. He liked it best like that.

Inside my mother paced the entire foyer corridor in total distress. The party was going to be a travesty. It always was. Last year no one had noticed the wandering teenagers that had ambled in until they were all completely trashed on the special lemonade. Why did she agree to these parties anyway?

Of course, it wasn't like she had a choice. By that point they were a neighborhood tradition. For thirty years, no matter what – rain, shine, or nuclear holocaust – my grandfather put on The Best Fourth of July Party in all Lake County. My grandfather used to haul out blockades, and girls and kids and dogs all ran relays, caught up over hot dogs and took turns manning the dunk tank.

The tradition had fizzled out for a bit in the Seventies, but then my mother married into the family money and brought it back from the dead. Now the wrought iron gates poured open to reveal a flood of florists and caterers and hired hands to replace the people who had retreated into their houses long ago. Under the guise of ribald celebration everyone was together again – but it was only temporary. An illusion that lasted just long enough to extinguish in a matter of hours amid a flurry of loud and restless fireworks.

I found my mother in the kitchen next to the hors d'ouveres. I reached for the food and she slapped my hand away.

"That was not done for you, it was done for our guests," she snapped. "If you want some, make your own." She turned to the man by her side and beamed. "This is my daughter Addison."

It was the start of a ritual waltz between the two of us that took place over the course of every party. As her favorite conversation piece I would get called over to entertain, cajole and dazzle with my newly acquired well-bred Ivy wit whenever she was at a loss for words or wanted an extra feeling of superiority over her friends.

"I thought your daughter moved to Mexico?" the man asked.

"No!" she snapped. "This is the good one." I stared at her in shock. Grace hadn't told. "She goes to Columbia."

"Now how about that!" he remarked, popping a shrimp into his mouth. "I have a nephew that goes to Columbia as well. It's a fine art school."

"That's the one in Chicago," I corrected him. "There's another one in New York."

"Never heard of it." His front teeth crunched on the tail, shooting three pink exclamation points upwards into the bristles of his mustache. "What's your major?" I tell him History and a puzzled look crosses his face. "Do you want to be a teacher?"

I say no. "I just love that history is about meaning beyond death," I explained. "Understanding the past not only provides a path for the future, it also reveals the secrets of the human race." The man's face was blank. "By finding that which is universal in humans, no matter when they lived, we find the timeless ether that binds us all together."

By this point his eyes had started to glaze. But now that I had started there was no stopping.

"It's immortality!" I chattered excitedly. "It's a dance between chance and destiny. An art and a science while also neither. It holds up a mirror to ourselves."

The mustache was back to sniffing amongst the food.

"And it's so fascinating," I continued. "Especially the changes in America in the nineteenth century. In just a hundred years it flipped from a small agrarian nation into a world empire. But how?"

"Hmph," the man replied.

My mother let out a short laugh. "Addison is adopted," she explained, attempting a joke.

His hands plunged into the tortilla chips as if there was a prize at the bottom. "I didn't know that!"

"I am not adopted." I glared at my mother.

"Well you look nothing like us." She shrugged. "Maybe they switched babies at the hospital."

"But what is it that you want to do?" the man pressed. Ah, the all-important question – what is it I want to do?

"I don't know," I said simply. This admission appeared to make them both very nervous.

The man's hands surfaced from the candy bowl with three king size bars. "You want to know where the money is?" He leaned in with eager eyes as he tore into the packaging with his teeth. "Property." He leaned back and beamed as my mother strode across the kitchen to open a window. His odor was unbearable.

"I've got a whole instruction set at home. I've read the thing three times over and am ready to start flipping. You don't even need money to get started. Being a good salesman is how to get ahead these days," he declared, slamming a fist the Jell-O. "Without that a college education is useless."

Ten minutes later I sprouted from behind the bushes. "Katrina. Thank God I found you. I've got to escape."

"What's going on?"

"I think I've finally stumbled on my get rich quick uncle. I've been cornered for the last hour listening to him ramble about property infomercials."

Katrina lifted an index finger to her chin. "So there is one in every family."

"I don't actually know if he's related. But I wouldn't be surprised. We have some real weirdos on my mom's side in Minnesota."

As if in response to her name, my mother materialized on the balcony and raised her glass and eyebrows sharply over a thin smile. I drifted past the disaffected lifeguards and neon blue water and floated up the stairs.

She cast a disapproving glance over my outfit. "I was hoping that for a family gathering you would decide to wear something more appropriate."

I glanced down. "It's a barbecue."

"It may be for everyone else, but for you it's a responsibility. A responsibility to not embarrass me," she hissed, re-arranging the pieces of my hair. "Did you hear back about your Economics grade?"

"Yeah – I got a ninety-eight on the final."

"Well what about the other two points?" I felt my heart fall as my mother strode away, leading me by the arm. "Now come with me and meet our new neighbors." Since I had left the small ranch house next door had been bought, destroyed and replaced with a colossal stone edifice. "You aren't going to believe the new addition on their house. Would you believe they even hired the same interior designer?" she clicked, briskly walking towards the stuck pig. "Some people really have no taste."

She halted before the pointed feet of a wan woman whose hair was styled the exact same as my mom's. My mother introduced us by rattling off a long list of accomplishments.

"That's wonderful," Mrs. Jones smiled upon hearing the school's name. "The Ivy League is a wonderful place to find a husband who can provide for a family."

"Oh, not for me. I'm entertaining the idea of having a kept man." I smiled politely back.

Mrs. Jones sighed. "It sounds so promising, doesn't it? The feminist manifesto." She looked at me with knowing eyes. "I met my husband in graduate school. I got my Master's and he went into Law. When we decided to get married..." She sighed. "He's working as a lawyer, it would be stupid for me to – " She cut herself off and tried again. "You have children and things change," she said finally, exasperated. "Now I have a Master's and I'm a – " She curled her lip as she watched her young son dart across the lawn. Suddenly her face was at peace. "But our faith reminds us that everything happens for a reason," she said serenely.

I could never understand why someone would want a child.

"I hear you're close to engaged yourself." Her face registered true emotion for the first time as I shook my head. "Don't worry," she implored, touching my arm. "You'll find someone."

Good God. In the fifties they had tranquilizers to sort this stuff out. What is keeping housewives so calm now?

From there the guests got worse.

"New York is the loneliest city in the world," Mrs. Snoot pronounced. After Wellesley she married a stock broker and settled in Lake Forest, and now spent her days sighing contentedly in the window as cars slowed down to pass her home. In her spare time she had a keen ability to articulate the downsides of any fortune that might come upon her neighbors and possibly bring them in a league comparable to her own.

"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers," I replied.

She arched an eyebrow.

"Now I've always loved New York," her husband interjected. He turned to me with a wink. "I even got my Economics degree there."

I stifled a cough. "That's very impressive."

"I loved that city even when Ford was against us. That's the real city." He held his glass up and shook his ice in a kind of twisted salute. "I don't like what I see happening to it. Nowadays when people think of New York it's Giuliani and chain stores in Times Square. And Ground Zero." His eyes turned sad.

His wife looked at him in shock, then glared at me down her filed nose. "Your building probably has cockroaches."

"I believe it's only fair that we share living space." I smiled sweetly. "After all, they were here first, and they're going to repopulate the earth after the apocalypse."

Her eyes narrowed and her head jerked in a birdlike fashion. "What apocalypse?"

"That reminds me," her husband interrupted, sensing a convenient transition to politics. He furrowed his brow. "I heard on the radio they may delay the election."

Mrs. Snoot gasped. "The presidential election? But it's months away."

He nodded solemnly. "After the attacks in Spain they're taking extra precautions."

It was as if the world was getting more and more ridiculous. "How many more precautions can they take?" I declared, exasperated. "They even have armed Marines in camo on the one line."

He looked shocked. "Do you prefer the alternative?" I went silent. "Who do you think the terrorists would rather have in office – a strong leader who isn't afraid of a fight? Or socialists like those in Spain?"

"I really doubt that the President is a lone warrior adrift in a sea of socialists."

Mrs. Snoot's mouth dropped into a small O. "An enemy of our country is harboring weapons, and you think – "

"No one has found weapons," I corrected her.

"How do you know?"

"I read the newspaper."

"Oh, they only print what the liberal media want you to hear." She waved a hand.

"What about the footage?"

My mothers' eyes flashed. "Be careful not to bite the hand that feeds you, Addison," she said, grasping my wrist with a tight smile and digging her nails in. "It might just bite back." Then her voice lowered. "You never want to see your guitar again?" I fell silent.

My mother turned with a serene grin and the sweet taste of a new secret. "The day the war was declared, Joe shifted all our stocks into the defense industry," she beamed. "In six months, he had made enough to send all six of our children to college." I had never heard that before. Mrs. Snoot's made a half-hearted attempt to stretch her thin lips into a smile. I stared numb at a single blade of grass. My father was a war profiteer.

"A wise investment," Mr. Snoot said. "A pre-election terrorist attack is not a question of if, but when."

"But," my mother interjected, "this is no talk for a party."

"That's right," Mrs. Snoot trilled. "Besides," her voice and glass rose, "it's a yellow day!"

"I'll drink to that," Mr. Snoot said, mopping his brow with one of the aging designer ties from his days on the trading floor.

I held up my glass, signaling the need for more ice, turned on my inappropriate heel and glided back towards the pool. Bored and bloated bodies floated by in bubble gum blue water.

"Maybe property wouldn't be so expensive here," a man remarked, floating past, "if Mr. Banks stopped buying up the whole town."

Children with plastered grins sailed down waterslides with eyes clamped shut.

"I thought he made all his money from oil," a woman next to him replied between mouthfuls of popcorn.

Our father was always silent on the subject of money. Whenever we asked he only spoke about it in parables. "I have it," he would say, "because I didn't spend it yesterday."

I sat alone at the long dining room table my mother used on nights when she wanted to feel important. Stacks of paper plates soaked through with grease and untouched food were scattered across the table. All around me kids and parents alike slurped on snow cones and sucked on hot dogs stepped on popcorn. And no one could see me.

"The mother's a drunk, you know," a woman said. "Abused the eldest daughter. That's why she's run off."

"You know I've never even seen their father once?" A man with dried ketchup on the corners of his mouth reached for the chips.

"I heard he's in Barbados with his mistress," the woman replied.

"With money like that," he laughed, "he probably has a girl on every island."

"Whoops!" The woman cried as her paper plate flipped onto the floor, exploding potato salad.

"Don't worry about it," the man laughed. "We'll just get more."

I wondered how Katrina was handling it. I wandered through the menagerie of white spotted tables outdoors, now covered with burnt sparklers and melted electro neon popsicle sticks and half eaten burgers and orange and red wrappers and long twisted strings of confetti binding all the scattered guests together.

"Hey Addison!" A kid cousin called my name. His chubby left hand clutched an upright noisemaker. "How many digits of pi can you recite?" His sticky face twisted into a smile. "Go." In high school I had once won a contest for memorizing over 300 digits of pi. I only did it to see if I could. But since then none of my relatives would ever let it go.

"Addison!" Another table called. I halted in front of a semi-familiar man whose face had gone cherry red. We had one of those strange relationships between adult acquaintances and kids that only exist when the former is fully inebriated. "Are you still playing guitar?" I nodded. "The next Jimi Hendrix!" he declared. "You'll have to play us a song later." I said I would try. I knew he would come up to my room later, drunk.

"Your mother tells me you only like to play the blues," the man next to him slurred, a green party hat pointing out of his forehead. He cackled and threw his arms into the sky. "Bluuuuuuuuues!"

I used to play the blues to escape. Skip James, Blind Lemon, Leadbelly – those guys knew what it was to want to get away. After listening to Ma Rainey I could feel better about anything. Nothing beat Cotton Slim. Who cares if I was alone? At least I didn't hear voices like Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

"Excuse me, are you Addison?" With only steps to go I turned, ready to put on my last show of the night. In front of me stood a nervous man and woman. The look in their eyes spoke of a desperation for only one thing. The woman held out a quivering hand. "You go to Columbia, is that right?" The pedigree.

"Our daughter is now a junior at the high school," she began. Her eyes looked as though she might cry. "Oh, how did you do it," she pleaded. "How did you get in?"

The Ivy League is the ultimate trump card of the suburban elite. I think parents get desperate for their children to attend because they believe it will somehow validate the crap that their lives have become since they had kids.

"You should meet my classmate, Katrina," I said, moving over to the dessert table. I placed my hands on her shoulders and Katrina snapped upright, shaken from her reverie over the food. "She got a perfect score on her SATs." The mother's pupils visibly dilated.

"Hey Addison!" the party hat called from the balcony. "Bluuuuuuuuuuuuuues!"

* * *

In between fireworks there is a hushed silence amongst the crowd. It was nice, up here where Katrina and I had climbed out the bathroom window to the roof. The fire department set up camp directly across the street, making our hot tar roof the best viewing spot in town. Up there you could lay back and watch the fireworks explode over you as large as God. Some years the winds drifted south during the proceedings, and streams of fireworks would shift from their soft whirring noise across the air into a louder, more shrill KYYYYIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAA as they hurtled towards earth – and more specifically, our backyard. The evening's amusement came not only from the sky, but also from the alternating sounds of the fireworks making a gentle plopping noise into the iced blue pool, and the splashing cannonballs of relatives abandoning their white plastic chairs and diving into the abyss as a burning flame shot up fresh dirt where their asses had once sat.

"That wasn't cool, passing that crazy woman off to me," Katrina remarked.

"Sorry about that," I apologized. "I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tell her you got a perfect score on your SATs." I rolled over onto my stomach. "I wanted to see if her head would explode."

Katrina considered this. "She did look somewhat possessed," she admitted finally. "Every time you said the school's name I swear her voice got higher."

"In these parts, a shameless name drop justifies virtually anything," I assured her. "If I went around saying, 'When not at Columbia, I kill endangered species,' people here would smile and say, 'I'm sure it's for the best.'"

"The White House must stay safe," a voice floated up from below. "If Kerry gets in, the terrorists will have won."

Katrina sighed. "This is one weird town you have on your hands." The white smoke from her cigarette curled apathetically into the night.

"Even Marlon Brando thought so," I replied. "He got kicked out after riding his motorcycle through the high school." I shook my head. "Clever bastard."

"It's a marvel you made it out alive."

"At least I got out." I cast a look over the yard. "I can't imagine still being here like the majority of my high school class." I turned over the idea of the girls I used to know with fresh pregnant bellies and still found it baffling. "Boredom can really push people to do absolutely anything."

The silent darkness exploded into frenetic streams of red, white and blue. Cheers erupted from beneath us. "Case in point."

"Nonsense," I defended. "Fireworks are crucial to the inner workings of society." I grinned. "Their majesty reminds the brown and plain peasantry of their own potential for inner greatness."

"They're sensationalist," Katrina corrected, "and so are you."

"Then Don Quixote was a sensationalist too. So I care not." But even the most steadfast fantasy has its limitations. I could only turn the world medieval for so long before it all faded back to windmills and plains.

I had to leave the false perfection of the white columned house.

Where everything went unsaid.

Where we sunned ourselves silently on vacations.

The fireworks began to rumble and exploded by the dozen. Hundreds of plastic legs quivered on the manicured grounds. Poppa-poppa-pop crack sizzles of sweet white light and spiraling orange and careening green shot through the sky in every direction.

The finale was upon us – the big let-go. Soon, all the remaining fireworks would go off in one loud orgiastic finish and then the sky would fall silent and it would all be over. The guests would stream out in an unending river of laughter and shouts, leaving the yard an abandoned mass of overturned chairs and wrinkled napkins, littering the vision of the cool blue pool shining up into the night.

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Four. The Wish

After months of glowing red summer nights in solitude on the wide white steps, the autumn semester and its crowds brought a distinct sense of loss to the grounds. Katrina and I headed down to the steps to watch the grand pilgrimage of returning students dart and weave their way over campus. It was always easy to tell the freshman – they were the happy ones. Everyone else was shrouded in some sort of low halo, their mouths set in thin lines.

"What's the matter with this place?" Katrina remarked, taking a poignant drag from her cigarette. "No one even looks at each other."

I studied the blank passing faces. "It's as if they're all focused on some faint point in the near future." I nodded to a circle of kids in black stalking around with posters. "I wonder what they're up in arms about."

Katrina shook her head as smoke billowed out her nose. "Someone is always sitting in a fountain protesting something."

We watched the guttural calls and battle cries and the anger of the scattered waving signs. No one was screaming back.

"I've got to give it to them," I said, watching a tidy line of briefcases stream across the fountains behind the gates. "At least the Republicans are organized."

Katrina tapped at her forehead with two fingers. "This campus has been driving me nuts. You know, college is the most self-obsessed time in our self-obsessed lives. We're supposed to 'find ourselves,' don't pay for anything, sit and have classes poured into our ears, and half the time we're not even paying attention and going off and getting drunk on our parents' dime. And for what?"

That night I drifted to the library, as I had so many summer nights before. I would stay in the alcoves until late at night, legs up in an old armchair, and reading Fitzgerald and Melville and Hawthorne until the lights went down, and then I would stagger home, dizzy from all of the ideas buzzing around in my head. It was a world where everything made sense, where it all tied up into a tidy bow at the end, where no one fell off the edges or was forgotten. It allowed me to forget about the weariness on the streets. I could pretend we all had a destiny.

But the library was not the same place that it had that summer been. Now I couldn't even think. I just kept staring at the kids. These were the ones who made it. These were the superstars who never saw something they couldn't conquer. But their eyes were sad. And their shoulders sagging in. Their heads were sunk. They were propping their chins. Closing their eyes willing it all to go away. Only to open them and stare off at nothing again.

One of the biggest problems about New York is that everything is so sped up. You step onto that sidewalk for a second and wham – people rushing by everywhere, heading to this and that and every second you spend inside your head trying to decide which one to do you're missing things. It's easy to feel like you are just trying to tread water in a rushing stream, paddling desperately trying to catch as much as you can before it all passes by.

People are always telling you these are the best years of your lives. They must not remember what it's like to be walking alone at midnight, lonely as hell and freaking out that the supposedly best nights of your life are passing you by in the silence.

Is this growing up? Is this what being an adult is like? Who wants to stay young? Why? Sure you have the ability to reinvent yourself a thousand times, trying on different things. But the flip side of that is being plagued by anxiety. You have no idea who you are. You don't know whether what you do is good or not. And you want answers badly while still feeling so far off.

I stared back at the kids. What made them happy? What did they really want? They had never stopped to figure it out.

It was everywhere. And no one smiled. Now it was all serious. The light had gone from their eyes, now they were empty and gray. It was as if the childhood hustling had turned into the new Gesellschaft along the way. And they were now miserable, obsessed with the time clock and clawing out their eyes. Madmen led the blind. We were nineteen, and the best times had died. This was our last chance at an unbridled life and it was fading, one day at a time.

So I too saw the best minds of my generation lost, not to morphine or Benzedrine or fast guns or street brawls, but rather to the claustrophobic clutch of self-preservation hurtled into overdrive, in these turbulent times, with a wayward President and the glimpse of one opportunity to get out alive, and that was to swagger in a sharp suit like the Monopoly Man, to sit behind a desk and rob the people, not the banks, and sail away on a yacht as soon as you can.

You couldn't blame them, really. The country was hanging by a thread. One more attack and we were looking at the suspension of the Constitution and the amber dawn of a military government. We were the babes of an endless doomsday. The children of 1984. The world was on the path to destruction, going faster than ever before.

It was all going too fast for anyone to change. It would be like stopping your hand with a spinning blade – no matter how noble, you're still getting sliced up in the process. There were more hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis than there had ever been. Even nature had an agenda of vengeance.

At night I sat on the wide milk steps that tumbled down the center of campus and would just stare for hours up at the sky, looking for something. I always thought I'd see a thousand stars twinkling out over the city. But there was nothing but black.

Cartographers used to find their way by watching the stars. But there were no stars in New York. How would we find our way? I felt so alone. I couldn't shake the feeling I was forgetting something I should know.

Do any of the things we are collecting matter? These stupid goals that other people said were great? Does anyone else out there feel like this all isn't worth it, and want to give up the chase? What if we've gotten lost somewhere along the way?

It was a lot to process. This would require a break. I needed somewhere I could slow down and just be for a while. I was tired of staring at flecks of black, brown and grey that dotted the sidewalks for miles. I needed some time to clear my head – a journey into nothingness as far from Broadway as I could get.

Why couldn't we go back to the ancient, primal wild? To the beginning of creation? Where all men were saintly, and there were no gods, or demons?

Why couldn't we go back to some perfect age? To Dionysus and debauchery? Where honeysuckles kiss the sky and a thousand vines twist up the trees?

Where labour was no longer objectified, and we could return to a wholeness of life? What if we could go back to a place where stars still filled the sky? What if you could go to an island no one could ever find?

I wanted to run like Rimbaud and unlearn the dirty devices of the city. It was decided. I had to cut myself off completely. I was ready to go, to disappear, to trawl in search of something – there must be something that can make me feel alive. If only I could be banished like Prospero. All I wanted was an island.

I pushed open the door to the lounge in our hall and crept past the piano. With one finger on New York I slowly turned the golden globe. I wanted to get away. I had to get away... but where would you go?

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part two

the island

Five. The Detour

Flights to the end of the world take off only at night. After hours of tunneling black an orange fire pierces the East of the white cotton sea. Red and cream and rose spill over the glowing white ocean like endless paint – and the canvas goes endless for miles. This is where the sun comes to rise.

The plane floats down through the pink waves, and then – an island! Flush with hills of green, and its a thrashing coastline kissing an aquamarine sea. On the shore there was a single spire sparkling like a dirty jewel – and around it, a city. I stared through the window at the sloping green hills in longing.

"Volcanoes," the guide at the front of the bus corrected.

I had made it to an island, but not as I expected. Instead the trip had been sponsored by an Ohio college, which packaged two dozen students into one cheap bundle and middle-managed their way across the Pacific. A bus had picked us all up at the airport and dumped us on a volcano on the outskirts of the city.

On top of the volcano I stared out at the lashings of teal and liquid cerulean that made the city sparkle and marveled that familiar old America lay on the other side. The water churned against rotting wood and the white spires of thousands of moored yachts danced like flashes of light on the sea. Another volcano sat in the harbor, frowning at the buildings.

"They're extinct, of course – or at least somewhat." The guide grinned.

A girl with tight brown curls and arms crossed stood beside me. "What do you mean somewhat?"

"The field is merely dormant. In fact, it's due to erupt some time soon." He let out a short laugh. "Hopefully not too soon!"

The whole bus grew quiet. No one had said a word about this before we got on the plane.

"The country is on a fault line too. But," the guide winked, "this is not a land for people who concern themselves much with sound decisions. After all, our ancestors had to come over on a very long boat ride."

"I'm not supposed to be here." The girl with curls' voice was flat. She let out a deep sigh. "I wanted to be in Fiji. I'm as close as I can get."

"It's a dirty little island city, isn't it?" I mused, scanning the jagged skyline.

She narrowed her eyes. "Put together with just the amount of thought one imagines someone would use when building over fault lines."

"Half these buildings look abandoned."

"It's summer," the guide replied. "Everyone's at the beach."

"The West Coast." I pointed right out to the sea. "That is where we need to be." There iron deposits turn the sand black, like the breathing world of an undiscovered Ansel Adams photograph. Where the sun sets on the water and endless surf breaks lap up on the sands.

"Be careful of the West Coast," warned the man. "Those waves will come and snatch you right off the beach."

"They are good for surfing though, right?"

The man let out a short laugh. "If you like getting tossed around. Next thing you know you wash up somewhere and you don't even know WHERE you are."

Unconquered nature, I thought. She is a mystery.

"One of our national heroes was just swept out to sea while saving his little brother. It's been a week, and no one has found him."

"Un femme fatale." I thought of the untold lives commanded every year by the brutal call of nature. I liked this wild and savage country. Beautiful on the surface. Deadly underneath.

There was something soothing about it. It reminded you that there was something bigger than you, and that some things still exist only for the land, only for itself, rather than the whims of the people that slummed their way across the surface. It kept things orderly in a fierce Darwinian sense.

We were set to spend three days on the coast before descending into the city. The bus snaked along slithering roads hanging off mountains with trees that grow sideways and bushes with pink flowers and leaves that spilled out like a thousand green and white tongues. The winding twists and hairpin turns revealed flashes of majesty. In the distance were the most calming mountains, and groves with rivers and springs, and ten thousand different trees blooming in the valleys. I rested my head against the window and watched the green mounds rise and fall in the distance.

The sky was so blue you could taste it. Horses galloped across golden plains. How had it come from a place I dreamed, even though I was seeing it for the first time?

"Wouldn't it be fun to roll down one of those hills?" I sighed.

"It looks like death," the girl beside me replied. Her name, she said, was Leslie.

"They're beautiful." I insisted.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Leslie replied. "They're just hills."

The bus scraped to a halt in front of a sign that said LOOKOUT POINT. Leslie solemnly lifted a little shiny silver box to her face. One click with the sign, one without, one with the bus, one self-portrait – with tight undercut faces and blurry outstretched arms. Did anyone look back fondly at these thousands of throwaway moments, with their gritted teeth and false poses? Or was it just to prove that they were once here?

At straight ten that morning we arrived at a small town near a marine reserve for some group snorkeling. The guide stood at the edge of the rock, frowning at the couches and car seats dragged out onto the sand. It seemed like everyone on the island was at the beach. Like the water was the final leveling – whether you came on a helicopter or sat on a couch with springs – everyone came to gaze out at the same thing.

"No use snorkeling," the guide said, shaking his head.

"Look at those weirdos," Leslie snorted.

Just beyond the reach of the water sat a row of kids dressed in black. Their stares were vacant and unbroken behind thick sunglasses. They were all in lawn chairs. Several held strange fat glass bottles. Not one of them moved.

I caught the gaze of one of the men in black, and we watched each other as I passed. It felt as if I was floating in slow motion.

"Time to get up Addison." The guide strode to the window and yanked open the curtains, flooding hot orange light into my dreams. I yelped and hid under the covers. I felt her fists grab hold of the covers. "It's six am. We're leaving in ten minutes for the walk. Let's go."

"Who goes on a walk at six in the morning?" I moaned from my dark retreat.

He slapped the covers. "Now get up. We finished eating, but there's more oatmeal downstairs."

"I'm not hungry."

"Oh." He stopped. "Well, it's your turn to do the dishes. Everything is by the sink."

Within minutes, there we were, perched on rusting cycles with bent handlebars, chipped foam helmets cocked on our heads, as we tottered dangerously near careening cars on the highway and tried to enjoy the beautiful mountain backdrop while attempting not to get broadsided by a passing semi.

"I'm exhausted," Leslie declared at the end of the day, a fist propping up her cheek. "That would go a lot faster if they just blew through some of those mountains instead of having roads that wind all over the place."

"Now." The guide tapped at a bat. We were in another field.

"Why are you teaching us baseball?" A wall of laughter erupted. A boy jabbed an elbow at one of his friends.

"Once again, this is not for baseball." The guide's tan face withered under a bed of wrinkles. "This is cricket. It's time you learned about the culture of our island."

The boy slowly looked up from his long gaze at the bat, and turned to his friend. "Do you know what he's saying?" He cast a look between the two. "I can't understand a word he says."

"Forget hitting balls. This looks like it could be good for something else," another replied, a hand sliding up the paddle. His lips slithered into a smile. "First to get the bat wins!" One whooped and the others all piled on top.

"I can't wait to go surfing," I tried. But there was no time. Instead there were schedules, and timetables, and check-in times. It transported me back to being seven, the moment that light switch is flipped on, at six am, and orders are barked for showers, packing, people, vague and hazy in the distance calling out names. Early risings, enforced rules, and feeding times, clambering up hills for the sole purpose of staring blankly at far-distance landscapes and ragged cliffs, nodding, shivering in the wind, and heaving back down, the highlight of the day marked, completed, finished.

I hate these kinds of vacations. Scenic views are so overrated when one is trapped within schedules and droll beasts masquerading as humans.

But the worst was yet to come. After being bumped and jostled for kilometers along a lonely dirt road pebbled and coursing with bruises, the suspension on the bus gave out on the right side. Gnashing his teeth, the guide slammed on the brakes, pulled the bus over to the side of the road, ripped open the hood and stared angrily at the wrong area.

"I knew we should have paid extra to get this thing checked by a mechanic."

He dusted off his hands and climbed back into the seat. "If we keep it steady at fifty we should be able to make it to the next town by midnight." He adjusted the rear view mirror. "Everyone lean to the left."

Around the hills and valleys between the last town and the one next snaked a slow-moving train of no less than twenty-seven pairs of headlights. The little white bus led the parade, leaning heavily to the left, crawling in front of a towering silver cab. A series of honks and horns bleated out desperately.

"I can't pull over!" The guide hollered out the window before jerking his head back into the bus with a huff.

"It really is a shame," Leslie said softly. "The view is so pretty."

"Left!" The guide snapped when we straightened out.

The cops stopped us. But when we told them the problem they just laughed.

"I wonder how close we are," I said after what seemed like days.

"I can't wait to get out of this seat," Leslie agreed.

Her boyfriend's ears perked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"What? Nothing..."

"You think I don't want some time apart? You think I'm just following you around?"

Leslie fell silent.

"I didn't come to this island just to be with you." The boy was going frantic. "I have other friends. You know, maybe we should just break up." The remaining two hours of the trip was driven in silence, twenty-six pairs of eyes widened, lips sealed, noiselessly leaning to the left. When the road ended we set up our tents in the blackness and retreated to wait out the rain.

The next morning later I woke up with a throbbing head and the vague memory of downing an entire bottle of champagne. I looked up. Red. At least I was in my tent.

I poked my head out the tent flap. Hundreds of sagging blobs sank low on the horizon.

We had gone to sleep in an empty field and woke up with two hundred odd cars and tents in scattered patterns, and the smell of sausages wafting up under the knotted trees. Kids hung off the sides of trucks and sprawled across hoods of old rusted vans, beer in hand. Some were leaning against cars painted black and peeling off rusted green. Others were stretched over mattresses and crates.

"Who are these people?" Leslie gasped.

"So that was the noise last night," her boyfriend said.

I stepped gingerly over bottle caps and cigarette wrappers and inched towards the cliffs.

"This girl has not seen her last evening," I mused, peering over the edge. "Though in her madness," I added, remembering the drunken stumbles of the night before, "was close to it."

Suddenly I felt very alone. I turned my eyes to the sky. What was I doing out here, in a shadowed forest? Then something in the distance caught my eye. It was the same kids that I had seen in black at the beach. Now they were draped over blankets, forming a sort of haphazard circle of laziness under the shade of a bending palm. Some had leaves in their hair as if they had just fallen out of the sky. Soaked others looked like they had rolled straight out of the sea. There was something intriguing, something I liked in the way they sat together staring across at nothing, contorting across the bodies to pass a dying cigarette, slowly nodding their heads against the beating sun. It was as if they moved along with the light.

I was never a risk taking kid. I certainly didn't just walk up and start talking to strangers. There were too many uncertains, too many unknowns. But... what's the worst that could happen? In the distance the crowd from the bus sat in silence, washing dishes in perfect time, three counterclockwise scrubs on each gleaming plate. And I drifted towards the kids.

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Six. The Kids

I picked my way over to the kids and their wonderful nothing. Ten pairs of eyes turned towards me in the same moment.

"Hey." I waved a hand. "Mind if I pop a squat?"

"Pop a squat!" A crowd of voices sputtered back. One fell on his back as he laughed.

Then one of them removed his sunglasses. A pair of eyes shifted from a flaming cigarette to flare into mine. And I met Jack Anodyne.

"You're a long way from home," he purred. He was brown from endless afternoons of beer and backyards, and as he slid off his rainbow-colored glasses his thin lips parted into a dazzling smile. In one deft move he yanked at a lawn chair and presented it as a snoring tangle of arms and legs went tumbling into the grass. "For you."

Jack had just turned 29 and believed strictly in three sole pleasures in life – wine, women and the island. Food was never savored or desired in any context. Rather, it was only for necessity and to keep the heart beating, as it detracted both his finances and senses from his other, more prominent loves: the wine to pursue the woman, and the island for solace when the plan had been failing for days on end.

The sheer length of his stay on campus had made him something of a legend. In his first week at university Jack decided that he was going to save the world. He had now been there eleven years. It had been eighteen hours and Jack hadn't slept.

Of course, I didn't know any of this at the time. Back then Jack was just a cigarette and a low breathy voice that rolled warm over the senses.

"Pleased to be your neighbor," I said.

"Oh, this isn't our campsite," Jack looked around. "We just acquired it." He settled back. "But the shade is over here. And thus, so are we." He nodded to his right and caught a beer flying through the air. "Where did you come from?"

"America. The city. Over there," I replied, nodding to a hill.

"The city!" He swept an arm over the bowed heads. "Us too."

"This beach is so beautiful," I sighed. "Where are we anyway?"

"You don't know where this is?" A boy laughed. "After the moon, this is the farthest place in the world."

"You hungry?" Jack cracked open a spiky shell that oozed black water and pointed to what looked like a small orange tongue. "Try that."

"What is it?"

"It's kinna." The kids to his right exchanged a wary glance.

"You first," I said.

"I can't." Jack pressed a hand to his chest. "I'm a vegetarian."

So I took a slow bite. And just as fast rushed to spit it back. The texture was all wrong. My mouth flooded with salt. Jack roared with laughter. I realized after a few moments I was smiling. And I started laughing too. As the hours flew by in an unending stream of beers and sun, I found myself lulled into a comforting state of numb oblivion. I took an inherent liking to Jack after quietly watching his evasion of responsibility for hours on end.

"Jack," Shelley commanded, marching over to the circle, carefully stepping and avoiding bodies and appendages along the way. She dumped a beaten dirt-encrusted banner at his feet. "I need this banner up over there by four o'clock. Everyone else is out kayaking." She eyed Jack suspiciously. His mouth slid into a Cheshire grin.

"Consider it done," Jack purred at her, nodding in time with her swaying hips as she retreated back to her tent. The girl on his right looked suspicious.

"Are you going to actually put up that banner?"

"Naw." Jack nursed his bottle. His eyes turned to Jamie, who had returned from earlier wanderings and was in the process of stumbling back to where we sat. "I'll get Jamie to do it."

"How are you going to do that?"

"Oh, he'll do it." Jack flashed a grin and whooped as Jamie slowly walked over and crashed to the ground. "Jamie, my man!"

"Ugh," Jamie groaned in reply.

"Oh, hey, Shelley has a mission for you."

Jamie picked up his face. "Oh?"

"Yeah, she said you have to put up this banner by four... somewhere over there."

Jamie turned his head to follow Jack's pointing finger. "Ohhhh..."

"It's okay though." Jack slapped him on the back as he popped up. "I'll help you do it – as soon as I'm done here with Addison."

Jamie's demeanor softened. "Hey, thanks, man," he cried as he hopped up and trotted away with the banner.

"Come on!" Jack leapt up. "I'll show you around."

Jack took me round the field, leaping and prancing through the land of broken tents. We slowed at blankets as Jack fetched beers from chilly bins and wiggled the volume on stereos and introduced me to all of his subjects.

"Did you come out here for a reason?" I mused as Jack plucked a guitar out of someone's hands and played a few chords while strolling on. "Or do you have no purpose at all?"

"Both, my dear," Jack said, trading the guitar for a beer and cracking it open against a tree. "For life is all about pleasure. It is the one absolute good. For pleasure never lies. All men and women are defined by what they enjoy... the drunk, the whiner, the speed freak, the ranter, the druggie, the workaholic, the sleaze... everyone knows oneself – and others – by the pleasures of their choice."

The afternoon swirled into a gray haze.

"Would you like one?" A boy nodded to the bucket of mussels at his feet. "Got 'em this morning while diving."

"Always." Jack cracked open a shell with one hand and popped the mussel in his mouth.

"I thought you were a vegetarian."

"I'm a pescatarian," he corrected.

At that point he could lie to me all he wanted – I couldn't take my eyes off him. I had the feeling Jack could turn even the simplest action into walking art – and I wanted to follow him everywhere just to see. At times I stop processing his words so I could just enjoy the sound what he said. His laugh bubbled up out of his throat and ran down my back like honey.

"Check it." He pointed to the kids on car hoods looking out from the cliffs. "Last year a drunk foreigner went the wrong way to take a piss and tumbled to his death."

"So it goes," I said.

Jack took off his shirt to wipe off the sweat and brought a jug of water up to his face. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he always had a knack for making it seem like the world's most beautiful place.

Streams of cars and rattling trucks coughed up steady clouds of dust. More kids were on their way.

Everyone knew Jack and everyone loved him, even the row of girls pulling on strawberry stems underneath drooping hats who looked at Jack they wouldn't trust him for a second.

Perhaps it was because he always strode to his own rhythm, never venturing, never compromising for anything — so if you happened to get caught in the crossfire, he was not to be blamed. Plus, he was unfailingly polite, and he looked so good, even when he was lying to you through his teeth.

He floated as if a little pair of wings carried him from place to place – fluttering faster when he was excited, like a dog's wagging tail, giving all his emotions away.

"Come and get it!" Jack crowed, shaking the bucket of mussels. "Fresh from the sea."

"This is awful nice of you."

"Nonsense," Jack said. "You can't keep something that has been given as a gift." He plucked a flower off a tree. "Do you know what this is?"

"A moly?"

"Wrong!" He closed his fist, crumbling the plant in his hand. "Eat three of these and you'll get more gone than you've ever been in your life. It's also poisonous..." The low chuckle rumbled under his tongue. "So you may die."

I twisted the flower between my fingers and looked up to the tree. It was as if its petals were a pair of ruby lips nestled in the rough dangling vines, that all at once called out, 'Kiss me!' and promised death if you did. I put one in my hair.

Jack laughed so hard he bent in half as a boy trudged through the water, fully dressed and soaking wet. "The classic mistake – visiting a high tide beach, at lowww tide."

"It was worth it," the boy approaching replied.

"How was the ride?"

"It's very, very unsafe."

"What ride?"

"I was out on the sand dunes testing the buggy I made. I would have stayed longer if it wasn't for the seal."

"The seal?" I cried. "I want to ride with a seal!"

The boy was less impressed. "Have you ever met a seal?"

I couldn't say I had.

"Those jerks are nasty." The boy brandished a knife. "But I'll take any opportunity to match wits with a seal – and win." He flicked his wrist and the knife disappeared back into his hand.

"What's your name, so I can forget it?" I asked.

"Adam," he grinned. "And don't ask again." Suddenly a pair of keys dangled down from his hand. "Anyone want to go jump off a twelve meter cliff?"

I caught Jack out the corner of my eye shaking his head. "Not so much," I said.

"Suit yourself! A roaring cloud of dust sputtered into the air.

Jack plunged a hand into the shallows and pulled out a dull gray shell. The wings beat fast and he turned with a smile. "Looks pretty boring, right? But only to the untrained eye." Jack spread open the shell to reveal a searing swirl of colors. He pulled down his shirt to reveal a matching one around his neck and wrapped the shell in my palm. "Now you can take a piece of the island with you wherever you go."

"Go?" I didn't ever want to leave.

The sun blazed red in the summer sky. My eyes pulled heavy on their lids. If only I could rest for a minute. I sank down to the sand.

When I opened my eyes everything was dark. The tide had gone out. There was nothing but black sand for miles around, dark as the midnight sky. Drums thundered in the distance. Figures drifted through the sand. I made soundless footsteps towards the shadows in the fog.

After a long journey into a flat wide black desert of iron sand comes a roar, and then the white strips of waves licking up in the waters for miles out to sea. There was a bonfire at the end of beach. Speakers had been dragged out onto the sand. And all the kids were dancing with fire in their hands. I followed the spinning trails of fire as they moved in untraceable patterns of heartbreaking elegance. They danced through the fire and it did not burn them.

Who were these people, these shadows, these souls dancing on the edge of the earth under a forgotten southern sky? Dancing and vanishing in the secret of night?

Manhattan could have been razed to the ground for all they knew or cared. Out here you couldn't care, where phone lines were broken and towers blinked on the fritz and cable faults sputtered short and tumbled cities into darkness. Perhaps the happiest place in the world was one where you had nothing to lose.

The twirling and whipping fire seared to a halt. At the end of the flame stood Jack. We stood apart on the field, our eyes locked on one another, facing each other over the curling, slurping fires. He held out his arm, his eyes ablaze, the flames licking up between us. I smiled and took the stick.

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Seven. Taken Away

"The city!" The guide spat. I was back on the bus. "People who live in the city are nothing but trouble. If I'm going to advise anything, just stay away."

I had blinked awake on the beach to find myself alone. The kids were gone. Back at the bus no one had even noticed I had ever left.

The drive home was a long straight shot, barreling past hills and surf and windswept dunes, no sights, no smells, no more photo calls, just the roar of the engine and solemn faces staring into the distance. The hobbling and winding destinations were now being thundered past at impressive speeds – a storm of green signs all whipping by in a blur, hurtling towards those consistent white block letters – the city.

Flashes of the night returned, and I stared into the sky with a vague smile on my face. "Why do people not like the city?"

"Because," the guide spat. "People from the city are the most arrogant, selfish..." I tried to listen. But I gazed at the hills I saw the kids everywhere. Walking around in casts.

I softly closed my eyes as the night drifted back. In the background the guide prattled on. "... inconsiderate, immoral..."

Juggling. Spinning balls on strings.

"... stealing our resources..." Stepping around roaming pigs.

"Uncultured..." Drinking under a raft propped up by a stick.

"PreTENDERS... who don't give a DARN about the rest of the island..." And I was amongst them, in a white dress, eating berries and getting sick from beers. And there was Jack, in a chariot pulled by six dragons racing the sun across the heavens.

"BeWARE of the SUN," the guide warned.

I leaned my head against the window, watching the world whiz by. There was so much to organize. Where would I live? If only I could find those kids...

"That won't be necessary," the guide assured. "We have organized accommodation for the entirety of your stay. Now, there is a mandatory farm excursion next weekend. Mandatory," he repeated. "Now, these families are very generous and kind to let you stay in their houses and all these details are arranged beforehand. Beforehand," he repeated. "Absolutely no exceptions –"

"Excuse me," I called from the back.

The guide whirled like a dervish. "Is there a problem?"

"The farm I was assigned to." I held up the sheet. "It says 'Beef'."

"So?"

"Well, as a vegetarian, I'm sort of against things like that." I scanned the paper. "Could I switch with someone, say, on the apple farm?" In a quick snap the paper vanished from my hands.

"We have worked tirelessly on these arrangements," he said, "and I am not about to spend one more minute, not one more minute, of my life on the phone!"

I sat on the bus, staring out once again behind the glass plane, watching them fade back into nothing.

We were all dumped into a decaying train station that had been turned into housing for American kids. It sat isolated on the outskirts of town where the harbor met industrial pollution. Inside kids from North Carolina and Boston wandered eager through the station, their tribalism matched only by their social dependence on alcohol. They would head out to the waterfront, where the cruise lines sailed in, drink themselves into a stumble and then drag themselves back hanging on the arms of newfound friends, singing bar songs into the night. When not at the bars they shuffled in clusters from their rooms to the kitchen, from the lab to the laundry in endless loops, wrapped in their refuge behind the solid glass walls.

I rapped on a window that used to sell train tickets and now handled student queries. A man with a thick mustache and beady eyes appeared behind the glass. "Hi," I smiled. "I'd like to leave this dorm."

"I'm sorry, you can't do that," an American voice hissed.

"Excuse me?"

"Any student that is here on behalf of a university program holds a binding contract with the Railway Campus for accommodation that lasts for the entire duration of their study," he rambled with a speed made for radio. "There are no refunds."

"Okay. Well would it be possible to at least switch over to the other side of the building?" A stadium was being built next door, and men in hardhats jack-hammered away outside my window from six every morning. They were punctual.

"The building is completely full," he said flatly. I could tell from the dead look in his eyes it was a lie.

"Okay then. I just want a cancellation. Keep the money. Just rip up the contract so I can live somewhere else."

"All right." The man plunged a fist down and surfaced moments later with a series of papers. "That will require you to fill out these four forms, including a detailed written explanation of the extreme circumstances which require the dissolution of your contract, a psychological evaluation and a five hundred dollar cancellation fee."

"Five hundred dollars." I repeated. "For you to keep my money. Just to allow me to leave."

The man's pencil thin lips curled into a smirk that caused the right hand side of his mustache to flick upwards. "That is the process."

I couldn't believe it. The friendliest country in the world had put us in a prison. All our colleges had signed contracts agreeing to this entrapment. Yet I was the only one that seemed to mind. Kids stared with open jaws at the soaring ceilings as if it were a glistening emblem of industrial progress. I had the feeling something had gone terribly wrong.

That night I could hardly touch my dinner. "I hate this place."

Leslie slid her tray across the table and took a seat. "I like living here. It makes me feel like part of something."

"It's a terrarium."

"It's not all bad." She stabbed at a piece of meat and twirled it round on her fork. "I'm just glad we have the internet."

And I was invisible again. I shuffled through the faceless students, one foot in front of the other, floating, as if barely conscious. I padded through the expansive concourse, passing circles of slouched figures in khaki with faded baseball caps, sucking down cigarettes, empty conversations echoing and bouncing on the sterile tile floor and whitewashed walls. Frozen figures clustered round the washing machines, stretched over broken gas burners, draped themselves over couches and carpets. I was in no one's company, but in the presence of hundreds.

***

Explosions of yellows and black fill the room. Images of artilleries and jet fighters tower like jagged tombstones over a darkened hall full of glazed eyes.

Planes with red lines with silver-tipped wings race across the screen, showing at once the unlimited potential of man and his inevitable self-demise. And the only thought on my mind was, "What's the point?"

"We will remember you," they promise the soldiers. But that's no value at all. Who cares if anyone remembers you when you're gone? There's not much room for ego when worms are wiggling between your toes. There is no honor in the sacrifice of one's hands anymore. It's enough to make one want to scrape one's eyeballs off the floor. To dedicate oneself to the expansion of a world where horrors were dated and narrated neatly on overheads and chalkboards was a cheap bet.

Still I couldn't get the kids out of my head. It was a thin line, I mused – the place between the people who become a part of your life and the ones that just walk right out of it.

A part of me knew I would never see them again. But it had been a nice day, I reasoned. It almost seemed fitting that these new characters I met should fade into oblivion.

Then the door swung open. In sauntered a staunch woodsman with stubble and eyes with contempt. He started arguing with the professor and I listened half-heartedly to his fragmented logic until I noticed the American accent. My head clanged with all sorts of bells. Not alarm bells – joyous bells, of the church and wedding variety.

"Did you know that Gloria Steinam worked for the CIA?" the woodsman challenged.

The professor sighed. "Did you know that you have a conspiratorial mind?"

As the fight dragged on I slid my way across the desks, one by one, until I was sitting directly behind him.

"You're American," I whispered once the professor droned again.

He nodded. "Pennsylvania. You?"

"Illinois."

"Blue state." Good. I had his trust. Let us begin.

"Where you staying?"

He puffed his chest and let out a long exhale. "A hostel at the moment. I'm looking to get out as quick as possible. I think my roommate is homicidal – so that's an issue. I've caught him staring at me while I sleep." His eyes rolled upwards and he gave me a sideways glance.

This was it. My big sell. I took a deep breath. "I'm at the Railway campus."

"That place looks nice," he said. "It's just really expensive." Bingo!

"It is nice," I stressed. "Real nice. The only thing is, now I've got these friends here, and I want to live with them, but I'm locked in this contract I don't want." I waved my hand as if the thought had just occurred to me. "If I could just find someone to cover my rent, for like, a hundred and forty dollars a week" – his eyes glowed – "I could give up my room and live with them."

"I'd take that room," he said, almost tripping over the words. He said he'd need about a week to get his things in order. The bell rang and we shook hands. I had never benefited so much from attending class.

"Then the unthinkable happens," the professor thundered.

THWACK!

I was reading Kubla Khan when I heard something hit my window. Rocks? Was I in a bad romance novel? Then a voice in the dark called out my name. I poked my head out the window to find Jack waving his arms.

"Hellooooooooo!"

I couldn't believe it. "Hey!" I called out into the darkness. "How did you find me?"

"She's here!" Jack's wings fluttered. "You have no idea how long we have been looking for you. Stop the rocks!" I looked to my right. Each window had a rock-shaped hole, running all the way down to the end.

"I'm so glad you're back!" Shelley called. "I thought we would never see you again!"

My brow furrowed. "But you left me."

"Our car broke down on the way back." Shelley shook her head. "And we all thought, 'Where's Addison now?'"

I had been with them only one night, and I was not only part of the group, I had become the one to whom all responsibility was deferred. Perhaps they were just being lazy, but still – I was secretly thrilled.

"Our biggest party of the year is coming up next weekend. You have to come!"

Were it not for the cows. "I can't make it," I mourned.

"You have to."

"I have to go to a farm next weekend."

"A farm on a weekend?" Jack was incredulous. "For what?"

"Some cultural thing."

"Ben!" Jack shouted. The boy slouching next to him stood at attention. "Addison here," he said with a gesture, "is going to miss our party to go on a cow killing expedition, against her will. And" – he resounded with a final blow – "she's vegetarian!"

Ben gasped. "No!" He turned with a start. "Don't do it."

"I have to do it."

"Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat." Jack's accent made the word nearly indecipherable. "If you want to milk a cow, or kill a cow, I have friends with farms. And I will take you down there on some other weekend, and you can hug as many cows as you want. But don't miss next weekend. You have to come to Flat 56!"

I paused. "Flat 56?"

"Where we live," Jack insisted. He turned to Ben. "How many people live there – ten?"

"Something like that," Ben said. "It's always changing. It's an abandoned floor above a bar in the city. We throw the biggest parties. Huge parties and everyone dresses up."

"All the people here," Jack gestured with a sweep of his arm at the kids milling around, "I only know from Flat 56 parties. We're headed there now. You should come!"

I glanced at the clock. Midnight.

Leslie rubbed her eyes in the other bed. "Who's there?"

"Where's your place?" I asked.

"On Broadway," Jack said.

"Are those the people from the beach?" Leslie fumbled for her glasses.

I must have been hearing things. "Come again?"

"BROADway." He called again. My fingers danced on the frame in contemplation. "All you have to say is maybe," Jack's voice sang up to the window.

"I'll be down in a second!"

"Where are you going?" Leslie gasped.

"I don't know!"

Outside Jack was discussing logistics with Ben. "How many does that make in the car – ten? Twelve. It doesn't matter. We cut out the seatbelts ages ago."

"But how will you get back?"

"Somehow," I lied.

"You're insane." Leslie lunged for her robe. "And I'm coming with."

I leapt out the door and sprang down the stairs. The door groaned as I slammed it shut. I looked up one last time. Goodbye Railway, you rat bastard half hostel half jail soul sucking empire. May we never meet again.

I struck the key into the ignition and the car roared to life.

I was on my way.

back

Eight. Then

The night was wet, and the sky was ripe with black anticipation as we headed out into the darkness in search of Flat 56. I finally found Broadway after several dozen zigzagging motions across ridiculously steep hills and roads whose directions made no sense. If you didn't know the road was there, you never would have found it. We parked on Railway Street, clambered up metal stairs past a bar and came to a white door scrawled with blue graffiti.

I knocked – no answer. I tentatively pushed the door open with a cautious finger. Darkness.

I smiled at Leslie. "I guess we can just walk right in."

Leslie said nothing. Her big eyes stared at the door like a frightened deer.

Leslie, it turns out, was a failed model. She was discovered at age 14 by an agent in a McDonald's, but no fashion houses were interested. Nor magazines or ad campaigns. Not even upscale catering services. Now Leslie was just a student, like all the others, only with bigger eyes and thinner hips.

Failure at such a young age had made her cautious. I, on the other hand, had never been served up to the big leagues for rejection, so I bounded into the narrow concrete hallway and Leslie followed close behind.

This was some place to live. It looked like an abandoned basement. Broken surfboards and mountain bikes poked out from the shadows. Clotheslines were bunched in the corners like cobwebs. The remnants of a board game were scattered across the floor. It was as if a party full of people had just vanished.

I walked along dragging my fingers behind me, tracing the rough wall edges.

"Abandon all hope ye who enter here," I read on the wall.

A light shone at the end of the hall. Noise control notices littered the walls. The counter was covered with stacks of dishes teetering this way and that. The food had started to grow out of some plates, as if moving curiously towards the fridges for a late night snack. Five fridges of all different shapes and sizes hummed against the wall, each looking worse than the last.

Leslie gasped for air. My ears perked as a familiar voice floated in from the balcony. I stepped over a chipped polka dot pot and under a sliding window to find Adam with something that looked like a homemade bomb.

"Oh, just buy me a beer," Adam was saying to a boy with dreads. "These were all things I had lying around at home." The springs in his hands bounced as if alerting him of my arrival and Adam turned. "The American!"

"Canadian," Ben insisted.

"Are you Canadian?" Adam asked.

"American," I corrected.

"American." Adam's lip curled. "Your president sucks."

"Thank you, I know."

"But she's a travelling American." The boy with dreads stuck out his hand. "Morgan. Pleased."

"Your nuclear policy is rough," Ben drawled, lighting a cigarette, "but we can still be friends."

"What do they teach you over there in America?" Morgan asked.

"History."

He waved a hand. "Boring. It happened."

"History is always happening," I replied, taking his picture. "What do you do that's so important?"

A grin slithered across his face. "We hack computers for money."

"Hackers," I mused. "Is that like pirates?"

"Pirates!" Adam yelped. "I wouldn't mess with pirates. They murdered one of our heroes last year."

Morgan nodded solemnly. "In the Amazon."

Adam nodded. "He could have survived, though. He only died because he fought back." He shook his hands. "That's just stupid." He shook his head. "Fight bureaucracy. Fight the government. But don't fight pirates."

"I don't trust computers." I scoffed.

"Don't trust computers?" Adam laughed. "How can you trust your mind? It can't tell the difference between dreams and waking life."

"Computers are the last place on earth where David can beat Goliath." Morgan slapped Adam on the back. "Adam here unearthed a bug that could have taken out the entire country! At a conference!" he whooped. "Tis a noble thing to do, but if it were me, I would have kept that one for myself." He paused. "Or sold it to the mafia for several hundred grand."

Adam shook his head. "Blood money." He proudly tapped a box at his feet. "I'd rather make this."

I eyed the undulating device. "I don't know if you should plug that in."

"Nonsense," Adam said as he sucked a thick stream of smoke through an apple. "This stuff is cutting edge. It just looks useless, because then no one will steal it." A spring burst out of the box.

"Don't feel bad," I said as Adam's face fell. "Edison failed twenty thousand times before inventing the light bulb."

"Edison!" Adam cried. "Edison was a hack! He should have been strung up and electrocuted for what he did to Tessla."

I glanced around. "Has anyone seen Jack?"

"Probably off with some girl." Adam snorted.

Jack slid out from under the window. "The weather's about to turn." He closed the grill. "We best head inside." He strode into the kitchen moments before the first scattered drops fell out of the sky.

"These are not the people for you," Jack said as he slid an arm around my waist and led me away.

Shelley stood at the sink in lipstick pink pajamas, furiously attacking the dishes. "You owe me for this one, Jack."

Jack raised his beer. "You are a princess."

"And we need you to fix the pipes again?"

"Ooh. I would if I had my tools," Jack said.

"Adam has some," I told him.

"Then it's a good thing life isn't about being right." Jack held up his hands, as if to prove he wasn't lying. "Life is about getting what you want. "

He opened his arms and spun in the hall. "What do you think of my home?"

"It's very nice."

"Isn't she gorgeous? No one's actually supposed to live here. It's a bit il-legal. I suppose you can see why."

Well. I just couldn't begin to imagine. But if I did, I would start with the shower.

The bathroom looked like it had been ripped out of an airplane. It was probably best that there was no room for long glances, lest you catch sight of the tendrils of mold that curled out from the bleak yellow corners. A browning sign warned beachgoers of toxic waste, and it looked like the newest thing in the place.

The well-bred child deep in my soul curled its toes. There was a certain alarm that human beings could live in such squalor.But now every part of me was thrilled. To live without rules, or cleaning detergent. To defy every household chore ever scrawled on the bedroom door of your childhood. To build a fort and live out your days like the Lost Boys, even as the long finger of society beckoned.

This was not your quiet Manhattan apartment with chrome countertops and metallic fridge, as I could so clearly envision the future dwellings of my classmates. I didn't need chrome countertops. I didn't want chrome countertops. Where along the line did I start to think the only option was chrome countertops?

I cast another look around the place, my eyes settling on the stacks of upturned plates and dishes that covered the patched counter. It was nearly impossible to give a shit about this place. And so, you didn't have to give a shit about anything. Lady Poverty had conferred on her children the freedoms of the universe.

"Wait 'til you see my room." Jack led me to a white door smaller than its frame. It only remained shut by a small metal padlock at the top. Shelley glared at us from the darkness of a far-off corner.

"That works?"

"It's all you need," Jack said as he picked the lock, threw open the broken hinges and strode into his room.

Jack flopped onto the bed. "Isn't it great?"

I was surprised. The room wasn't half bad. The plaster walls had been covered with bookshelves and maps and a huge painting of an eagle with two heads on top a twisted tree. Above his bed was a series of charcoal sketches of a beautiful girl tossing and turning in her sleep. Jack had even managed to make the exposed wood look charming – but perhaps that was merely due to his presence in the foreground grinning.

"That web a mess yesterday," Jack mused, studying a spider in the corner with hands on his hips. "He must have been up all night fixing it." Even the spiders were his friends.

"Poisonous," Jack admitted. "But their teeth won't break skin." Then he grinned. "Try and guess the rent."

I had passable knowledge of the market. My room at the train station squeezed students out of a hundred and eighty dollars a week.

"One ninety," I guessed.

"Wrong!" He shot up. His eyes shined. "Seventy. Dollars. A week."

"Can I live in your room?"

"Sure." Jack shot a stern parental glance. "But no boys." Jack placed his hands on my shoulders. "Now go help yourself to the vodka in the vat, stay awhile, talk a lot, and I'll be right back."

There was vodka? In a vat? I had but started the journey when a freshly manicured hand dug into my arm.

"Where have you been?" Leslie hissed. "I leave for a second to go to the bathroom and the next thing I know you're GONE!"

"I was in Jack's room."

"Already? Anyway, listen – " she said rapidly. "I don't know about these people. There was this guy with a vat that wanted me to – "

"The vat of vodka?" I interrupted her. "Where?"

"Above the fridge." She waved her hand towards the kitchen. "But that's not the point." It may not have been for her but it was for me. I cut back into the kitchen and copped a quick look around. I spotted a clear plastic vat and reached up in vain.

"Can we go?"

"We just got here," I said, peering into a glass that had some strange green film encrusted on the bottom. It would do.

Leslie's face dripped with disbelief, hesitation and worry – all the hallmarks of someone doomed to never get their kicks. "You're actually going to drink that?"

"Why the hell wouldn't she?" a voice boomed from just over her left shoulder. Leslie went stiff. I assumed this was the troubling figure she had been hissing about before. I looked up. Oh come now, Leslie. What had frightened her about this gentle soul? Not the eyebrow piercing or the naked woman tattooed on his bicep. Leslie was too cultured for such shallow judgments – maybe. I conceded that it may have been the neck brace that made his head appear as if it was perched on top of a marshmallow. It gave his shoulders a bit of a hunch, which made his walk more of a lurch, and I admit, created a bit of a stalker vibe. I could grant her that.

"You should come see my room." Stu beckoned with a finger and I saw Leslie's shoulders stiffen.

"Why would I want to do that?"

Stu placed a hand on his chest, feigning offense. "To see the distillation process for Stu's Brew, of course."

What a wonderful idea! "You made this vodka?"

Stu nodded. "But that's nothing. Wait till you try my homemade absinthe." He raised a bottle wrapped in white paper.

I could feel my eyes involuntarily glowing. "All right!"

"No!" Leslie cried, grabbing my arm. "Do you really think it's a good idea to be accepting random foul liquids from his guy?"

I shook her off my arm. "I'll accept absinthe from pretty much anybody."

"If done improperly, alcohol brewed at home can make you blind."

"And he isn't!" I gazed at Stu in admiration. "Isn't he amazing?" Leslie was shaking.

"What's wrong?" But Leslie had already turned and was sprinting for the door. I took one last sorrowful look at the bottle.

"I'll be back," I promised Stu before spinning on one heel and running after Leslie.

"See you tomorrow!" Adam called out as I ran past.

"Wait!" came a cry from the window. I looked up. Jack was hanging off the balcony. "Where are you going?"

"The clock struck midnight for Cinderella." I nodded down the street. "And I've got this whole... what's the word... feeling. That I don't want to leave her alone. But I'll be back," I cried, breaking into a sprint in pursuit of the disappearing model. "I promise I'll be back!"

back

Nine. And

"So, who here has done the readings?" A shabby red cover popped up into the professor's weathered hands. His hopeful eyes search the stained walls and brown floors for a glint of recognition in the vacant stares. Nothing. I glanced around the room. All the kids blinked back, blank and bored. Before I could even raise my hand the professor chirped onwards, not missing a beat, his smooth vowels drifting lonely through the still air.

The fluorescent glare drained my mind, followed soon after by my body, of life and will to live. I sank further into my seat, trying to get the night out of my mind.

That night I headed to the darkroom with A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The bathing red light and cool black machines had a way of soothing my soul, as did the music. I twirled the white paper in the liquid darkness, batting it back and forth between my fingers as I waited patient for second thirty – the most beautiful moment in photography. When the first sharp outlines of your past bleed through the white.

There was Jack, fingers in a V at his face, a cigarette floating between them. Gazing intently into the lens. I looked at the gray images of these new creatures I called my friends. I had captured them in moments, but it was like quantum physics – you can either know where they are or how fast they're going, but never both. It was as if I held a few scattered pieces of the giant puzzle of their lives, whose larger picture I did not know. I was determined to find out more.

The door slid open and I stepped into the familiar hall. In a slow trickle the room transformed into something like a Victorian salon. The light at the end glowed low and red, drowning a girl in satin on the couch. Legs swung half hung out the giant bay windows in stilettos and ripped chiffon. Gangly boys dressed in top hats and tails slouched with beer in the corners. I gazed around with the uncanny sense that I had seen it all somewhere before.

Morgan dug into his pocket. "I think it's time for another..." The fingers stopped and his face dropped into a frown. "Adam," he called sharply. "Where is it?"

"Where is what?"

"What you were supposed to bring."

"There."

"But it's not."

"That's all I got."

"It's all you brought?"

Adam shrugged. "That's the lot."

Morgan stared in despair. "Well can you get some more?"

"I'll try. But I promise nothing."

"Adam! Adam!" Shelley ran to Adam. "Do you have any? Can I take some?"

"Of course," Adam breezed.

"Do what?" I was aghast.

"If you have to ask," Morgan laughed, "you're not ready to know."

"What is he talking about?" I asked Jack.

Jack ignored my question and took me by the shoulders instead. "Now I've got to do some things," he said. Take a cab with Adam and Shelley. I'll meet you there."

"Where are you going?"

"Just on an errand. Now get in the van. Shelley will take care of you," Jack promised.

An inspired choice. I had the constant feeling Shelley would, given the chance, throw me into the harbor at her first opportunity. She cast a sideways look down her long nose before turning sharply away. "Great."

"She will look after you," Jack stressed. "Because if she doesn't," he said, raising voice so she could hear, "I'll never speak to her again."

"I'll look after you," Adam promised. I knew he had ulterior motives but all the same it made me feel safe.

Then Jack called out for last drinks. Beers were finished and tossed over the edge onto the aluminum office roof next door, and we headed out into the cold.

Jack peeled off in a cab and the rest of us clambered into a car. We careened through the park under the blackened trees, and then slid on the giant gray tongue into the concrete tangle of the city. The car tumbled down from the highest hill in town in a sea of yellow headlights as if it were alight a waterfall of fireflies. On the street half naked angels mingled with animal heads in a line that wound down the sidewalk and snaked underneath a darkened marquee.

The only thing left to do was buy a ticket.

Shelley pointed a long finger down a hallway where two winding streams churned into the building. I took two hesitant steps and was swept into a golden hallway along with the rushing tide. The sounds of the crowd melted together, the ceilings echoed with jubilant chatter. A menagerie of moving colors carved glittering paths through the lobby like sparkling rivers. Flashes of red lips, towering wigs and blackened eyes, chased paths around where I stood against the wall frozen. Amongst all the madness I must have looked like a refugee from the land of normalcy – lifted straight from a dinner party or an afternoon walk in the sun.

I found myself looking for Jack despite knowing he was lost in the swim of downtown, across gridded streets and flashing traffic lights, lost in the transition between coins and chemicals.

Coins for chemicals. The words rattled round in my head, sparking all kinds of terrible visions.

"There's nothing to worry about," Jack soothed.

I was still flattened against the wall when Adam's hand emerged out from the Technicolor stream. We grasped for each other and headed for the doors.

"I have had this" – Jack held a tiny yellow pill between his fingers and flipped it to display a P carved into one side – "exact print, several times."

I glided past the ornate doors and underneath the fears that flooded my mind. No one was on the stage. There was only the audience.

"I want you to take a look at this." My mother, holding a newspaper, motioned me close. "There are children," she swallowed, "having parties." She pointed to the front page. "In old buildings in cities."

"It will be very clean" – I didn't know what that meant – "and very smooth. No concerns, no troubles" – he shot a finger into the crevice of an eye – "not even those little eye wiggles you get sometimes."

I leaned over for a closer look and my mother snatched the paper away. "If I was to look in your room upstairs, would I find any of the items on this list?" She began to read aloud, pausing for a stern glare between each item. "Cotton. Candy. Glitter. Water." She glanced up from the paper. "I hope you have a good reason for why you carry your own water."

Jack roared in laughter. Silver and gold wands glittered above the bobbing heads. A man in the center of the room, nodding at the attention, flicked a finger over a button and the crowd dissolved into hysterics.

What had gone through Eve's mind, from her first thought to that graceful fall? The moment that cast our fate to live forever with the thirst for the unknown. Ever since childhood there lies an intrinsic fascination with what lies behind the billowing curtain. Some never get there. They remain lost in their own cluttered thought for their entire lives. Others find talking snakes.

Adam stuck out his tongue. "This is Freedom."

"All of us are on the same thing. Me, Shelley, Adam" – Jack waved off the rest as insignificant. The theatre roared in response. "If anything were to happen, we'll take care of each other.

Hands joined—Shelley's to mine, mine to Adam's, to the back of the room, led by Jack, and bottles of water were fished out as we all pulled out the pills concealed in our palms.

It started as a tingle. Then, just over my left shoulder, I felt the roar of something coming.

"What's the worst that could happen?" Adam shrugged. "When nothing happens at all."

"So the only question really is" – Jack turned his hand – "Do you trust me?"

I didn't hesitate for a second. "Yes."

The roar vanished. Somewhere between then and the lights, and not before, or after, but around the bass line, behind and through the expanding and collapsing colors, things changed.

Time raced back to when all the world was America, that first blue promise in dawning rays of the morning sun. The steel and rafters fall away, and all the masks and all the guns, and all the girls and all the gold, and all the doors in all the walls, from all the buildings in all the cities. The electricity casts you adrift on an invisible sea, under light swirling golden and velvet. The top hats and cream lace and crimson one by one melted into pink waves that churned and splashed over the floor. I plunged my hands into the sea, lifting the foam and sending it adrift over the swaying heads.

"Will we ever see you again?" Leslie was the only one who had come out to say goodbye.

"Of course," I assured her, knowing full well it wasn't true.

The grand staircase that swirled its way up the center of the room melted. Wide black irises, eyes crinkling, teeth clenched never-ending smiling, and I simply wanted to reach out and kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and I felt each moment not just as it passed, but also its anticipation and comedown, vibrating between the others and licking up alongside them like flames.

"My keys," Shelley cried, patting her clothes. "I think I left them on the car seat!"

I felt charged with energy. "Leave it to me!"

I ducked into the bathroom and whirled the red door shut. A boy in a blonde wig gasped when he saw me in the mirror. "You look like an angel!" his reflection said.

"And you a queen!" I cried back. Instant best friends.

He snapped up when he heard the accent. "Where did YOU come from?" His voice with curiosity danced. And he roared when I said New York. "What are you doing HERE?"

"There's no time for any of that." I told him what happened.

The boy's back snapped. "This sounds like a job for Karma Chaos!"

He cut across the dance floor and bent sharply at the table of a broad Pacific island queen whose hair was three times the height of anyone else's. The queen leaned over, picked up the edge of her baroque gold dress, and dramatically rose to full height. "Let's go." The troupe of us walked out to the car in a royal procession with the queen out front, and the boy and I trailing respectfully behind.

"Chi Chi," the boy whispered.

"Hmm." Chi Chi peered into a window. "I'm going to need a coat hanger."

Chi Chi spun on her heel, hiked up her skirt and in a matter of quick strides was digging near a chain link fence in the shadows of an alley. After a few moments Chi Chi held a rusted coat hanger, one side already bent and twisted, in triumph above her head. She strode back to the car and carefully set down her wig. She stuck one end in the window and wrenched it down towards the lock.

After a few grunting cranks noticed we were watching and looked back up. "My brother is a criminal," she explained with a casual breeziness as if she had said he was a doctor instead.

Jack trolled to the parking lot, misting yellow in the wet night air. "I thought you had DIED!" He stared at Chi Chi with his jaw hanging open. "How did you get a coat hanger?"

"We found one in that alley." I pointed to the shadows.

Jack turned this over in his head. "That's not dodgy," he finally said.

"There!" The lock popped open and Chi Chi dusted off her hands. "I've still got it."

The drag queen strode off, the curls of his wig bouncing in his hands, and Jack looked around and stubbed out his cigarette. "What would you like to do?"

In the distance the sky was shifting to a pale blue.

"You go your way," I insisted, "and I'll go your way too."

Jack was already leaning against a cab in the street. He spun his keys round a finger and caught them back in his hand. "Let's head out."

The party spilled out the doors and under the low ceiling of the marquee. In the car rain spilled down the window, racing each other in sparkling streams. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes. Then the glowing sunrise melted into a black abyss.

back

Ten. So

In the morning I woke up still dressed. Jack floated in and out of the kitchen, grabbing a towel, searching for his toothbrush, reaching for his cigarettes. In a suit he looked so different from his drunk splayed out lull. It was as if he was putting on airs along with his tie, tightening them around his neck.

"I thought you were quitting," I said, watching the smoke curl out from Jack's nose.

"It is a statistical fact that ninety percent of smokers relapse within the first year," Jack breathed.

Adam snorted as he stormed past. "Or maybe ninety percent of what you say is bullshit." He ripped open the cabinet and peered inside. "Have you been eating my beans?"

"Of course not." Jack looked hurt.

Adam slammed the door shut and stalked out in a huff, aggressively sucked at a carton of juice.

"For a guy who drinks grape juice, he's sure got a lot of anger," I mused.

"I've been putting grape vodka in that for weeks," Jack mused, "yet his mood hasn't improved."

"Why is he so angry?"
Jack rolled his eyes. "I stole his girlfriend – like a YEAR ago. "

"How did you manage to do that?"

"I think – " Jack's shoulders hunched as he let out a low chuckle. "Heh heh heh. I think I did it when he was on vacation." He puffed out his bottom lip in a what-can-you-do. "When he came back, she was mine." Then a raised eyebrow. "I never thought it would have caused such a stir. Talk about overreacting."

"What did he do?"

"Well," Jack said, "I had this bottle of Black Sambuca. The sweetest liqueur in the world. Also one of the most expensive – retails for about a hundred bucks. A friend had given it to me for a present. Well, Adam comes home and someone" – he shot a look at the door at the end of the hall – "wasn't too gracious in telling him what happened." He paused. "I come home, turn the keys, and the first thing I sense is..." Jack fluttered his eyes and inhaled deep through his nose. "Mmm. Black Sambuca. The smell is strong."

He bit his lip. "Too strong. I walk to my room. The door is unlocked – and open. I walk into the room, and there, all over my floor, is the contents of my birthday bottle of Black Sambuca. He had poured it all onto my carpet – in the shape of the word 'Cunt.' It was huge!" he cried. "For months I couldn't bring anyone into my room without their head going sideways and asking me, "Why is 'Cunt' written into your floor?" It was impossible to hide." He nodded. "I've got to give it to him, it was pretty good."

"That must be frustrating," I mused, "to live with someone who hates you, always grabbing on like a power struggle.

Jack shook his head. "There will only be a power struggle if both people participate. If one person doesn't take up the struggle then it's not happening."

He stubbed out his cigarette and dusted off his hands. "Well, I'm off to work. Do you have class?"

"A better question is whether or not it's worth going. That hour of my week would be better spent designing a time machine so I could watch history unfold myself."

Jack flicked a finger at his shelves. "Would you like a book?"

I had to admit, I would. I was halfway through Beyond Good and Evil when I had lost it. When I asked if he had it instead of answering a book landed facedown at my feet.

"What don't you try that instead?" Jack waved out the door.

I picked up the book – and when I saw it was pornography dropped it again. I padded over to Jack's bookshelf. There were guides to America, to Thailand, to Istanbul. There were books on consumernomics and advice for worst-case scenarios. The more I drifted over the titles, the more I felt my request for Nietzsche ring hollow with intellectual snobbery. I would have to work hard to curb my elitist aesthetic. I brushed my fingers along the shelf until my finger stopped at the edge. There, under a thin layer of dust – Beyond Good and Evil.

My mouth fell open. "Asshole."

I could hear Jack's bouncing laughter through the wall well before he swayed back through the door, clapping into one hand.

"Why limit yourself to Nietzsche?" He seemed disappointed. "There's lots of things to learn in the world."

I raised an eyebrow and crossed my arms. "Aren't you supposed to be at work or something?"

"I decided I'm not going in to work today after all." Jack grabbed his side. "I think I'm getting an ulcer."

"That could be contagious," I affirmed.

Jack flopped himself back down on the bed and rolled over. "So. What are we going to do?"

I had wondered what Jack did during the day. It turned out he did hardly anything at all. The job he wasn't going to was with the electric company. It was one of the few industries where Jack felt like he didn't have to punch in his soul along with his time card. Before then it was a bit hit or miss, some advertising here, some marketing there, all of which he had found deeply meaningless. Jack preferred to work with necessities – it kept him honest, he said, doing good things for people for the right reasons.

We adventured through the parks and tip-toed through the thin red paths in the park that swept their way up to the museum. We ran under the motorways that curved like gray rainbows over a graveyard that cut through the heart of the city. Under his guise the world melted into something mysterious and beautiful.

Jack was from the city, born and raised. He told me about the land, and all kinds of things you couldn't learn in books. Most people only saw the city as a pile of jagged concrete hills and alleys – but when Jack turned a corner, and you caught a glimpse of the emerald water between the buildings, shimmering in the sun, your heart soared.

"Isn't she wonderful?" Jack sighed as we looked out at the lashings of teal and liquid cerulean at each other's side.

The water! That spire! It was as if Atlantis had been pulled from the slime.

"And people say the city is not a real part of the island." Jack sighed. "But that's all the better. Then we get her all to ourselves."

Jack had both of his hands tucked halfway into his pockets, his chest puffed out soaking up the morning sun. He was, in all pure sense of the word, a man of the city. I felt a quiet pride standing next to him as the sun dazzled his skin, as if on command. It was as if he had a key to the world, hidden away like the bottle of wine tucked beneath his coat.

"Got to protect the image," he insisted. "Wouldn't want to run into anyone from work."

"Should I feel guilty about ditching class?" I wondered.

"No," Jack said. "The only way to sense whether something is morally wrong is to check... Ethics comes from experience. Be immoral and see if you feel truly guilty or just a little bit wicked."

"I may miss a lecture," I smiled, "but I'm discovering my soul."

And Jack said, "That's right."

As he strutted along and I followed close behind I started to feel insecure about all my life had been. When did I become so half-involved? When did I become so hesitant? I had the sense I was witnessing something important even if he was just smoking and drinking his youth away. There was something about this 29-year-old man. He had nothing to show for it yet was complete, untouchable even. It was as if he declared things, rather than stumble and wonder and break them down into a million little pieces like I did.

Back at the flat Ben sat on the couch alternating between consciousness and deep snores.

"Is he going to eat that?" I eyed the half-finished sandwich clutched in his hands.

"Mine," with eyes still shut he said.

"He'll sleep through anything," Adam mused, poking Ben with a stick.

"Say, where's Anton?" Adam asked. "I haven't seen him in a while."

Morgan shrugged. "Neither – not since he tried that fire spitting trick with carbon disulfide."

"Is he nuts? It's one thing to douse your lungs with turps," Adam sighed. "but carbon disulfide – that is a highly flammable solvent... is he all right?"

"Mate, he burned his face off." Morgan shook his head. "It was safe to say he was pretty rooted." Then he gestured towards the grill. "Help yourself to some sausage. I got enough to last for a month." He beamed with pride. "It's the best bargain since I tapped the elementary school's water main!"

"Where did you get them?"

His lips curled into a smile. "I acquired them." And that was all he said.

"Here." Adam shoved a chunk of cheese into my hands. "Try this."

I sniffed, then took a cautious bite. Overtones of dark chocolate, burnt caramel and roasted onions rolled around my tongue. "What is it?"

"I don't know." Adam frowned, eyeing the molding rind. "I found it a dumpster. This cheese is more than food though, isn't it?," he sighed as I lunged for the sink. "It's art."

"You should come with me sometime – you can get some really great stuff!" Ben was awake again. "Last week I got an entire bag of peanuts."

"You have to wash 'em," Morgan stabbed at another sausage from the barbecue, "but they're still good."

I was hungry and the kitchen was stacked with piles of encrusted dishes. The rule sat that if someone missed their daily turn, it remained their turn until they remembered. It was nearing day seven, and the dishes had grown into tottering edifices of art that challenged physics.

I picked up a cup with green residue encrusted on the bottom.

"You may not want to drink out of that," Morgan advised. "That one has seen a lot."

I tipped it over. The crust stayed put. "It has stories to tell?"

"Oh yeah," he affirmed. "It's seen the bottom of rivers. Has been kicked off cliffs. I'm pretty sure it gave me gangrene once."

"I just remembered," Jack announced, suddenly appearing from the hall. "I have to see a man – about a dog." And poof! Just like that, he was gone.

"Where is he always going?" I wondered, watching from the balcony as his silhouette sprinted away below.

Morgan shrugged. "I find it's usually best not to even wonder."

"The dishes are Jack's." Adam snorted.

"I'll do it." The words come out before I know why.

I was bent over the kitchen sink, brow furrowed, scrubbing heartily at a plate when I heard a familiar voice echo down the narrow hall. "She shouldn't be raising ostriches anyways," the voice cried. "You should have poured acid in her eyes."

Then the boy with the blonde wig from the theater stumbled into the light – except this time, the blonde wig was nowhere in sight. "Was that Jack I just saw running off?"

Adam nodded.

"Typical. And what were you two getting up to?" he called out to the balcony, a hand fanned out over a freshly jutted hip. "I believe that's what the university council defines as inappropriate conduct! Naughty naughty!"

"Leave it, Nick." Stu snapped back.

He turned back and cast a mischievous grin over his shoulder. It was only then our eyes met.

Nick glided to my side in three elegant leaps. "What are you doing?"

I looked down. "The dishes."

"But why?"

"Someone's got to."

His face was drawn. "Karma would never do such a thing. There's plenty time for that in 2012."

"I don't know about that," I replied. "The history channel tells me the world may end."

"Exactly." Nick grabbed the remote and flipped through the channels at lightning speed. He tore off a chunk of licorice and gestured accusingly with the flaccid remains. "Whoever encourages kids to go on these shows and have their dreams crushed should be taken out and shot." The channel flipped again. Guns. Fire. Buildings. Politicians.

"Carline!" he screamed – and then, without missing a beat – "I was on this show, you know."

Nick had penetrated every niche, party and society in the city. He had been on soaps, partied with pop stars, chased thieves down Broadway and ridden on elephants. They were never dwelled on, and always came out in offhand comments.

"But that's over now," he would then say with a wave of the hand. And none of these past exploits satisfied him more than his permanent state in the Now... which was, at the moment, cross-legged on the floor popping beer tops across the lounge.

"Guess where I've been?" he insisted, shoving a beer between the dishes and me.

"Porlock?"

"K Road!"

The name sounded familiar. "What's K Road?"

Nick was aghast. "What's K Road?"

At the sound of the street Adam's eyes lifted slow. "I know K Road. I hate that place."

"K Road!" I marveled. "A street so nasty all the other letters ran away."

Nick's face dropped. "You've never been to K Road?" I admitted it was so. "Well come on, let's go!"

"Wait!" I said. "First I need to find Jack."

At the sound of the name Nick's head returned, his lip curled. "Jack Anodyne?"

"Yes." I paused. "Why?"

"Let me guess," Nick smirked. "You got left behind?"

My silence was interpreted again as admission.

"Get used to it. Jack doesn't care about anyone but himself. Now, K Road." He rubbed his hands.

The boy was always onto whatever was next. Listening to him bubble up with excitement gave his stories the sense that things were always really happening. And I was ready to believe in something, so I followed eagerly in his wake with eyes open, taking in as much as I could. And it was decided. It was done. I was going to K Road.

back

Eleven. Next

Sitting on a giant hill that rose up from the harbour, K Road was the top of the bottom of town. It used to be a high-end shopping district, but as the rest of the world hitched its wagon to the big development boom that followed the Second World War, K Road, in all its self-important isolation, sank the opposite way. Motorway projects bulldozed the area and shoved out its inhabitants, leaving nothing but abandoned storefronts. Then as it always goes in places that get left behind, there came the drug stores, mafia fronts and sex shops. There had been a concerted effort to take back the neighborhood after all the other parts of town got too expensive. But nothing lasts like the red light district.

By day and without the wig, Karma was known solely by the name his mother gave him, Nick. He lived on K Road in an old department store with wooden floors and a thousand doors. I stood lost on the grand staircase spiraling up the building when the door marked with the letter K flew open and Nick strode out. He drew me into his apartment with his arm draped around my shoulder, and a cigarette dangling from his lips.

"What took so long? I've been drinking for ages!" Nick shoved a dirty glass of white wine into my hands. "But what does it matter? You're here now! Let me show you around!"

The place was rather small, but that didn't stop Nick from pulling out all the stops of a grand tour. "This is the living room," he said, which we had been standing in ever since he opened the door. Behind the still bouncing cigarette Nick noted how the low beige walls tastefully matched the cigarette burns on faded carpet, and the kitchen swept up into a closet.

"And this is my room," Nick said as the door thumped against the foot of the bed. The room was all bed and dresser – which not a bad allegory for Nick's life at large. He was either fabulous or fast asleep and never in between.

"I can't wait for tonight," he said, plopping down onto the ground and reaching for a magazine. After a few moments of flipping he gasped and flipped the page. "Class A have come out with new stuff. We have to try it."

"What's that?"

"Legal narcotics." Nick sucked at a cigarette. "You get them at dairies. Next to the milk." Then it was as if the channel in his head changed again. "Now there's a premiere tonight and we have tickets. You are going to look fabulous."

Nick opened a giant white pad and thumbed through loose sheets until his eyes doubled in size. He grabbed at the paper and held it to my face. "It's perfect!" Nick spun towards the closet. He turned back on his heel, a giant pipe clenched between his teeth.

Piles of clothes sprouted up in the hallway and spilled out from the closets in towering heaps as Nick fussed around the edges, pulling this and straightening that, bobby pins pointing outwards from his lips, one shoulder forever shaking in unbroken time with his hips.

He threw open the hallway closet and mounds of tulle and lace exploded forth like hungry tongues. There were corsets in black, and silver, and mauve, with plastic lining and lace-up backs, or fastenings, or spaghetti straps, tossed in a pile over stockings with runs and fishnets.

Given the humble size of the place, a striking amount of things got lost. A naked mannequin was on the floor, the cords of multiple straighteners wrapped around a nearby but dismembered arm.

"Chlamydia, you selfish vixen!" Nick roared. "If you do that one more time you get the closet." The channel in his head changed again. "We are going to have so much fun tonight," he promised.

To be drawn into Nick's world was like being sucked into the eye of a hurricane. The only hope you could have was to hold still, shut your eyes, let him do what he wanted and pray you were still alive at the end.

In the mirror it was like staring into the eyes of a stranger, but I thought, what the hell. Nick turned lazily between drags from his cigarette and gasped. "You look like an angel!" He ran for my camera.

"There's not very much light," I insisted. Nothing more than formless shapes in a clouded haze. Outside with the unsteady light from one blank white bulb, he peered through the lens with one eye, awkwardly jamming the other shut, sticking encrusted silver eye shadow to mascara and lashes. A manicured finger decisively slid across the camera, and the shutter snapped shut.

There were deep swigs of beer and deep breaths of air as we savored the quiet before the long night spell. Then we clicked our heels out the back door and headed towards K Road, where a shop glowed orange on the corner.

"Karma Chaos!" The clerk insisted when Nick pushed open the metal door.

"Do you have any of the new stuff?" Nick asked.

I stared at the endless rows of packets and plastic bottles under the glass counter.

"How about this one?" The clerk slid out a lime green pack. "It's our bestseller."

"I want the new one," Nick said. "And don't try to sell me any different."

"You sure you don't want to try these?" Nick's lids grew heavy with intolerance as the clerk held up a bottle. "Twice the pills and half the price."

Nick waved them away. "Those make me vomit."

I gazed around the shop in shock. "How long has this been around?"

The clerk didn't seem to understand my surprise. He scrunched up his nose. "A few years?"

"Diamonds and Chargers and Ice, oh my!" I held up the package. On the back the package said Extreme twisted nights. Drink fruit juice. "These are like Freedom?"

The clerk gave a short laugh. "I wouldn't exactly go that far."

I flicked a packet. "What do they do?"

"Don't worry." Nick fanned himself with his twenty. "The whole road will be on them."

A giant broken clock that towered over the street glowed even though it had lost the time. Fire engine screams cut through the air and the tar sizzled with the enamel glaze of rain.

As we approached the first bar I felt a steady uncertainty – like a nervous itch ready to leap into a sprint.

"Those pills we took," I began, rolling my shoulder to shake the effect off. "What are they supposed to do exactly?"

"Who knows?" Nick laughed. "That's part of the fun."

"You don't have a favorite?"

"It's different." Nick shrugged. "That's all that matters."

Once the sun set, a new world slunk out of the buildings. Poets and do-nothings smoked with anarchists and trannies. Everyone came. Here the ground was level again – on K Road everyone was the same.

Black coats and cowboy hats swigged beer from the awnings that jutted over the rogue cabs that crawled on the pavement. A pair of baby-faced cops stood on the corner, looking lost and out of place.

Nick's striding figure carved through the chilled air, his collared shirt billowing in the breeze. "Those incompetent cops," Nick snorted. "They never spend their time doing anything important." Then the channel changed again.

A wave warbled through my body. "What's the plan?"

Nick was swaying to the guitarist in the street. "Who knows? Go there, get drunk, and see what happens."

We headed for the churning carousel that exploded, sucked and grabbed at every creature that passed by the first bar. Nick kissed and grabbed at the air and introduced me with a wave as his American. A glistening set of teeth laughed like we were old friends and reached in for all the pleasantries of a hug with none of the contact. "A pleasure, darling!"

"I like your dress," I remarked. "It's very postmodern."

"Never heard of it!" she yelled over the music. "But I got this at the mall!"

It took about an hour to make it to the back, but once we were there Nick was ready. He planted himself in the courtyard on a white plastic chair.

"At last," he affirmed between strikes of the lighter. "I have everything I need." His trusted supplies – a tall golden drink and a steady stream of smoking things – were stocked on his left. He wouldn't move for hours.

"I cut my hand the other night." Nick lifted his palm to reveal a red ribbon line. "The bar girl kept saying, 'Oh my God, do you need to go to the hospital?'" He shook his head. "I told her, honey – if I slit my throat I'd still be on K Road."

I nodded at a gorilla as nuns in fishnets skipped past. And I had become some kind of American princess. One word out my mouth and everyone wanted to touch my hair and hear what I had to say. At one point I found another American and had been talking for only a minute when I noticed two boys I had never seen before staring.

"It's like being inside a television show," one said to the other in a reverent hush.

"You're so far from home," the other said cautiously. "Do you miss it?"

"Hell no!" I cried. "This place is amazing."

The boy reacted as if she had been slapped. "This old thing? Compared to New York?" I nodded, adding that New York can be a very gray place.

"I want to be in New York!" The first cried. "Where they make all the movies!"

I let out a gasp. Their home was so beautiful... but no one could see.

I wanted to howl at them, "You fools! The people in New York would give ANYTHING to live like you are now. Do not be loathe to leave the paradise you have. And pry all those filters off your eyes, that tell you that this place is boring or dull or stupid or ugly or not special." But it was not enough. There was something in New York that called to them.

"Anything is possible in America, eh?" his friend purred. "It's pretty big."

America! To them the word was magic. But I knew the secret of their heavens. I had seen the bad side of the stars. At its worst, New York is THE worst, I tried to tell them. New York with all its speed and crowds – people banging up against one another in fantastic amounts, all of them directionless, harried and lost. But I was the only one who had been there. To them the city was a beautiful dream. I was the only one could see.

"What do you do in New York?" I admitted, mostly read. His face fell. "The last thing I read was probably in grade school."

Such things used to appall me. But now it seemed like it didn't really matter. This was so much better than a place where people recited Hemingway to each other. All that energy I had saved for crying over the Romantics was now pumped into the world, the NOW. There were no divisions here, only THE NIGHT! "How is your night?"

It was as if K Road, this backwards little nowhere, was the only place that really got it. The crowd, the grins, the gods and sinners, the tortured visions of philosopher kings... I felt something undeniable in the whole thing. It was as if everyone had just turned to one another and said, "You know, competition isn't going to lead us to salvation." And so life was no longer about staying in your one box room in a stacked box building within the greater city box. We had all found a better game.

We bantered and caused nonsense and spun our mythologies in the shadows, and out from the morass seemed to appear a common thread, as if from all the separate weaving of our tales there came a fabric, sinuous as silk, which threaded us together under the fallen night sky.

But Jack, where was Jack... the last few days had been the longest stretch that I had gone without seeing him since we met.

Outside people were spilling everywhere. Glittered faces towered in crowns exploding with feathers and golden beads. A cluster of kings in deep purple robes shifted and swayed. The streets were filled with chaos and boxes and coins and blood and strangers becoming best friends and then fading away again. Anarchists mingled with poets, debutantes and drag queens. Nobodies were celebrities and celebrities were nobodies. Everyone stayed on the move.

I was about to head back inside when a familiar name boomed from the heavens.

"Jack Anodyne!" Morgan swayed on the rooftops. "I thought that was you!"

"Throw down your bottle!" Jack called from the ground. Just like that, there he was again.

Morgan shook his head, swinging his dreadlocks under a cowboy hat. "Come up for a drink!"

Jack found a ladder and we climbed to the torn velvet couch on the awning that came out just under the windows of an apartment. I had a beer, Jack had a cigarette. We took a seat, touched beer to cigarette and switched.

"This is the way to be out here," Jack insisted. "Not crawling with cabs all over the pavement." I gazed up in rapture at wide open blackness and smiled at the dusty clouds of stars spread across the sky. The stars had come back! Where I once saw only constellations, few and far between, keeping to themselves in a large and empty black sky, there were now smears of stars in an endless game of play.

"Why is the world such a lonely place on the other side?" I asked Orion as he did cartwheels in the sky.

"It's lonely in America?" Jack cried.

"Something makes everyone lonely," I insisted. "All together and all at once."

There we were, two darkened figures, burning embers the only source of light. Jack stood in the blackness and whipping wind, striking a flint under creased eyes. The burning embers shone across his dark silhouette. The sky slowly turned back to that sweet light blue as we sat folded on the couch, heads leaning, watching light break across the water.

This is what it feels like to reach the center of the world, I thought as we stared out at the fading night. And know you have to come back out again.

back

Twelve. Home

After that I didn't really go to class and Jack didn't really go to work. And then the next day, and then the next. Together we headed out at breakneck speed for the west.

The car screeched to a halt against the lip of the black dunes and I stumbled out sick.

"You may have to vomit," Jack warned. "I can have that effect on people."

We stared at the warning sign at the entrance. Collapsing dunes. Falling rocks. Strong riptides.

"All right!" I cried. "This beach has it all!"

A sheep tethered to a wooden stake chewed in plaintive contemplation as we hauled two long boards out from a shack and waxed them on the grass.

"Just look out for sharks," Jack warned. "But don't be afraid. Just bop 'em on the nose, they'll go away."

I didn't quite know what to say. "I... don't want to bop a shark on the nose," I managed.

Jack waved a hand. "Oh, they'll probably never get close enough anyway. The dolphins are usually good at keeping them away. Why so surprised?" He smiled when he saw my face. "You think humans are the only ones who like to surf waves?"

But I was starting to get it. It made sense when you finally caught a wave. At the right moment you throw your weight and drive one arm deep into the water, turning on one axis, until you're facing the sand and paddling like hell waiting for the roar of a wave cresting behind you. Then if your arms push hard, and you keep going faster and faster, even when it seems like there's no hope, out of nowhere it hooks you, and the board lifts, and you feel your heart lift right along with it, and you sail majestically out over the water.

Your heart soars, it leaps into the sky. It's love! There's magic in it. You're carried up onto the crest and into the mercy of something far bigger than your own soul, and it's chosen you, you're a part of it, just like you're a part of everything and we walk through life in sole shoes like something separate but we're wrong. There's something bigger pulling us along.

Nearby a tanned boy bobbed on a short board. Together we sat up on our boards and slapped at the water and called out for waves. And in between he told me all about his life. In the afternoons, he worked in his father's orchard, and in the mornings he was the first person in the world to greet the sun, bobbing out on the sea.

"There's only one problem," I said, "with living in such a gorgeous place. Where do you go after a place like this?"

The boy looked at me blankly. "After?" The word dripped out thick and slow.

"Sure, you're still in high school, right? Aren't you going to college, or off to work?"

The boy stretched and lay back across his board. "I figure I'll just stay here. Hang out."

"Don't you want to see other places?"

"Are you kidding? I live in paradise," he declared. "Why would you ever leave?"

I stared at him. "You're eighteen." He didn't care. "You don't even want to see the city?"

"I hate that place," he spat. "The people living there are nothing but pretenders."

I took a long look at this curious creature as he left. He turned with a strong arm and cruised back towards the waves, a gorgeous young thing never to desire anything beyond picking apples in his father's orchard and living on the sea.

His words rang in my head as I turned back to the sea. The water stretched out in an unending horizon of serenity. Every now and then the black riptide pulled me across the beach and I would have to paddle long and steady to get back to where I wanted to be.

What makes a surfer? Not just the skill of standing on swells, or the dream glide on an enchanted sea. Perhaps it's the moment when the wave hurtles those souls back to that place from whence they came. Surfers smile, turn around and paddle back out again.

But that was the most beautiful moment to me. Now in calm waters, and knowing the strength it would take to get back, but turning around and doing it again anyway until sunset filled the sky with blood and cotton candy.

"What do you feel like making for dinner?" Jack asked.

"I'm afraid I can't help you there," I cheerfully replied. "I can't cook."

Jack froze as if he had been slapped. "What do you mean, can't cook?"

I meant that I had never been taught, that I had been driven out of the kitchen every time I tried by an angry mother who told me that I ruined everything I touched.

"Trust me, I can't."

"I hate that word, can't." Jack spat the word like venom. "Anyone can cook. And tonight, you will." He dragged me to the markets of cheap and exotic things and gathered a pile of vegetables in his arms. Then, as if the thought had just overtaken him, he turned on his heel and added olives, sun dried tomatoes, feta and a fine Merlot. His card declined and he used another.

As I prepared dinner, he kept watch over my shoulder, removing half the water from the rice, turning down the heat on the meat and taking off the vegetables just as they turned bright. Afterwards as we crunched down on hard noodles and bland food he said it was delicious and insisted that I had done it all by myself.

I gave him an incredulous look. "It's barely edible. And without you, I would have ruined everything."

Jack shook his head. "Nonsense."

We fell into a new routine, and I quite liked it. I would prepare dinner, while Jack looked over my shoulder and adjusted anything that needed to be fixed.

"You're me," Jack said, "if I was an American girl from the Midwest."

"And you me," I replied, "if I was a boy on an island. Maybe fate brought us together." I smiled.

Jack shook his head. "There is no fate."

"What, everything is chaos?"

"Not necessarily," Jack said. "Everything matters – just not in how you think."

"I guess if people don't believe in God they have to believe in something." I looked at Jack. "What do you believe?"

"That we have a responsibility to each other as humans," Jack said. "That we're all on this ball together."

How did he do it? How did everything he say come from some place that sounded like I was remembering it, rather than hearing it for the first time?

We used to conjure up reasons to spend nights together. Now, we didn't even bother. If we felt no reason to do anything we did nothing. We would forget what day it was and roam around the city trying to guess. We would lock arms and stride in step at the south city markets. We picked strawberries and listened to life stories at fruit stalls. And got drunk in small pubs with millionaires and mailmen.

We spun from beach to beach, and swam in lakes and lagoons. We rode bikes on islands and slept under the moon. We climbed volcanoes and napped under sunken statues. The radio was broken so I sang us songs. We rolled our hands out the windows past rows of chopped lawns. We wandered through the parks and licked ice cream on the lips of fountains. When the car overheated, Jack showed me how to fix it. Then he taught me how to drive manual on a deserted country road in the rain. We had big nights in where we ran from policemen. He taught me how to roll cigarettes in a single flick.

Everything either made us collectively happy or collectively furious. And I was greater by his side. He didn't know his father any more than I knew mine, but I knew that somewhere within the tangled vines, raging seas and open, spacious grassy fields, we would arrive at something.

We traveled to towns where dolphins were known by name, and to towns with too many dolphins to ever know. We collected stars in the countryside and rode surf breaks with the tribe. We swigged wine on hilltops and slept in vineyards at night. We helped fisherman pull their catches in from the sea. And swam in the phosphorous swirling lime green. We climbed mountains and found the bridge that led to heaven. The good was the wild and sacred again.

What had I done to deserve such a friend? Someone that would skip by my side and fix all my flaws? The thought of returning to class when I had such a ready guide to life at my disposal seemed ridiculous. Jack was my missing piece, my guru, my guide from the Orient. He was an angel who dealt directly with things while the rest of us were stuck in senses. I felt like I could learn everything in the world running at his side. And he let me.

When Jack asked, "What do you want to see now?" I cried, "EVERYTHING!"

And when I asked, "Where are we going?" Jack howled, "CRAZY!"

I wondered what had happened to his family.

That night there was a party. Of course. Dark liquors flowed onto lips, stained carpets. In theory it was for my birthday. In practice it was just another night.

Past Jack's third cigarette and swinging chairs between our legs and my breath, whispering in Jack's ear, "I don't know anyone here!" and Jack throwing back his head in a laugh, Jack and I talked about everything. We talked about God and nature and I told him about how divine revelation had replaced Enlightenment in the American countryside. I told Jack about the soul of Afrobeat and Jack explained the natural Georgian dynamics of cities. About republics versus colonies, environmental versus resource engineering, arts degrees, New York, Los Angeles, and escaping death on mountain peaks. And Jack talked about labor politics and I Republican sex and Democratic violence. We lamented the disappearance of the femme fatale, and agreed on self-reliance. And I told Jack how half the country clamored for peace while the other wanted an all-out war, frozen in fear and frantic to follow some blank abstract blueprint from fifty years back. And Jack ran up the trees and told me about the lava bombs and lagoons that came from the volcanoes under the city. And I told Jack how I loved to read Hegel, but not in the subway – for the subway Shakespeare was better, for rapping along with the train rail jingle. And I told him how nobody sang Black Betty like Leadbelly, and how Francis Bacon's painting begged to be touched.

And Jack told me all of the things he had been. He had been a snowboarder, a bartender, an assistant to a mafia head. He had done a little bit of everything.

I figured if half of the things he was saying were true, then he would still be out there, jumping and running and swiping and doing all the things he talked about, instead of spinning a yarn for a girl from a strange and faraway land.

Even if they were just Cretan lies I found him wonderful and exciting nonetheless. Who cares if they were just stories? When someone moves with that kind of magic they can get away with whatever they want. It was such a beautiful and reassuring place to be. It was as if Jack made the city have some sense by always having a reason for how everything fit with everything else.

Past fingers pawing, skimming through lists of irritating songs, none of which we wanted to sing, as we sat on the couch, legs in tangles, splitting our last beer–

"Addison and Anodyne," Morgan drawled even though Jack had disappeared. By his side Adam was dressed as a giant bear. "I see the circus has come to town."

I glanced around. "Jack's not here."

"I'm sure he's not far," Ben laughed. "Wherever Addison is, Anodyne's never far behind."

"That guy is such a cad!" Adam howled. "How does he do it?"

"I'm more impressed by the fact that they let themselves out in the morning." Morgan said, giving me the eye. "What a lucky guy."

My ears burned hot even though I told myself I didn't care what they said. I was the only one who had seen his hidden depths – the political dreams, how he picked up trash as he walked down the street, the quiet work he had done bringing water to remote Pacific island villages. His faith that one small person could do so much good was like a white light bouncing around in an ordinary day's darkness.

But I was the only one who saw. It broke my heart that no one bothered to ask Jack about all the great things he's done, or his dreams. They all just wanted to cut him down into little slices, one dig at a time.

"We're just friends." Jack promised Shelley, throwing an arm around my neck. He was always half a step ahead. Shelley was one of his favorites.

"Out of all the girls I have ever known," Jack confessed, "you are the only one I haven't slept with."

I wasn't quite sure why I was privy to all this.

After that it all went downhill rather fast. When I regained consciousness I found myself violently ill and unable to move off the floor.

"I'm sorry," I moaned ad nauseam, my arms curled around the wastebasket. Jack stepped gingerly over me and I felt my limbs lift off the floor. When I opened my eyes I was on the couch in front of a blue plate with beans and toast.

"Eat, eat," Jack nudged from behind an apron as he meandered back to the kitchen. I sniffed at the food. "I'm not sure if I'm hungry," I called out over my shoulder before finishing it in two minutes flat. I managed to mumble a thank you before sinking back into the clouds of dust.

* * *

"I think I'm going to start calling you the growth on the couch," Stu called, passing in the daylight.

A pale hand flopped over the edge of the other couch moaned. Signs of life! I rolled onto my stomach and gripped the armrest, slowly pulling myself up. The hand did the same. My peering eyes met Nick's. We collapsed into laughter. "We're so easy to entertain," Nick said, in a tone that was both celebration and lament.

His eyes turned towards the TV. "It's so tragic." He frowned at the pop star writhing on the screen. "We could do better." Then his eyes rose. "We can do better!" He grabbed my arm. "The drag competition next month! You can be my backup guitarist!"

"I haven't played in years," I stammered.

"Doesn't matter. You can fake it, and no one is going to know the difference." He rose, his eyes glassy with the promise of a new challenge. "We are going to get on that stage and blow them out of the water!"

My gaze drifted to the vase on the table. "Didn't there used to be a fish there?"

Nick's eyes never left the television. "Yeah I don't know what happened to him."

"I can't believe it's Wednesday already. It feels like the weekend has just passed."

Then Nick turned, his eyes sad. "But to think when you leave it's all going to end."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "There's no way I'm not coming back."

"You know, everyone says that," Nick said softly. "And I believe you. I believe you," he stressed. He shook his head sad and slow. "But no one ever comes back."

back

Thirteen. The Show

Becoming the finest drag queen on K Road – the finest, since Nick settled for no less – was a very delicate thirteen-step process. The magazines were research, shopping too – then there were drawing boards, a final five outfits, cutting and styling the wig, and a test run on the mannequin. Two hours of hair, ninety minutes of make-up, three hours of assembly and seventy-five minutes of pacing later, with the addition of a black hat, silver diamond-encrusted jewelry, knee-high boots and a long blonde wig, standing, moving and certain ways of sitting all became near physical impossibilities but it didn't matter, because the moment he stepped out on that street the world was under his knee high heel.

Out of the thirteen steps, at any given moment, Nick would be doing seven. Behind the mirror voices growled from the television. "New reports reveal that pills seized on K Road have been found to contain traces of illegal substances. Other reports," the chief constable growled, "that now tell us that the drugs currently legal are ten times as strong as black market amphetamines. Make no mistake," – the camera cut to footage of kids skipping across rooftops on K Road – "the ones behind this are dark, immoral men who have no interest in anything other than profit."

"And we love them for it!" Karma turned to the mirror and began pouring deep red all over her lips in wild circles. Her eyes blazed into his own reflection with deep focus.

"Just think..." She gazed in admiration at her reflection. "Next I'll have to come over and do this with you in New York!"

"New York!" Chi Chi turned abruptly in her stool. "What are you doing HERE?"

"Everything," I told her.

She shook her head. "You must be on something."

"Not yet." Karma held her pill above her head. "For courage." She saluted. And down it went.

An hour later I felt a strong wave of nerves rush over my skin. Bumps appeared on my arms and vanished in flashes. My left leg felt wrong unless it was bouncing and shaking. My arms were constantly cold.

I watched the swell of the chattering crowd as I rocked on my heel, trying to strike a rhythm that would soothe me. I unwound into the plastic white chair, blonde curls spilling out under the pageboy cap, feet rammed into black stiletto boots and a dress short as death, drifting around in the breeze, gazing into the canopy of black that covered the night. Eyes followed me across the bar but it had nothing to do with me. It was as if I was the shell of something else that I didn't quite know how to imitate. I got nervous from all the attention.

Karma stretched her arms out towards the sky. "I am having the most marvelous time!"

Then Karma's voice went soft and the pools of blue in her eyes quivered.

"I haven't told many people this," she said quietly. "But I got a girl pregnant when I was seventeen." She cleared her throat. "I wasn't sure if I was gay... and abortion is illegal in Brunei, so for four months I sat in my room, accepting that this was my life." Her pink fingernails played with the handle on her bag. "Then, out of nowhere – she loses the baby." She stared dead ahead. "And everything was back to normal." Her voice went quiet. "Except for me."

"I couldn't stand to be around anything anymore, so... I moved here. At seventeen. Left my whole family behind." I didn't know what to say. She shook her head. "So. Life as you know it.... Enjoy it while you can. It can all change like that." She snapped her fingers, the press-on nails leaving red marks in her skin. "And it's never coming back."

I tried to play the guitar to calm down and could barely hold the strings.

Chi Chi stared down from her glittering mountain. "Are you almost ready?"

Karma nodded. My head flashed with heat. Still I couldn't stop shaking.

"It's probably just exaggerating how you already feel," Jack advised, drink in hand. When did he come in? "Although I don't understand why you're so nervous. Crowds are one of the easiest things to handle in the world."

"Easier said than done," I insisted, teeth chattering.

Jack hesitated, then signaled for water. "Give me one of those."

"I thought you hated these pills."

"I do," he said as he threw the pill back. "But if you're going to be down, I want to be down too."

On stage Karma had them in the palm of her gloved hand – the crowd danced until they were dead.

Chi Chi howled over the crowd's roar. "Our audience has spoken!"

Karma fanned a hand to her face. "We did it! We did it!" We waded through a dense sea of compliments – "Congratulations!" "I love your dress!" "You look just like my sister!" – before the doors shot open and we spilled out onto the black streets. Karma stumbled forward and fell onto her knees. She leaned forward, as if she were about to kiss the sidewalk, but then decided against it and instead sank back with her arms spread. "I love this city!"

We leapt down the street, now slick and gleaming. Girls in plaid skirts and ripped fishnets tumbled over the street, screaming. Two drag queens sold sausages for a dollar behind a wave of smoke that curled up from their barbecue steam.

At some bar or another, after a few shots too many, or merely too strong, Jack swayed, and then stumbled, until he caught a pillar and slowly sank against it. I staggered towards him, my rhythm no longer quite matching the music.

"Hey you, how you feeling?"

Nick and I spilled back onto the wet night pavement, each dragging Jack along by one arm. At one intersection or another, no one remembers, Jack adamantly groaned and veered right, moaning "Fooooooood," drawing the sound mournfully across the night air. We looked to our right. Jack stretched against our pulling bodies towards a white trailer parked alongside the street, alit with flickering fluorescent. After confirming that yes, Jack did want food, I followed my drunken hero down the hissing sidewalk. Almost immediately after beginning the determined walk towards the counter, he veered and settled instead into the corner of a nearby storefront entrance, his body weight sinking onto the sidewalk.

That was the first time I noticed how profoundly sad Jack looked sometimes, when his eyes were glazed and focused on nothing. The confident, growling, brash young man of 29, eternally proud, affectionate, fierce, extremist in all his emotions, was now, hundreds of kilometers away from the dozens of women he's seduced and throbbing rhythms of the bass music and general frictions of Flat 56. And I was the only one who could see him.

I squatted down next to Jack and passed over a mug of tap water I'd collected from the one chef that understood English. Jack limply held out a hand. I cupped his fingers around the mug.

"Come on, drink-drink. I got you some water." I drew out my Chicago "water," hollowed with nasal "a"s and curt "r"s, which never failed to garner a reaction. Jack shifted into a half-smile and made kissy faces in my general direction, eyes still lidded shut.

"Yeah, I know. Drink the water." Jack leaned his head against me, resting it in the crevice between my shoulder and neck. I wrapped an arm around him. "Ah, Jack."

We sat side by side in silence.

I wanted to stay with Jack here forever, slowly making bad meals and drinking away the days. But like Faust, as soon as I thought about it, there it was, TIME. Leaking back in. Neither of us could stop the gears of the world, or our slow return to the clock rhythm. And like the deadened atmosphere of the carnival in the late afternoon, it was all going to end. I did not know where he fit in the real world, the one that was slowly pouring back into all our minds, the one that called across the sea. I knew Jack didn't know either. I had the awful feeling I would never see him again.

Jack shook his head. "That's not going to happen. I'll find you in New York. What do you graduate? I'll be there for your graduation day."

I told him the coming spring, and he slurred back the date. Then his head fell on my neck. We slept for a while on the sidewalk like that, with me squatting down next to him, until I finally decided to stand. "Come on, cowboy." I held out a hand. "Let's go home."

The sky was shifting to a pale blue. As the sun rose behind the buildings the road faded into an abandoned street, with garbage fluttering in the winds. We side-stepped the blood and walked off into the faded light of the morning.

back

Fourteen. Until

I opened my eyes, bleary, to the piercing light of a new morning. A hung-over morning. Faint light filtered through the window. I could only process thoughts in segments as the night came pounding back with a vengeance. Along with a headache.

Nick sat cross-legged with Stu's yellow trucker hat cocked on his head. "I am not MOVING ever again."

I tumbled towards the bathroom, hitting every wall along the way. A crash erupted from the kitchen. After a long pause came Nick's scraggled voice. "I'm alriiiiight."

The air in Jack's room hung with the distinct comforting scent of too many cigarettes smoked not quite near enough to the window. White beams of daylight streamed from the fluttering curtains. But Jack wasn't there. My credit card was on the floor with a piece of paper wrapped around it.

"Jack left, by the way," Nick said as I unfolded it to find a $140 receipt with my name signed neatly in Jack's handwriting on the bottom. "Emily was dragging him out the door." Nick chortled. "Someone's getting taken care of."

My phone glowed with messages. "Something happened." Something was different. Leslie's voice skipped and bounced with a happy cadence I had never heard from her. Immediately I knew – they had found out about Dan.

"I'm not sure how. But he's not here anymore. The manager showed up with him one night and watched him clear out his stuff and that was it. They said you're expected in the manager's office tomorrow morning to explain what happened."

The following morning I found myself across from a beady-eyed man sitting unimpressed in a brown shirt as boring as his unimportant desk. He shuffled his papers and stared at me over reading glasses before finally letting out a deep sigh.

"So. You abandoned your room. Endangered your flatmates. Put a strange boy in their quarters."

"Dan was a friend from class."

"Did he pay you rent?"

"Certainly not," I said.

"So you let him stay in your room for free." The man tapped a pencil against his knee. "Why would you do that?"

"I wasn't using it. And I had already paid for it. He told me he was staying in some hostel with a homicidal maniac."

"Homicidal maniac."

"He had his suspicions."

"And he never paid you anything." I smiled and rolled a shoulder. "Because Dan said – " he consulted his notes. "Something about a check for five hundred and forty dollars."

"I don't know what you're talking about." That bastard sold me out. Probably in exchange for indemnity. I knew I would never see him again. That deviant hardly ever went to class – what kind of person would do that?

"I'm sure your bank statements would tell a different story. Those records can be confiscated, you know." I didn't know whether or not he was making that up.

"Now, this is a serious breach of housing policy. Grounds for ripping up your contract. You could lose your student visa. That would lead to deportation. However..." He tapped the pencil against his leg. "There is another option." He scribbled a number onto a large white pad and slid it over to me.

I leaned over. One thousand, eight hundred. "What?"

"The exact cost of rent on your room during the time Dan stayed. Return the money and the charges will be dropped. It's up to you, Miss Banks. You can either pay us that money back or get kicked out of the program." He cast a snide look across the desk.

My gaze hardened. "So if I bring you this money, this whole case will be closed."

The pencil nodded. "You have till eleven am tomorrow. Bring cash."

Night fell and I wandered over to Flat 56. Handle inwards, key pointed, angled slightly to the right, click. The door swung open as I balanced grocery bags balanced alongside my hefty black schoolbag.

"If anyone wants to go to a plant store," a voice drifted in from the balcony, "I can assemble everything we would need to make a ridiculous amount of gunpowder."

"Potassium nitrate," Morgan was saying as I stepped through the window. He gazed happily at some abstract point above the metal roofs as Adam stole his cigarette. "I can easily make a kilo."

Adam considered this. "You recognize a kilo is a massive amount of gunpowder, Morgan." Then he flashed a grin. "I thought you said that you couldn't cook, look at you, always preparing dinner on Tuesday night! Tuesday night —the night for dishes."

"Wait – it would be two kilos," Morgan corrected. "The ingredients come in one kilo bags."

Adam's eyes widened. "We could blow up a car! Although," he added, "we'd have to be more careful than last time."

"When have ever not been careful? Hey," Morgan jabbed at Adam with his cane. "Remember that napalm-making session where we got high on petrol?"

"We got very high on petrol," Adam remembered.

"Have either of you seen Jack?" I asked.

"Try the bar downstairs." Adam let out a short snort. "He's more often there than he is home."

I trotted down the stairs two at a time and halted at the pool hall. At the end of the bar a man's forehead was in deep conversation with the wood. Behind the bar the owner tipped the gin bottle back towards his glass.

"Why do you have to sell?" Jack moaned from under his arms.

"I'm starting a family now," A smile overtook the man's face. "Once I get married I'm a new man." He rested his arms on the bar. "You'll understand someday, when you fall in love."

The pile of arms and hair didn't move. "Love is a chemical," it mumbled.

"I thought you were over the bars," I reported, sliding onto the seat next to Jack.

"It is a statistical fact," he slurred, "that ninety percent of what Jack says is bullshit."

"Listening to Adam – that's not like you." I reached for his drink.

A girl sitting next to him with wide eyes and clenched teeth screamed when she heard the accent. "I'm so jealous!" she cried, exuberant. "I would do anything to see New York. But I probably never will. Instead I'm stuck here."

Then her gaze softened. "How old are you?"

Jack said nothing. I told the truth.

"Only twenty! What a doll!" She squeezed my fingers. "I'm getting old." Her eyes rolled upwards, demonstrating an occasionally wrinkled brow. "I hate it." She rubbed her temples. "Soon I'll be twenty-three. I can't believe it."

"I hope I die before I'm 30," the bartender said.

"Things don't have to change." Jack ran his fingers through his hair. "It's all about keeping your worlds separate. For instance, I never let anyone at work know what goes on at Flat 56."

Jack talked on as if nothing was wrong I saw the flip side of Jack not getting affected by anyone. Maybe part of Jack not having to answer to anyone meant that he would never belong to anyone either. Maybe his greatest era, this false start between childhood and the responsibilities of an adult, was coming to a long delayed end, the grinding realities and timetables and consequences, but he was gripping, gripping, not willing to give in and let that glory phase quietly slide. Jack's gaze drifted along the empty hall. It was as if waiting for something while fearing that it may have already passed him by.

"Did you know," he asserted after another beer, "that more of our soldiers were killed during World War II than British?"

I spun some figures in my head. "That can't be right, can it?"

Jack beamed. "Of course it's right!" Jack sat up a bit straighter. "And the Battle of Crete..." Jack listed facts and figures, ticking them upwards on extended fingers – the black sea of German paratroopers falling out of the Greek sky, and the soldiers that fought on after all the big guns and tanks had gone.

Jack began, but then glanced slow around the bar. No one was listening.

"That's a really helpful opinion to have." The bartender laughed. "If anyone bothered to listen."

For once Jack said nothing.

"I used to have ambition," the bartender sympathized, studying Jack's stoic face. "But then reality sort of got in the way." The man's eyes lowered as he nodded in agreement with himself, the words pouring back and forth across the channels between his ears. "You can't just be normal, you can't just want it. You have to be actually good at something."

Jack had new lines around his eyes. "I've been thinking about when you leave. And it's going to be great. It's going to be a new start for me." He nodded easy, as if he were still convincing himself. "Everything is going to get better."

"It may be sooner than you think." I told him what happened and his back snapped. "What? He can't do that to you!" Then he pressed a hand to his chest. "I happen to know the university's Dean of International Affairs over there. A lovely woman. You tell her your story – she'll be on your side. You're not giving him anything."

A week later I sat in the office of someone completely different. "Well, you're either incredibly smart or very, very ignorant."

"What's the difference?" I asked, trying to sound dumb.

The dean sighed. "Short-sighted as your actions may have been," I rose in my chair, "I don't think that this dalliance in freelance accommodation is grounds for removal from the program."

"Thank you sir."

"But there will be discipline in other measures. You are hereby banned from all future dorm activities." Excellent – I could keep up my unblemished track record of not having attended a single one. "And of course, you are ordered to return to the Railway campus until further notice." There were only two weeks left in the semester anyways.

"And you go to school in New York." He examined his paper. "Are you returning there once classes end?"

"I've decided to stay on through the winter, sir."

"I can see you have a lot of spirit. Which is good. But be careful." He looked down a steady nose. "Make sure you don't throw your life away over something stupid."

back

Fifteen. Then

Classes ended in the fragrance of autumn and all the exams passed. The only piece I really cared about was an essay for my Vietnam class.

"How are you, GI Joe?" Vietnam disc jockey Hanoi Hannah asked. "It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war. Nothing is more confusing than to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on."

I moved back into the Railway Campus on Memorial Day, but I don't think anyone who was staying there remembered. I stepped curiously through the wooden and majestic marble lobby that had so impressed me on my arrival.

What I didn't expect was for the dorm to feel so different. It was all now so foreign and distant, much farther packed away in the expanses of my mind than the short few months since I had left. There were no more cheerful hellos. You had chosen your friends. I hadn't been around like I promised.

The skyline was covered in a thick haze of smog, the spire a shapeless purple form in the distance. It made everyone on the road look as if they were stumbling out of a dream. Sleeting rain poured over the city in billowing sheets. All the while the words of the Tokyo Rose drifted through my head. It hurt to think it had all been said in 1967.

I headed over to Flat 56. That night there was a party. Of course. In the back there was a flash of black. Morgan's six foot frame was rocking.

"Stupid bitch," he moaned, holding his head. His bottle was nearly empty.

Adam appeared, all stiff and no neck, his trenchcoat swirling around him. "No one's seen Jack," he said before I could ask.

A stripper with a meth habit and gashes in her face was running round shoving pop top cans of bourbon and coke into all available hands. "It's my birthday!" she cried, wobbling on pin legs. "Everyone is drinking! Everyone is coming to see me dance!"

Adam seemed nervous, as if he were about to do something terrible. His face ticked with a nervous twitch that turned his lip up every second time he talked.

"You must do something other than read stories," he insisted.

"I read philosophy too," I said.

"Philosophy is useless. What is its purpose? It can always be argued back and forth. There's no end. You have a problem and a philosopher waxes about it for centuries." I thought about Descartes. He had a point.

"Now technology – that is effective. I like engineering because it's about solutions. Problems are set, designed and solved."

"It's aspirational," I explained. "Take Plato's Republic." I outlined the basic premise.

He shook his head. "To solve real problems you need engineering – and something I like to call the Smash-Test Principle. Things need to get blown up in order to work later. If everything is going sweet, none of the hidden flaws and vulnerabilities get exposed."

Ben held up a sack filled with white pills. "Why don't you stay awhile?"

"What's that?" I blinked at the bag.

"I ordered them from China. They only cost cents."

"What's in them?" He had to have hundreds.

"How am I supposed to know? I'm not a chemist."

"Haven't your heard? They're banning the pills from stores." Adam sighed. It's the end of an era. Then his lips slid into a smile. "I'm going to make millions!"

"I thought you hated pills."

"I distribute them." Adam drew a box, as if the word was suspended in mid-air. "I certainly don't take any."

"You know, I've been thinking about money," Adam said as a lightning bolt blazed across the sky. "We're socially indoctrinated to think that it's the product of hard work, but it's not. Money isn't about hard work. It's all about getting around the system. It's about opportunity. Fuck, it's about exploitation. My old man slaved away, he vowed, but I won't. I'm getting my own."

"No philosopher is going to save the world," Adam insisted. "Liberal arts degrees are nothing but a bunch of people arguing in armchairs," he scoffed. "It doesn't affect the world. What does an art degree do? How can a book make the world better?"

The thought that he didn't know appalled me. "You'll know when you read the right one."

"You know what the world is about? Survival of the fittest. You take what you can. I learned something about how money works. For every dollar of printed money there are thousands in circulation. The only reason the whole thing hasn't fallen apart is because no one has noticed!" He shook his head. "I've got to set up my own island nation," Adam said slowly, his eyes and lips parting moist, "so I'm safe when everything collapses."

"You can't sell that," I said to Adam.

"Why not? I'm innocent until proven guilty." He considered this for a moment. "And if I'm proven guilty, then I'll lie."

"But it makes people forget."

"What's there to remember? The island is almost destroyed. Kids are running each over in cars. Babies are dying at the hands of their parents. The dolphins are dying too," he sneered. "What's left of them, that is."

"Hey Adam," Morgan said nervously. "Say less, get away with –"

"Oh, that's right," Adam interrupted. "We're not supposed to talk about it. Right? We're not supposed to talk about the killings. We're not supposed to talk about the guns and all the kids who walk into the sea."

"There you are!" Nick said, flipping open a mirror once he saw me. "Where have you been? You missed EVERYTHING."

"But it's only Friday!" Morgan pointed out. "We still have tomorrow."

There was that word again. Tomorrow. But what did it matter? Another day passes. A weekend, a weekday, God knows how many have been – it's really just another day, isn't it.

Adam glared at the tower. "Look at it. They used to light it up at night. The city can't even afford to light one tower anymore." He let out a short laugh. "It's a sign of everything."

Figures half hung out the windows and lingered in the shadows. Voices swirled around, hurried past with streams of feathers and gloves.

"My pill isn't working," one of them said, desperate.

"Just take more. How many more do you want?"

"Three!" The boy called out from across the room. Ben tossed him the bag.

"I wouldn't take that many," Adam warned.

"Are you studying pharmacology in university?" The boy glared up underneath a furrowed brow. "Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." Then he grinned. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." And down it went.

As the pills came up through the overmind eyes rolled into the backs of heads. Tongues poked out from teeth, chests rose and sighed.

"Let's face it." Adam's eyes dropped low. "The world as we know it is coming to an end. I'm talking about the superorganism – how the human race as a species moves. We are nothing but a virus."

One girl sank onto the floor, tears streaking down her face. "It's so pretty," she over and over repeated.

"Your country may be bigger, but no one can escape it. The earth is shaking. The oceans are toxic."

Ben was turning a unique shade of green. He stumbled back and slowly lowered his gangly limb one by one over a bed. "I feel... really nauseous. I feel like I've been poisoned."

Nick clutched my wrist. "Now that you're here, everything feels right again." His eyes closed and his body shuddered. The ride was coming up, strong and hard. 'It's all coming back, it's all coming back, I can feel it." He smiled up at me in a pleasant haze, his body trembling in a warm rush. I had the sad feeling I would never see him again.

"Why do you have to leave?"

"I must return before the fall," I explained.

Nick frowned. "You mean autumn?"

"I want to be in New York!" The girl next to him insisted. "Everything's happening there."

"I hate it here." Adam stood at the balcony, hands gripped. He glared at the volcano in the harbor. "Nothing good will ever come this place. We're not special. We're just BEHIND. Same old everything. No intellectuals – just man against the elements. And the elements are winning. Where does that leave us? We could get blown to bits and no one would even notice."

"I can't remember your name." Someone said to their friend.

"I can't remember your name either." I reminded them.

"At least in America you count for something," Adam insisted. "America may be an enemy of the world, but at least it is a player. We are nothing."

"Help." Ben was alert again. He stood stone cold in the center of Flat 56.

Adam swiveled his head back to Ben "What do you want?"

Ben's eyes didn't move.

Adam reached for his arm. "Do you want some water?"

Ben shook his head.

Morgan reached for him. "He just needs human contact."

Ben stepped back. "NO."

"What do you want then?"

Ben's hands began fluttering in front of his chest. "Four, seven, one one one for the rig, rig, rig-rig-rig-rig..."

"Oh my God." Adam sucked in his breath. "He flipped."

His fingers crawled in air and snapped back at his chest as if ribbons were tied to his wrists. His head jerked and seized this way and that. "Hi. Hi. Hi."

Oh, to be a Savant! The supreme Savant! Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed!

"He needs air," Morgan decided. "Take him for a walk, Adam."

"He can't go outside just looking like that." Chewing at nothing, jaw slack.

Someone found sunglasses and a baseball hat.

Morgan put them on lopsided, then stood back. "I think he could pass for retarded, eh?" Morgan grinned, then frowned, looking at his work.

"I think he'll get arrested, man. I don't know if it's a good idea."

"No, he could totally pass for retarded." Someone else offered up. "'Hey, this is my retarded cousin. He goes with me everywhere.' What's the worst that could happen?"

"He could get arrested and put under observation for seven days."

"Okay, maybe he's not fit for a walk then." Morgan said, disappointedly, taking the sunglasses off. We sat Ben back down. An unfamiliar ringtone sang out across the room. Adam picked it up. "It's his parents." We looked at each other. "Let's not answer that."

"Alcohol. It'll knock him right out." Morgan sprinted to the kitchen.

Nick started to moved towards the balcony, but quickly retreated his steps. "The photo wall!" He grabbed my arm. "Come see photos of all the parties we've thrown."

"Here you go, Ben, drink this... Drink this... Good boy! Damn, man, you just downed four double shots! Well done, mate!"

Five minutes later vomit trickled down his face.

"It was worth it." Ben mumbled.

Adam burst out laughing. "Oh, you think so? Well, I'm glad you're having a good time in there, wherever you are."

Someone escorted Ben out the door.

"Jesus. That set me back." Adam collapsed, exhausted. "I could really use some methylone right now."

I found myself with Nick in front of the world's biggest collage. It stretched across three brown boards. Photos stacked on top of one another with coloured pushpins and the occasional noise control notice. Nick blew smoke rings around his favorite shots, most of which consisted of him in fabulous outfits. There were lingerie shots, rock star poses, cartoon parties, pirate parties, burlesque shows. "And here's Sanj, and Karl..." and a million other people I didn't know... "and here's Jack's son..." Then Nick stopped abrupt.

I turned my head to face him slow. "Jack has a son?" I looked back at the photo. He must have been at least eight. I couldn't imagine Jack having a son, let alone a fully grown child.

"Don't tell him I told you," Nick begged. "He may not want you to know."

I crossed my arms. "Why?" Nick merely shrugged. "Huh. Isn't that guy just full of surprises."

"You don't even know the half of it." Then Nick laughed. "But then again, neither do I. That's what makes him such a fun guy."

I wondered what it would be like to have a father like Jack. Maybe his son would grow up to be a businessman, the most conservative person on the block, always running from his past just like his old man.

"He'll be one of these kids that lashes out and kills their parents," Adam insisted. "We are betting on it. Seriously. We have a pool going – 'At which age is this kid going to lash out and kill Jack?'" We have another pool going too – 'At which age is he going to be institutionalized." I turned to the door, tears streaming from my eyes.

The girl at the door gasped. "Don't be sad, angel."

"I'm no one's angel," I bitterly said.

back

part three

the fall

Sixteen. Taken Away

I was a dot. A dot in the middle of a giant abyss. Sprinklers shot glistening light over the neon toys scattered in the grass. Flags billowed softly from clean white porches. Nothing was significant. Nothing connected. And I was invisible again.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Ainsleigh was even back again. She had fallen in love, gotten pregnant, married and divorced – all within eighteen months. And I thought I had a big year. That night at dinner we stared across the bowls and breads, daring each other to speak.

"So Add," my father said. I stared at my food. "Tell us about class."

I made up a few things.

"Ainsleigh." I volleyed the attention over to her. "What are your plans?" She shot me a look.

"Addison," she smiled sweetly back. "Tell us more about class."

"Now, before we eat." My mother opened a Bible. "I would like everyone to select a passage that reflects something they are thankful for."

My father started, citing work and a strong family.

Ainsleigh shooed at the Bible. "No passage for me."

My father sighed. "Just say something."

"It would be disrespectful to read from a book I don't believe in."

"Read it anyways," my mother said.

"I won't."

"You have to believe in SOMETHING." My father burst. "Use it to think about SOMETHING."

I told them nothing about the island. It's not like it was without reason. How could I explain it? I was very aware that on the whole it sounded rather bad, but there was something important under the surface. Or at least I was certain there was, if only I could find it.

I just wanted to dream and be back again. But how could I? Go back to New York? What then? Go back to the same dead ways, the same solemn lines? Returning to that place would feel like ripping an arm off, or going back in time. If I abandoned the island, what then? What awaits us in the rest?

I headed to my room to see what was left. There were stacks of clothing still dirty, rumpled and smelling of the beach. Neglected sheets of paper fluttered helplessly in the breeze. I stood in the center of the room and felt nothing. I was free. Yet all I wanted was to be on the island again.

Surely New York didn't have kids like that. Then again... maybe I could find them. I was sure they were out there somewhere, if I looked for it with eyes open. It's all out there. You just have to be willing to find it. America, where anything is possible. I was ready to return to the battle.

I packed up my one bag and hugged Ainsleigh goodbye at the station. I forgot to buy a flight so I was boarding a train instead. I turned my collar up at the station and headed off back east.

The slough shakes off your life if you're gone a long time. The incidental friends have forgotten who you are. The excess falls away. And all that's left is the purest parts of your soul, because no stale routines stick to a rolling stone. I always liked that about travel.

The New York summer was ending and yielding those last few days of bright sun where anything seems possible. As the cab ripped up the side of the road, I stared at the buildings as they flashed by. It was as if the city had a new shine, dripping rich under the reddening sky. That's the magic about New York – it can turn another surface to you every time.

On campus I gazed at the bright floods of eager faces gripping worn copies of The Iliad, and for the first time I didn't feel like knew more than them. And how my heart swelled, when I passed that tree, and caught my first glimpse of the library! It was like the city of bright green fantasy that I had seen on my first eager visit.

The whole campus looked clean and new. I felt an ambitious itch for the books and was ready to work.

The only thing that felt wrong was that Katrina had left while I was gone. New York had finally done it. She had fled for the west. I wondered if she would ever come back.

My room was above a Broadway deli on the outskirts of campus. Everything was clean and sterile – the kind of unnatural tidiness that acquaints strangers with the bitter idea of living with one another. It was the land of forgotten students, the fringe deposits of campus for those with no links to the past. I wandered through the lonely long white halls chewing meditatively on a raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese. It felt like I was resting up for something big.

One little afternoon I headed down to the park and sat by the lake with floating petals and willows weeping on the bank. The breeze swept warm through the air, carrying hints of hot dogs and pretzels from the carts and happy sticky fingers near the castle.

I decided to ditch the subway and walk instead under the soft pink sky of the late summer afternoon. Golden scents danced over the turning leaves. The red brick on campus glowed in the summer heat. The island was far off and like a dream. I had the uncanny sense everything was around the corner.

It was around such a corner that evening that I found Alex. We wrapped arms round each other and tumbled out into the wet black night, looking for something to take over.

"How about the West End?" Alex suggested.

I shook my head. "I don't go there on principle." It had a certain amount of notoriety in the Fifties for being the drinking hangout of the school's artistic elite. Now it ran on the fumes of that reputation and the dollars of drunk first years who didn't know any better.

We sat in the amber glow of a little pub on 105th where fat blue collar bellies hung over bar stools with baseball caps and stubble. I liked its sailor atmosphere. Alex liked it because they didn't card and tequila shots came with a beer chaser for only a dollar. The beer tasted like corn. But that could be cured with another tequila. Which needs some washing down. And so on the carousel spun.

"Here's to real weapons of mass destruction." Alex pounded another empty tequila glass onto the bar.

The beer was foul and made my mouth sour, but appealing taste isn't really the point, so I drink and, but I'm all right, I tell myself, and get through the ordeal one swallow at a time.

Alex stared at the coverage on television with disaffection. "Remember how teachers used to say to you in grade school, 'You could be the President of the United States?' It was supposed to inspire you, make you study harder. But somewhere along the line you realize that would actually be a terrible job."

"Any job is, compared to solving the great Herodotus mystery," I smiled at Alex. It had been his project since he was seventeen.

"No time for that now. I'm working a hundred hours a week."

"On Wall Street?" I guessed.

"Nowhere else worth going."

"You know," Alex mused as he refilled our our glasses, "when I got into this school... I thought, 'This is it. I'm going to be surrounded by only interesting people for the rest of my life.' Then I got here, and realized... the world isn't like that. It's a capitalist's world and we're living in it."

Turns out after hating college, Alex had graduated a year early and wrote the great American novel, dreamt of raising dogs on a farm, Labradors, enormous and husky with white fur – but then, suddenly, stopped. Now a year on, Alex was an up-and-comer.

"I'm a glorified secretary," he bemoaned, still dressed sharp, and the waitresses were being particularly attentive to our table, particularly attentive to the suit, their gaze lingering on its turns. I sat on the other side of the table, a fork twirling between my fingers.

"I got to bed at ten every night, so that I can get up at five, to be at work by six, and it is the most boring thing I've ever done." Alex tugged at his collar. "I'm going to have to get a haircut too."

I stared in sorrow at my fallen comrade. "Et tu, Brutus?"

"I just want to not have to worry about money." Alex sighed. "Is that so bad?"

"There are other ways to make money."

Alex shook his head. "I have to. If China asks for its money back, we're screwed." His nails tore at the label on his beer. "At least it keeps people from asking me what I'm going to do."

He was all right with his life, until he saw me, breathing heavy and chirping about the wildness of that fantasy world across the ocean. Alex's eyes glazed over as he stared vacantly out the window, exhausted by the wide gulf between that world and his own, and his inability to reach it.

It was as if all my life I had been carefully setting up the outlines of who I am or what I do – and it was always contingent on past events and future plans. I had spent years bouncing between the past and the future – reading old books, planning out my next steps – and for the first time I was feeling the rhythm of the present.

I asked him why he had enslaved himself to such a miserable lifestyle – his words, not mine – and he replied, near tears in his eyes, "I have to."

It didn't have to be like this! Life was no longer about staying in your one box room in that big box city in the greater globe box, all plugged into one tidy massive grid of purpose and distribution. Everyone had traded a portion of their possibilities for security – just like Freud said.

I gave Alex a sideways glance. "What if you didn't have to be practical? What if you could major in anything?"

Alex leaned back and sighed. "Music, poetry and philosophy." He smiled. "Can you imagine any subjects more pure?"

"Poets are liars," I replied. A hundred years ago Coleridge pledged we were on the verge of a millennium of Enlightenment. "Even Aristotle said so."

I watched him gaze at the empty bottle in sorrow and wondered how many others were out there like him, growing stale in quiet desperation, playing along with the system only because they couldn't think of anything better to do.

"This stuff can't last," Alex agreed. "No one else is going to look out for you." He reached for the bottle of champagne with a smile. "At least I have this."

I imagined him with his hair cropped, shaking hands and stole drags from his cigarette.

"You know, I never would have pegged you as someone who smokes."

"I don't," I replied. "But I'll smoke with you."

Perhaps that old path is the right track, perhaps I'm in the process of falling off the face of the planet, but if so, I couldn't be happier. There is no way you could have dragged me kicking and screaming back to that world. It did mean I was now more or less alone. But what did it matter? I was on a hunt for the solo.

The clock was now eking on three am, and I was hungry and drunk, and Alex was complaining about some girl he had been hitting on all night, declaring, "She won't crack! You can't get in there!" I decided I was officially bored when his arm slid around my shoulder, and I stepped up to go home.

On my way to the door I caught sight of a boy with his top hat tipped low slouched in a corner. Next to him sat a girl in a red dress, her satin gloves caressing a cigarette. In the other hand a green bottle tipped towards her glass.

"Last one to finish this shot," she said, "has to cover my next shift."

The boy shook his head. Thick black curls tumbled round his forehead and hung over his ears. There was something familiar about him, like I had known him for years.

"It's only a matter of time." The girl threw her head back and slammed the glass down on the counter. "You may as well give in now." She slid a shot towards him. "Six in the morning isn't that far off from four, you know."

"There is one very large difference – the sun." The shot slid back. Then the boy rolled his eyes upwards slow, and the way he did it made you believe there was nothing in the world that couldn't be taken in the same languid way. Where did I know those eyes? Maybe it was from the part of you that exists outside of time and already knows about the years spent asleep by his side.

"I'm Addison." I stuck out my hand.

The girl looked me up and down. "I've seen you before," she slowly said. She didn't look familiar at all. I would have remembered the screaming red eyeshadow or the colossal mountain of hair. I told her I didn't think so and her face settled in concentration. She snapped her fingers. "Last year! I found you passed out in our bathtub at a party."

Had I? Was this true? The boy nodded his head. "You were wearing rainbow toe socks." Oh yes the socks. Now I remember.

The girl held her arm next to mine. "You're so tan." She grabbed the boy's arm. "I'm tanner than you, Pete." Then she turned her attention back to me. "Where have you been?"

"I've been on an island," I said.

Pete hesitated. "An island?"

"That's right. One with a thousand hills, where all the animals roam free. And there are waves to surf on, and dolphins in the sea." Pete and the girl exchanged a look.

"I think you've been on something else," Pete said. "And I want some."

The girl pulled out a chair. "I'm Sera. Have a seat."

Pete and Sera met in South Africa. Sera was there visiting her grandmother and Pete was tagging along on an archeology trip with his professor parents. Turns out the two knew each other through mutual degenerate friends. They had joined forces in the spring to get into a nice apartment. We bonded over the blues and Lee Friedlander photographs.

"Were there pirates on your island?" Sera asked.

I shook my head. "It's not the Amazon."

Sera frowned. "Were there sharks?"

"Only well-fed ones," I admitted.

Then she paused. You could almost see the wheels turning in her head. "Where are you living?"

"Nowhere much. Some hole on Broadway."

This seemed to please Sera. Her fingers danced. "You should come over and see our place," she said, her fingers crawling up the arm of a stiffening Pete. "We'll have some drinks."

And so I set out on one of my last college adventures, with Sera and Pete wrapped in coats long and black, I in a furry gray debacle from the flea market.

Something magical happened as we strolled over the cobblestones that lead back into campus. The red buildings with white trim began to fall behind us, the expansive lawns came into focus, and an emerald lady appeared, with garments tumbling over her sinuous curves and mighty throne. Giant pale white steps cascaded all around her like a wide milk stage, and shadows spilled over her curves along with the warm summer light. Everything sparkled with a renewed colour, dripping rich under the red night summer sky. I closed my eyes and willed the island from my mind.

back

Seventeen. The Kids

Pete and Sera lived in the highest apartment in the tallest building on campus. Which was impressive, considering that Sera had been kicked out of housing twice. But every time they kicked her out Sera just re-applied, and the university was so disorganized no one had ever noticed.

Crossing over into the apartment was like entering Berlin at the dawn of the Third Reich. Some walls had been painted, somewhat. Others were draped in gold and red fabrics that tumbled down like waterfalls and bunched up at the chair legs and spun a wandering turtle in dizzy circles. On the coffee table sat the Tao Te Ch'ing and an array of porn magazines. Green and purple and red feathers were scattered about the couches. There were mermaid paintings and glittering posters from past protests. An old player was surrounded by records.

In the corner a tall drink of water in khaki grew ever more nervous and stiff as Sera strode topless towards the fridge. "Hey," she said blasé as she passed.

"My GOD!" He shielded his eyes with a hand.

Sera stood across from him and stared. "Uh, what are you doing?"

"I am averting my eyes!"

A bull honing in on a glimpse of red. "Why?"

"Why?" The spectacles nearly flew from his nose. "I am being decent! I am properly dressed." His glasses forever sliding down, but never falling off. "Why can't YOU be?"

Sera stretched backwards, her exposed breasts heaving before popping eyes. "I don't see why we should we be ashamed of our bodies."

The boy scrambled for the door.

Pete was spread out over two chairs and a coffee table, bending mournful notes on an amber guitar. "It was as if the boy had just seen a woman for the first time," he mused, staring at the guitar through thick curls, "and had no idea what to do with himself."

Sera twisted her straw. "So, tell us about your new roommate, Pete."

Pete scratched his head, his face slackening in a lazy smile. "I don't really know him. He was willing to go in a double... good enough for me." He took another swig of his drink and looked over at Sera. "Is it true Meg is thinking of leaving?"

Sera shrugged indifferently. "I can't help it if she doesn't get along with Mister Torty."

Sera hung out the window, her long legs dangling above the dozens of stories below, contemplating the park that stretched out in a perfect square.

"Do you like it?" she asked, blowing smoke into the apartment.

"It's beautiful." I was smitten with the view. "How did you manage to get something like this?"

Sera chose to ignore the question. "What do you think about nudity?" she asked instead.

I shrugged. "It's convenient."

"Good." Sera swaggered over, one hip at a time. Then she spotted bowed heads in the windows of the library next door and stopped. "Are they studying?" she asked, incredulous. "I know how to make them stop..." She wriggled and shimmied and pressed up to the glass.

"What are you doing, you fools!" Sera screamed out the window to the bowed heads in the library next door. "It's a Thursday night!"

"That girl is just asking for trouble." Pete shook his head.

"Oh, to each her own," I mused. "Whatever makes you happy, you know?"

"Come on." Pete laughed. "Do you think Sera acts like this when there are no people around?" I pictured Sera alone, her face in the flickering iridescent glow of a television, watching infomercials in pajamas.

"You should live with us," Sera demanded.

There were a thousand reasons I should have said no. Yet I was drawn to this fiery tempest with sparkling eyes. Smoke oozed from her fingers lily white. And that name. Que sera, sera. So pretty. I had stepped into a perfect situation I couldn't refuse. Besides, it sounded dangerous. "I'll do it."

Sera straightened her shoulders and headed downstairs. Five shrieking minutes later a door flew open and a girl stalked out, her face covered in angry red streaks. I caught her, consoled her and solemnly offered her my room on the other side of campus.

"How can you stand her?" She pointed a long finger at Sera, who was engaged in some kind of half-naked tribal shuffle in the hall. "She acts like a six-year-old!"

Soon after the Scot left – and was even all smiles about it. What was his name – I always confused it with Andrew, couldn't ever really remember, something with an –ew. We paid lip service and asked him to stay, but after finding me brushing my teeth naked in the bathroom he insisted with a wide smile that just wouldn't do. Sera drew another notch on the wall. "Another one gone. Let's celebrate!"

All in all it seemed like the flat dynamic could work. Pete kept Sera from engaging in her favorite bar pastimes of manipulating, teasing and conning sorry old men. It was her form of public service, a sort of cleaning up the streets. Sera would stalk to the corners and trace her tongue around shaking ears and whisper all sorts of licentious things. At which point Pete would drag Sera out into the street for a raucous fight that often ended with either one of them storming off in a cab. Not that Sera would ever do anything – it was all a game, a liberated stand against the conniving black hearts of men, a daring counter strike to the oppression she felt had been unfairly dealt on women in the West. She was also quite good at turning out on Saturday mornings impeccably dressed for the Sabbath.

That Saturday there were friends and guests and people Sera had invited in from the street, plus extras, plus some musicians, looking for space on the coffee table to tap their cigarette. Pete roared with laughter in the corner with Chris, who was arguing some kind of philosophical bullshit and there's ten million other people I don't recognize but everyone's easy, everything's all right, smiles are genuine and laughter is going round in circuits and no one's talking about becoming consultants, instead the kid with the crazy hair is showing how to crack off my beer bottle top with a lighter but I can't quite do it and Charles is on the floor getting pummeled by some other guy despite being twice his size.

Sera changed the record and clambered to the top of a chair. "Everybody motherfucking TWIST!"

And they all did. Every last person stopped, made fists, bent their knees and swung their hips.

Over the days the clusters of empty bottles on the tables grew into fantastic geometric patterns. The record player grew hot in the autumn haze. Dexter Gordon and Zoot Sims and Philly Joe Jones took turns coding the air with sensual rhythms and syncopated measures, while I swung my legs in time out the window, Traherne in hand, and Sera swung her hip pouring milk over cereal, and Pete swung open the cabinet filled with vodka under the sink, with a crashing sound heard shortly thereafter.

Over time his demeanor would change, as he grew louder and faster, until midway through the bottle when he turned into a merry tornado, blowing through girls and grins and gin and anything that came his way until he collapsed facedown on his bed, not to emerge for days.

Though it all looked the same – with wide easy laughs and long endless nights, I was surprised to find that I only wanted to cry. I found myself longing for deeper conversations, rather than piles of shallow parties filled with people I didn't know. In my head I was back on the beach, with my longboard under an arm, tossed on the waves, sliding on belly first, and paddling away from the shore. I wanted to whimper, to back into a corner and slide down, prove that I wasn't growing up and slowing down, that this world wasn't as lucid as the white smoke that curled up into the air. I'm still here, I said, gripping myself. I'm still here.

But I was back in that turquoise city. Where the kids spun in circles in the night on weird streets. When I closed my eyes I saw their smiles. But what was the cost of that easy smile? Maybe they had all that time because they had no dreams. Only unforgiving darkness that swept people out to sea.

"What are you dreaming about over there?" Pete asked.

"Nothing," I said softly.

Sera sniffed the air, as if the music had just turned foul. "Can we listen to something other than this atonal drawl?"

Pete was aghast. "It's Jimmy Forrest."

"It's Night Train!" I cried.

"The original," Pete smiled.

"James Brown did it better," Sera insisted. Then she slapped her forehead. "Shit, I almost forgot. I have to cover Jazz 'Til Dawn." The thought depressed her enough to take an unusually long swig.

"I'll cover it," Pete said.

I turned to him. "That's awful nice of you."

"That's all right. Being on air is a privilege. Besides," Pete smiled, "at one am on Saturday night, would life be better if I was in a room with ten thousand jazz records?"

"That sounds amazing," I admitted.

Pete smiled. "Would you like to come?"

"Yes."

The station in question was tucked on the corner of Broadway and 114th. It played old music from the past to help people forget the present. Most hadn't heard of it – especially not since the towers fell. The station's $1 million antennae went down with them, and insurance being what it is these days, their claim was rejected. And so the radio signal was reduced to a blinking six-block radius from the decrepit church where they now broadcast their lonesome American music.

"So, station manager." I extended my legs onto an empty chair. "You must practically live here." Pete shrugged and I saw it was true. The rounded toes on his giant feet sat familiar on the carpet that had gone muddy from visitors and neglect. The chair that sat before the gleaming panels slouched for him, as if in agreement, like a loyal dog. Even the microphone hanger curled in sweet interest around his reclining figure. It was his home.

Pete pushed the desk and his chair swung back, and with one practiced glide of his foot slid effortlessly over to the crates.

"I've known about this radio station my whole life," he began as his fingers passed casually over the discs. He settled on one disc, flipped it into the air as he kicked the chair back and caught it in the other hand with a flourish. "I still remember running around the lawns in front of the steps as a little kid, with the football game playing on the radio – on this station." I imagined a smaller cloud of hair flouncing in happy pursuit of a football.

"Visiting college campuses as a kid – impressive ambitions for a young child."

Pete's eyes flared. "I was only there because I grew up across the street."

I wrinkled my nose. "Going to college across the street from home. Isn't that a bit odd?"

"It's not like I had a choice." He bowed and the cloud of hair dropped forward in front of his face like curtains politely obscuring his disdain. "There was no way I was getting sent anywhere else."

"Why not?"

He let out a chuckle and the curtains billowed. "Tuition was free."

"Free." I repeated. "How does one arrange a deal like that?" Pete shook his head back and forth with a solemnity that suggested it was both obvious and terrible.

"When your dad is a professor." He coughed out a short laugh and shrugged his shoulders. "I hate this place."

The clacking opening of the song started up, giving our conversation a kind of strange and sudden frivolity, as if we had gone to the circus together and just stepped up to the ring toss. "Good song."

The vibrations from the speakers caused Pete's curls to bounce in time with the bass. "It's the best."

I nodded along, watching a series of gold rings sail into the air in rapid succession, descend just beyond their white sticks and vanish into vapor moments before clattering to the floor.

"What is it?"

Illinois Jacquet," he drawled, dragging out the last syllable like a bored cowboy.

"A good man."

"He's dead."

"Oh." I considered this. "I've actually never heard of him," I admitted.

Pete's curls slunk slightly inwards, as if they were saying incredulous, "Look at you girl, stuck on the blues. How could you miss jazz?"

"I only know some jazz. There's a Max Roach piece I'd like to hear. It's called The Hunt, and was recorded with Dexter Gordon."

"Max Roach played that with Dexter a million times. Unless you know–"

"July 6, 1948." Kerouac used to write to it.

Pete's eyebrows raised. "You've got one hell of a memory."

"Only for the most useless things," I assured him.

Pete's brown eyes bored into mine as his lips curled into a smile. "Standby."

One final flurry of his hands exploded across the blinking orange dials. The lights dimmed, the music faded, the orange glowed phosphorescent on his skin. He inhaled sharply, froze and flicked his microphone on. As he let roll that low tongue all the tension spilled off his body like water sliding off his back into a pool. His voice hung in the air, suspended above the twinkling panel of lights – "This is the sound of Illinois Jacquet." The levels slid down like two bowing fans. The horns popped and brayed. Pete's hair bounced in time to the music. I stifled a yawn.

"If you're looking for a nap, try under the desk," he offered. "I usually spend most of the fourth hour down there."

I sank to my knees as Pete slid his voice back onto the air. The low grooves of his steady rhythms loped out over the night sky, patiently listing the names of forgotten heroes.

I crawled under the desk and rested my head at his feet. After he was done talking, Pete ambled to the door and turned the lights down to a gentle glow.

back

Eighteen. The Detour

That was how the autumn began. Classes were only a distraction from long unbroken tides of blues, honky-tonk and soul from twilight to sunrise. I spent every waking moment in the station, a stack of records by my side, slowly making my way through the archives.

The rate of college attendance would be so much higher if everyone was just honest about it and told kids: anything that you've ever wanted, you can do in college. There is nothing quite like sitting in a room with several thousand records and knowing you have nothing to do for months.

The station was a sanctuary where time stood still, where New York still swelled with the brass of big bands and jumped to tumbling bop drums and mumbled cool in Coltrane's sax. It was the one place I could go to get away from the noise – a sacred space where the world all made sense. You could hold masterpieces in your hands. It was forgotten by everyone except the kids. And so the lingering sounds of songs from long ago continued to drift out over the airwaves, carried aloft on the winds like whispers from a better time.

My thumbs ran across the frayed and torn covers and I smelled the history of the place, the sweet lingering scent of students, lovers and jazz men who had stood here before me and held the record with the same affectionate longing.

At the heart of the station were four long dusty hallways lined with endless shelves. The worn covers numbered in the thousands, all red, blue black green white frayed yellow and dusty pine, sweet chocolate brown, sometimes half discolored by mold. I stood before them gazing at the decades of promise, unknown heroes beckoning me forwards like whispers on the wind. The air was impossibly still, temperature controlled to the finest degree. There were no windows, lest the hot sun of the new century steam in and the sad truth of what had become of the city be revealed to the ancient greats.

In the light glimmered a renewed sense of purpose. I was to explore the covers, study the faces and the names, play sweet and foreign notes over the thick summer air, as if falling into the world for the first time. I gazed at the thousands of highlights from decades of promise. I couldn't believe I was the only one there. Somewhere in the abyss there lay the secret to where we had all gone wrong.

First I fell in love with Cab Calloway, especially a version of Minnie the Moocher he played on February 2, 1942. Maybe Bessie could stay in a chord and reinvent the melody, but Billie moved around the beat. But most of all, Louis Daniel Satchelmouth Armstrong – the Chaucer of music! Man, hearing Louis play was magic. Listening to Up the Lazy River you could feel it – it was as if the melody wandered away, then winked at you and sauntered on back. It sounded slow but it's going fast.

I trained myself up for greatness by seeking out everything Louis ever loved, just like Billie. I took a liking to Verdia and Rinoletto, and whooped over King Oliver and Buck Johnson and slid around the station to Lester Young. Pete and I sang along with Count Basie and agreed that the first Tiger Rag to be recorded by the Dixieland Jazz Band was the best. Most of all I wanted to love something so much nothing else mattered, like Louis did his horn.

During the slow slide into December New York grows into a cold and domineering place. Winter emerges from behind the cracks and corners of rainy drizzle days and winds cut sharp through the alleys. It's all lumbering near, and we know we're going to have to bundle up hard for a long slow losing fight, with enormous scarves round the necks muffling mouths before descending into the dank subways.

But if you know where to look, there is magic. Grand black and gray wool coats billow outwards and sweep over the white sheet streets. Snow falls and umbrella pop fast from leather gloved hands. The avenues turn into beautiful seas of rushing white milk with black circles spinning in silent rhythms on the surface. Little golden lights wrap tight around the campus trees.

And Pete and I listened to everything. We listened to Eric Dolphy and the avant garde of Albert Ayler. Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and the later works of Cecil Taylor. We went to Tijuana with Mingus and danced with the Pharaoh. We rocked round with their dynasties and got it in our soul. We moved like Charlie Parker – the most beautiful Bird in the sky.

Outside blank faces passed with complete indifference, but we found kinship in other ways. In the station time stopped – we played Billie for days. We found old stars who had accepted their life on the fringe, as if that was the way it had always been, and paid the door fees to hear them play again.

When we weren't at the station we were listening to each other's shows. It was like we were all at the same party, but just had to walk a really long way to get to the record player. No matter where we were, we were all in something together.

One night on the way uptown I found a man with fabulous dreadlocks in the subway beating the life out of an African drum. His rhythm felt like fire and I suddenly wanted to bang on a drum more than I cared about saving my life. Before the 1 came hurtling through the tunnel we shook hands and became friends.

Back at the flat a message was scrawled across the bathroom mirror in furious blue crayon: HAS ANYONE SEEN MR. TORTY?

"Oh no," I breathed.

"Flat meeting." Sera banged on Pete's door. "Wake up. We need to devise a strategy."

"For what?" The door moaned.

Sera fiddled with the radio dial until the white noise melted into the drawling tones of the President.

"We're fighting the terrorists... all around the world," the cracked voice declared. "Striking them in foreign lands before they can attack us here at home."

Sera clicked the radio off. "Sometimes I think terrorist is the only word that guy knows."

Pete shuffled out holding his head. "This had better be good."

Sera leaned on the table, flashing her teeth. "There's a protest next weekend in D.C."

"What are they protesting now?"

Sera stared. "Everything," she drawled, as if it were obvious. "Pete, there's a WAR going on!"

Through half-open eyes Pete warily watched Sera remove a glittering marijuana leaf off the wall. "Then shouldn't the posters you bring say something about the war?"

Sera chose to ignore him. "Growing up we were told America was a great success. We were told this is the luckiest time to be alive. The country had never been better. That's what the papers said. But for the last fifty years the American economy has been based on a military-industrial complex. It's all a big broken mess.

"The fantasy of prosperity we had been living in since childhood has vanished. Our government has failed us. The war is a lie. We are living in continual fear. Gone are the dreams of a home, a job or money. Everything is blowing up. Lies are coming out all over the place. Enron is only the first – the rest will fall in its wake." Sera looked steadily around. "We just need one event to take hold of all the deep, pent-up discontent. And it will take off."

"Why does there need to be an event?" Pete mused. "Isn't the best way to stage a revolution is from the inside, in a suit?"

"If we stay silent, do you know what they are going to say, when they talk about us? 'Here lies the generation that did nothing'." Sera was beside herself. "We've got to do something."

Pete was barely paying attention. "There's nothing you can do."

"Says you." Her eyes flashed. "Columbia made headlines when students hijacked the administration buildings."

"Yeah. In the Sixties."

"Those people are still here. They just need a leader." Sera held a hand to her ear. "Do you hear that?" Her lips curled into a smile. "The revolution is coming."

Pete rolled his eyes. "Thundering down the road," he replied.

Sera glanced furtively about the room and realized that she was all alone. "We'll see. I'll take care of this," she insisted. "Leave everything to me."

We told her she was nuts. She swore she could pull it off. Then exams came and we all went home for our trimmings and celebrations and forgot all about it.

back

Nineteen. The Wish

A familiar brown head sprouted up wiry bits of hair behind a spread newspaper.

"So what did you think of my hurricane?" Katrina asked. "Every time I say my name now someone wants to talk about it. I can't turn on a television without hearing that Katrina has killed thousands. Apparently I'm the worst disaster of the 21st century."

"Is that what you've been up to for the last six months? Because you are impossible to get a hold of," I said, hidden behind golden aviators for a rare morning appearance.

Katrina pressed her forehead between her hands and glanced through her fingers guiltily. "I'm sorry for falling off the face of the earth."

"That's all right." I poured myself another drink. "You know, after a long winter, it felt good to be getting back to what really matters – getting long breakfasts and messing up the day."

We were in the oldest diner in the Heights. Katrina eyed the champagne. "You know you're living the dream when you're drinking champagne for breakfast."

"You can't leave any left over," I replied, topping off her glass. "That would be rude. It's all right, though. Consider it an early birthday present for your genius."

Behind us was a slow motion ballet behind haphazard stacks of danishes and muffins. The fat middle-aged waitresses and gruff Brooklyn Italians pirouetted around one another in smeared grease aprons, the tallying ching of the cash register singing mournful notes off in the distance.

"I can't believe you got to abandon this whole place and disappear off to an island in the middle of the Pacific."

"Technically it's not in the middle of the Pacific," I corrected her. "It's the way the hell off south in the Pacific." I leaned back in the chair and sighed in happiness. "Second star to the left and straight on till morning. Its closest neighbor is Antarctica."

"Thank you for the geography lesson. Say hi to the penguins for me."

"Already did."

"How did you get approval from the school to study on an island?"

"I asked."

"What did your department say?"

"First the dean laughed in my face – which I thought was rich coming from someone wearing a bow tie. Then he told me to have fun." I rubbed the bottle for good luck. "How was the West?"

Katrina sighed. "Los Angeles is one hell of a place. For one it's a desert even though the ocean is just twenty miles away. It makes the killing machines that demoralize the people and then sell their happiness back to them in bad blockbuster movies. The state motto should really be California: Running away since the Great Depression."

"I've always been amazed that trees grow there."

"They don't, really," Katrina said. "They bring them in from somewhere tropical, I think." Katrina stabbed with her fork at a tomato. "And there's not much rain, and the city forgets to water them sometimes."

"What doesn't kill them will only make them stronger," I tried. "Am I right?"

"It's probably best they don't get watered anyway," Katrina mused. "The water is said to have rocket fuel. Not that this place is any better. Did you hear that Pentheus actually tried to bring a pair of horses into Saint Anthony's?"

"What happened?"

Katrina emitted a pained look. "I think he got arrested."

"Awesome."

Katrina stabbed her fork straight into heart of the baked potato on her plate with a fury normally reserved for matters of vengeance. "I just kept thinking to myself," she cried, "Why aren't you HERE?"

"You could have written me," I protested.

"I DID write you," Katrina insisted. "You never wrote back."

I stared at the floor. "I'm sorry." My voice was lifeless.

* * *

Later that day I was safely hidden away on the floor of Pete's room. Over the air and under the currents of the autumn wind, the sound of Eric Dolphy's Memorial Album drifted in through the curtains. We stared at the secrets in the ceiling as increasingly bizarre noise glided out from his speakers. Piano riffs and sax harmonies drifted by occasionally, as if they got bored with the song from time to time and wandered off to the bar or got lost in the corner with a pretty girl.

I held up a cassette. "I brought you a set."

"Why on earth did you put it on a cassette?"

"I don't know. I just really like cassettes."

"Do you just really like crappy things?"

"Hush." I pushed play and let roll a 1946 stint Bird recorded with Earl Coleman. It was full of jukebox songs like "Slow Boat To China" and "Hey There" that were generally throwaways – but that was Bird's gift. He made the ethereal out of the mundane.

Pete stood up. "Well – I'm off to the library." He picked up a plastic sword that had been found behind a couch. "Perhaps I should keep this sword, for trips to Butler," he mused, swiping it out from his belt loop and pointing it about the room. "How dare you card me, security guard!" And I was holding my stomach and falling over laughing on the couches.

He pointed the sword at me. "You should come."

"Nah," I chortled. "I hate that place."

Pete laughed. "What, now that you're no longer sleeping there on the weekends?"

I froze. "How did you know that?"

"I worked there all freshman year," Pete said. "How could I forget? You were always there. You would bring flowers, and candles, and knew all the guards."

He had me at flowers and guards. I guess I could go back. The library would be beautiful for photographs. But first I put on my favourite white dress.

We darted across the campus in the pouring rain until we crossed into the light of the columns and out from the black.

The kids stared gape-jawed as we laid out candles alongside poetry stacks. There was Baudelaire, Verlaine, Ducasse and Yeats. Then there were figs, feather boas, a blue hand clock and a light-up garden gnome that we plugged into the wall. All around us all the other students still had their jaws dropped.

Why couldn't they see the world as the island did? That man in a state of nature was – happy! And there were stars, millions of miles away burning with the same light that pumped through their blood, and the kids there knew it! God is dead, and yet I saw angels. Happy, unconscious and innocent, just like Rousseau said.

I had sympathy though. I too had spent a lot of time in my life banging my head against my desk. Even thought to myself once in the heated middle of one assignment, pressed to the final hour and sweat dripping out in fat beads down my head, what it must feel like to accept total defeat, think you can't do it, may as well end it here, this life I mean, because if you can't finish this assignment, then you can't finish this class you've failed and if you can't make it here then well we don't want you back at home – a sort of Spartan "Come home with your shield or on it" type sentiment.

There was a desperation in it that I remembered from the island. As above, so below, like the alchemists said. They were all looking for something, I guess.

I flipped pages and read Christopher Smart and John Clare. But why should I listen to Baudelaire? Where did all the decadence lead? Suicide attempts, and a gig running guns for Ethiopian warlord kings.

Still I dreamed of millionaires, trick girls and drag queens. Racing off cliffs and scrambling up trees and swallowing fire was more sane than a world where everyone was caught running harder and faster just to save their own skins. But then why were they so sad? They dance under the guise that they didn't care about anything, but they did. Death terrified them. It was not Oisin's magical world where no one had to age. They were growing up, but the only thing that changed was the lines on their face.

Round and round the days go, spinning faster and tumbling over one another with nights, runs, tales, hangovers, lipsticks, bills and beers, until it all churns into a giant blur. The higher things went in that world the more they went carousel back to the start, to the bed, to the lighter and the drawn shades in the early twilight, the same dirty cabs with a fresh pair of hollow eyes.

The shine was slowly fading from their eyes. Maybe this is getting old – trying to beat time. Until you're trapped in the same moment as if in a beautiful painting that was slowly fading in the sun. They were the last, loneliest and loveliest, and no one would ever know it, least of all themselves. It was a city without a home, abandoned by its country. So caught up in some fantasy they could not see their beauty. Instead they were all looking for some magical pill to come along and give their lives some meaning.

I longed for Jack, who could always come up with something – but he was gone. Even with all the things I knew, there was something about him I couldn't shake. I knew Jack belonged somewhere, deserved something far better than any of those simple things. But without a future, all he did was drink. I wondered why he would feel the need to hide himself away from the people he professed to love, why he felt the need to be someone he was not. It was as if he were pulling at all the pieces of himself and could only find his center when diving into the pretty white lights of late night fantasy. But he had gotten lost somewhere along the way, tripped over and caught in what others felt he should be. That's all you have to do to get yourself out of something real ugly – keep your eye on something else and never take it off.

With all that pounding pavement you feel almost certain that you're changing the world, one night, one line at a time. But who's going to hear it? Then you wake up one day, and four years have passed by while you were inside the frozen mirror.

I could not stay in that place, on that island spinning on the edge of oblivion, where people run and bash into one another in endless circles.

It couldn't happen to me, I swallowed. I didn't have to worry; none of this was real – I was back in New York. I wondered about the others.

Maybe it wasn't a place to be saved. It was just a place full of people who had run away from everything and never went home.

It's a hard swallow, the moment that you realize someone does not match the fantasy you made in your head. It's like the grass has been yanked out from under your feet, as you wonder where the fantasies you have been living by end and the real world begins.

I wondered if it could all be avoided if we had found one another sooner. I tried to imagine another world, maybe on another island, where we could stop time, bend it and twist it to catch each other at the right moment.

But it was too late. I knew only one thing. If I did nothing, everything that I knew would vanish without a trace. If I didn't save it, it would all disappear, like sea foam exploding on the waves.

It was beautiful but I was the only one who could see. It broke my heart. What is the purpose of beauty? If all the magic you see is going to fade away?

What am I chasing anyway? What are these things I see? Are they figments of my mind? And I'm scared of the soaring light as it flashes all around me – what if it's nothing but moonbeams? Their perfect forms were nothing but hazy shapeless images in my head. It felt near impossible to make words out of the long white cloud of my mind.

Maybe this was how people got old, I thought. Maybe it comes from hoping and wanting things to be different but feeling powerless to change it. Feeling stuck somewhere while dreaming about all the places you can't go.

Had the whole thing had been found at the bottom of a bottle? Even if it all was just a load of chemicals, this drowning in his sky and sea, did that make the things I had felt any less real? Or would I one day wake up and wonder where every feeling had gone, after all the dreams and every last hope had flown away?

Could I ever remember every last piece? No. I wouldn't even try. But maybe I could just remember his face. I closed my eyes and imagined Jack. The vision wavered in a single sentence. When I read it back he appeared in a flicker and vanished.

I wanted to bawl. He came back, but then he went away. But for the moment he was there, everything was okay.

It hit midnight and the lights in the room all flickered off. And I felt so small as they all went out. Thinking, please.

Come back.

back

Twenty. The Party

At first Sera didn't understand. How could this have happened? She spent sleepless nights prowling the West End, lauding the cause to all the drunk freshmen who would listen. She stalked the cobblestones with petitions. She distributed pamphlets and rattled cans. She lifted quotas from logged in students and put out hundreds of flyers that littered the campus. She staged demonstrations on the steps and held vigils outside the station. She sent letters to trustees and threw blood when it failed to take effect. But still no one paid attention.

By the New Year frost every college experiences the same flood of emotion. None of the students want to leave. Instead there are long pauses and sad eyes as they realize that soon they will have to leave this beautiful life, where friends roam like packs of butterflies.

I felt for these kids, who needed to be pried like flies from every statue, tree and column and flung against their own accord into the raw murky bath of the next thing. Come down from the lampposts, I wanted to tell them, you're only making yourself look foolish. This place is not the end. You are showing your age, I wanted to say, before realizing that for many this was it. This was as free as it got.

The last week of classes the school threw a carnival. Sleepy inflated castles and long running yellow races covered the campus. Pete had cotton candy and I had a hot dog. We were ready for the races. Sera was there too, in tailored Armani. There was a coldness in her eyes that I had never seen.

I stared bewildered at the crisp shoulders. "Sera, what are you doing?"

"I'm being responsible," she shot back.

"What happened to the revolution?"

"Don't get mad, play the game." Sera reached for her cigarettes. "The world is chaos, Addison. What do you want from me? Kids today – there's no community. They're passionless! But what do you expect?" She snapped a lighter at her cigarette. "It's not in their nature to be any different. Ah well. The life of virtue is elitist anyways. The time for morality is the privilege of the educated."

"Sometimes I think you're insane," I insisted.

Sera took a poignant drag from her cigarette. "What is sanity?" She glanced around slow. "Do you think it's this place? She narrowed her eyes. "This bureaucratic corporation they are trying to pass off as a university is the exact kind of broken establishment responsible for the decay of society."

Pete snorted. "Don't you say that about everything?"

"I mean it this time." She lowered her voice. "Did you know it has war contracts with the Pentagon?"

"Everyone knows that. They developed the nuclear bomb here," Pete reminded her.

"My point is, we can't stay in the Ivy Tower forever. At least I'm dealing with it. Consider me promoting the natural process of disintegration."

"What about Darwin's pelican?"

Sera jerked her head. "Come again?"

"The blind pelican that Darwin wrote about whose friends fed him fish. The world isn't as bad as you think," I insisted.

"You live in a dream, Addison. Like a kid! You're like this... this island."

I headed down the steps and for the darkroom, winding through more angry kids and neighbors with signs. Another scattered set of voices heading out alone into the void. Four years in this place, and we all spent it staring out the windows watching the world pass us by. No matter what I dreamed I was still simply one of the millions of freaks, all disenfranchised, staring out at the abyss. A million freaks in New York, and each one angry for their own reasons and lonely as hell.

In the darkroom dark lines slowly unfolded on white under the blood red light until I was staring at the first and only photograph Nick ever took. It was the most beautiful picture I have ever seen. I sank down the side of the cabinets with dumb tear streaks all over my face.

The last party was a masquerade. Sera painted herself up as a China doll. I went dressed as nothing and called myself a nihilist. Phantoms and courtesans in red blue white black sparkling masks arrived in droves to drink the absinthe. Whispers of forlorn futures danced across the party. Everyone stayed on the move. I had the sense I was watching something I had seen somewhere else.

As the night wore on I found myself looking around for Jack. In the distance, I could have sworn I saw him, still and staring through the blurring parting hands. He tapped at the ashtray, then put on a smile. I had to see him, I thought. But when I looked back at where his haunted figure had stood, he was gone.

I threw the rum back, it tore up my throat. This isn't what I was looking for. It's a cheap copy for something else.

Is this what we have to do to grow up? Kick off the valve on Fridays, and sleep on Sundays, gathering up enough energy to spit ourselves back into the machine? Like the masks at Mardi Gras, it was all an illusion. Carnival – a pretending valve to get through the next thing. And the world would melt back. The feeling would pass by. I couldn't handle it. I was no Oscar Wilde. I no longer wanted to play.

The colours all began to blend and melt until it was one giant throbbing mass of deep reds and blacks and lace and top hats and velvet scarves – all churning together, pulsating, growing stronger, louder, fiercer with every drink tipped down a throat.

But now it's becoming clear that Sera's had too much to drink, and before she could even pass out she vomited all over her own mattress and then promptly shut her eyes.

The digital clock in the station ticked down to midnight. As always, Pete was the only one there. He tuned a sitar he had found in the Village and I talked to the lonely people who called. Not many listened. But those who did were notorious. They called in from all over the world, saying they worked on the record or just to say thank you. The conversations went something like, "It sure is nice to hear this stuff again." They talked slow and friendly, with an easy Zen that comes from having nothing to lose.

Through the glass Pete's eyes wound steady around analogue ribbons. I was curled up in the Gillespie chair. It was so named for the trumpet legend having once stumbled onto it and taken a nap. The upholstery had been auctioned off years ago in ten thousand dollar strips to help pay off the station's debts. It had worked for a while, but stripping off the past will only get you so far for so long.

"What happened?" My eyes softened at a fading image of Gillespie holding up an ear to Bird's horn. "Why is all the music we play over forty years old?"

"Things were made different back then." Pete's head nodded over the tape deck. "Everyone was sharing around ideas and playing with each other. There's no place in New York like that anymore – but that's how great things get made."

I swung my finger in time to the music. "Why do you play?"

Pete kept his eyes fixed on the rolling tapes that clicked and spun in a never-ending hum. "Why are you always reading?"

"To find myself?" I guessed.

"It's the same with music." Pete passed a hand over a bare guitar as if cleansing it from his previous sins and set to work attaching new strings. "I hear beautiful things, and I can't stand the thought of them ever going away. But if I can catch them, then they are saved." He smiled and nodded to the piano. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I thought you never showed people works in progress."

"I don't," Pete said. "But I'll play it for you."

He sat down. And in an instant the chords crashed. Thunder rolled down my back. Then everything became colours. I was surrounded by shades of red melting into one another.

The bass moved round my heart flooded my spine. I remembered but my body had forgotten what it felt like. My veins filled with liquid light. I closed my eyes and saw orange and red, softly sloping in all directions, churning with each breath. It was sunrise. And I was on the beach again.

How did he do it? How did he make it sound like remembering something, even though I was hearing it for the first time?

"It's magic."

Pete shrugged. "It's nothing."

"My god," Nick cried, sitting down between Adam and Jack. "I haven't seen either of you in ages."

Adam cocked his head. "I don't think we've been together since Addison left."

Jack shook his head.

Strings sounded out over the airwaves shimmering into the limousines on Park Avenue crawling down in slow streams. I laid my head down on the floor and felt the life drain out of me. Maybe you don't always have to be figuring everything out. Sometimes it's enough to just listen. And there may be no heroes, but at least there is music.

back

Twenty-One. The Visit

"Friends come and go," went my grandfather's favorite line. "But family will always be there. One day you'll wake up and they'll be the only thing left."

And so they were. My parents had brought the whole family up and organized a mid-morning brunch at Tavern on the Green to celebrate the ritualized loss of youth that was my graduation.

"So, college grad." My mother's face was tight with lines. "I take it you still don't have any plans?"

"Maybe I'll go to Fiji."

"And do what?"

I shrugged. "I'll find something."

My mother and father exchanged an unsteady glance.

`"But what is it that you want to do with your life?" my mother asked.

I bit my lip and stared into the distance faking a long hard think. "I don't know," I said lightly.

"That's not so bad." My father shrugged. "I'm fifty-six years old and I still don't know what I want to do."

"All I want to do is write."

My mother sighed. "That's not what I mean. You have to commit to something. You can't just sit there on an island and write things."

Watch me, I thought.

"Here –" she pulled a brown book out of her bag. "You can start putting that English degree to good use by reading this."

God Wants You To Be Rich, I read before raising an eye.

"You don't need a book to get rich," my father began. "It's like I have always said," he took a deep breath, and Ainsleigh and I took deep sighs right back, "you've got to spend less than you earn," and we mouthed it along with him.

"Why don't you come back to Chicago?" My dad beamed. "Come back to Freedom Woods and work for me. You know, that place just doesn't stop growing."

I looked at my grandfather, who had migrated South long ago. "Do you miss Freedom Woods?"

"Oh my God," he drawled. "I'd rather sleep with the alligators."

"Steak please," my father said to the waiter.

My mother gave him a stern look. "I don't know if you should be eating that dear."

"Well, I like it. And I've got my cholesterol under control so I can eat whatever I want."

"JACK," my mother snapped. "Your doctor did NOT say that."

"Yes he did."

"He said you have to change your diet."

"He said I could take the pills or change my diet. I am taking the pills."

They went on like that, and the conversation was forgotten.

* * *

Pete cast a long look about the room with drooped eyes and let out a sigh. "This is so depressing."

Our apartment was a shadow of what it had once been. The charm had been sapped from the empty white rooms. The bad mermaid paintings in vibrant colours had been taken down and sent off, and the crazed patterned fabrics packed up in boxes.Where there were once records and stray beer bottles and bowls there was now only long unbroken stretches of plain carpet. On the walls were faint traces of the scribbles that had once been in orange and red, big beautiful women with raven hair and naked breasts.

Pete and I stood in front of the walls and stared. We were the only ones left to scrub it all away as if it had never existed.

"Don't think of it that way, Pete." I dipped the brush and streams of white paint tumbled onto the carpet. Shit. We would get charged for that. "You excited for graduation?"

"Yeah. Especially for our guest speaker. Not a Clinton. Not even a Democrat. Have you heard who we're getting? John Iraq McCain."

"That's the gift we get for having his daughter in our class. Maybe you should pull a Parker and stick it in a vein."

Pete rolled his tongue around inside his cheek. "So long as I'm acquiring his bad habits, I could start beating women."

I flicked the brush towards the wall. "Charlie Parker didn't beat women."

"He did too. Said it was his way of showing the world that there's no such thing as black and white." The red Crayola woman glared from under fresh shards of white paint. "Are we going to turn out just like our parents?"

"Never. But we'll probably turn out like our grandparents," I admitted. "Swings and roundabouts, you know. Then our kids will rebel and do what we always meant to."

Pete shook his head. "No one will remember anything we do."

"I won't forget. I'll remember for you. And don't forget, we still have the summer too."

"But the fall," Pete mourned. "What about the fall?"

"Who knows?" I smiled. "And isn't it wonderful?"

"I wonder what I'm going to do."

"Anything you want to."

"I think I want to teach." Pete hesitated. "My parents are going to hate me."

"Let them."

While our fresh white creation melted away, the question then remained of what to do with our day.

In between tousles of fallen hair, Pete's eyes drifted upwards and he breezily mentioned Coney Island, and I had nothing to do save something in the Village, but that was evening, hours away. The beach was now not a question, but a necessity. So we disappeared into the subway and began the long trek to Coney Island.

Under the wash of the water the Q train hissed like it was tunneling under a thousand seas. Despite the clanking metal and worn facade, there was a solemn beauty that came with facing each other in the rusting car as the city smeared past, our cameras held tenderly in our laps.

Like the West, Coney Island had been financed by the railroad kings. Ten miles from Manhattan but still a Bedlam by the sea. Lindbergh said it was better than flying across the Atlantic. Freud said it was the only thing he liked in the country.

Once seventy thousand people gathered to watch the rides burn down and the concert halls still played on. It was built back with each coming decade, glittering and anew after each blaze. That is, until all the people stopped coming.

Now once you got up close it was all creaking hinges and rust chain link fences. The rides were all closed – not that there were many left.

"Es la vida," Pete murmured, his non sequiteur motto to life.

We wanted to ride the Cyclone, but didn't really mind. As long as the beach was open, and deserted, we were fine.

Pete and I stretched out on silk and sat in the sun, with rose champagne rising to our lips, and pink streams coursing and running down our mouths like hungry tears.

I stared out at the black water and wondered where I belonged next. Whereas the city before had represented college, the piles of books on my desks and various friends and acquaintances that scattered through my life, it now seemed to hold a different pulse, now so close to graduation, no longer merely a place to hang my hat for a few years, now tied up in that inescapable question of where I was living, what I chose to do with my life after. The word dripped out thick and slow. After. A question so simple before, and now so entangled. Where I choose to live.

While beautiful, in its own decaying way, with the rotting boardwalk fitting your buoyant step, Coney Island still felt far from home. I knew I was not going back to the Midwest, for that was never home, but rather just where the foundation of my house sat, but nothing comforting, rather just familiarity set in stone. California sounded weird enough for me – the Pacific Ocean was on distant shores waving, but I couldn't commit myself to anything. I could fly off and move to Amsterdam or London or Barcelona, but I didn't know if any of those could satisfy the swelling within me either.

Nor was I quite sure if I was quite ready to leave, even though the city felt as if I was walking through my past, or through some kind of dream.

I wanted to roll forwards, to chase something onwards, beyond these iron gated walls and through the highways that lay stretched before me. I had to strike out. It was time for a new era. After all, we can't keep ourselves stuck in the past forever.

But then why did the island still call my name? Why did I still want to be on a little green hill with flocks of sheep, writing for hours in the shade?

I'm not going to save the world, and I'm not running for president so that I can ruin it. All I needed was a piece of paper somewhere I could occupy myself with little other than the waves crashing on the shore and paddling my board out to the horizon. Why not on its southern tip, playing guitar with the dolphins? Napping among the swaying grass, drifting on the breeze. Where all my thoughts could float above the clouds over the sea?

Tell me, great sea, I thought as I dreamed back to that blue, who needs Aphrodite? Who needs a muse? When one has the treacherous folly of youth! For I still had dreams at night of the island, and that city and her single spire. And if I were a billionaire, I'd fill that island full of spires, so all the kids could come and climb until they reach the pretty lights. And when there dawns that sweet sunrise and pink fills up the city skies they will not it's not all lies passing by behind their eyes. Maybe I couldn't just leave the island behind.

In the meanwhile, there was the metal beach, with bottles and white garbage scattered through the sand like snow, the soft lapping water against the peals of a beaten sun. Pete and I flopped down on the sand.

As the sun began to set the buildings started up their soft glow – but something was different. Instead of the pretty white late night fantasy lights the city had always been there were a thousand new glowing colors instead. There buildings were lit low with amber, and daffodil underneath. Beneath the purple clouds and surrealist smear of sienna the buildings twinkled in the distance like a thousand Christmas ornaments. And for the first time, though I had spent so many nights inside the city, I could see it from a distance. The city was changing.

"What's happening?" I breathed.

"I'm not sure," Pete said. "I think it has something to do with the energy crisis."

"Did you know that the meaning behind Manhattan is 'land of a thousand hills'?" Pete said, his gaze far off in the distance. "That's what this used to be. And there were lakes, and rivers" – he swept a hand over the buildings – "and all this was rolling green." Pete shook his head. "And people think New York is ugly."

"At present I am cursed," Rimbaud said, and for the moment I agree. "I abhor my fatherland. Let the towns sparkle in the evening... the best of all is a very drunken sleep, on the beach."

Pete pulled out the antennae of the radio he had brought along with, turned the volume all the way up... and suddenly there was music, picked up all at once at Coney Island on the beach, and by the Park Avenue drivers of limousines, and lonely writers and brokers on Wall Street.

As the sun pulled slow across the sky we fell into a drunken sleep, bellies sinking in the sand, snug and snoring under the yawning chain jaws of the city.

Pete and I were there for each other, but we were mostly there for ourselves, bellies sinking in the sand, making an hour-long subway trip away from Manhattan to remind ourselves of the worlds that lay beyond its gated waterfronts. Imploring not to let it kill your soul, begging you to stay alive, to remember that when the world gets you low, all you need is a beach – and the Q line will take you there.

back

Twenty-Two. The Friends

Less than two hours of sleep later I stood head hanging under the shower while the last blast of hot water shocked consciousness back into my bones. Woke blinking and tired and turning from the sun with encrusted eyes spilling out clumps of god-knows-what.

All of a sudden it was graduation. You think this day will never come. But once you're there, you're ready. You're already past it in your head. I found my place in the line, fifteen minutes after marching time, and sort of just stood there for a while staring off at nothing. And thank God it's just a bit cloudy, it's not that sunshine day where God smiles down on your beaming bouncing souls exiting the gates and re-entering reality, but no matter, we're more an agnostic crowd anyways. We're just glad there's no rain.

Not a moment after ten, the great wide clouds opened up. Sheets of cold rain flashed down from the heavens. And our dizzy little patterns commenced around droplets thick as pebbles, where one drop splotches across your arm, shirt, down the side of your face. Not the kind to run in between, or skirt around. Just wet.

We trudged on, inching towards the plastic chairs lumped in the middle of the lawns, a marching line of proud little drenched rats. The guards laughed and threw us bags normally used for trash.

The rain appears to let up for a moment, but then it started thundering. Sheets and sheets of cold rain splattered off the hundreds of colored umbrellas popping up round like exploding balloons. All the kids sit huddling and shivering against friends beneath umbrellas, jostling for warmth and losing all the empty space between each other shivering in a solid blue mass, as rain streaks faces like long slow tears. And under that patchwork canopy of umbrellas we were all the same, slouching down to stay warm. Can't see the stage, or the crowd. Can hear nothing other than the rain. And all we can see is each other, hopelessly cold, stuck, and laughing.

And it takes a long time for a thousand pairs of feet to saunter across a stage. Some students streak down the cobblestones. Many are jumping ship. While I like the idea of getting drunk instead of sitting through this mess, there's still some damn sentimental thing in me that wants to stay, staring down at the ground, huddled with my friends in the rain. Waiting only for the moment to walk across the stage, saying over and over again, 'God I just want to walk, I just want that stage...' And suddenly I don't mind the rain. That pressing moment filled with unknown wells of desire was more searing and sweet than anything that could have been conjured out of a cloudless sky and beaming day of sun.

* * *

Late at night, when all the students had either gone home or were drinking down in the pubs, one got a sense that the campus was truly yours, that it belonged to you and no one else, a brick cobblestone hideaway dropped in the city and shielded from the outside world by towering black iron gates with fine-tipped points that kept out the duller aspects of reality.

The pearl columns and brick buildings glowed in the twilight as Katrina and I skipped and caroused and whooped through the tree-lined paths and under the soft glow of the black corner lamps for one last night on the campus.

We ascended the long wide stairs and turned, gazing out with her over the twinkling deserted landscape. Katrina found an access point through a tree that allowed us to crawl up and hoist ourselves into a giant window frame in the old library. And with the scraped up red bricks and cobblestones under our feet, I looked back out over the campus as if I was doing it for the first time.

There was a definite sense of having arrived.

Katrina and I stood at each other's side and stared, silent spectators in the pitiful glow. In the twilight under the columns the desolate pieces were starting to come together. There was a definite sense of fondness when looking at the white and red brick buildings and I'm thinking to myself "Oh hell" because this emotion hadn't surfaced all semester and now here it is circling around my mind in the last moments. It's all beautiful at the end.

Maybe having too little time is a good thing. Maybe it means the journey will always be bittersweet. Having longing means it's the perfect time to pack up and go.

I wanted to believe Jack was at the base of a mountain somewhere, eating peaches and living forever. Or bobbing in a little boat on the sea, dreaming the universe, with his snake curled by his side. Or waiting on some golden bough.

And Katrina says, "Jack?" and I'm saying nothing but I'm smiling and she knows. I longed for the one I wrote for.

I turned back to Katrina and nearly screamed upon finding Jack's grinning face, two inches away.

"Where did you come from?"

Jack pointed to the tree. "Over there. I was just having a snooze."

"You know what I mean. How did you get here?"

"It just so happens that a wonderful woman I know, Linda," Jack clutched at his heart. "Is now a stewardess." He lowered his eyelids. "That redeye flight doesn't get any easier, let me tell you."

"Especially when you're sleeping with the luggage?"

Jack slapped my arm. "What makes you think I would ever do that? Although that's not to say they'd ever find me."

I was soaked. But Jack wasn't getting wet. "Adam said you had disappeared."

Jack sighed. "Adam gets all his information off the internet."

I still couldn't tell if he was real or only in my imagination.

Jack grimaced. "Well I had, I guess. I was depressed... After my son was taken away, I had nothing left." He let out a short laugh. "I haven't told anyone this."

I was still the only one who saw him.

"But I found him. Now I know where he is. That's where I've been. He's in a town that's as far as one can get from both London and Berlin."

So he had given it all up.

Jack shrugged. "I just wanted to get away."

"I know the feeling," I said. "Does anyone know where you are yet?"

Jack looked up. "They won't for a while. I like the thought of keeping a low profile."

As I searched Jack's face, I found no trace of the old image. Something is being spoken between us. Something I don't entirely yet know. A thousand things, a little bit sometimes something and sometimes nothing at all.

"Take me with you." I cover my mouth. What did I just say?

Sure, I wanted it. Yet I thought of all the credit card bills I had found in my wallet. I thought of the lies, and the many times that he had abandoned me in the night. I thought of all these things, and how I'd still go anywhere he would take me. I didn't know whether he was a hero or a blind fool. But what did it matter? Whatever he was, I was too.

Maybe we would never understand each other. But that's all right. Out of all the things I didn't know I knew I was better by his side.

"There are no jobs down there," Jack warned. "Or perhaps very few."

"Can I sit there and write things?"

Jack cackled. "That's about all you CAN do. You can't live a normal life," he warned.

I shook my head. "Who would want to?"

Graduation is for commemorating the past – the long distortion of moments in time that form legend and become the truths of our lives. Forever forward, got to walk, got to keep in line. New York – where it all went down, and something else rose. We came as kids and left as souls.

And what was college if not doing nothing on the steps? Or getting drunk with the lawyers and lost with the artists? Staying up late to pace around a grand piano case? It was all those nights of coming up with songs in beautiful old buildings for no reason other than to be up late. It was a series of beautiful moments that I could pull down and keep in my pocket to ward off the bad days.

Maybe collecting these moments is the purpose of life. Because the bad days are going to come. And I could archive them into a string of pearls to wrap around the heart to keep it glowing on lonely sidewalk days. Maybe I wasn't wrong after all with that vision of writing things on a hillside. Maybe I was just early.

What is this feeling? Is this getting old? Caring more about the feeling of someone else's fallen wings to want to float down and care for them as if they were your own? Wanting something longer than one long endless day? If this is getting old, let it come forth in waves.

"But to chase after something you cannot see," I mused. "Is that delusion?"

"No," Katrina insisted. "That's faith."

Katrina stood by my side, her dark brow sinking. Tears glistened in her eyes. "I can't believe it's ending."

"Nothing is ending," I said. "This place made us. And I have you because of it. This world is not something we are leaving behind. It brought us together. I found you the first day. But now," I smiled, "a beach at the end of the world calls my name."

Katrina sighed. "You know, one day you're going to have to learn how to escape without running away."

I was going to ride wild horses and nap in the glades.

"What are you going to do?"

"Maybe I'll make surfboards. Or just type things in the shade. The Prince was written in the countryside."

"So was The Inferno," Katrina replied. "And that wasn't exactly by choice." She shook her head. "I can see you staying there forever, listening to records."

I clicked my tongue. "According to Schopenhauer, that makes me a genius." I paused. "I'll write you letters."

Katrina gave me a knowing look. "Are you kidding? I know you. Always up in your own little world. You'll never remember to write."

"I will," I promised. "I'll write something for you."

epilogue

I awoke with a start back on the island, the sky drenched red from the setting sun. The bottle is gone. In its stead a scroll of words blows in the wind.

All those memories are fading. I don't know how long it's been. Have I been here one night? Has it been nine hundred?

I feel my old self disappearing, but now I don't mind. I'm ready for youth to end – and all the fear of death that goes with it. It was nice, but now it's time for something new to begin.

For we are part of something eternal. We are part of an endless chain. Something transient flies within us and will one day too fly away. For we are not islands seeking sole destinies. We're all looking out at the same stars for something to believe.

So strive on star children, seek out your dragons. Seize that spark in the night! Run, before they drift out of sight! For though stars may seem like impossible balls of light whose hidden depths you could never know? It's only fire – and we have matches.

So what if we cannot catch them? So what if we fall behind? What if we can never hold the high white sound that lights our lives? Then we'll spend the rest of our days standing at each other's side. At both ends of the world. With collars up against the wind.

Striking matches in the dark.

# # #

Holy hell, you made it to the end. You have no idea how many of my closest friends have not achieved this task. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my first novel. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to keep in touch, please head to hannahherchenbach.com to check out other writings and future works. You can also connect with me on Twitter, facebook, or Instagram – just search for the username highwhitesound. And if you're ever in New Zealand, feel free to drop me a line, all right?

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