God Is Awe

Enlightenment and…

“Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha, Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha…”

Perfection is action, action is perfection.

They are almost here now.

They are already dead.

They are the walking dead, processing silently up the tenement stairs with their automatic rifles aimed at everything but me.  They think I don’t know they are here, think they are going to catch me unawares.  They think, they think, they think.

They do not act.

Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha, Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha…”

The lotus no longer hurts.  Was a time when my joints would have screamed protest at the awkward position.  But we of the Oneness of the Pure Land Way know nothing of pain.  Anyway, I am too close now for me to allow my body to distract me from enlightenment.

Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha, Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha…”

They are on my floor now.  They keep their backs to the wall, signaling for silence.  There is no need for me to rise to meet my guests.  They will find that they already know me.

Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha, Amidha Buddha, Buddha Amidha…”

They surround my door.  The leader signals to his man and the man steps forward, pulling his battering ram from his back.  They are too late.

He pulls the ram back.

“Amidha…”

Slow pendulum, the ram swings back.

“Buddha…”

Height of the arc, gravity pulls the ram.

“Buddha…”

There is light, One, light.  The ram is pulled towards the door.

“Amidha…”

First strike.  Not strong enough.  Their cover is blown.

“Amidha…”

They rush the door.  Wood shatters at hinges.  A six inch splinter lodges in my thigh.  Blood begins to flow from the wound.  No matter.

“Buddha…”

It is over.  I am One.

“Buddha…”

They step into the room, guns trained upon me.  There is only light.

“Amidha…”

…Rebirth…

Lieutenant Santa Espada is finishing his second line of coke when the call comes.  He ignores the first two rings, punching a hole in the dry wall of his apartment instead.  Ignoring the blood running off his knuckles, he crosses the floor of his one room apartment, kicking aside bottles of whiskey (some finished, others only just begun), and answers the phone.

“Who’s it?”

There’s silence on the other end of the line for a moment, confusion oozes through the line and Espada, already bored after three seconds, hangs up.  Returning to the site of his recent injury, he stares at the hole and then at his knuckles.  The blood had slowed and he can already see some of it clotting.  He can’t think of any reason why he would have struck the wall and yet there is the evidence of his attack.

The wall is thin, he can see through to his neighbor’s apartment.  He’ll have to deal with that in the morning.  In the meantime, he grabs a bottle of Jameson from the ground and unscrews the top.  The phone rings again.  Espada curses, takes a swig from the bottle and then tosses it to the ground.

“What do you want?”

Again there is silence at the other end o the line but this time the person recovers and clears his throat.  “Is this the number of Lieutenant Santa Espada?”

It had been months since anyone had addressed him as lieutenant, long enough that Espada had almost forgotten who he was, forgotten what he was.  “Yeah, that’s me. What do you want?”

“This is Sear gent Aukera of the 1^st Precinct.  I have an assignment for you, Lieutenant.”

Espada wanders his room fighting shadows at every step, breaking that one’s neck, shattering the arm of another, sidestepping yet a third.  “I don’t know if you heard over there but my badge has been suspended.  I don’t go on assignment anymore.”

“Yeah we all know about the incident.”  Aukera pauses as if to elaborate but then clears his throat.  “Anyway, I spoke to Captain Oharra, and he agreed to remove the suspension.”

“Well isn’t that…”

“Under one condition.”

In a different time Espada would have given Aukera hell for even thinking to offer him a condition but this was not a different time and Espada had no job.  “And what’s that?”

“That you don’t bring any of your bullshit into this case.” Espada bristles at this but holds his tongue.  “That you do what I ask you, when I ask you and nothing else.”

Lieutenant Santa Espada, who has never promised anyone anything doesn’t hesitate for a moment.

“Done.”

…Reveal…

                Humans would be more perfect if they would lose their fear of pain.  They are too afraid of pain.  I am not afraid of pain.

Mark me: I am not afraid of pain.

They have already recruited the man who is going to kill me.  They think that in killing me, they end me.  They know nothing of Zen, know nothing of One.

Perpetual motion, perpetual existence.

Moving down Sullivan Street I think about the men who came to kill me.  Killing isn’t anything new to me.  I’ve killed men before but this was different.  I knew their deaths as well as I know my own.  When they died I felt their pain as though it was my own and with that purifying epiphany I was able to step forward as what I am now.

But it was not just those men who brought me to my present state.  My realizations as a Buddhist, the path that I chose, one of three, is what led me here.  Zen Buddhism, the true school of Buddhism, founded on the notion that enlightenment is not found on paper but in realized action, was also what brought me here.  This school, the school of truth in action and action in truth, convinced me of this: violence is the truest form of Zen expression.

For what is violence if not action?  Action for the sole sake of action, action for the sole reason of discovering the one truth: that action is all.

Humans, afraid of the consequences of their actions, have ceased to act.  Convinced that their social networking and online donations to who knows where will change the world, they have forgotten to act.  So now I will make them act.  I will make them act or they will die.

…Three Paths…

                Lieutenant Santa Espada is standing across the street from the crime scene an hour or two before the summer sun begins to rise.  He is a shadow in a city full of shadows.  He wears a long black coat; the wind picks up the tail and tries to drag him away with it but Espada is not one to be carried away.  He wears the collar high to prevent the biting wind to strike his face but it serves a second purpose.  To hide the stark white scar that runs up from his chin to right below his right eye.  The coat is large enough to hide the two pistols he has in holsters under his coat.  His pants are tucked into high laced, black boots.  The boots add to his militant nature, his stern posture and the hard angles of his face give him the aura of a seasoned veteran, a man returned to the battlefield after too long away.

He is sipping from a cup of coffee, concentrating on the coffee to avoid the fact that he is still slightly strung out.  The cocaine had run its course and his body was beginning to recall its exhaustion, six hours of sleep over the course of three days will tax even the strongest man.

He does not sleep much anymore.  When he sleeps there are always the eyes, six sets of pretty young eyes, staring at him from the rubble.  Better to be exhausted than to deal with those eyes.

The sun has not yet risen on John and Nassau streets in the financial district of New York City.  Sunlight rarely ever fully reaches these streets, the old factories, now converted into luxurious lofts, are shoulder to shoulder and the streets are narrow for the city that never sleeps.  The streets here are physical history, cobblestoned roads that anger drivers to no end but against which no one would file a complaint.  Espada’s boots click, clock, click, clock as he crosses the street towards the apartment building where the coroner is waiting for him.

The building is still cordoned off by police tape and a young rookie, Espada can tell by the way the boy addresses him, too eager to prove dominance, holds out his hand.  “Can’t come through here, chief.  This is a crime scene.  Unless I see some sort of identification from you, you’re going to have to keep walking the other way.”  Espada bristles at the upstarts tone but takes a deep breath and draws his badge from his pocket.  He takes two fingers, his pointer and his middle, and taps them on his arm.  The rookie isn’t all that naïve, he recognizes the sign for a lieutenant, and begins to apologize, speaking rapid fire at his superior.  “Shit.  Sorry, lieutenant.  I didn’t know we had any stars coming our way. Especially not any stars in plain clothes.  Go right on in.”

Brushing past the rookie, Espada heads into the building and upstairs.  The coroner waits for him at the top flight and extends a hand.  Espada grabs it and immediately regrets it as he looks up at the face of the coroner.  The man looks starved, not of food, but of something more important than that, his skin is pulled tight across his skeleton, giving him the impression of having no flesh, a skeletal collector of the dead.  He grins widely at Espada, the skin pulls tighter, Espada is sure that it should tear, should snap like a taut wire, but the skin holds.

“The unit asks for some brass and we get the famed Lieutenant Espada.”  He runs a tongue across his teeth and then smacks his lips together, a wet, hungry sound.  “You’re the best there will ever be.  How many arrests do you have again?  Something like 200-300 right?  Most police don’t even break fifty.”  Espada takes a step back and the coroner smiles again.  The act isn’t comforting.  “Well enough gushing about you and your accomplishments.  My name’s Heriotza.  Heriotza Burua.  You want to see the site I’m sure.”  He turns away from Espada and begins to walk down the poorly lit hall.  That wet, hungry sound again.  “You won’t believe this.”

Espada follows a few feet behind the coroner, his hands itch to draw his guns; the man makes him nervous.  “So what made you return?”  The coroner is looking over his shoulder at Espada.  He can’t see the man’s eyes in those deep eye sockets; they’re like tiny lights in pools of black.  “After the hostage incident, I was sure you were gone.” A sound rises from Espada’s throat that resembles the deep low growl of an angered dog.  The coroner doesn’t seem to notice.  “Six girls.  Young too.  I saw them when they came in.  Well I saw what was left of them.” Espada’s fist slams against the wall and the coroner turns around.  He doesn’t look particularly concerned.  “Sorry.  I guess I forgot that’s probably a touchy subject.  Didn’t happen that long ago.  Well, fine.”  He turns to his left and turns the handle of a door covered in yellow tape.  “We’re here anyway.”  He opens the door and steps inside.

The room is empty, not for lack of decoration but as a result of whatever had occurred the previous night.  Ducking under the yellow tape across the door, Espada steps into the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle.  There is a film of dust settled upon the walls and floor.  Going to one knee, Espada runs a finger through the dust and raises the finger to his face.  Looking up at the coroner, he turns his finger away from himself and asks, “What is this?”

The coroner grins, his skin pulls tight across his face.  “Notice a lack of furniture? And bodies?”  Espada looks at his finger and feels bile rise to his throat.

“How?  Do we have any idea who the hell this man is?”  He brushes his finger off on his pants.  “How the fuck do you vaporize a room?”

The coroner shrugs and angles a bony finger towards the wall by the door.  “Hell if I know but have you noticed this yet?”

Espada turns towards the door and the bile rises again.  There, against the wall, are five silhouettes.  They are embedded in the dust, the silhouettes etched in tormented positions, limbs splayed as though the men had been slammed against the wall before they died.

“A regular old Hiroshima, don’t you think?”

Espada swallows hard and looks up at the hollow coroner.  “What?  Hiro-what?”  The coroners grin broadens, white teeth gleam through fleshless lips.

“Hiroshima?  Nagasaki?”  Anthony’s face remains blank.  “You soldiers never are the most well read.  Hiroshima was the site of the first A-bomb drop.  The blast leveled the city.  Countless were killed or would suffer from radiation poisoning.  There are pictures of the aftermath.  Those who died were found as shadowed silhouettes on the wall.  The blast removed all signs of their humanity.”

The grin never leaves the coroner’s face.  Anthony returns his gaze to the wall.  One of the silhouettes is pointing upward towards the ceiling.  Following the finger, Espada notices a message etched into the wall above the men.  He steps towards the wall, feet shuffling through the dust, and stops a few feet from the wall.  On it he reads the message and this time the bile does not rise, instead settling deep in his stomach.  [God Is Awe]

Anthony stares at the writing until he can’t stare any longer and then turns to the coroner, who has not moved once.  “What the fuck does that mean?”  The corner grins as the shadows play with the hollows of his eyes.

“God is awe.” Anthony has been repeating the words again and again as he walks click, clock, click, clock down the cobblestoned streets of the financial district.  It is still dark, the sun is beginning to rise on the horizon and a dull glow bathes the streets.  He has been walking west for a few minutes when he suddenly realizes where he is.  This hole in the ground, where the towers once stood, is where Anthony needs to be.

Here at the edge of the abyss, he allows himself to think.  The coroner hadn’t been able to shut his mouth, had to bring them up.  He had heard them the entire walk.  Even the line of cocaine that he had done on the way to the hole proved unable to assuage his anxiety.  But this place could help.  Here three thousand men and women had died and this made him feel better.  What was his six to that number?

“You think that those numbers make your failure any less real?”

The voice is many voices and one voice all at once.  Espada hears it and he already knows who it is.  He spins around reaching into his coat and comes around with his guns leveled at the source of the sound.  A man stands in front of him.  He wears the garb of a Buddhist monk but the colors are off, when Espada focuses on the clothing, his eyes slide off, unable to focus on anything; it is one color and no color at all.  The man’s head is bald but it is his eyes that capture all of Espada’s attention.  It is like looking into the face of the sun, his head hurts and for a moment he can’t see anything.

When his vision begins to return, he swears that he can see, behind the man, a great eastern idol.  The idol is holding out its arms, in one hand he holds a sword, in the other a lotus blossom.  His eyes are flames, his skin is light.  Espada’s head hurts, he looks away.  “You’re the one who killed those boys, right?”  No reply.  “Who are you?”

The voice is all around him now.  “I am the avenging angel of the Pure Land Way.  Buddha has deigned to give me the name Azrael.”  Espada’s head is ringing, he can’t see, he is alone in this moment.  “What you see now is me.  I know all about you, Lieutenant Santa Espada.  You think that coming here, to this hallowed ground will save you from your own failure.  Weak man.  You failed because you did not act.  I will show you how to act.  You will remember how to act.”

Espada struggles to look at Azrael, finally turns towards him.  The man is still standing there.  Then he isn’t.  He appears a few inches from Espada’s face, disappears again, is to his left, is gone again, appears at his back.  Espada can’t focus.  He refuses to believe that this is any sort of reality.  He closes his eyes and the voice returns.  “Coward.  You refuse to see what I am.  I am everywhere and nowhere.  This is truth.  You aren’t ready yet.  Look at me!”  The last words are shouted and Espada cannot help but obey the man’s command.  He opens his eyes and Azrael’s eyes are only inches from his, those spheres of pure light glaring at him until he loses all focus.  He falls from consciousness.

…The Struck Snare…

                I am whole.

That man was not able to stand against what I am.  He could maybe.  I felt in him what I feel in me.  The endless, forever ending pain that is his and my failure.  Looking into him was far from comfortable; it shattered the oneness for a moment.  For a moment there, I was something less.  There are eyes inside him, six pairs of young, dead eyes.  Those eyes decided something for me.

I will enlighten this man, this Santa Espada.

I will bring him to action so perfect that it will bring tears to his eyes.

I will show him perfection.

I will do all of these things because I can.

He will find the way or he will die.

…The Never So Eternally Vibrating Cymbal…

A fist smashes into Lieutenant Espada’s ribs and he sees stars.  If not for the padding of the gloves, he would have lost a rib to such a blow.  Taking a step backwards, he rolls back to the balls of his feet and strikes upward, catching his opponent on the chin.

Sear gent Aukera holds his gloves up before him and Espada lowers his hands.  They are in the gym at the 1^st Precinct.  The rookie who Espada had found so irritating at the crime scene had found Espada face down in the street and called an ambulance immediately.  A few minutes after his discovery, Espada had come to.  He was slightly disoriented but other than that he was fine.  When the ambulance arrived, the rookie had to apologize to them for Espada’s absence.  Espada had not seen fit to wait for the ambulance and had instead walked north to the 1^st Precinct.  He had gone straight to the gym and had not left in five hours.

“So you met him?”  The sergeant is breathing hard, he is not as young as he used to be, a fifty year old cop in a teenage criminal’s world.  Still, Sear gent Aukera was a hard man for his fifty years, a granite statue, his body all hard muscle.  He wore no shirt now on the mat, clothing was a cumbrance in a fight and Espada was offered a history of the Sergeant’s career.  His body was covered in scars, it was hard to tell where the scars ended and his healthy flesh began.  He wore a thick, snow white mustache on his face; it had been years since anyone had seen the skin under that hair.  Running a hand through his mustache he looks at Espada expectantly.  “Well?”

Espada glares at the Sear gent; he does not like to be rushed.  “Yeah.”  He remembers the eyes, remembers a light that blinds him with the thought of it.  “Yeah, I met him.  You owe me some explanations, sarge.”

Aukera’s eyes narrow and his muscles tense.  “I owe you what?”  Espada steps back and his arms raise a little but he does not entirely retreat.

“You sent me after this guy.  Why were we sending five police to kill the man?”  Aukera steps forward but Espada does not back down.  “Who the hell is Azrael?”

The sergeant stops his advance and then puts his arms up.  Espada understands.  He comes in low, his body crouching under Aukera’s vision and then comes his left.  Aukera is ready and he rolls backwards, right arm deflecting the coming blow.  “Azrael, as he seems to call himself now, is a bit of a sore subject for the NYPD.”  He rolls back on his heels and then strikes forward, his age forgotten in the attack.  Espada rolls to the right and comes up on his feet, looking for the sergeant’s next attack.  He is too slow.  A right hook catches him hard in the ear and if not for the helmet he is wearing, he is sure that he would have lost his hearing.  “His name was Christopher Venganza.  He used to be a captain at the 35^th precinct up in Harlem.  He was one of the best too.  He had the sharpest intuition I’d ever seen in a police officer and his skills as a fighter were unmatched.  Everyone in the department was sure he would end up wearing the commissioner’s coat at the end of his career.”

Espada has recovered from the strike to his head.  Spinning to his right, his right leg hooks out and catches the sergeant right behind the knee cap.  Aukera’s leg gives out from under him and Espada rushes forward pushing the man to fall.  “So what happened?”  Aukera falls back and catches Espada’s wrist using his weight to bring the lieutenant down with him.  Catching the lieutenant in the stomach with his feet he heaves and Espada is thrown behind him.

Rising to his feet, Aukera crouches into a defensive position and waits for Espada.  “What happened to this entire fucking city?”  He brings up both of his arms to deflect a strong right kick and grabs the leg, pushing his opponent backwards.  “His was one of so many precincts that rushed downtown when the first plane hit.  He brought ten men with him.”  Espada rolls backwards and waits.  “They needed brass on the ground, needed someone who wasn’t going to rush into the tower.”  The sergeant does not allow Espada to catch his breath.  He comes in hard, right fist, left fist, sweeping leg.  Espada blocks it all and then throws a hard punch to Aukera’s side.  The older man takes the hit and circles backwards.  “Azrael didn’t want to stay but they made him.  All of his men went inside along with all those other poor fucks and they never came back out.”

Espada holds up his gloves and slumps to the ground, chest heaving.  “How do you know all this?”

Aukera grabs a towel and begins to rub the sweat off his body.  “I was there, boy.”  The sergeant’s body, the scars laced all over in odd patterns, looks as though it has been stitched together.  “Azrael and I were on the ground when the towers came down.  When the first tower began to collapse I remember running.”  Aukera’s eyes have taken on an inner light, he is there again, it is September; the towers are falling on his head.   “All that metal coming down.  All you could hear was the screeching of the metal and sometimes the screeching of other things.  But…I realized that Azrael wasn’t running.  He was staring at the tower as if he wanted to go in.  As if he thought he could do something to stop it from coming down on his head.”  Taking the helmet off, the sergeant settles down on the mat across from Espada.  “After that, Azrael wasn’t the same.  He went off to a Buddhist retreat somewhere in Japan.  When he came back he was a different man.  He’d shaved his head but that wasn’t it.  He kept talking about how he had failed.  How all he had needed to do was act and that he had been too afraid to act.  They transferred him to a different precinct and then he fell off the map.  And now you’ve met him.”  Espada had not known that the sergeant had been there on that of all days.  He felt almost sorry for him.  “You two aren’t that different.”

Espada is quiet for a moment.  “He knew about the incident.  He knew about the girls.  How would he know that?”  He thinks about it for a moment and then laughs.  “After what I saw, I don’t even know if I can question how he knows.  What really matters is how do I kill him?”

The sergeant holds Espada’s gaze for a moment and then gets to his feet.  Stepping away from the mat, he strides over to a chest in the corner of the room.  Espada cannot see what he pulls from the chest.  The sergeant returns and tosses the lieutenant something which lands in his lap.  Looking at the item, Espada recognizes the sparring knives that the department issues each precinct for training purposes.  They are dull blades but they are blades nonetheless and Espada offers his superior a confused look.         Aukera stands across the mat from him and gestures.

“Let me show you something.”

Espada rises from his spot.  His body protests the movement but he is not about to back down from a fight.  The sergeant comes at him fast, the arm with the blade is held out far above his head.  Espada almost laughs at how open his superior has left himself.  He barely moves, falling to one knee and swiping out at Aukera’s ribs.  The sergeant crashes into him but Espada does not allow this to distract him.  The dull blade slams into the older man’s ribs and Espada grins.  “Got you!”  His proclamation is followed by the dull edge of a blade poking his spine.

“Got you  too.”

The sergeant steps back and looks at Espada.  “Sometimes there are moments when you most allow yourself to take a blow in order to inflict one.  It should never be your first option, but you will know if you need to.  Azrael is strong.  He always was.  Whatever he is now is probably beyond any of us but maybe you can take him down. “

With that, Sergeant Aukera bows to his officer and walks out of the gym, leaving the lieutenant with the faint memory of a blade poking his spine.

…The Perfect Staccato Of The Circular Roll…

Where does this end?

Where do I end and the oneness begins?

Somewhere on my way to the place, I find a young woman.  She screams when she sees me.  She screams; an action but not the right one.  I will enlighten her.  I will fill her with my being so that she knows only the truth.  Then I am in her, energy so pure that her organs erupt from her body and she lies there, a dark mass of blood.  Too weak.  Her soul did not even attempt to combat me.

I leave her to be found later.  They won’t understand but it will put fear in their hearts.  Maybe fear enough to illicit action from them.

Maybe.

Espada has learned something. I don’t know how I know but I do.  I cannot figure out what it is he knows but I can feel his presence and I can feel that he is greater now.

It is almost night again.  Espada will return to his hunt and I will be given the pleasure of being hunted.  He will find me, of that I am sure.

He must find me.

…Imperfection…

The Canal Street station is relatively empty for a Friday evening in the city.  Espada needs to think.  He is struggling with where to go next, with what the next step is and subway rides always allow him to think.  Espada waves his badge at the attendant in the booth and slides through without paying the fare.  He gets a few glares for this and a whispered “Fucking pigs” but he ignores them.  Stepping down the platform, Espada leans over and glances down the tunnel.  The train is coming, so he steps back from the platform; his coat is long and he has always been afraid of being caught on a train and dragged down a tunnel.

The train erupts into the station and a powerful wind sweeps across the passengers waiting on the platform.  It slows to a halt in front of Espada with a hiss, a metal serpent arriving at its destination.  He steps onto the train and looks around the car.  It is crowded but there is a space next to a young boy and his mother.  He steps over and sits next to the boy, muttering a polite, “Excuse me” as he does.  The train jerks out of the station and Espada settles into his seat.

Despite the packed nature of the car, there is no sound.  The passengers are all staring straight ahead, dead eyes in living faces.  He feels a finger in his side and looks down to see the boy staring up at him.  “What happened to your face?”  His mother grasps and slaps the boy’s knee.  The boy begins to wail and at this moment, with a screech of wheels, the car turns sharply to the right.  The lights flicker and Espada loses sight of the boy.

“Yes Lieutenant Espada, what happened to your face?”

The lights flicker back on and the boy is gone.  Looking around the car, Espada realizes that there is now no one on the train.  Drawing his guns, Espada looks for the source of the voice.  The lights flicker.

“Yes, what happened to your face?”

The lights return and when Espada looks again, he isn’t alone.  Lined up across from him, spaced evenly with a foot between them, are six young girls.  Espada recognizes them, he knows those faces.

“You remember us, don’t you?”

“Yes, do you remember us?”

The girls begin to repeat the question and soon all he can hear is their voices and the screeching of the train’s wheels.  The lights flicker again and suddenly he is no longer on the train.

He is in the warehouse, the only warehouse he will ever be able to remember.  There are the six girls all tied around a barrel.  They are begging him to help them.  The barrel is filled with some nitrate compound that would inevitably explode when put under pressure.  Espada is standing fifty feet from the girls, his gun leveled on a man who is standing next to the girls, his hand on a detonator.

“Don’t!” Espada is near begging the man, the girls look so afraid, they’re so fucking young.  “Look, we can fix this.  Shit doesn’t always pan out the way we want but they don’t deserve this.  They’re just kids.”

The man’s face is covered in tears, his eyes are red from lack of sleep and long hours of drugs in dark places.  “Bullshit!”  His hand trembles for a moment and Espada almost shoots but he holds back.  He still believes that everyone can be saved.  “You weren’t there!   My wife was in one of those planes!  She called me from the plane just moments before it hit the tower.  I could hear everything.  Everything.”

“I know.”  Espada’s voice is soft but his gun never falls, they remain trained on the man’s chest.  “We all know.  We all lived through it.  But these girls won’t change the fact that your wife is dead.  Won’t change the fact that the towers aren’t coming back.  Just put it down.  Let them go man.”

The man begins to lower his arm and Espada sighs, bringing his gun to his side.  It is in this moment that the man screams, “There is nothing for us here anymore!  There was never anything here!”  And with that he presses the button and the pressure is applied.  Espada does not remember raising the gun to shoot the man but he remembers running towards the girls, remembers the horror in their eyes as they realize it is over.  He begins to run towards them only to be thrown back by the power of the blast, he feels a sharp pain in his face as a shard of the barrel tears across his chin.

When he comes to, the warehouse is aflame.  There is a hot wetness running down his face but he ignores the pain.  He looks around, ears ringing from the blast and looks towards the spot where the girls had been, already knowing what he is going to see.  Where the barrel had been there is only a hole in the ground, a hole covered in the remains of six girls he had had been too weak to save.  His stomach heaves and he is on his knees, a purging of its contents being the only solution he can think of.  The fires rage around him and—

–he is back on the train.  The girls are gone, replaced by the passengers that who had moments before been nonexistent.  His guns are out and he is looking around wildly at the passengers.  They are staring at him; the mother has picked up her son from the seat next to him and is eyeing him warily.  Espada flushes; he must have been dreaming.  But the memory had been too real, and those girls had been there, hadn’t they?  The train has arrived at its next stop and Espada finds himself getting off the train, avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers.

He looks up at the station name and nods.

Of course.

…To Reach…

I am back.  At this place which harbors all the pain of a city and a country.  It bubbles and writhes here like some angry animal; it swipes at me but I do not fall back from it.  I do not fear pain.

It is midnight in the city that never sleeps.  The financial district is always quiet after the offices close, especially after the towers were lost.  Now only I stand on the edge of the abyss, looking down to where my men rest, to where countless men and women rest.

On that day, I did not act.  I allowed countless men and women to die.  I should have died with them.  And now, now that I can act, I cannot rebuild, I cannot revive.  What is the point of all this power if I cannot even achieve what I want?

A person walks hurriedly by behind me.  I do not need to turn around to know that he is behind me.  For a moment I consider attempting to enlighten him but find that I cannot bring myself to.  I am not so sure that I want him to share in this.

I am not so sure anymore.

…Perfection

                Lieutenant Santa Espada has risen from the ground, emerging at World Trade Center station.  The memories of the train ride drive him forward towards a destination he already knows.  His mind rushes as his boots move click, clock, click, clock rapidly along the cobblestones.  The streets are empty now; a full moon shines down on Espada, momentarily obscured by clouds and then returns.  He knows now what he must do.  There will be no more thinking.

Only action.

He turns a corner and finds himself in front of the hole.  A man stands at the precipice and Espada’s eyes slide off him, his eyes incapable of focusing on the fabric.  “Azrael!”  The man ignores him.  “Azrael!”  He doesn’t know why he shouts it the second time, but when he again receives no response, he charges, long legs covering ground, black coat falling off his body as he lets it go.  The wind howls in his ears but nonetheless he can hear the multitude of voices that is Azrael’s voice chanting.

“Compassion and wisdom!”

The first chant sounds like a plea.

“Action before inaction!”

Espada’s guns are out; Azrael still pays him no mind.  The wind picks up and Azrael glows liquid fire.  He is the birth of a sun.  The hole is lit for all to see.  There is nothing to see.

“Namo amidha Buddha!”

It is too bright.  Espada can’t see his target, heat sears his body.  He stumbles but forces himself back up.  He remembers the girls, remembers their eyes, remembers that he could not act then.  But he will act now.  He pushes forward.

“To the never ending action!”

Espada pulls the trigger.  He hears the shot go off.  He cannot see where the shots are going but he continues to shoot.  He must continue to shoot.  He can feel his flesh being seared; feel it peeling back as the heat reaches new heights.

“I commend my soul!”

One more shot and suddenly the heat is gone.  It feels almost cold after the inferno but all Espada can think is to make sure that Azrael is dead.  He crawls in the direction of the monk, his clothes are long since gone and his skin is nearly gone but he forces himself forward, ignores the pain.  He can barely see, white spots hover over his vision but he can see enough to know when he is near Azrael.

The monk is lying on the ground; hand over his chest, breathing heavily.  Espada can just make out the blood running from between Azrael’s fingers and he slumps to the ground.

“You did what needed to be done.”  Azrael’s voice is only one voice now.  It sounds weak.  It sounds alone.  “You acted where I could not.  You are a better man than I.”

Espada can barely hear anything now; he does not feel the heat anymore.  His body is beginning to cool.  “A better man wouldn’t have had to kill you.”  He turns towards Azrael.  The hole is in the background.

“You acted appropriately.”  The monk’s voice is wet now; he coughs.  “I will now return to the cycle to be set on my path.”  A pained gasp rattles from his chest.  He is looking at something that Espada cannot see. His eyes are wide.  There are tears.  “God is awe.”  The rattle again, heaving, gasping sighs and then nothing.

Lieutenant Santa Espada, body torn to shreds, near blind, forces himself to his feet and stumbles to the edge of the abyss.  Looking down, he cannot see anything.  There, on the edge of the precipice, on the edge of his death, he begins to know.  A slow understanding creeps into the back of his mind.  Shadows creep in at the edge of his vision as he falls to his knees.  Blackness takes his vision.  Azrael’s last words echo in his ears.  He whispers into the hole, his words echoing forever into the vastness.

“God is awe.”

Yeah, I’m an angel, don’t stress too much about it.

I’ve been up here for a bit less than one thousand years now and I know the celestial plane pretty well.  I was a soldier on Earth during the First Crusade or the Invasion as we children of the Seljuks called it.

Again with the surprises, right?

See, up here God could care less about your allegiances.  I was at the Siege of Antioch manning the walls when the first ballista began to rain fire and brimstone.  I don’t remember the stone that hit me, but Gabriel was gracious enough to inform me at the gate that there was very little left of me to be identified by my family.  See, for God, as long as you’re a decent human being you are worthy of Heaven.  Honestly, I don’t even know how decent you have to be.  Some of the angels up here have done horrible things; only just yesterday I ran into a crusader who I had personally witnessed rape and pillage repeatedly just a thousand years ago.

There’s no accounting for taste is there?

He’s a weird one for preferences, God is.  Take, for example, His music tastes.  He loves Lady Gaga despite the fact that I’m almost entirely sure she’s devil spawn and we should probably send Michael down there before she brings about the end of the Earth.  But I’m just a secretary.  And anyway, Michael hasn’t really been on a mission in some time.  He just smokes lots of the weed grown over in the Elysian Fields (a fantastic vacation spot for the especially pious humans) and writes horrid poetry that he reads to all of his women.  God has been trying to get him back into shape but honestly, he’s usually too stoned to tell the difference.

Oh quiet down, over there, Senor Pope.  See?  This is exactly what I’ve been talking about.  I utter one word about God smoking a joint and the papacy nearly craps itself.  I don’t even really understand why.  We see everything and I can promise you that Pope Benedict smoked more than a joint or two in his heyday, the Nosferatu looking son of a bitch.

And He doesn’t give a shit, I can promise you that.  He used to live down on Earth back in the golden days and he created marijuana so he could smoke it while he thought up the brilliant ideas that encompass this planet.  I mean do you think He could have thought up all that diversity if he hadn’t been just a little stoned?  I mean most of you people don’t even really appreciate it anymore but I’m pretty sure a good 99% of your population watched Planet Earth, right?  Tell me that isn’t the craftsmanship of a profound stoner.

That brings me to you guys.  Sorry if I don’t refer to myself as human anymore but it has been nearly` a millennia and you begin to forget yourself when you can fly and disappear any time a jet passes through your particular house-cloud.

Yeah, it happens.

Stop it.

Now.

Now when God makes you guys, he waits about five months before he even begins to consider placing a soul inside the fetus.  He and the other writer angels begin work at the conception but in order to ensure that souls aren’t wasted on potential aborted fetuses or miscarriages they wait for a bit.  Vonnegut, just the other day, was talking to me about how angry he was about one soul he wrote that died almost immediately after birth.  He’d written it so that this girl would have led the world out of the darkness that’s coming in the next few years but leave it to God to place it in an African baby.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything wrong with Africans or African babies but there’s always an unfortunate gamble when playing with birth in Africa.  She died soon after birth and well, good luck with the next few years.

I like Cervantes’ souls most of all; they’re crazy.  Some of my favorite people to watch were written by Cervantes.  Churchill?  A Cervantes original.  Teddy Roosevelt?  That man was a badass.  As far as the teddy bear story goes?  Lies.  I watched T.R. shoot that bear in the face.  I mean, what’s the point in that?  No rug from that baby bear, I can promise you that.

So back to the reason why I’m writing this.  I know how often you all fight about abortion and how serious these fights get.  Just the other day I watched some religious sect commit a drive by on a local abortion clinic.  How that is going to save a baby is beyond me.  And don’t think I’m taking sides either.  I’ve seen plenty of pro-choicers beat the crap out of a person for wearing cross.  I think I just flew by one actually.  I’m actually floating over to the big man himself right now.

See, this is exactly why I’m telling you all this.  I’m on my way right now to deliver a rather important soul blueprint to Him right now.  This one was a humongous collaboration and He just needs to proofread it and send it on its way.  What I have under my arm isn’t just any soul but THE soul.  This one’s going to prove to be a prophet I think but I’m not really sure.  I don’t get to read these packages, I only deliver them but even Poe, the poor morbid soul, told me that this one gave him hope.

So here I am at God’s office, knocking on the door which of course opens before I’ve even laid my hand on it.  For a second, it was impossible to see anything as my eyes worked to adjust to His radiance.  I’d like to apologize here for the use of male pronouns when addressing Him.  It isn’t so much that He is a man so much that there is no better way to address him.  I could call Him Her for a bit here too if you like but it would make no difference.  It wouldn’t capture the magnificence of His power.  Anyway, this day he had taken the form of a female gorilla, a form that he quite liked.  The gorilla was sitting behind a massive bronze desk that made even the largest of all primates look small.  She was smoking a humongous cigar from between stubby black fingers and beckoning me inside with the others.  I floated in and settled, cross legged on a cloud that had assumed the shape of an E-Z Boy.  Leaning back, I sailed the manila folder over to the gorilla, which snatched it delicately from the air.  Ripping the flap off the top not so delicately, God placed the blueprints on the table and began to read them.  The female gorilla was quiet for a moment and then glanced up at me.  She opened her mouth and began to speak with a voice both soothing and terrifying.

“Sorry, Mustafa.  I didn’t even notice you.  I’ve been smoking blunts to the face all day with Michael.”  The gorilla offered its most shamefaced brow furrow and then shrugged.  “I can’t help it.  He’s crazy and I just can’t seem to get the fool into shape.  So I just smoke with him.  It’s better than wasting my efforts trying to make him into the archangel he should be.  Wanna smoke something?  Or feel free to have a drink.  You know where everything is by now, don’t you?”

Rising from the cloud with a gentle flutter of my wings, I ride a small air current over to God’s personal stash.  Now I know how excited you humans on Earth get when you smoke weed out of California or hashish from Afghanistan but you wouldn’t believe the stuff the big guy smokes.  I mean even the hash I used to smoke as a Turk was significantly better than what you people are smoking and God’s stuff usually just leaves me in a state of retardation.  Taking a small handful, I floated over to the bar at the back of God’s mahogany office and poured myself a glass of wine.  Returning to my seat I found a low glass coffee table in front of my cloud.  On it rested a nearly three foot bong wrought of the finest glass and so thin that it appeared to be made of mist.  Dropping some of the marijuana into the slide, I offered it towards the gorilla.

“Would you like to start this?”

“Oh heavens no.” The gorilla chuckled and shooed the bong towards me.  “You go ahead.  I have to read this soul and I don’t want to be too high for it.  Go ahead.  This shouldn’t take me too long.”

I nodded my thanks and snapped my fingers, creating a flame.  Another common misconception about evil spawn is that only they can create flame by snapping their fingers.  God created flame, not the Devil so we get first dibs.

Suck it.

I inhaled deeply and held in the smoke for a few seconds.  Looking around the office, I began to exhale little smoke rings slowly.  Again I return to my point about God’s taste in things.  The decorations were odd to say the least.  In one corner was a statue of Zeus that God usually explained with this: “You gotta remember where you come from.  I mean not that I directly come from Zeus.  He isn’t real.  But…you know what I mean.”  Against the far left wall was a painting of Joan of Arc.  This one always made me a little uncomfortable in the telling.  “It was Prank Earth Day up here.  What do you expect?  Michael thought it would be funny to tell a random human girl that she could lead an army.  He didn’t actually expect that she would…”  I finished exhaling and put the bong down gently on the table.  The female gorilla was still poring over the blueprints meticulously and I was pretty high.

“So, how’s it looking?  As good as all the writers are saying?  Do you have a DNCB yet?”  That’s Designated Non Celestial Body for you humans who don’t happen to work for God.

God raised her furrowed brow at me as if really noticing me for the first time.  “As it so happens, I do.  This one is going to be born in New York City.  At the highest point.”

It took me a moment to grasp this in my clouded state but it was hard not to understand.  “You’re sending your son back to Earth?  That’s pretty intense.  You think they’re ready for that?  Last time they messed your boy up pretty bad.”

God shrugged and rose from behind the desk.  Knuckle dragging over to the bong, she took a hit and held it, staring at me.  Right before I found myself melting under her stare she blew out the smoke and turned away.  “It doesn’t really matter whether or not they take him. If they don’t take him this time then they will die.  Period.  I’m tired of being nice to them.  I mean they actually repealed Prop 19 in the United States and that Sarkozy clown is still in office.  So this is their last chance.  If they don’t’ listen then I don’t really give a crap.”

I was falling into my high now and some of what God was saying to me wasn’t making all too much sense but I nodded anyway.  You don’t acknowledge misunderstanding God.  Just nod.  Always nod.  The gorilla had returned to its seat and I was trying to remain focused.

“So when’s the due date?  When are you starting all this up?”

Scratching its head with a knuckle, the gorilla shakes its head.  “Actually I’m not really sure.  Let’s see…Due date…due date…”  Running its fat fingers along the paper, the gorilla suddenly yelped, an unexpectedly high pitched sound from an animal so large.  “What the shit!  It’s today!  Damn the baby is coming today!”  A moment later I had a table flying straight for me as God threw a divine tantrum.  “Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me this?”  I waited patiently for the tantrum to pass.  See, once you’re dead there isn’t much to be afraid of.  She would calm in a moment.  As the moment passed, the gorilla began to gather the scattered papers off the ground, shoulders heaving.  Taking a pen off the ground, she ran her pen loosely over the page and hands it to me.

“You need to deliver this.  Now.”

And that’s how I came to be flying through the middle of New York City with a knapsack on my back holding the blueprints for the soul of God’s only son. You would think that would be the end of the story, that I would just whizz over the skyscrapers and hurry over to Staten Island.

Yes, God’s only son is going to be born on Todt Hill, the highest point on the Eastern seaboard.  Staten Island, for those of you who don’t know the place, is a dump, literally.  Fresh Kills Landfill is New York City’s primary garbage deposit and it shows.  Now the Bronx; that would have been ideal for the birth.  I heard that an old woman many years back built houses for Jesus and all his disciples upon his return in the Bronx.  She’d been a little confused by the Russian embassy which had assumed that Riverdale, Bronx, New York held the highest point in the city.  They were wrong but no one had to know that.  I had attempted to convince the lady gorilla to change up the plans but she was adamant about following the rules.  That of course included me and my entrance into the city.

See, when an angel enters your world we lose our wings and regain our corporeal bodies, which, frankly, is a bit of a hassle since I was a bit pudgy.  I ate much too much lamb when I resided in Antioch.  There is also the danger of sensory overload.  Since I’ve become an angel, I only eat when I wish.  We don’t really get hungry up there; mainly we just eat because it tastes good.  So when you return to Earth, you’re suddenly overwhelmed by hunger and exhaustion and all number of bullshit.  Also, don’t forget I was still super high from God’s weed so munchies were actually real now.

God dropped me off in a little alleyway down by Battery Park.  Now, let me explain something about losing one’s angel status: when I say drop I mean literally drop.  See, we have to die in order to become full human again, cut our wings off, and then and only then are we ready.  The drop hurts like a bitch.  I couldn’t move for about ten minutes and me with a deadline that was only two hours from now.  I spent a few minutes picking out teeth that had fallen out and then grabbed the celestial knife that God had so graciously lent me.  If I thought that the drop hurt, that was nothing compared to severing my wings.  I was never much of a fighter; I mean, there’s a reason I didn’t even last beyond the breaching of Antioch’s walls.  So I spent another five minutes screaming behind a dumpster while I sheared my wings off at the joint and then another ten screaming while I stitched myself up sloppily.

Being God’s secretary is a bitch.

I searched through the garbage for some sort of garment for me to dress myself in and was fortunate enough to find a peacoat and some ragged jeans.  I have no doubt that I looked worse than the worst homeless man but I could care less; there are deliveries to be made.  Stepping out of the alley, I walked over to the Staten Island Ferry, ignoring the disgusted looks and wrinkled noses of passersby.  Walking is horrible after a millennia of flying everywhere and I’m sure I looked like I was strung out and drunk all at once.  People gave me a wide berth until a police officer came over to talk to me.

“Good afternoon, officer.” I said cordially, bowing a little.  “You wouldn’t happen to know when the next ferry departs do you?”

The police officer looked at me askance and then scowled.  “I don’t speak Arab, buddy and even if I did, I wouldn’t help you.”  I was confused for a moment until I realized I had never actually learned English.  Up in heaven, language is irrelevant; we just understand each other.    “Let’s say you and I take a walk for a bit to make sure you’re ok?”  I wasn’t going anywhere with this man.  I have no time for any of this and so I did the only thing I could do.

I kicked that cop right in the nuts.

As a man, I know I should be super ashamed of myself but God’s son is on the line so you can all judge me some other time.  The cop was tough, I’ll give him that.  He didn’t let go of me even after he was down on the ground and I am ashamed to say I had to kick him twice more before he finally went down in a pile of male indignation and vomit.

Now I was running and my legs were beginning to make sense to me.  People were screaming and pointing at me and a few other policemen had begun to chase me, drawing their guns.  This was getting ugly quick so I again did the only thing I could do: I dove into the East River.

I immediately regretted this as I remembered cold was a sensation I could now appreciate in all its glory.  Having grown up on the Orontes River, I am proud to say that I am a strong swimmer but even I was daunted by the distance I would have to swim to get to Staten Island.  I paced myself for as long as I could but after half an hour of straight swimming I was spent and needed to rest or I would die along with the blueprints.

I dragged my body onto the shore of Governor’s Island and began to look around desperately for some kind of vessel.  Wouldn’t you know that the only boat was a police cruiser and the three police officers who operated this fine vessel were now bearing down on me.  Word travels quickly in New York City.  I was exhausted but I had a little over an hour to get to Staten Island and Todt hill.

They say that when a mother senses her child in danger, she gains superhuman power.  There is little that can stop a mother when her child is danger.  Picture me as the mother and the blueprints as my child and I think what happens next will make a little more sense.

The three policemen had their guns drawn by this point so I approached them slowly with my hands up.  They kept yelling at me to stop approaching but as long as I kept my hands up, I was pretty safe.  Leave it to me to find the only squad on Governor’s Island with a rookie. A bullet grazed my shoulder and I almost fell backwards if not for adrenaline.  Taking advantage of their confusion, I dropped them one by until all three of them were down on the ground.  Maybe I would have been okay at Antioch if I’d made it past the ballista.  No way of knowing now.  I jumped into the boat and quickly tried to figure out the controls.  Thankfully, I had watched enough television up in heaven to understand the throttle and I pulled out of the dock at top speed.

It only took me twenty minutes to make it to the northeastern coast of Staten Island.  From there I was fortunate enough to meet an old hippie who still picked up hitchhikers.  He asked me where I was going and when I said Todt Hill he was overjoyed.  “Yeah, man?  That’s where I’m going!  My son’s having a kid over at the hospital there.  Feel free to come along.  Birth is an experience every man should witness at least once.”  I nodded my consent, afraid to confuse him with my Arabic, and we were on our way.

It was only another fifteen minutes to the hospital and when we got there I jumped out of the car with the old man, whose name turned out to be Jesus.  Go figure.  I followed him into the hospital hoping to avoid security since I had no way to explain why I needed to get into the emergency room.  The attendant at the front desk attempted to stop me from going into the emergency room with Jesus but I was lucky.  “Whoa, whoa!  He’s with me, lady.  He’s my adopted son.  Don’t worry ‘bout it.”  The attendant gave me a skeptical look but shrugged her shoulders and sat back down at her desk.

I smiled at Jesus who began to run down the hall to the maternity ward where I could hear screaming.  I sped up, running ahead of the old man until I came upon a room that was full of doctors and a screaming woman holding the hand of a man I assumed was her husband.

“Joe I don’t think I can do this!”  The woman was simultaneously sobbing and cursing at her surroundings.  “Fuuuuck!  Why hasn’t he come out yet? It’s been nearly six hours!”

“I know baby.  I’m so sorry.” The husband, whose name was Joe, looked horrified but I gave him credit for not once stepping away from his wife’s side.  “Just a little more.  They said he’s crowning right?  That’s not too far off.”

Jesus ran into the room and then stepped back out as the wife pushed again, roaring her pain at everyone near.  “Shit.  Nevermind, man.  You hang around here if you want.  I’m gonna go smoke some weed.  Once is enough for any man.”  See, even Jesus smokes weed. The old man returned down the hall and I entered the room silently.  I drew forth the blueprints from my coat and stepped towards the mother.  No one heard me approach until I had already gently placed the papers on the mother’s stomach.

“Who the hell are you?” Joe looked at me and then at his wife.  “Who the hell is he?  You have been cheating on me haven’t you!  I knew it.”

The wife looked at me with confusion in her eyes and then suddenly she nodded.  “Calm down, Joe.  It’s gonna be ok.”

I smiled at her and the husband and took a deep breath.

They, sometimes, up in heaven call me the voice of God.  And I guess that is what I am primarily.  My voice has set many other events in motion and this would be no different.

I opened my mouth and began to sing.

The doctors who had originally been yelling that they were going to call security became silent.  From my mouth poured sounds that I unfortunately do not have the skill to place on paper.  Imagine that Niagara Falls and all the brass instruments in all the world had converged in one spot to make music.  That is the closest I can come to explaining to you what I sang for the mother and her child.  The blueprints began to glow and suddenly they were gone.  With another great heave, the baby popped out.

He was beautiful.

Silence reigned in the hospital for a moment and then the baby began to cry and so did everyone in the room.  And amidst all the tears, the mother looked at me and smiled.  “What is your name?”

“Mustafa.”

“Thank you Mustafa.”  The baby was brought over by the doctors who were all crying and ignoring me by this point.  “He will have your name.  I promise.”

I shrugged and suddenly felt an itch at my shoulder blades.  My wings were back which always meant a mission was complete.  I threw off the peacoat and made a display of stretching my wings.  Again silence.  I turned to the baby and looked down on it.  I uttered only one thing.

“As-Salamu Alaykum.”

Then I opened my wings and flew out through the window and back to heaven.

“Another job well done, Mustafa.”  God was smoking again.  I was too.  Heaven had been in a state of elation the past few days as news got around that God’s only son had been born again.  Michael was in the office too, smoking out of a hookah and looking for all the world like maintaining focus was impossible.  Despite millennia of peace and letting himself go, the commander of heaven’s army was still an impressive site.  He wore gold plate mail and had an eight foot spear sitting by his side.

“I wrote another poem.” He looked up from the hookah.  “Wanna hear it?  It’s pretty good.”

God shrugged and I nodded. “Sure, why not.”

Clearing his throat, Michael rose from his cloud and put his hand over his gold breastplate.  “It’s called ‘We Don’t Give A Shit’”.  At this I tried hard not to laugh and then Michael took a hit from his hookah and began.

What you expect from us is not what we expect from us.

What is our will is not always your will.

Bibles, Torahs, Qur’an’s

They’re all the same to us.

And maybe you don’t even remember we exist anymore

And that’s fine

Because some of us don’t even remember you exist anymore.

So when you wage wars and kill each other in our name

We don’t really remember where these edicts come from.

As we have forgotten you, so have you forgotten us

And that’s fine.

Because

We don’t give a shit.

God applauded and I just nodded and Michael exhaled the smoke.  It rose up into the heavens and will always rise up into the heavens.

And seriously, we don’t give a shit.

So let the smoke continue to rise.  And keep your eyes out for a boy named Mustafa.  Because he’s going to change it all.

She always told me to stop thinking so much; that I was above the mind. Woody Allen once said that the mind is the most useless organ.

She always told me to stop thinking so much; that I was above the mind.  Woody Allen once said that the mind is the most useless organ.  So here goes.  We’ll see if I’m any sort of artist without her.

By his adolescence, Miguel had begun to fall prey to all manner of diseases: lechery, coveting of all that was not his, brooding.  All of these and more were part of his prognosis.  He had become so bad at being loved that he had decided that there must be something wrong with him.  Today was different though.  After years of self prescribed medication he felt he was ready to be released back into the world and he said so to his father who did not look so sure.  To assure him of his progress, Miguel grabs a vase from their dining room table and throws it into the wall, denting the dry wall and shattering the vase.  He storms out of the house, with no clothes or money, vowing not to return until he has proven himself.

Ten minutes later and approximately thirteen blocks away, he realizes how childish he is.  A homeless man, patrolling a corner near a convenience store approaches Miguel, reminding him of what the world looked like without money or a change of clothes.

“Oye papi, you could spare me some change for a bottle of water?  It’s 90 degrees out here and I ain’t had nothing to drink but some water out of a public bathroom sink this morning.”

Miguel shakes his head apologetically and keeps walking, mumbling that he doesn’t even have enough money for himself right now.  The man doesn’t seem to care much and offering Miguel a very dirty middle finger spits at his feet and tells him, not so politely, some things he can do with his genitals that don’t seem very appealing to Miguel.

Taking his phone from his pocket, Miguel dials the number of one of his friends from Manhattan, hoping that they pick up.  After three rings, the phone finally picks up and Jeremy’s cigarette-ash voice clouds the receiver.  “Sup, ‘guel?”  Restraining a sigh of relief, Miguel explains his situation and after a few minutes of negotiation, they agree to meet at Jeremy’s apartment on the Upper West Side.  Walking down Broadway, Miguel tries to figure out what to do about his lack of money and Metrocard fare.

It’s hot out but not nearly as hot it will be in a few hours; a light breeze runs through Miguel’s denim shirt and over his legs which are scarred from countless accidents and scrapes.  He readjusts his Washington bullets cap, a cap that he finds to be ironic due to the fact that the team no longer exists.  He likes to think himself funny in the most ironic sense, ironic being a word that comes up quite often with Miguel.

Van Cortland Park is under construction again, this time to install more baseball fields that no one uses and Miguel scrutinizes  it as he walks by, judging the runners who trace circles around the construction and the Hispanics who set up their nets to play volleyball like clockwork every morning.  The tree line at the far end of the park looms ominously in the distance, barring entrance to Miguel.  He knows there are paths out there in that artificial forest but he for some reason avoids walking them, avoids leaving the sidewalk and the safety of bare city.  Pulling his eyes from the park, he ascends the steps to the 242 street station, still unsure of how he’s going to get on the train downtown.

Entering the station, Miguel peruses the vestibule, noticing that the attendant at the toll booth is occupied with a particularly fat woman who can’t seem to understand why she needs to pay 2.25 now when two dollars was already too much.  He glances past the turnstiles towards the train and sees that the “go” light is flashing green and Miguel thinks: fuck it. Running to the turnstile he grabs the sides and jumps over the metal bar, ignoring the police officer who tries to stop him.   He runs through the doors and feels them close a second after he leaves the platform.  Behind him he can hear the officer banging on the door but he knows the train operator can see and hear none of this and he settles down into a seat, waving cheekily at the officer as they leave the station.  Some of the passengers laugh and shake their heads, others glare at him but he has already closed his eyes to nap.  Having lived long enough in the city, his body knows how long it takes to get places and he’ll wake up when it’s time.

He is now sitting in Jeremy’s apartment on 82^nd and West End, nursing a beer and listening to music.  Jeremy is telling him something about the novel he has been working on for a year now but Miguel can’t force himself to be interested.  Jeremy is small and fragile, his body appears to almost disappear when Miguel doesn’t look directly at him and his limbs are thin after months of spending all of his energy on pen and paper living.  He was fair of skin, and rosy cheeked, characteristics that gave him the impression of a 19^th century German school boy, overalls, white shirt and all.  Even with all of this, his most striking features are still his eyes, eyes that merit more description.  They are green on the outside, flecked with brown spots that leak into an inner circle, creating the effect of some unholy fire raging into a black hole, the birth of a universe in his eyes.

He is still talking.

“…maybe if I made Mark’s character less relatable?  Would that help do you think?  A bit unconventional don’t you…You’re not even listening are you?”

Miguel looks up from his beer and focuses on Jeremy.  “Ah.  No.  Sorry.”  He returns his gaze to his beer and then takes a drink.  “Sorry, I’m just thinking that if today is supposedly the first day of me being cured of her, why is my only reaction to my father’s doubt to throw a vase against the wall.  I don’t even really know if I’m ready to do this again.”

“I dunno, ‘guel.  Locking yourself up isn’t doing shit.  You’re just hiding away and the longer you hide away the harder it will be for you to handle reality.  I think this is the only way you can ever really cure yourself of her.  Anyway, fuck her.  You don’t need her or relationships or any of that.  You’re fine, man.  Just fine.”

The second just fine felt less like an affirmation and more like doubt but Miguel ignored it.  He took another swig from his beer and looked around Jeremy’s apartment.  The walls were covered with pictures from the early turn of the 20^th century and late 19^th century, pictures of men hunting, homesteaders, wealthy uptown New Yorkers who lived in the Village when the Village was about as far north as you could go.  These were portraits of Jeremy’s family, old money New Yorkers who had helped write the city’s history in their own way.  Jeremy found the portraits to be a little excessive, he suffered from white guilt, but Miguel, being the historian that he was found them fascinating, placing each generation within their proper place and time, imagining their lives for them.

“Its bullshit you know.”

Jeremy’s questioning face doesn’t reach Miguel as he continues to drink from his beer, finishes it and grabs another, so he voices his expression.  “What is?”

“That you just get over it.  That’s bullshit.  That everything is ok.  It’s been years and I still dream that I’ve fixed things.  There are days where I just try to remember the exact moment where I should have said shut the fuck up Miguel and just tell her you love her.  I didn’t tell her enough that I loved her, you know.  I complained a lot.  I still complain a lot.  I’m complaining now.  How am I cured?”

Looking at another portrait of one of Jeremy’s homesteader ancestors kissing his wife in front of their cabin, he drinks deeply from the beer.  The drink is cold and its hot outside.  Jeremy doesn’t say anything about the beer, understanding and not really caring how much his friend drinks; he doesn’t judge.

“I don’t know if you ever can cure yourself of that shit.  Unrequited love is the love that always stays with you longest, I think.  You have to learn to accept the past is what I think is more important.  You fucked up.  Fuck ups happen.  People live years fucking up, man.  That’s life.  I personally avoid the shit out of girls so that this same shit won’t happen to me.  But you didn’t and that’s cool too.  Just means that you’re gonna learn to make amends.  You’re too smart for this.  To let yourself dwell on the past.  You’re too smart for this.”

And Miguel was smart.  He wasn’t science smart but he had original ideas and he was working now on his doctorate thesis, theories that would change the face of history if they could only get them published.  In a lot of  ways his drive to be so successful had come from her, from his deep desire to prove that he was better than her, or as good as her.  And every day he got a little closer to that goal and maybe redemption would be his.  But until that day he would take another drink from his beer.

“So are we going to Christopher’s?”

Jeremy knew that they hadn’t finished the discussion but it wasn’t really his place to push and he knew that Miguel hated being pushed.

“Yeah let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Miguel was drunk.  He’d been drinking since Jeremy’s which had been around midday and it was now evening.  They had gone downtown to Tribeca where one of their friends owned a townhouse.  They were on the roof, looking up 6^th Avenue to the skyline and a glowing Empire State building, lit red, white and blue for the World Cup.

“Yes I am more Chinese than you, Christopher.  And yes my name is Miguel.  What of it?”

Christopher laughs and shrugs off the joke, one that was long standing in their group.  Miguel had a deep obsession with Asian culture and Christopher, half Chinese, had no sense of his Asian half.  So whenever they could, the group liked to tease him for not being Asian enough and for Miguel being a better example.  The group was small, consisting of Miguel, Jeremy, Christopher, Dan and Marta.  They had known each other since childhood and drinking was nothing new to them.

Dan was talking to Marta about something that sounded serious to Miguel and he stumbled over to sit next to Dan on the floor.  “What ya talkin about?”

Laughing, Dan rubs Miguel’s head to his great pleasure.  “We’re talking about the future of everything.  Wait.  You’d be interested in this.  What do you think about it?”

Miguel, taking no time to think, shrugs and answers simply, “We’re fucked.”

“Well yeah but why?  I mean I was just saying that I’m happy with this whole postmodern approach to everything.  But!” At this he pauses and raises his hand, bending over to look directly into Miguel’s eyes.  Miguel sticks his tongue out at him and takes a hit from the joint being passed idly around.  “But its scary and postmodernism is flawed too.  It’s too much about equality and justice and too little about the facts.  You can’t write books about the way the world was before and base it off your desire to equalize the inequalities without science!”

Miguel stares intently at Dan for a second and then blows the smoke into his face and laughs, coughing out more smoke.  “Eh.  That’s not true.  They’re not just trying to equalize things.  That’s not all postmodernism’s about.  It’s about voicing the voiceless.  It’s the people’s medium.  It’s…” Stopping for a moment, he notices that everyone has quieted down and is staring intently at him.  “Punk rock!”  The group laughs.  Miguel shrugs and lights a cigarette.  “I dunno.  If the world is falling into ruin then I guess I’d rather the academy move in this direction.  At least they’re trying to make up for the identities they’ve smashed and all the agency they’ve taken away.  But maybe it’s all just bullshit fear again.  Maybe they just know that Judgment Day is coming and they’re worried that St. Peter isn’t gonna be as forgiving as they once thought.”

Silence.  Coughing from Marta who has inhaled too much weed.  He looks at her and she looks back intently for a moment.  “You’re too dark, ‘guel.  Just chill out a little.  We’re all gonna be okay.  And if we aren’t, then what the fuck is brooding gonna do?  Smoke some of this and shut up.”

He doesn’t.  Instead, Miguel gets up and leaves, ignoring Dan’s offers for him to stay over at his apartment.  He gets on the train and closes his eyes.

“Who is she to judge me?”

Miguel is drunk.  He’s walking home because there are no buses running this late.  Vancortland is pitch back and he the tree line is no longer visible, only a deep, dark black.  Without thinking, he trips  into the park, making his way towards where he assumes the trees are.  Impossible to see more than five feet ahead of himself, he holds his arms out and tries not to trip as he makes his way.  Suddenly he hears a rustling of grass behind him and he stops.

“Don’t move, motherfucker.”

Miguel doesn’t move.

“Turn around slowly me and give me your shit.  Do it quick! Then you can go home and I won’t have to kill you.”

Miguel turns around and finds himself face to face with the homeless man from the morning.  Seeing recognition on his face he tries to talk his way out of the situation.  “Look I still don’t have any money.  I had to hop the turnstile just to get into Manhattan.”

The homeless man leans closer to him and Miguel forces himself not to recoil.  “Then why can I smell beer on your breath motherfucker.  Don’t smell to me like you don’t got any money.  Don’t fuck with me papa.  Just give me your money.”

“I don’t have any!”  Panic begins to set in but Miguel tries to remain outwardly calm.  “My friends bought the beer!  I promise you I’m not lying.”

The man laughs and the sound scares Miguel more than anything else in the darkness.  “You rich motherfuckers and your rich friends.  Don’t gotta pay for shit.  You just milk your parent’s bank accounts.  And you all pretend like ya’ll are tryin to help us with your politics and your fund raisers and shit but it’s all bullshit.  It’s too bad you don’t have any money.  I’m just gonna beat the shit out of you then since I ain’t got nothing better to do.  Can’t promise I won’t kill you.”

These words and the cool calm with which the homeless man says it force Miguel to react and with a scream he kicks the man and runs.  He doesn’t know what direction he runs in but he can hear the homeless man behind him, cursing at him and promising him that he will kill him if he catches him.  From nowhere, a tree rises up and Miguel runs into it.  He has found the tree line.  He scrambles through it, hands in front of him and his legs kicking aside brush.  When he finally can’t hear the homeless man anymore he stops and looks around him.  All he can see are trees and darkness but he sits down anyway.  Seeing no other option but to wait out until daylight, he curls up and lies down, looking around in fear.  The beer and the hour still are too much for him and he passes out.

The sun peeking through the trees wakes him and Miguel jerks awake, looking around himself erratically as the memories of the previous night come flowing back.  The homeless man is nowhere to be seen and he soon calms down, looking around at where he ran to in his panic.  He is high up on a rock in the woods, looking out over Vancourtland.  The sun is rising and in the moment, Miguel forgets everything.   The rays reach out to touch him; red, gold, purple, and orange all touch him and he breaths it all in deeply.  He remembers Marta.  And he thinks maybe I should just remember to chill out.  Maybe everything will be just fine.

By honing one’s mind like a knife it is not unthinkable to cut through the fabrics between the universes...

That from the moment she says “It’s over” to the moment she turns the corner and you lose sight of her back time has already begun to slow until it has reached a halt.

Everyone lied.

When Sol finally broke the news to Hector time did not stop. Instead it accelerated and moments became instants and Hector found months passing like days until a year had passed and he found himself still alone.It was a terrible period in someone’s life to be alone, 23 and only just out of college with barely a career to speak of. It hurt him badly, left him broken and alone and unable to slow down. He just kept living without truly being aware of what was occurring, the days that were passing. It was a time in which Hector found himself sitting for hours on end, striking out at the stupid mistakes of his past as if the abuse would change anything. He did not know it yet but there would be other women. There always are. But for him Sol’s retreat was something like the Maya’s wayeb, nameless days that spelled out nothing but trouble.

On one of those nameless days, somewhere between then and now, Hector found himself reading in a café. The place itself was nothing special but it was out of the way of the tourists and that was an increasingly rare luxury around Manhattan. He slapped back his first shot of espresso as though it were alcohol, the gesture making him feel more like a man. Having been in the café for nearly three hours now, the book he had brought with him had run its course, families that betrayed each other and women who were ultimately the root of the destruction. His mind had begun to fidget and the mental tension began to manifest in his body, rapid tapping of the feet and hands that elicited long stares from other patrons. Not wanting to find himself on the street he went over to the long coffee table in the center of the lounge chairs and rifled through them. The large majority of magazines consisted of tabloids and he had long ago stopped caring about current events to want to read the newspapers. His only option turned out to be a science journal that had been released months back.

A return to the lounge chair and a few articles later and Hector found himself reading an article that had his mind running again, his feet playing a tattoo of anxiety that left the other patrons tapping with him to soothe the rhythm. The article documented a rogue scientist’s experiments in Berlin with the multiverse, a then hypothetical construction of the mind that attempted to explain déjà vu, doppelgangers and all other manner of unexplainable events.

Apparently the scientist had stumbled upon proof that there were other universes parallel to ours, on all sides, hundreds of thousands of millions of universes all scattered at the borders of ours. He had been working with the particle accelerators, projecting nano particles into the distance and finding that they disappeared after a certain distance. But due to the fact that they were simply too small to just disappear and too elementary to have broken down into smaller matter he attempted to track them. Before he could do this, the particles reappeared in totally different areas of the room. He was not sure whether these particles were his however and so he devised an experiment. Tagging each of the particles with a radioactive tracer he shot them through the accelerator again. This time when the particles returned it was with the tracer.

After analyzing the tracer he found that it had begun to disintegrate. The half-life for the tracer was approximately two hundred years. There was one eighth of the tracer left. This meant six hundred years had passed from when the particles had disappeared to now. The discovery was incredible. He had discovered a means of time travel. He began to attempt experiments with small animals, sending them through the accelerator and here was where the article began to truly interest Hector.When the animals returned they were also slightly different though the aging process found on the tracer was not seen. They were missing legs, fur color was different, eyes were mismatched. And then one of the animals that returned wasn’t the one sent through in the first place. In order to keep track and ensure that the animals that returned were the same the scientist had taken samples of their DNA in order to ensure their identities.

One day, having sent a cat through the accelerator and, the scientist found something that stole Hector’s breath away. The cat that returned was genetically ninety percent the same cat but the ten percent difference was along lines that were genetically and physically impossible. The cat had no fur; instead it was covered from head to toe in scales made from stone. Repeating the experiment a handful more times the scientist received similar results: birds composed of diamond feathers, snakes with the softest down scales one could imagine. The conclusion was a stretch, one that even the scientist in his article doubted but one that he begged the audience not to dismiss: we were walking, every day, parallel to universes that were similar to ours in nearly every way but different. The universe that we lived in was encased in a delicate bubble but one could step through it if they were able to sense the casing. He alluded to Buddhist monks who had told stories of such experiences, walking along the lines of the universe in order to see both halves, the millions of directions in which the universe can go. He finished the article like this: “By honing one’s mind like a knife it is not unthinkable to cut through the fabrics between the universes and discover these alternate directions.”

Hector did not even put the article down. He did not move from the seat for the rest of that day, becoming a fixture within the café. Those who worked there ignored him, he was so still that not even the customers were bothered by him, and as long as he was bothering no one it did not matter. Hector was still. His mind had begun focusing from the moment he read the last word. It was perfect coincidence, perfection in every way possible that Hector meditated religiously, every day for hours. After Sol it was the only way he could find peace.

But now he had a new way, a way to fix everything, to get her back and to finally reclaim his place of glory.

To control time.

There was no end to what he could do with this.

It was closing time. The lights had been dimmed and the food was all sealed and returned to the fridge, the espresso maker turned off and the money counted. Saul was tired now. He wanted to go home to his wife and kids. He wanted to move to Europe, to be out of this damn country where effort meant nothing and despite all the work he had put into school he had ended up here, as the owner of a café.

It was raining outside so he grabbed his umbrella from his office and then locked the door, heading towards the front and dark night. Making one last survey he noticed with dismay that there was someone still in the shop. Upon closer inspection, he sighed and walked over to the man. He had been here since early afternoon. He’d ordered a coffee and then sat down in one of the lounge chairs and not risen again. Now he sat in the same lounge chair in a corner of the café, draped in shadows. Saul figured he was probably crazy and approached him carefully, hand in his pocket on the mace that he carried with him everywhere. The man’s eyes were like the eyes of a man in a billboard, following Saul no matter where he went even though they didn’t appear to be moving. Saul was only five feet from the man when he stopped. He didn’t know why he stopped but there was something not quite right about him. Eyes that had appeared to be watching Saul were, upon closer inspection, not looking anywhere. Still despite the vacancy of the stare, it somehow appeared to be intensifying, arriving closer at a destination that Saul could not identify or see.

The lights that were still on in the café began to flicker, the light creating crags along the man’s face. A smile spread across his face and Saul, stepping back, shuddered. In the shadows, Saul could not be sure but he thought he saw a third arm sprout from underneath his left arm and then a fourth from beneath his right. They slithered momentarily as though the arms of some demented Eastern idol. Other transformations began to occur, his skin shattered, developing crags and cliffs that no longer appeared to be made from skin but something harder, like a rock. Saul could do nothing but watch the horrid metamorphosis.

The man’s eyes began to rise, the smile still upon his face as though in mockery of everything that had ever been or would be. Saul wanted to say something, to do something but found himself frozen. As the man’s eyes reached Saul’s he disappeared. An instant later he was inches from Saul’s face, his eyes probing Saul and then he was gone. He appeared outside the café, arms writing, legs exploding from his torso in places where legs were never meant to be and begins to stroll down the block. He disappears around the corner.

And finally Saul begins to scream.

Hector hears the scream as he starts down the block but he does not care. He is something more now and these screams don’t matter to him. The manifestation of the limbs is not some odd mutation but a perfect representation of time itself. The arms are doing things that he would have done, or could have done, or should have done, and the legs are attempting to take him directions he had not even considered. It is harder to maintain balance maybe, harder to even breath but he knows now what he must do.

The streets are dark, there is no one to see him, no one to witness this first glorious step into a new era. Street lamps reflect off the black asphalt, and the bare autumn trees whisper to each other, the wind running through their proud nakedness. It is lonely, still so lonely, and he picks up his pace, needing to get there now. And then he stops because he has forgotten that he no longer needs to walk, no longer needs to do anything. He focuses, splits the fabric and finds himself in her room.

She sits over a desk, writing. She looks older to him but she is still beautiful. The days have been lonely for her too but he of course does not know that. We never recognize the pain of others. The room is bare and it makes him shiver, his arms, all of them, the thousands that sprout from everywhere rub his body until he is warm. She hears the sound of those many arms stroking skin and she turns.

The look of terror that spreads across her face is not what he expected. He has not yet seen himself nor does he care to. He just wants the loneliness to go away. She screams. The noise tears through his eyes, and the hands want it to stop.

In some universe, in some time he would have killed her for this, would have stopped it, the only way possible. So the hands take control now and the feet follow, stepping closer and wrapping around her neck. She can’t scream anymore now, the screams become gurgles and soon the sound is no more.

The arms writhe and Hector stands in the middle of the room again focusing. He is not trying to tear the fabric this time. His face is a collage of different eyes and different lips, different actions being taken all at one moment. One set of lips is howling its anguish while another laughs. Eyes cry while others are cold, lifeless.

He is in the room, with nowhere to go and no reason to care. Sol lies on the floor now but Hector can no longer see her. There are too many directions to take, too many options and he is king of time.

Today as the Voice offers the morning’s greetings Roberto Ignacio del Fuego listens, not without a sense of irony.

“Today, as we venture forth to our Tasks, We ask that you remember this: We are but etchings against the wall, the radioactive etchings against the walls of this new Nagasaki.  This meaning, of course, that you are only memories and will always be memories.  There is nothing here that will last more than a day and that is not to be forgotten.”

Roberto listens and the smirk on his face is noted by none of the other Tests that walk the street and he does not expect them to; tomorrow they will all be gone.

——-

He had been born at the beginning of it all, when the fire had rained over the city and the first bomb roughly kissed the flesh of Gaia.  See, it was in this moment that he had been born, and on this day that the Revelation was made: that here on Her surface there was nothing that could be pure, that could be real.  Winds raged over the city, consuming the edifices that had been the pride and joy of humanity and melting the flesh off the bones of those who dwelled within them.

Roberto had been different, when the fires had taken his mother he had been sleeping within her womb, unconcerned with the rest of the world and the problems that obviously confronted it.  She had exploded (being so close to the epicenter of a 4 ton package of Uranium tends to do that to even the best of us) but he, he had not.  See, it went like this: when the bomb tore his mother asunder the bomb, on a whim, caught Roberto and lifted him from the wreckage of what would have been his home.

Crying his first cries all the way up, Roberto was carried upwards towards the heavens as if he had been so perfect that he would not even have to go through the test of living; he was already worthy of Paradise.  But then the winds stopped and they held him above the wreckage of the city and those who had survived the blast picked themselves and saw him floating high above them.  It was this vision of something that appeared to be so messianic that sculpted the new world, this, to use words that have already been taken, this new Nagasaki.

And when Roberto began his descent to the city, he was met by hordes of people all who wished to touch him but they would never receive a chance because an instant later the suits came.  And they barreled through the crowd and scooped baby Ignacio with their gloved hands and raised their guns to the sky, announcing their victory, for  now the babe was theirs.  Roberto had by this point quieted down, despite the noise from the guns, in fact he had not uttered a sound since he had arrived on the planet’s surface, as though someone up above had spoken to him while he had remained suspended.

So it was that Roberto came into the possession of the government, what was left of it after the bombs and the war, and he was not heard from again for years.  But more of that later.

—–

The Voice switched off and the Tubes were allowed on their merry way, to their Tasks.  The city was in tatters still, a hollow shell that was gradually being rebuilt by those who had remained: the Tubes.  They were the tests that had to be enacted in order for humanity to move on, because without a sense of safety they would never be able to progress again as they once had.  See, imagine what that had felt like for the world, watching years and years of forward thinking destroyed in a matter of moments by some metal and unseen atoms that had become just a bit too friendly in their small casing.  The destruction had been devastating but the message even more so: that no matter how hard they worked, none of it survived and none of it would be there tomorrow.  So the Tubes were the test that inevitably fell to the US of A because doesn’t it always fall to us?

The city had been New York.

The damage was outstanding and those skyscrapers that had been allowed to stand after the attack of 9/11 were gone, leveled, nada, kaput because the fact that they had remained standing the first time had been an accident anyway.  The Tubes went out into New York, elephant graveyard of the world, and picked their way through the skeletons of the behemoths, The Chrysler, the Empire State, and tried to rebuild.  They were offered no help from the government, no these were all residents of New York proper, or improper, who had left to their glorious five boroughs to take back what had been once theirs.  Never mind that very few of them were construction workers or engineers and practically none of them had been fit after the bomb to reconstruct; it was their duty.

They had been, however, given clothing, uniforms more like, that they were to wear everyday they went out to work.  They were grey, ashy grey, that gave the city when viewed from above to have the appearance of being covered in a thin cover of burnt refuse.  And everyday that layer grew thinner.

But Roberto Ignacio del Fuego, golden child of the government, was offered a different uniform, white, pure white so pristine that it blinded one to see and so perfect that it could be seen from above no matter where he stood.  So, whenever Roberto went out to help clear the rubble and build back up, he was ignored.  Because despite the fact that he had been a savior when brought down from the sky, the suits had turned him and he was now seen as a Judas.  He never once stopped his work, never looked up at the angry eyes of the people and instead applied his hand in the building of the city.  The sun pressed down on his shoulders but he never once asked for water, never once asked for help from the other Tubes, guilt propelled his actions.

—–

Growing up had not been a joyful process for Roberto.  The government had offered him needles and serums and enzymes which they hoped would draw out the answers to their questions.

Why you, you creepy son of a bitch?  What had allowed you to live when the rest of the city had died or at least been scarred irrevocably?

The boy had been protected by the bomb itself and he had come down to the wreckage without even a scratch.  There was an answer.  So they stuck him full of needles and shocked him with their therapies that were supposed to draw out the answers they could not find.  They wanted him to tell them why he never cried and why even when they subjected him to the most painful of questions he never even whimpered.  He only watched them with glassy eyes and remained quiet as if when he had been held up before the sun and away from the destruction, he had been told something they were never to know.

This holier than though nonsense only helped to fuel their fervor even more and their tests became even more intense, punctuated by beatings which solved nothing but the rage that his captors felt.  He never interacted with the suits or even the nurses who they sent in to try to convince him that they were the good guys.  He never trusted them, could feel that they were not like him and that they had never known what it felt like to be permanent, above erasure.  He felt closer with the roaches that scurried across his cell at night and who he knew would never suffer at the hands of time.

Then one day they found it.  There, nestled within the bones that connected his hand to his wrist was the answer.  It was a vein that pumped blood at a steady rate, the tick, tock, tick tock, of a clock and that when they checked for his they realized it had never been there.  The suits began to call him Father Time after the discovery, aware that they had discovered someone who was above time and above the need to count.  For him there was no notion of permanence, no need to mark down the days because Roberto knew that it was all subject to ends.  He had been put above time, above the tick tock tick tock and that put him above them.

The knowledge that he had been born at the exact moment of the explosion sparked something in the minds of the government of our Us of A.  There had always been Robertos.  The stories of Rip Van Winkle, those of us who could step upward and beyond and ignore the effects of age, ripped from the streams of time by forces such as the collision of a few choice atoms.  And within their minds twisted thoughts began to brew, of entire groups of people who could avoid the processes of radiation and death and who would make our glorious Red White and Blue stronger than any other nation.  They sent him back to the city.

—-

Today when looking down on the city, one noticed a few other people in the pure white of those exempt.  There stories were all different (birth by lightning bolt, car crash, fire) but one thing was the same: the fact that their innocence had allowed them to ignore the destruction, to be above the erasure.  These figures graced in pure white were graced with some things that the others weren’t: women or men who were to be their partners.  And after they had taken to their business and the children were almost ready to be born, it began again.

Fire rained down upon the city and Roberto and those also clad in pure white were ignored by the destruction of the bomb.  Those Tubes who were not above Time became ash, engraved memories on the walls.  But a handful, those blessed with child found that their children were carried above the destruction by gentle winds until the fires had quieted down.  Twisted, raging fires plastered the hard work of the Tubes to the ground.  But the government watched over this, their hard lesson in impermanence with gleaming eyes.

We, humanity that had tried so hard to find our escape from death had finally found it.  It would take years to perfect, but being ignorant of the horror was the first step towards the answer.  Those children born into the fire would never know that they had escaped the fire and that was what made them so perfect.

Roberto Ignacio, who had tried for so many years to help rebuild the city that he had never known looked up at the fires that rained down upon him.  He was tired of trying, tired of watching his home burn.  And so he did what none of the suits had ever been able to do.  He recognized Time as they had never been able to and released his power over it.  If they would not allow him to help in building something that would last forever then would he would give in and end it.   And Time, the real Father of all, having watched for so long took back his power and laughed in the face of the suits.  There was no escape from death. The fire caught and spread.

And so Roberto Ignacio del Fuego burned and gave Gaia back to time.

I saw a dead bird today on the sidewalk.

It was wrapped up tight like a Christmas present from a parent who had forgotten to poke the holes in the box, its ruffled feathers shifting gently with the breeze.  The eyes were shut tight as though it were asleep but if this were sleep then it was no sleep I ever wanted to partake in–they were clenched as though it never wished to open them again, the horrors all too real.  I stared at it for a few moments longer and then continued down the street towards the skyline.

It is a new spring but none of the sounds that accompany spring are here this year.  A month or so before there had been people rushing out with leaf blowers and brooms to clear out the last of winter’s pelt; the wolf was gone and with it the hopelessness of a year full of horrible news.  At least that was what we had hoped.  The clouds had hung heavy for the past month and the sun that had come out for a brief cameo had quit, given up on the industry and allowed his less than friendly colleagues to take over.  The hail had hit that same week with winds that tore small trees from their roots and knocked wires down so that we were left without our communications.  And throughout it, a president, calm and composed, bidding us to calm down and not to worry because when he was done with the weather it wouldn’t know what hit it.

But Gaia only laughed, her laughter throwing cars onto sidewalks and people into streets.  It probably isn’t the brightest move for me to be out and about but the confines of my home had become too much for my claustrophobic self and so I took to the streets.  The weather had calmed down now, the Earth was exhausted I suppose.  Gaia is like a smoker trying to run the marathon and and run it she will but the breaks in between were lengthy, we had destroyed her lungs with our cigarettes that we had plunged into her skin.  So today is cloudy and a little wet but there is no wind, gracias a dios, and the rain is gentle perspiration.

New York is eery these days.  There are multiple empty stores on both sides of the street, all sporting for sale signs some with an added Immediately in bold letters.  Property is being lost and sold all over the city and no one is coming in to buy it anymore.  So those of us still loyal to our city wait with bated breath for a bailout, a helping hand from the Great Father who every day smiles on television and says wait.  The people on the streets walk with raincoat collars up and hands in their pockets, their eyes perusing the sidewalk for spare change and salvation.  Even when money has failed us we seek it out on every street corner and every crack in the sidewalk.  But it isn’t there and I look forward toward the end of Manhattan Isle which from 181 St is quite a way off.

I stop in at a diner to buy myself a coffee and stock up before beginning my journey south.  The place is practically empty except for a man in the corner who is nursing a coffee and his mind which lies splattered on the table.  Every so often it twitches and winks at me and I smile back politely and try not to make eye contact.  I settle down at the counter and greet the owner who looks to be a failed investor, his Wall St. credentials glued to his forehead in the form of stocks and bonds that are now worth nothing.  I ask him for a coffee to which he nods and places a cup in front of me.  The coffee is a tad stale but what isn’t these days and I drink it down quietly, ignoring the man behind me who appears to be reprimanding his mind for being a little too loose with its love.

“So you migrating too?”

I look up at the owner who doesn’t actually appear to care what I’m doing but is only asking because it is programmed into him.  ”I don’t really know.  I grew up here.  I can’t just up and leave.  My family is here too; though they keep talking about leaving too.”   He’s not listening anymore.  He’s trying to reach the slips on his forehead but is going about it the wrong way–reaching over his back and between his legs but never getting close.  What the hell is wrong with these brokers anyway?

“What about you?  Everything north of 14th St is virtually abandoned anyway.  What are you doing up here?”

He shrugs, an uncomfortable motion to watch, his arm bends backward when his shoulder lifts and his head twitches erratically to the right.  ”Someone needs to serve you people.  Obama knows I didn’t serve you people well enough when I was down serving as a watchman on the wall.  So now I serve you all food for free.  Not that free really means anything anymore.”

He attempts again to get the stocks off his forehead, putting his foot up on the counter and pressing his head against his shoe to attempt scraping it off–a remarkably flexible stockbroker.  The papers tear a little but remains on his forehead and he gives up, pouring me another cup.  ”The president promises an end to the bad weather soon,” he goes on.  ”Then I’ll return to my post and get a medal for serving so honorably in the trenches.”

I nod sympathetically at him.  ”I’m sure you will and I’m sure he will.  Don’t worry.  It’s just storm season.  It all comes to pass eventually.”  I turn and nod to the man and his mind who both offer me a tip of their hats and a good day.  I get up and leave him a tip which he hands back to me.  Money doesn’t matter anymore.

Back on the street it is cold and snow rains down upon the city.  It looks more like ash, a haze of ash that settles down, gray upon the ground and rustles when I walk upon it.  There are even less people now but they all walk south towards the end of the Isle, their eyes on the ground.  There are few apartments left on the streets, Gaia has made sure of that, and those that are left are boarded up or occupied by the Faithful.  They look out from the cavernous depths of the buildings with gleaming eyes that glow green.  I ignore them.  Let them keep waiting.  I’m done waiting.

Someone sidles up beside me and links arms with me companionably.  I laugh aloud, the sound muffled by the snow and bid him hello.  He nods at me from behind his collar.  There  is something altogether soothing about his presence and I walk with him for nearly a block before he says anything.  ”The smell on the street is pleasant today, is it not?”  His voice is smooth.  So smooth that I find myself drifting but I force myself to pay attention.  ”It smells of foolish hope.  There is a hint of impatience on the air but overall its not all that bad is it?  A nice scent to walk to if I do say so myself.”

I find myself nodding without really knowing what he’s saying.  I turn to better see his face but his cowl is high and I can’t see anything but the shadow over his face.  His voice seeps out again and I forget what I’m looking for.  ”We’re supposed to have a comeback soon.  What, with all the hot air they’re blowing all over the planet to clear away the clouds, we’re sure to have a comeback.  When we do I’ll be the first one on the steps of the Wall waiting for my medal.  And let me tell you they always give the highest in command medals.”

He turns to me and winks and I stumble.  The dollar sign engraved on his forehead is festering but he doesn’t seem to feel it.  The snow is falling heavily now and the streets are  blanketed.  I can’t see more then a few feet beyond my face and the buildings are lost to me.  All I know is that we’re somewhere around 125th because of the heavy slope of the street.  He looks forward again and I lose sight of his face.  The soothing voice flows forward again and my fears are assuaged.  ”You must come out when they hand out medals.  I am sure you will be one of the lucky to be allowed onto the Wall when the cavalry comes rushing forth.   You can be my second in command and we’ll call forth a new era.”

The words sound promising but the dollar sign keeps flashing through my mind.  I begin to extract my arm from his slowly so as not to make a fuss but he tightens his grip and turns to me, baring teeth that flash a dirty gold.  ”Come now, it would be unseemly if I were the only one to return to the Wall.”

I trip and my arm wrenches free of his grasp with a sickening twist.  The pain blinds me for a moment but I scramble to my feet and run.  I can hear him breathing on my neck but soon the breathing stops and all I can hear are his cries, “They will damn you for turning your back!”  I never look back and soon not even his calls are audible.

I don’t stop running for some time.  The snow is so heavy now that I can see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing–a virtual vacuum.  My chest heaves but I can’t stop because somewhere in here with me is the radioactive dollar looking for me.  I panic, something I am not prone to do, stumbling, crawling over the snow.  What feels like hours could have been minutes or vice versa and I choke on the snow which tastes more like refuse.

After an interminable time I burst forth from the haze as though through a wall.  The snow clings to my body and I strike it from my person.  I spin around and face the cloud, tripping onto my back.  For moments my heart races and I wait with dread for him to burst forth but he does not.  So with tremendous effort I still my heart and get up, brushing myself off.  Stupid.   Calmate idiota.

I look around, trying to regain my bearings.  The buildings are old, not just New York City old but Stuyvesant old.  They are crumbling under the weight of the last Faithful who have all moved down here near the Wall to wait.  I know where I am.

This is the Financial District.  The End of the Isle.

Behind me the cloud hangs heavy, consuming the corpse of Gotham silently and completely as Gaia is prone to do.  Back to the good earth.  Pieces of edifices fall to the ground around me so that as I walk I am forced to dodge falling brick.  There is no one in the street here, everyone is inside.  The city watches as the cloud expands, moving out.  I keep moving.  I will not return to that.  I turn a corner and stop.

Above me looms a massive wall reminiscent of Hadrian’s failed barricade.  Even this looks worn and the cracks are filled with money and discarded articles of clothing and items of pleasure–it is all they are good for now.  At the base of the wall is a horde a men.  They are armed with muskets, harpoons, and spear throwers and they face the wall purposefully.  One man, wearing the hat of a Napoleonic general approaches me with a harpoon and I brace myself to run.  He raises his hands and approaches slowly.

“Peace.  I’m not here to fight you.  Take this.”  He hands me the harpoon.  ”It should be here soon.”

“What should?”  He doesn’t hear or he doesn’t answer and turns around to join the group.  I follow him warily and consider leaving but when I look behind me I see the cloud looming.  Forward.  I join the group and wait.

The moments hang again and the cloud looms and then the Wall shudders.  Another impact shakes the Wall and one man at the front screams the obvious, “It’s coming!”  Despite the redundancy, the men should it back over the ranks and they raise their weapons as another collision rips more cracks through the Wall.  Money rains from the older repaired spots and some of the men grab at what lands in their hands.  I turn around again to see the cloud only ten blocks away and before I can turn back the Wall explodes.  The blast throws me backwards and my head strikes against a wall.  The world is reduced to black.

When I come to there are screams and the bellows of an animal.  The cloud to my right is now five blocks away.  Not that long. To my left is where the screams and horrible roars are coming from.  A massive bronze bull stands in the middle of the militia, nostrils flaring and head shifting back and forth aggressively.  His eyes are bloodshot and his horns gleam despite the lack of sun.  It utters a bellow of challenge.  One man rushes forward and slams his spear into the bull’s flank.  He is immediately gored by the enraged bull which roars its pained defiance.  The bull bleeds money profusely but does not fall just yet.  He rears his head and bellows, the screaming assailant hanging from his horn.  Two more men hit the bull hard in his side and move to get out of its range.  One man escapes but the other takes a hoof to the face.  His skull crumples under the blow and he falls to the floor.  My heart surges and I again glance to the right.  Three blocks to go.

Fuck this.

I dash forward and stab my spear blindly into the bull’s throat.  Money spurts into my face and I dive backwards blindly.  The bull bellows and by the time I can see, he is on his knees.  The men are now hitting him with everything they’ve got.  When he finally stops twitching and moaning the cloud is only a block away.  The men fall to the ground and grab the money, the blood of the bull.  ”You’re not serious, ” I scream as the buildings empty out, the Faithful finally return to the streets.  ”It doesn’t mean anything anymore!  You need to move!”

But they hear nothing and cloud is on us.  Never again.  I burst through the hole in the Wall and run as their cries are muffled by Gaia’s quilt.

Beyond the wall is nothing.  The ocean is gone, dried by Progress and the Earth Mother’s ire.  Vast valleys lie before me as does a gate which lies open to all migrants–to me.  I walk through it and speakers whisper quietly to me, “Help is on the way.”  The voice of the of the Great Father promises.  I look past the gate to the vast wasteland before me.

“We can get through this.”

“Yes we can…” I whisper into the waste.

Such a loaded question hadn’t been aimed at Tenoch in some time.  Did she mean why hadn’t he been able to get it up?  Or perhaps why hadn’t he smiled the entire time they were together?  Or maybe it was why had she woken up to him curled up into a ball, crying?

The thing was, he didn’t have any answers and even if he did, he wasn’t willing to start talking about his personal life in the middle of SoHo on Broadway and Prince during the busiest time of the day.

“Nothing.  Just a bit of stress getting to me.  Don’t worry about it.”

He can hear the doubt on the other end of the call, there was no need for her to voice it.  The inevitable shrug and resigned sigh soon followed but none of these things really dragged any feelings from him.

“Hey, sorry I’m out right now.  Can I call you later?”

Please do, she says.  He hangs up and offers a swift glance around to make sure no one had been listening to him.

Of course he was never going to call her back–he never did.  Last night had been a particularly pleasant evening and he found a spring in his step.  It was one of the first times in what felt like years that he had not found himself regretting sleeping with someone.  She had been a sweet enough girl–brunette, brown eyes, and the curves of a hispana without all the hang-ups that came with hispanic women.  She had not stood out to him at the party but they had found each other as people were wont to do when inebriated and young and the night had become a prolonged set of animal grunts and groans that ended with her waking up to an empty bedside and a phone number on the pillow.

And there it was.  He had given her his phone number because at the moment he had wanted her to call because the sweet release she invoked from his loins had sold him on love and her.  But as he left her place, his tie loose and hanging from his mussed shirt, the euphoric feelings that had only hours before enveloped him soured and the unique puzzle that they had solved became less so.  They were now squealing pigs, grunting and writhing in their troughs until finally at the climax of it all they sank, exhausted into the mud.  And so when she does call him and asks him about the night he is already done with her, is on the step of forgetting about her and not letting his failure devour him.

He walks along Prince Street now, perusing the street vendors wares and saying hello to some of the vendors who happen to recognize him.  One of the women vendors smiles at him and he smiles at her but does not walk over to her and that clears the smile from her face swiftly.  He had been with her at some point in the past and he supposes she wanted him to talk to her but that was too much reminder and he was not looking for that.  So he turns right on Wooster St and ducked into the Adidas Store.

It was not that he didn’t like women.  No, see that was the problem.  He loves all women with all of their perfection but especially for their little imperfections.  He wants to be at all their sides and simultaneously at none of them and he knew that this was akin to being a womanizer but it was not his intention.  He just wants to know what all of them taste like, feel like, shout like.  Perhaps then, when he has finally known them, will he finally be able to find the peace he needed.

The Adidas Store is blanketed in neon greens, oranges, and yellows and young store clerks lazed around looking as though they would more likely judge you than help you.  He looks through their track jackets, an old habit of his, for his nation’s colors though he knew they would never have them.  He is a child of mixed blood and most of the blood was too indigenous for their ever to be a track jacket dedicated to it.  Still, sometimes he likes to hope.

He ventures back onto Prince St, raising the collar of his jacket and pretending to run through his text messages in order to avoid the eyes of the woman vendor.  When sufficiently far enough from the vendor he puts his phone away again and looks around.  Prince St. was more crowded than normal and the mob was saturated by Europeans and Asians all in a rush to milk our stores for all they were worth with the dollar being so weak.  They were the plague of locusts sent down upon Egypt to make them pay for their hubris and as with Egypt our crops were abundant–we simply had no one to purchase the grain anymore.

Tenoch knew that he loved women too much to ever give them up.  He had tried but always found himself coming back.  Every time he met one at a party he went home with them and time would slow.  In any movie this would be perfect, romantic and sensual but Tenoch found that time never returned to its normal pace.  He was lost in time and everyone around him was still on normal time.  And every new woman left him feeling a bit more displaced.  He wishes he could figure out how to return but the molasses only grew thicker each time.

Tenoch stops in a deli on a corner that happened to make one of the best BLTs in the city but that he preferred to keep secret; no point in ruining a good thing.  He took the sandwich over to a nearby playground and sat down to eat, ignoring the chastening looks of wary parents.  Taking a bite he smiles.  Delicious. In the middle of a bite his leg begins to vibrate, he curses, and immediately blushes as he hears the children around him Oooo mommy! He struggles to get his phone out of his too tight pocket and when he does finds that the person has given up calling.

“God damn it!”

This time he ignores the howls from the children and rises from the bench stoically.  He checks his missed call list and dials the last missed number which reads Dan.  It rings one, two, three times and he is about to hang up when he hears the distinct sound of someone picking up.

“Hello..?”

“Yo.”

There’s a snicker on the other end.  ”Hey Tenoch.  How ya doin man?”

“Good, good.  Yourself?”  Tenoch weaves in and out of the crowds on 6th Avenue expertly, paying little attention to them.  A few people look at him askance, he always speaks a little too loudly when on the phone and some people, normally tourists, jump when they hear him behind them.

“I’m not too bad.  Just chilling in the Village.  You know how it is.  It can get boring sometimes, even here in the city.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”  You could tell he didn’t.  ”But look we’re throwing a party at the gallery today if you want to come by.  We haven’t seen you in too long.”

Tenoch pretends to think for a moment.  He has no plans for the night but sometimes he likes to pretend that he does.

“Yeah, I mean I can be there, mos’ def’.  Not much going on tonight.  Who else is gonna be there?”

“Just about everyone.  Its gonna be kind of like a reunion.  I mean its gonna be crazy.  It’ll be like old times.”

Tenoch bumps into a man who turns around as if expecting an apology.  ”Ok so I’ll definitely be there.  I’ll drop by at ten or so.”  Tenoch turns to glance over shoulder and throws the man a stare that has him walking two times faster than he was when crossing the street.  Tenoch smiles and continues down 6th.

“Alright man see you then.”

“Peace.”

He hangs up the phone and turns on Christopher St.  Descending the stairs into the 1 train station Tenoch turns on his ipod and loses himself in the music his entire ride home.

After a brief trip home, he finds himself back on the one and descending into the depths of Manhattan.  The train has its nocturnal baggage now and it speeds swiftly through the tunnels dispatching the troops throughout the city on their various missions.  They are a murder of crows hovering over the city, prepared to pick its bones dry for every last scrap they could find.  Their generation could not hope to be anything more than scavengers.

He dozes a bit in the corner of the train, his collar up around his face.  He never worries about missing his stop because any native New Yorker knows that they will feel the rhythm of the train and know when to get off.  So when it finally arrives at 18th Street he opens his eyes as though Bram Stoker’s Dracula and exits the train to join the hunt.

The gallery is not some bohemian name for a club but actually a gallery owned by the parents of one of his friends and also their home.  His parents had always allowed him to use the place for parties and tonight would be no different.  They would be out and about and they would consume the night in their own way.

From the outside it doesn’t even look like a gallery but more like an old taxi garage and perhaps that was what it had been in its past life but now it was their den and everyone knows that your past lives don’t matter once they are gone.  Pressing the buzzer on the door, he waits for his friend Luc to come down and open the door.  Moments pass and Tenoch moves to press the button again and the door opens as he presses the button again.

“Ah!  Sorry…I wasn’t sure if you were coming down or not.”

“Whatever it’s cool man.”  Luc shrugs and embraces Tenoch.  ”It’s been forever, man. How are you?  Wait, come in.  We can talk once we’re inside.”   Luc ushers Tenoch inside and shuts the heavy door behind him.  He starts to walk upstairs ahead of Tenoch and speaks over his shoulder.  ”So how long are you back?  I hear you’ve been traveling constantly.”

“Yeah, it’s been pretty sweet.  I just got back from Japan a month ago and that was crazy.”  Music streams down from upstairs and  Tenoch can already feel the bass strumming his body like a string.

“That’s insane, man.  Look we’ll talk more later on but right now there is no way I’m gonna be able to hear you up there so yeah…Let’s do this!”

Tenoch laughs and words his assent.  Luc opens the door and a wall of sound rushes through the stairwell, consuming Tenoch and Luc entirely.

They press on into the gallery and Tenoch hears shouts both male and female of his name and he looks around to see people he had not seen since high school rushing over to embrace him.  But these were no longer his friends but doppelgänger’s who look almost exactly like his friends but are always slightly different.  One of his male friends was a bit broader, a female friend had become just a bit prettier, and he found that this was not what he remembered and that he, unchanged by time did not fall into place as he thought he would.  The trips to other places had removed him from the time stream and now that he had finally returned he found that everything was different.  He was Rip Van Winkle returned from the war but the war he had been in had not involved guns or artillery but minds that no longer wanted to see as one and revolutions that were not as promised as Marx had once written.

His friends did not notice how their appearances affected Tenoch and their embraces covered him like fairy dust until he felt that maybe if he kept moving around the room he would find himself whole within this new reality that he had been forcefully removed from.  He told his friends he was going to get a drink and that he would be back and presses on into the gallery.

He gives himself a moment to take in the space again, hoping that the more he acknowledges the more he will be able to place himself back within the stream.   It is a large gallery the size of a warehouse and divided into three sections with a living area in the back with Luc and his family lived and slept.  The sheer size of the place throws Tenoch off and he feels that maybe he has not grown to fit the gallery.  The main room is 800 square feet  if not more and the walls tower above him nearly fifty feet tall.  They are off white and bare of anything making them all the more imposing.    It seems the gallery is not hosting any shows this month and so there was a sterile air to the surroundings.  But there is nothing sterile about the contents of the room–the writhing, living  wave that was the dance floor, crowded with all of Tenoch’s old friends and some people he assumed were new friends of Luc’s from college.  They yell and sing along to the music that a dj in one corner of the room blasts.  The sound system is massive but still there are enough people for their voices to be heard over the noise.

He steps intrepidly into the sea of people and almost laughs aloud as he is dragged by the current in the direction of the crowd.  He forces himself through the heaving bodies, apologizing to those whose feet he treads on and to couples that he tears apart for precious moments before allowing them to return to their conjoined beings.  He makes it to the kitchen where all the liquor is and finds Brooklyn Lager to his great delight.  He hears a voice behind him say his name tentatively and turns to find a beautiful girl behind him.

“It is you!”  She embraces him and he tries desperately to put  a name on this face that had, as with everyone else, aged and matured.  He concentrates and with an immense effort pulls forth a name.

“Lauren!  Jesus its been forever!”  They embrace and he can’t help but find himself thinking that they somehow feel nice together.  He brushes the thought from his mind and  focuses on Lauren who is talking to him.

“–keep hearing that you’ve been all over the place.  What the hell have you been up to?”

It doesn’t take long for him to put two and two together and he shrugs, “I dunno. Just traveling.  Trying to stay on the move.  I couldn’t stand it here anymore.  Everything felt too small and insignificant and I wanted to feel something you know?  Everything here is ‘see and you shall believe’ but I’ve never believed that.  I just wanted to feel…I don’t know.” He flushes and averts his eyes.  ”That made no sense.  First time I see you in nearly two years and I sound like a dumb ass.  Sorry.”

Lauren smiles at him as if she understands and Tenoch can’t help but feel as though maybe she does.  Again he tosses the thought away and focuses on the conversation.  ”–me, I’m trying to stay moving too but its a little different.  I’ve been all over the U.S. now just covering anything and anyone I can.  Journalism is dying and I feel that maybe if I just keep writing I’ll keep it alive.”

Tenoch laughs a little inside, the notion of one person keeping written journalism alive is laughable but he smiles because noble ideals are familiar to him.   “I get that.  For a while I thought maybe I could keep the revolution alive.  You know how I used to be.  I used to wave the hammer in the sickle in everyone’s face like nobody’s business but now that seems to be dying and I can’t keep up with it either.  I guess we all have to grow up sometime.”

“Yeah maybe but I like that you always wanted to do something that made no sense.”  She looks for a moment as though she wants to retract the statement and Tenoch almost spits out his beer as laughter erupts from within him.  ”No I mean, its not that it didn’t make sense.  It just seemed soo…futile…I mean…oh, man…I’m sorry.”

He laughs again and runs his sleeve across his mouth and shakes his head.  ”Don’t be.  It’s true.  I was always a bit retarded when it came to what I wanted to do.  No one’s fault but my own.  Don’t apologize for being honest.”  He looks directly in her eyes for a second and can feel the connection again and looks away.  They stand around awkwardly, Tenoch nursing his beer and Lauren muttering random empty ended phrases as if attempting to start a conversation.

“Do you want to dance?”

The question catches him off guard but he doesn’t show that and says Of course.  He grabs another beer from the fridge to her great amusement and follows her to the dance floor.  She grabs his hand so as not to lose him in the crow and for a moment every stops and he feels time surge forward while the scene remains the same.  So this is  what time traveling feels like. An instant passes and he is back with her and the music surges above them and breaks upon them like a wave.  She doesn’t feel that much older anymore and the room fits more, doesn’t loom nearly as much as it initially did.

Lauren finds an open spot within the crowd and turns to him.  They begin to dance and this isn’t the dancing that is so typical on modern dance floors; they don’t grind and they don’t in any way shape or form rub against each other but it is apparent that they are moving together.  He can dance.  He’s no Michael Jackson but he can move.  He can find rhythm where there is none and pull his body’s strings like a marionette until he has found the proper speed at which to move and suddenly there is rhythm–something created from nothing.

He watches her move and she wasn’t half bad either.  She had the hips to move and they followed the sound well.  He found his eyes following them and when he looked up at her he saw her eyes on his and he blushed.  She laughs and put her hands on his waist and pulled her closer to him.  There was nothing sexual about their dancing despite all the writhing bodies around them nearly orgasming on the dance floor.  She put her arms around him and let him guide her to the beat of the music.  They became lost in the wave, thrown back in forth, crashing on the wall and then surging back to crash against the other wall.

“Do you want to go sit down for a bit?”

She yells it into his ear and still he barely hears it.  He looks up at her and she looks at him expectantly, expectant of what he isn’t sure, but still he nods.  He guides her out of the sea, avoiding the rip tides that threaten to drag them both back in and finally they make it out to an area where there are couches and people.

Tenoch recognizes a small handful of them and a few others he recognizes after pulling them out of the past and placing them within this new present.  He sits down within the circle of chairs and Lauren places herself in a lounge chair next to him.

“What’s good, Tenoch?” A tall man with a strong jaw and an odd likeness to Clark Kent asks.  His name is Jeremy if memory serves.  ”Dan was looking for you.  He’ll probably be back here later.  You know he hates dancing.”

“Yeah.  Not much.  Just been home for a month or so now and catching up with people, you know.  Its crazy being home.”

“Word.  Japan right?  Tokyo!  Godzilla!”  Jeremy extends his arms and rises from his seat to rampage around the chairs as though Godzilla to everyone’s amusement.  One person in the group yells out, Gozirra! and the group laughs louder.

“Yeah.” Tenoch picks up as the laughter subsides. “I mean Godzilla was crazy but nothing like Mecha Godzilla.  Now there’s someone to shit your pants for.”

The crowd laughs and for a few moments there is silence.  Tenoch hears his name yelled and suddenly a mass lands on top of him and smothers him.  He crouches and then pushes the person off gently, trying to see who it is.

“Dan!”  He gets up and embraces his friend.  Of all the people there it appears that outside of himself Dan had escaped the time stream most.  He did not look much different and he acts about the same.  ”This party is crazy.  Thanks for the invite.”

“Of course man.  I couldn’t pass up seeing you after I heard you’d returned from Japan.  I’ve been traveling a bit myself actually.  I just got back from filming in Costa Rica.  I was working on an independent film down there.  Hopefully it will be well received and you’ll hear about it but for now we’re just waiting.”

Tenoch smiles but suddenly feels a slight tug on his arm and looks down at Lauren who he’d completely forgotten about.  ”Hey, I’m going to get another drink.  Do you want anything?”

“Oh man, sorry I got distracted.  Yeah,” he pauses and thinks, “You know what?  I’m gonna be an old man and just play it safe.  Could you just get me another beer?  Thank you!”

She says its nothing and moves to fight through the crowd towards the kitchen.  Tenoch turns back to Dan who is following Lauren with his eyes.  ”Lauren, huh?  Are you two together?  You two always acted like you were in love but from what I remember nothing ever went down.”

“Yeah, we’re not together.  We were just dancing for a bit.  I bumped into her over at the fridge.” Dan raises an eyebrow.  ”I mean I guess she was looking for me but whatever.  Yeah but whatever.”

Dan laughs.  ”Okay, okay.  So yeah.  I see you’ve been chillin’ over here with the old crew.”  He nods at the people sitting around the lounge and takes Lauren’s seat.  Tenoch returns to his seat but before doing so he looks towards the dance floor to see if Lauren is back but nothing.  She’ll back when she’s back.  Chill out. He settles into the chair and talks to Dan about days gone by. This goes on for some time and Tenoch finds himself drifting in and out of the time frame again until he feels a firm hand on his shoulder.  He looks up and Lauren is handing him his beer.  Thanking her he takes the beer and looks to see if Dan is going to get up but finds that Lauren is already on his lap.

The solid weight presses down upon him and again time around him stops and he feels himself speeding up and sinking into the ground.  The substance is like molasses and he can feel it sucking him down and panic takes him.  It is all too abrupt for him to put up any sort of argument and he is through the ground before he can say anything.  He pops out of the floor and lands again in his chair and the room feels new now.  The molasses is gone and he feels clean.  This all takes a moment and he is back with Lauren on his lap and Dan smirking behind his drink.

Someone across from Tenoch asks him a question and once again he finds himself attempting to place a name.  She is Indian or maybe Bangladeshi.  He knows they get angry when you confuse the two but he can never tell the difference.  Shazli?  Maybe.  ”So why were you over in Japan anyway, Tenoch?”

Tenoch looks at her and questions whether or not he should answer.  Who the hell is she anyway?  Lauren puts her arm around him and the gesture soothes him.  ”I was working with a  syndicalist group.”  One of the group laughs, thinking that Tenoch is joking but those who know him remain silent.  ”Despite the flourishing market in Japan, particularly Tokyo, it really isn’t as great as you think.  The shit’s hitting the fan and people are getting sick of it.  I worked with a group of older men.”

“Older men?”  Shazli again.  ”Shouldn’t you have been working with other students?”

“Students in Tokyo are useless.  They spend all their time on their novelties and completely forget their goals.  We were working to awaken the students and through them hopefully find a way to jump start the businesses.  The CEO’s are all old men who are tired and want to step down but there aren’t any people our age who want to take the position.  So we protested and organized rallies and tried to reignite a new desire for work ethic and motivation but the students ignored us.  Wherever we went we never had an audience and finally I just came home.  It isn’t worth fighting a revolution for people who don’t care.”

There is silence for a bit and Tenoch can feel Lauren’s heart beating against his.

“What you should have done was called up Gozirra and had him tear down Tokyo.  Then there would be such a need for initiative and motivation that everyone would have to work!”  Everyone laughs.  The joke wasn’t funny but the need to laugh was there and that is all that one really needs to make anything funny.

“I’m tired.  Do you wanna go?”

The whisper is barely there and Tenoch is not sure that he hears it properly but when he looks at Lauren she is looking at him expectantly again and still he isn’t sure that he knows what she is expecting but he is beginning to suspect.  He leans over and whispers in her ear that whenever she’s ready he’ll go.  And he can feel her smile and she says that she’s ready to go now and she rises from his lap and he follows slowly.

“Aight, Dan I think we’re out.”

“Oh ya?”  Dan doesn’t hide the smirk this time and Tenoch smiles back.   “Alright man you need to keep in touch.  And stop being crazy.  No one wants you dying in some foreign country.”

“Yeah…I don’t know about all that.  I’ll be fine.”  He embraces Dan and says goodbye to everyone else.

Before they can leave they look for Luc who if nothing else they have to thank for the party.  He is off in a corner of the room on a lone couch with a girl that Tenoch does not recognize.  Tenoch yells out a farewell but knows that in their present state Luc will be incapable of untying his tongue to return the sentiment.  Lauren grabs his hand and leads him out of the party.

They catch a cab and take it to Lauren’s place.  The entire ride is silent with Lauren’s head on Tenoch’s shoulder and Tenoch’s mind racing.  It isn’t that he doesn’t find Lauren attractive.  It’s that he had been with someone the night before.  No, that’s not it either.  He had been with women one, two, three, four nights in a row and each one different.  He didn’t want to throw her away.  He couldn’t.  So when she asked him to come upstairs he considered saying no but paid the driver anyway and went up with her.

It is a beautiful Upper West Side apartment well decorated for someone who was barely out of college.  She offers him a seat on the couch and asks if he wants anything to drink.  He asks if she has any liquor and she does so he asks her for a rum and coke which she runs off to get.  He fidgets on the couch, taps on his lap, hums songs until she returns with the drink.  She sits next to him, nearly on his lap again and they sit here for a moment in suspended animation. This is not one of the occasions mentioned earlier but simple human ineptitude, the inability to take the next step.

“No.”

Lauren looks up at him confused.  He is shaking his head adamantly.

“No.  I can’t do this.  No.”

“You can’t do what?”  She looks concerned but not upset.

“I can’t sleep with you.  I won’t.”

Lauren stares at him for a moment and he expects her to laugh.  He expects her to mock him for even thinking that she would want to sleep with him but instead she nods.  ”I can’t say I didn’t want to.  That would be a lie.  Is there someone else?”

He shakes his head.  ”Nothing like that.  I just.  I want you.  I want to feel what you feel like.  But I want to know you within now and not then.  Up until this moment everyone has been a past moment.”

She smiles at him.  ”I have no idea what you just said.”  Tenoch blushes and stutters a response but she cuts him off.  ”Look, it’s fine.  I don’t have to get it.  I want you too but if this isn’t the place then whatever.  We’ll figure something out.  The thing is I don’t really know what you mean by the past.  I just know that every moment has to be the present.  If we don’t live that way then we turn into Tokyo and I don’t want that.  I don’t live in a place where everything is outdated but we live like a plague on the work of the past.  So you need to stop too.  We’re the present.  And you’re the present.”  She stops as if running that through her head and laughs.  ”I don’t know what the hell I’m saying.  Look can we go to bed?  You can sleep in the same bed with me.  Don’t worry we don’t even have to touch.”

Words fail to form and so she grabs his hand and takes him to her bedroom where she undresses him and lays him to bed.  Never once does she even attempt to kiss him and when she climbs into bed beside him she doesn’t touch him.  Tenoch stares at her as she closes her eyes and he feels it for the final time.  This time he feels himself freeze along with Lauren and the bed but the world around him revolves in a blur until he can no longer distinguish shapes.  He feels nauseous and tries to move to run to the bathroom but finds that he is incapable of moving.  A moment later the revolutions cease and the nausea dissolves.  This time, when he looks around, the room does not appear out of place and he feels as if within time he fits, a perfect piece of a massive jigsaw. He drifts off to sleep, safe in the knowledge that he is where he should be.  When he awakens he is once again like Rip Van Winkle but now he has returned to the time he belongs in and the awakening is on that does not scare him.

The next morning Lauren feels herself awaken to a minor hangover.  She opens her eyes, smiling, excited to see Tenoch but finds nothing.  The other half of the bed is empty and for a moment Lauren is crushed.  Then she sits up and looks on top of the pillow and placed carefully in the center of the pillow is a note with a phone number.

I don’t get up from the chair, nor would you if it were your chair. What is there to do in such a place? I think that once the presence that is my mind asked why I make no attempts at escape. And I thought, for a moment that I had once but now, in the warm glow of the television I find no reason to rise. Have you ever tried to turn your back to it? I did once when I felt the wall for exits, and moments of darkness were terrifying. Do you know what I mean? When the television shifts to another scene or switches to a commercial the screen is black for a moment but that moment, on the outskirts of the rays, is isolating. There is nothing around you for an instant but when the television returns everything returns to normal, the world keeps running like clockwork. Still, the moment is palpable. No. Apologies. One can no more feel a moment taste the colors. Though once I swear I tasted red. Or maybe that was in a movie.

Apologies.

The president elect. All of it outside of the room, all of it far away. And the crowds that appear on the television appear to be overjoyed, emotional to the point of tears but I don’t know what that feels like. I am not so sure that it is worth getting to know what that feels like. I am safer here, I am safer in the refuge of the television. Here all I need to do is watch and listen. The television switches to a commercial and the room vanishes for the interminable moment and my heart races. Light. Breathe. Light.

The room is fifteen square feet and the only thing inside it is the television. And me. Everything except for the television was made by me. The television was always there. It was there upon my birth and it nursed me to health. The chair I thought into being and I am never truly confident that it is there. It holds me up and the moments when I do not acknowledge it there is a hole in the room that leaves me afraid and has my stomach twisting in knots for the rest of the night. So the chair is rarely ever gone. It is simply the television. And me.

The inauguration returns and the commentators speak and speak until silence. Not true silence. The new president speaks. And I hear but from here, from the room, from the chair, what do I care? His actions are irrelevant. The television needs no governing and I with no money to spend need no protection from the inevitable recession, the succession of power that I simply need know nothing about. And the audience is crying again. Should I be crying? I try to cry but I am safe behind the screen and I need no president. I who am we need no television.

There is only the television. And me.

And the exits. No. Apologies. The commentators speak of exit strategies and relief to bereaved people who have been suffering. There are no entrances in the room, nor are there exits. I was borne in the womb of the television for generations. From the year when the man landed on the moon and Kennedy and Nixon both won simultaneously. Because for the world I am the final moment. I am the child weaned upon the milk of the television, upon years of media and wars and peace time. Upon my birth there were other children in this room, a radio, books, sofas, people in and out. But time omits those so-called necessities. So now it is the television.

And you.

No. Apologies.

And me.

For am I am not you.

When you. No. Apologies. When I look in the mirror. No. Apologies. There is no mirror. The president speaks of looking into a mirror to find the person who can truly save the nation. I do not look into any mirror to see you. I do not see me. Because there is no mirror. I only need the television now. Those which were the necessities of life are all fed to me, intravenously, through the television, through a tube that is placed precisely on the inside of my eye to feed me what I need to know. The needle is never removed and when it is only because I chose it to be so.

And with the end of the speech there is the benediction and the president and his cabinet exits. And I don’t know where they go. How could I know where they go? Here there are no entrances and no exits.

]]> http://wrdisbond.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/exits-and-entrances/feed/ 0 wrdisbond I am safe behind the screen and I need no president... http://wrdisbond.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/the-roots-of-our-salvation/ http://wrdisbond.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/the-roots-of-our-salvation/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:55:00 +0000 wrdisbond http://wrdisbond.wordpress.com/?p=43 ]]>

This entry was inspired by a recent comment on my first post.  The commenter politely stated that in their opinion Magical Realism, a recurring topic throughout the mentioned post, was not truly a Latin American thing but had its roots in a tradition that stemmed to Europe and Spain.  I wholeheartedly agree and recognize that there were those from many other nations especially  in Germany with writers such as Kafka and Johan Daisne.  I was not attempting to discredit them but simply draw the Latin American magical realists away from their European predecessors.

There is something entirely unique about the Latin American movement in magical realism and, not to reiterate something that was expressed in the earlier post, it is the nearly unifying attempt to protect oneself from vulnerability and the pains that exist so often as a man and as a citizen of Latin America.  It is not that other people do not suffer as well but they handle it differently as can be viewed in Kafka’s “Wedding Preparations in the Country”.  Kafka acknowledges the insecurities of his characters and plays with them, placing them in the spotlight no matter how fervently they attempt to hide from them.  The magical realists of Latin America also tend to acknowledge their character’s insecurities and pain but that is as far as the similarity goes.  In Bolaño The Savage Detectives, the two true protagonists Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are never allowed to tell their stories for themselves, never show any sort of emotion to anyone and when emotion is apparent it is only seen from the narrator’s shadowy perspective, be it from an entirely different room or in such a dark room that no real emotion is ever really witnessed.

It is for this reason that I separated the world of European magical realism from that of the Latin Americans.  There is a feeling of escape within their stories, a need to run from the pain of their world in order to remain sane and sometimes as in the case of Bolaño it is truly difficult to say that he was able to retain this sanity.  It was also their safest bet when attempting to describe a too dangerous world.  Some of the magical realists carry a journalistic air about their writings and it could never have been safe for them to describe the events they do if they had been blunt and transparent in their commentary.  In Latin America, magical realism offers the safety necessary for artists to be able to assert their political views without the repercussions that a man such as Victor Jara, a popular musician around the time of the Pinochet coup, faced.

So as is obvious, this is why I separated Latin American magical realism from that of other movements.  This is not an attack at the commenter but simply my explanation for something that obviously did not come across clearly in my previous post.  I hope that this better explains my thoughts.

Sing, O Muse...

Sing, O Muse, of the shame of Tenoch, son of Ivan, whose time (now irretrievable) had been spent in foolish second guesses and what-ifs that had eventually led to him as he was today: frustrated and land locked. And sing, false Muse, of the opportunities, all gone now, that Tenoch, in his shame, felt himself unworthy of taking. How could he deserve such privilege? Sing of his failure to launch, cruel Muse, the countless moments where mission control had reached “2…1” but he failed to ignite the fuel. Moreover, sing for me of how in this, the twilight of his youth, he found himself on his computer scanning through his junk mail. Sing then, my muse, but once more, of how this last chance flared before him as in a beacon, warning him to take heed, pay attention.

“Holy fuck.”

He was normally more eloquent than this but the words on his screen had silenced his mind. Congratulations! You have been accepted into our program in Bhutan. His mind remained submerged, struggling to find air until finally with one last pull, he broke through. He lay back in his chair, his chest heaving, his arms splayed out for balance.

He had applied to this one as he had applied to every other, with little hope of getting in. He prepared to compose a response telling them that they had sent an e-mail to the wrong place; there was no way the email was meant for him. As his thoughts settled, he reread the letter and found no mistakes in address or name. The invitation was for him.

Further perusing the letter he begins to laugh hysterically, his shoulders heaving and his head down. Minutes pass and tears begin to land on his lap. “8000 dollars.” It was not that he couldn’t ask his parents to help him pay for it; it was that he did not find that his life merited such a reward. The undeniable burden of his shame lay upon his shoulders leading him to question his every thought and feeling. It was fitting that he would be offered salvation only to find the broker was Shaitan. The shame, the thoughts of a string of attempted failures, debilitates him and leaves him crippled. He falls asleep in his chair, unable to rise from his seat.

He wakes to his dog licking his fingers in an attempt to rouse him from his coma, a sleep that had left him out from the world all day. “Morning Achilles” he says, reaching behind the ears of his golden retriever. Like clockwork his leg begins thumping and Tenoch smiles and rises from his chair, finally able to muster the will.

Plugging his iPod into his speakers, he steps into his shower. The gentle tattoo of the water is gently overcome by the gentle swell of Pyramid Song. Thom Yorke’s ghostly coo reverberates throughout the bathroom and Tenoch finds himself wailing his fury along with York as the drums contribute their swinging cadence. He massages his scalp and thinks, thinks of the day’s potential but can find none here, not with the music fading out and following into the much angrier Pulk. He steps out of the shower—

–and into a café. Ordering a double shot of espresso he settles down at a table and begins to write. The words sprout from his shame, gargled remnants from the back of his mind that had not been shaken loose this morning. It was summer and Tenoch preferred the café at this time, clear of the NYU students who frequented it during the academic year to flaunt their so called intellect. It was uninspired as was most of what he wrote. He did not find that he deserved the privilege of comprehending the madness that all great writers suffered. He looked up from his writings for a moment and found that at an older white man at a nearby table was staring pointedly at him, something he could not stand. Tenoch was the child of a nearly Haitian Dominican mother and a near pure indio Columbian, so he suffered from an inability to see himself as fully anything (even his roots weren’t pure!). He held the white man’s gaze until he looked away, a victory he found profoundly satisfying; it made him feel more like the activists of his past standing up for his people.

As the espresso begins to settle in he finds his writing becoming more erratic and the lights become uncomfortably bright. He stares at the lights, they captivate him and then—

–he is fucking her but she isn’t his and he isn’t hers. Her gasps grate against his ears until he just wants it to end; he wants to cum and be out of tHERe. And then he does and she screams and he—

–orders another espresso. He needs it. The trip wants him to pay attention to it, to say “I will go!” But he can’t. Not yet, not now, not yet, not now, not yet. And his pen is cleaving the paper’s flesh and the manager is demanding he leave, that he is scaring the customers and Tenoch smiles “Wonderful espresso” and leaves.

New York City is lonely in summer. It is dark even in broad daylight and there are too many people around for him to feel a part of anything. And he knows that he should decide on whether to go or not but he can’t. He walks and—

–steps into a bakery in Inwood on Dyckman St. “Dame un sandwich de jamon y queso. De swiss por favor.” And the words are slow to come, he is not Hispanic anymore, he is Latino, or maybe it is the other way around. The Dominican woman at the counter smiles at him and gets to making the sandwich. Tenoch thinks on this half of himself, on the Dominicans. They were the late migrants, only really gracing America’s shores in the past 30 years but there was something significant about them. They were black; black enough to count in this new black regime, they were black—

–she was white. She clung to him, her sweaty body heaving after the desperate act they had commited. He wanted her to let go. He didn’t want her anymore and this was almost as bad as the fucking, the dirty, needless thrusting and searching. He wanted to sear his skin, to have someone skin him and place him on their wall. But he couldn’t die so long as she held him. And she looked at him and opened her mouth “I—“

–“hate you.” He took it. He needed it. She, darker, creamier, slams each word into his face like a fist and he took it standing. He needed to. He loved her and he needed to. He knew what she needed and would give this to give it to her. “You want to go to Bhutan. So go. Fuck this, Tenoch.” He smiled. “I—“

–“love you.” He cringed. Those words stung, left his ears bleeding. No you don’t, no, no, no, don’t, you. It was just a dick. Fuck, it was just a fuck. Her claws dug into him and he couldn’t leave. “Do you—“

–“I got in mama!” His mother sounded tired, old on the phone. “I don’t think I can afford it though.” She spoke and he could hear the aging, couldn’t piece apart the words. He nodded. “So I’ll go. I—“

–“love me too?” Tick, tick, love, tick, me, tick, do. Yes, no, yes, your eyes, gods, no, yes, gods! He kisses her; he fucks her, anything to shut her up. Her moans go on and on, oh god, on me, on her—

–and on the boat. Bhutan waits. Weeks from now it will wait for me with legs wide open. And I go in or he goes in and we don’t know that I don’t know. And I

love

you

too.