chapter 7

The rhythm of my footsteps and the crunch of the dirt under my boot built a metronome in my heart as its pitter-patters climbed and fell with the hills. Sweating against the cool night air my pores pushed out the microscopic bits the city air had packed into me.

They said I kept impressive pace for not getting out, but honestly I pushed my self to near black out as not to seem too slow to her. She rode my heels; stopping is surrender to embarrassment. I left my thoughts in the Toyota.

Red on the horizon.

I practically bit the back of his head, grabbing the sides of his backpack. If he had said we were stopping I hadn’t heard.

“Whoa”

Sara must have grabbed some hold on my bag, the shoulder straps tightened and my center of gravity balanced. The trees in this spot grew less dense, or had been removed - I couldn’t tell. My breaths grew longer and sparser, the metronome calmed and I perked my ears like a critter – running water? A river perhaps. Marcus dropped his pack. I heard Sara’s hit the ground behind me.

I took mine off. My sweat soaked through my sweatshirt and immediately the slightest breeze sent me into shivers. Ruffling through my bag for a sweater I started looking around. Marcus clicked a flashlight, he had one in front of me during the hike but I never saw anything directly under it. Seeing my own hands after hours of blueness made me want a sink. Filthy.

“We’re here” he said.

“We’re where?” I asked. He flicked his flashlight up and centered it on flatness. It took a moment to decipher it. A tiny cabin.

“Forest Service, more or less free to use, its like forty bucks in the summer time but its free to us now. There are no beds, but there are hammocks and it’s actually very comfy for what you expect. Especially after a hike like that, way not to be some cliché wind huffer, you kept pace pretty good”

“Thank you” I said. Wind Huffer?

I walked inside the little cabin, seeing only from the weak and even moonlight the almost arachnid shadow of the hammock. Sara had laid out the near vintage sleeping bag, and I tried not to think how fast all the spiders and mites must have rushed it for warmth. It must have been Sara; Marcus had been outside with me moments before. I sat down, sinking to where my tailbone bobbed at the maxim of the hammocks stretch only a few inches above the old dry floorboards. Awkwardly finding the point of stability, hesitant from the un natural sensation of the cradle. I stood up again, after feeling something under my thigh. A cookie. Another cookie. The last one tasted like cardboard but this one felt softer, had an earthier smell to it, it must have been high in some sort of hippie- meal. I nibbled it first, succumbing to uncomfortable hunger, then began stuffing it in my mouth to satisfy more than my stomach. I had it, I had to consume it.

I lay down on the hammock, pulling the sleeping bag tight around me. I could hear them talking, their voices tapping the paper-thin windows like flies bouncing off the plexy. There voices went back and forth, but I heard no passion, no, she wasn’t even trying. blah blah blah blah I don’t really care. Blah blah I know but blah blah irrelevant. I’ll just close my eyes a little, then go see what’s going on outside. I could use a fire, some s’mores would be nice. I’ll just close my eyes for a minute I thought.

Right before I slipped away.

There voices became predictable, rising and falling in a calm matter of factness, a dialogue on beat ticking like a metronome. Slowing my heart, swinging, oh how low. Eyelids heavy now. Lashes getting drunk and close. Retinas growing and shrinking to the moonlight so blue it made the vintage red of the sleeping bag look a little purpling bruise.

Flickers on the window cast their blotchening shadows as the fired kicked up. The yellow and white never diminished from the center of the glass, but cutting left and right and up and down were the reflections between the night and the light and between their hand motions and shifts that cast shadows and spun patterns onto the pane like spattering blood or the frequency of jittering sounds as if the window, tiny and flat, was the cockpit glass from forty thousand leagues under the sea and the seaweed and slithering creatures of the unexplored domain were the markers of forward motion on the concaved imagery of dirty little window.

Where was I. What the fuck was going on. Somewhere I was comfortable. I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming. I think I am dreaming, I thought. I was not dreaming, unless dreaming was as simple as this incredible mind (mine and yours!) that makes us so different than the critters that wouldn’t think twice to sleep outside transcends that bullshit conception of time and the farce of space and our powerful, glorious minds knew all along not only what was going on in our physical dimensions, but all the others as well! I believed that and forgot everything else I had ever thought on the presumptuously out of reach concepts of my idling thoughts.

Something had changed, elsewhere it hadn’t. Elsewhere my mind and mannerisms were in a micro-economics class text messaging the days events back and forth under the table without even looking at the screen. Who looks at the screen? I had missed something important, as I had earlier that day when text messaging that same person cost me a glance that would have other wise been directed at a half Thai/French culinary student who in some other path of mind would have become my best wife.

But if this is true, at their hands, then, in the balance of that equation I was outside, on the rock, speaking to Sara as if it were my job. Marcus would be here, curled in a cocoon in the middle of the last place its wits would have placed him. Maybe in a hotel room in Bangkok or maybe a shack in the Adirondacks. What was I saying to him, how did my reflection cast with the fire on the tiny window and where did it look as though that vessel traveled. What was his prison and how did it get tighter as he sank in the hammock. Her too. How low did her hammock sink, what did she taste like, and did she know that when she handed me the cheesecake a world away in their lie of a kitchen, I smiled not because her finger tips touched mine, but because feeling hers I immediately knew she had never touched a violin in her life.

I hit the wood. I had not been out the door. I had heard through the wall and stretched my ear to the door until the whole thing came apart like a wet hot dog bun. Tearing, the all of me flopped against the floor. Conversation stopped. I gathered myself up on my elbows, crouching awkwardly in the dark while the remnants of netting fretted against my neck and scared me with sensations of spiders legs and moth’s wings colliding against my neck hairs.

I couldn’t feel my hands.

“Lying on my back and counting the stars, it causes a chill all over the top of my back. A nervous chill, you know? Like when you remember a time you fucked up royally and slipped by. When you realize that you shouldn’t even be where you are enjoying your freedom because, if the system actually worked, if karma came back and god existed, you’d be in jail or six feet under. Live life close to the bone and you can’t count the stars anymore because your not lying in a field counting stars, you’re still lying in your best friends living room counting your pulse, counting the flickers off the skylight that are in fact millions of years old – photons surviving the rigors of space to be accounted for between fearful cold sweats of a fading heart beat.

That’s what Marcus was saying. I could hear it now, through the wall, as if I’d crawled on my hands and knees down in the filthy with the spiders to spy a conversation I was presumably invited to in the first place. “Painkillers are a funny thing friend, they kill indiscriminately” he was talking to me. He saw my head around the corner. How would he call her friend?

“They silence the pangs after knee surgery or they can silence that little drummer boy in your chest. Then you realize, right before you black out and dream in the mat black cosmos of the celestial highway, that you got to, absolutely have to kill the little boy inside you or, one of the times you look back over your shoulder for him…he’ll kill you. You’ll turn and he’ll be there, smiling dumbly tossing breadcrumbs to the ducks as the rest of our world blindsides you – unless you can”

Were these his thoughts or mine? Hers? Or all of ours unaltered as if I looked upon the fire to not see it only through its bending shadows and glares from the window but directly in the vulnerable state of flesh. Goddamn the window frame! Damn the shack and cell phone. My throat ached, I had been sick and tried to make myself get it out. It hurt. It couldn’t do anything else but hurt and no play of light could convince me otherwise.

chapter 6

The city of lights, Paris, in the dark side of earth during the long days of the year.

A young man is standing across the street from a rounded tree park and up the avenue from where a broad, flat faced apartment building split the avenue in a two-way fork. The streets, with their broad white markings, are barren except for him, an old taxi, and an elderly lady walking down the street with her groceries. The bread stuck out. With her shawl she had looked the same for the last hundred years.

He’s walking towards the apartments; his face freckled with spots of streetlight that poked through the arbors. Most lights are off. There is a bus stop out front, where the building rounded out and split the street. An orangey, dirty light flickered above it. Behind that, the front doors of the apartments lit by cheap white-blue lights that attracted nats and robbed the skin of pigment. They tend to buzz. In the summer when even the night felt humid, these lights made it worse.

Third floor window, the one he kept eying as he crossed over lines in the cement sidewalk, flickered with a crossing shadow. He steps off the curve as the old woman nears the far corner, across from the apartments. He walks briskly, sending ripples up his slacks and his loafers clicking, jogging slightly with the buttons buttoned.

He jumps up onto the opposite curb, pulling a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and, without looking hitting send. He holds the device to him mouth like a walkie-talkie and looks with pride at the apartment window.

Ring….Ring….

The older woman stops for a minute, huddling her belongings a little closer on the corner as the yellow taxi turns left in front of her. The windows are rolled down, or else she should have seen her reflection and not the worn brown leather of late modeled Mercedes.

A voice clicks onto the cell phone.

“hello?”

He slows his footsteps, collecting his thoughts and his plan in the shadows of the trees.

“hey, you left kind of early”

“yeah” the voice says. “I do that sometimes”

“you didn’t say goodbye” he says..

“I do that too, don’t see the point in it really, it just brings sadness into a room, even if its not an important good bye you know, its never an upper”

“I am almost at your place…” he says. “Wait” he’s almost on the corner where the old woman is crossing. He closes the phone and keeps the corner of his eye on the third floor window. He can tell, without looking, that the moving silhouette has quit shifting, settling in the corner of the sill. Watching.

She looks down on him from her tiny window lined in lace and pealing white paint. He leans into the old woman and says something in probably broken but nonetheless charming French and the old woman hands the bag to him. She watches from the window as he crosses the street, nodding and forcing small talk with the little old lady. Our watcher step back from the window, wrapping a robe tight around her nightgown. She scurries to the door, barefoot against the aged wood marred with dark signs of age, down to the street level where the blue cold lights lit her door. She cracks it just a bit, peering with a single green eye down the block to where she sees his coat disappear into the apartment of the old woman. She breathes cold night air through the three inch gap before she sees him reemerge.

She lets the door clunk close quick and hides behind it, listening through it for the click of his loafers that grow louder. She reopens the door as he reached for it, catching him in a slight look of surprise.

“hi!” he says on the exhale. “Wow”

“Hi” she says, letting the door open with its own nonchalance.

“come out”

“come in”

“come out”

“come in” she cant help but smile, thumbing the cusp of comedy and annoyance. She puts her arm out for him to take, as if to walk inside, and he, as if to comply, offers his arm as well. Grabbing her arm he pulls her out from the door onto the sidewalk close enough to dance, but she can’t hear the music.

“what are you doing?” she asks.

“I…don’t know” he says. Staring not in her eyes like black and white movies with clicking projectors had taught but at her lips. Thinking not of some kiss but of the science of their scene. If indeed the light he stood beneath turned the white paint of the building a powdery shade of blue then, by all means, it should distort all colors. Her lips, even a vibrant red, would look dulled by the blue. But they did not. He is sure she has no idea that curling from the lines of her face and nape of her neck shined a violation of the physical world, as he knew it. A tiny little wonder that gave his face and mind a tiny bit peace as the door clunked closed and hid the sounds of fast feet ascending stairs.

chapter 5

That Friday, 2 o’clock in the afternoon I was the avenue of the America’s using a vast network of satellites and cellular towers to hear the politics that goes into choosing housing at NYU. Leah modestly denied what brought her such nonchalance comfort; that she got what she wanted. She was on the cool floor for next year. You know the one, the one with out the losers. I kept, for the good of our love, insisting what she needed to hear but never agreed to. We’re talking straight gangster real politik Kissinger shit.

The situation worsened as I encountered more of those fliers. I could take one or the other; her (but oh never my), humanistic tendencies, or their gambling conception of what constituted art. The two of the together, just kill me now. Last Tuesday Marcus saw past my confidence and clarity. He’d been right. I needed to get out. I sensed to look up.

I saw Sara, smiling again, in the window of an old Toyota Land Cruiser. Someone had removed the TO and the TA, leaving. “Yo!.”

They turned right, just in front of me, not because they could pick me from the crowd but because this was where we agreed to meet. I followed them down the side street until they had a spot for me to jump in. I opened the door. Together in colliding pitches they said hello. I said Yo, although I don’t think they got it. Sara climbed into the back of the car, insisting I ride shotgun. Quite decent of her, I think.

After a number of lumbering weight shifts as he navigated the blocks of the city to an exit ramp. We made small talk out of the city, heading over bridges; Manhattan shrank in our rear view mirror but never lost its marvel. I kept looking back, like a child watching his mom wave him off to kindergarten on the first day, until the last brick of the Bronx disappeared behind the anemic greenery of Westchester.

New York, as it turned out, is actually quite natural once you get up into it. In the fall the trees are fading from green into a singed yellow and a red Marcus said looked like the apples that grew at home. Plopped along the ridges and tree lines, little white houses looked like paper creations with the windows punched out and rough around the edges. Dioramerica.

We had been driving for hours when we picked up a college radio station somewhere outside of Albany. For a minute or so the repetitive ramblings of some douche bag attempting comedy made me yearn for a quick end to it all. When he finally shut up he did what I expected from a college radio station disk jockey. Drug music.

“Do you like Jimi?” Marcus asked. “Of course” I said. I loved Jimi. I absolutely loved Jimi.

“Jimi’s from Seattle”

“I didn’t know that” No one ever told me how was I supposed to.

“You didn’t know that?”

“Nope”

“I can’t believe no one knows that” he said. “You would know if he was from New York, you would know and I would know”

“I know”

“What the hell is that?” I changed the conversation from where exactly Hendrix met the devil for his skill to a hunk of metal on the side of the road. “Jesus H. Christ” I said. “A tractor?”

Marcus kept on talking, he’d never stop. The sun sank in the west and lit the Appellations red. That sight, of the pink sunset sliding over the slow hills like sorbet must have meant the world to many people. Perhaps if I had been able to enjoy it in silence then its flavor on the eyes would have taken a fixed position in the synapse of my brain, but, he kept talking. I blurred his voice from my head, watching the groves of this and that growing in squares like on the labels of wines. Something snapped my attention back at him. Red again.

He told me in the future the lands of North America would be colored red by the mapmakers. Red, as Rome and China are both painted now. Red, because it is the color of shame, and fitting for the worlds civilizations that achieved such power through blood and good intentions only to collapse under the weight of their own bellies. (Red, which grabbed my attention to this, did so for another reason). I agreed. But in all fairness, I did not live in America. I tried to explain this to him as I pictured Red America in the rust of derelict tractors along the roadway. He didn’t listen. All the way up the tiny, windy roads of the upstate into the green state. He didn’t believe me.

Nothing he said struck me as all that wrong. I’d find it shocking in the newspaper. But wouldn’t be that surprised to hear someone shouting it from the street corner. Not an incarnation of Christ street corner shouter, but a protester. Someone who seemed to have their cause in order. But no matter how many times I told him plainly I wasn’t that type of American he said I was.

Because it was not Americans that defined who American were. But the enemy. Stone thrower defined where the window shatters. Under the worst or circumstance, the same people. Then America would be lost. But, save desolation, he said, the enemy would define us. I asked him who the enemy was. Being en route to the natural world on his instruction began to look, with the discussion, as the fulfillment of my initial impression of Marcus, before I saw the watch. Out west. Out of touch. But he didn’t blame the Arabs, or the communists, the gays or the Jews or the increasingly popular Mormons. He blamed all of them, and us, he and I, as contributors to the stitching of the star spangled banner.

“It doesn’t matter where you vote. Red or blue? Depends on how fresh the wound is man. A southern Baptist bigot in Georgia or a heroin fiend in Philadelphia (they vote?) could vote two ways but if they both buy bananas that came from the same grove in south America then they together are touchable, tangible America. The banana growers protest their poverty and wages, get replaced with younger workers, lose fingers, gain understandable rage and tell their children of what America has done to them”

He takes his hand off the wheel, momentarily steadying it with his knee while he pulled another pack of cigarettes out of the door panel. Most people ask smokers trying to quit if they mind. Not him.

“Then those children turn around, grow up and low and behold start trafficking yayo because its easy cash, because its there way of getting something back from America. They come across an American schoolgirl walking along the beach and of course they want rape her, hold her head under the water and mail her crushed skull to the American Embassy. They know she has absolutely nothing to do with their fathers suffering but that’s exactly the point man.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses, thick and plastic but sturdy looking, from the fold in the visor. In the reflection the cigarettes burn and the gaping landscapes looked to be the same size.

“She’s oblivious. She has no idea what the repercussions of her actions are, as innocent as those actions may be, the flag means one thing, and even if she’s just stitch of the star, if the whole thing gets burned then she’s getting burned too man”

With that I interrupted, quickly relating a tail from my grandmothers family. She was a member of the Ross Clan in Scotland. The same clan as the émigrés that bore Betsey Ross in the new world. Thus, Bets and I were related. He didn’t care. Sara had fallen asleep in the back of the little sport utility. That didn’t surprise me girls fall asleep all the time in cars. Especially to relevant stories.

He blamed, if not for a better term without malice, those in America who had fallen into the trap of discussing at what degree to stop perusing progress. America had been beautiful in his mind when, even under the tight joints of the church steeple, it lead the rest of the globe in the search for the free world.

As soon as it lost sight of Polaris it never thought to look up again.

In all fairness he was pushing it. Although I really shouldn’t have said blamed. You cannot blame for the unfortunate nature of circumstance prevents it.

Marcus did not see it that way.

Circumstance was gravity. Constant, but its effects relied upon a number of variables. The bloated populous, which sounded like something he took from Marx, steered itself into the path of least resistance. The easiest. Down. In my mind that’s how I saw it. He began to draw upon abstract, and yet somewhat communal experiences to explain it to me.

But he had it. Allow me to explain. He didn’t have all the pieces. I had what he was missing. But as his pieces began to form together with mine in a puzzle I had been constructing since the gravity reference I saw it.

Gravity affects all objects the same. In terms of accelerating to the ground without resistance. Here, it is time that is the speed, time that the constant. In the downward spiral all that is needed is for resistance to change just a fraction, and the equation would be thrown completely off balance. Yet, for such a bloated and dispersed society, the thought of even a miniscule and panoramic change would be too daunting a task to be placed on any body smaller than…oh…the Federal Government. They’re busy.

“And even if the Government stepped in, so much of the populace would label whatever they had to say propaganda for the simple fact that it was deliberate”

“Uh huh”

“You know like, if the government made a firm stand on any domestic issue as firmly as we need, you know, people would just be like “fuck you - you have terrible intentions, I have no reason to trust you”, even if they do have reason.”

“Yeah” I agreed. “People are fickle like that”

“So in theory it works. But in practice the whole construct functions in a slightly different capacity”

“What?” I lost him again. I sensed a need for a soapbox, but I had nothing else to listen to.

“With the two party system man. Instead of the government seeking approval of the people on ideas, it’s the people seeking the approval of the government for a forum for their ideas. Ideas that are probably useful, yet shot down as the two party system allows for enough reasonable doubt to cast any grassroots movement as either extreme or the result of the “other” parties propaganda machine”

Propaganda machine you say? Wow. “You want extremist input in the government”

“What kind of input isn’t extremist?”

“Obvious input?” I had no idea. I hadn’t read the paper before he convinced me

“I don’t know?”

“It has nothing to do with the idea itself. Ideas are by nature neutral. Their acceptance denotes their classification; you just need the bulk of the people to nod their head. Or to sit idly while more extreme maneuvers are met with blank stares.

The car stopped. Marcus leaned into the backseat and woke Sara up. Outside of the car: blotting blackness, ferns and tree branches cast carnivorous alien silhouettes. Marcus stepped out to the back of the car.

“Grab your bag, eat that cookie Sara made for you your going to need the sugars, it’s a hike in from here”
“To where? Where are we?”

“Out by Walden’s Pond”

“Really?”

“Well. Not really. Closer than you’ve ever been though. Am I right?”

“No. I’d been there on a field trip” he couldn’t see my smile.

Hiking alone in the dark, however safe is justifiably terrifying. Hiking without fear in the dark is a symbiotic experience. It requires others. Everyone is at the height of alert; their senses straining to make up for the lack of sight. You don’t talk. You point out places where the person behind you can trip. You keep it close. I treaded fast in this little expedition to bring battery operated light to the heathen landscape, right behind Marcus, watching the thumb grips of his backpack swing with each of his steps it sent me into a trance of sorts, as if my reciprocating bi pedal ness took commands from his brain. These are dangerous times, when you no longer have to worry about what’s directly in front of you. Thoughts, like in dreams, take tiny flickers from the day’s meditation and run with them. Less likely are these to be moments of mania than they are to be good, old fashioned regret.

chapter 4

Marcus paced between the sheets of water that spilt over the gutters of the viaduct. He puffed a tiny hand rolled smoke, sending invisible plumes away in the breeze, taking in the waterfront. Islanders waited in line, eating fast food and trying to keep their belongings dry in the steady rain. Behemoth freighters, marked in Korean and Cantonese, slid by behind them, silent for their size. They cut the waterline with a red stripe and black hull on which the primary-colored patchwork of their containers faded into the white of Seattle’s notoriously low sky. Marcus tensed at every car that crept by him on the street below the overpass. He whipped his eyes at the driver just long enough to see their face before pretending to be busy with a cell phone he kept half sticking out of his pocket.

Behind him, from the row of tiny brick warehouses, a rusted green door creaked open below the faded sign of the fur trader that once owned operated there. A portly old man in an earth toned sweater and humorously small corduroys waddled down the steps and towards Marcus. Two girls, locking the door behind him, followed slower making small talk, seemingly less intent on talking. They looked lean, plain. Durable.

A red Audi from the mid eighties splashed down the street. Marcus waited for it to disappear before acknowledging the old man.

“You’re back!” the old man said.

“Been back for a little while” he said.

“Oh is that right?”

“Yeah, long enough for that old familiar feeling of self termination to return” Marcus said. He kept looking over the old, making eye contact difficult.

“You alright?” the old man asked. “You need a happy lamp? Listen, I have an extra bulb”

“No” Marcus answered, rubbing his eyes. “I’ll just wait for the real sun. There’s no substitute for the real thing, you know?” The two girls reached the conversation. Smiling side by side the old man. He pulled a folder from beneath his baggy sweater and handed it to Marcus. He turned it in his grasp as if handed some foreign object, but his brow looked concerned and informed.

“Don’t open…” the old man began.

“I know, I know” he said, finally looking him in the eye. “But this is different”

“Are you?” the old man asked. The two girls began to shy away from the conversation, treading lightly.

“No, sir, I am not.” He said slowly.
“Then pupil, there is nothing more to discuss. This is necessary. And things that are necessary tend to be difficult, and difficult things, Marcus, are the ones most worth doing” He smiled behind a faded gray and white beard. His eyes, locked with Marcus, seemed to shine in the dullness of a rainy day. For a moment, Marcus thought of the struggle of those two sensations, those wide bright eyes in a dull powdery afternoon. One, breaking free of the other, screamed in belief or desperation. But which, Marcus could not tell. The dark haired girl walked away, across the street towards the salty green Puget Sound. The rain began to fade and the sheets of water pouring from the viaduct ran thin into strings of beads.

“Amelia found him in Paris” the old man proudly said. One of the girls, with light, looked at Marcus, insinuating in a symbiotic blank stare the acknowledgement that cogs had begun to turn. Reservations were useless.

“Sara will go with you” the old man said.

The other girl kept her distance. Marcus tucked the folder under his arm and turned back to the waterfront to look for Sara. She had disappeared in the background of islanders and patrons deciding to brave the rain for good seafood. It’s impossible to tell people apart when everyone is hiding from the rain behind bright colors and plastic.

Then there she was; pulling her hood down, letting the retreating downpour touch her skin and wet her hair slick like a jaguar.

Black sails on the horizon

chapter 3

I agreed to meet Marcus, and his She at Wasabi South, a little sushi bistro I could have once called home when I had developed a bit of an addiction to tempura. They were at a table that could fit four, but made even two feel intimate at tiny tables that demanded a bit of a dance to get under. Cramped, but after 8 the spider rolls cost only six dollars and could feed two people with drunken munchies. They could even tempura fry the whole thing for an extra dollar and believe you me you haven’t lived until you’ve stuffed your face with an entirely fried roll of sushi.

The two of them together, as he had with the city the first time we met, looked miss-matched. She was a round faced, earth toned girl who seemed too charming to waste her exoticness on plain Marcus.

They were just finishing up their rolls – apparently I was forty five minutes late; another bad habit of mine. I had been distracted by all the fliers I could find advertising on 8x11 and 10x14 pieces of urban confetti. Plastered over the walls around construction cites and around polls on the street corners, ambiguous imagery and depressed fonts beckoned for your time. It must be artistic to put

The Gulf Stream @ the PodCityLounge

burning, faded into the cusps of a woman’s neck being traced the outline of a strawberry on a razor. The woman is blindfolded to look like the statue of liberty, tears run from below the blindfold over her fragile Anglican cheeks>

Other things prolonged getting there as well. The portly Arab newspaper vendor at the bottom of NYU’s 3^rd North dorm tower was laying out the evening times when I past by. I usually don’t touch news papers, the black ink get all over my clothes and it’s an arm and a leg to keep getting things professionally cleaned, but something caught my attention. I don’t know, maybe it’s guilt or the small faculties of perversion that all men probably have (I hope) but I slowed down to clarify a headline. I thought it said “Drill Amelia.” Drill Amelia? I backtracked a step. “Drill Alaska” Now there’s a funny image.

I paid the vendor for the paper and moseyed down 3^rd. Next to the Alaska headline (which was in fact, near the bottom of the page), a grainy image of NY Senator Willingham looking pale and angry next sat above the caption “proponents of drilling for crude in Alaska claim the US is too dependent on Saudi oil.” I liked him much better in his campaign commercials, smiling with his beautiful wife while helping teach a black boy in the Bronx how to read Curious George.

I didn’t tell Marcus or Sara that though. I told them I had a family matter and offered to pay for his meal, as he had been so gracious to do for me- and they obliged. Sara said they had dessert at their place and I wanted to see where these people lived. Another bad habit of mine; raised by my mother on the floor of an interior design studio uptown. (Watch for paper cuts) I was six when I realized I was the only straight male on the premises.

We split a cab back to “their place.” Temporary, they kept reminding me, as they were travelers- and the place did not belong to them. Something he stressed probably because it was gorgeous and he did not want me to think something that was not true. Eastside townhouse. Old. Wow. When he had given the cabby directions I though for sure they were renting a room in one of these places. Nope. They had a whole one.

The dwelling, a Spartan three stories, had evidence of Marcus and Sara living there, but no one else. A tasteful collection of exotic woods and dark leathers dressed every room, but sparse.

I had to ask, “how did you get this place?”

“It was one of those opportunities I couldn’t pass up!” he answered from the kitchen. What that meant? I don’t know. Why do people say things to comfort themselves? Other people worth their salt never buy it.

It felt good to sitting in the big leather sofas in an old city house. There were no pictures on the coffee table, only paintings on the wall. Landscapes, but no photographic evidence of the owner. That made it easy to pretend it was mine.

Sara came down the stairs, creaking the old wooden planks before hopping over the back and landing in the accompanying love seat.

“One of my mentors owns it” she said. She said it into her chest as if she didn’t want Marcus to hear. “She’s letting us stay here”

“Mentor?” I asked. She tipped her head to the side and began playing an invisible violin, miming the bow slowly across her clavicle.

“TV works” Marcus called from the kitchen. “Knock yourself out, 128 channels plus on demand, if you can figure it out, I’ve never tried”

The remote was on the coffee table, sitting next to an REI catalogue and National Geographic from which a painted face stared at me. Yellow, outlining green, with a piece of wood pierced through his lip. Only as I followed the forest behind the cover subject did I finally see the whole of the table. Spanning out from the gold frame of the magazine a vast collage of simple crescents and bars appeared in such intricate detail it looked as though the wood had fallen victim to some natural phenomenon. Too much water rubbing it away, or bugs.

But it wasn’t, the design, from what I could tell depicted a large beaked bird pulling something from the waterline.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Sara asked.

It was. It made no sense. But it was beautiful.

“Its pretty cool” I said. I had seen it before. Not that exact image, but something of the same collective movement. Hectic and natural, even nauseating. I made the mistake of trying to understand it all at once, and I lost it. Trying to fathom all the lines and the colors caused the image to become animate; moving in place as if bouncing on an atomic level. It had to go. It had struck some nerve and it needed to go. I put the National Geographic back into the center of the image, destroying its effect, and sat back. The sofa exhaled with me as I sank.

The cable started and deposited me at the cable company’s startup page. As it turned out this is always made with an offensively low budget. Advertisements with solid colored backgrounds selling Nissans or real estate do it yourself guides

Get rich developing New Jersey! No money down! Bada bing!

I turned past the twenty-four hour city news channel, past the Knick’s game and the political cartoons until I found something worth staring at. A tiny Japanese man, cracking live crabs in half with a huge knife in what appeared to be a stadium. Kind of dark I guess. I liked watching them squirm before they burst in half under his weight on the blade. Marcus came in from where the kitchen met the living room and stared at the TV.

“Wow” I said. “Jesus Christ these guys are cooking?” The little Asian man started tossing white onions into pot like someone had a gun to the back of his head.

“This is what you watch?”

“Well I am kind of hungry, I didn’t get to eat remember?”

He asked why, and I told him about the fliers. I spoke simply as if insisting the presence of death while escaping finality of it’s language. Like talking to a little kid, only purposefully. He listened to the whole explanation, while drying a mug he held to avert his eyes from my idea. Fight or flight. I didn’t mention the newspaper. I had forgotten.

“So then” he said. “You really watch the food channel?” Clearly. I was doing it right then. “You have access to the least regulated body of media perhaps in the world, something for which revolutions fight to achieve at huge costs, what is held on a pedestal where the wrong word can get you killed. And at your fingertips…you choose a vicarious method of enhancing your own gluttony” He said it in such a way I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to laugh or take offense.

“I mean, yeah” I said. He had a point, but it’s not my fault he doesn’t understand cuisine. I could easily admit that whatever I had to say in defense of my media preferences could easily and logically be disassembled in three sentences. I’m not going to be ashamed of it though. Its better than discussing MTV at a dinner party.

Is he being sarcastic? He must be kidding.

“When was the last time you were out of the city?” he asked.

“What’s out of the city?”

Sara sat up on the loveseat, leaning on her shoulder like an Egyptian portrait. “That’s the answer” she said. “That’s all I need to hear” she laughed, sort of. Giggling on the inhale.
Marcus clanked his fork against the dish he had picked up. He took a bite and a little hint of joy crept into the corners of his mouth and brow.

“Is that cheesecake?” I asked, shooting a glance at both of them. Sara caught it.

“Yeah” she said. “It’s absolutely decadent, but there’s a catch” Marcus spoke but I couldn’t break eyes with her. Not quick enough. From the kitchen he said, “If you want a piece of cheesecake you have to agree to come with us this weekend”

She nodded to agree. Slowly. Her eyebrow stayed level. He couldn’t see.

“We’re leaving the city” he went on. “Its what you need man, trust me, I’ll pack your bag we’ve got tons of stuff”

Sara smiled quickly as she darted into the kitchen to fetch my cake. I watched her walk out of the room without an ounce of shame.

“Do you want berries on your cake” she asked, catching me in the act.

Oh, did I. She came back into the room with

chapter 2

Leah is a shooting star. I met her at seven thirty later that morning. Leah claimed to be a morning person, but I never believed. She hid her sleepy eyes with adorable expressions.

“I’ve got nothing to do today but smile” she would say. It could really melt a heart and dissolve the very concept of conflict if you wanted it to. Yet, as my shooting star slipped in from the morning streets and sat next across from me, talking up a storm, my mind was elsewhere. Still in the restaurant. Still looking at that watch. Still watching myself on the barstool, befuddled by a stranger. Minutes passed.

“Are you even listening?” she asked. I could have said no. This was my luxury. She was human enough to know I knew she hardly listened at all, to anyone. Not to me, not to her better judgment, not to laws, not to signs that some neo-spiritual reformed Jew-Bu would consider absolutely divine. She had been alive enough, long enough to know that attention was a commodity not to be taken lightly. A lesson she taught to all who had seen her break eye contact to turn her glance to a window or into her coffee. There is something to be said at one preferring the look they are giving you than the words you are giving them. I thought of this –, while the waiter brought me a dopio and a scone.

“You know that has like 820 calories? All starch and sugar, sugar” she said.

“Oh Really? Are you sure? I’m going for the high score” I bit my scone. “This one has cheese, mmmm” She looked in her coffee and I lost her attention.

“I met someone”

“What?” I had it again.

“Not like that, this really weird guy”

“Jesus Christ you’re not…”

“No no, nothing like that, I guess I made a friend? As odd as that sounds. Who says that? I mean really”.

“People do! That’s a good thing! Friends are good!” Her face lit up, pushing stray hair aside. “I say you make friends with this guy, you don’t really have any friends, any real friends”

I could have said a lot of things, like none that you like or I have plenty and I resent that! But she had a point. I didn’t have a lot of friends, not in the city at least. Not that I saw more than once or twice a year as they strolled through town en route or from school. I had co-interns. They were just boring but decent for martini or smoothie conversation. But that didn’t change anything; I had no way around Leah’s insistence.

“I suppose you’re right” I told her.

The check came and she stretched her arm for it. There was no way she could reach it, slinked that far down in those avant gaurde chairs. “I got…”

I cut her off, cash in hand. “shut up” I said, slapping my MasterCard on the little black tray. She smiled, filling her mouth with both chocolate mint sticks, and told me she’d call me after lunch by holding her thumb to her ear and her pinky to her mouth. I could feel the brick get heavier in my pocket.

Or I was getting smaller.

chapter 1

I met Marcus outside a Thai restaurant in the gray blue hours of spring. I had been wandering over the cobble of Chelsea, ignoring street signs to SoHo when I realized I was hungry and that he was there. Not that I saw him- I smelled him. He was smoking my brand, and I, barely able to quell my urge to join him, made a terribly cliché remark about my most recent attempt to quit. I was winning, and he was glad for me - although he added that quitting just wasn’t his style. Other than his cigarette nothing about him stood out. He was a plain-faced boy in a town of the extravagantly cultured. If anything he looked like he was in over his head, at least to me. The island of Manhattan must be the rawest of all the worlds’ islands and he looked as though he’d stepped off the subway from a suburb in Denver, a basic and burly American frame wrapped in the most functional solid and inoffensive colors Eddie Bauer could find. He appeared…too sure-footed, as if he didn’t know he should be ashamed and that made him look all the more out of place. He kept exhaling his cigarette up into the awning, leaning just right of the door with one foot flat against the wall like a rock star looking nonchalant in a black and white Rolling Stone cover. Yes, if he had looked more self-conscious then I wouldn’t have noticed him, but he was the kind of guy that let the wind comb his hair.

And he was smiling. From that moment on, whenever I would hear the name Marcus, I would immediately think of the Greek theatre. I saw that face in their masks; deliberate, bright, and porcelain against the grays of modernity. He looked a fool.

So I took a pity of convenience, carrying on a conversation that allowed me to enjoy the smell of his cigarette while satisfying his need to talk. My opinion, however, changed when his phone rang. He kept his cigarette in his mouth and pulled a sleek little piece of plastic from his pocket, it made mine look like a brick. When he flipped that little computer open an exhausted frustration took form of a brightening ember on the black cigarette. He was ahead of the curve with a trendy piece of plastic, so perhaps my opinions of him had been misled. Perhaps he was a smiley-faced fool for some other reasons.

“She just canceled, (it was important it was a she) Do you like Thai?” he asked. These were the kind of questions I hated. I was standing in front of a Thai restaurant for heaven’s sake. I just wanted to tell him no, hit him flat faced with a cream pie or with the brunt of a large fish. But, fighting against the craving of nicotine I had to turn, as I often did, to the decadence of curry and peanut sauce. Any excuse is excuse enough for Thai food.

He said he hadn’t been to New York since he was a child and that he was a traveling with someone but she couldn’t make it.

“I can’t stand to eat at a restaurant alone. That’s a waste of a good conversation. You might learn something, I always say”

He offered to pay, I told him that was not necessary, and against my better judgment and normally shy disposition agreed to sit with him at the bar. I ran the fingertips of my left hand over the ambiance candle’s flame.

“Doesn’t hurt?” he asked.

“No, the fingers are callused from playing”

“Cool” he said. “The guitar? Cello?”

“Guitar” I said. “Yeah I’ve uh, been playing for a while I guess, nothing to spectacular” he kept nodding, but I didn’t have more to say until the water boy came.

“With lemon” I told the waiter as he obliged with a bow. It took him only a few seconds. Marcus and I sipped lemon water while sharing a conversation two passer-byers often do: a shaky explanation of where we’d been, and a terribly clear explanation of where we were going.

Marcus was from the West, he named the town, somewhere near the ocean in Washington State. I’d been to LA, and frankly all I saw was a better looking New Jersey with only a tiny bit more going on, vegetarianism and general idiocy that the glitziest New York socialite couldn’t hold a candle too. I had heard from a friend studying film there that adults watched MTV reality shows and discussed it at dinner. Honestly I had never thought what existed north of it. Some hills near San Francisco where hippies smoked dope, beatniks snapped fingers and “brilliant young minds” redefined the full stop.

When the chef behind the bar looked up at us I ordered without looking at a menu. Marcus had never touched his but I thought it was because I hadn’t either and it would have disrupted the flow of conversation that took a few attempts to get going.

“Phad Kee Mao, four stars” I said, holding up four fingers “and could you slice the tomatoes a little thicker?” The chef nodded with an englishless smile and looked to Marcus. He began to fumble with his words, he hadn’t opened the menu.

“um…” he curled his lips in contemplation as I expected an “I’ll have what he’s having.” Lots of my friends took my advice in thai cuisine.

“Pa yaen tai, mau kau dau ko” the chef nodded. “tom gum gai ko katsu taa” the chef nodded again. “Pan koa” they both laughed.

What the fuck? “You speak Thai?” I asked.

“Not a word” he said. I looked down at the strands of lemon swirling in my ice water waiting for the pie to blindside with cream. Whoops.

“What did you order?” I asked.

“nothing too fancy” he said. “Phad Thai, and I told him to really spice it, four stars in English isn’t four stars, and I need my noodles hot”

Had Leah been there that would have triggered some synapse in her brain to examine him and, if she did, then this whole thing would have never happened.

She did that. Ruined things with three fourths of a BA in Psychology. All of a sudden you can’t open your mouth around her without telling her that you definitely want to bang your mother or your sister or your brother or something ridiculous. I guess she had nicer, more amicable words for it. But nice words are useless when the definitions are cruel.

But back to Marcus. I told him pretty much everything about me, which was kind of sad. Not because the dimmed red lighting was somewhat morose, but because I could explain my life story in the time it takes to shovel down a plate of Phad Kee Mao. He explained his life too, without saying a thing for sure except that, he’d gone to high school, engaged in the regular cliché story telling fodder, and while he was technically in college he was currently taking a little time off do a “bit of traveling.” The story sounded familiar, and I, the usually suspicious questioner felt satisfied at his explanation. This would make a great story for Leah. She always said I needed to be more social, talk to more people different than I, people who had a “better grip on reality” as if she had one. Honestly, I thought she said that just so I could go take a picture a picture to let her know what those people looked like.

And that they were real.

When the check came he reached for it first. I tried telling him “that’s not necessary” and that “I got mine” but I was distracted. What the hell was this? Peeping below the rather plain clothes of this traveler from the pacific northwest was a band of leather that tapered wide into the elegant rotund face a Rolex, a vintage Oyster Air Lion, at least fifty years old. Impossible to find.

“That’s a pretty nice watch” I said instinctively as he paid in cash. “I bet it has a story”

“I suppose the chopsticks we’re eating with have a story too man” he said. I let him pay the check as he informed me “I really have to get going.” Again he blamed she. He tossed the receipt at me, scribbled across it was a ten-digit phone number with an out of state area code.

“I’ll be in town for a while, we should definitely kick it again, I’ll tell you the story”

I guess it was kind of odd he left me sitting in the restaurant by myself. Pushing the left over noodles left and right on my plate. I thought of what I was going to tell Leah about my willingness to eat with a complete stranger. And that he had been genuinely nice for no reason at all. I thought I would make a good story to tell. I thought the story was done.