La ballade des chasseurs de la tragedie

I’m holed up in a hotel. Room service has brought me 12 shrimp cocktails @ 6.95 a pop in as many hours. Five shrimp per glass of sauce, that’s 60 shrimp. The bottle of bourbon I checked in with is almost empty. In the bathroom, the sink full of ice has run out of beer bottles. I didn’t let the maid in this morning. The blinds have been shut since I got here. Electrical tape is masking the TV screen. Judging by the digital alarm clock, it’s 1:12 AM. That makes today Sunday.

I need to write this all down. Someone has to, and I can't think of anyone else. Too much has already been said about what they did and why. The rumors are already twisting into myths and lies. I am going to avoid the traps the sensationalists have fallen prey to. I will not speculate on motives, nor results outside of my scope. I was privileged to witness some of what happened, and my accounts of the rest comes from those involved. I will only write what is certain. As for the rest, others have let their imaginations run wild, and will continue to do so. In fairness to the dead, I need to set down what really happened. So people will read it, and will know the truth about it all.

This might, for all I know, be a suicide note.

I don’t really feel suicidal, but that might change when this is over. It doesn’t matter yet. Maybe I’ll end this, go out to my car, and blow my brains over the back window with the nine-millimeter in the glove compartment. I like thinking of this as a suicide note. It makes it urgent. It means someone will read it. You will. You’ll hear about me, somehow - at the checkout line at the supermarket, your Mom or Dad will hear the latest. They’ll phone you, wherever you are, to make sure we were never friends. And we never were, were we? You’ll hear, and you’ll read this because you think you’re in it.

You are.

This is for you. I remember you. I know you. I know you look at your life: your waxed SUV that only goes off-road in the sense of an exit ramp, your casual Fridays, relaxed office environment career; your three cocktail lunches. I know you smile on Sunday Mornings and think you’re happy.

I’m writing this to tell you you’re wrong.

Canto I. Chinua Achebe Blues

August 14^th. 5 AM

An ashtray, pregnant with dog-ends, upended and fell silently into the piles of laundry on the floor. Spidery fingers fumbled through bedside debris, found the ringing phone, and brought it beneath the sweat soaked sheets. Nick’s voice was unintelligible as he answered.

“ngh.”

“Nick? Dash. I, uh… well, fuck. It’s on. He’s doing it. Midnight two nights ago, this farmer outside Poughkeepsie wakes up ‘cause thirty three roosters decide to crow at the moon.” Dashiell’s voice was tinny and digital with encryption.

“Five.” Nick placed the handset on his pillow and pushed his shirtless back up the wall until he was sitting. He frowned at the clocks scattered about, then bent over to find yesterday’s jeans and with them today’s cigarettes. Dash would be patient. He knew he was calling at five, and wouldn’t begrudge Nick the customary five minute wake up time. Halfway through his second cigarette, a cup of cold coffee and congealed milk rinsing the sour taste from his mouth, Nick picked the phone up again.

“Thirty three roosters? Who the fuck has thirty three roosters?”

“John Kirby, Amenia, New York. Had thirty five until three days ago. Sometime during the night, the oldest two were pecked to death, and the rest started screaming. He found them, covered in blood, crowing at the new moon. It’s happening, Nick.”

“Who else knows?”

“Kirby’s a Catholic. Mentioned it to his priest. Priest called it in, and it found its way to me. So, pretty much everyone. You’re the first one I called, though. How long’ll it take for you to be ready?”

“Three days, maybe four. What do we do about Matt?”

“We? Sorry, man - you. You gotta do something. I got shit to do on my end. School, remember?”

“Yeah.”

Nick shook his head, then let it fall back against the wall, stretching his voice farther into the thick scratchiness of just woken basso profundo. “Christ. I thought I was going to have a fucking weekend this time. Yeah. Three days?”

“If you can swing it. Any ideas for a replacement?”

“For Matt? Yeah, I’ve got an idea. He’s throwing an acid test out at the quarry tonight. I’ll feel him out, see if he hasn’t turned up any hopefuls. Three days.”

“Three days. Hasta.”

Nick hung the phone up with a ragged exhalation. Did Dashiell ever sleep? Shaking his head, he rolled out of bed and pulled a filthy pair of jeans to his waist. The sight of the squalor around him brought first a frown, then a shrug, as it always did. There always was always tomorrow. He tugged on a pair of broken boots and a clean t-shirt and walked for the door. As he passed the couch, he bent over to rap the shapeless form snoring under a sheet there.

“Oi. Johnny Boy. Business calls. Mind the shop and try and do some fucking dishes, OK?”

Without waiting for a response, Nick braved the dank and creaking stairs and ventured out into the muggy, nausea-grey dawn. Five hours earlier and a few miles west, Marc McNaulty was being thrown out of his girlfriend’s apartment.

August 14^th, 12AM

A wine glass lay shattered at his feet, and it occurred to Marc, looking at his now ex girlfriend, that if her eyes kept widening, they threatened to end up the same way. He blinked at the glass, at the blood flecks on the tile, at the wine puddling around his feet, and frowned. That sneaking suspicion that something, somewhere, had escaped him.

“I... I think, you know... at times like these.” His voice was thick and slow from the sudden, after-the-crash silence it interrupted.

She frowned and sat down, pushing a stray auburn lock behind her ear. She was still staring, and Marc thought her wide and silent eyes would envelop him at any moment, that he wouldn’t be able to speak, that he’d fall to his knees crying and asking forgiveness, asking her to take back her final words. Her eyes were the rich yellow of wolves and owls and a thousand awful sonnets scrawled in Marc's diary. He stared at them, already beginning to miss the inspiration they represented. Then, with a shrug, she broke the spell and looked away. He was still paralyzed. She slowly drew a cigarette to her lips. He stared at the cuts on his hand, shifted his weight, and found his voice.

“...about thermodynamics, and entropy, and... and if things start well, if it’s all working out, and you know what’s going on, then slowly it seeps away and the information is gone, and...”

He looked down at the wineglass, its broken stem still upright. One foot lashed out, toe first, and knocked it over.

“...and so it’s all so fucked up, it never works, never can. Like when I was little one time, right? I was out on this sand bar and I was six and it was summer, and when you’re six summer is forever and...”

He gave an apologetic wince as he took the wine bottle with the still bleeding hand. It was, he realized, too late for apologies. It was too late even for excuses, but Marc wanted to be understood, to just for a fleeting instant be understood, by this girl. Who, as he floundered around his monologue, was watching him the way one watches theater: with no sense of connection to anything that came before or would come after. She would not interrupt, Marc would not ask a response, and the moment would remain like that, sacred, unprofaned, and utterly disconnected and irrelevant.

“...and sandbars are too, and I’m all alone in the middle of the sandbar. Not really alone, but alone in the special six year old way where if you’re not thinking about them, and you cant see other people, then they can’t see you either, and so you’re alone. And I was building a sandcastle. It took hours, It was huge, with spires, and, and those... things. Minarets. And seaweed flags, and seashell windows, with roads, and... and everyone came to look and they were smiling and oohing and I was explaining defense plans against the invasions, pushing these snails around like soldiers, and they loved it. They were fucking eating it up, couldn’t get enough of me, and I, like, thought I’d be in the fucking newspaper or something. You know, Genius Boy builds Worlds Greatest Sandcastle? And so...”

He took a deep breath and coughed at a shallow gulp of wine. She kept staring.

“And so the sun started to set, and the people left, and I was still working on it, when the tide started to come in.”

Marc nodded slowly and paused in a manner he might later have described as dramatic for another mouthful of wine.

“My parents came and got me, an hour later, I was crying... like, hysterically. I’d been repairing the castle, dumping and packing sand onto the walls with one of those tiny little kid buckets, but the waves kept pulling the sand away, digging away at the walls, pulling down the seashells...”

He shrugged.

“Everyone on the beach was staring. I was screaming and kicking and they carried me away and the castle crumbled.”

He hadn’t meant to say so much, had meant an apology, an explanation, but... but he didn’t care anymore. He might as well finish his exit scene. He was standing awkwardly, bottle in one hand, its label smeared with blood, and was suddenly self-conscious of his posturing. Scratching at his ribs, he finished the last of the wine and sighed, then walked over to her and gently set the wine bottle down on the coffee table. Broken glass skittered out from under his boots. He lifted his coat from the sofa, pulled it on, and set his shoulders for the door. He had it open before the script let him look back. He realized that her expression was not empathy. It was not understanding, or concern, or any tacit unutterable compact between them. She was waiting for him to shut up and get out, and had been all along.

“Yeah, it... I... it just...”

He shrugged again and shook his hand once, sending more blood to spatter on the floor, before lifting his fingers to suck thoughtfully on the wound. In the moment, it seemed appropriate. Tears and the ocean mixing on his tongue, he shook his head and walked out.

He shut the door quietly, and went out into the wind for the proverbial long walk home. The roads were blissfully empty, none of the usual assortment of lovers cavorting, kissing in long embraces in doorways, smiles so wholefully content and sweet they would have rotted his teeth out in this mood. He raised one arm and signaled a passing cab. Inside, he sucked again on his bloody fingers as familiar ghosts, selves of the distant and of the uncomfortably not-distant past rose, one at a time, to remind him of other cab rides, other girls left in tears, other times he’d kept his chin up and his upper lip stiff. This spring seemed to hold no new beginnings, no fresh hope, just the same old stale cigarette smoke and tired memories.

“The best thing about cabs,” she’d said, “is the way people are always waving at you, like you’re famous.” He had favored her with a smile that he found insightful, ironic, and at the same time self-knowing. Then the expectancy he had seen in her eyes had given him pause, a skipped beat as the winter had held its breath. He’d realized an awful lot in that moment. He’d realized that he’d actually just wondered if she was kidding or not. Of course she’d been kidding, no-one, especially not her, was that stupid. But that instant’s doubt had spoken volumes on the course their lives would take together.

Were all truths so silent, he now wondered, creeping their way stealthily in under windowpanes and whispering in sleeping ears? Visions of trout’s dreams and stolen cherries brought words unbidden to his lips. Waters and the wild, waters and the wild. He blinked, morose and dry-eyed, out of the taxi window as the night grey buildings sped by, each facade a solemn frown.

That other night, in that other cab, he’d made a choice. Tired of cabs home alone, tired of creaking floorboards and cigarette smoke on the rafters of an empty apartment, he’d forced a grin. And, to follow the grin, a wry nod “All the popularity four bucks can buy.”

The windows of that cab, he remembered, had been rainstreaked, though he didn’t remember rain. But that had been another city and another life, a city where windows had raindrops even when the skies were bare.

Resolutions notwithstanding, even as she had curled under his arm, leaving him a clear view of the moonbrushed river flowing past, he’d already felt the cold grip of thermodynamics, its inescapable equations permutating somewhere, digits spinning down on some cosmic counter, whittling order and safety away with each brushing scrape of a zero. And now, in another cab in another city, Marc felt the old familiar chill as the world spun him closer to Entropy.

August 12th. 3 AM

New York in August bears a serious resemblance to Hell. Like Jules had always said - "I'm not gonna lie to you, Matt. I'm not gonna say New York is hell, but they share a zip code." Matthias shook his head, rubbing his face with both hands and coming up with twin palmfuls of sweat. Jules's voice, in memory, led directly to memories of Jules's blood, of Jules's intestines tangled in the seaweed when he’d had found him, face down on the beach on Long Island. It was coming up on one year since Jules caught a bad case of dead, and Matthias was finally ready to finish what they'd started back then.

Rounding the corner onto C, he turned right off twelfth and dodged the Latinos stumbling out of the bodega. Closing his eyes, he counted his steps, and came to a stop. He turned right, then left, then right again, looking up and down the avenue. The sky was still pink, even at three AM, and the neighborhood still busy - knots of kids from the projects across the street were here and there, drinking and walking in packs. The police were nowhere in sight.

A moment's panic mounted at the base of his spine. He shook his head, hard, and pushed on the buzzer to the right of the doorway in front of him, ringing apartment 6E.

A slide opened, he was sized up from behind it, then the door unlocked. Kid Sinister, an angry-nosed mulatto out of Flatbush, leaned out to peer up and down the street, then opened the door fully and stepped back. Matthias let it fall shut behind him, squinting in the dim and flickering fluorescents of the stairwell.

"Yo, Matty Mouse. What'chu need, man?"

The silver row of top front teeth were the Kid's trademark - he'd had the canines elongated into fangs. Which, while admittedly being intimidating as all fuck, made the above into an incomprehensible slur along the lines of 'Yo, ma'mouf, 'shoonee, ma'?" Matthias thought about telling him to go fuck himself and his short-counted sacks. A sigh, and he answered,

"A bundle. And I need to see Turkey Joe." Ninety dollars in five bills, folded into quarters, was pulled from his back pocket and offered over.

Tugging on his Lakers cap, the mulatto bared a wide grin and plucked the cash from his trembling fingers, then pulled a rolled bundle of wax paper baggies from the pocket of his ankle-length shorts and offered it back in exchange. He laughed, shaking his head, and pointed at a door behind the stairs. "Fucking stupid, looking for Joe. But he waiting, anyway."

Matthias didn't answer, pocketing the heroin and walking over to open the door and step into Turkey Joe's office. Joe had never come any closer to Turkey than East Queens. As a matter of fact, he was probably of Swedish descent - pale hair and paler skin. Matthias had never seen his eyes, since Joe'd been affecting a pair of Lennon glasses ever since he knew him. He figured them for blue. But Joe had, at some point, become the go-to for the Turkish Mafia from his office in Alphabet City. So he became Turkey Joe, and so he was the man Matthias needed to see.

Joe was sitting at the janitor's desk, his back to the far wall. The air conditioning was cranked, and Matthias watched as breath writhed, trying to spell some warning before it faded into tendrils of meaningless dissipation. Joe didn't say anything as the door shut - he shook his head sadly and stood, walking over to an antique refrigerator in the corner and pulling out a small, six and one half ounce bottle of Coca Cola with a faded and peeling label. He sat down, laid the bottle on his desk, and spun it. Matthias hadn’t moved.

"Finally making your run for it?" In Joe's glasses, the reflected image of Matthias distorted as it swallowed dryly and crossed the linoleum floor. On the desk, the bottle was slowly wobbling to a halt, its dented cap facing squarely at his navel.

"Got everything I need lined up, Joe. I'm gonna make it."

"You know this bottle leaves this building, they'll be onto you. Won't have much time."

"Yeah. They won't catch me." Matthias tugged a thick roll of bills from the other back pocket and dropped it onto the desk. "Six grand. Like we said."

"That was a year ago, Matty Boy. And I owed Jules a favor. Price is seven five. Aren't many of these left, and lots of people are looking these days."

Matthias's mouth opened and closed, but he simply nodded. This was not a place to waste one's breath. Digging into the front pocket of his ragged jeans, he found a fold of money, and snapped it open, counting ATM-crisp hundred dollar bills onto the green formica table. When fifteen had been laid down, he returned the slimmed bankroll to its pocket, and reached a hand for the bottle.

Joe's hand closed around his wrist before he'd gotten there.

"Listen to me, kid. Your friend got you into this, he was the one who knew what was going on around here, and he bought it trying for the prize. You touch that thing, you go outside with it, and you are in the game. No turning back. Better hit the street running and don't plan on stopping in this life time. The cryptophage, he's in town. No way he won't be coming after you. Most likely already is. You savvy the crypto?"

Another mute nod as Matthias slid his wrist free and picked the bottle up. His skin stuck to the glass, colder than anything had a right to be, the chill settling immediately into his muscles and weighing there.

"Yeah. I savvy.” He turned and walked back for the door, wrapping the bottle in an old t-shirt and stowing it in his satchel. “Be seeing you, Joe."

And then, he was walking out - past Kid Sinister and the savagely skinny punk rock nymphette in the stairwell. Past the bodega and back up twelfth, his steps accelerating slowly, strides lengthening, the panic rising like bile to the back of his throat, until he was running down Third Avenue for the subway at Astor. The bottle was his, but God only knew if he'd be able to get the rest together before they found him. This could be his last chance to die. But with odds like this, no way he’d need a second one.

August 15th. 1 AM

Marc’s apartment was cold, his plants unwatered, his answering machine sullenly unblinking. But the phone rang before he had the chance to slip into soliloqual self-pity, or to do anything more than get some Bandaids for his hand. The manic laughter as he lifted the receiver was unmistakable, and brought an unconscious grin to Marc’s lips. It had been too long since he'd heard it.

 "Marc! Matthias. Howareya!"
 "Umm... not so good."
 "Whaddyamean, not so good?"
 "Well, uh... you ever read Hamlet?"
 "No! No Hamlet tonight, my little droogster. I'm at a payphone in a diner outside Fishkill; we're giving a test out at the quarry. Be there or be a chick band, man."
 The chick band was L7. L7 was slang for square. Matthias, marc pnce remarked, wished more than anything else that he’d been born a Cockney.
 "Jesus. No, Matthias, I don't think..."
 "Yes you do, Marc. It's your biggest character flaw, but we all love you for it, man. Now get up here and pontificate publicly like last time, would you?"
 "Look, that was last time. Like, -the- last time. I can't do this anymore."
 "Marc, please. It's not the same anymore, not without you... you were always the real miracle worker, man... look, just come, break a few minds, take a few drugs... you know, good times."
 "I dunno... c'mon, Matt. Don't ask me to do this. Please. Not tonight."
 "Marc - for serious, man. Please come. I got something... I just really need to talk to you, okay?"
 "Serious?"
 "Like a heart attack, man."
 "Fine! Fuck- Yeah, one hour. Keep..."
 Matthias gave a cry of victory to whatever throng of teenagers surrounded him this time, was met by responding cheers, and hung up before Marc could decide on a witty parting line.
 "Asshole."
 He tossed the phone in the direction of the cradle and lit a cigarette. A pause caught his motions while he focused a brief, intense study of the ash gathering at its tip, but he found no new insights into the new threads loosening from the invisible loom. Marc took a deep breath, walking to the closet and mentally scrambling for inspiration. These were never easy affairs to dress for. I mean, god forbid you dress as, like, Elvis, and there's another Elvis already there. You're now suddenly bound together by the logic of the party for the rest of the night, no matter how much of an antisocial homunculus he might turn out to be. A tuxedo. A tuxedo is always appropriate. Before he knew it he was strapping the cummerbund on and already in his head rummaging through the medicine cabinet. He heard himself repeating, even as he mentally tallied pills, what he’d said to Matthias the last time they’d been girding up for war, "No way this party is manageable, not without very serious, no-nonsense, industrial grade hallucinogens."
 And, since everything else seemed to be backsliding, he didn't bother to feign hesitation. He strode into the cramped whitewashed wood confines of his bathroom, found the film canister in the back of the medicine cabinet, and shook it open. Adurol, Vicodin, Dexedrine, Ritalin, Mescaline, Ecstasy, and so on. A dozen and a half pills in his palm. And a shiver of excitement climbing his spine at the very sight of them that made him wince with momentary reproach. As if these castoffs and leftovers from parties long over were something to be proud of. As if everyone he knew couldn't produce the same or a longer list from their medicine cabinets And yet, somewhere inside him, a teenager still grinned at the variety of colors in his little pillbox stash.
 Fuck the amateurs. He was committed. He swept most of the pills into the bottle with a deft and practiced flick of the thumb, capped and pocketed the bottle one handed, and swallowed the night's selection. An Ecstasy-with-Heroin, Mescaline, and Amphetamine cocktail. An old fashioned Haight-Ashbury speedball, recipe adjusted for the changing times. Marc dropped the bottle into his pocket and glared at the mirror, thinking of Travis Bickle as he walked out.
 He left his car parked at an all-night diner, and hiked the trail to the quarry. Standing in the jagged shadows of a towering elm, he looked down over the party and took stock. Matthias in priest’s garb, giving communion with God knows what. Check. Caribbean hash gods flailing on drums. Check. Naked hippies dancing around bonfires. Check. Cowboy, with horse. Check. Martians with rayguns, Jedi knights with light sabers, Renaissance geeks dressed as Elves, Dwarves, and what looked like the entire supporting cast of The Hobbit, Check. Midget, making a very un-subtle point of avoiding said Hobbit contingent. Check. (Not entirely unlike noted filmmaker David Lynch, Matthias always insisted on at least one Midget. Marc had never decided on the P.C. ramifications of this and had given up wondering.) And now, the crowning touch. The one guest no party is complete without. Marc drew a silver cigarette case from the tuxedo coat and tapped the cigarette thrice against a thumbnail before lighting it. He adjusted his bowtie, straightened his shoulders, and sneered. James Bond. James “I Expect You to Die” Bond. Carefully making his way towards Matthias’ circle, he kept his face frozen in the ruthless smirk of a British assassin about to get laid. 
 "Blofeild, I shee your tashtesh have remained the same," Marc brogued.
 Matthias turned, grinned, and without missing a beat made the sign of the cross and offered a round, plat pill.  
 "Ah, Commander Bond.  How good of you to join us."
 Marc grinned and swallowed the wafer, tasting sugar, cornstarch, and an unfamiliar metallic pharmaceutical twinge.  He bowed his head, letting Matthias murmur the necessary incantations.  This was all getting a bit “Hair” for him, but the crowd loved it.  If Matthias was the reigning Czar of this private hell, Marc was Rasputin. They'd been doing this for years together, routine after routine, gag after mindblowing gag.  It was a war of sorts, a relentless assault on banality, stasis, and all forms of organized reality.  Or so they'd described it to each other so many years ago.
  It had been August, and an unnaturally starry night for Chicago, a thick and lush sky full of UFOs and shooting stars.  They'd come from art school together, two hallucinating self-titled intellectuals standing in a parking lot with index fingers raised, hoping for grateful Dead tickets.  And, standing there, they'd both seen the bell-bottomed hipster skipping, ten feet each slow and graceful bound, hanging impossibly long in the sky, arms and legs swinging and stretching out in time with each singsong whisper.  At the apex of each leap, "...trips..."  The two turned to face each other, wordless.  Matthias, it should be noted, was the first to break this reverie.
  "Fuck...  It's totally unreal, man.  People have no fucking idea.”
  "Huh?  Idea of what?"
  "How... how everything is so cosmically fucked when you're tripping. Like, fucking -reality- bends for you..."
  Marc had shrugged noncommittally, staring up at the stars and their drunken spinning.  "Maybe someone should tell them."
  Matthias had nodded, eyes widening as the scope of what they were about to begin reached him.   The plan's web stretched from that point, that origin, that crossing of the great axes into a dimensionless unity beside Soldier Fields.  They were determined and organized and, for years, they'd done what they did, and they'd done it... 'well' wasn't really an operative word in the situation since no-one else was doing it.  But they took pride in their work, and were as close as the siblings they proclaimed themselves to be. Predictably, a girl came between them. Marc had heard through the grapevine that she’d left Matthias in a Juarez prison, but by that point Marc had already moved, cleaned up his act, and gotten a job. Matthias became part of a misspent youth, a memory to toast in absentia, and nothing more. Until tonight.
  Matthias shook Marc awake, and motioned around the recently un-abandoned quarry.  
 "Foolproof plan twelve?"
  "Twelve?"
  "Chain of Fools."  
 Canines flashed as Matthias turned to punctuate the announcement, leering wild-eyed at a young bride covered in imitation pigs blood.
  Marc stood with a flourish, threw back his head, and sounded what he hoped would pass for a barbaric yalp.  It was, predictably enough, answered.  Half the throng surged suddenly, crowding around the two, jostling and screaming, and for an instant Marc forgot the games, forgot the predictability, forgot the time he'd spent away from it all, and was a part of the howl.  But the moment passed, and Matthias felt its passing.  Clapping Marc on the shoulder, he turned an empathetic frown, and slowly nodded.  As the howl died, Marc emptied the rest of the pillbox into his mouth and liberated a Steinlager from an androgynous asian in head to toe sparkling silver.  This evening seemed to call for greater pharmaceutical assistance than he'd reckoned.
  The cocktail he'd already taken had, however, suddenly decided to seize the phenomenological reins, and the crowd's faces melted together into a grinning blur, firelit and eyes wider than ever any had a right to be.  Like the slow motion carnival-scene smiles slowed down as the music swells in a movie, the faces seemed predatory, drawing something from him he didn't want to give.  Summoning the familiar revolutionary assault resolve, he matched the grin, baring fangs and snarling.  He was a professional, this was what he did.  
  Matthias' silent urgings kineticized the crowd, who felt the circle around Marc and drew back, respecting the radius of their newfound locus. Marc leered at the crowd, and leveled Matthias’s ceremonial dagger at a scantily clad Batgirl.  "A sacrifice!  A sacrifice for the dread lords!"
  The girl's eyes widened, and she shook her head no, "Dude... this is, like... bad tripstuff.  Demons 'n' shit..."
  "Bad trip?"  Marc's gaze achieved a practiced state of wide-eyed, nearly transcendent luring enthusiasm.  "No... No, these are friendly Demons. You'll -like- them!"
  Marc found himself writhing in snaking half-moons around the fire, with an improbably tall aborigine, a Jewish anarchist from Columbia, dressed in cut-off fatigues, and hundreds of beaded necklaces, and whose spiderlike gangly dance was accompanied by spinning the long wooden spear he carried.
  The moon had risen, and stained the ripples in the largest kettle lake. Rainwater the black of ichor, of colorless fear, stretched down before them.  It was a new game, Chain of Fools, and Matthias was the center link.  James Bond was smoking a quiet morphine-laden Camel, staring at the faces rippling on the waves, his eyelids sagging in repose.  He flicked the butt into the waves with a slow streaking parabola which hung in the still night long after the hiss had ended.
  He stripped off his shirt and dropped it into the sand, padding slowly over to join the knot of half or wholly naked revelers waiting for him. He pulled on the climbing harness he was offered, and clipped himself to one of the ropes unfurling from the weight Matthias held.   Together, the eight contestants swam out into the center of the pool, until the fires no longer lit their faces, and the shadows of the dancers loomed, gargantuan kokopellis on the granite cliffs.   And then, linking hands into a ring, they took a collective breath and sank, yanked beneath the surface the moment Matthias pulled the weight from its raft.  Hands tightened as they began to speed farther and farther down, deeper into abysmal darkness and sepulchral silence.
  The rocky walls were blacker than the sky above, and a flashlight lashed around someone's wrist was tugged at by the waters, illuminating stray features, pale faces leaping suddenly out of the dark to break into horrific smiles, obscured by the undulation of minnow-schools of bubbles speeding back skyward.  Hand in hand, the ring sank lower, the chill seeping in through clammy skin and gripping frightened skeletons.  Marc shook a hand free, and brought his wristwatch into sight; Twenty seconds.  With a sudden kick, a blonde wraith broke free of the ring and urged himself towards the welcome of air waiting above.  Marc hardly took notice of the hand grasping at his, reforming the ring, nor of their continued descent.  The luminous face of his watch was shining still in front of him.    The dull thuds of his slow heartbeat were footsteps down a long hallway, the pale blue Indiglo light a door opening, a warm apartment he'd never see again.
    The watch was a birthday gift, one he'd greeted with a sigh.  She'd blinked in surprise at his reaction, doe-wide green eyes registering insult and incomprehension.  "You don't like it?"
  Shifting his weight, he had reached a hand up to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck.  
 "No, no... I love it.  That's the problem."
  "This qualifies as a problem on your planet?"  She grinned up at him.
  "Well, yeah.  It means I'm going to have to get rid of my scarf."
  She didn't look any more understanding.  He sighed again.  
 "I mean... Okay, so, like... people have this, this finite limit imposed on them at birth, right?  This maximum number of inanimate objects.  A total of things they can sustain.  Like jugglers, or... or like little private suns."
  She blinked again.  He remembered her eyes and her blinks better than anything else about her.  Eyes the green of sunrise oceans, and long elegant eyelashes capable of such eloquent derision.  
 "Is this a joke?"
  "No, for real- my number, I happen to know, is five.  And right now, I have a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, my wallet, my keys, and my scarf. If I wear the watch, I have to get rid of the scarf.  And, like... it's cold, and I'll miss the scarf and all," he grinned, " but that's a fucking cool watch."
  The flashlight streaked upwards in a storm of bubbles, and the remaining four were left blind, the touch of hand to hand, the pull of the weight, and the chill of the darkness all that was real.  Stars, literal stars, began to slowly spin before him, constellations converging and whirling away, fireflies under dogwood trees on summer nights long ago.  Marc shook his head, letting loose a flurry of bubbles as he sought to expel the vision.  The diver to Marc's left squeezed his hand once, and disappeared.   Another hand found Marc's, and the three continued to fall.
 A sudden lance of light rock illuminated above their heads; the rest of the party was trying to check on them, but they'd gone too far already.  The flash made Marc blink, visions of hospital ceilings, the knowledge of a blossoming life within his womb, the guilt of extinguishing it.  This was not his mind, these were not his thoughts, what weird hurtling brain had his soul caught in its butterfly net to hitch a ride with?  He was stowed away deep in the hull of a machine he suddenly failed to understand.
 Whalesongs began their slow humming, the vibrations oscillating through him, sounding on him, strange songs of horrible regrets and interminable longing.  Pressure began to make itself felt, sinuses and ears strummed as taut wires.  In the geologic blackness, the stars became diamonds, souls forged into hard gem-like beauty by the weight of the waters.  Shapes had begun to appear out of the diamonds, the dots connecting truly now, when the last of the descendants had begun his return and left Matthias' hands linked to Marc's.  The two drifted together and entwined their legs, the ropes digging into bodies pressed close.  Marc felt Matthias' heart beating against his right breast, a countertime to his own.  The two beats, synchronized by some strange outside force, filled his eardrums, the two tranquilized organs spasming slower and slower.  The embrace ended with a kiss, brief and fleeting, and Matthias soared away, rising like an ascendant angel to meet the sky.
 The sickly watchface was a ghost, a specter of the forgotten surface. Three minutes.  Marc imagined the tranquilizers as somehow slowing his metabolism down to the point where this sort of stunt became possible.  The harness stopped pulling him down; the weight had hit bottom.  The ropes' tension gone, he'd lost all sensation.  He moved his arms in small circles, feeling nothing around.  Within the black about him, blacker forms coalesced and dispersed, a continual unraveling.  He saw his life mirrored there, watched daughter, sister, and mother weaving, and knew it was the crone's comb, Penelope's secret, that held the ascendant house of his horoscope. His life had shattered with a wineglass tonight, and he'd returned to a hell he had sworn a thousand times never to see again.  Holding his arms out to the side, he tilted his head back, and shrugged out of his harness.  Above, a circumference wobbled fluidly, deathly pale light teasing and inviting him.
 But what lay behind this veil of kisses?  Entropy was down here, in the deep, in turbulence and water currents, in the patterns of bubbles that rose from his numb lips.  This was the legacy of an absconded father, beneath the Thesean rock the waters, and beneath the waters the cold truth of oblivion.

    He couldn't tell if his vision was swimming, if the stars were drug hallucinations, or his brain begging for oxygen, if this sojourn was suicidal or enlightening, but he knew it didn't matter anymore.  Fuck The Buddha.  He wasn't going to accept this ever again, this time the sandcastles would last.  Wriggling his shoulders, he cast his head back, grit his teeth, and squirmed towards the waiting night sky.  His arms broke the water first, and he arched his back, allowing himself the momentary conceit that his ascent might continue, that the water would continue to recede and fall away beneath him.  But it stopped, just beneath his nipples, and rose again, until only his head and shoulders were free of the black, a Kilroy negative against the night.  Blinking and gasping, he shook his head and stared at the havoc engulfing the quarry, absorbing the frenzy with remarkable alacrity.

Cops had arrived. Squadrons. Legions. Teeming hordes of them. They were pursuing knots of teenagers who scrambled up bluffs only to encounter more waiting. A riderless horse was trampling bonfires. Martians were leveling rayguns at the police. The sky was a shattered hologram, spotlights and sirens turning the starscape into a collage, each shard reflecting an angle of the whole, each perspective held in isolation from all others.

Marc blinked, shook his head to clear the water from his eyes, and stared. A cop holding a flashlight in one hand and an automatic handgun of the large, black, and persuasive sort in the other turned and aimed both at him. He saw the cop’s eyes open in recognition. Then the explosions started, and the cop turned and sprinted away. Marc couldn't match the cop's recognition - familiarity, deja vu, it was all too vague to someone having problems with his own name.

The water’s surface rippled with Moire crosshatches as siren strobes traced their scars across the kettle lake. Away from the chaos, alone in the lake, none of it was real. Marc floated in solipsistic peace, holding his breath, and wondering if he’d taken the proverbial second left at an astral Albuquerque and come up through the wrong kettle lake, in the wrong quarry. But he was not so self absorbed as to deny the immediate danger of his surroundings. And so, slipping back into character as James Bond, he paddled silently to the shore, crept from the water, and pulled his jacket on, then sprinted barefoot for the shadows and trails back to his car.

The run was the most extraordinarily alien experience of his life; he did not follow the shadows as much as they seemed to follow him. He felt ley lines beneath his feet and followed them, dancing along spiderwebs that stretched across the arena, staying invisible in the borders that separated the frames of violence and surreality. And he was invisible, between worlds, and he knew he would continue to be so, so long as he managed to stay atop the walls of the labyrinth, cheating its rules, refusing to descend into any of the scenes the night offered.

Looking back later - that night and in the days that followed, he was able to remember flashes and snapshots of the chaos around him. Matthias had been shot. Though it didn’t register as Marc sprinted by, the next day he remembered everything about that moment. Matthias grabbing a pistol from a fallen officer. Turning, firing into the night, and the three separate forces that struck his frail body, spinning him one way, then the other, then pitching him backwards to fall, kicking, from the precipice behind him.

His car was where he left it. The road above the diner was closed, and through the window, Marc saw a few officers in the diner, getting coffee and sandwiches for the long task of identifying and arresting the mob to the north. Shivering, he folded himself into his car and drove away in silence, his windows rolled down, his mind blank. Still wearing the tuxedo pants and jacket, he climbed the stairs to his apartment.. All he wanted was to sink to his knees, vomit into the toilet, and crawl to sleep. Mourning and regret could begin early the next afternoon, long before he would dare to consider himself awake.

Instead, his stereo greeted him as he pushed the unlocked door open. A cigarette burned in an ashtray, and a leather pea coat, not his, hung from his chair.

“Someone’s been eating my porridge...” Marc called the ghost into sight, stepping in and letting the door swing shut behind him. The toilet flushed, water ran behind a closed door, and in stepped the ghost.

Nick grinned at Marc and walked over to retrieve the cigarette. Marc recognized it as one of his own, pinched no doubt from his freezer. Marc blinked and shook his head, and sat down, looking up as he tried to cope with the situation. He never met Nick in a good state of mind. Marc figured Nick just knew when his life was falling apart, and showed up to step on the pieces. The first time they met, the Dandy Warhols were on the jukebox of a drag bar in Amsterdam and it was Christmas Eve.

The year before Marc had been walking across Times Square when he heard the song. He’d gone to the Virgin in Times Square to try and find something by this New York band called Stage. He’d seen them in Prague, opening for Kiss. Instead he ended up picking up Come Down by the Dandys because he wanted something as witty and pretentious as he was. And as he crossed the street he saw a billboard that said War Is Over. It was signed Merry Christmas, Love John & Yoko. He wasn’t sure he’d ever gotten a better present.

And, if that was the Christmaseyest he’d ever felt, the next Christmas Eve was the least. He was in Amsterdam and freaking out because his stepfather was in the hospital for his kidneys and he hadn’t spoken to anyone in something like two weeks and all he wanted to do was call his mom and tell her how sorry he was.

And the first Christmas, in Times Square, this one song just got all the emotion he was feeling. That’s the only way he could think describe it. Because, a year later, it’s Christmas Eve, and he’s gutshot with this weird rock and roll weltschmerz. It was Nick who first told him about the word, one night when they were drinking and Marc was trying to explain foiertrunken. Merriam Webster defines weltschmerz as, “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.” It translates as world pain.

So it’s freezing in A’dam and he’s dressed like an extra from Trainspotting in an undersized t-shirt and hoody and bloodstained jeans so thrashed that it looks deliberate and he's shaking with the cold or malnutrition or god knows what. He may very well still be tripping. And he has just spent all evening panhandling for Guilders. At one point, he went into some kind of neon lit shrine to the new grocery sciences to use the payphone, but some Dutch mother with a gaggle of churning monsters was talking to the cashier about the Christmas card she’d gotten. Not that he spoke Dutch, but they were passing the damnable thing back and forth and giggling each and every time they opened it and it played Away in a Manger. The rain didn’t seem so bad.

And he wanders around looking for a phone. Except it’s Christmas. So everything is closed. And all the windows are frosted and glowing and he’s starting to feel more and more like a scrooge or one of the ghosts. And he walks into this bar that’s totally empty except for a tired and sagging old drag queen behind the bar. He creeps in, and he’s sniffling and he walks to the phone at the corner of the bar and dumps his pocketful of change onto the bar and starts trying to dial transatlantic except the phones are all busy. Mom’s. Dad’s. Stepdad’s. All of them. And he’s starting to panic more and more and then suddenly the jukebox comes on and it’s playing Holiday, by the Dandys. And so Marc is gutshot with this feeling that the band is singing about a place full of elegance and cool haircuts, where everyone is hip and brilliant and beautiful. And he is suddenly struck in the stomach by the certainty of distance, the certainty that the place the band is singing about is so far away, but that just a year ago he was inside the song in a way he can barely understand now. Rock and roll weltschmerz. And he loses it, just starts coughing up tears, doubling over and shuddering with surrender.

And it’s Nick in the corner who put the song on. Nick’s not his real name. If you ask, he’ll say he doesn’t have one anymore. It’s sort of involved, but he used to be a Rock Star and then he disappeared and now he’s… whatever he is now. Nick’s skinny enough to look tall in a crowd, and his hair at this point was still Britpop big, but he’d dyed it blond, and since he’d always had black hair in the band, Marc didn’t recognize him at first. Besides all of which – Marc didn’t really look. He started to cry, then to hyperventilate. He may have tried to walk out, leaving his day’s wages carefully piled on top of the phone, but he didn’t make it – he collapsed, or stopped, or just decided to have a sit down. And, Christmas Day, he wakes up on Leentje’s couch. She’s still in drag, if Mrs. Claus counts as drag, and she's feeding him oatmeal. Nick is feeding him vicodin. Between the two, he recovered.

And now, in his apartment in New York, Nick is smoking his cigarettes and grinning. He’d gotten a haircut – suggestions of a pompadour, manicured sideburns – a young and hungry Elvis. But he was still Nick, and Marc was not ready to think about what his presence meant.

“This, Mr. McNaulty, marks the end of your life as you know it.”

“Yeah, well…” Marc ran his hands through his hair, struggling for something appropriately sinister and nihilistic. “Well, my life’s been unraveling since I was born, you know? Had to end somehow.”

Nick pointed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on Marc’s desk.

“You ever read that?”

“Yeah, I wrote my dis… yeah. Yeah, I did. You?”

“Mmm hmm. One of my favorites.”

Marc just nodded, unable to follow the conversation. What do you say to the cop sitting in your apartment waiting to arrest you? Was Nick even really a cop? What the hell kind of scam as he running?

“You should think about the book, Marc. You look to me like a spear-carrier hanging from the mast of a boat. Not like a Danish prince.”

“Yeah, well- they’re all dead, right?”

“We’re all dead. Do you really want to die in someone else’s play?”

Marc was, understandably, speechless at this point. Nick just flashed a grin and stood up.

“Time to go.”

Marc looked around. ‘I’m being arrested,’ he thought. ‘Is there something I should do? Water my plants one last time? Unplug the stove? What would my mom tell me to do?’ All Marc could think to do was shrug and nod. Nick, absentmindedly, gestured at Marc’s feet.

“What, you wanna go barefoot, in a wet tuxedo?”

Marc rubbed his face.

“’m still tripping.”

Nick nods and has the audacity to smile again.

“Yup. Should make understanding what’s about to happen that much easier. Get dressed.”

While Marc puzzled over what to wear, if the other cops were going to sodomize him more or less if they knew he was tripping his proverbial balls off, the cop ended up picking his clothes out.

Nick led Marc downstairs to a red dodge charger parked illegally in front of his apartment building. He didn’t say anything, just pointed the remote so the doors unlocked and waited for Marc to get in before sliding in behind the wheel. Marc started to speak, but Nick just smiled and held a finger up, tapping it against his lips with a nearly inaudible hiss. He pointed. Two men in gray suits crossed the street, walking in perfect cadence. They pressed the buzzed of Marc’s building. The super, scratching furiously at the back of his dredlocked head, opened the door. The men flashed badges. The super’s Caribbean features grayed and he motioned them inside. As the door closed behind them, Nick put his foot down and Marc was pressed back into his seat as his street blurred away behind him, tires noisy on the morning asphalt.

He looked around the car, deciding to ignore the breakneck pace at which the skyline was disappearing. The rearview mirror had electrical tape over it. A portable CD player was attached with Velcro to the console and trailed a wire leading to the stereo. A plastic figurine took Jesus’ place on the dashboard, but had a distinctly non-canonical look to it. Marc was reaching for a closer look when Nick spoke.

“You can’t go back there.”

“What?”

“Those men. They know where you live.”

“They’re not with you?”

“Jesus. You really are tripping. No they’re… they’re the enemy. Not with us.”

“Us? You’re arresting me, remember?”

“Not exactly. Listen, you’re tripping, we’re driving, and we’ve got a ways to go. You maybe want to sleep?”

Marc agreed with this line of reasoning. Last night, he’d written himself off as useless for the next fourteen hours, and even if he was speeding around in a dodge charger with a police impostor, there was nothing to do about it until he sobered up. God knows, he’d only make things worse like this

Marc rubbed his face again. He recognized the figurine, now. It was a molded plastic model of a devil. Nick turned the music up and Marc surrendered, shrugging and leaning back into his seat. This would all, no doubt, make sense one he sobered up. He figured something had worn off, or something had kicked in, because neither the driving nor the encroaching sun kept him from falling asleep. Panic waited until he awoke.

August 15^th, 9PM

Marc woke on a highway silhouetted by the setting sun. He didn’t see any exit signs, so he wasn’t sure which. Nick was still driving, intent on the patterns of traffic through which the car was darting fluidly. Marc winced at the tremors in his hands and lit a cigarette to cover them. Cracking the window, he took a few deep breaths to counter his shakes.

“So,” He asked, “Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“Where are we?”

“Way to Ashville. About halfway there. You hungry?”

Marc shook his head no, shuddering. He watched his pale reflection.

“Matthias is dead, right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“I saw it.”

"You saw what?"

“I saw Matthias get shot. Didn’t you see it?”

"I didn’t ask what you think you saw. Just the for real. What did you really, actually see?"

“Dude, he’s dead. He picked up a gun and he got shot. Three times. Then he fell.”

"Right. Something that looked like our friend fell off a cliff. When you got there, what... fifteen? Twenty? How long’d it take you?"

“Ten seconds. What are you saying?”

"Okay. When you got to the edge, ten seconds later, someone who looks like your buddy's three stories down, looking dead. He's lying there... face down, right? Am I right?"

“…yeah.”

"Yeah, see? I knew it was gonna be face down"

“What the fuck is your point? So he fell face down.”

"Sure. Sure, Marc. No, you're right. They shot him like that, he falls like this, yeah - no, you're right. He'd have to have landed that way. Absolutely. But, you know what else?"

“…I never saw his face?”

"Bingo. Never saw it. They coulda chucked Hoffa off that cliff and you'd never see anything but..."

“So he’s alive?”

"No, He's dead, alright."

“Why?”

"'Cause he got thrown over a cliff and fell from a three story drop straight down to the bottom. He's dead."

“How do you know?”

"I rolled the body over and looked."

“Then what the fuck is this about?”

" I wanted to make a point, okay? These people, they don't fuck around. They're serious. Serious, and really fucking good at what they do. They want you, they're gonna make your life twelve kinds of miserable 'till they find you."

“What, they’re looking for you?”

"The both of us, yeah. From a long way back. Doesn't make a difference. Point is, they remember us. See, they have real real long memories, when it comes to things they decide to forget. And you, Marc, are definitely something they want to forget."

“So what the fuck do I do now? I thought I was out of all this shit.” A hint of a whine crept into Marc’s voice.

"Do? I don't know. Run. Hide. Keep your head down and your ears up. That kind of shit."

“Hide where? That was my apa-”

"Outside.” Nick interrupted. “Way out, you know? Get gone. Off the map. Where the sidewalk ends. Places like where we’re going. Anonymous.”

“Nick. You’re telling me I have to spend the rest of my life in a hippy town?”

Nick laughed.

“You'll see. You're not alone. This shit? It's big. Big and old. They've been hunting us for centuries, now. They get better at looking, we get better at not being seen. There’s more of us, now. Me and Matt, we made contact. A whole world of us, and this country was supposed to be ours. Almost was, too. 'till we blew it and fucking went and let those fuckers snake it out from under us."

Marc blinked, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“What? What are you talking about? Who stole the country?”

Nick sighed and repeated Marc’s head shake.

"Doesn't matter. Nobody agrees. Nobody knows, is my bet. Besides, half what this is about is history. Theirs or ours. They keep writing us out. Making like we never happened. And they keep doing weird things to time. Calendar's all fucked up. Gotten worse since the weathermen went.”

“The weathermen?” Marc barked a short laugh. “We’re fucking weathermen now? Jesus, Nick. What’s next, the Yippies?”

Nick scowled.

“Levitating the fucking cage. Like that’d fix anything. Bunch of Johnny come lately fuckwits, the lot of them.”

“Nick…” Marc laughed uneasily. “I’m supposed to be the one on drugs. Are you mental or something?”

"Alright already. Forget I said anything. Nobody said you had to. Just don't worry about them, then."

Marc pointed with his cigarette. “What was that about a cage? The pentagon, right? You call it the cage?”

"Cage? Hell, yeah, we call it a cage. Look at the fucking thing. It's a god damned pentagram a mile on a fucking side. You never wondered what it was there for? Or what the fuck they keep inside?"

“Enlighten me.” Marc leaned back, grinning contentedly.

"America."

Marc blinked and forgot his grin. “What?”

Nick nodded solemnly. "Like I said. America. They snaked it out from under us and that's where they keep it. They got the heart of the land. The fenceless frontier. The can-do pioneer spirit. The American Dream. The cowboys and the minutemen and the Tribes and the inventions and everything that was ever great and free.” His voice stayed low, though his excitement was betrayed in the quickening of his speech and a manic gleam in his eyes. “They caged it and they put all these straight lines around it and now its theirs and look at this place. Crankhead rednecks running the country and clowns killing kids and fake sugar and chips that leak out your ass and and don't even get me started on cable TV."

“…and how, exactly, did they do all this?”

"It's the Ley Lines, Marc. Those assholes are fucking them all up. Moving everything around and straightening out all the kinks 'till it's all one big grid. Those mother fuckers are draining all of the fucking life out of this country and keeping it all for themselves." Now it was Nick’s turn to whine, a shrill lament underlying his voice.

“What do they do with it, if they have it caged?”

"Do with it? Fucking nothing. They just want it to have it. To hang from their fucking black iron walls."

“Why?”

"Because that's what they're there for. To want. To take. To fix. They're the Enemy, that's what they fucking do."

Marc leaned back, frowning, and scratched his neck. He nodded. “So, ah… how’d you find all this out? Last I remembered, we were just using drugs. Nobody had guns.”

Marc fell asleep listening to Nick’s story. It came on suddenly, something kicking in or something wearing off. He was picturing her apartment – not as he had left it, all blood, broken glass and silence, but before that, when it was good – yellowed light, Stereolab, hot tea and long talks. An appropriate eulogy would be, they ran out of things to say, and Marc went back to looking for things to take. It had lasted almost three years. Six months of neurotically cleaning up his act, finding a job, re-matching all his socks. Then two and a half years with her. Three birthdays, two holidays. Two weeks ago, he’d started in on the remnants of a vicodin script. Last night, she found syringes behind the toilet. Right now, something behind his sternum trembled uneasily with the realization that he hadn’t packed anything for the come down. Knowing that the sick was coming, Marc happily escaped into dreams.

He was in a club, surrounded by friends. Everyone was high on something, but there was nothing sinister about it. They had a table and were sprawled around it on couches. The music was good, and the dance floor was packed. Marc bent over, reaching across the table for a candle, then used it to light a cigarette. He lowered his head and inhaled a line of something. Sinking back into the couch, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The music changed suddenly, all treble and harmony vanishing, only a muted and echoing bassline slowly pounding. His eyes snapped open. The club was empty. The air seemed cold. A vibrato sound was cycling through the space, reminiscent of whale songs and feedback, as though a didgeridoo were being played off camera somewhere. Every few seconds, the bassline and the didgeridoo jumped, skipped, and repeated themselves. He stood up, leaving the cigarette to smolder in its ashtray.

Across the dance floor was the DJ booth. The record was skipping. Marc reached out his hand and nudged the arm of the turntable.