Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 14 of 20)

Evening was falling in Little Aleppo, tumbling down the stairs and picking up speed along the fade to black. The light was golden and warm: what fancy people call crepuscular, what photographers call the golden hour. The air was pacific and so still that a cloud above Mt. Fortitude had not moved for two hours; locals were starting to develop theories about it.

There were swans lying in moistened ambush. Fathers buy shampoo. Parallel parking occurs, and sometimes well. Werewolfs are getting itchy. Three men are dying in St. Agatha’s, one who did not expect it. You can still get breakfast because you can always get breakfast. Fast cars cannot show off on the Main Drag, and they rev in frustration. A kid puts a cherry bomb in a mailbox. The shops put on their lights in no particular order. Apartments, too, and then houses. It’s best to avoid the police. A tall woman thinks about Mardi Gras. Teenagers pretend not to be frightened of adults, and vice versa. The first star of the night comes out. It’s white against purple, and it’s not a star. The first star is a planet. The first thing night tells you is a lie.

On Briar Street, a man named Galloway Unh prays for his mother to get better; on Vallejo Avenue, a woman named Myra Bettis prays for her mother to drop dead.

The pigeons watch everything, but don’t give a shit unless it involves food, and the clumsy. Some men have axes, and people get out of their way. Windows glow blue from the teevee, and married couples sit on stoops drinking tallboys of Arrow in paper bags. An old man known as Captain Halifax goes to the corner to buy an evening paper, but he’s twenty years too late. No one believes the sign on the bench that says “Wet Paint.” An eight-year-old boy has run away from home, and made it as far as the Victory Diner, where they fed him mac and cheese and called his parents. The news is on, and you won’t believe what this hero dog did.

The athletic teenagers are still at practice, and the rest of the kids are smoking dope, or joining bands, or homework. Muslims call other Muslims to prayer. Old habits are picked up again. The Salt Wharf has a greater variety of knots than anywhere in the world: rolling hitches, and cleat bows, and double-turned eights. Frye Fingers, a retired court bailiff, is dead in his apartment on Hilo Street and will not be discovered for five days. A duck is in the wrong place.

The tide was on a 17-day cycle, and the rains were on an 18-day cycle. When they met every 306 days, the neighborhood would celebrate.

The Town Fathers limp to their luxury cars in the parking lot of Town Hall, and people yell at them. People think they have the right to yell at the Town Fathers just because they have the right to yell at the Town Fathers. Luxury cars are soundproof. Sleeping children in rented strollers are wheeled out of Harper Zoo. Buskers are used to give directions: turn right at Accordion Jim.

Jayme Daguerre used to work at the Arrow brewery, but the forklift turned left when she thought it was going to turn right. Spine got pinched. Nerves got fucked. Insurance ran out. She’s got a room in the Hotel Synod now. Currently, there is pain. Soon there will be none. Her hands will stop shaking, and soon there will be none.

People are deciding whether to get ice cream, people are deciding whether to get drinks. At Harper College, there is a seminar on the Semiotics of Semaphore, and the grad students are eying each other up. Somewhere, there is anal sex. Deep fryers have been boiling for hours and hours. Fewer dance lessons are given than last year. The dearly departed are laid to rest on the Upside, and bodies get buried on the Downside, and babies are born whole and perfect. There is a permanent temporary autonomous zone in a loft; the half-naked are dancing to disco.

There is a building made of printing presses. The Cenotaph comes from there. Men have jammed crowbars in the machinery’s innards. Bomb threats have been called in, and real bombs planted silently. Protests outside. Very sarcastic letters. There have been hostage situations. The whole damn neighborhood is a hostage situation. Quiet now. Tomorrow’s newspaper doesn’t exist yet, but the machines have been greased and primed, and there will be news even if nothing happens.

Oenophiles discuss terroir; winos pool their change.

The 31 bus ran through up the Main Drag; it had not been attacked in a long time, and the driver was becoming suspicious. The firefighters switched to their evening hoses. The marquee on the movie theater didn’t tell the whole picture. The new shit was coming in Thursday. Squirrels squirreled.

On Gower Avenue, there are magazines. A man, a dog, a larger man. But mostly magazines. Papers, too, but they lined the sidewalk. Magazines received pride of place. Verticality is key for sales. Gower Avenue is glossy for a hundred yards. The show biz magazines have tits and abs and teeth and teeth. Sports magazines have uniforms and bikinis. News magazines have drawings that are dramatic, or piquant. Magazines dedicated to sewing mostly feature sweaters. Dailies, weeklies, monthlies, the irregular.

At the far end, far away from Omar and Angus and Sally Moon, there are various pornographies. Genitals against a white background, and tongues where tongues should not be. Big fat tits and veiny cocks. There are multiple insertions. The women cannot close their mouths, and the men sneer. Complicated underwear and taut hamstrings. The women have implausible names, and the men have ludicrous ones. Specific magazines that display fighting, or feeding, or feet. Men assaulting each other’s juicy assholes, and women fucking in their heels. They were not happy in their sex, but impressive. Proud hard-ons, and pussies adored. Teenagers would sidle up, and Omar would yell. They would skeedaddle, because teenagers are just as scared of adults as adults are of teenagers. The big tits would stay, along with the fat cocks and also the sewing magazines.

Evening was falling. It does that. You throw everything into your day, and evening comes around just as scheduled and there’s nothing you can do but give in and grab a drink and put a dollar on the Mother Mary. There was no news from the south, and life was up in the air as always in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Tommy Amici was an old man. It happens to everyone, even geniuses and bastards, and Tommy was both. Didn’t sing much any more because he couldn’t sing much any more. No more power in the low notes, and the high ones had slipped away a half-step at a time. The words were getting tougher to remember, too. Last big shows were four years ago, the We Part As Friends tour. Tommy had done three retirement tours before that, but this one was real. Crowds jammed the stadiums–he played stadiums, 60 and 70,000 people each night–and Tommy wore his tux for them, and that was just about all he did. In between songs, he would tell his old jokes, and the audience would laugh out of duty and love, and sometimes Tommy would tell stories that would scoot around between topics until his bandleader would start a new tune and cut him. Tommy would have fired him on the spot for that kind of bullshit in the old days, but he didn’t seem to even notice now. The music started, and he sang. Perform long enough, and you can do at least one tour on sheer muscle memory.

And that was it. Tommy went to the house in Jeremiad Springs, and stayed there. The record company quietly assembled unreleased songs, and alternate takes, and live performances; waited for him to die. His children (four) and ex-wives (three) and current wife (one) eyed up the properties and secretly put estate lawyers on retainer; waited for him to die. Obituaries sat in the files of the New York Times and the Cenotaph, occasionally updated; waited for him to die.

Tommy wasn’t ready to die, though. He still owed some people. That fucking neighborhood full of weirdos, fruits and nuts the lot of them, with their fucking attitudes and ingratitudes, that fucking neighborhood where ten percent of every dollar he ever goddamned earned went. How many millions? Christ, how many fucking millions was it? He couldn’t even figure it: the ten percent was off the top, before tax and in cash, and Jesus who knows what he could have done with it. He could have been wealthy, but instead he had to settle for just being rich.

And that bitch. Hiawatha Mayflower. That little bitch. Tommy could still feel his neck get hot and tight when he thought about her, thought about that fucking telegram–a telegram!–that she had sent. How many people read it before it got placed on the vanity in front of him in the dressing room of the Menefreghista Club all those years ago? All those years. Was it years? Decades, Jesus, decades. Or maybe it was years.

He was drinking way too much. He had always drank too much, but now he was drinking way too much. The fuck else was there to do? Sometimes he would wake up at dawn, and sometimes he would wake up at noon, and then he would wander around the house making phone calls to people who were waiting for him to die. Tommy didn’t do drugs–he had fired several drummers for smoking reefer–but the doctor had prescribed Paradil to help him sleep. It was taken off the market a few years later: Paradil had a long half-life, weeks, and so if you took it for a few days in a row it would build up in your system until you were blacking in and out of your life. Sometimes he would wear his robe all day, and sometimes he would wear his tux. He didn’t know where Jacob was. Around here somewhere. Just saw him, the lazy bastard.

What had happened was realer than what was happening, and Tommy felt like he was living his life all at once constantly: he was in clubs, and stadiums, and hotel rooms, and castles, and bedrooms he should not have been in. Casinos, and trains and planes. Dressing rooms; he tried to remember one, a specific dressing room, and couldn’t: they slid into each other, but he knew there was a star on the door, five-pointed, and that there was a mirror ringed with light bulbs like it just had many ideas at once. You don’t put your pants on until you’re ready to go onstage.

Theresa was in the kitchen. He had just seen her in the kitchen. She was the one who loved him. When he was nothing, just starting out and penniless and cocky. Gap between her front teeth, and a heavy face. Put up with everything, almost, until she wouldn’t. Cara Thorn was in the bedroom. He had just seen her in the bedroom. She didn’t go in for lingerie or any of that peekaboo shit; she would lay there naked daring him to fuck her. Was that pot? Did he smell pot? Shit, goddammit, Hiawatha was in her fucking teepee again, or wigwam or whatever the fuck that thing she built out by the pool is. “Meditation space” she called it. My ass, he thought. But, Christ, her ass. His Little Bird. Sherry Amici was in her office. When they got married, she had him turn one of the bedrooms in the house into an office for her. His kids didn’t like her. Fuck ’em, Tommy thought. Ungrateful. Everybody’s fucking ungrateful.

Tommy Amici was in his office behind his desk, which had been made from wood salvaged from the Menefreghista’s stage when they tore the club down. He had told The Friend that he wanted a keepsake, but that was a lie: he wanted a daily reminder that the shithole had really been destroyed. He wanted to put his feet up on it. The desk was nine feet long, and five feet wide, and deep brown, and it was atop a hidden shim in the floor that placed it–and Tommy–just a bit higher than whoever was seeking an audience. There were three chairs opposite, oak with green padding on the seats and back and armrests.

Three? Why three?

“Gloria!”

Gloria Cutuli had worked for Tommy for 47 years, and lately she had been crying when he napped, because even the worst bastards in the world have people who love them.

She poked her head, jet-black and lacquered six inches high, in the door.

“Should I let them in?’

Tommy wanted to say, “Who?” Wanted to blow out all the air in his lungs and let it take all this fog with them, and let time flow like it used to: one direction, forward, onward, steady, unimpeded. Was Theresa not in the kitchen? He knew he had just seen her, but there were three chairs in front of his desk when there should only have been two, and so maybe his judgement was suspect across the board.

But he didn’t say, “Who?” He said,

“Wait thirty seconds and then let them in.”

Gloria closed the door behind her, and Tommy stood up and went to the bookshelf along the north side of the room. On the third shelf was a hardcover copy of What Passes for Heaven by R.D. Maindt. They made a movie out of it, and Tommy was in it. Won an Oscar. He pulled it out and the shelf went CLACK and he spun it around to reveal a full-length mirror. Tommy’s shoulders were hunched, and his gut protruded, and his neck wattled and swung. Yellow V-neck sweater over a baby-blue shirt. Light gray slacks. Splotched hands like a Appaloosa horse’s ass. Posture was fucked, too. Hip hurt.

In the mirror, Tommy was in his tuxedo, which was blacker than an orgy of midnights, and he was wearing his most youthful toupee, and there was a single spotlight on him. He was in the studio, leading the band. Couldn’t read a note of music, and still: leading the band.

He spun the mirror back, and it CLICKED into place. Sat down at the desk and rotated so his back his to the door. Waited. Door opened.

“The Reverend Arcade Jones, Dr. Penny Arrabbiata, and Tiresias Richardson, Tommy,” Gloria announced.

Tommy heard steps behind him, and then sitting, and he let the office be quiet for a moment. He loved pulling this stunt on people. Sometimes, he would count to one hundred before he turned around.

Not this time. Only ten, and then he spun the chair around and saw Cara Thorn sitting in front of him, to the right of a giant black guy and some old chick.

“Cara, baby,” Tommy said, and rose quick like a teenager, and the Reverend and Penny did, too. They both figured he was kind of the American Pope, and when the Pope stands, so do you.

Tiresias stayed in her seat; she was rubbing the green padding on the armrests with her fingers, just for the sensation, and when she looked up everyone was on their feet and Tommy was right on top of her, so when she stood up she cracked him in the chin with the crown of her head, hard, and they both went down, hard.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Penny closed her eyes and sat back in her chair.

“Mr. Amici!” The Reverend Arcade Jones stepped over Tiresias to help him up; she staggered back into her seat: the light was knifing in through the west-facing window, slashing and slicing into her optic nerves, and she squinted–was that an Oscar?–and looked away from the sun. It was only so strong here because the desert encouraged it, she thought. Very co-dependent relationship the sun and the desert have. They should get out on their own, make new friends. The sun should see other landscapes; the desert should date alternative energy sources. The top of Tiresias’ head was clanging, and she rubbed her brown hair with her fingers, just for the sensation–that was definitely an Oscar–eyeballs had the fuzzy-wuzzies and her skull felt loose on its vertebrae. Allen wrench. I need an Allen wrench, she thought, and so she asked Penny,

“Are you Allen?”

Penny put her face back in her hand and muttered, “For fuck’s sake,” one more time.

Tommy was on his feet, braced against his desk and massaging his jaw.

“She hits like Sugar Ray,” he said.

The Reverend Arcade Jones was standing over him, and while he was curious about which Sugar Ray Tommy meant, he did not ask. He had seen the look in Tommy’s eyes before: people he had ministered to, his father before the end. Knew it was counterproductive to try to pin them down on details.

“She does, yes. Are you sure you’re okay, sir?”

“Jacob, I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.”

He watched Tommy for a second, watched for wobbles, went back to his chair, squeezed himself back between the armrests.

When Tiresias could focus, she saw Tommy staring. He was an old man: heavy lines tracing a triangle from his nose to the corners of his mouth, loose neck, hunched. The eyes, though. Still had the eyes. Green as the Verdance in summer.

“You were supposed to be in Rome,” he said.

And Tiresias’ improv training kicked in, muscle memory, so she said,

“I had to leave. The city has too many pigeons.”

“You walked off another set?’

“I didn’t walk. I had a driver. AAAAHahaha!”

The Reverend looked to his right and tried to catch Penny’s eye, but she had not thrown it.

“Goddammit, Cara, you can’t do that!”

“Why not?

Tommy walked across the room behind the desk. There was a bar under framed photos: Tommy and Mr. Smith; Tommy and Mr. Flood; Tommy and Mr. Jones; Tommy and Mr. Moon. Three Lalique crystal decanters: brown, brown, clear. Tumblers, also Lalique, with frosty owls etched into the sides. Decanter topped in a glass ball, dimpled like a Titleist, with a protruding spike into the neck of the bottle; Tommy unplugged the middle one, brown, and poured two fingers in one tumbler, and then in another. Recapped. Drink in both hands, and back to Tiresias. Hands her one.

“You’re just a mess, baby.”

“You have no idea. AAAAHahaha!”

Expensive glasses make a sound like TONK when they clink, and they both slugged half their scotch without breaking eye contact.

“Was it that director?”

“Yes, it was,” Tiresias said.

“Little queer bastard.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones leaned slowly towards Dr. Penny Arrabbita.

“Say something.”

“What?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted.

“There you go,” she answered.

It was a shrine. The office was a shrine, an ossuary with the meat still attached. His Oscar in a glass cube. Leather-bound scripts from all his movies, even the ones he hadn’t read in the first place. Pictures of Tommy with everyone you’ve ever heard of. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Platinum records.

“Mr. Amici,” the Reverend started.

“Shut the fuck up, Jacob. Speak when you’re spoken to.”

“Oooookay.”

“God, you look good,” Tommy said to Tiresias.

“Me? No,” she said, putting her hand to her chest and letting a finger linger in her cleavage. “Really? No.”

“Let’s take the plane. We’ll go to Hawaii.”

“Too boring.”

“Cuba,” he offered.

“Too exciting.”

“Miami.”

“Under no circumstance.”

Tommy was alive again, and he knew where he was and when he was, and there was blood flowing to his cock at last–do you know where this cock has been?–and he could breathe: his lungs were clear and new, and no longer labored. Cara. The one that mattered. Tommy was sure she was in the bedroom, but she wasn’t; she was right here in front of him in his office drinking with him, and he knew what followed drinking. He took a sip from his scotch, and lowered the tumbler down right in front of his crotch, and watched her eyes follow. Cara. Here she was. He knew she was here. He built the house for her, so why wouldn’t she be here? Here she was. Cara.

Tiresias threw back the rest of her drink, held the glass out, waggled it.

“You’re not gonna let a girl die of thirst, are you?”

Tommy smiled, took the empty glass, and walked over to the bar. Once his back was turned, Tiresias turned to Arcade and Penny and spat in a fierce whisper,

“What the fuck is happening?’

“He thinks you’re Cara Thorn,” the Reverend answered.

“She was so pretty.”

“Focus,” Penny said.

“Right.”

“He thinks you’re Cara Thorn.”

“They were married?”

“Yes. Twice.”

Couples who get married twice are couples who fuck really well, but hate each other.

“Bottoms up,” Tommy said, handing Tiresias the glass.

“Not just yet. AAAAHahaha!”

TONK went the glasses. Tommy took a sip. Tiresias drained hers. Gave back the glass and smiled. Tommy went back to the bar.

“Why are you drinking like this?” the Reverend whispered.

“I needed him to go back to the bar so I could ask you something.”

“This is not a good long-term strategy,” Penny hissed.

“It’s really good scotch. Does he even know you’re here?”

Penny shrugged her shoulders.

“And why is calling you Jacob?”

“He thinks I’m a different black guy,” the Reverend answered.

Tiresias thought for a second and said,

“It’s unfair to bring race into it. He thinks I’m a different white woman.”

“This is a conversation for later.”

Tommy was back. TONK. Tiresias just sipped this time, and said,

“Tommy, baby?”

He was leaning against the desk.

“Doll?”

Tiresias hated her eyes. (The corneas, specifically: she was fine with her pupils.) Mud brown, she thought. Find the dullest color in the spectrum, multiply it by an economics textbook. She tried colored contacts, but fell asleep in them the first night she wore them and woke up with the upper half of her face swollen up like a baboon’s ass; that was it for the contacts. Eyes like Tommy’s, what she would give. Eyes like that and tits like these? I’d rule the world by now, she thought. But they were mud brown.

Didn’t stop her from fluttering them at him.

“Tommy, baby?”

He made a noise, halfway between growling and hocking up a loogie: it was his sexy noise, and Penny knew that she would have the sound in her head for the rest of her life.

“Would you buy me the moon?”

“You got it.”

“What about the stars?”

“Every one.”

“Buy me the stars, Tommy,” Tiresias said, leaned back in the chair, reversed the cross of her legs. “I don’t want diamonds. I don’t want furs. No more houses, either, baby. I want the stars. Can you do that, or should I find someone who can?”

Tommy dipped his finger in his drink, stirred it twice, put his finger in his mouth.

Tiresias flared her nostrils and went, “Mmm,” and while the Reverend Arcade Jones was unsure whether this tactic would work, he was impressed with her acting.

“I want you to buy me that Observatory. The one we went to.”

The problem with winging it is that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Tommy had never taken Cara Thorn to Harper Observatory. He and Hiawatha Mayflower went there on their first date. They sat on a bench overlooking the valley, and she gave him a tugger while he sang to her. He hit the high note as he came, and then gave her a cream-colored silk handkerchief to wipe her hand with. One of the first warm spring nights, he remembered that, all the fresh green leaves on the trees on the way up Pulaski Peak; they had taken his Corvette, the convertible one, the Stingray in Tuxedo Black, and he had driven too fast like always and she screamed–for real, not like Cara; Cara always wanted him to go faster–and so he slowed down a bit, and she put her fragile and fragrant hand atop his on the gear shift.

This was not Cara Thorn.

And that was not Jacob George.

Absolutely no clue who the lady in the middle was. How long had she been here? How long had any of them been here, and Tommy remembered a conversation from this morning about the vampire with the big tits from that shitty little teevee station in that shitty little town. He was meeting her today, Gloria said that to him, he remembered, and looked down again and this was not Cara Thorn, this was a vampire with big tits and too much eye makeup and cheap slacks. Not Cara. Not at all.

Tommy set his Lalique tumbler on the desk–it had a drop of scotch left, swirling around the thick bottom–and walked back to his chair. Sat. Templed his fingers. Breathed in and out through his nose.

The three Little Aleppians smiled at him, hopeful, and behind his head was the pool and the sun.

“You come into my house,” Tommy said. There was a small chest, silver with gold highlights and six inches long, on the desk; he flipped the top open and took out an unfiltered cigarette.

“Oh, can I get one of those?” Tiresias leaned forward and asked. Penny and the Reverend closed their eyes: one in prayer; the other in something she would not call prayer, but was prayer.

Tommy smiled around his cigarette and chose another from the case, closed it, stood up and around the desk; he was right in front of her, arching over her, and there were tiny bushes of tobacco flopping out the end of the cigarette; he plucked them out with two fingers and deposited the waste on his desktop, and he was still leaning forward with the posture of a man a third his age right on top of her, over her, and he held out the smoke not to her hand but an inch from her lips.

Tiresias jutted her head forward, took the cigarette. She knew she had fucked up, but still thought the situation salvageable.

Dunhill lighter. Gold with silver highlights.

FFT.

PHWOO.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Oh, no. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Back behind the desk, opened the top drawer. Heavy glass ashtray. Placed it in front of Tiresias and sat back down. Another ashtray, also heavy and glass, from the drawer. In front of himself, on the dark green blotter.

FFT.

PHWOO.

“Thank you for reminding me of why I’m tearing down that fucking Observatory. For reminding me of what kind of people live in that dog’s asshole you call a neighborhood. Liars, all of you. Scumbags. All of you, everyone, fucking scumbags. PHWOO. You’re gonna take advantage of an old man? What kind of people are you?”

“What the fuck kind of person are you,” Penny yelled. “you fucking prick!? You want to destroy something that doesn’t rightfully belong to you because of, what, some bullshit little boy grudge?”

The Reverend stared out the window and pretended the meeting was going well. Tiresias smoked. Tommy was a very specific form of calm. He reopened the top drawer of his desk and reached in.

Behind the three Little Aleppians, the glass case protecting Tommy’s Oscar lifted off of its own accord. Settled next to the award on the shelf. The two women and the large man turned around at the sound, and then they and Tommy watched the Oscar float from one side of the office to the other. Around head height.

Then, back.

The Reverend Arcade Jones crossed himself.

“For fuck’s sake, Romeo,” Penny said into her hand.

“He’s pulling out a gun,” said a voice from the air in the vicinity of the Oscar.

Tommy pulled out a .32 with a pearl handle. The Reverend, Penny, and Tiresias leapt up.

“Thank you for seeing us,” the Reverend said over his shoulder as they evacuated the office; he kept himself between Tommy and the women, walking backwards down the hallway of the house towards the front door. Tommy followed.

“Clever little fucks, aren’t you? Got a plan, huh? How’s your plan now, assholes?” He punctuated his questions with his gun, and then Gloria Cutuli came out of the living room.

“Tommy! Put the gun down!”

He turned, and the three used his distraction to bolt for the door. Tiresias threw it open, and they were in the yard of the house, twenty feet from the gate which would lead out of the compound into the street where, they hoped, far fewer armed show biz legends were stalking them.

BANG and now the three were sprinting.

“Holy shit, he’s actually shooting,” Tiresias said, and none of them turned around to see the pistol knocked from his hand as if by an invisible man.

And now they were on the street, out of the madhouse, out on Pinyon Way, and Tommy is right behind them shouting about respect and fucking oneself. He promises to tear the Observatory down slow, in sections, let everyone watch in slow-motion, and there is no 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham on the street at all, and the Reverend says, “Fuck,” under his breath, but there is a dull grey panel van speeding towards the house and it fishtails and WHACKS the Reverend with its back quarter-panel, and he tumbles across the grass and says, “Fuck,” with the breath knocked out of him.

The back doors of the van open. Two jump out: man and woman with pantyhose over their heads. Grab Tommy. Back in the van, doors shut, and off they go SCREECH VROOM.

There are two slashing shadows across the pavement of Pinyon Way, and they come from Tommy’s Washingtonia robusta palms. One hundred feet tall with a bushy brush of green fronds all the way up. Tommy had built the house for Cara, but the architect had built the house around the trees. Their bases were close together and they grew outwards from each other; they made a shape like rabbit ears on a teevee as they transected the road.

Penny cried, “Reverend!” and ran to where he was laying, knelt down beside him.

Tiresias had, somehow, kept her cigarette. PHWOO. Pinyon Way was very long and straight, and you could see almost a mile in either direction. She watched the van until it disappeared, and then she said,

“I did not see that coming.”

“Reverend,” Penny said. “You dead?”

The Reverend Arcade Jones had moved his feet, and his hands, and swiveled his neck around. Nothing was broken, and nothing had torn. He thanked the Lord for that, and then he made a noise like “Ooooohfug” because getting hit by a van hurts so, so badly

The dull grey panel van had vanished to the north, and from the south a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham drove up. Precarious Lee and Big-Dicked Sheila were wearing brand-new sunglasses, and they each had ice cream cones.

“What the sweet fuck?” Precarious asked.

The Reverend Arcade Jones was down, and Penny Arrabbiata was ministering to him as well as she knew how, which was not very. Tiresias Richardson looked like she’d seen a ghost. There was a puppy on the front seat, a mutt with floppy ears named Emergency, and he was barely able to stay awake for an hour at a time, but he could pick up on human emotions because that’s what he was bred to do, and the puppy became concerned and went, “Berf!”

Precarious rolled down the window. Tiresias walked up, leaned in.

“Hi.”

“Hey there,” Precarious said, turning down the radio.

Sheila stretched over Precarious’ lap to the open window and asked,

“What the fuck is happening, Tirry?”

“It’s not my fault. It’s not entirely my fault. It’s not my fault.”

Sheila reached out and took the half-smoked cigarette from Tiresias PHWOO and gave it back, and Precarious nearly knocked her over getting out of the Cadillac and running to the Reverend, who was still down on the impossible grass outside Tommy Amici’s house in Jeremiad Springs, which is three days by horse–but less than that by car, even if you stop for chicken–from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“Cormorants were overhead. That was the day I graduated; it was 1971. Top of my class, and cormorants do not come as far inland as they were. An odd sighting. Our gowns were purple, which is an auspicious color. A learned man knows that purple is an auspicious color. There were four above me. I was fifth in the class rankings. I was recruited.

“Not everyone was recruited. The best, just the best. This was 1971. I swore my Oath of Office on the steps of Town Hall. I was in love and I had an apartment on the twelfth floor. I was recruited. My work had been rewarded. My father’s hadn’t, but I took the Oath of Office and when I did, I was wearing his suit. This was in his honor.

“Before law school, I had studied chemistry. I also received top honors in that field. The gowns were green, though, and there were no cormorants. Too much of a coincidence for them to show up twice. They’re a rare bird. I went to the University of Maryland. The Terrapins. I received top honors, and I could have pursued a career in chemistry.

“I was interested in the law. Words make up the law like elements make up chemicals. It was a lateral move, intellectually. I graduated in 1971 on the steps of Town Hall. My mentor was a man named Pullet. He was brilliant, and he complimented me often. I wrote several of his opinions. He was a judge. Once, he let me wear his robe. It was black.

“I do not have a child. People lie about me, and I do not have a child. My mother owned property in Georgia, and there were fields with cotton in them. The fields were beyond the houses. My mother owned all the property.

“Holly, Wood, and Vine fired me for no reason. I was a leading attorney, and they fired me on the steps of Town Hall in 1971 after nine years of service. I was not allowed to retrieve my belongings. Items were missing when they were returned to me. My possessions had been gone through. I practiced tax law, which is just like chemistry.  Some elements neutralize other elements. Some combine. I would find the right mix. People got rich off of my work. I did, too. I had a boat that I berthed in Boone’s Docks. Slip 71. Slip 1971.

“They were cowards. All of them. I took the Oath of Office and they would not let me take my possessions. I want to look a man in the face. I’m a man. I passed the bar on the first attempt. That was in 1971. My mother was there at the ceremony. We took pictures, but I’ve lost them.”

“Friends, you have been lied to. Bamboozled. Hornswoggled, even. Listen to me now, because I’m telling you the truth, and there ain’t many in this world and certainly in this park who’s gonna do that. Man over there on his soapbox, he’s gonna give you a rap about his past–misremembered and fractured, as it were–and that lady over there’s gonna prophecize at you, but only your pal Randall gonna tell you the honest truth, yessir.

“Liiiiiiied to, yes, you have been. Gotta work eight hours, sleep eight hours, watch teevee and eat the other eight. You believe it? You believe that happy crappy? Not me. No, sir.

“Because I have seeeeeeen, my friends. The mountaintop ain’t high enough, and the ocean ain’t wet enough! Not to compete with what I know as truth.

“Not to compete with what I know as truth.

“Four years going on, four years past, four years in the service, and four years awake: that’s me, and I now come before you, standing on my soapbox, to share with you the good news of the First Church of the Iterated Crystal Meth.

“Little diamonds, my friends. This is the Lord, not some bearded mope on a cloud, and you know I am not lying because I told you so.

“The iterations, O, the iterations. Veins and nostrils and smokestack lightning: you ain’t never cum so hard in your life! You got arteries? I got highways, interstates, bloody and rushing and free, baby, free.

“Freedom lies in the ability to regulate. Don’t let the situation speed you up, slow you down! No! That’s your choice, you see, it’s your prerogative, it’s natural law to insist upon chemical freedom and any man says you can’t is your enemy. Tyranny of the bloodstream, fascism of the timestream.

“Who are they to tell you how fast to go?”

“People lived here before you, asshole, and they were probably smarter than you. Soft fuck that you are. Sloppy and late for appointments. Stains on your wrinkles. You need a haircut and a hard punch. Ever been punched in the face? Teaches you shit about yourself. Whether you’re a pussy or not. No electricity and no plumbing and no medicine and no Jesus and those fuckers were three times the man you are. Sleeping, they were three times the man you are.

“Devolution! That’s what’s around us. The slow surrender. Look at you. Look at us. Doughy and stupid. Belly like watery mud. Hands like satin. Round heels, every last one of you, every last one of us.

“You’re not rugged, and you’re not individual.

“Rights. You have rights. You love your rights, your fucking rights, but your ancestors had their wits. Difference between rights and wits is that wits actually exist. I bet one of you got a lawyer on retainer. Gonna make sure your rights are respected. Wouldn’t last a day, not a goddamned day, and you know it. You know how depleted you are. You know you’re not living up to your potential. You know you’re just a person-shaped lie.

“So you take pills. Doctor gave them to you, so they’re not drugs. Medication, because you’re sick. You’re so fucking sick, aren’t you?

“And you drink alcohol. You stink of it. Stink of wine. Reek of beer, not like a human. You don’t even smell human any more, did you know that?

“The drugs. The ones the doctor doesn’t know about. They make you smart, they make you creative, they make you so fucking special. You’re so fucking special, just like everyone else. You’re such a rebel, just like all the others. Smoke that dope, dope. Bang that shit, shit.

“Got no fucking idea who you even are. A mammal. When’s the last time you remembered you were a mammal? You’re not a taxpayer! You’re not a customer! You’re not a pedestrian! You’re a fucking mammal. Got the exact same needs as a prairie dog, but you can write poems about those needs and so you think you’re better. You think you’re better than prairie dogs. You’re not. Just more aboveground in your dealings.

“Cast it off.

“Burn it down.

“Leave it the fuck behind, leave it all the fuck behind.

“What’s a book ever taught you besides a new way to be sad? What did you ever see in a movie besides someone you weren’t gonna fuck, and somewhere you weren’t gonna go?

“Spectacular bonanzas. This is what awaits you. A life lived in glory, and honestly.

“Someone else grew your food. A stranger made your bed, and built your home. You’re no fucking pilgrim: you’re a tourist. All pilgrims are tourists. Put your hands on your goddamned life.

“A stranger will make your coffin, too. Cowards, the lot of you.”

“Why do you bring me here?”

“I like listening to them.”

“I don’t. I feel bad for these people.”

“Why?’

“They’re crazy.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t think.”

“Some of them. Some of the time.”

“Great. I’m not coming any more. I get bad dreams when you bring me here.”

“Me, too. That’s why I come.”

The man and the woman walked away from Shrieker’s Corner, towards the Thoroughfare that ran through the Verdance, and then they turned south and did not hold hands; behind them, the freedom of speech was muscular and unabrogated, but tucked away in a corner where it wouldn’t bother people. On their left was a statue of a hand, upturned and bronze, and to their right was the forgotten grave of the Pulaski, and ahead of them was the Main Drag through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

There was a single bead of sweat on Big-Dicked Sheila’s lip right in the middle rivulet under her nose like molten amber, and it wiggled as she inhaled from a Camel cigarette clenched in her front teeth and PHWOO exhaled. Her hands were behind her head. The sun was in front of her head. The pool was over there somewhere. Thattaway, towards her bare feet and baby blue toes which matched the water, chlorinated to within an inch of its life. A heavy hand is needed to keep a motel pool clean.

The Heliotropicana had 40 rooms on two floors, and the room doors opened onto a catwalk with a white guardrail that overlooked the pool; the stucco that made up the building was pink, and so were the lounge chairs on the concrete deck, which were the cheap kind with strappy belts of vinyl that left sucking highways on the back of your thighs when you got up. Tiresias Richardson needed to change–and primp, honestly–and Penny Arrabbiata could use a shower, too, and as long as there was a shower available, then the Reverend Arcade Jones was going to hop in, and so Precarious Lee downshifted his Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham off of Route 77 and onto the boring old Interstate, and then off the Interstate to the surface streets of Jeremiad Springs, and then into the parking lot of the Heliotropicana.

Jemima Gloaming had owned the motel for ten years, and her shoulders and chest were deeply wrinkled and brown like a baseball glove made out of Willie Nelson. She was wearing a tie-dyed tank top, and that made Precarious smile. He put his tweed briefcase on the counter, face up, so she could see the small red and blue inlay near the handle.

“We need a room, please,” he said.

Jemima eyed them up and said,

“This a pervert orgy?”

“No.”

“I don’t care, but there’s a deposit for the cleaning.”

“Not an orgy,” Precarious said.

“I’m gonna check.”

“Fine by me.”

“Do you have any pets?”

“No.”

Jemima reached under the counter and pulled out a puppy.

“Want one?”

“We’re good.”

Arcade Jones isn’t fast any more, not since he shredded his knee playing LSU, but he’s still quick to the point of blurriness for the first six or eight feet and Precarious did not register him coming up besides.

“Oh, Lord; puppy-wuppy, come here.”

The Reverend scooped the dog up–it fit in one boat-sized hand–and brought it close to his face.

“Are you a puppy? Who is a puppy? Is it you?”

The puppy did not know if it was a puppy, or refused to answer the question on ideological grounds. Either way, it said nothing and wriggled furiously.

“Are you pretty or handsome? Let’s see.”

He picked up the dog’s backside, checked.

“Who is my handsome little man? Who is?”

The three women were by now circled around Arcade and the dog.

“He is. He is the handsomest,” Sheila said, scratching the dog’s wiggly rump.

“Professor, what kind of dog is he?” Tiresias asked.

“I’m not that kind of professor.”

“Best guess.”

The puppy was short-coated and dirty blond–the color of rusty gold–and he shook his floppy ears out of his eyes every few seconds. Couldn’t be a shepherd or a retriever; didn’t have the right tail. Snout was too wide to be a doberman, but not wide enough to be a pit. Too big to be a terrier. Not a dachshund.

“Canis Intersectionalis,” Penny said.

The dog had flopped happily onto his back, and four people were rubbing his belly.

“That sounds fancy,” Sheila said.

“It means mutt.”

“The fanciest mutt in the whole wide world. Yes, he is.”

Sheila was standing in the Reverend’s shadow, and she leaned her bright-red head up against the sleeve of his bright-red jacket.

“Y’know, Reverend, every church needs a dog. I mean, that’s just the way things work. A bookstore needs a cat, and a church needs a dog.”

From behind the office, there was a splash as a child cannonballed into the pool.

“I’ve never heard of that before,” Arcade said

“Yeah, not a thing,” Tiresias added.

“A dog can’t belong to a building. Cats can. You can have a church cat, and the cat belongs to the building, but not a dog. Not how dogs work,” Penny said.

“I thought you weren’t that kind of scientist,” Sheila answered.

“None of this has anything to do with science.”

Jemima flipped open the guest book on the counter in front of her and said,

“$50 for the room, and $50 for the dog.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones felt guilty about the $50. Deacon Blue had given him a few hundred in cash out of the First Church of the Infinite Christ’s petty cash. For emergencies, he had said. So he named the dog Emergency.

The Reverend was beginning to understand Little Aleppo

He was dripping over the sides of his lounge chair next to Sheila by the pool. The Reverend was larger than whoever the chair was built for, and the effect was like an overstuffed sandwich, or Godzilla laying atop an oil rig: more was off than on. Penny and Tiresias were using the bathroom in the room, so he was waiting outside. His jacket was off, and his tie, and so were his shoes and socks; the legs of his stop sign-red pants were rolled up to his knee. There was a puppy on his broad chest.

“Always had dogs growing up. Chessy. Big Duke. We had one dog: his name was Gator, and Gator was just about the smartest person in any room he was in. Always used to growl at my cousin Rodney, bit him once or twice. Turned out that Gator was right. Rodney got caught up in the devil. There was evil in his acts. Gator knew. Always trusted his judgement after that.”

“We had Derby,” Precarious said. He was on the lounge chair next to Sheila, and had his shoes off, too. The sun was high and hot.

“Smart?” Sheila asked.

“Shit, no. Scared of pine cones and spent most days trying to mount the chickens.”

“Least she didn’t eat them,” Arcade said.

“Preacher, she was too dumb to know they were food.”

Emergency had fallen asleep on the Reverend’s chest, and let out a small snore/hiccup, and the three of them–even Precarious–made small noises in response.

Tiresias had debated getting a black wig, straight and long, maybe do a half-Draculette for Tommy, but then decided that half of a Draculette was no Draculette at all. Kohl for the eyes, though, just for reference’s sake. Old Hollywood chic, yes, that was what was called for: taupe wide-legged slacks that were tight around the ass and billowed out. White blouse over a sheer white tank top, ribbed. The buttons above her belly button had never even been introduced to one another. Old asshole wants the vampire with the big tits? Here ya go, she thought.

The room was pale green and creamy white, and there was a painting of palm trees bolted to the wall. The bathroom was bifurcated: the shower and toilet in a small chamber behind a door, and the sink and mirror right outside in a small hallway. Penny was in the shower, and country music was playing from the clock radio on the nightstand in between the two queen beds. That Bakersfield sound.

Tiresias felt good. But not great.

Sheila had left her purse on the bed to the right.

HOW WILL IT END?

“Jesus!”

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, was not easily startled. She had stopped going to haunted houses many Halloweens ago, as they were just a waste of money. Some teenager in a floppy mask would leap at her, and she’d say, “Hello, there,” and everyone involved in the exchange would feel hollow. Gussy was scared of the right things: failure, and death, and rats.

Still, though: when the entire building surrounding her began bellowing melancholy wonderings at her without warning, she jumped.

“You need to clear your throat before you start talking.”

I DO NOT HAVE A THROAT.

“Wally–”

DO NOT CALL ME THAT.

“–we need some sort of noise to let me know you’re going to talk.”

YOU WILL KNOW I AM SPEAKING BY THE FACT THAT I AM SPEAKING.

Gussy was qualified for her life – the professional part of it, at least. Double-major in Business and Film Studies at Harper College, and she graduated magna cum laude. “Why not summa?” her father, David O. Incandescente-Ponui asked at her graduation party in front of the whole family. Gussy’s father was an asshole. She prepared, did her homework, kept up with the literature. She knew more than you did about the history of Bollywood, and also the per-unit cost of Fanta.

She was a hard-worker, too, and if the deep crimson runners that covered both lengths of the aisles in the orchestra needed vacuuming, then she grabbed the ancient, heavy Electrolux–Gussy had been meaning to look up when the company went out of business and vaguely place the device’s vintage–and the bright-yellow 200′ extension cord.

Patterns swooping up, and then curve back down. The nap of the carpet. Lay it this way, and then that. It catches the light different, looks different. Roll the Electrolux away from you, lighter; bring it back, darker. Take a step forward. Repeat. Repeat. When you get to the front of the auditorium, turn around and do it again.

Gussy was thinking about Sheila’s collarbone, and the way it stretched the skin away from her shoulder, the concave pocks on either side of the ridge, and how much she’d like to put her mouth on one of them when her theater started talking to her.

“Repeat after me: ahem.”

AHEM.

“No, don’t just say the word.”

ALEA IACTA EST.

“What?”

IT IS LATIN. THE DIE IS CAST. IT IS WHAT CAESAR SAID WHEN HIS ARMIES CROSSED THE RUBICON TO TAKE ROME. HE HAD COMMITTED AN IRREVOCABLE ACTION WITH NO FIXED OUTCOME. THIS IS THE PRESENT SITUATION, WITH REGARDS TO THE OBSERVATORY.

The Tahitian had 1,200 seats in the orchestra, and Gussy sat down in one. She was wearing a yellow dress because when she was getting dressed she was thinking about Sheila, and worried about her–no specific reason, just vague dread–and so she decided to cheer herself up by wearing her favorite color. Crossed her legs, ladylike, and pulled the hem of the skirt over her knees, ladylike.

“What the fuck are you talking about?

FLUXUS. THE INCORRUPTIBLE SPACE BETWEEN A QUESTION AND AN ANSWER.

Neither her film nor business classes had ever covered how to deal with a sentient sound system with a philosophical bent. Wally was an artificial mondo-intelligence in the physical form of a sound system lashed together by savants, dopesuckers, and Oregonians. It had belonged to the band Precarious Lee used to work for, and now it belonged to her because she had neglected to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“You’re the supercomputer.”

I AM SO FAR BEYOND A SUPERCOMPUTER THAT IT WOULD MAKE YOUR HEAD SPIN.

“Pardon me,” she said, and curtsied in her seat sarcastically. “You’re…what are you?”

I AM THAT I AM.

“Uh-huh. So, you tell me. What do you think?”

I HAVE NO FAITH IN ANY OF MY PREDICTIONS. THE RANGE OF MY VARIABLES IS TOO WIDE, AND I BELIEVE THERE ARE IMPORTANT FACTORS I AM UNAWARE OF. I CAN TELL YOU WHAT THE WEATHER WILL BE IN THE NEXT HOUR WITH 99.998% ACCURACY, IN THE NEXT DAY WITH 99.87%, THE NEXT WEEK WITH 96.21%.

“But not a land dispute in a shitty neighborhood?”

NO. TRILLIONS OF ATMOSPHERIC PARTICLES ARE EASIER TO KEEP TRACK OF THAN ONE HUMAN HEART.

Gussy had never felt empathy for a sound system before. Odd sensation. Like falling in love with toaster.

“If it makes you feel any better, none of us have figured us out, either.”

EVEN WHEN YOUR INTENTIONS ARE CLEAR, YOUR ACTIONS CANNOT BE PREDICTED. IF I WERE TO COMPARE YOU TO MYSELF: IT IS THOUGH YOU HAVE SUB-ROUTINES RUNNING THAT YOU ARE NOT AWARE OF. ERRORS IN YOUR GRAMMAR THAT ITERATE DOWN THE LINE OF CODE.

“It’s a lump of jelly.”

WHAT?

“The brain. We’re not like you. We don’t understand ourselves, and we can’t run a diagnostic. There’s no wiring. Just jelly. When we’re born, it’s a certain shape, and then the world pokes at it. When the world pokes hard enough, it leaves a fingerprint.”

She said this to the empty screen. Gussy pretended that the screen was Wally’s face, because Gussy did not know how to speak to someone who did not have a face, and so she pretended that the screen was Wally’s face.

AND WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THESE FINGERPRINTS?

“Ignore ’em. Make ’em into art. Fuck. Pray. Some turn to drink.”

YOU LACK THE CAPACITY FOR A HARD REBOOT.

“We do, indeed.”

IT IS VERY REFRESHING.

“I would imagine,” Gussy said, and stood up. She flipped the switch of the Electrolux and it went WGREEEEEE as she rocked it up and back on The Tahitian’s deep crimson runners, WGREEEEEEE–

She flicked the power switch up and back, and spun around to face the screen.

“Did you do that!?”

YES.

“How!?”

I AM WIRED INTO THE MAINS.

Gussy made a mental note to push Precarious out a window the next time she saw him.

“I thought we were done.”

HOW WILL IT END?

“The Observatory and Tommy and all that?”

YES.

Both hands on the grip of the vacuum, and knees together, and eyes down.

“I don’t know.”

There was quiet in the auditorium, even from the balcony, and dust motes mated in the thin light.

TAKE ME TO HARPER OBSERVATORY. I WISH TO SEE THE STARS.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“What?”

Sheila held up a prescription bottle, green and translucent.

“Please tell me you only took one.”

Tiresias was checking her makeup in the motel room’s mirror and not making eye contact with Sheila. The Reverend Arcade Jones was in the shower.

“One.”

“Sweetie, I don’t mind. What’s mine is yours. But these fuckers are strong.”

“One.”

Her hair was the color of a chipmunk’s fur; wavy across her forehead, and exploded into chaos below her jawline. Thin, long brows. Tiresias had the suggestion of a cleft in her chin, and her lips were dull-red and very glossy. Nails matched the lips. No rings. Watch on her left wrist, tiny and gold like the cross that was–well, there’s no other word for it–nestled in her cleavage. She had spent a week finding the right length chain. Didn’t want the cross to disappear in there, but couldn’t come up short, either. A half-inch above the junction where chest turned into tits, a smidge above that was where you wanted Jesus, she figured. It’s all show biz, she figured, as the strong afternoon light glinted off the cross and into the mirror and back and the mirror and back, and Tiresias went into her reflection deeper–that better not be a pimple; motherfucker, that’s a pimple–and tried to avoid looking at Sheila, especially after she noticed how blown-out her pupils were.

“One.”

Behind Tiresias was the small room with the shower and sink in it, and the sound of water stopped.

Sheila had left her sneakers out by the pool, and she padded silently besides Tiresias.

“Jesus!”

“Sorry.”

“Give a girl an ‘ahem’ or something.”

Tiresias to the left of Sheila. (To the right in the mirror.) Tiresias tall, Sheila short; long hair, short hair; shirt and slacks; little black dress.

They leaned into each other.

“Precarious’ angels,” Sheila said.

They did the pose.

The door behind them opened up, steam billowed out and so did a great, black, bald head.

“Ladies?”

The two ladies turned around. Tiresias cocked her head, and Sheila leaned back against the vanity seductively.

“Gentleman,” Sheila said.

“Ooh, you look so clean.”

SLAM. (That’s the sound of the door.)

“You’re very inappropriate people.”

“Us? We’re in a motel, Padre,” Sheila said through the door.

“You’re the weird one,” Tiresias added.

“There is something inherently dirty about a motel.”

“Why do you think people stay in them? AAAAHahaha!”

Sheila reached up and scratched Tiresias’ shoulder, right where the blade is, and then peered into the mirror and asked,

“Are my eyeballs too white?”

“That’s the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.”

From in the bathroom,

“Girls!”

And then the room’s door opened CLIK-TCHACK spilling sunlight, blazing, into the pale-green and creamy-white rented sanctuary of Room 18 of the Heliotropicana. Precarious.

“We gotta get a move on.”

“I’ve been telling them that!”

Precarious looked around the room: the beds, the dresser, the ceiling.

Sheila said,

“The bathroom, dummy.”

Precarious saw the door to the bathroom, the women, understood what was happening.

“You two.” Pointing with his index and pinky.  “Out.” Pointing with his thumb.

And then they were gone and the motel room was quiet and the Reverend Arcade Jones could escape the tiny bathroom with just a shower and toilet, both of which were not made for people his size. He wasn’t shy, or a prude, but the thin white towels did not wrap all the way around his waist. The best he could do was two–one in front and one in back–gathered up in his hands and prone to slippage.

He stood before the mirror behind the vanity, turned the sink on. Toothpaste on the brush. He liked the kind with the stripes, mostly because the company had never changed its packaging too much. Arcade couldn’t read a damned word in the supermarket, but he could pick out shapes and patterns like a dyslexic hawk. Just don’t change the box, that’s all he asked of his consumables. The shampoo he liked had completely revamped its logo a decade ago, new colors and everything, and he had started shaving his head.

The Reverend Arcade Jones’ suit was redder than Mao, and hung in the dissipating steam of the bathroom.

Just four miles from the motel to Tommy Amici’s place. 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, with the radio playing low. Man and two women up front. Man, woman, and dog in the back.

“Emergency.”

“Berf!”

“Your name is Emergency.”

“Berf!”

“Emergency.”

“Berf!”

Tiresias only smoked cigarettes when she was nervous, or fucked up, and she was nervous and fucked up, and so she wanted a cigarette but the Reverend had forbidden smoking around the puppy; there was an ashtray in the armrest of the Cadillac’s door, and she flipped it up and back, and up and back, nostrils wide open and sinuses like valleys and she felt good, almost too good, but good very good and she hoped she would not feel any gooder: gooder would be bad, this was the level of good she was comfortable with–cruising altitude–and she desired no further goodening.

These are not words, she thought to herself. Gooder is not a word. Goodening is even more not a word.

Shit.

Pinyon Way was named after the trees that had been cut down to build the road, and you could not see Tommy’s house from it. There was the sidewalk, and twenty feet of impossible grass, and then a wall made from very fancy and expensive cinderblock. Ten feet high, and above that were the crowns of fan palms that blocked the view.

He had built it for Cara. He had built it for them. A little fucking privacy, is that too much to ask from you creeps? Singing’s my job, and I’m off work. Fuck off, would ya? He built the house for her.

Cara Thorn was dead twelve years when Precarious Lee pulled up to the curb.

It was late afternoon in the Low Desert, and there was a cloud to the east. Blue, otherwise. The palm trees had their hands up on defense. Chinch bugs up high, and chiggers at your ankle. Down the street, a team of gardeners with bandanas around their faces forced the sandy earth to grow grass and bushes and other plants that should not have been there. Anything will grow anywhere, if you have enough money.

Engine clicked off. Quiet in the Cadillac.

“We’re here,” Precarious said.

“Yaay,” Tiresias muttered, and Sheila grabbed her hand.

The Reverend Arcade Jones was holding Emergency in one of his hands, close in to his chest, and the dog was staring up at him.

“Would it be all right if I said a little prayer?” he said, not looking at Penny Arrabbiata. The Reverend tried not to judge people, and he thought Penny was quite lovely and very smart, but he had never gotten a warm reception from academic-type folks when he offered a prayer. He didn’t understand why people would get angry when you wanted to pray for them, but they did.

Penny took his hand, the one that didn’t have the puppy in it.

“Not too little,” she said.

In the front seat, Sheila was already holding Tiresias’ hand, and so she reached out for Precarious’ and it was right there. The five of them were silent for  moment, and then the Reverend Arcade Jones said,

“Lord, please.”

And then it was silent for another moment, and Penny said,

“That’s it?”

“That’s my prayer,” Arcade said.

“A bit underdone.”

“What else do you need?’

“Fire? Brimstone? How about a hallelujah or two?’

Sheila turned around and leaned over the seat and reached out to pet Emergency.

“It was a good prayer,” she said, and Tiresias added,

“The brevity informed the sanctity, which can be read as the inherence of the…thing.”

Sheila closed her eyes deliberately, grabbed Tiresias’ wrist, squeezed a little too hard.

“Nice prayer, Padre,” Precarious said.

Arcade Jones handed the puppy to Sheila, who cradled him in her skinny chest and kneaded his belly until she found the right spot to get his leg kicking, and he opened the door and once out he smoothed down his shirt and trousers and put on his ketchup-red jacket. Penny out the other side, into traffic but there was no traffic at all: she was wearing her scientist drag, khakis and a fleece vest with an obscure patch on the breast.

Sheila grabbed the back of Tiresias’ neck, squeezed a little too hard, and drug her face in close.

“Don’t fuck this up.”

“Sheel, I’m gonna kill it.”

“Tirry if you fuck this up, I’m gonna be pissed.”

Tiresias licked her lips, but she had left all her spittle back at the motel.

“I’m in the pipe.”

Sheila squeezed her neck a bit harder.

“Don’t. Fuck. This. Up.”

Tiresias grabbed Sheila by her ears and kissed her full on the mouth.

“Berf,” the puppy said.

“I’m gonna kill this shit.”

And then Tiresias was outside the Cadillac and walking towards the door in the front gate, adjusting all of her clothing and putting things in their proper place. She still wanted a cigarette. Maybe Tommy still smoked.

The car was quiet again, and Sheila scooted over so she could close the door that Tiresias had left open, but it was massive and heavy and her angle was wrong, so she put Emergency in her lap and reached out her left arm. Precarious took it and dragged her back, and the door closed, and now the car was even quieter.

He reaches into the pocket of his tee-shirt. Soft pack of Camels. Jerks his wrist up and two cigarettes pop out, and he squeezes the pack so they don’t fall back down. Offers. She takes one. Pack to his mouth, draws the smoke out with his lips. Back in the pocket. Zippo is in the jeans, so he arches his butt off the maroon velour seat and plucks it out. SHNITKT. They light their cigarettes, and then look at the puppy in her lap. She eases the dog onto the bench seat, and they each retreat to the far side of the car with their arms hanging out the windows, and thrust their heads out to take drags.

Sheila asked,

“How will it end?”

And Precarious took a drag off his cigarette and PHWOO exhaled, and then he thought for a second and said,

“Well for some, poorly for others.”

And Sheila thought that was so funny that she started crying. Precarious turns into her, and she comes back across the bench seat, waking Emergency up and nearly squishing him between their legs. She leans into him and puts her head on his chest, and his heartbeat is in her ear.

The sky is still blue.

“The preacher from the weird church, a scientist who hates people, and a vampire with big tits.”

“Who’s off her ass on stolen pills,” Precarious added.

“Who’s off her ass on stolen pills.”

Sheila wipes her eyes on Precarious’ tee-shirt leaving a bit of mascara, sighs.

“This was the best we could do.”

“Apparently.”

Precarious stroked Sheila’s bright-red hair with one hand, and took a drag off his Camel with the other. PHWOO. He said,

“We’ll get our shit together one of these days.”

“One of these days.”

The door buzzed and opened, and the man and two women entered the compound, and the door closed behind them. There was a Cadillac on the street, idling with the windows down, and there was a man and a woman and a dog inside. There were towering palm trees, and squat ones, but none like the two rising from within Tommy’s yard. Washingtonia robusta. Skinny trunks that swayed upwards for ten stories with tufted fronds up top. There was nothing so impressive for miles, and nothing to do but wait in the car in a place that was very far from Little Aleppo, which was a neighborhood in America.

Town Father Sentenced
Convicted of bribery, assault,
vote-tampering, grave-robbing,
other.

By IFFY BOULD – There was chaos in the courtroom as the long-running trial of Stanchion Potts came to an end today. When Judge R.J. Fulsome read out the sentence of twenty years, several of Mr. Potts’ supporters and members of his family attacked him with previously-concealed weapons, including a katana and a chainsaw. Four bailiffs were injured, and the statue of Justice was decapitated.

After order had been restored and the statue’s head duct-taped back on, Judge Fulsome detailed the reasons for the harsh sentence. Mr. Potts had not only betrayed his constituents’ trust, the judge said, but done it in such a brazen fashion as to be insulting. Judge Fulsome mentioned the hole Mr. Potts had cut into his office door at Town Hall labeled “Bribe Slot.” Upon hearing this, Mr. Potts wriggled free of the bailiffs restraining him, urinated on the prosecutor’s table, and shouted, “I had to cut the Bribe Slot! I didn’t want criminals in my office!”

[CONT – A6]

Courthouse Chief of Security Fired
Numerous incidents cited; chainsaw
was “last straw.”

By OMONA KORYOKU – There was chaos in the courthouse today after Chief of Security Amble Danitz’s short tenure came to an end, with officials citing gross dereliction of duty, specifically “failure to find a chainsaw with a metal detector and a patdown.”  Upon receiving the news, former chief Danitz picked up the very chainsaw that was his downfall and began swinging it around wildly. The statue of Justice was further damaged, as were several jurors who were minding their own business.

[CONT – A6]

One Dead In Hotel Synod
Foul play, drugs, suspected.

By ERNESTINE BURTON – Most of Magnificent Amberson, 22, was declared dead at the Hotel Synod early this morning. The Little Aleppo Police Department is not releasing the details of the scene, but unnamed sources within the LAPD (No, Not That One) have verified to The Cenotaph that while several organs from Miss Amberson, a local musician, were missing, the neighborhood does not have another Harvester on the loose.

“This appear to be a drug-fueled crime,” the source who is definitely not Officer Sigmund Absence said. “Quite frankly, you’d have to be on drugs to even dream up some of the stuff that was done to this body. Who makes a habitrail out of intestines? And where’d the gerbil come from?”

Forensics is expected to take six to eight weeks if the evidence doesn’t get lost.

“We lost the evidence,” the source told a reporter.

[CONT – A7]

Potts Sentence Fair, Just

By the EDITORIAL STAFF – Stanchion Potts has not gone quietly. From his arrest, when he barricaded himself in his office and jerry-rigged a flamethrower out of deodorant and a lighter, to his arraignment, when he still had the flamethrower, to his trial, which featured at least three lawyers that turned out to be ninjas, to his sentencing, the blood stains of which are still being scrubbed from Courtroom 2, it has been a roller coaster that all of Little Aleppo was forced to ride.

In his ten years in office, Potts was an ethical embarrassment even by Little Aleppos’s lax standards. A partial list of his transgressions: declaring eminent domain on the property that would become Tower Tower while silently partnering with Tower Gildersleeve on the building’s ownership, letting all those perverts into Harper Zoo after hours (the wombat has still not recovered), suplexing Cenotaph reporter Omona Koryoku, doctoring secretly-made audio tapes of his enemies to show that they were communists (or capitalists; whichever was more damaging), grave robbing.

It was, in The Cenotaph‘s opinion, the brazenness of Mr. Potts that led to his downfall. Many a Town Father has been known to sell his vote, but only Mr. Potts went so far as to hold an auction on the steps of Town Hall.

Mr. Potts has used the power of his office to harass his rivals, threaten his enemies, and sabotage his opponents. He has rented out the Main Drag to movie productions, shutting down all traffic and business for the day, while keeping all the money. He has militarized the meter maids. He has attempted to foment ethnic hatred, but only against the Icelandic, and there are no Icelandic people in Little Aleppo, so the whole thing was a wash.

His behavior during his trial was just as bad. Mr. Potts attempted to both tamper with and molest the jury. Three successive legal teams presented his defense, as they kept quitting when Mr. Potts wouldn’t stop objecting to his own side. He kept throwing tennis balls at the judge. Four faked heart attacks. A kangaroo was brought into the courtroom one day to demonstrate that, in Mr. Potts’ words, this was kangaroo court. The judge declared the metaphor too on the nose, and added an additional charge: grand theft marsupial.

Stanchion Potts is not the first Town Father to go to jail. He will almost certainly not be the last. No student of the neighborhood’s history would even place him in the top five worst Town Fathers. Nevertheless, he deserves his sentence, and we deserve to be rid of him.

Letters To The Editor
All letters are [sic] and unedited.
Send your letters to LttE, 1 Greeley Square.
Or just accost our reporters in bars, like usual.

You motherfuckers,

The hysteria of The Cenotaph has been on full display lately. The willful collusion between the media, the courts, and the zoo to persecute a fine American civil servant such as Stanchion Potts is appalling and, I believe, criminal. You have slandered a good man’s name who could have made a fortune in the private sector, but chose to do so in government. That’s sacrifice.

Town Father Potts is a patriot, and a hero. Only he had the bravery and integrity to warn us all of the incoming Icelandian hordes, or as he called it: Really, Really White Genocide. How long are we going to wait before we round these people up and throw them out of Little Aleppo? Until they move in? That’s playing defense, and Americans don’t play defense.

Why is no one talking about Town Father Dubrow’s crimes? Everyone knows that he used one of the columns in front of Town Hall to pay off his gambling debts, and not even cool gambling debts. Keno. This man cannot be trusted, and he is also a voodoo priest who keeps many zombies, but yet you in the vicious press insist on crucifying–yes, crucifying–a man who loves his mother and dogs and American mothers and God.

There is a sickness in the country, and the outbreak stems from your newsroom. Your are liars and cowards, the lot of you, and you are trying to kill this country which we love so much.

Sincerely,
Gary Spumanti

Dear Letters to the Editor,

In the May 12th edition of the Kitchen Kittie’s Kountry Kooking column, there was a recipe for cranberry tarts. Perhaps it would have been appropriate to warn the readers not to read the recipe out loud. We had to trap the demon in the rumpus room.

Get on the stick!

Sincerely,
Antonia St. Expiration

Dear Letters to the Editor,

There used to be a Rapunzel Street, right? That’s a rhetorical question: I know there was a Rapunzel Street, because I lived at 131 Rapunzel Street for sixteen years, and now it’s not there.

Someone has replaced my right foot with a copy. It is identical to my right foot in every way, but it is not my foot.

I don’t know if I have a dog.

Sincerely,
Bummer Berlin

Blue Oxen Edge Generals 41-37

By TAWNY MUSSELS – Pitcher Christian Rock and first basemen Hux Grange led the Paul Bunyan High Blue Oxen to victory over the Washington High Generals 41-37.

“Their lead-off guy got on, right? And we start talking, and we’re like ‘Baseball is boring as hell,’ and people heard us and agreed, so we all just decided to play flag football,” Mr Grange reported to The Cenotaph.

Arts & Culture
Live music review: The Snug at the Davidian Theatre

By DAN DRUFF – They didn’t show up.

Obituaries

Alan Lamp, 92 – Alan Lamp died in his sleep Monday night at the age of 92. He follows his wife, Hetty, and is survived by two sons, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Born in Little Aleppo in either 18– or 19–, Mr Lamp was educated up until the sixth grade, and then sold to a carpenter for twelve dollars. Mr. Lamp would apprentice with that carpenter, Edwin Fleense of Dancer Street, for the next decade. After Mr. Fleense’s still unsolved murder, Mr. Lamp took over the shop and quickly became Little Aleppo’s woodworker-to-the-stars.

Tables for movie stars, kayaks for pop singers, terribly fancy toothpicks for travel writers: Mr. Lamb crafted masterpieces by the dozen, and commanded the highest prices. A chest of drawers he made for the Pope recently sold at auction for $28,000, despite recent revelations that the Pope never took custody of the chest, nor did he ask for it or have any idea that it existed.

Aside from his commercial work, Mr. Lamb also gave back to the neighborhood. The Tyndale Pagoda on the campus of Harper College has become a local icon and a visual shorthand for the school. His son, Alan, Jr., said that his father “loved that the students appreciated his pagoda, but didn’t like all the sex they had in it, especially the interracial kind. I love my father, but he was a bit, you know, old-fashioned. Don’t write this part down, okay?”

Mr. Lamb will be buried next to his wife, Hetty, in Foole’s Yard.

Magnificent Amberson, 22 – The majority of Magnificent Amberson was discovered in Room 100 of the Hotel Synod Monday morning. Ms. Amberson had recently moved to the neighborhood from Cascabel, Texas, and was the bass player for a local punk-rock band, The Fucks. She is survived by her mother and father, Maybelle and Gulch, and her twin brothers, Northrup and Grumman.

Ms. Amberson’s mother contacted The Cenotaph and asked that we share her a portion of her daughter’s final letter home.

…

Mommy, you should see the hills. There is nothing in Cascabel as green, and I’m counting Jimmy Niemark’s Chevelle. You always know which way you’re going because of them. It’s almost impossible to get lost here.

I can’t lie: I was scared my first few weeks. There’s so many people! And they’re different people. There are some of the differentest people I’ve ever seen in Little Aleppo!

Do you remember what you used to say to me when I was little? About everyone being the singer of their own song? I have to be honest and say that I never understood what you meant. This morning, I was walking up the Main Drag  and caught eyes with a stranger. He was a man I had never seen before Wearing a suit. Just some man.

And then I understood what you meant. He had the same amount of brain behind his eyeballs that I did, and just as much history, and problems, and things he wasn’t going to tell anybody unless he was drunk.

I think people are all about the same, Mommy. Same size, same shape, and same stuff. I mean the stuff inside. And I don’t think we give each other credit for it. And I don’t think we forgive each other enough.

Maybe we should forgive each other as much as we forgive ourselves.

We’ve got TWO shows next week, and we are starting to get fans. When we played Schoolejandro’s on Saturday, the audience was singing along with some of the songs. They knew the words! I almost started crying, and after the show I went and found everyone that was singing and hugged them.

I hope you are not worrying about me, because you have more important things to worry about!

I love you and will see you soon,
Maggie

There will be a memorial concert for Ms. Amberson at Schoolejandro’s on Friday night. All are welcome.

The scarecrow marathon was running again, and herky jerkers skipped and stuttered down the tarmac. Swerving from lane to lane, not in control, and trailing hay: they spilled out of themselves and left themselves where they had been; their tattered blue work shirts bulging in places, flattened in others, they were lumpy creatures with no neck muscles and their burlap heads lolled and bounced like metronomes from shoulder to shoulder. Marionettes controlled by a spastic, and hopping toward a finish line which only farmers could see.

“I’ve made up my mind: I do not like this road,” Tiresias Richardson said from the passenger seat of a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.

“Route 77’s not always like this,” Precarious Lee answered from behind the wheel.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Sometimes, it’s weird.”

The Interstitial Highway System was what the Interstate would have been if Eisenhower were a schizophrenic with an American Studies degree. All the states, even those two weird ones, were connected to the Interstitial; rumors said that it went overseas, too, and even other places that you shouldn’t go without an exit strategy and at least several pre-cast spells of mystical slipperiness. No guardrails on Route 77; it would take you anywhere you wanted to go, no matter how terrible an idea. You could go to the mountains, or the oceans, or even the Low Desert.

But not in any car. Had to have a proper ride for the road. Need the right tool for the job, Precarious thought, and you had to be open-minded about your definition of “right” and “tool,” or at least you did in his line of work. There were times you needed a hammer, and other times you needed a screwdriver. Once in Tulsa, he had needed a duck press at two in the morning, and though he didn’t much like remembering what the duck press was used for, he was proud of himself for procuring the sucker.

Former. Former line of work, he reminded himself. He was semi-retired now, whatever the fuck that meant.

“SHWAGHH-MNUCHH.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones snored. He had a thick neck–he had a thick everything–and the sound was an intermittent and startling basso profundo that came from his chest and mouth and nose all at once, and it was phlegmy and gargly and irregular.

“KWOCH-KWOCH-PHNUH.”

Never the same snore twice. The Reverend Arcade Jones slept with great creativity.

Penny Arrabbiata was to his left in the back. Tiresias was by the window up front, and Big-Dicked Sheila was in between her and Precarious: 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Broughams had a bench seat that fits three comfortably, or two really comfortably.

“THNOSHmughmughWAAAAAAAAAAphlum.”

It wasn’t the Reverend’s fault: he had had a big lunch, and the maroon seats were thick and soft; floaty, even, especially when matched with the Cadillac’s plush suspension, and there was the feeling of not driving but sliding, sliding down the highway slick with silk and stuffed with satin, and thick with industrial strength lube, the kind used in wind turbines and on horse breeding farms; there was no friction anywhere–what a drag that coefficient is–anywhere at all and the crushed velour seats contoured beneath your thighs and ass and back, cradled you like a metal mama and took you as you came: they were sin-causing seats.

Whole car was made of sin, Arcade thought, all seven of them. The fuel tank was Greedy and Gluttonous; and the color, Jennifer Blue, was surely Vainglorious; and there was more than enough space for Fornication; and any man who drove it must know Pride; and the seats birthed Sloth. He had almost figured out how to work Wrath into his metaphor when his enormous head drooped against his shoulder and then the orchestra of the adenoids began.

“FuhhhNOZH.

Off to the east was the Hamiltonian Chasm, and Bald Mountain was beyond that. To the west, there was a lake full of cryptogeese molting PGP keys while whistleblowers tossed them bread crumbs. The air smelled like Bible stories, fresh-mown grass, and nachos.

“I could go for nachos, actually,” Sheila said. Tiresias’ jaw dropped, and Precarious shot her a quizzical look over his cigarette.

“We just ate. We just ate,” she said.

“Tell that to the Colonel.”

“Stop calling your stomach that.”

Sheila called her stomach the Colonel because her orders must be followed. Three guesses as to what she called the General.

“Think you got a tapeworm,” Precarious muttered.

“We didn’t have dessert,” Sheila said.

“Nachos are not dessert.”

“Anything is dessert if you eat it after the meal.”

“Nachos are a snack.”

“Penny, you’re a scientist. Are nachos dessert?”

Penny Arrabbiata spent a lot of time alone, and extended contact with people made her realize why.

“I’m not that kind of scientist,” she said.

Precarious grinned around his cigarette, and Sheila plucked the half-smoked Camel from his lips and put it to hers, PHWOO, and screwed it back into his half-smile; her ring finger brushed against his promontory of a chin–stubble bristly like a tiger’s tongue, he had shaved two days ago–and felt lightning in her wrist forearm shoulder heart cock, and she did not look his way deliberately, did not look anywhere near him because Sheila was nothing if not self-aware and knew she had a shitty poker face.

“Yes, but you’re educated,” Tiresias said.

“We’re all educated,” Penny answered.

Precarious took his right hand off the wheel and held it up.

“Nope. High school dropout.”

Sheila’s hand joined his.

“Same here.”

“BRAGGGGGHHtunfMAFCH.”

Sheila and Penny looked at Tiresias. Precarious kept his eyes on the road. The Reverend was asleep.

“Harper College, baby,” Tiresias said.

Penny perked up and said,

“You were a ‘Squatch?”

“No. We were the Fantabulists.”

Harper College changed mascots every several years. At first, the school was known as the Dead Injuns, but societal changes led to the name being abandoned. However, the lesson that Harper College took from that was that a school’s mascot was not a permanent feature of the landscape, and could in fact be changed at will; they did. The Stevedores, the Lenticular Motives, the Wildcats, the Sparkling Winos, the Barbarians, the Armistice Seekers, the Azure Mob, the Halloween Celebrators, the Possums, the Unharmed Mass, the Cougars. Harper College went through name after name, at will or by vote or sometimes it happened in the middle of the night when no one was looking: students would walk by the bookstore and notice the new hats.

At the moment of the conversation between Tiresias and Penny in a Cadillac on Route 77, the school was known as the Harper College Itty Bitty Titty Committee. Initially, the campus rejected the name, but then realized how funny the tee-shirts would be. Tiresias owned two: she bought them a size too small on purpose, and would wear them without a bra.

“GURddfghMWOW.”

And the front seat thought that maybe the Reverend had a point: a drowse settled in and pinned them to the velour; posture slackened, eyelids fluttery, and Tiresias yawned first. Sheila tried not to look, but there she went and finally Precarious, who had to snap his hand up to his mouth to catch the cigarette that almost fell into his lap when his jaw loosened in postprandial snooziness.

Sheila shook her head back and forth, slapped herself on the cheek twice, deep breath deep breath, and reached between her legs and into her purse, which was more of a satchel, rummaged around.

Keys: apartment, mailbox, shop, two unidentified. Wallet: $62, no driver’s license, and a library card that had been scotch-taped back together. Gum: spearmint, cinnamon. Two packs of Camels, one unopened. Yellow plastic lighter. Lipstick, mascara, one compact with no puffy poof for applying the foundation, one with. Flick knife. Condoms. Cigarette case with four joints left. Sig Sauer P238. Tissues. Three pill bottles of varying fullness. Nail clipper. Emory board. Switchblade. Little black book, but it was red. Paperback: American Sargasso by Summer Stone, which was about a brother and sister that kill their parents for taking away the car keys, and the fun they had in the week after that.

It was the pills she was looking for. No, not those, not unless you wanted to pass out, and not those, no, not unless you wanted to fuck, ah: here we go. The kids nowadays, they didn’t understand the glory of the old days, the rough days, the fend-for-yourself days. Little peach badges, that’s what Sheila thought they looked like, and she rattled the green plastic bottle and it made a sound like SHACKASHACKA which her brain calculated into a vague estimate of how many she had left; it was enough for this road trip, she knew that, and popped off the top and said to Tiresias,

“Midnight runner?”

Tiresias smiled.

“Come on, Sheila.”

She held out her hand, and Sheila shook a little peach badge into her palm SHWOP into her mouth and dry-swallowed it GULP.

“You’re very good at that.”

“Swallowing is the first trick you learn in show biz. AAAAHahaha!”

Sheila chucked one back, too, and Precarious’ hand was outstretched in front of her.

“Please,” he said, and he got one. Sheila swiveled around on the front bench of the Cadillac until she was on her knees and her arms were draped over the back of the seat SHACKASHACKA her head was cocked like the RCA dog, and Penny thought the sight was funny, and so she laughed.

“Never seen maracas like that,” Penny said.

“You gotta get out of the Observatory more,” Sheila answered.

“What are those?”

The pill bottle was unlabeled, and Sheila said,

“Vitamins?”

Fuck it, Penny thought. This daytime shit was for the birds, and she was a bat. Afternoons. What the fuck good were afternoons? At least the day had some promise in the mornings, but afternoons were just sludgy monstrosities meandering their way towards a tasteless dinner and a resentful fuck. Not that she was sticking up for mornings–fuck that shit, too–but afternoons were torpid and dull. Nothing worthwhile, Penny figured, had ever been accomplished in the afternoon. You could think at dawn, and you could create at midnight, but all you could do in the afternoon was contemplate suicide and watch baseball.

The sun was smudging her brain–she felt stupid and slow–and she needed to be fresh and alert for the meeting.

“Gimme,” Penny said, and Sheila did.

There was a cooler by Penny’s feet, cheapo styrofoam job, and six tallboys of Arrow half-floated in the water that had been ice back in Little Aleppo; the cans were white and red, and the “O” in Arrow was a bullseye. Penny handed two to Sheila, and then popped one open PSSHT and threw the little peach badge in her mouth and took a slug of the beer.

Sheila handed an Arrow to Tiresias, and then she filched a cigarette from Precarious and lit it, and there was quite a little party going on in that Cadillac.

Now Tiresias turns around, just halfway, and Sheila is still facing Penny, and asks,

“What’s your favorite star?”

“Paul Newman.”

“C’mon.”

“Whichever one I’m looking at.”

Tiresias snorted.

“Most interesting?’

“Educate us, Professor,” Sheila chimed in.

Penny sipped her beer and Route 77 slipped by like it didn’t exist at all.

“Kamilopara-81. Only about 700 light years away. Virtually a next-door neighbor. Precarious could drive there without stopping.”

He revved the engine in appreciation.

“It’s not the star that’s interesting. I mean, all stars are interesting, but I mean it’s just a G-type like our sun. Well within the parameters of normal for a star of its kind. Right in the middle of its lifespan. Normal. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t look at it twice. It’s not the star.”

Precarious flicked the turn signal and got to the right to let a hijacked ambulance go by.

“Kamilopara-81 is interesting because it has planets, at least two. Probably more, but only two confirmed–K1 and K2–and they’re in the Goldilocks Zone.”

“What’s that?’ Sheila asked.

“Not too hot, not too cold. And it depends on so many things! How hot the star is, and how much atmosphere the planet has, and a bunch of other stuff, but basically: if you’re too close, all you get is steam; if you’re too far away, all you get is ice. But if you’re juuuuuuust right, then you get water. And water is the stuff of life. Everywhere there’s water, there’s life. And K1 and K2 are in the Goldilocks Zone of Kamilopara-81.”

Precarious eased the Cadillac back into the fast lane so smoothly that no one noticed.

“But that’s not it, either. These two planets share an orbit. They’re exactly the same distance from the star, but on opposite sides of it. Same size, same chemical makeup. Twins. But the star’s in the way. Imagine a double of Earth, but while we were on New Year’s Day, they were on July 1st. No matter when you look up, the sun would block the view. They can’t see each other.

“So what you have to ask yourself is this: assuming life on those planets, assuming sentient life that can figure things out, where are they in their history? Because if there was a Counter-Earth rotating opposite of us, then we would have only been able to figure out its existence a couple hundred years ago. And we could have gotten there easily. All you would have to do is launch yourself out of our gravity well and lose a bit of velocity. The slower you go, the faster you’d get there. Way simpler than getting to the moon.

“The planets share an orbit, but we don’t know what else they share. Maybe they worked out a transplanetary culture. Or maybe they nuked each other. Maybe there’s babies from two worlds.

“Or could be they’re not there yet, and have absolutely no idea of what’s around the corner.”

Precarious tilted his head like he was thinking, because he was thinking, and then he reached past Sheila’s back to the glove compartment, opened it, reached in and found the metal box with Tom Mix stamped on it where he kept his joints, opened that, took one out, in his mouth, Zippo, PHWOO, closed the glove, settled back into the soft maroon seat of the 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and kept the car between the lines. There were discussions to be had and diplomacy to be practiced, but he would not be involved in that; his job was driving, and Precarious Lee was good at his job, and so he took the women and the preacher to Jeremiad Springs, which is three days journey on horse from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Sometimes the most fragile things seem the most permanent. Governments. Businesses. Teevee shows. The ones that have been on since you were a kid, or longer, and have become load-bearing berms in your life. That news show with the stopwatch that always runs late because of football. The comedy show with the topical sketches and teenybopper bands. They seem like mountains, but they’re not: you don’t need to make a new mountain every week. Mountains require no maintenance at all, in fact, which is the opposite of a teevee show, and the double-opposite of a daily teevee show.

Like a soap opera.

It was almost one o’clock in the bookstore with no title. It was almost one o’clock everywhere else, too, but Mr. Venable didn’t care about those places, as they did not have his television set. In his customary suit, he rose from his customary seat and went to the door, locked it. The door had bay windows on either side, and Mr. Venable picked up a well-worn and laminated piece of paper attached to a suction cup. He stuck it on the glass of the door. The sign read,

Can’t a man have his lunch in peace? A half of an hour, this is what I beg of you to allow me, your humble purveyor of tomes both antiquarian and best-selling, to sustain himself. Am I not entitled to that?

I believe that I am. Come back. Or not.

God bless America and all her ships at sea.

Mr. Venable walked back towards his desk and past it to the wall of shelves behind. The Revelation of the Intrinsic by Mahdi Zaman was on the fourth shelf. No dust jacket. He looked around one last time to make sure there were no customers watching him, and pulled the top of the book towards himself. There was a sound from behind the shelf CHACK and the wall of books sprang forward towards him an inch, and then swung open, and then there was his office.

A tortoiseshell cat darted between his feet and went inside.

Mr. Venable had never measured his office, partially because he was quite sure that the space was unmeasureable and might, in fact, respond poorly to the attempt. He had found it was a bad idea to try and pin a magic bookstore down on specifics.

There were books in his office, uncountable and receding into the horizon–Mr. Venable’s office was so large as to contain a horizon–and scrolls and at least several tablets that were contained either cuneiform writing, or artwork with a triangle motif. The Mayan Codices and the card catalog from the Library at Alexandria. Books that were too ferocious to leave out for the public, the ones you had to ask for and have a damn good reason to need. The Athervaveda was open on a table off to the right next to the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. There were no windows, so the office was lit by illuminated manuscripts.

And a raggedy green couch in front of a table with a television on it. A portable model, faded white plastic, and it had rabbit ears: the picture was clear unless the bookworms started chewing on the ozone again. Two big dials, one on top of the other, and a smaller knob underneath. Top dial for the channel. Second dial for something. Small knob pulled out CHOCK to turn the power on, and pushed in CHICK to turn it off, and rotating it controlled the volume. Little Aleppo was wired for cable teevee, but Mr. Venable didn’t trust it and didn’t want to pay for it, plus there were quite a few books in his office he didn’t want to leave alone around a hardwired line to the outside world. Rabbit ears are good enough for rabbits, he thought. Am I so superior to a rabbit?

Yes, he thought further. I am completely superior to a rabbit. Twitchy little lagomorphs. Still, he wasn’t paying for cable.

The set took a second to warm up–the new ones are either/or propositions: off off off WHAMMO–but teevee sets used to ease into their duties: less a big bang than a steadily-increasing state. The sound came in before the picture.

“…and I was acquitted of all of those charges, and have removed all the cameras from the dressing rooms.”

When the screen fuzzed in, there was a man on the screen in the most incorrect pair of slacks you’ll ever see.

“So come on back to Creepy Ernie’s House of Inappropriate Trousers. This month, socks are 20% off if you try them on in front of me.”

KSOS was a local station, and so it had local sponsors. Creepy Ernie had been doing his own commercials for years, and his wide-eyed awkwardness in the spots was one of the two things that kept the neighborhood from losing their patience with him, the other being that Little Aleppians figured if you went into a place named Creepy Ernie’s, then whatever happened to you was your fault. Ernie told you right up front that he was creepy.

The picture was clear, and the colors loud and waxy and almost parodic in their reds and blues: teevee was smaller than life, but so much brighter. Mr. Venable did not have to futz with the rabbit ears at all. Why should he? He could just about see KSOS’ studios from the sidewalk in front of his shop. He knew it didn’t work that way, but he also didn’t care. Gadgets and gizmos didn’t interest him much, and he sat down on the raggedy couch and put his feet up on the table.

The familiar intro, reshot in color years ago, but always the same: a helicopter shot of a beach community, which dissolved into a family portrait, and then shots of windmills, and then actors and actresses and finally a shot of an Airedale terrier. The beach community was named Valley Heights, and the family was the Chambers family, and they battled each other and outsiders for control of the local wind farms, and the actors had names like Brince Bompleton and Alabaster Hart, and the dog was called Jumpy.

There was a very baritone voice-over, too:

“Ambition. Family. Revenge. Lussssssssst. Today is always uncertain in…Yesterday’s Tomorrows.”

Mr. Venable always said the voice-over along with the teevee.

Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s had been on a long time, and that was as specific as you could get. The first few years were live and there were no recordings made, and no one wrote anything down. It didn’t seem important at the time. Just a soap opera. Late 50’s was as close as anyone was willing to stake their reputation on. An actress who worked on the show from the beginning named Ingmar Hanson kept a diary, but it was undated and also descended into madness very shortly upon her taking the job with the soap.

An hour a day. Live. Five days a week, and of course Paul Loomis, Sr., had refused to staff the show up to its needs and so a skeleton crew was expected to produce a full body’s worth of work every single day: an hour–a motherfucking hour of scripted teevee–a day, and so the breakdowns and outbursts began almost immediately. At first, there was no writing room. One guy would do it, an hour of teevee a day, 60 pages. Two weeks later, when the writer had fled the country or shot himself, Paul Loomis, Sr., would hire another one. It was cost-effective, but the consistency of the show varied too widely and the sponsor complained.

Pilot soap leaves your hands flying free of germs. That was one line the writers didn’t have to bother coming up with, because the actors had to say it four times a show. Commercials were integrated into the narrative of the program at first, and characters would often interrupt their affairs or kidnappings or reunions with their long-lost amnesiac twins to wash their hands while chatting enthusiastically about the efficacy of their chosen soap, which was Pilot.

The Chambers family needed soap, though: they were often stabbing one another in the back, sometimes figuratively but mostly literally. The wind farm, dammit. Whoever controlled the wind farm controlled Valley Heights. But, so often, love got in the way. And then revenge would get in the way of love. But family would get in the way of revenge, and then love would get in the way of family. Everything was in everything’s way, and so there was no completion, ever, it was written into the charter: thou shalt not wrap up storylines, and so cliffs were left to hang, and bodies were never recovered, and the status quo was never too upset. Books, movies, records: these are lakes. Soap opera is a river. Doesn’t have boundaries, it has a direction.

Take a story. Remove from it the beginning, middle, and end. No beginning, you have no reason; no end, you have no consequence. What’s left? People doing things to one another.

Maybe that’s why Mr. Venable loved Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s so. Books had climaxes, and stories had structure, but the soap just flowed on forever without a whit of concern for acts or monomyths or dramatic convention or any of that fancy bullshit. The Chambers family just went round and round forever. Death was negotiable, too. If the character died, then they’d probably be back after they apologized to the producer for setting the dressing room on fire; if the actor died, that was generally more permanent, but sometimes the part would be recast and the show would plow onward as if nothing had happened.

The selfish and pretty, ooh, he loved them. Monsters, the lot of them, and always so well-dressed and their hair was so right. My God, the teeth. He loved the melodramatic revelations–“No, sister: I hired the sexual assassin! Ah-HA-haha!”–and the blatant cue card-reading. The wheezy organ playing augmented chords behind betrayal, and the cheap backdrops and suspended stuffed seagulls that stood in for the beach. Every couple years, an ingenue would appear on the show, and sex her way through the entire town, only to be cast in a Hollywood movie and skedaddle as fast as she could. One even won an Oscar; the neighborhood was very proud; she had not been back since receiving the award.

The patriarch was Vox Chambers, tall and silver-haired and rapacious in all ways. He was married to Whippoorwill Chambers, and she had murdered him four times; it never took. Their children: Hamp, Singer, and Westminster. Vox’s brother, Prance, who was always angling for those windmills. The family physician, Dr. Priest, and his randy nurse, Randee. The family bartender, Beverleen Switzer, and her sneaky barback, Snag Fort. An Airedale terrier called Jumpy. (Depending on who you believed, the show was on either its ninth or twelfth Jumpy.)

Mr. Venable cackled at it all, the double-crosses and two-timings and affairs, and especially the long-lost twins. Yesterday’s Tomorrows knew its audience, and gave the people what they wanted, and so each character on the show had at least two long-lost twins that would show up fairly regularly, and it was always accomplished with the least special of effects: obvious doubles in cheap wigs shot from behind, or a split screen where the halves didn’t quite sync up. Nothing meant anything; how lovely.

“Plep.”

“Oh, that’s Spartacus Amethyst. She’s married to Hamp now.”

The cat, who had no name, was crouched next to Mr. Venable on the ragged, green couch. She did not understand teevee, but it was warm right next to him.

“Mlaaaarh.”

“Last week. You weren’t here. Mercenaries attacked the wedding.”

“FREHfreh.”

“Well, you should have been here, then. It was very exciting. Shush, commercial’s over.”

The cat’s head was oddly tiny under his fingers–he had not noticed how small and fragile the animal was before–and he stroked her head with the tips of his first two fingers, slowly and softly. Out in the bookstore with no title, there were customers and business, and on the Main Drag was the world, and in a car approaching Jeremiad Springs was the future, but Yesterday’s Tomorrows contained only a permanent present where no one ever suffered for mistakes, and cruelty could be laughed off. Where nothing ever ended, but just went round and round in living color on your teevee screen on KSOS, which is the local station in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The Pioneer Chicken Stand sold fried chicken. You could buy other things there, but not officially. Whole, or pieces, or a local favorite called a Sloppy Chick: same fried chicken as the rest of the menu, but chopped up and mixed with something close to mayo but not quite mayo on a kaiser roll. It came with a pickle, until they ran out of pickles, and then it would not come with a pickle. RC Cola. If you asked for diet, the moon-faced man behind the counter would say,

“You want diet fucking soda with your fried fucking chicken?”

And you would feel shame, several kinds, and accept the RC Cola that was three times as sweet as the respectable colas and complemented the chicken’s salinity boldly and without backing down. Thick straws, too, with red stripes up the length of each side and you would depress all the option dimples on the soda’s cloudy plastic top without thinking about it. Six tables inside, white and clean, with four chairs each, red and shiny. Place your order on the right. Pick up on the left. Most people ate outside: there were twelve wooden picnic tables on the grass off to the Stand’s left, and you could eat while watching the cars roll by on Route 77. You might also see some drug deals and maybe a kidnapping or two, but you could only count on the cars.

Precarious Lee’s Cadillac, which was a color called Jennifer Blue and splattered with bugs like an entomologist’s career, was in the parking lot where he could keep an eye on it. Down the row of cars was a white Lotus Esprit Turbo next to an Aston Martin DB5 and a Toyota 2000GT. Cars, sports cars. There was a repurposed school bus with all sorts of bullshit painted on it that disgorged all sorts of loud assholes who thought they invented taking drugs. Orange ’69 Challenger. Black Trans-Am with a golden Screaming Chicken on the hood and a two-story tall whipsaw antenna that you could talk to truckers with. VW Beetle with racing stripes and a white circle on the hood with the number 53 in black paint. Everybody wound up at the Pioneer Chicken Stand eventually.

Made sense, Precarious figured. It was damn good chicken, and always fresh: 24 hours a day, and also 24 hours a night; hot and dripping fat from the pressure cookers in the back. There were four of them, overengineered custom jobs that used the chicken’s own juice to create the steam: the chickens cooked themselves in themselves at the Pioneer Chicken Stand. Precarious was sure there was a metaphor in that, but he couldn’t be bothered at the moment because he had a bucket of fried chicken in front of him, and you can think or you can have a bucket of fried chicken in front of you, but you can’t do both.

“Trade you a breast for two legs.”

“I need my breasts and my legs. Have you seen my act? AAAAAhahaha!”

Tiresias smiled and handed over two drumsticks; Precarious put the breast in her bucket, but not before ripping the skin off and dropping it into his mouth.

“Bastard!”

He smiled back through a mouthful of crunchiness and salt.

“Never played skin-the-chicken before?”

“Not a thing,” she said, digging out a chunk of white meat from in between the frame of skinny bone and rib with her fingers. “So good.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones was next to Precarious answering the eternal question “How many napkins does it take to entirely cover a ketchup-red size 64 Long suit?” He had two buckets of chicken in front of him, and two RC Colas, too, and he would take a bite, wipe his mouth, take a bite, wipe his mouth. He dabbed at his globe-sized bald head occasionally: he was an enthusiastic eater, and it was a little warm out.

“This is astonishing chicken,” he said after he had swallowed. “There’s a secret ingredient in here somewhere.”

“Juiciness,” Tiresias answered with a full mouth.

Big-Dicked Sheila and Penny Arrabbiata were sitting next to her on the table’s bench, and they nodded in agreement.

“Juiciness isn’t an ingredient. It’s a descriptive word.”

“Something can be both an ingredient and a descriptor,” Penny said

“What?” the Reverend asked.

“Ginger.”

Now it was Sheila and Tiresias’ turn to nod in agreement.

“She’s right, Preacher,” Precarious said with a mouthful of chicken.

“All y’all need to stop talking with food in your mouth.”

Sheila opened up real wide to show Arcade a gobful of half-chewed poultry.

“That’s just nasty,” he said.

She smiled, and curtsied in her seat.

Sheila wasn’t going to the meeting, but she felt like getting out of Little Aleppo for a day. Whatever she and Gussy were doing was going well: in previous years, Sheila would have run away, but she was more mature now and was retreating to ponder her position. Definitely not running away.

Precarious turned his head to face the Reverend and opened up wide, too.

“You I expected better from.”

“Why?” Precarious asked.

Arcade shrugged. It was a good question.

Precarious was not attending the meeting with Tommy Amici, either, but nobody who was had an appropriate car. Harper Observatory owned a pickup truck, and the First Church of the Infinite Christ had a panel van it used to pick up food donations and trawl for passed-out drunks, but it was unanimously decided that a more suitable ride should be sought. It’s Tommy Amici, for fuck’s sake: you can’t take a pickup truck to go see him. Couldn’t drive a panel van to Jeremiad Springs.

It used to be sacred, and now rich people live there. The original springs, those two connected pools in the shape of the symbol for infinity, they were connected to an aquifer under the sand–water in the Low Desert where previously there had been thought to be only geckos–that could service a town. Sanctity comes first, and then utility. The air was good. Clear. In the early 1900’s, the climate was seen as medicine, since there was barely any actual medicine. A resort was built, The Hillock. Fancy people showed up, and the tubercular, and ecologists. The stars were ten feet overhead; the stars moved in. Hollywood types. They all hated each other, and wanted to get away from each other, and so they all bought vacation homes right next to each other.

Tommy was one of the first in the Springs, and the rest followed him. Creeps can’t get their own desert, Tommy thought. Gotta live next to that two-faced comic and that junkie dancer? Jesus. Couldn’t get away from assholes. Everywhere he went, nothing but assholes. Should punch more of these cocksuckers, especially that fucking junkie with her GODDAMNED STEREO playing that jungle-oogie-boogie shit at dawn. Fuck off, all of you. Leave me with Cara, leave us alone, don’t fucking talk to us. You sing for people, and this is the thanks you get? Jesus.

He had the house built for her: it was nestled into lumpy hills on the south edge of town, and invisible behind a wall that faced the street. Curled around a pool. Flat, modern roofs. Living room had a fireplace in the middle of it, a round metal job, for the desert nights. One of the walls of the master bedroom was made of sliding glass; twelve steps from the bed to the pool. Tommy paid good money to have the architect who designed it win several awards.

And the office, which Tommy had weaponized. The desk was on a subtle platform–you could not see it from the guests’ vantage–and Tommy’s chair was custom and very high. The walls were covered in photographs to within an inch of their lives. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices. Movie Stars. Popes and Prime Ministers. Tommy and Einstein, and not just that but it was a picture of Tommy and Einstein at Tommy’s show. Einstein ever come to see you, you wretch? No? I didn’t think so.

The windows in his office faced west, and so Tommy would meet people in the afternoon. That way, the sun was in their eyes.

The three women on one side of the picnic table were wearing sunglasses; the two men on the other side were not. One of the men had thick, long, grey hair worn in a ponytail, and the other was completely bald. Two of the women were young, one was older and also had grey hair, but it was short and under a blue ball cap with a cartoon ox on the front. Of the two young women, the one on the outside had long, brown, lazy curls and was wearing rust-colored sweatpants and a blue hoodie; the one in the middle was in a tight, short, black dress and her hair was short, spiky, and the same shade of red as the suit of the large man on the other side of the table, who was black and sitting next to a man in a rock and roll tee-shirt he had stolen two decades prior, who was white.

All enjoyed fried chicken, regardless of gender or race.

Bucket full of bones, dirty-grey and slick, and two more just the same. Chicken genocide on a picnic table. Henocide. If the bones belonged to people, it would be a tragedy, but they belonged to chickens and so it was just lunch.

Cars and trucks flew by on Route 77.

“Explain it to me again,” Tiresias said.

“No,” Precarious answered.

“Please?”

“Okay. It’s a road.”

“Just a road?”

“No special highway.”

Over Precarious’ left shoulder, toll booths jousted and the double-yellow line rose off the tarmac to whip motorists who passed on the right.

“Really?”

“It’s got some juiciness to it, I suppose.”

“M.C. Escher would masturbate to it.”

“A man’s preferences are his own business.”

“Answer my question.”

“What is your question?”

“What the fuck?”

“Be more specific.”

“What the fuck is all this?”

“Route 77.”

“That’s no answer.”

“And yet here we are,” Precarious said, and pulled his cigarettes from the pocket of his Levis.

“Where are we!?” Tiresias fairly yelled.

“Route 77.”

Her eyes opened as wide as they would go, but she was wearing giant sunglasses so you couldn’t tell. Tiresias turned to her left and right, tried to martial support.

“The man makes sense,” Sheila said.

“Speaks the truth,” Penny added.

Tiresias reached across the table and plucked the Camel from Precarious’ hand with two fingers, took a drag PHWOO, and did not give the smoke back. He smiled, took his pack out again, offered it around. Sheila took one.

“Ah, fuck it,” Penny said, and took one, too.

The Reverend Aracde Jones leaned back from the table, shook his head.

“Some smoking-ass motherfuckers.”

“Reverend!” Sheila said.

“The Lord will forgive my language. He knows I’m right.”

Sheila pulled a silver cigarette case out of her purse, took out a doobie, lit that and the Camel off Precarious’ Zippo. PHWOO. PHWOO. She offered the joint to Penny.

“Ah, fuck it,” Penny said.

Sheila handed her the joint, kept the cigarette.

Route 77 made more sense when you were high, but it did not make all of the sense any time. Route 77 was the paved version of the Kennedy assassination: theories and fact and lie and wish had melted into one, and it was impossible to boil them back down into their constituents, and so you were forced to make up your own mind about the whole business knowing you would never understand the truth. Unlike the Kennedy assassination, there were places to pull off and get chicken.

“Really?”

The Reverend Arcade Jones looked unhappily at the doobie, now being passed across the table to Precarious, who said,

“Told you, Preacher: cops don’t bother folks in Cadillacs on Route 77.”

“We’re not in a Cadillac.”

“We came in one.”

Which was true, and what was true could not be argued with, and besides: the Reverend knew Precarious was not a liar.

“Ah, fuck it,” the Reverend said, and grabbed the doobie mid-pass and took a hit PHWOO and smiled. The whole table smiled back wide.

The Pioneer Chicken Stand is halfway to Jeremiad Springs, depending on which way you’re coming from, and they serve fried chicken in pieces, or whole, or chopped up on a Kaiser roll with something that is close to but not quite mayo; it’s called a Sloppy Chick, and it comes with a pickle until they run out of pickles, at which point it no longer comes with a pickle. You can get whatever you wanted in the parking lot, and the only option for a beverage is RC Cola, and the picnic benches to the left are often filled with political hopefuls and mid-level drug dealers but right now one of them has three men and three women who are trying to do the right thing, even if they have no idea what it is, and God help us all they are the best and brightest of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America

Lopsang Biltzstein used to be named Karen. She also used to have a daughter. Everything changes; nothing lasts.

The monastery of St. Sebastian was on the third Segovian Hill to the left, Mount Faith, and there was no road up, just a nightmare of a goat path bracketed by brambles that needed to be regularly scythed lest it grow over and disappear back into the ravenous chaparral. Whatever the monks needed, they carried up the mountain. This led to asceticism.

Little Aleppo let the monks alone, and the monks did the same. A lot of people from the neighborhood had made the trip up, spent some time there. A lot of people from the neighborhood didn’t believe in rehab or psychiatry.

When Karen Blitzstein took her vows, she changed her first name to Lopsang.

“You really don’t have to,” Brother Yup said.

“I know,” she said.

“We’re not Buddhists.”

“I know.”

“Pretty sure Lopsang is a boy’s name.”

“I know.”

A monastery is a fortress is a castle is an ancient city is a Roman villa: build some walls and live in them. Turn the world binary. Out There and In Here. Them and Us. You always know what side of a wall you’re on. Build it high enough and time slows; build it thick enough and gravity stumbles. Carve out a piece of the world for yourself and damn the rest.

The Sebastianite brothers were idiosyncretic, which is a fancy word that means you were allowed to believe whatever the hell you wanted. Eremetic, Lavritic, Cenobitic, Skete. Flagellants and Penitentes. Visitandine novitiates, and Chthonian articulates. Wives and millers and knights fresh from pilgrimage. Warrior monks and fat old sybarites heavy with wine. An orphan or two.

A brother stayed awake all night, every night, to say Nocturns at midnight and then wake the rest of monastery well before dawn for Lauds. Breakfast, which was small and did not contain coffee. Six a.m. was Prime, and some worshipped Jesus and others the sun, but all the brothers worshipped, even if they were sisters. Terce and Sext followed at three hour intervals, and then the midday meal which did not contain meat. Dozing off was common during Nones, as was a senior brother hitting sleeping monks with a stick. Vespers is the prayer for the candles, the benediction of the lamp, and when all were lit in the monastery, you could see the faint and whitish glow from all the way down the Main Drag. Children would confuse the light for a star and make wishes, which are like prayers but more honest. Before all the brothers but one went to sleep, they would assemble for Compline.

Sturdy set of walls and a strict routine lets you ignore the world real good.

When they moved into the three-bedroom split-level on the Upside, Karen had noticed that the corner needed a stop sign. The house was on Crater Road, which was very long and straight, and so drivers would pick up speed. Probably didn’t even notice they were doing it. Children chase balls into the street sometimes.

Come to prayers and don’t cause too much trouble. Those were the rules at the monastery of St. Sebastian, and they were followed by some occasionally, and others fervently. The church was laid out east to west, which sat it diagonally within the square of walls. Well, “church.” Too many Muslims, Minoans, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Malanga’i, Hindus, and Sikhs had worshiped there for it to be rightly called a church any longer, even with the giant crucifixes all over the place: the monastery had been built by Christians, but then everyone else moved in.

Courtyard surrounding the church. Buildings in the courtyard: library and workshop on one side, dining hall, kitchen, and storehouse on the other. The cells were built into the walls, two floors worth and all the way around, looking inward and opening onto communal walkways like a cheap seaside motel. Mattress. Table. Chair. Window with no curtain. Door with no lock.

Knock on the door and the St. Sebastianite brothers will refuse you entrance. This is how it works: you need to wait outside for three days. The monastery being in Little Aleppo, however, the rules were more like guidelines: if it was raining, you could come in right away, or if you were hungry, or if you just didn’t want to hang around sitting on concrete steps for three days. You were still responsible for 72 hours spent outside waiting to come in; most of the monks chose to amortize the time over the course of several weeks and would goon around outside for a half-hour at a time. When the weather was especially nice, initiates would burn off an hour or two playing touch football.

Karen’s husband started drinking after the funeral, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t stand the sight of him anymore. She couldn’t stand the sight of herself anymore.

You’ll throw up if you just take pills because your stomach loves you more than your heart does. Combine the pills with a dry cleaner’s bag and rubber bands.

Rent is work. Earn your bed, your rice, your fish and vegetables from the gardens chunked out of the hillside to the south of the monastery. Rent is prayer, which is also work. Prayer is a one-way street. Rent is communion. If you can’t fix yourself, fix your brother. If you’re not worth a prayer, then she certainly is. Or maybe she isn’t, but rent in the monastery of St. Sebastian was also the benefit of doubt. You might be the most fucked-up person behind these walls, but probably not.

The churches on Rose Street were not enough, and neither were the bars on the Main Drag, nor the painful pleasures of the Hotel Synod. Karen tried Christ and she tried needles and she tried strangers and their philosophies, and she had the pills and she had the dry cleaner’s bag right there in her bedroom in the empty house on Crater Road on the Upside. She had not listened to any music since the funeral, at least not intentionally, and it may have been a Thursday but she had stopped keeping track of that sort of thing: dawn breaking over the Segovian Hills, and she left the house without locking it up and walked west; there was a hiking path that went up Mount Faith and spiraled around the cone of the hill, and the shaky goat path to the monastery broke off the trail halfway up the mountain; the footing was crumbly and loose, and she slipped to her hands and knees several times.

When she knocked on the door, she left a bloody print.

Lauds in the pre-dawn morning, and Prime in the light. Terce, then Sext, and Nones is next. Vespers is the prayer for the candles, and Compline before sleep. One of the brothers does not sleep so that he can say Nocturns. Karen had been left down in the valley, and Lopsang Blitzstein existed behind a sturdy set of walls and a strict routine. Nothing changes, and everything lasts in the monastery of St. Sebastian, which is in the Segovian Hills above Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Precarious Lee was behind the wheel of a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. The car had four doors, and was 18 feet long standing still. The big engine, the 428 cubic inch V8,and she was a shade of gunmetal blue that the catalogue called Jennifer Blue. Stella’s sister, Precarious supposed. The seats were maroon, and plush enough to lose a small pet or child in. Only thing softer than the seats was the suspension: the Cadillac felt like she had ball bearings instead of wheels, and he commanded the window down with the nothingest flick of a finger and rested his elbow out in the baking sun as he drove southeast, away from Little Aleppo.

This is not a drag racer, the 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham in Jennifer Blue. The controls and pedals are smooth and mushy, and so is the acceleration. The car had a sort of gathering power, Precarious decided. Gained weight as she went until you got up to cruising speed and then you did just that, cruise. The trees were giving way to scrub on the sides of the highway. Off on the left, Precarious saw a roadrunner. Squatty little brown thing. Fast enough, he guessed. Precarious felt a bit lied to the first time he saw a real-life roadrunner. Did not match the billing.

Oh, the bullshit. Oh, the bullshit of a place. It oozed in through your ears and nostrils no matter how quietly you tried to go about your business. Plans and chatter and the rumor of gossip. Open a window for some air? Let the smoke out? You can hear it babbling quickly like Little Aleppo’s sewers after the rains that come every 18 days. Go to sleep, and other people’s agendas become your dreams. It was tough to be in a place sometimes, Precarious thought. Going to a place or coming from one was much easier, and driving by a place was the easiest of all. You didn’t have to be in a place, not in America. Not on the highway. The roads went through towns and cities and villages, but highways went in between them.

You could leave it all behind and glide down the highway. It was in the Constitution. Precarious found the on-ramp to Route 77 hiding in a subordinate clause in Article IV, and found that there was precedent, and then he was in the Interstitial Highway System, which run parallel to the Interstate, and also perpendicular and asymptotically. Also, at a slightly different frequency. It had been a while. Precarious tilted his head towards the open window. He sniffed the air and listened, so he could see how the engine was running.

You could leave it all behind.

“Roll up the window, sweetie. It’s too windy,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.

Unless you brought everyone with you.

She gave his shoulder a scritchy-scratch; she was taking up very little space between Precarious and Tiresias Richardson on the split front seat. The Reverend Arcade Jones was behind the girls, and he was impressed: most cars’ backseats are not fit for 6’5″, 300-pound former University of Florida linebackers, but a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham was not most cars: long as a Russian novel and half again as thick, there was legroom and headroom and every other kind of room you could envision needing.

Penny Arrabbiata was behind Precarious. Her head was tilted back onto the maroon velour, and her mouth was open; she had a red bandana tied around her head blocking her eyes from the sun, and she was wearing a blue ball cap pulled down low. There was a cartoon ox on the front of the cap. Every few miles, she made a little noise like “mloccch” and turned her head a bit. It was ten a.m., which was well past an astronomer’s bedtime.

It was also past a Horror Host’s bedtime, but Tiresias was up and glassy-eyed and taking pulls from a tallboy of Arrow beer. Sheila had one, too, and the Reverend Arcade Jones had made his disapproval clear.

“I want to make my disapproval clear,” he said when they popped their first tops five miles outside Little Aleppo.

“Noted, Reverend,” Sheila said.

“We’re not driving,” Tiresias added.

“Moving vehicle. Seems wrong.”

“You don’t want one?” Sheila asked.

“I don’t want one.”

Tommy Amici’s office was in Jeremiad Springs, which was three days ride from Little Aleppo on horseback. The trip was much shorter in a Cadillac on Route 77, but no shorter than the boring old Interstate. Sheila asked Precarious,

“Why we taking 77?”

“Wanna stop at the chicken place,” he said.

Sheila was not from Little Aleppo. She belonged there, but she wasn’t from there: she had the bad luck to be born somewhere else entirely. And to lousy people. Precarious had known Sheila for longer than just about anyone else on the planet, and the most she had ever said to him about her parents was this:

“They were lousy.”

And she didn’t offer any more, and he never pressed. Person had the right to not dwell in the past, Precarious figured. Some folks gotta talk about how fucked up they are, and others gotta forget about it. Dick digs, but Jane buries, and Sheila was a Jane.

But they had met at the chicken place, the Pioneer Chicken Stand, and then Precarious had put her in his car–a white ’72 GMC Ambassador–and then they were in Little Aleppo and she was a new person entirely. He didn’t try anything, not that she would have minded. Sheila still wouldn’t mind at all if Precarious tried something. He was her raggedy gentleman, and her magic carpet, and she could feel his skinny arm against hers. They had met at the Pioneer Chicken Stand, and he had fed her and brought her home and let her smoke all of his cigarettes and choose the radio station; if he pulled the Cadillac over right now and threw her across the hood, he could have her, he could have her in front of the motherfucking reverend: Sheila didn’t care, she loved him and always had and would, and she wouldn’t say anything about the chicken but she knew it was his way of saying that he loved her back, taking her back there, bringing it all back home.

Precarious didn’t remember stopping for chicken when he picked up Sheila. There was no hidden meaning. He wanted chicken.

The sun was pocked in the sky. Beauty marks? Saballanian warships? Blips on the yellow, whatever they were, and Precarious angled his visor to block out the glare. Fast food billboards were having a sumo match on the road’s shoulder. On the other side of the highway, someone in an El Camino drove through a drive-through movie theater, killing several. Everyone’s a critic. A tour bus with no one at the wheel passed them; the marquee above the windshield read “Marie Celeste.”

“So, uh,” Tiresias wondered. “What, uh, what the fuck kind of road is this?”

She had never been on Route 77 before.

“It’s less a road than a ‘road,’ if you get me,” Sheila said.

“I don’t.”

Precarious grunted and pointed towards the glove compartment with his chin; it opened with a TCHACK and Sheila pulled out a small tin like a child would keep his prized possessions in. It had been painted brightly a long time ago, but that was a long time ago; the colors had faded, but you could still make out Tom Mix on the front. He had been stamped there, too. Behind him were Precarious Lee’s joints, fat and stinking: Sheila offered Tiresias the tin.

She nodded, smiled, FFT, PHWOO.

“Oh, come on!” the Reverend Arcade Jones yelled from the backseat. Tiresias handed the joint Sheila, and turned to look at the preacher.

“You’re right. So sorry.”

Tiresias’ window went down two inches.

“Not better. Put that out.”

“We’re almost finished,” Sheila said.

“You just lit the damn thing.”

“Deep inhalers, Reverend.

“She’s right,” Tiresias said. “You should see my lungs. Hell, it’s easy to see my lungs: they’re on teevee all week. AAAAAHahaha!”

“Hey, listen: I’m not an uptight guy. I just don’t want to get pulled over.”

“They don’t pull over Cadillacs on Route 77,” Precarious said, and took the doobie from Sheila.

There was quiet from the backseat. The Reverend knew that Precarious was not a liar, and so he said,

“Well, smoke yourselves silly, then.”

Southeast to the Low Desert like their ancestors, but faster and with climate control and an AM/FM radio. Precarious often felt thankful he had not been born in the past; wanderlust was a far more uncomfortable affliction back then. Fuck the trail and hang the horses, he thought. Man needs a highway, and an engine, and a window to hang his elbow out of.

And, sometimes, a man needs some fried chicken.

“If all of y’all will all stop yelling at me, I will explain the ostrich situation. Good gravy.”

Terrence Mompkins used to preach the Gospel; now he shoveled rhino shit. It was all show business. He was standing at the entrance to Harper Zoo in his pressed khaki shorts and many-pocketed adventure shirt with a tag that read “TERRENCE” and a pith helmet worn way back on his head of sandy, straight hair. (The zookeepers hated the pith helmets, and occasionally petitioned to get rid of them on the grounds that “people with lisps think we’re being vulgar.” No dice: the pith stayed.)

He had brought out the portable podium that the zoo’s president used for important announcements. It had the Harper Zoo motto on the front: HARPER ZOO: WHERE ANIMALS ARE, and it made Terrence feel very official. Reminded him of the pulpit, too, but now his congregation was Iffy Bould from The Cenotaph and Cakey Frankel from KSOS, along with a cameraman. A few Little Aleppians, smelling a free show, had also gathered.

“Okay, so: we did not–I repeat not–lose an ostrich.”

“Are you saying that the ostrich that terrorized the Main Drag for several hours last night did not belong to the zoo?” Iffy asked. He was cadaverous, and smoking.

“You didn’t let me finish,” Terrence said.

“Please continue, then.”

“We did not lose the ostrich because we knew where he was at all times. He was chasing people around the Main Drag. So, you see: not lost. You newspaper people and your words.”

“Ah, right. And how did the ostrich get out of his cage?”

“Oh, sir, the Harper Zoo has no cages. Our animals are in enclosures.”

“Okay. How did the ostrich get out of his enclosure?”

“Quite easily, it seems.”

“Right, but what I’m asking is: what went wrong?”

“From the ostrich’s perspective, nothing at all. He had a ball. Cakey, do you have question?”

“Does the snack bar still sell those big churros?”

“They do,” Terrence said.

“Oh, that’s super.”

Iffy Bould snorted, and smoke came out of his every orifice in his skull.

“So,” he said. “How did the ostrich get out?”

“Are you asking me?” Terrence said.

“No, I’m asking Cakey.”

“I have no idea how the ostrich got out,” Cakey said.

“I’m not actually asking you, Cakey,” Iffy said.

“Oh, okay.”

A shirtless man behind the two reporters raised his hand and shouted,

“I have a question!”

Terrence smiled at him and said,

“Sir, this is a press conference.”

“I am a citizen journalist.”

“You don’t have a shirt.”

“Did Woodward and Bernstein have shirts?”

“Yes,” Iffy said.

“He’s right,” Terrence said.

“Who are we talking about?” Cakey asked.

The shirtless man continued,

“Like I said, no one owns shirts. My question is this: why is the Harper Zoo lying to us about the existence of penguins?’

More people were gathering, and Iffy smirked. He had been a journalist for The Cenotaph for longer than anyone could remember: all the powerful people in the neighborhood despised him for the questions he asked, and all the common folks hated him for the answers that he wrote down. A journalist that people liked was a publicity agent, he figured.

“Answer the penguin question, Terrence,” Iffy said.

“Penguins are real! They’re mean, but real,” Terrence said.

And now another man from the crowd:

“Why don’t the tapirs pay taxes?”

“Because they’re tapirs.” Terrence had never been in a free-floating press conference before, and did not know what to do. A woman just arrived to the scene yelled,

“How much is Allen’s bail?”

“This isn’t a jail, ma’am.”

“Tell that to the penguins!” she shouted

“There’s no such thing!” the shirtless man answered, and they began wrestling.

The crowd, swelled and joyous, began peppering Terrence Mompkins with inane questions. Where do giraffes get off being such snobs? Why don’t you race your animals for the purposes of wagering? Do polar bears have a favorite band? Who are you to tell me I can’t eat a condor?

That last one caught on. The crowd began chanting,

“FEED US CON-DOR! FEED US CON-DOR!”

And Terrence, who was not used to being treated like this, picked up the portable podium and ran. Little Aleppo followed, having far too good of a time for a Tuesday morning.

Iffy, Cakey, and Cakey’s cameraman watched the chaos recede.

Iffy said,

“Buy a lady a churro?”

“Is the lady me?” Cakey asked.

“It is.”

“You bet.”

Iffy Bould stuck out his elbow, and Cakey laced her arm into his, and they went to eat Mexican pastries in a zoo.

A Cadillac and an American highway. Find a better combination, just try. Chocolate and peanut butter is fine, but won’t get you to Flagstaff in two days. Somewhere between 70 and 80, keep the speedo bouncing around there and there won’t be any trouble. Line up the front end with the road–right headlight on the single white line and left on the double yellow–and flick a look up to the rearview every ten-count. Don’t let the sun in your eyes. It’s an automatic, so your left foot is useless and it withers on your homunculus until all you are is vision and right foot Precarious Lee wore boots, heavy ones, but he could feel the engine through his big toe and he feathered off the accelerator a touch and adjusted his visor with his left hand because Sheila’s head was resting on his left shoulder and he did not want to disturb her. Tiresias was asleep, too, head lolled back like a dead woman and snoring, half-finished tallboy of Arrow clasped in her crotch.

“Just you and me, preacher,” he said.

The Reverend Arcade Jones looked to his left and saw that Penny Arrabbiata was still out like the tide. He smiled and met Precarious’ eye in the rearview.

“Appears that way.”

“Lightweights.”

Arcade laughed, but not loud.

“Night owls at noon.”

“The one in back, yeah,” Precarious said, and then nodded at the two women in the front seat. “These two? These two are messes.”

“They do the best they can.”

“Do they?”

“We all do, Precarious.”

Precarious snagged the pack of Camels from the pocket of his tee-shirt, and flicked the bottom with his finger. Two cigarettes flipped up, not parallel, and he put the leading one in his mouth and pulled it from the pack. Zippo. SHVIP. He inhaled. PHWOO.

“Well, shit, I’d hate to see our worst.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones laughed again, loud this time, and if the ladies woke up then that was on them. Precarious grinned and grasped for the gearshift by instinct, but there was none–the Cadillac was an automatic–and instead grabbed Sheila’s knee and did not take his hand off right away. The radio was still picking up KHAY, but faintly: it sounded like cotton on fire with a song under it, an old number about teenage fuckery sung by a grown man, and Precarious mumbled the words around his cigarette as the miles rolled by. There was fried chicken in their immediate future, and meetings beyond that, but for now there was just Route 77, which is the road out of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.