Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 15 of 20)

Tiresias Richardson, who plays Draculette on KSOS’ Late Show, calls her dressing room Masada. Her cameraman had bought her a star for the door, but he got a six-pointed one by accident. She went with it.

This was the year 73 or 74 AD, somewhere around there. Rome ruled Jerusalem. Judea had been a province for a hundred years, and were sick of rendering unto Caesar, and so there was the First Roman-Jewish War. By 73 or 74, the Romans were furious: the Jews had won several early battles due to Imperial underestimation, and so the great general Vespasian was dispatched to kick Hebrew ass, and when he became Emperor his son Titus remained in Judea to finish the job. By 73 or 74, it was almost over and the winner was who you’d figure, and so was the loser: the Jews had the story of David and Goliath, but the Romans had the legions. Just dead-enders left, almost 1,000, called Sicarii after the daggers they favored.

The Sicarii were also called Zealots. That’s where that word comes from.

Romans never salted the ground at Carthage: salt was far too valuable, and they didn’t need to. You don’t need salt when you have Scipio Africanus. Fields won’t produce any food if you kill and enslave the entire population and burn every single building to the ground. Scipio Africanus was like Sherman in a toga. The thing about the salt was just a bit of fancy talking that got taken for fact over the course of several thousand years. Roman soldiers got paid in salt, and they were worth their salt. Million people died during the war, mostly Jews, and the rest were enslaved and the city burned and the Second Temple went the way of the First.

Just the dead-enders left, almost 1,000, called Sicarii after the daggers they favored. They holed up in a fortress atop a mountain; there was only one path up and it was so narrow that two men could not walk abreast. This was the hilltop that David hid from Saul upon. It was impregnable. The Romans impregnated it. They built a ramp up the cliffs–it took three months–and then hauled up a log tipped with a 200-pound brass fist. Knocked.

When the legionnaires entered the fortress, they found almost 1,000 Sicarii dead, and everything burned but the food. They had left the storehouses full and untouched to show the Romans that they were not desperate, that they were not hungry, that they made this decision with a clear mind. Jewish law prohibits suicide, so the Sicarii had killed one another until there was just one left and he sliced his throat and damned himself. Two women and five children remained; they hid in a cistern; water is the stuff of life.

The mountain’s name is Masada

We know this from Flavius Josephus, and him alone. He was a Jew, a soldier, captured by the Romans who gained favor with Vespasian and became a Roman citizen and a historian. Only one source for an entire war. Until recently, of course, when science got involved and started poking around and taking notes and arguing amongst itself. Turns out a lot of what Josephus wrote doesn’t quite hold water. Might have made up the mass suicide. Make the Jews look good, make the Romans look good, everybody wins. Sounds like something a Jew captured by the Romans might do.

But it doesn’t matter whether a story’s true if it’s good enough.

“What happened to the two women and the five children?” Big-Dicked Sheila asked.

“Enslaved if they were lucky, I guess,” Deacon Blue said.

“What if they were unlucky?”

“Raped to death? I don’t know. Something terrible. It was the past.”

“Well, here’s to modernity. AAAAAHahaha,” Tiresias Richardson said and raised her glass. Sheila did, too. CLINK. They were drinking Black Russians because Sheila had forgotten to buy milk. They were on the ratty blue couch: Tiresias in her soft black bathrobe with her legs stretched out in front of her; Sheila kneeling and half-facing Tiresias. Deacon Blue was in the chair by the makeup mirror. There was a monitor sitting on top of the mini-fridge showing the studio feed in black and white. Cakey Frankel was reading the news.

“Uh-huh. Yeah. So,” Deacon Blue did not know how to say what he was saying. “The thing is about the meeting–”

“I totally know what to do,” Tiresias said.

Sheila nodded.

“She does, she does.”

They both sipped their drinks.

“Right.”

Louis Blue had not always been a man of God; in fact, he used to be a roadie. Which is the opposite.

Hump the speakers up the ramp and hump teenagers at the hotel, and there is the local union to deal with or fight with, but to under no circumstances gamble with. (Deacon Blue was a slow learner, and had to be taught that lesson several times.) The bus all night in stacked coffins–you sleep with your feet forward so a sudden stop doesn’t concuss you–and then the load-in starts early and bright: hockey arena, vaudeville theater, football stadium, racetrack, state fair, it’s all the same and never the same: this venue can’t handle the trucks, so the equipment needs to be carted in one piece at a time; that venue is full of racist spiders. Life on the road.

He was happy, he thought, but one day Deacon Blue found Christ, specifically the Iterated Christ, and he left the rock and roll life. It’s an interesting story, but it’s not the one we’re in the middle of.

“Tiresias,” he said. “Are you gonna be okay? The meeting. You gonna be okay?”

She straightened up her back and widened her shoulders. This was, after all, her dressing room.

“And why would I not be?”

“Honestly?”

“No, lie to me.”

“Every time I see you, you’re a mess.”

She took a big hit off her Black Russian.

“Coincidental.”

On the monitor, Cakey Frankel’s eyes shined like counterfeit pennies.

“The Harper Zoo has issued a statement saying, and I quote, ‘We have not lost any ostriches.’ What an odd statement to release.”

A hand reached in from off-camera with a sheet of paper.

“Breaking news, Little Aleppo. There’s an angry ostrich on the Main Drag. Oh, well, now the statement makes sense.”

Deacon Blue, Tiresias, and Sheila rose as one. To the door, and then the hallway where station owner Paul Loomis, Jr., joined them, and down the stairs, and out the front door of KSOS which was on the Main Drag. Sheila took out her cigarettes, offered the pack around–no, thank you from all three–and FFT with a brand-new yellow lighter PHWOO as windows opened up and down the street and Little Aleppians poked their heads outside like vertical prairie dogs.

“AAAAAAAHHHH!”

The Poet Laureate ran south down the Main Drag.

“OOOOMackackackOOOOMackackack!”

Ostrich.

“WOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOooooo!”

Cop car.

The two men and two women in front of KSOS watched the spontaneous parade of bird terror pass. Sheila scrunched up her nose in thought, scratched her lip, PHWOO, said,

“So, is the zoo lying or is that a random ostrich?”

“I was just wondering that,” Deacon Blue said.

“And which is worse?”

“I was wondering that, too.”

“Gorgeous feathers,” Paul Loomis, Jr., said dreamily.

The other three agreed.

“Tiresias, you understand my point, right?”

“No, Deacon, I do not.” She turned to face him; he was a few inches shorter than she was, but her height advantage was partially negated by the fact that she was wearing a bathrobe on the sidewalk. “State it clearly, please.”

“Please do not fuck this up.”

“That was clear.”

“They don’t bury their heads in the and when they’re scared, you know. Ostriches,” Paul Loomis, Jr., said. “Pliny the Elder wrote that they did, and everyone just believed him.”

“What do they do when they’re scared?” Sheila asked.

“Slice your guts open with their six-inch talons.”

“Huh. That’s, like, the opposite of burying your head in the sand.”

“Conceptually, yeah.”

Tiresias’ hands were on her hips.

“You’re very judgemental for a man of the cloth,” she said.

“Shit, I’m not judging anything or anyone.”

“You should tell your tone of voice.”

“Tiresias. Please. I’m just trying to get everybody on the same page,” he said.

“The page with the 12 Steps on it?”

Deacon Blue reached into his suit-colored suit jacket, came out with a sliver flask with an inscription that read You know what this is for –  EP. Tilted it to the sky for a two-count and then flung a breath out through his nose and made a noise like HOO and then offered the flask to Tiresias, who was smiling: she was an actress, and therefore appreciated a dramatic gesture. Took the flask, drank–whiskey–and handed it back.

“We don’t need to fight,” she said.

“Well, no,” he said and took another slug and returned the flask to its hidey-hole. “We do need to fight. But just not each other.”

They both smiled.

“AAAAAAAHHHH!”

The Poet Laureate ran north up the Main Drag.

“OOOOMackackackOOOOMackackack!”

Ostrich.

“WOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOooooo!”

Cop car.

Night had arrived at the Jeremiad in the Low Desert. It was cold. The desert has no soil that has warmed all day under the spoiling sun, and little vegetation to hold in the heat, and so it is cold when it is dark: the temperature drops 40 degrees in the hour encompassing sunset, quick enough to blast-chill the sweat off your chest and set you to spastic shivering, chattering teeth and all.

If you’re going to spend the night in the Low Desert, you should know how to start a fire.

The horses had blankets, thick and canvas and faded, and they stood sleeping tethered to the cottonwood trees that had all day provided shade for the two men by the springs, which emptied and bubbled into a pool the shape of the top two segments of a snowman. They had blankets, too, the men, and they sat curled into themselves against the cold.

“Time has oddened, Peter.”

“Time’ll juke and jive on ya, Preacher.”

“It goes faster in some places. Not here. I believe we are in some sort of sink. A temporal well. Slower. More…more…”

“Gloopy?”

“Precisely. There are places where time is mercury, and there are places where time is pitch. Time is the Christ, Peter, but a transient Christ. It’s not always the same. It’s slower here. I do not know why, but it is.”

“Desert pace out here. See the mountains? See the stars? We’re breathing at their rate now, and our hearts need as little blood as cactuses need water.”

“Cacti.”

“Them, too.”

The Reverend Busybody Tyndale and Peter, who was not a Pulaski, jittered under their blankets and their mouths vibrated with steam and theories: they had each eaten a dozen or so of the Jeremiad cactus’ flowers, which were dark-green and shaped like aspirin tablets.

“It speeds along out there. In our home. Not here.”

“We don’t live here,” Peter said.

“I know that.”

“You can’t live here. There’s no food.”

“I meant back at the village.”

“Tons of food there.”

Busybody stretched an arm out of his blanket and put his hand as close to the fire as he was able.

“It speeds along because it’s the time of the future. It all happens at once, Peter, except the rate is different. This is why we cannot talk to the future. They’re here, but they’re going too fast for us to see. Like water in a rushing river. You can’t see the drops. Just a blur. Maybe a week or two has gone by in their world while we’ve sat here.”

Peter thought that over for a second. Then, he said,

“Your blanket’s on fire.”

“Shit!”

The Reverend Busybody Tyndale panicked, tried to extricate himself from his blanket–just a tiny corner of it was on fire–but tripped and fell on his face; unfortunately, this was towards the fire and the blanket flipped up over his back and into the flames and now more of it was on fire.

“Stop moving,” Peter said as he tried to slap out the flames with his hands.

“Stop hitting me!”

“I’m not hitting you, jackass.”

Busybody tried to get up again, fell again, more fire, and now Peter started laughing (he did not mean to) and could not stop: huge weeping hurks and haws, and he wiped his eyes of tears and kept slapping at the burning blanket.

“This is not funny.”

The Reverend was wrapped up in the flames, and so Peter–still laughing–picked his up and threw him into the springs of the Jeremiad; Busybody bobbed to the surface sputtering as Peter went to one knee in hysterics and then the other. His stomach was cramping and there was snot coming out of his nose.

Floating in the Jeremiad, the universe above him and the desert around him, the Reverend Busybody Tyndale was no longer on fire and if he had known of the concept of a third eye, he would have said that his had opened. Nothing is more important than not being on fire, he thought. It was a very important thought, he thought. Later, he would try to explain this thought to Peter, but find that he did not have the words. It was a personal thought. People had those when they ate a dozen or so of the Jeremiad cactus’ flowers.

He felt like Jonah, like he was inside of something large enough to be unknowable.

“AAAAAAAHHHH!”

The Poet Laureate ran south down the Main Drag.

“OOOOMackackackOOOOMackackack!”

Ostrich.

“WOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOoooo”

Cop car.

“I could watch this all day,” Sheila said and passed a joint to Deacon Blue, who looked up and down the Main Drag before accepting it, hitting it quickly, passing it to Tiresias.

“It’s oddly calming,” he said.

“Well, not for the Poet Laureate,” Tiresias said.

“No, guess not. You’ll be good for the meeting?”

“Absofuckinglutely.”

Nature would out. Even on the Main Drag, nature would out, and then you were left to sprint for your life from giant semi-dinosaurs with no sense of humor. News would break, and fire would catch, and if you were lucky you could maintain a bit of perspective, but only if it was not happening to you. Easy to get lucky. Tough to stay lucky. Hang around long enough and it would be your turn to get chased down the Main Drag, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

It was Monday morning in Little Aleppo, and the Frankie Nickels Show was on the air.

“If the Pacific Ocean was the size of a football field, the Hawaiian Islands would be the size of home plate. I’m mixing my sports up, I know, but you can picture it. Awful small out there in all that blue. Nothing around it, neither. Thousands of miles in all directions: nothing but water. Easy to get there now! They’ll even feed you on the plane. Or you could take a cruise in comfort and luxury.

“That’s recent, cats and kittens. So many things are recent.

“It’s the last settled place, Hawaii. When you think we set foot? Not white folks. You always know when white folks show up somewhere, cuz they write it down. Not talking about white folks, I’m talking about Homo sapiens. When you think it happened? Twenty thousand years ago? Ten?

“1200 AD. Roundabout there, anyway. There were Crusades going on, and a fellow named Marco was playing polo. There’s a bridge in Greece, in Mycanae, called the Arkadiko. There’s someone walking over that bridge right now, and it was built two millennia before Hawaii got settled. Rome rose and fell, and there were birds on those islands, and Christianity conquered all it saw, and there were trees on those islands, and Mohammad rode his army to Mecca, and the tide lapped at the beaches, and the age became dark, and there was no fire that was not accidental.

“And then the sound of a canoe crunching up onto the sand.

“And that sound was the difference between the thing that was, and the thing that is. Man had entered the forest. Began to build, plant, cultivate. Re-routed the damn streams. Ain’t that just like us? Got to Hawaii–Hawaii!–and the first damn thing we did was start changing everything. That’s humanity in a coconut shell right there, cats and kittens. Anybody gives you that noble savage crap, smack ’em right in the suck. Ain’t a human alive who ain’t a tree-chopping son of a bitch.

“Home plate. Size of home plate on a football field. How’d they find it? Didn’t just happen upon it in the middle of the night, did they? Some Norwegian jackass thought they did. Rafts. He said they took rafts from South America and floated out by the caprices of the currents.

“That sound right to you?

“Sounded right to a lot of people. Theory was that the Polynesians weren’t smart enough to figure out navigation. How could they be? No compass. No sextant. Couldn’t tell you latitude from longitude. Not to mention the incontrovertible fact that these Polynesians had never even heard of Jesus. How smart could they be if they hadn’t heard of Jesus?

“Smart enough to know the stars. Smart enough to know the swells. Smart enough to know that it’s easier to remember a song than a speech, so the navigators would sing their way from island to island. They were smart enough to pay attention.

“Paying attention is all being smart is.

“That’s the distal question, cats and kittens. How. How is for engineers. How boring ‘how’ is. The proximal question is what we concern ourselves with here on KHAY–Hey!–this Monday morning. And that question is: Why? Now, those engineers will tell you that Pacific immigration was generally due to population constraints. The land you’re standing on has a carrying capacity. Exceed it, and you’re in trouble. For any given square acreage, only so many folks are gonna eat. That’s what the engineers will tell you. And, it makes sense.

“People don’t make sense, do they? Not all the time, and certainly not when the horizon is calling them. That horizon seems to have our direct line, don’t it? Horizon’ll get in your head and start bouncing around.

“I think it was the navigators. Forget food, forget population, forget it all: I think it was the navigators.

“They were a guild, you see. Just like in Europe, just like the white folks and their civilization. Navigators, brought up in the tradition and schooled out on that open water: they used the apprentice system, too. Convergent evolution in action, and all them navigators from all those islands in all that water knew each other. A guild brings like-minded people together.

“You ever know like-minded people not to compete?

“Let’s go farther. You went here? I went there. Rope a couple dozen people into your status game, and now you got a breeding population. Pack some livestock and seeds in the canoe, and now you got a settlement. If you can find the damn island. A navigator finds islands. I thought you said you were a navigator.

“Home plate on a football field. Man who finds that is a man, indeed.

“Humanity settled the world via pissing contest, cats and kittens.”

“Plep.”

“You’ll need to be more specific,” Mr. Venable said.

“Mlaaaraaah.”

“Ah.”

Mr. Venable was in his customary seat in the bookstore with no title, in his customary suit, and he swiveled his chair around to face the bookshelves behind his desk. He removed a copy of Spengler’s Decline Of The West and reached into the socket that was left. Catnip in a slippery plastic bag, greasy with advertisements, and he shook it once twice and the cat, who had no name, stared. Pupils went from linear to orbital in a heartbeat, purring, whiskers flicking. She was a tortoiseshell, and she was on the desk.

“Plep.”

“Yes, plep. You’ve mentioned.”

He sprinkled a dimebag’s worth of ‘nip on Dickens. Bleak House. It was originally serialized, and though Mr. Venable had read enough history to not romanticize any bit of the past, he felt a small bit of jealousy towards those who got to experience the story the way it was meant to be told. A little bit at a time: you would pass by the newsstand and there it was–perhaps you had forgotten from the previous month–and then you could dive back into the story that had been rattling around since the last time you sat at the campfire. A little bit at a time, Mr. Venable thought. That’s how life happens, doesn’t it? After everything is over, you slap a grand narrative on it, but mostly life just happens a little bit at a time.

So why shouldn’t stories do the same?

The cat who lived in the bookstore with no title did not know anything about Charles Dickens, nor could she tell you the first thing about Victorian London. She was an uneducated cat. Cheeks through the catnip, muzzle smack into the pile of dull green specklings. Then a backwards step. Another. Still. Step. And down on her side on the table, legs stiffened and splayed out in front of her, and staring at nothing but heavenly mouses and intradimensional sunbeams.

“Drug addict.”

“Flaaaaaa-flum.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. We all had rough childhoods.”

When the cat was high, she had very little recourse to scritchy-scratchces, and so Mr. Venable gave her scritchy-scratches. If you asked the cat, she would not admit to purring, but she was.

The door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and man stooped under the jamb to enter the shop. Black suit, black, shirt, black tie. Barefoot and bald and pale. Stood in front of Mr. Venable, who said,

“No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

“I do not need service. I need a book,” the tall man said.

“Can’t really argue with that.”

“And I am wearing a shirt. I am entitled to half-service.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“And a tie. I have a tie on. A tie should count for the same as shoes.”

“It’s not a point-based system.”

“What about pants?”

“What about them?”

“You specifically require shirts and shoes, but make no mention of pants.”

“Pants are implied,” Mr. Venable said.

“Your clothing rules are a tort waiting to happen.”

“Can I point you towards a book that is far away from me?”

The tall man’s ears were flat against his skull like they were repulsed by the world.

“Magic.”

Mr. Venable stroked the cat’s forehead with his thumb, and took a sip of coffee.

“Which kind?”

“Pardon?”

“Magic, magick, or magik?”

“You said the same word three times.”

“I most certainly did not. Check the spelling.”

The tall man shifted his weight from one bare foot to the other.

“Tuxedos, tantra, or Trianon the Ravenous? Are you entertaining children, impressing a hippie girlfriend, or trying to summon things?”

“Number three.”

Mr. Venable swiveled towards the bookshelf behind him again and removed another book. Minor Acts and Their Amplifications by Fontaine Grondis. A baggie, greasy but with no advertisements: fogged and creased plastic with dull green flecks of plant matter inside. He took a pinch with his thumb and pinky, the middle three fingers extended, and then he sprinkled it onto the table in front of him making a barrier in between him and the tall man. Then he set the baggie aside and took a sip of coffee.

The tall man smiled. He had too many teeth.

“The middle aisle. All the way down. If you hit the wall, you’ve gone too far. Turn left and walk to the annex. There, you’ll see an Aborigine with a bull-roarer. Run. If you want to remain in this reality, run. Get in the elevator and press the button marked Θ. Get off the elevator. It’s broken. Stairs are a better option. The second sub-basement from the right is the one you want. When you get there, turn left. You’ll come to a fork. Please pick it up and bring it back to me. I’ve been eating nothing but soup for days. Fifteenth row, seventh aisle. Can’t miss it.”

“Virtually a straight shot,” the tall man said.

“Mm. Take care around the preetas.”

“The what?”

“Preetas.”

“Would you care to define that word?’

“No,” Mr. Venable said.

“The service here is terrible.”

“You’re not wearing shoes.”

The tall man disappeared into the back of the bookstore with no title, and Mr. Venable poked the green specks into an evener line on his desk, got back to his Dickens. A good story. A well-observed location. Someone to root for, someone to boo. Lady Dedlock and Inspector Bucket. Mr. Venable always liked stories where the characters had silly names. Why would you write about Doug Collins? Or Jane Anything? Names had a kind of magic in them, Mr. Venable thought, and glanced back towards the stacks and idly wondered if the tall man would ever reappear.

Amateur, he thought. Thinks I don’t recognize him.

Mr. Venable crossed his left leg over his right and took a sip of his no-longer warm coffee and he was in England, London to be precise, and there wills being contested and Victoria was in charge. Monday morning was assaulting the Main Drag: there were casualties on the sidewalk and in the offices and shops, sleepy-eyed cranks relying on muscle memory to make it to Tuesday afternoon–this is the longest period of the week, Monday morning to Tuesday afternoon–and the week stretched ahead like a forced marathon. There would be intrigue and boredom, and digression, fucking, and self-sabotage. All that human shit. Death, too. Mr. Venable had never met a story that was any good where someone important didn’t die. Someone you weren’t expecting. He knew how the story ended, but he liked the sentences and so he gave the cat, who had no name, scritchy-scratches while he drank his coffee in the bookstore with no title, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The Tahitian was solid, but its owner was wobbly. Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, had woken up in Big-Dicked Sheila’s bed–they had been spending a lot of time in bed–to a ringing phone. 8 a.m.? On a Saturday? Jesus, no, fuck no, what? Sheila reached out from under the covers, picked up the receiver of the baby-blue princess phone, replaced the receiver.

Quiet, and Gussy rolled into Sheila and draped her arm over her skinny chest and massaged her shoulder. The phone again. Both women opened their eyes: Sheila stared at the ceiling; Gussy’s face was buried in Sheila’s armpit, so she just saw stubble, and then she shoved her nose in the ‘pit like a truffle-hunting pig, inhaled for all she was worth. Sheila smiled, and slapped at the nightstand. The phone? No, her cigarettes. She offered one to Gussy.

“Blech.”

Sheila took a Camel out of the soft pack with her lips. Yellow lighter went FFT, and she inhaled and PHWOO and then hacked out three wet, crunchy coughs: smokers make frightening sounds in the morning when that first drag loosens up the phlegm all those motionless hours have caked to their lungs. It doubled her over, then she laid back on the bed. The phone was still ringing, so she picked it up and placed the receiver on her chest. They listened for a second.

“Is that the Stones?’

“Uh-huh,” Sheila answered.

“Tirry?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Morning Tavern?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s a mess.”

“Uh-huh,” Sheila said and lifted the phone to her ear. “What the fuck, sweetie?”

Gussy got out of bed. The door to the bathroom was open, and she caught Sheila looking at her ass as she walked. Gussy did not turn the light on: there was enough coming in the pebbled window in the shower, and she shut the door behind her. Clean floor, toilet, shower. Bleached and sparkling grout. Messy sink: makeup, four hairbrushes, eyelash crimper, razor. Extendable mirror attached to the wall by an accordion hinge. A signed promotional photo of Serge Gainsbourg above the toilet tank. Put the seat down, sat, pissed, wiped. She had never had a girlfriend before where she had to put the seat down. Gussy had dated women before, and lots of men. She was polyamorous, but only for a week: she enjoyed the threesomes, but truly had no interest in keeping up more than one relationship at once.

The door was thin, and she could hear Sheila’s end of the conversation.

“Of course I was asleep. I sleep at night like a human, Tirry.”

…

“No.”

…

“Nooooo.”

…

“Maybe.”

Gussy heard the phone resettle, and Sheila grunt as she PHWOO blew out the smoke of her cigarette and thwunk thwunk she stubbed it out in an ashtray that was square-shaped with rounded-off corners with divots cut out of them; it had The Menefreghista – Where The Stars Come To Shine written in fancy black cursive on the bottom glass, faded but readable; Sheila had paid two dollars for it in a thrift store in the Low Desert. Once, she had to hit a guy in the forehead with it. More damage to him than to the ashtray. Old-school craftsmanship, she figured.

Back into bed, into warmth and stink and flesh: the sheets were stained, and the sheets were sweaty, and the left corner at the foot of the bed was hanging on to the mattress by the skin of its elastic. Maroon, the sheets, and the blanket was tangerine, and one pillow was chartreuse and the other puce. Sheila wore black, but lived among color. It cheered her. Primaries and neons thrown together and refusing to complement. Free country, she thought, whenever she stuck a blue chair on a green rug. She turned over and threw her arm over Gussy, pulled her closer and Gussy shoved her crotch right up against her cock and put a hand on Sheila’s ass and pulled her even closer; their bellies were rubbed up against each other and Sheila put her hand on the back of Gussy’s head, fingers twined into brown hair, and blinked as slowly as possible; Gussy made a small noise like “Uhhh” and put her forehead into Sheila’s, and then she rotated her head up and the bridges of their noses collided, then the tips, and then the nostrils, and then the philtrums, and oh God the lips; they did not kiss each other for a moment, just held their mouths there sharing breath and still until there was nothing else, nothing else in the whole damned world, barely touching at all, just the prow of the upper lip rubbing back and forth so softly and slowly and then Sheila makes a fist out of Gussy’s hair, pulls her head back swift and fierce and forceful, and Gussy makes a small noise like “Ohhhh” and Sheila pivots on top of her, rolls Gussy onto her back and straddles her; Sheila’s balls are squished against Gussy’s belly button, and her cock is not hard, but thick and pulsing and resting on Gussy’s sternum; Sheila takes Gussy’s wrists in her hand–she can barely get her thumb and middle finger to touch–and holds her arms above her head against the grated metal headboard of her bed and leans down–Sheila does not hunch; her back is arched–and kisses her hard, and shoves her tongue deep in her mouth; Gussy’s hips start to buck under Sheila, and she rips her hands free and puts them on Sheila’s waist, lifts her up and splays her feet out to the north and south, puts her down between her legs and grabs her cock, hard now, and then Sheila is inside of Gussy and she makes a small noise like “Ahhh” and there was nothing else in the whole damned world.

“Maybe I should come.”

“You’re not coming,” Penny Arrabbiata said.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” Officer Romeo Rodriguez said.

“Don’t do that.”

“And maybe I should come to the meeting.”

Penny had an apartment on Bransauer Avenue, but most nights she cracked open her first Arrow at dawn and slept on the couch; her office had no windows, and she would line the bottom crack of the doorjamb with a towel like a freshman getting high. Pitch black. Crank up the AC. She was fine there.

Except when ghost cops wouldn’t leave her alone.

“You’re not coming.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a ghost,” Penny said in the same tone of voice you might answer “Four” to the question “What’s two times two?”

“I’m a cop.”

“You still getting a paycheck?”

“I don’t really need money any more,” he said.

“Oh, because you’re a ghost?”

“What does that have to do with it?”

Penny swallowed a mouthful of beer, and then took another large swig. She was sitting at her messy desk; he was on the couch. Not on the couch: you could vaguely see though his legs and note that the cushion under him not compressed by his weight. Ghosts don’t technically sit on things. They sit “on” things.

“Really?”

“What?”

“Kid–”

“I’m not a kid.”

“–you’re not coming to the meeting because you’re a ghost and that’s final. That mean asshole’s gonna be mad enough to see a black guy and a woman he doesn’t want to fuck; we’re not bringing along a spectral apparition.”

Romeo Rodriguez had been shot in the face his first day on the job. He was returned to Little Aleppo for a reason–spirits hook onto a place for a reason–but no one had told him what that reason was, so he decided to throw in with Penny and try to save the Observatory. Maybe we’re all ghost cops, Romeo thought, brought back for a purpose not told to us in order so that we may learn to find our own purpose? And then Romeo thought, that’s some strenuously dumb shit I just thought; maybe I should stop thinking for a while and let the juices recharge.

“Undercover?”

“What?” Penny said.

“Like…ghost shit? Freak him out?”

“Wander around his office in a sheet going ‘Ooga-booga?'”

“No.”

“But, sort of like that?”

“Sort of.”

“Romeo. Honey. You’re not coming to the meeting. Unless, you know,” Penny took another slug off her beer, “you can be invisible. And not say a goddamned word.”

She upended the can, crushed it while making eye contact with Romeo, reached under her desk and opened the mini-fridge. Fresh tallboy of Arrow. She  opened it PSHH-OP! and raised it slightly towards him and poured some back, eyes on the drop ceiling. Grid of squares. Metal lattice with foam inserts. Big holes, little holes. When Penny looked back at the couch, there was no one there and then when she looked around the small office, there was no one there, either.

“Well, that’s fucked up.”

“No idea I could do this,” Romeo’s voice came from the place where his head used to be.

“How are you doing that?”

“Thinking see-through thoughts.”

“Is that all it takes?”

“Apparently.”

“This is helpful, Romeo. This,” she took a pull of the beer, “is a helpful ability.”

He was happy to hear that.

“Awesome. How?”

“I have no idea.”

Harper Observatory’s parking lot was filling up: there were school buses and beaters. Children come to learn, grown-ups come to yearn. All of Little Aleppo lay beneath and behind the main building, which was exactly like the White House, but a little bigger and with a giant telescope sticking out above the Truman Balcony. You could see the Main Drag slashing north to south. If you knew trigonometry, you could calculate the distance; if you didn’t, then you would just know that it was too far to leap.

But you could stand there, not ten feet from the edge of the machine-flattened summit of Pulaski Peak. There was a chain-link fence with a sign on it:

This is a fence. For legal purposes, this is a fence. It can be climbed, uprooted, or tunneled under, but it is still a fence and you know what that means.

Try not to fall off the mountain.

(The phrase “Try not to fall off the mountain” could be seen on tee-shirts around the neighborhood. Little Aleppians admired the phrasing, and its acknowledgment of both free will and destiny. People fell off mountains. It was inevitable. But you could try not to.)

Put your hand up, blot out half the Upside. The Verdance, gone by palm. Swivel your waist and spread your fingers: there goes the harbor. You’ve got Godzilla at the end of your arm, a whole army of turtlemonsters, worse. Ball up your fist and pound flat the churches, the schools; whoever’s on your list. Everybody’s got a list. Writing it down makes you a paranoiac, but just having one? Made you human.

Field mice that avoided the cats ignored the fence and scampered up and down the choking cliffs, made of fur and fear and fast metabolisms. These are the winning mice. The ones you don’t see got eaten.

Every person you’ve ever met has been a survivor.

“Gonna be the death of me,” Gussy mumbled.

She did not feel like a survivor, just jumbled up and clumsy; certainly, she smelled. Gussy’s shoes were on the floor, but not next to each other–they’d been kicked off–and she was on the couch half-asleep and half-keeping an ear out for catastrophe. Julio could handle it and oh God it was Saturday, sonofabitching Saturday: after the seven o’clock show, and after the nine o’clock show, there was still the Midnight Movie with Draculette. Whose fault this all was. Don’t show up to work fucked up–it was inevitable, but you could try not–and especially don’t show up to work fucked up if you were the boss. A thought popped up like a target at a shooting range: another line would truly set you right. PING she shot it down. Well, how about a cigarette? She put the gun down, reached to the floor where her purse was. She had a yellow lighter like Sheila’s because she had stolen Sheila’s yellow lighter, and Gussy rubbed her thumb along it thinking about Sheila’s cock FFT she inhaled and PHWOO blew out. She had quit four years prior, and was lying to herself and knew it: I am not a smoker, she thought. I’m just smoking. Difference, she bullshitted. Big difference. She could still blow smoke rings PWOFF PWOFF; it was one of those non-forgettable, bike-riding type skills, apparently.

Sheila was sitting cross-legged on the bed, naked, with The White Album in her lap. She hated The Beatles, but there wasn’t anything better to roll joints on. Six every morning, placed in an old-fashioned cigarette case with a tight elastic strap to keep the doobies secure. Sometimes, she’d end the day with none and other times with all six: it depended on how many friends she ran into. One had made her way into the bed, so Sheila lit up the first one that she rolled and handed it to Gussy, who said,

“It’s early.”

“It’s Saturday,” Sheila said and–careful not to upset the weed–leaned back and over and kissed her; Gussy wondered if they would fuck again, hoped they would, and she took the joint from Sheila, hit it, said,

“You’re a terrible influence.”

Sheila kissed her again.

“Wait until I say that we should go get a drink.”

The church bells on Rose Street struck ten. The Calling Judge in the First Church of the Iterated Christ, and then St. Clement’s, and St. Martin’s, and St. Mary’s.

“Now?”

“Morning Tavern.”

“Obviously.”

“Come with. I gotta fetch Tirry. You were right,” Sheila said.

And kissed her.

“She’s a mess.

And kissed her again.

“You were right.”

And again.

“You’re very smart.”

And once more.

“I know what you’re doing,” Gussy said.

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah,” Gussy said under her breath.

Sheila had not spilled a speck of pot while she was turned around, and now she went back to her task. She rolled joints fast and tight, and she would twist the paper at the end so it resembled a Japanese fan. When she was finished with each one, she reached into the open drawer of her nightstand and plucked a premade cardboard filter, white, from a baggie. Condoms, lube, dildo, rolling papers, a Bible that Precarious Lee had stolen for her, a snub-nosed .38 (loaded), prescription bottles of varying fullness with the labels peeled off. Just the filter. Sheila had thin fingers, but they were strong and did not ever shake, and she closed one eye and fixed the tiny cardboard wedge in the end of the joint.

When she was done, she snapped the cigarette case closed and laid it the bed next to her. Frisbeed The White Album to the floor; it slid across the hardwood and bounced off the baseboard. She spins off the bed and now standing naked with a hip out, hand on it, other on the mattress and finger beckoning Gussy towards her.

“Just a hop, skip, and a jump,” Sheila says. Her hair is short and as red as a screaming infant.

Gussy puts her hands behind her head and says nothing; Sheila looks at her tits.

“Okay, forget the drink. But we should go get her.”

Gussy gets up on her knees, goes to Sheila, kisses her, and again, and again.

“Are you fucking her?”

“Tiresias?”

“Yes.”

Sheila had a low, stuttering laugh–she hated it, thought it was coarse–that went Huh-uh-uh; not the polite laugh or the “I’m agreeing with you,” laugh, the real one that gets forced out at the point of a sharp incongruity. Sheila laughed, and then she took Gussy’s whole head, grabbed it with both hands under the ears and locked it in place: fast, she came in for a kiss and their noses jammed together. Gussy made a small noise like “Mmmm.”

“Holy shit, no. So much no,” Sheila said. “No a million times.”

“Methinks the big-dicked lady doth protest too much.”

“Oh, honey, no. No. I’ve known Tirry for years. She’s my friend, that’s it.”

Gussy asked,

“Am I your friend?”

Sheila kissed her and said,

“Perish the thought.”

There were other things said. Mimosas were mentioned, and the prospect of not drinking at all was discussed further, but when they got to the Morning Tavern, there were shots waiting for them and there was a bathroom stall waiting for them and by noon all three were shitty and in need of tacos.

The seven o’clock show had just been seated, and the movie was ratcheting up. Soon, a cartoon would advise snack purchases: you could hear the auditorium through the thin door of Gussy’s office. It was a wasted day–she had been wasted all day–and she lay there smiling and thinking about getting fucked the night before, and thinking about getting fucked that morning, but she was also thinking about the walk over to the Morning Tavern from Sheila’s apartment: she lived above her shop, and so the door to her building emptied out right onto the Main Drag. Gussy thought about turning left and heading to the Upside, and she thought about Sheila taking her hand and not letting it go for the whole trip, and Gussy wondered if her heart would get broken again. They do that. Sometimes, it seems like all hearts do is break, even in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo has a natural harbor that is shaped like a bass clef, or the right side of a cartoon heart. Whichever imagery you find more appealing, and it is an appealing place. To the north, jutting into the sea and sheering down into the water, was Mt. Lincoln; the hill provided a rocky promontory that sheltered the harbor from the crashing waves of the Pacific and had–geologists from Harper College speculated–ripped a goodly chunk out of the seafloor. This made the harbor deep enough for commercial ships and private boats: the former were unloaded and rigged at the Salt Wharf; the latter tied up and orgied upon at Boone’s Docks. Visitors to the neighborhood would often look out on the crescent cut out of the ocean, bustling and brimming with trade commerce life work houseboats, and they would ask,

“Is the Salt Wharf the one on the left or the right?”

And then their wallets would be stolen, and they would not find out the answer to their question. People didn’t visit Little Aleppo a lot.

The Salt Wharf was on the right, if you’re looking out from the Segovian Hills, or more locally specific, it was on the Upside of town which made little sense until you recall that the Salt Wharf was built before the rich folks decided where they wanted to live, and you can’t move a wharf. Petitions had circulated, nevertheless.

“What the hell is this?”

“A petition, sir.”

“Lady, I’m a stevedore.”

“That’s what the petition is about. We demand you and Boone’s Docks switch places. It works out for everyone: the poor people get to be closer to their jobs, and the rich people get to be closer to their boats. Everyone wins.”

…

“What?”

A Blue Ribbon Committee was even appointed by the Town Fathers, all of whom just happened to live on the Upside, to study the feasibility of the proposal to switch the locations of the Dock and the Wharf. After months of careful deliberation, the committee returned a finding:

“What?”

And that was pretty much the end of that, but–like Flat-Earthers–catch someone drunk on $100 scotch at the right moment, and you’ll hear the idea defended.

“How tough could it be? I put together million-dollar real estate deals. Those are complicated. This? Not so bad. Move this here, move that there. Bing bang boom.”

Mostly, the Upside tolerated the Salt Wharf and the work done there. (It didn’t hurt that many residents of the Upside profited from the work that was done there.) They similarly tolerated the businesses that catered to the Salt Wharf, and the men and women who worked there. A rich Little Aleppian is still a Little Aleppian, and therefore instinctively knows that people are fuck-ups–they get drunk, sloppy, and weird–and that furthermore any suppression of said propensity to fuck up was not just counterproductive, but exponentially counterproductive: folks go squirrelly at the rate they’re told not to, squared. “Keep Off The Grass” signs lead to walked-on grass and stolen signs. Give people a reason to walk someplace that’s not the grass, that’s better than the grass, or so they think. Somewhere they chose of their own free will. If people don’t have somewhere to go, they’ll find a place.

The Upside figured it was better to deal with a couple dives and hovels than to have drunken sailors breaking into people’s houses to make love to the linen closet.

There was the Morning Tavern, which originally opened to service the fishmongers and hands whose day ended thirsty at dawn, and the Hotel Salt Wharf, which housed the sailors on turnaround dreaming of home. Anatoly’s American was a luncheonette: counter with the metal stools attached, square formica-topped tables. Plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, and no menus: sign above the cashier listed your choices. Anatoly’s lived up to its name; only the most American food: hamburgers, pizzas, tacos, French fries. The fries come in plastic baskets diapered with cheap paper that soaks up the grease and salt

Anatoly cooked; Brickel was the waitress, countergirl, cashier. He was tall and rangy, and quiet; she was short and spherical, and spoke only slightly more. Brickel had “You. What you want?” down, and she had no problem telling you how much you owed, but beyond that she was as silent as Anatoly. The only thing that regular customers knew was that Anatoly was most likely not actually named Anatoly, as the joint was called that before he bought it. If and when the man told everyone his real name, then people would call him that, but until then, Anatoly it was. Brickel had a tag on her uniform that read “Brickel.”

After that, no one had a clue as to the details. They were from somewhere not local: they had been overheard speaking to each other, and no one could place the language. A professor from the linguistics department at Harper College once got a chance to eavesdrop on an entire conversation, and she declared that they were using a pidgin of Quechua, Xhosa, Hungarian, and Klingon. There were also several fricatives and plosives she had previously assumed humans incapable of making.

But he made a mean taco, and so no one gave a shit past idle speculation.

If you could do something–do something well–then no matter where you from, Little Aleppo would accept you. Or if you were completely useless, snuck in, and refused to leave. Either way.

Swingtown Nutt was in the corner working on his third grilled cheese sandwich and wondering what shape an inside-out bagel would be. The Blister Sisters were out of their work clothes; their private show from the night before had run long, and they were dragging and shot over their coffees and shared basket of fries. The Reverend Arcade Jones and Deacon Blue were at a table.

Arcade enjoyed eating with the deacon. He was good to talk to, and he also knew when to stop talking and let a hungry man work. And he didn’t comment on how much food Arcade was eating. Lord, did he hate that. Look at the size of me, he thought. Course I got four or five plates. The reverend also liked that the church was buying when he ate with the deacon. They had felt like tacos, and Anatoly made a mean taco, so the two men had walked over from the First Church of the Iterated Christ on Rose Street; when they got there, Arcade decided that he also felt like a club sandwich and a breakfast burrito and a cheeseburger.

“Reverend, my chief concern is that you’re gonna deck him.”

“That is the single most absurd thing I’ve heard today, and I sat in on the Prevaricators Anonymous meeting this morning.

The men’s suit coats were on the back of their chairs: Arcade’s was bright yellow; Deacon Blue’s was suit-colored. Paper napkins covering their thighs.

“This guy’s a real asshole.”

“I don’t overreact to things like that.”

“You tackled a parade on the Main Drag.”

“A parade of Nazis! Context is important.”

“Still impulsive,” Deacon Blue said. “I got your back here, but I’m just worried.”

“Don’t be.”

“Guy’s a button-pusher.”

“Got no buttons. Nothing but switches.”

“Might say certain words.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones took down half of his fish taco in one bite without breaking eye contact with Deacon Blue.

“I have heard those words before, Deacon.”

“Hey, hey, I dunno. Those words, y’know. Sometimes guys hear ’em and they just lose it.”

Sometimes Arcade felt like explaining things to white people, and sometimes he didn’t. He popped the remaining half of the taco in his mouth.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Okay. Just warning you.”

Deacon Blue had spent the past day reading up on Tommy Amici; he had inadvertently discovered an axiom about famous people: you only needed to read two books about them. One by a disinterested biographer, and one by someone they know. It is preferable that the second book is written by someone who bears a grudge. Put them together and you’ve got everything you need to know.

The deacon felt like he knew too much, punch-drunk from Tommy’s bullshit. The divorces, the fights, that coup he had instigated. For Christ’s sake, he had slugged a president. And sure, Deacon Blue thought, it was a president that truly deserved to get the shit kicked out him, but it was the principle of the thing. Intercontinental love affairs and jet-set blowjobs. Jesus, the blowjobs. Deacon Blue had not always been a deacon, and he had received what he thought was a healthy portion of blowjobs, but apparently he was a piker. How did he even find time to sing, the deacon wondered halfway through his research.

From what he could tell, Tommy Amici had only had one love: Cara Thorn. She would laugh at him and then fuck him, or fuck him and then laugh. It was the combination Deacon Blue figured. Other women had laughed at him, and Tommy spat at them and called them bitches; the ones who just fucked him, he called whores, But Cara Thorn did both, and it drove Tommy insane with need; he hated her for it. No other broad made him need, and that’s what he hated: the weakness of it, that he would so easily beg for her. And she called him “Thomas.” No one else did. It wasn’t even Tommy’s name. He didn’t care.

Cara Thorn had wavy hair–all the actresses back then had wavy hair–and she was originally from Piscataway, New Jersey, but you couldn’t tell until she got drunk. She was the fifth of six children, only her sister Lainie was younger; Cara doted on her until she died at age four of meningitis. Father was a butcher with thick, hairy forearms. She inherited his hirsute nature and underwent regular electrolysis, having tried every other form of depilatory there was. Her mother sang beautifully, but she did not inherit that.

The studio paid for the voice lessons while she did bit parts: she was under contract to Barry Alsop at Sunrise Pictures. $400 a week, which sounds good for the 40’s, but that’s before taxes and agency fees and the PR bill and, let’s not forget, she was expected to look presentable when out and about, and that cost quite a bit, so when Stompy Happ asked her to marry him, she didn’t let him finish the question. Stompy had been a child star, and he had not grown since: he was a cherubic and tiny thing with a puppy’s face, and he was also the biggest goddamned pervert Cara had ever met. Weird shit she could simply not get into, even though she tried. The marriage lasted almost five weeks, and she did not return any of the wedding gifts.

After that was the bandleader, Koy Montage, but that didn’t last–a clarinetist just wasn’t going to make it–and the roles were getting bigger, and so was the money now that she was represented by Sharky Katz at the Bugle Agency: she played doomed countesses, lusty wenches, an empress or two. The breakthrough was Mata Hari. Cara played the spy/exotic dancer to perfection, and it was a big budget flick: there were sets of France, Holland, England, everywhere. No expense was spared after first being haggled over. It was a hit. Variety called her “sex personified,” and Spotlight said she was “a delicious dish that may inspire tumescence in observant viewers.” She didn’t believe them. The thing about beautiful people is that some of them are just as fucked-up as ugly ones, and Cara Thorn just saw a little girl from Piscataway in the mirror, a little girl who couldn’t help her sister. Booze helped. It does that.

Cara and Tommy met in Tahoe at the Borderline Casino & Lodge. He was singing, she was waiting out the six-week residency requirement to file for divorce. Same suite she had stayed in last time she got divorced. Be cheaper to buy a place if this is going to become a habit, she thought, and poured herself more scotch. Everyone told her how gorgeous Tahoe was in the fall. Everyone was a stooge: Tahoe was boring. Ooh, a lake. Big shit, a lake. There was a lake in Piscataway. Vegas was an hour away, but Koy was there. With his drummer. Cara was fairly sure she knew what was going on there. Women can tell.

Reno was out of the question.

She read, drank, made long-distance calls for hours. And then: Tommy. The Borderline plumped til the seams burst, spilling debutantes and comics and viscounts and hookers out into the lake’s implacable depths: everybody came out for Tommy, full occupancy and then some. The casino rocked on its foundations and there was a wheel of fortune you could hear clacking and stealing from miles away out the doors, open to let in the breeze; the sky outside was purple and the dealers were all white. The only black people in the room were celebrities. There were no clocks in the casino, but all the lights dimmed at 7:50–once, twice, three times–and chips were abandoned, roulette balls ignored, a mad rush to the showroom to their tables to the spotlight to the overture and then: Tommy.

Still skinny and hipless, waist the diameter of a Marlboro cigarette smoldering in a heavy glass ashtray on a wooden stool; he would light them, puff puff, set them down, forget them; the ash would prop up the filter until the drummer hit his toms BROCKADOOM and the whole shebang would crumble into the ashtray’s cupola. Gleaming black tuxedo–beyond black, infrablack, the color of a landscape painted by a blind man–with satin lapels that shimmered in the spotlight and crepe piping up the legs. Warm Beside You was the opener–Tommy would always sing it as Warm Inside You during soundcheck–and it was a sad tale about a schmuck, but the brass section was hopping and the tempo was brisk: couple had a fight and the guy leaves, dead of winter, to seek refuge in his local bar and he has an imaginary conversation with her. I’ll take cold and alone over warm beside yooooooooou, Tommy held the last note as the band shifted chords beneath him and the conductor made a fist. For a tiny moment, there was nothing in the room, no noise sound music, just the reverberation of an echo, and then the swells swelled up in another standing ovation, his second of the night. Some entertainers got standing ovations for performing, but Tommy Amici got them for showing up.

Except Cara. Front row of tables, only one sitting. Her wavy hair was up, one strand of pearls. Yellow dress–she was so tanned that she could pull off yellow–with bustling and crinoline and all that busy shit that was the fashion of the moment. Legs crossed at the ankle and looking up at Tommy, who was looking back at her, and so she smiled with only half of her mouth, and raised one eyebrow and he was looking back at her still. Was her drink full enough? She examined it, determined that it was not, searched the crowd for the waiter. Anything but look back at Tommy, and his eyes that were green as the Verdance in the summer. That waiter was around here somewhere, and she casually wiped a hair that did not exist from her cleavage. He was still looking. Women can tell.

Tommy sang All That I Am and Meet Me In My Heart and Last Train To Lonely and The Devil’s In The Details.

You say you love me
But
You tell me you need me
When
Oh baby I’ll call you
If
The devil’s iiiiiiiiiin the details.

The showroom was full of stars. Grown men with little boys’ names: Johnny, Sammy, Kicky, Tushy. Women with elegant necks who wore dresses with sleeves. Fuck ’em all, Tommy thought. Look at ’em clap. Like seals. Urk urk, you lowlife motherfuckers. You want a song? Here’s a song.

I knew you were his
From how he took your coat,
And the way he pulled out the chair.
I remember when you sat here;
Now you’re sitting over there

When the band stops playing,
We’ll play musical chairs.

Ladies wearing jewelry clapped, and men in large watches whistled and stomped their feet. Cara applauded politely, and the crowd swept her back into the casino. Buzzing, everyone buzzing and buzzed–at least–and hurling down chips onto the tables: it was a competition, who could not give a shit the loudest, and the dealers called BLACKJACK the top of their voices with a smile that didn’t reach their eyes; a very famous comedian climbed atop the craps table and removed his trousers to the delight of the punters, and then: Tommy. It’s Tommy, they murmured; he’s here, they said. Sauntered. Pointing. Hey, Stevie, you still alive.? Haw haw haw. Another ovation, of course: he had shown up.

Cara did not turn around. She was at a blackjack table playing blue chips; she had no idea how much they were worth, but she thought they complemented her dress.

“Take a break, yeah?” Tommy said to the dealer. Folded hundred in the shirt pocket. Pit boss nodded. Dealer scrammed.

She had a ten and a three up in front of her. The dealer was showing a five.

“You wanna stand on that.”

“I’ll stand wherever I like, thank you,” and she looked up at him for the first time, eye contact, and that was all there was to it.

When Tommy Amici smiled, his eyes got greener.

“Just friendly advice.”

“We friends?”

“Perish the thought.”

Cara was a good actress, and you could not tell how hard her heart was going thrump thrump thrump.

“Hit me.”

“Oh, you don’t want that.”

She took a cigarette out of her clutch bag. Tommy had a lighter.

“Hit me.”

Queen of Hearts.

“Busted.”

“Am I?”

Tommy flicked the card away like a cockroach on a wedding cake. Filthy thing.

“Dunno. Haven’t dealt yet.”

“Hop to it, slowpoke.”

Eight of Diamonds.

“Well, ain’t that lucky?” he said.

“Mister…”

“Amici.”

“Mister Amici, where would a girl be in this world without luck?”

“She’d be getting some fuckin’ TACOS but fuckin’ people are trying to stop the processions and proceedings because of jealousy and the motherfuckin’ patriarchy and the FUCK are you lookin’ at, pal?”

Tiresias Richardson was fucked up and wanted tacos, and Anatoly’s American served up a mean taco. She was leaning–sprawling–on Big-Dicked Sheila, who looked vaguely embarrassed but also quite used to the feeling. Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, followed them in. The Reverend Arcade Jones and Deacon Jones looked up, caught their eye.

The women froze like teenagers caught out on a panty raid.

“Reverend,” Sheila said with an involuntary curtsy. (She had had several drinks and several toots.)

“Deacon,” Gussy said, and waved. (She had had the same amount of whatnot as Sheila.)

“Tacos!” Tiresias yelled. (She was fucked up and wanted tacos.)

The Reverend Arcade Jones put his breakfast burrito down on one of his empty plates, smiled wide and friendly, raised a giant hand. Deacon Blue was turned around in his seat, but he tried to adopt a cheerful posture. It was tough; he had a dodgy back.

“Ladies,” the reverend said.

“Hi, girls,” the deacon said.

Sheila and Gussy poured Tiresias into a chair. Anatoly started making tacos, chicken: Tiresias had been in before and he knew what she liked. Deacon Blue swiveled back towards the table. The Reverend Arcade Jones picked up his breakfast burrito.

“Please repeat your concerns to me,” the reverend said.

“Knock it off.”

“No, no: you were worried about how I would behave at the meeting.”

“Not ‘worried.’ I had concerns.”

“And they were?”

“TACOS!” Tiresias mumble-yelled from across the room.

“Tirry, shush,” Sheila told her.

“All gone now,” Deacon Blue said.

“You sure? You sure you’re not still worried about the sober man of God and not the actress who’s stinking drunk at noon?”

“In her defense, she works nights.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones took a bite out of his breakfast burrito.

“I’ll talk to her,” the deacon said.

“Yeah.”

Anatoly worked the grill. He cooked with his nose–the beef smelled like this when it was ready, the pork smelled like that–on the metal slab. 400 degrees; he would chop at it with his metal spatula, the oils would sizzle and pop pop pop: order of bacon, burger plain, burger cheese, shrimp for the tacos; eggs in the top right corner: sunnyside and scrambled they would bubble and he would poke them with the edge of his worn metal spatula POP again the yellow juice hits his apron as the church bells start to go WHANG. It is noon: first, the First Church of the Iterated Christ, and then St. Clemen’s, and St. Martin’s, and St Mary’s. WHANG a dozen times to let everyone know that the sun is half-dead and it is time for lunch in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

No one writes songs about Saturday morning. Sunday mornings are for church and hangovers, and Monday mornings have a sense of tragedy about them, but Saturday morning? No one even notices. Most sleep through it. Torah Torah Torah, the synagogue, is brimming and davening  from dawn until lunchtime. Healthy people love Saturday morning: they go on healthy hikes, and then eat healthy food.  Saturday morning was Saturday night’s ignored little brother: morally superior, but lacking flash.

The Morning Tavern is open as usual; they are just getting started in there; the jukebox is barely warmed up since the joint opened at dawn. There are no windows, and the front door is actually two doors: one at the sidewalk, and another at the bar, separated by a short corridor. Only artificial light inside. Neon sign in the shape of a bullseye advertising Arrow beer. Rectangular lamp hanging over the pool table. It is a flattering light scheme. You are at least 30% more fuckable in the Morning Tavern than in real life shpuh-KACK the break from a game of nine-ball going on. All those nice colored balls sitting there minding their own business until the white ball came barrelling in with its inherent violence.

Walk in the outside door, two steps, through the curtain of thick black plastic, two steps, pull open the inside door. Take off your sunglasses and let your eyes adjust. The bar is on your left, el-shaped. Circular tables on your right, and booths along that wall. Pool table in the back. Jukebox, too. There is Sonny Frist, and he is not wearing pants; he used to be an investment banker, whatever that is. Shambala Ohm, who is at the bar, once swindled a MacArthur Fellow out of his entire grant; locals considered that an act of genius. The Poet Laureate is at a table with a composition tablet and tequila. Sometimes, the Poet Laureate slept at night and drank during the day, and sometimes vice versa. Change in life is change in art, the Poet Laureate would say, and no one would listen.

The Rejection is on the walls, plastered and fluttering in the air conditioner’s gravity. Dear John letters, and a letter from John Deere asking that Morrison Struthers please stop sending them photographs of himself naked atop their tractors. Buck slips from the assistants to Hollywood agents saying that “they were keeping you in mind.” Eviction notices. Repo claims. A cease-and-desist order addressed to the entire neighborhood from the International Olympic Committee. Pin up your failure: wins you a cheer and a free drink. Pleased to meet you, one of us.

Tiresias Richardson hits C17 on the jukebox, and an old punk song about hitting children with sporting equipment comes on; she pogos up and down, raises both arms in the air with fingers outstretched. She does not know the words, just the sounds that the singer makes, and she sings along: theater kid voice singing punk doesn’t work but Tiresias couldn’t muster up a shit with a drill sergeant and a bran muffin. Another week with a job, another week as a working goddamned actress–a rare bird–five more shows under her corset. At three hours a night, that was a fifteen hour workweek, and Tiresias was exhausted. She had dated a guy doing his residency at St. Agatha’s once, and he had to work 36-hour shifts. Tiresias would just let people die. She had an artistic temperament: exuberant sloth punctuated by intense concentration, seasoned with tantrums and substance abuse.

The show had gone well, the show always went well even when the studio caught fire. (The studio occasionally caught fire.) The movie was The Oubliette of Doctor Frmamrf.

“Paul, I can’t even pronounce this.”

“Frmamrf. What’s so difficult?” Paul Loomis, Jr., replied, desperately eying his office door; Tiresias had planted herself directly in front of it.

“And what the hell is an oubliette?”

“I think it’s like a Renault.”

“It’s not a car, Paul.”

“I took Spanish.”

Paul Loomis, Jr., did not like his job. He did not like the windowless building on the Main Drag with giant red letters over the door that spelled out KSOS, and he did not like dealing with the advertisers or the unions or the talent (especially the talent), and he despised the public. They wrote letters. Called. They had opinions. They were offended. They wanted a pizza and had misdialed. Bastards, the lot of them, he thought. It was his father’s fault, all of it, his miserable life and this airless dungeon; cursed by blood, doomed from birth to labor in this closet; he imagined it bricked up in front of him: he was Fortunato, for the love of God, but whom had he insulted? All of this was his father’s fault, including the baldness.

Paul Loomis, Sr., had built KSOS in the 50’s with his own bare hands. (He wrote the checks to the contractors by hand, so he figured that counted.) Television would defeat Communism, Paul Loomis, Sr., had decided. Couldn’t trust writers, and certainly not the radio. Could be anyone behind the typewriter or microphone. Might be a Bolshevik. Most writers were Bolsheviks, and if they weren’t they were pussies. But teevee? You could look a man in the face. Size him up, judge the straightness of his shot. Paul Loomis, Sr., could spot a Commie within two seconds of making eye contact.

At least that’s what he told people: he liked people to think he was half-nuts. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the Communist bit–Paul Loomis, Sr., hated Communism with all his heart, like a teenager’s first love–but he wasn’t some Billy Jack simpleton blathering about his precious bodily fluids: teevee was propaganda. What was said, sure, but mostly what you showed: plenty, overabundant plenty, and gleaming prizes and vacations to spectacular locations (drinks not included), and all the men were tall and all the women wore pearls. The teevee imprinted a baseline of opulent society that was thought to be expected: well, why didn’t you own a house, car, designer handbag like the ones Parisians are wearing to go on strike this season? The teevee could tell people what was normal, Paul Loomis, Sr., realized. It could tell them what they wanted.

There was Yesterday’s Tomorrows, the soap opera. It was live at first, one o’clock sharp unless the camera broke, live from the main studio on the first floor; the story of the Chambers family and their town, Valley Heights. Betrayal, affairs, secret twins; someone would always get stabbed during sweeps week. The actors were hired less for their acting skills than for their ability to memorize an hour’s worth of dialogue every day without going insane. Several of them did, and so cue cards were implemented; the psychotic breaks continued, and Paul Loomis, Sr., came to the conclusion that it was just an actor thing.

Eggheads was his game show, which pitted scientists, academics, and lawyers up against “real people” in trivia competitions; the show was fixed, and blatantly so: sometimes actors from Yesterday’s Tomorrows would play the scientists, often not even changing out of costume. No one in the neighborhood minded much. Little Aleppians knew everything on teevee was make-believe.

Paul Loomis, Sr., thought that KSOS would be the first of many, but it was the only; his empire never had a chance to expand. He spent his time teetering on financial ruin: it was tough to receive the channel outside Little Aleppo, which kept ad rates down. He ran commercials for his own inventions: a towel with a holster for “dangerous beaches;” the Car-B-Q, which was a grill that plugged into your Chevy’s cigarette lighter; the SlapWop, which was an oversized hand made for the express purpose of striking Italians. (He got a visits from both the Catholic priest from St. Mary’s and the large gentlemen from Cagliostro’s the day after the ad aired, and the SlapWop was quietly pulled from the market.) Nothing worked. KSOS made just enough money to not fail, but not enough to pool together and do something else. Don’t touch that dial.

And Paul Loomis, Jr., did not want that: he wanted to touch the dial, rip the dial off, throw it as far as his skinny, freckled arm would allow. Fuck teevee, fuck everything about it: the smiles, and the suits, and the smarm. Big tits and bullshit, he thought, that’s all it was and–what’s more–that’s all it ever could be. Ideas? Humanity? Connection, one-to-one connection unmediated by anything but the heart and mind and genitals: unworkable on the small screen. There was no outside in there.

He liked it outside, at first because it was where his father wasn’t, and then for its own pleasures. The smell of a redwood forest in the morning, sweet and somehow meaty, and sunset from an unknown goat path leading through the Segovian Hills up to the monastery of the Sebastianite monks. At 18, he got away: college, one as odd as the neighborhood he fled, Far Waters College, an experimental-type school. 30 boys, ten teachers, a built-out ranch on the edge of the Low Desert. The mountains were in view, and there were long traipses through the brush, days-long, and then back to the ranch for Homer and Kant, and Paul Loomis, Jr., fell in love. With nature. With being outside. And with a tall, blond boy named Snick Hartford, but that’s not the story we’re telling.

After graduation, he was filling out applications to be a Park Ranger, happily. He had never enjoyed paperwork so much, and then his father told him to throw that shit away because he was going to work at the station. Paul Loomis, Jr., could never stand up to his father, but he didn’t throw the application away. It’s still in his desk in the office he hides in on the second floor of KSOS studios on the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, where there is no nature and, even if there were, the building had no windows. He looks at it sometimes, and wonders if there’s an age cutoff for acceptance; when his father said he was going to work at the station, he had simply said, “Yes, sir,” and that was it; he could not argue with his father, and now here he was an old fucking man (not really, but he felt it) being barred from his office by a woman he had hired because she had big tits and would work cheap. Paul Loomis, Jr., thought that he didn’t deserve this treatment, and then he thought that cowards deserve everything they get. His pills were in his office, too.

“It’s barely even a movie, Paul,” Tiresias said, hands across her chest.

“It’s fine, it’s great.”

“A couple of the scenes are just shots of the script pages.”

“That’s French. New Wave.”

Tiresias crossed her arms harder and said flatly,

“Really.”

“Godard did it.”

“He most certainly did not.”

“Adieu, Mon Pamplemousse. Groundbreaking film. Oh! Look over there!”

He pointed down the hallway; she didn’t fall for it.

“Really.”

“What do you want from me, Tiresias? It’s the Late Movie. The movies are crap. That’s how it works,” he said, and then tried flattering her. “Besides, everyone tunes in for you. Movie doesn’t matter, you’re the star.”

She knew what he was doing, but–on the other hand–agreed with him. She was the star, she thought, and it was nice (if a bit late) of him to notice that, and to fucking acknowledge that: the ratings were up, just about the highest they could go, and it certainly wasn’t the films, was it, and then Tiresias thought about asking for a raise and holy shit how did he sneak by her?

“Mother–”

SLAM the door whamped close, and locked.

“–FUCKER!”

There was little arguing with a door, though she did for a bit to make herself feel better, and then back to her dressing room, Masada. Big-Dicked Sheila would be by soon to help her into Draculette’s clothes and face, but it was up to her to get into character and it was so much easier with a drink. Everything was. She had brought a bottle of red wine in with her: Merlot, Cabernet, she didn’t give a shit; she made her purchases based on label art and price. Red, not too sweet, and preferably from California. Wine glasses with no stems, just the cups. Don’t bother to unwrap the foil, pierce it straight through with the corkscrew’s point and POP liquid joy, sweetie, and if the glass is kept full then who will be the poorer for it?

Not I, Tiresias thought, and chugged half of her wine, flipped on the lights of her makeup mirror, pure white and accusatory, and then the rest of the wine, and now the jukebox lights, red and blue and flattering, she is standing–she is boogieing–in the Morning Tavern: she does not care if anyone is watching, but she also hopes they are. R38 is next, another one of her picks. Tiresias is busting that jukebox like a bronco: bar music–bar music!–with guitars and thwacking drums, and the songs are about fucking, or fights. Or bullshit. There was some godly bar music whose lyrics orbited the general topic of bullshit, and R38 was a prime example: Orientalist hibberdeejibber about deserts and Shangri-La, but overlaying a guitar riff that surely was the Christ WHANGY-DANG…WHANGY-DANG, WHANGY-DANG…WHANGY-DANG martial in its horniness, and every head in the bar bobbed by the end of the first measure. In a club, the music moves the dance floor, but in a bar, the music is the dance floor; conversations and come-ons bounce on that rock and roll rhythm coming from the jukebox. Perfect bar music makes you feel like you’re in a movie.

Back to the bar and her drink. She has switched from wine to vodka, which is a terrible idea unless you add cocaine, so she has. Substances have very few acceptable combinations; the best advice is always to pick a horse and stay on until the finish line. Mixing alcohol and pills was a good way to have a short evening, and you shouldn’t do cocaine and heroin simultaneously, but coke and booze? O, sweet symbiosis.

Anson Truncke waddles up dressed in white with orange shoes. He tells people that he is a freelance homosexual, and then refuses to define the phrase.

“You know anything about the Pony Express?’

“Much as the next girl, long as the next girl’s not a historian. AAAAHahaha!”

“Missouri to San Francisco in ten days. There were Paiute in the way. Mountains, too. There was The West in the way. Ten days. We don’t know the riders’ names, not most of them. Who could be bothered writing such things down? The boys are dead now, and their names are dead, too, because no one bothered writing them down. So we don’t know the names. But, you have…you have heard of the Pony Express?’

His ears are too large for his head, and his nails are immaculate.

“Of course I’ve heard of the Pony Express”

“Yes. Yes, of course. It’s part of the patois. It soaked into the limestone, and now it’s in the water supply. It gets in us, America, without us even knowing. The stories and how…19 months.”

Anson Truncke sips his drink, brown with ice cubes.

“19 months what?”

“The Pony Express. That’s as long as it lasted. Like a flashbulb. Lit up and then gone forever, but flashbulbs leave images in their wake. Scars made out of light. And that’s where we live, you see. Surrounded by scars.”

He drains the rest of his drink and walks away. Tiresias shrugs, fingers the small plastic baggie in the pocket of her rust-colored hoodie. You have to be prepared for the occasional drive-by philosophizing in the Morning Tavern. There are two men in suits and crew-cut hair across the bar from her. Slugs her vodka and cocks her head at them and says,

“You’re not in this story.”

They rise and leave without a word.

It was a jail cell, a certain kind of jail cell, anyway. The door was in the middle of the ceiling, and the ceiling was high. Prisoner enters via ladder, ladder gets pulled up. Different psychological timbre than a normal cell, tended to drive its occupants starkers within short order. Something about being buried alive. Oubliette.

Who Dr. Frmamrf was, Tiresias had no idea. There was no such character in The Oubliette of Dr Frmamrf, nor was there any sort of prison cell, let alone a specialized one with a fancy foreign name; instead, it was about a town where the mailboxes come to life (evil life) and begin eating arms. Just stop going to the mailbox! she yelled at the screen, and the dummy actor would go looking for his Sears catalogue and get his arm eaten. And repeat. Tiresias lost sympathy for the victims quickly.

Again and again–it may have been the same actor in different clothes and a wig for several of the de-armings–they went in there looking for their checks or magazines and SHA-SHWAMP they were no longer up to challenge of shoelaces, over and over: it became hypnotic; there was little story–a fat sheriff, a psychic housewife–just the same avoidable mistake, looped and infinite, unavoidable.

And the makeup, the dress, the wig, the wheelchair, the hall, the couch, and then the red light which is the difference between live and dead air, and which must be obeyed. First rule of show biz: when the light goes on, dance. Wanna be an artist? Get a garret, and starve until you’re inspired. Wanna be on teevee? Do what the light tells you. If you won’t, there’s someone who will. There’s a dozen who will, and so when the red light erupts, Tiresias waits in the dressing room while Draculette tells jokes and shakes her tits, sometimes at the same time.

There is a woman vomiting beer in the stall to her left, a couple fucking in the stall to her right. The toilet paper dispensers are made of metal and hold two industrial-sized rolls; they have a flat top that was not designed as a platform for cocaine use, but might as well have been. Tiresias does two small lines. One for each nostril because she believes that all things should be in balance. She walks back into the bar, careful not make eye contact with the occupants of either stall.

Sheila is meeting her later–soon?–pretty soon, at least, whatever, no matter, she will be here; the jukebox is glowing and she has quarters. B12 for a shot of energy, that sounds right. The opening track from that album everyone knows by heart, the real long song with all the bits and pieces and the motorcycle in the middle, some fat man pretending to be a 16-year-old with a hard-on, and she throws back her head and prays for just one more night of all this teenage fuckery. Every guitar in the world for just a quarter at the jukebox, and Tiresias Richardson is a simple girl: all she wants is every guitar in the world, turn ’em up, turn ’em up, blow the grid and sentence us all to darkness and moonlight just for one last dumbass power chord BA-WHANG the Morning Tavern vibrates and bops slideways atop the music making up the dance floor, conversations and come-ons behind walls with no windows and two doors, an exception from the sun’s brutality. Just a little pocket universe.

I got your pocket universe right here, she says to no one and scratches her ass; she is aware of being part of something, someone else’s bullshit, roped in and tangled up now, but only vaguely and chalks it up to the coke; in the future, she will sin no more, but Tiresias is not in the future: she is in the Morning Tavern, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

In the Verdance, where everything grows, there is a Hand. Ten feet long from fingertip to the base of the palm, and set smack in the middle of the park right next to the main path through it, which was called the Thoroughfare. The Hand was made of bronze, and the side of the thumb that ran alongside the Thoroughfare had been polished shiny by decades of passers-by rubbing it for luck. Upturned, welcoming: the Hand beckoned you and reached out like Adam straining for God’s touch on that ceiling in Italy. Children swung from the pinky, and teenagers fucked in the palm, and grown-ups gave the thumb a stroke or two hoping for Providence to take notice on their way to put a dollar on the Mother Mary. College students on acid would make plans: if we get separated, meet at the Hand. Draculette had done a photo shoot up there, pretended it was King Kong. Couples got married under the ring finger.

On average, the Hand was sold twice a week by conmen. The Town Fathers put up a sign warning people not to buy the Hand, that it wasn’t for sale, but the conmen just incorporated it into their pitches. (“That sign’s just for the rubes. It’s to scare off the little fish.”)

Harper T. Harper had bought the Hand for–no, not bought, nothing so pedestrian: he had bequeathed it to–Little Aleppo when he returned from making his fortune in the Congo; he would tell anyone who would listen that the statue was a replica of his hand, but that was a lie: Harper was a stubby, wide man with stubby, wide fingers and so the artist had used one of his friends, a concert pianist with elegant fingers, as the reference and just told Harper that he was the model. He would hold his hand up next to the Hand, and demand whomever he was speaking to acknowledge the likeness. They always would. Little Aleppians know instinctively to lie to the rich and powerful.

Leaves fell on it in the fall, and the summer sun baked it to where it burnt flesh in the late afternoon; the statue would expand and contract a full glove size with the heat and cold.

“I don’t think PHWOO this is a good plan,” Stuart Brand said, and palmed the joint as the mom with a stroller walked by. Violet Violence stuck her tongue out at the baby and thrust out her hand for the joint.

“Gimme.”

“Be cool.”

“Suck my dick. Gimme.”

Stuart gave her the joint and wondered about his taste in friends. His hair poofed out unfortunately, and he wore shapeless, grey, canvas shoes.

“Why are you a pussy, Stuart? Where action meets ideology. Right? PHWOO You said that’s where you live,” she said. “The intersection. You said that in your fucking smart guy voice. ‘I live at the prattle.’ Remember that?”

“Praxis”

“Fucking whatever!” Violet walked faster, ahead of him so that he was rushing to catch up and she had control of the conversation again. She didn’t know why she put up with Stuart. All he did was read, and no fiction. Philosophy. Symbology. Entheoneutics. Autodidactics. And Hunter Thompson. Violet had met some boys in college who didn’t read Hunter Thompson, but only because they didn’t read anything at all.

They walked past a couple on a bench. They were breaking up: he was trying not to cry; she was trying not to laugh.

“It’s a good plan, Stuart.”

“It’s kidnapping.”

“It’s direct action,” Violet said; hit the joint again; PHWOO; handed it to Stuart. “Direct action. We’re like Martin Luther King.”

“Leave him out of this.”

“This is what Martin Luther King would have wanted. He would support us, Stuart. What’s the difference between the fucking lunch counter sit-ins and what we’re gonna do? It’s direct action. Direct fucking action. You see a wrong and you deal with it. You fucking deal with it DIRECTLY,” she yelled this last part at him, and several squirrels stopped gathering nuts to look at her.

They were walking south, and on their right was where the Pulaski were all buried; they did not know that.

“Whose neighborhood is this? Does it belong to the people who fucking live there or to some asshole who fucking swoops in with his fucking money? Do we not deserve a fucking VOTE, Stuart?”

Violet was getting louder and gesticulating wilder. He snatched the joint from her hand mid-gesture.

“Where’s our SAY? Some rich shitbird who thinks that his fucking money buys him everything he wants comes to OUR neighborhood and gets to fucking DICTATE what happens? What fucking stays and goes? Bullshit! BULLSHIT!”

She stopped on the Thoroughfare. Stuart walked a few paces before realizing that she had, and then he stopped, too, and turned around. He put his hands in his pockets.

“I just don’t know–”

“You’re never gonna fucking KNOW, Stuart,” she said. “KNOWING is for pussies. We have to DO. We need to be the change we seek in Little Aleppo.”

Violet Violence, whose real name was Melisandre Boone, was wearing a ribbed white tank top under dark-blue overalls. She took the doobie back from Stuart, and thought about changing her name again. Jen O’Cide? Guernica Prolapse? She would need a new name. Violet thought many of the world’s problems were based in the fact that we remained the same people our whole lives. Be somebody else, she thought. Choose your own adventure.

“The sky is held up by the stars,” said the Reverend Busybody Tyndale.

“The stars are buttressed by the sky,” said Peter.

Night comes on weird in the desert. As the sun sloughs off its duties, there’s a false image of the starfield in the sky–Venus shining bright and blue under the evening moon–and then the sun fucks off at last under the horizon’s skirt; the Heavens are above you, prickling and full of shine.

“The night is dangerous for man, but prosperous for the bat. The stars hold secrets for the fortune-teller, and the pagan, and the scientist, but also the moth. Cats, Peter. To a cat, night is day. The nighttime is the territory of others’. Not man, Peter. Man is a daytime creature.”

“But do we not stay up late?”

“Yes, we do.”

“And are we not man?”

“We are,” Busybody answered.

“Then man is adaptable in all ways. Adaptability is the Christ, Reverend. If the Christ is human, then He must be adaptable. This is man’s greatest adaptation. Not the thumb. Not language. Adaptability. The coldest climes, the warmest: you will find man. And thus you will find the Christ.”

“Gotta go along to get along.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

The two men were lying, naked, by the Jeremiad spring. It was growing colder rapidly and they would soon need to put on clothes, but for now the chill was a prickly, pimply, pleasure; their goose bumps postured and plumped; vestigial coats of fur, long abandoned, puffing and protecting the men from the Low Desert’s dangers. They lay in a straight line next to the spring; the crowns of their heads touched. Peter was six feet tall, which was large for those days, and broad in the shoulders and chest. His wrists were thick. Busybody was around 5’2″, which was small even for those days, and scrawny by nature. He was very pale, and even though the Pulaski women stuffed him with food every night, his ribs were still visible.

But they had the same hair, kind of. Peter had been born a Pawnee. He didn’t remember much. The lodge, huge in his mind. His sister during a winter storm. His mother had a crooked front tooth. In his next memory, he is in a white man’s school, and he is wearing hard shoes and his hair had been cut very short. When Peter left what he had been told was his home not too many years later, he let his hair grow back out and never cut it again. Busybody Tyndale, on the other hand, was a reverend. A man of God, and is not cleanliness next to Godliness? Never during his travels through America did Busybody get too scruffy: the first stop in any new town was the barber’s, and if he did not have the money for the cut and shave, then he would sweep up and do chores to pay. He insisted for a time on keeping clean-cut after reaching the Pulaski village, even though no one had scissors; Peter did it with his knife and he did an even worse job than you might figure. Eventually, and after much chewing of the Peregrine leaf, Busybody stopped caring and let his hair grow.  Both of them wore loose ponytails secured with leather ties.

“Do we tell them?”

“Who?” Peter said.

“Everyone. America. Everyone. About the Christ. About His infinicy. About the sanctity of all souls, and that all that exists has soul. Do we tell them about the specter of soul? That the Animists, heathens though they were, were correct and that all things live? The spring lives and contains the Christ, and that which contains the Christ is the Christ.”

Busybody pointed towards the spring, which emptied into a pool shaped like the symbol for infinity. The earth’s water, the deep water, the water under the water: it bubbled up from subterranean cisterns, aquifers left from the last continental shift and forgotten about by the mountains, clear and cool and stars reflected off the surface. They twinkled in the sky, shimmered in the water.

“Shall we alert the press? Contact the White House? The authorities must be notified. The serious people, Peter. The serious people need to know about the Christ. The newspapers say that they’re Christians, but they clearly do not know the Christ.”

“They do not chew the Peregrine leaf.”

“And they murder and steal. And they consume. Dig. Carve. Oh, so much carving. Man from earth. Man from woman. Man from Christ. All carved up and claimed. Mine, mine, mine.”

“Do you know how you can tell a serious person, Preacher?”

“No, how?”

“Their clothes are uncomfortable.”

Busybody laughed and said,

“Then we must be the least serious people in the country.”

It was almost totally dark now in the Low Desert. The Milky Way was a smoky highway across the sky, smudgy with vague barriers, and crackling with light-brown and purple off-ramps to the Outer Worlds.

Penny Arrabbiata had mapped them all. The Cowcatcher Nebula and the Aquiline Variable. Wandering black holes screaming through the Oxbridge Quadrant. She wondered about the worlds sucked up: there was no infinite, infinity was some speed freak mathematician’s jerk-off dream, but there were so many, o so many, and surely anything that could exist did, and surely anything that might happen would, and through the 100-inch telescope of Harper Observatory, she saw all; sometimes she wondered about the lives of whomever was living on those planets orbiting those faraway stars, but not for long. Whatever she might think, whatever conclusions arrived at about aliens: all just fiction. Speculation, and not fit for a scientist. Little Aleppo had enough novelists, Penny thought. Let them make shit up down in the Morning Tavern. She dealt in the provable: helium ionisation kappa mechanisms, Manseur’s Constant, massive baryonic objects.

The telescope was pointed towards the Ophiuchus constellation. The Greeks thought it was Laocoōn; the Romans, Asclepius. Doomed either way, Penny thought. Never make the gods take an interest in you. The gods do not fight fair. The gods send snakes. No, she thought as she took a sip of coffee from a white mug that read HARPER OBSERVATORY: WHERE THE STARS SHINE in blue and yellow letters. Not snakes. The gods send lawyers. Much worse.

Harper Observatory was built around a 100-inch telescope that, for a while, was the biggest on the West Coast. He wasn’t the king anymore, but he could do the job. (Penny tried not to anthropomorphize the ‘scope, but it was just so damned dick-shaped.) At dusk, the two metal lips on the hemispherical outbubbling opened–almost silent–and the sky was reflected in the polished glass, and flipped, refracted, amplified and enhanced, and then shipped down wires to the screens in the control room tucked into the outer wall on the ground floor. There were computers in there, and a little plug-in heater, and a tiny bathroom, too. Penny hated it in there.

She liked the Prime Focus. That was where the eyepiece was. It was still a telescope, no matter how overgrown, so it had an eyepiece that you could wedge yourself into and give the universe the old hairy eyeball. 80 feet up by a narrow utility staircase. Above the calibrated cannon of the ‘scope, in a cylindrical chamber ten feet in diameter and exposed to the elements when the doors opened. Circular bank of instruments in the middle, and screens and wiring and piping tattooing the outer walls. One chair, no bathroom. Metal grated floor.

And the stars.

You had an eyepiece–you looked into it, physically pressed your ocular socket into the hard plastic–and a joystick with a button on it. Like a video game. What are you looking at? The Ursa Major Moving Group or the Barnard Nebula? Focus, focus. The viewer has a crosshatch on it. Line it up like a sniper. Curse the clouds. You have it? Then press the button, and the building will respond: the great dome of the Observatory would, when commanded, rotate in precise accord with the movement of the sky. Smoothly, so you wouldn’t know until the sky pinked and you were facing the opposite direction than when you began your night. A woman named Anthema Proff had written a novel set in a fictional version of Little Aleppo that featured the Observatory, and she had used the silent swiveling as a metaphor and a theme: how you can get all turned around without knowing it. That happens to people sometimes. The book was called Up and Down Skyway Drive, and it won several awards. Peggy didn’t read it. What use was fiction when there were Blue Stragglers?

Ophiuchus is not ten stars like the Greeks thought. The Greeks didn’t have 100-inch telescopes. There are tens of millions of stars in the segment of the sky our benighted ancestors described via myth, and things much weirder than stars. Globular clusters. Dwarf spheroidals. Spiral Hexologens. Bok globules. Blue Stragglers were stars, just stars, but out-of place in context. They were too massive and too blue: stars have a sequence, they age just like we do, and for where these freak stars were, they were too young. Misfits. They should not have been there. Wrong place, wrong time. They didn’t make sense, and yet there they were: twinkling, and ready to receive wishes. There are billions of stars in the sky, and some of them are not where they are supposed to be.

Penny Arrabbiata was wearing long johns under her flannel shirt and jeans. Peacoat from the army/navy store and wool hat, too. Cold at night with those metal lips opened up to the heavens. If she were immortal, she’d never leave. Let the Main Drag burn and rot and disappear, leave the mainland for the buffalo and grass; all she wanted was her telescope and the sky. And glorious night. One more perfect, silent, pitch-dark night under the stellar eaves just like the first night in her backyard with her father, who named the sky for her. Penny did not believe in God, nor would she admit to praying, but she still did: one more cloudless night, Lord. My work is not done, Lord. Why did You assign me the task if You won’t give me the time to finish it, Lord? Take my days, take all of my noons, and leave me with beautiful midnight, Lord. Take the time I don’t need and give it back to me, You bastard. You utter bastard. Give us minds to contemplate million-year time spans, and give us bodies that wear out in less than a century. You motherfucker, You think You’re funny, don’t You?

When the sun butted in, she would sneer and raise her middle finger. Fuck you, buddy. Who invited you? Boring G-type. I see you every day she thought, and with familiarity came loathing. Yellow bully-boy. Penny Arrabbiata had brought two thermoses up the Prime Focus. One had been full of coffee at the beginning of the night, and one had been empty. Now, one was empty and the other was full of used coffee. She stepped carefully down the metal stairs to the main floor; there was a tallboy of Arrow beer waiting for her in the fridge, and maybe she would watch the sunrise, maybe not. Saturday was rising over the neighborhood, an invader from the east, and God only knows what the weekend will bring in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, lived at 19 Robin Street and her living room window overlooked Cagliostro’s, which was a pizza place, among other things. There were always large gentlemen sitting outside at the tables, and sometimes cars that were too fancy for the neighborhood would pull up. When that happened, everyone on the sidewalk would find something else to look at. Gussy liked her street, and she liked living across from the large gentlemen outside Cagliostro’s. Police stations are always on the most dangerous blocks, but the streets where large gentlemen gather are always the safest in town; when she walked home alone late at night, she would turn off the Main Drag onto Robin and when she smelled pizza she knew that she would make it home safely.

She was safe in bed now, at ten in the morning on a sunny and quick day in Little Aleppo; it was Friday, and everyone was wrapping up their affairs, getting their ducks in a row, putting a bow on things so that nothing was hanging over their heads for the weekend, the glorious sainted promised declarative performative restorative weekend, that was coming up fast. Monday through Thursday, people count the days til the weekend, but on Friday they count the hours. You can hear Saturday night from Friday morning.

Gussy was not alone. Her nose and upper lip were pressed into the back of Big-Dicked Sheila’s neck, and every time Gussy breathed in she could smell Sheila’s sweat and hair dye–Firetruck Red this week–and she spooned against Sheila’s back, both of them on their right sides. Sheila did not have hips, but her ass plumped out, and it rubbed against Gussy’s pubic hair, which was black and thick, and Gussy rubbed back. They were half-asleep and half-fucking. Gussy was bigger than Sheila, but so were most: Sheila was 5’4″ in the tallest heels she could walk in (she usually didn’t wear heels) and slight everywhere except her cock, which Gussy was holding.

There was a ceiling fan, and on the dresser was a teddy bear from Gussy’s childhood named Wilbur.

She kissed the back of Sheila’s neck, still asleep but not; her right arm was under Sheila’s head, and she leaned into it and put her lips on Gussy’s bicep and sucked, and Gussy made a very small noise from her nose and pressed her pubis against Sheila’s ass and stroked the back of her ankle with her foot. The bedroom was in the back of the apartment, and still dark. Gussy had thick curtains, quilted blue with white fluer-de-lis embroidered on; they blocked the light and muffled the sound from the alley. Cats fucking and bums going through the trash, and sometimes fucking.

And the bed. There was nothing bigger than an Ultra King, so Gussy bought the Ultra King. She had not had a real bed since moving out of her parents’ house, just futons and floor-mattresses. Once, a tatami mat, but Gussy woke up with an aching back; she didn’t understand how the Japanese did it. When The Tahitian started to make money, it was the very first thing she bought. The bed was as broad as Kansas, but offered more lumbar support: it would sleep four comfortably, or eight people could fuck on it.

“Gus?” Sheila murmured.

“Mm?”

“What time is it?”

Gussy lifted her head and looked past Sheila to the clock on the nightstand .

“Little after ten.”

Sheila smiled and said, “We were up late.”

Gussy bit her on the shoulder, not hard, and pulled her in tighter and said, “Yeah,” and squeezed her cock, and squeezed it again, and squeezed it again until it pushed back against her hand, plumping in her grip.

“You’re up now,” she said into Sheila’s ear, and then stuck her tongue in it.

“Fuuuuuck,” Sheila said and turned over.

The door to the bookstore with no title opened, and the bell went TINKadink.

“Deacon.”

“Venable.”

Deacon Blue was not tall, and he was not wide; he was dense. Solid. He radiated a size his body didn’t possess, and if you asked people how big he was when he was not present, they would peg him for a larger man. He was in his shirt-sleeves–it was a beautiful morning–and his forearms were tattooed: an old and faded naked woman on the left, a fresher cross on the right. The deacon’s hair was long, graying, receding at the temples, and pulled back into a ponytail. His fu manchu mustache was also graying, but very neat, and the skin where his neck met his chin was creased and bumpy from overshaving.

Mr. Venable was sitting in his customary spot, wearing his customary suit.

“I need a book.”

“I can’t help you. This is an ice cream shop.”

Deacon Blue ignored him and said,

“On Tommy Amici.”

“You didn’t strike me as a fan.”

“Oh, the man’s got a voice like an angel.”

“One specific angel, I’m thinking,” Mr. Venable muttered into his coffee as he took a sip of coffee from a mug that read HARPER OBSERVATORY: WHERE THE STARS SHINE.

“Where am I looking?”

“Middle aisle. Then turn left. Down three rows. Left again. Ladder up to the annex. Go right, but if you hit the Foreign Pornography section, you’ve gone too far. Then you’ll meet a sphinx. It will be small, but please do not underestimate it. Answer the riddle. Take the ladder back down. Turn right. If you see ducks, ignore them. You should be in the Poetry section. That’s wrong. You got lost. Get out of the Poetry section. Then come back here.”

Mr. Venable leaned forward and pulled a gently-used copy of Tommy Boy: My Life With Mr. Amici by Jacob George out from under a pile of books and papers on the table in front of him.

“And I’ll give you this.”

Tommy and Jacob were on the cover, Jacob standing behind the seated Tommy, who was in his photo shoot hairpiece. They looked so happy. When the tell-all was published, Tommy tried to have a hit put out on Jacob.

“It really is the customer service that keeps people coming back.,” the deacon said.

“I aim to please. I miss, but it’s the aiming that’s important.”

Deacon Blue picked up the book, riffled through it, stopped at random and read:

“Mister A. had set himself a challenge that awards season. He wanted to fuck all of the Best Actress nominees, and even though one was a lesbian and one was 70, Tommy got it done. Wow,” the deacon said.

“That’s mild,” Mr. Venable replied Deacon Blue flipped forward a few pages.

“In addition to my normal supplies, I also made sure I always had some thick foundation makeup and a few pairs of ladies’ sunglasses; sometimes girls would come out of Tommy’s room in the morning with some bruises. Lovely guy,” he said, and leafed through the book some more. “How much of it you think is true?”

“Oh, a jilted employee would never lie, would he?”

Mr. Venable swiveled around in his chair and plucked a hardcover from the shelf behind him. It was The Singer, a classy and well-researched biography of Tommy. It had appendices and footnotes and an overflowing bibliography; it was nowhere near as fun as Jacob’s book. THUMP it dropped on the table. The dust cover was embossed and glossy, and the pages were thick.

“This is the respectable version. Many respectable publications wrote respectable things about it. There were awards, I believe.”

Deacon Blue scratched his ear; he had scars on the lobe from where the piercings had grown over.

“Can’t argue with an award, I guess,” he said, and picked the book up and held it with the other. “What’s the damage?”

“Twenty.”

The deacon pulled a neat fold of bills from his front pocket, snapped off a twenty, handed it over.

“Stay for a cup of coffee?”

“Got some reading to do,” Deacon Blue said, and the bell on the door of the bookstore with no title went TINKadink.

“How do you take it?”

“Sweet and creamy,” Sheila yelled back.

Gussy padded down the hall and into the kitchen, naked, shielding her eyes against the sunlight slipping in from the living room. The tiles on the floor were yellow and white checkerboard, dingy but clean, and she opened the jar shaped like an elephant where she kept the coffee and scooped it out into the filter, and then water, and then the switch, and the wait, and then there would be coffee. Gussy brought it home from The Tahitian in gallon-sized baggies; she had no idea why anyone would order coffee at the movies, but some people did, and so the theater always had a percolator going.

Her bellybutton was sticky, and she idly picked the flaking, dried cum from the fine hairs below her navel. She was on the pill, but didn’t trust it, and made Sheila pull out.

The Tahitian’s schedule was held to the fridge with a magnet from Graceland, and ticket stubs and pictures. Her mother, dead almost two years, and her brothers. One was in Phoenix doing something she was pretty sure was insurance fraud; she had no idea where the other one was. None of her father. The front page from The Cenotaph the morning after the grand reopening. A black-and-white glamour shot of Cara Thorn.

Gussy got two mugs from the cabinet: one said HARPER ZOO: WHERE ANIMALS ARE, and the other was dark blue. Milk and sugar. Milk milk milk and sugar sugar sugar. Coffee. Coffee. She carried them back to the bedroom, where had left the door ajar and flipped it open with her foot. Sheila was half-under the covers and smiling sleepy. Gussy could see her flat, skinny chest–a boy’s chest–and her cock draped on her thigh–a man’s cock–and somehow it still read as feminine: the angle of her shoulders or the jut of her jaw, something Gussy could not quite articulate but was still there and radiating from Sheila: pure Yin, woman through and through, and Gussy did not quite understand it but she went with it. 90% of life in Little Aleppo was going along with things you didn’t quite understand, Gussy thought. She handed the dark blue mug to Sheila, got into bed next to her, close.

The women sipped their coffee and tried not to fall in love with each other.

“So…”

“Oh, God,” Gussy said.

“What?”

“Is this gonna be some kind of ‘Let’s be friends speech?'”

“No, it’s…no.”

Sheila put her coffee on the nightstand and got up on her knees. She leaned over and kissed Gussy.

“I don’t wanna be friends.”

And she kissed her.

“I don’t wanna be friends.”

And she kissed her again, and Gussy did the thing she was trying not to do.

Sheila laid back down. She was nestled into Gussy, face half on her shoulder and half on her tit, and she picked up her coffee and took a sip.

“I was just asking about the meeting. The one at the Victory Diner.”

“You gotta see Reverend Jones eat. It’s amazing.”

“He’s a good man.”

“I like him.”

“We should go to services one week,” Sheila said, and that was the first plan that she had suggested to Gussy, the first suggestion that their relationship projected into the future past coffee and a lazy morning fuck; Gussy liked that, but she had a good poker face and sipped her coffee.

“Mm-hmm,” she said.

“How’d it go?”

“Wha?”

“The meeting.”

“Good. Good.”

Gussy was rubbing the crown of Sheila’s head with her chin, back and forth softly.

“No details?”

The ceiling fan spun above them. It clicked on and off with two little chains, and Gussy had attached pink fuzzy dice to them. They swayed in the breeze.

“Sheila.”

“Gus?”

Gussy put her coffee down and sat up. She knew this tone of voice: it was the same one her teenaged employees used when they had fucked something up.

“Ask me what you want to ask me.”

Sheila put her coffee down, too, and pulled herself up; she sat cross-legged to the side of Gussy and stroked her naked thigh with the fingertips of both hands. She said,

“You’re gonna think this is funny.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

In a souvenir ashtray from Monk’s Casino on the nightstand, there was a half-smoked joint from the night before. Sheila leaned over Gussy’s lap slowly to fetch it, and she hesitated there with her ass sticking up in the air; Gussy ran her hand up the back of Sheila’s thigh, and brushed her fingers against her balls and smacked her ass, not hard but firmly, and Sheila made a little noise and smiled as she FFT flicked the yellow lighter and relit the joint and then she settled back on her heels in a posture like a Japanese lady at a tea ceremony with the smoke still in her lung; curlicues of white smoke flared from her nostrils as she leaned over and Gussy opened her mouth and she PHWOO shotgunned the pot smoke into her mouth and then kissed her as hard as she could.

Sheila sat back and decided that the truth was the easiest path to happiness. Sheila had often found in her life that path through avoiding the truth, or ignoring it, but this time the facts seemed to be the most expeditious method.

“Tiresias completely spaced during the meeting and she has no idea what the plan is.”

“Really?”

“What?”

“That’s it?”

“It’s a big deal,” Sheila said, and took another hit off the joint; she brought her lips to Gussy’s and PHWOO the smoke went into her mouth throat lungs, and Sheila’s tongue followed: she took up Gussy’s tit in her hand, and rubbed her thumb over the hardening nipple and when she opened her eyes, she found that Gussy’s eyes were open, too, and so she kissed her some more.

“Okay,” Gussy said. “It’s a big deal.”

“We must defend our island.”

“We shall fight them on the Main Drag, we shall fight them in the Segovian Hills, we shall fight them in the Verdance.”

Sheila kissed her again.

“But, really, her whole part in the plan is to wear something low-cut. Laugh at Tommy’s jokes, that sort of thing. Reverend Jones and Doctor Arrabbiata are gonna do the talking.”

Gussy took the joint from Sheila, ashed it, handed it back.

“Uh-huh. She’s gonna start talking.”

“That’s not the plan.”

“Guarantee you she’s gonna start talking.”

“I don’t think she’s supposed to.”

“We’re not talking about perfect worlds here, baby, we’re talking about Tiresias. I’ve known her a while, and she doesn’t shut the fuck up. She’s, like, loquacious.”

The joint had just hit Sheila.

“Loquacious.”

“Sure, yeah. This is good weed.”

“I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. It’s from Precarious.”

Sheila took a big toke off the joint that was more rightly by now a roach; she held the smoke in and blew it out her nose slowly.

“Oh, yeah.”

Gussy took it from her, hit it, and said,

“He drops off an ounce every few weeks. Rent for that jackass sound system he tricked me into sheltering.”

“Wally’s not that bad.”

“Yeah? Imagine all the chairs in your shop talked back.”

“He means well.”

“Precarious or Wally?”

“Either one. Both,” Sheila said, and slung her leg over Gussy’s lap so she was straddling her, and she took the joint and put it between her lips to free her hands to play with Gussy’s tits. Gussy put her hands on Sheila’s thighs, and then her flat stomach and over her jutting clavicles and around her neck; Sheila bent her head down and took Gussy’s thumb in her mouth and they didn’t talk much for a while thereafter.

The bell atop the First Church of the Iterated Christ is named the Calling Judge, and the whole building shimmies when it strikes the hour WHONGG followed shortly by the bells of St. Martin’s, and St. Clemens’, and St. John’s. Eleven a.m., and the church is as quiet as it ever gets. There are ex-drunks in the basement telling each other the same stories they told last week. Mrs. Fong is at her desk; she picks up the phone and says “Hello?” (Mrs. Fong answers the phone every time the Calling Judge tolls.) Deacon Blue, sitting on the ratty couch in the same office, doesn’t look up from his books. He is taking notes.

The Reverend Arcade Jones is in the nave, second pew on the right near the aisle. He has laid his suit jacket, orange, next to him and his hands are between his knees. The crucifix bearing the Christ is suspended above the bema of the First Church of the Iterated Christ as though by magic–from the pews, you cannot see the supports–and someone has put a Blue Oxen baseball cap on Jesus’ head.

And the preacher prays,

“Lord, please.”

And that is his whole prayer, because the preacher knows the Christ and knows that anything else is a waste of breath and time, and so the preacher says it again, and then once more for good measure. Better to beg God’s mercy than ask His plans, and up above there was a bell still ringing out the hour; it was eleven in the morning in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo’s second educational facility was a one-room schoolhouse; its first was a half-room schoolhouse that shared space with an opium den. Even in 18–, people could see that wasn’t optimal, so the one-room schoolhouse was built next to the opium den. Much better. The students ranged in age from five-year-olds learning their letters to 28-year-olds working on their dissertations. Sometimes, opium addicts would audit a lesson, but they were usually quiet.

But the neighborhood was growing, spurred first by the wealth being chipped out of the Turnaway Lode, and then by the trade coming in from the newly-built Salt Wharf; the one-room schoolhouse needed to expand. First, the Chinese who ran the opium den next door were murdered and their building converted and connected. Then an addition was built, and teachers were brought in from back East. More than one teacher, though, requires a principal, so one was hired, but a principal needs a secretary and so a secretary was also hired, and at this point you’ve got to have a guidance counselor, and as long as you’re doing that, you might as well go whole hog and get a gym teacher and a lunch lady; before Little Aleppo knew what was happening, it had a full-fledged Board of Education on its hands.

Power is just leverage, and all the different power bases in the neighborhood had different leverages. There were the Town Fathers, who had the law. And the cops, who had force. The large gentlemen had violence, business owners had money. The mob out on the Main Drag had chaos and fire as its leverage, but the Board of Education had Little Aleppo’s children. “Whaddya gonna do? Homeschool ’em?” the Board of Ed would threaten, and their budget would be passed the next day.

There are three schools in the neighborhood now: Lyndon LaRouche Elementary and Paul Bunyan High were built in the 20’s out of brick by skinny men in overalls; they look like schools, cannot be mistaken for anything but, could not be anything else; they are sturdy and sweaty and held together by the institutional knowledge of the maintenance staff. (LaRouche was originally named after President Taft and rechristened in the 80’s after someone double-dared the Town Fathers.) Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School was built in the 70’s out of glass and sheet metal and linoleum. It looks like a building where dentists work, or maybe podiatrists, or both.

Paul Bunyan High’s motto was “Disciplinati hominis est longeque periculosissima hominis.” The school was heavily influenced by the nearby Harper College–most of its teachers came from there–and was given to wild pedagogical experiments. There was a romance with John Dewey’s progressive theories, where the students choose their own topics of study; that didn’t work, as it turned out that the students chose topics such as “titties,” and “going home.” After that, the pendulum swung to regressive schooling, in which the children were beaten all day. This, too, failed to turn out model citizens. There were experiments (one year, gym class was taught in Cantonese) and ideological struggles (algebra was briefly outlawed for being counter-revolutionary), but Thursday was always pizza day in the cafeteria.

First grade til twelfth, and then on to college, all in the neighborhood. Small batch education, Little Aleppo boasted, and a good percentage of the residents were products of the system. The Poet Laureate once wondered out loud if a good deal of the local weirdness was not caused by the weirdness of the local education. People had better things to do than listen to the Poet Laureate.

But they were still schools and couldn’t get away from the basics. Reading, writing, teen pregnancy. And chemistry, which is only taught in high schools because the parents of the students had to sit through it and they’ll be damned if their brat kids didn’t have to, as well. Julio Montez did not understand chemistry. He got that everything was made out of basic components, and that these components were called elements. Sure, okay, fine. But then it turns out there’s math. Coefficients, Julio thought. Bad enough I don’t understand that shit in math class, but I have to be confused here, too? He wished there was some paper he could sign, something official, saying that he’d never engage in chemistry–he’d leave it to the professionals–so he could be excused from this protracted humiliation. Julio hated the stupid experiments, and he hated that potassium’s symbol was K, and he hated the eyewash station that reminded him that not only was he tanking the class, but he was also in danger of being scalded with acid at any moment. He did like the goggles.

“What is she talking about?”

“Ions,” Buzzy Verno answered.

“What are those?”

“I got no idea. Small things.”

They were sitting in the back of the class; Julio gravitated to the back of the class in most instances, but he insisted on it for chemistry. He had known Buzzy since childhood–Little Aleppo was not a big place–but they had not become friends until they bonded over their mutual befuddlement in Mrs. Larkspur’s chemistry class. Confusion brought them together.

“Like a molecule?”

“I think? Maybe it’s part of a molecule,” Buzzy said.

“How many fucking parts does a molecule have?”

“At least three, dude.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, there’s the nucleus. And the, uh, mitochondria. There’s a flagellum somewhere in there. The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.”

“I don’t think that’s chemistry.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s getting the C minus?”

“You are.”

“And who’s got the D plus?”

“That is I.”

“So, who’s right?’

“I apologize for challenging your great brain.”

Buzzy Verno had taken to weed. Armonk had gotten him high for the first time at his house–Buzzy wasn’t even sure if Armonk had parents–on the scratchy green couch in the basement. There was an Iron Maiden poster held to the paneled walls with three thumbtacks and one piece of tape. (Armonk ran out of thumbtacks.) The pipe was el-shaped and made of brass fittings; the shaft was a few inches of bare screw, and Buzzy was nervous he would drop it when Armonk handed it to him and then lit it for him and when he inhaled…oh, when he inhaled…Buzzy was wearing a Blue Oxen baseball cap; he could feel it tighten and clasp on like a circular spider and the music…oh, the music…he didn’t know what Armonk was playing, something heavier than Buzzy preferred, but now the instruments were separating, individualizing, swanning apart only to coalesce again in harmony. The ting! The ting! of the high-hat, where had that been until now? He had never heard it: was it new or something he’d just realized that existed and if the high-hat had been there all along WHAT ELSE could be lying right under his nose (or his ears, as the case goes) that he hadn’t noticed? This required attention. This required research. Within a week, Buzzy had bought a quarter-pound and was selling eighths so he could smoke for free. Buzzy Verno took to weed.

Julio tried to pay attention, he really did.

“What does covalent mean?”

“It means, like, when you got two things? Both of them are valent.”

“Oh, okay. You explained it.”

“I got this shit on lockdown. I could teach this class.”

“If you’d like to teach this class, Mr. Verno, come right up and do it,” Mrs. Larkspur said without turning around from the blackboard.

“You got it,” Buzzy said cheerfully, pushed his chair back, got up.

She still didn’t turn away from the equation she was writing.

“Sit down, Mr. Verno.”

“You are very fickle today, ma’am,” he said as he sat back down.

Julio admired Buzzy, in a way. He could talk to anyone like an equal. No fear or stutter or hesitation, even if he was high as a kite. Maybe because he’s high as a kite, Julio thought, and then he thought that kites didn’t actually go all that high. Saying should be high as a cloud, or a jet. Hell, birds went higher than kites, and you wouldn’t say you were “high as a bird.” People would think you were high.

Language made no sense, chemistry made no sense, work never made any damned sense. Julio had grown up smack in the middle of the Downside of Little Aleppo, so he was used to oddness, and ghosts, and riots, and the occasional hiccup in reality, but The Tahitian was high-test weird; he felt vaguely guilty for enjoying it so much, but Julio was a Catholic and so he felt guilty when he enjoyed anything.

Manager, though. Julio smiled, and then he looked at the incomprehensible blackboard and stopped smiling, but then he did again. Manager. He thought that would impress Romy Schott, and when he saw her at lunch in three hours and seven CLICK six minutes, he would tell her; he was already picturing her face. He thought he should think up something cool to say. “Ever kissed a manager before?” No, that was terrible. Don’t say that, he told himself. But he could see her face, mouth a little too small and eyes a little too big, and he could see how it would light up when he told her. I’ll tell her I love her in the cafeteria, Julio thought. Maybe by the freezer where they kept the ice cream sandwiches.

Then he wanted an ice cream sandwich, but he looked at the clock and saw that it was still not nine in the morning, which means it was certainly not ice cream sandwich time. Julio felt guilty again, and admired Buzzy again, in a way. Buzzy would eat an ice cream sandwich no matter what some clock told him. Julio looked at Buzzy, who was leaned over in his chair with his forearms on his thighs. He hocked a loogie, a thick and creamy one that did not detach from his mouth, and it drooled down towards his green Chuck Taylor sneakers one foot two foot almost snapping and SHWIP he slurped it back up; it sounded like a Japanese guy with 95 lips eating ramen, and Julio’s admiration for Buzzy cooled a bit.

Julio didn’t do drugs. His father did, if he was still alive. Julio didn’t do drugs.

Three hours and five minutes, and he could already smell her breath against his lips.

“What a show, cats and kittens. Maybe too much dillying, little bit heavy on the dallying? Yeah, sure. Okay. But, you know what the man says: all progress and no digress makes for a straight arrow. Ain’t no straight arrows in Little Aleppo. This neighborhood’s like a quiver left out in the rain.

“Or maybe we just transgress. That will happen every now and again.

“Progress, digress, transgress, regress, congress. Maybe we should all just gress for a little bit. Drop the pretense of prefix. Get down and get gress with it right here on the Frankie Nickels show on KHAY–Hey!–on your radio dial.

“Let’s talk about it. Progress. For who? That’s what I’m asking. Who does progress serve? If it ain’t serving us, then we’re serving it. Everybody got someone they answer to. Maybe we’re just along on progress’ ride, that’s what I think, and furthermore I do not even believe we’re sitting shotgun. No! We’re in the backseat, cats and kittens’ we could even be sitting bitch.

“Stuff‘s better. Oh, yeah: stuff is better World’s smaller. All this progress made the world a whole lot smaller.

“Made you happier? Smarter, more capable? Has humanity’s progress kept pace with society’s? With the mad ascension of our toys? Or have we deified our gadgets at the neglect of our mortal souls?

“That sweet soul music…

“World gets faster, faster, faster. Do you? Nah. More and more information, coming from everywhere until you’re not sure which way to turn, and lemme ask you: do you get more hours in the day? More years, or do you still get your three score and ten? Where’s your memory upgrade, baby?

“You don’t gotta go along to get along, y’know. Give it all up. Move to the island, the mountain, the farm. You can unplug. Hell, you can rip out the damn socket. Somewhere away from the crowd, that madding crowd, and where there’s nothing in between you and the sunrise. No hassles negotiations compromises politics friction it’s just you–maybe your beloved, maybe your family–and you’re out there. You’re OUT THERE, man, where the Frankie Nickels show does not reach and neither does the law, long as its arms may be, and on a real cloudy day even God can’t keep His eye on you.

“Oh, I’m sure that’ll make you happy.

“Victims of circumstance, cats and kittens, that’s what we are. Softened and decadent, made weak by luxury. Polluted by politesse. We got different kind of problems these days.

“Cast your mind back. I know it’s early in the morning, but I think you got in it you.

“Little Aleppo’s got a pretty stark division between the old days and now. California had missions all up and down her spine, right? You got your Californios, and you got your native folks. We’re talking the 1800’s here. And the thing is: there weren’t all that many Californios. Ten thousand, twenty? Whole state, ten or twenty thousand. They clustered around those missions, and there wasn’t no damn mission in Little Aleppo. Just the Pulaski, and it was a pain-in-the-butt getting over the Hills.

“So it was just the Pulaski. Until the gold.

“And then the whites came. Gold, then white: ain’t that always the way? Ha ha ha.

“Now, forget about Manifest Destiny. Forget about history and don’t think about all the blood. Don’t think about Andrew Jackson and don’t think about the reservations and don’t think about the Verdance. Don’t think about history, just lemme tell you a story.

“How’d the whites come? The first ones here back in the 1850’s? That was something called the California Trail, cats and kittens, and I can think of several folks who are descended from these early arrivals. Not gonna mention any names, now.

“Wagon trail. Wagon ain’t a carriage; wagon ain’t a stagecoach: wagon’s a wagon. It’s not for riding in. Stuff goes in it, your whole life goes in it and walk next to it. Oxen pull the wagon because they can live on scrub. Can’t ride an ox. You’re walking, baby. Wife’s pregnant, someone’s sick? They get to ride in the wagon, but that ain’t no treat! No suspension. Straight axle. You gonna feel every bump.

“Imagine that, cats and kittens. That walking across the continent is the most comfortable option.

“So you set off from Independence, Missouri in April. You gotta leave in April because if you don’t, you won’t be out of the mountains when the snows start. Six months from Back East to Out West. When was the last time you went someplace it took six months to get to?

“Never, that’s when.

“You still casting your mind back with Frankie Nickels? Good. Now, a trail ain’t a road but it ain’t wilderness, neither. First part of the California Trail is what is referred to in the literature as the Oregon Trail. First bit is through Kansas, though it wasn’t Kansas at the time, and up into Nebraska. Then you know what that trail does? Do you know?

“It goes all the way across Nebraska.

“My Lord. You’ve driven I-80. Just grass and nothing and no hills and nothing. About 200 miles in, you’ve stopped at a liquor store. I know it’s wrong to drink and drive, but it’s also wrong for a state to be so monotonous.

“And that’s at 80 miles an hour, cats and kittens. The great-great-great-grandfather of someone you know–maybe you–did it at the blistering pace of three miles an hour.

“All of Nebraska at three miles an hour. Storms out there, yeah. Big. See ’em coming and there ain’t nothing you can do and you got nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide because the Omaha had burned all the elephant grass. Just you out there in the middle of America. No trees, no scrub, nothing, so you cook your food with buffalo chips. Get sick of that real quick, but I don’t know if what’s next is any better.

“I like to go hiking up in Christy Canyon, but man is it a workout. Hits your glutes, and you know that’s good for your social life, but those Segovian Hills of ours don’t have anything on the Rockies. Your whole route was about the Rockies. There’s only so many places to cross, especially if you’re humping oxen and wagons. Gotta go to Wyoming! Gotta find that South Pass! Can’t miss it: ten miles past Fort Laramie and take a left.

“Better not miss it.

“That’s the Continental Divide right there, you just passed it without thinking. You been walking for three months now. Probably buried a couple people in your party. Keep going, keep walking. Try not to drink the bad water, try not to break your leg. Hope the ox doesn’t break his.

“Then you go south. If you were going to Oregon, you’d go north, but you go south into Utah. Watch out for Mormons, and follow the river. The valley is green, and maybe the weather’s nice. Sometimes, the weather’s nice. There’s a line of wagons ahead of you; one behind you, too. Dust everywhere, gets in your clothes, hair, nose. You only got two sets of clothes.

“Five months since you left America for the West. You haven’t even taken the Sabbath off, have you? Heathen. Walking towards California, slowly towards your future. If you make it. Might not. Might not make it across the 40 Mile Desert, which is not named in an exaggerated fashion. Sandy there. Wagon wheels slip and slide. Get out and push, baby.

“You know you got another mountain range, right?

“Sierra Nevadas, cats and kittens: one last bit of hell. Got decisions to make. Carson trail? Maybe you should take the Truckee route? How about the Walker trail? Gotta choose carefully. Getting late in the year, air’s getting a bit of bite to it in the mornings and you are gaining in elevation every step. Rather not get stuck. It happened to a party on the Hastings trail. Spent the winter in the mountains. Bad time.

“When was the last time your commute was a life-and-death decision?

“And then: Balboa. Imagine that. Six months on the trail, wearing out boot after boot, stinking and riddled with scurvy and lice, and now look at this: the Pacific. Even bluer than advertised. Balboa on the shore.

“That’s your great-great-great-great grandfather, maybe. That’s who settled the West. Little scraggly guys with rotting gums and rifles. Just ask the Pulaski if you don’t believe old Frankie Nickels. You know where to find ’em.

“How about some music?

“How about some music?

“How about some music?”

She played an oldie, but it was a goodie, one everyone knew by heart and sang along with without realizing; it crackled from the radios strapped to the food trucks lines up by the Verdance, and it sirened out from cars speeding by on the Main Drag. From an open second floor window on Robin Street, the sound of the guitars mixed with the sound of two women fucking while half-asleep; in the Paul Bunyan High parking lot, Buzzy Verno and his buddy Geech hotboxed his station wagon with the radio tuned to KHAY, which was the local station in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

There were seven peaks to the Segovian Hills that were the eastern boundary of Little Aleppo and curved around the neighborhood like God’s hand around Job, cutting it off from the rest of C—–a City. The range sloped west, towards the ocean, and the last hill ran down right into the water where it became a natural harbor. The tallest one–fifth from the left if you’re looking at it from the Main Drag–is called Pulaski Peak. The whites who first settled the area named it that after the Indians they had to kill in order to settle the area. To honor them, they said.

They gave all the hills names, or at least they tried. The northernmost, the one all the way to your left, was declared Mt. Lincoln, but only after the newspaper office got torched and three guys got shot. Quickly, the hill next to it was named Mt. Booth; then, no one was happy and everyone settled down. After that, the naming of the hills was removed from the democratic process and they were named (in order) Mounts Faith, Fortitude, Chastity, and Charity by Miss Valentine, who ran the saloon. She thought she was being funny. And, at first, that’s all the whites did with Segovian Hills: name them. They ventured up in to them no more than the Pulaski did, which was mostly not at all. The Hills had teeth.

Over time, they were tamed. Everything that humans rub up against gets tamed, but a mountain is like a lion; tamed is not domesticated. Tamed doesn’t mean “safe;” tamed means “not actively killing you at this moment.” Mountains aren’t pets and they aren’t soldiers: they won’t take to training and they don’t listen to orders. You can carve a swatch off, or chisel a road through, but nature will snap back on you when you let down your guard. The earth will always reclaim herself, sometimes eventually and sometimes all of a sudden. You don’t want to be there for the all of a sudden.

There were Rock Stars in houses on stilts that they had bought decades ago with the advance from the first album, and long-forgotten communes and summer camps and abandoned hunting shacks; there are drug dealers who rent, and drug dealers’ bosses, who own. Nestled into a wooded spur on Mount Faith was the monastery where the Sebastianite monks lived and worshiped, among other things. The artists lived on Mount Chastity and couldn’t stop fucking each other; the bankers lived on Mount Charity, and they couldn’t stop fucking each other, either, but in a different way but also in the same way.

Up on Fortitude was the antenna. One hundred feet of latticed steel and cables and dishes rising from a concrete slab the size of a swimming pool; next to it was a utility shed made of dull green plated metal with GO BLUE OXEN spray-painted on the side in yellow. In the right light, you could see it crackle and spark as it slingshotted KSOS and KHAY down into Little Aleppo, from the studios on the Main Drag and up the hill through a cable thick as fat man’s thigh protected by wire mesh and toughened rubber; the signal hits the shed and steps itself up, down, whatever signals do, and radiates from the antenna down to the valley and up into the ionosphere just so it could bounce back into teevee sets and transistor radios.

And in an hour, the Late Show would come on. Big-Dicked Sheila was poofing up Draculette’s hair in the corner of the dressing room that Tiresias Richardson had named Masada after the mistakenly-purchased six-sided star affixed to the door. Tiresias was at the makeup mirror in a fluffy black robe putting on Draculette’s face, pale with swoopy black highlights and so goddamned much mascara that it took her three washings to get it out at night.

“Where did that robe come from?”

Tiresias slapped her eyeliner down on the table in front of her and swiveled around.

“I was wondering when you were gonna notice,” Tiresias said, standing up and walking over to Sheila with her arm out. “Feel.”

Sheila did.

“So soft.”

“Virgin fleece.”

“Well, now I feel sad for the fleece,” Sheila said.

“AAAAAAhahaha!”

Tiresias went back to her mirror and sat down. Sheila started poofing  the wig up again and asked,

“Where’d it come from?

“Fan bought it for me. Mailed it in.”

“Check the pockets for drugs?”

“First thing. No joy.”

“But so soft.”

“So soft.”

“You washed it, right?”

“Like, five times. Then I microwaved it for ten seconds.”

“You’re not gonna fall for the ol’ smallpox in the blanket trick.”

“I didn’t fall out of a truck last night. I was asked to leave. AAAAAhahaha! Ooh, I should use that tonight.”

Sheila snorted.

“What’s the movie?”

“An Adamo Brothers classic called Don’t Kill Me Again.”

“Zombies?”

“Of course not. It’s about a haunted diner where breakfast eats you,” Tiresias said. She turned her face left and right, examining each angle. Her eyes were not bloodshot. In fact, she thought, her eyeballs were freakishly white. Have they always been this bright and shiny? She looked closer and in the powerful light of the makeup mirror she could see a viscosity on the convex surface, mucosal and slimy, and she wondered if they had always looked this way.

“Sheel, are my eyeballs too white?”

“Yeah, you’re a freak.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Me, either. People are talking.”

Tiresias leaned in closer to the mirror and pulled down her eyelid with a black nail-polished finger. She said,

“Seriously, I need to discuss my eyeballs.”

Sheila had known Tiresias a while, and so she knew to avoid these kinds of discussions. One time, she had gotten it into her head that her pinkies were too long and that went on for a week. Best to nip it in the bud.

“Can’t believe you’re going to the meeting with Tommy Amici. He’s a fan, huh?”

Tiresias froze. She was a wonderful actress, but a shitty liar. Sheila had known Tiresias a while.

“What?”

“What what?”

Sheila walked over to the makeup mirror, grabbed Tiresias by the shoulders, spun her around.

“What are you not telling me?”

“Y’know how I went to dinner with the Reverend and Gussy and all to plan how the meeting was gonna go?”

“Yeah.”

“Spaced out.”

“Dammit, Tirry.”

“Just absolutely zoned. I think it was my blood sugar because I hadn’t eaten. We sat down and next thing I know Penny is asking me if I got it. And, you know, I’ve done a lot of improv training so I just said ‘Yes.’ It was like muscle memory.”

Sheila smiled at her sarcastically and said,

“You’re something special.”

“I’m lovely and talented. Sheeeeeeeel?’

“Yes?”

“Could you find out what I’m supposed to do from Gussy? But don’t let her know that I don’t know? Because that would be awesome.”

Sheila laughed.

“How do you fuck up listening?”

“Actresses never listen, darling. They wait until it’s their line. AAAAAhahaha!”

Sheila fell back onto the ratty blue couch and shook her head.

“Amazing.”

“It was like an out-of-body experience. Except I didn’t go anywhere.”

“That’s called not paying attention, sweetie. Were you fucked up?”

“No.”

“Tirry.”

“I wasn’t,” Tiresias. “It was five o’clock! I had barely woken up and I didn’t even have that much the night before. Zip, nada. Sober as the Calling Judge.”

“Unbelievable.”

Tiresias batted Draculette’s eyelashes.

“Pleeeeeeease? Just find out what I’m supposed to do.”

“How do you know I’m going to see Gus?”

“AAAAAAhahaha! Draculette sees all, sweetie. I see evvvvvvverything.”

“Maybe you should try hearing something.”

Tiresias started piling her lazy brown curls on top of her head, bobby-pinning them down into coils; her hair was thick and tried to wriggle out of her grasp.

“You’re cruel and capricious.”

“If I do this, will you promise to try harder?”

“Any effort at all would be more than I’ve put forth so far. AAAAAhahaha!”

“Tirry!”

“Okay! Okay, okay.”

“Just be, like, in the moment.”

Tiresias crossed her heart and said,

“Cross my heart.”

Sheila smirked.

“Gives me an excuse to see her.”

“There’s no excuse for this, Julio.”

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, was pissed. The evening’s feature at The Tahitian was a documentary about women blacklisted from ballet companies called Barred From The Barre; it was terrible. The denizens of the balcony, bored, broke into the projectionist’s booth and thus began Little Aleppo’s XXX-Rated Shadow Puppet Theatre.

“No, yeah, you’re right. But I was working the snack bar.”

“Well, I can’t blame Fanow, can I?”

Fanow was the projectionist at The Tahitian, and he had gone home after being taken hostage.

“Well,” Julio thought out loud, “just because you can’t blame him doesn’t mean you should blame me.”

Gussy was like any movie theater owner: she employed a lot of kids. She liked watching them grow up. Come into themselves. She was proud of them when they took their first tottering steps towards adulthood, and she was proud of Julio Montez for standing up for himself logically and respectfully. On the other hand,

“Don’t talk back to me.”

“Okay, sorry.”

They were in her office off the lobby with its Tiki theme and gaudy red carpet and cardboard standees of dead movie stars. Gussy was wearing a new dress. It was green, which was a color she did not often wear, and she was feeling good about her choice to wear green; the meeting at the Victory Diner went well, but long, and when she returned to The Tahitian there were shadow dicks and titties humping on her screen. It had just about ruined her day.

“And do you know why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I am grooming you, Julio.”

He looked down at his sneakers.

“Gussy, I think you’re awesome, but I have a girlfriend.”

“Not that kind of grooming, jackass.”

“Oh, okay.”

“To manage the theater.”

“Oh, okay.”

And he smiled. Julio Montez loved movies. The crap and the art, documentaries and cartoons, product and passion. He liked that whirring behind him, the projector’s warning that a new reality was getting thrown up in front of you larger than life. Julio liked larger than life. Life was Little Aleppo, school, the apartment he shared with his mother and sisters. Life was boring most of the time, he was finding, and confusing sometimes and terrifying occasionally. Movies made sense when life didn’t. They had a beginning, middle, and an end, Julio thought, even when the story in them refused to; didn’t just wander around for ages, people bumping into each other again and again. Movies had set pieces. Julio had never been in a set piece; it sounded fun.

He loved The Tahitian, too. It was, to him, unfathomably old. It had simply always been there on the Main Drag, just like the Great Wall was in China or the Grand Canyon was in Arizona. Whether made by God or our ancestors, The Tahitian had clearly been given to us, Julio figured. We inhabit it like the Hopi inhabited the caves of the Anasazi, we live in the houses of our fathers, we walk the streets first paced out by the settlers. Julio almost certainly would not have been able to articulate these thoughts, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have them.

“Is that something you want to do?” Gussy asked.

“Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that would be…yeah.”

“Rousing.”

Julio felt like he was failing a test he didn’t know he was taking.

“I would appreciate the chance to show my qualities, and skills, to you and aid with the management of this, the, this, Tahitian to facilitate–”

“Stop talking.”

“Okay.”

“Sit down.”

Julio moved a box full of posters from the couch to the floor, then took the box’s place. Gussy rolled her office chair towards him.

“What do you think a manager does?”

“Supervises…the…people…who–”

“Stop talking.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Gussy liked teenagers, she really did. They were blatant. Obvious. You could read them a mile off; they hadn’t learned to lie yet, at least not well, and they lived in the superlative: everything was the best or worst thing that had ever happened. But, Gussy always reminded herself, they were right. First time’s always the best or worst. First love, first rip-off. First time leaves a scar. Teenagers skitter between traumas, she thought.

But, God, were they clueless.

“Who is in charge of The Tahitian?”

“You,” Julio answered.

“Right. What about when I’m not here?”

“Last couple times, it’s been me.”

“Right. And what did you do?”

“Followed the checklists.”

The Tahitian ran on checklists. Gussy printed them out each morning: snack bar, ticket booth, projectionist’s booth, auditorium/sound, and one for herself. Then she clamped them to waxy brown clipboards and forced everyone to use them. It just made sense! This was the bare minimum, she thought. If nothing went wrong–and it would–there was a sequence of events that needed to take place for the theater to operate. Write it down! Memory was for elephants, Mr. Venable had told Gussy a long time ago; humans write things down. Which worked. As long as nothing went wrong.

“Great. Good for you, checklists are a big yes,” she said.

“You love them.”

“I do. But lemme ask you: what if something happens that’s not on the checklist?”

“Like the projectionist’s booth being stormed?”

“Like the projectionist’s booth being stormed. Yeah.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“Right, yeah. Got that. But what I’m asking is: what should you have done?”

Julio leaned back into the couch and bit his lip. He tried to look like he was thinking, and then he actually did start thinking but the conclusion he came up with was frightening. It showed on his face.

“C’mon, Julio.”

“Cut the power?”

Gussy smiled, leaned over, tapped his knee.

“There ya go! Gotta cut the power. Couple minutes in the dark and they scurry back to their seats without harming any of the hostages.”

“Okay, yeah. I was worried about the hostages.”

“Don’t. The balcony’s bluffing.”

“Sure, okay.”

“They’re all talk. Never, ever negotiate with the balcony. Give ’em an inch, and they’ll take the mezzanine.” Gussy said, turning back to her desk and opening the bottom drawer. She took out something that looked suspiciously like a smoke grenade.

“Julio, this is a smoke grenade.”

His eyes slammed open and his wide mouth made an O; he reached out for it without realizing that he was. Gussy snatched it back and covered the grenade with both hands.

“You can’t play with it.”

“I just wanna see it.”

“You see with your eyes.”

“I wanna see it with my hands.”

WHAP she slapped his wrist; Julio sat back and pouted.

“Should I be sorry I showed this to you? This is not a toy, Julio. It is the last resort in a full-scale balcony revolt.”

Going on a century, the balcony at The Tahitian had been trouble. It was planned that way by its builder, Gussy’s great-grandmother and namesake Augusta Incandescente. She knew the neighborhood, and decided that concentrating the weirdos was better than spreading them out among the decent people. Let some of those balcony crazies in the orchestra with women and children, and they’ll be sneaking under the seats to lick ankles. Separate the strange, she figured, and keep an eye on them.

There was generally an unspoken détente. The normal rules of a movie theater–no smoking, no alcohol, no battle rapping–were not enforced, but only so long as the balcony stayed in the balcony and didn’t disrupt the film. Generally. Occasionally, the balcony would get bored and start bungee jumping; the management would be forced to step in. Rarely, a full-scale balcony revolt breaks out.

“And when that happens: you pull the pin, chuck it in, and lock the doors,” Gussy said.

“But everyone is trapped in there if you lock the doors.”

“There are rope ladders.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why not? Julio, look at me.”

Gussy scooched up in her seat and leaned forward and put her hand on Julio’s knee. She smiled. She pinched his leg as hard as she could. She smiled again.

“Last,” she said, and pinched his leg again.

“Resort.”

“Ow.”

“Ow is right, mister. Ow. You think about that. Big responsibility here, Julio. Can you handle it?”

He was a little scared now and said nothing, so she pinched again.

“Yeah! I can.”

Gussy sat back and put the grenade in the drawer, shut it.

“Gussy?”

“Yeah?”

“Do I get a raise?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Give me the motion and spot me the murder. My family is all-in-one but the gods have been singing poorly, and my spotless kitchen floor is spotless nevermore. It was the thinkers, Peter, it was the thinkers. They’re the ones who got us into this mess. With fabrications, fabulations, and dreams. And America. Peter, I saw America one time but only once and I think it was but I can’t be sure. It was in the distance, she was in the distance. Farther away than eyeballs. Much farther. But still there, half in the sky and half bloodied dead. The river or the thinkers, Peter? Who wins? You say the river, the thinkers say a dam. They will think the rivers dry. As sure as the Christ, they will think the rivers dry,” the Reverend Busybody Tyndale said.

Peter thought that over for a moment.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

The two were at the Jeremiad, which is an oasis in the low desert three days ride from the Pulaski village where they both lived. It is the only place in the world where the Jeremiad cactus grows, which is the size and shape of an overstuffed ottoman. On that cactus is the only place the Jeremiad flower grows.

“Fangs and fingers. The stories have fangs and fingers: they stick in, they hold on; they extract, they insert. They told us to go west. Follow the sun. America ends where the sun sets. This was told to us. It was revealed. It was revealed to us in the fullness of fact. It was not revealed to others. And, thus, they have waned in their influence. The civilizing of the continent continues apace, faster than propriety would recommend, and sped along by steam. Sped along by the thinkers, zoom: New York to San Francisco and back in one week. One day. What do you think of that? One day, the whole of the continent zip zip zop slashes by you and then you are here. Or you are there. It’s coming, Peter. Who is the future born for?”

Peter was naked and lying tangent to the spring pool in the shade of a palm tree. Busybody was also nude and lying down. Their heads were together. and they formed a straight line.

“Dunno,” Peter said.

The Jeremiad flower is button-shaped, and dark green; if you eat a handful of them, you will begin to make sense of whatever Busybody’s ranting about.

“The thinkers. Murder in motion, Peter, that is the future they will build for our children. Faster and more deadly, ’til faith and love lie insensate on a road made from pounded shit. And there will be no Christ, and the last shall not be made first, no; the first shall make themselves even firster. All the world Gehenna. A Golgothic symphony in march time and there will be fire, Peter, there will be the Lord’s fire tho He not spark it, and it shall be encapsulated and its energies harnessed, and it shall be exposed to foreigners misbehaving. A flaming titan, Joshua with his sword, striking randomly and wildly and loosely with no regard for the Christ there shall be none of Him not needed when there is fire. The Word becomes the sword and it does not shed its blood for us, but draws it for us. And what is valuable will be set aside for what is viable.”

“Sure,” Peter said.

The sun was in the sky and the two men were in the Low Desert.

There are three types of circadian rhythms, and evolution bends anatomy to this fact. Diurnal animals are awake during the day; they have excellent color vision. Crepuscular hunters are active at dawn and dusk; these are invariably predators. Nocturnal creatures rely on hearing, or smell, or possess massive eyes to gather all the available light. Humans are diurnal by nature.

But some people stay up all night.

The insane and the lonely, and all the sots. Watchmen and bartenders and drug dealers and dancers. Dying men stay up all night, reliving their lives and wondering who they pissed off. Short-order cooks and the waitresses that hated them; fortune tellers on the lam; freelance paramedics. The cops hiding out from the graveyard shift. The whores on Eighth Avenue. Astronomers and insomniacs.

And Horror Hosts. Tiresias Richardson was not a night person before she became Draculette. She liked brunch, peaky sunlight streaming through windows, a fresh day to conquer or ignore. Sometimes, she would get up extra early and jog. Now, though, she had been getting up around dusk and there was tin foil double-taped to the window in her bedroom, and when it rained or she slept late she did not see the sun at all for days in a row. Which, Tiresias thought, was wrong. Somehow. A sin? She could not put her black nail-polished finger on it, but it seemed loosely to be a sin. She had not been raised in any particular religion–all her theological knowledge came from the time she played Mary Magdalene in the Paul Bunyan High (Go Blue Oxen!) production of Jesus Christ, Superstar–but she still felt somehow guilty about the hours she kept. It was an affront to someone. Maybe God. Maybe farmers. When she would slump into her bed after dawn, going from her awakening living room into her bedroom dark as pitch, she would always think about the farmers. They’d been up for hours already. Milking or plowing or some shit, farmer shit, what did she know about farms? But she had been raised, unknowingly, to think that agricultural labor was the natural state of man and so she felt guilt about the city surrounding her and her schedule and her life.

Still, though: better than a real job.

Tiresias could not quite walk in the Draculette dress, and she could not walk at all in the Draculette shoes but she carried them as Sheila pushed her down the hall of the KSOS building in a semi-stolen wheelchair that had PROPERTY OF ST. AGATHA’S stenciled on the back of the seat. She hated sitting in the thing, and she hated sitting in the dress: it was so tight that she could stand or she could recline, and that was about it. Draculette was a straight line, tangent to the camera and bulgy in all the right places, and other positions were uncomfortable and unflattering; when she sat down, her stomach flopped out in rolls that she couldn’t help poking at hatefully.

“It’s the wine, sweetie.”

“It’s a mess is what it is. Look at this,” Tiresias said while grabbing a chunk of her stomach.

“Wine weight,” Sheila said.

“I must learn how sit-ups are done.”

“Or switch to vodka.”

“I like your idea better. AAAAAHahaha,” and then they were at the studio, where Bruiser the cameraman was standing where the union told him he must stand, and it was time for the Late Show and Tiresias was Draculette, talking to Count Fang and the Prince of Flies and shaking her tits to punctuate her jokes–she had it all covered, and everything made sense when the camera was pointing at her–Sheila raised a hand and Tirry raised an eyebrow and out the door and down the hall and the stairs and the door and it was midnight on the Main Drag.

Sheila stopped outside the doors, rummaged in her purse, lit a cigarette and PHWOO blew out the smoke and coughed just a little. She walked south, towards the Downside of the neighborhood, and when she passed her hair salon she rattled the doors to make sure they were locked. There was a half-moon that was yellow like a smoker’s teeth, and she smiled. On her right was the lake that the Pulaski fished in, and lived around, long since filled in and covered over and built up and forgotten about, and on her left was the Wayside Inn that had burned down a century before, and she felt her cock thicken under her skirt, which was short and black and stretchy, not hard but ready to be hard; she flicked her cigarette into the street and turned west onto Robin Street.

She breathed in through her nose and there were riots and uprisings, and there was hours-ago pizza from Cagliostoro’s. Maybe she could eat.

When she got to 19 Robin Street, she walked up the stairs and pressed the button for apartment #2.

A second went by.

“Hello?” the voice from the speaker said.

“It’s me,” Sheila said, and another second went by and then the voice said,

“Hey,” and the door buzzed open.

Sheila walked up a flight of stairs, and when she went to knock on the door, it opened. The teevee was on. The Late Show starring Draculette, and there was a smell of weed because Gussy had a joint in her hand and said,

“I was just thinking about you.”

And Sheila took the joint from her, hit it, and PHWOO blew the smoke up towards the top of the doorway, and she cocked her head to the right and smiled, Gussy was still wearing her new green dress, but she was barefoot and took a step forward. Sheila offered her back the joint and when Gussy reached for it, she snatched her wrist and pulled her towards herself and kissed her, and she ended the kiss with her chin; Gussy backed away, just a few inches, and the joint was smoldering in her hand and her pussy was wet now and she pulled her arm away from Sheila and handed her back the joint, and then she reached down to her waist and gathered up the material of her new green dress and one two three over her head and she was standing there in just white cotton underwear with no bra; her tits were bigger than Sheila’s hands, but she gathered them up anyway, and inhaled deep through her nose as her cock fought the stretchy black fabric of her dress, aided by Gussy’s hand, and they tumbled back into the apartment; Gussy stopped to put on a Tommy Amici record, and she and Sheila went to her bedroom and they could not stop staring in each other’s eyes as they fucked; they would stop to kiss, and Sheila would brush Gussy’s thick, black hair from her eyes. They were both sweating. Honest sweat, righteous sweat, fuck sweat pooling in the corners of their eyes; they licked the sweat off one another and sucked on each other’s earlobes as Sheila thrusted and Gussy felt full up her toes pointed and Sheila played with her clit; Gussy shot her head back and knocked Sheila in the nose with her chin and they both laughed, and Sheila bit Gussy’s bottom lip not hard and very soon all the sheets that were formerly on the bed were on the floor and everyone’s asshole was in play.

The light was gathering outside, and the swans that lived by Bell Lake had already begun their day. The Cenotaph slapped on porches. Sheila and Gussy did not notice; they were asleep, and so was most of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.