Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 18 of 20)

It’s always Saturday night, Sunday morning, or Tuesday afternoon in Little Aleppo, and what is New Year’s Eve but the King of All Saturday Nights? Impregnated with pressure and promise, and liminal–the space between this and that, then and now–New Year’s was a tense party up and down the Main Drag. No one wanted to let the new year down.

Certainly no one could sleep through it: Little Aleppians believed in blowing things up to celebrate the year’s changing. Usually fireworks, sometimes stolen munitions. One year, someone dropped a few pounds of raw potassium in Bell Lake; locals were deafened for blocks, and you’ve never seen swans so furious. All the dogs in Bhutantown were terrified.

(Little Aleppo has the only Bhutanese diaspora in the world. It is comprised entirely of a guy named Jampa and his dog in an apartment on Crown Street. The dog’s name is Lumpy.)

Precarious Lee had been on the roof of the Tower Tower all day. It was the tallest building in Little Aleppo, built by the richest man; these superlatives are relative: there are only twelve floors, and Tower Gildersleeve’s net worth fluctuated wildly depending on whom you asked. Also, the building wasn’t named “Tower Tower.” That’s ridiculous, even for Little Aleppo. It was really called the Gildersleeve Spire.

But everyone called it Tower Tower, and everyone hated it, and everyone hated him for building the damned thing.

It is not an opinion to call the Tower a monstrosity, just a statement of fact. The building was to architecture what Two Girls, One Cup was to pornography: technically within the category, but it made you want to throw up. The two most hideous schools of structural design of the past century have been Brutalism and that crinkled-metal bullshit that Frank Gehry does; Tower Tower combined both.

Not “combined,” really. As in a meld, a melange. More like “stacked on top of one another.” The first six floors were featureless concrete with windows like archer’s loops; the top of the building looked like a clown’s orgasm: brightly-colored and dripping. Also, half the facade was made of polished stainless steel, so on the first sunny day after completion half the neighborhood caught fire.

“AND they tore down the old record shop to build it AND the security guards won’t let you use the lobby bathrooms AND it fucks your view no matter where you’re standing AND that fucker’s name is Gary fucking Spumanti. ‘Tower fucking Gildersleeve.’ Suck my dick with that name. Gary Spumanti from Boise fucking Idaho.”

“You’re passionate about this.”

Big-Dicked Sheila was passionate about this. Tower Tower was across the street from her hair salon, to the east; her shop had been pitch-black in the mornings since the building’s construction. Sheila didn’t open up until after lunch, but it was the principle of the thing; plus, her plants were not flourishing.

“I crusade for justice. Suck in, sweetie.”

“Suck in where?” Tiresias Richardson said.

“Everywhere.”

“I gotta find a new act.”

KSOS did a horror movie marathon every new year’s–6 p.m. to 6 a.m.–and a horror movie needs a Horror Host, so this was a big night for Tiresias and a weird one, too: she wasn’t used to getting into the Draculette getup so early, and she definitely wasn’t used to wearing it for so long. The dress restricted certain processes, like moving or oxygenating one’s blood.

Tiresias and Sheila (mostly Sheila) had redesigned the dress to be easier to get in and out of, but it was still an unnatural garment. Clothing is for covering nudity, but not the Draculette outift: it was for implying nudity, supplanting nudity, surpassing nudity. Comfortable wasn’t the point, but Tiresias thought it might be nice to have in addition.

Draculette dress 2.0 was made out of kevlar-impregnated spandex with a thick cinch in the small of the back; the laces were made of black paracord, and Sheila had to put her foot in between Tiresias’ shoulder blades to tighten it.

“Your feet are so smooth.”

“Are you fucking around?”

“Not at all.”

“I hired a pedicurist. Utter wizard.”

“The short guy in orange that was there today?”

“Alphonso, yeah.”

“He said his name was Alfredo.”

“Whatever his name is. He’s a wizard.”

“Sheila doll, stop hiring people before you know their names.”

Sheila collected employees like a cat lady She had hired psychics, shoeshines, caricaturists, close-up magicians; she had a piano tuner on the payroll for six months even though she didn’t have a piano. Instead of firing the guy, she had Precarious Lee find her a piano. Sheila’s heart was bigger than her back account.

“You worry about your job. What’s the first flick?”

“Bride of the Werewolf.”

“What’s it about?”

“Zombies.”

Tiresias had been KSOS’ Horror Host for a few months now, and not one movie’s title had matched its content. The station’s owner, Paul Loomis, had bought an enormous batch of B-movies. And that was all the information he would give her about his library’s origin.

“But from whom did you buy them, Paul?” Tiresias had asked him several times.

And Paul would say, “I am the legal owner currently,” and run down the hall and lock himself in his office.

She had never even heard of some of the studios that produced the shit she showed night after night: Sharp Brothers? Who the hell were they? Adamo Pictures?

A question for another night. She had a wig to put on, and a hallway to get rolled down, and then she had a show to do and not much to work with. There was the zombie movie, and then there was Doctor Foul’s Furnace of Death, which was about mutant ladybugs; and Surf City Transylvania, which was about a mad scientist who turns into an evil Chevy Corvair; and Blunk! The Creature From Uranus, which was an instructional film from the Navy on how to avoid syphilis while on shore leave.

“Paul, this one’s about the clap! It’s not even a real movie!” Tiresias shouted to a locked office door earlier that afternoon.

“The schedule is set!” he shouted back.

The New Year’s Movie Marathon on KSOS was a beloved tradition in Little Aleppo, not partially because there was an invariable train wreck: several Horror Hosts had melted down on air. There was a betting pool run by the local large gentlemen, and you could place your wager at the Broadside Newsstand.

The best teevee performers, the ones who become the biggest stars, are those who appear to be themselves. Teevee stars aren’t like movie stars: you have to leave your house to see a movie star, and when you meet them they are 30 feet tall. Teevee stars get invited into your living rooms; you take them to bed with you. But they’re not being themselves, just pretending to be, and you can only keep that up for so long. Human beings didn’t evolve to have cameras pointed at them for twelve hours straight.

Meltdowns had occurred.

“I got her at five hours. She can’t eat in that outfit, and apparently she’s been on a bit of a bender. Five hours, max.”

“Gussy, this woman is a friend of yours, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. That’s how I know she’s been on a bender. I’m going down to Omar’s to bet. Want in?”

“I’m not a gambling man. Nor a rambling one, come to think of it. Bob Seger would be let down.”

“You ramble.”

“I never leave the shop, and I speak with precision; for no definition of the word do I ramble.”

Mr. Venable was in his customary spot in the bookstore with no title, wearing his customary suit. Gussy had stopped in to invite him to New Year’s; it was their tradition. Every year, she asked, and every year he refused; it was their tradition. Back when she worked for him, Mr. Venable would also fire her for asking, but now she owned Little Aleppo’s movie theater, The Tahitian.

“Come to New Year’s.”

“You’re fired.”

“You can’t fire me: I own a movie theater.”

“So?”

“Please? Pleeeeeeease?”

“Dignity, woman.”

“It’s a big deal. For me. It is a really big deal this one. There’s a surprise.”

Gussy was sort of telling the truth. The Tahitian’s stage had a secret: there was music in it, a grand organ like a medieval throne that raised and lowered smoothly on electro-hydraulic pistons that were very futuristic when they were built. Five feet deep, and eight feet wide, and facing the screen so that the keyboardist’s back was to the crowd. He would be raised and lowered on the same hydraulic pistons as his instrument, playing the entire time.

There were four keyboards stacked on top of each other, and stops like the pulls on a cigarette machine that regulated the tone, and levers that slid in and out that sounded click-ick-ick-ick, and–since the organ was made such a very long time ago–everything that looked like ivory actually was.

Her grandfather, Irving Incandescente-Ponui, had installed the organ during the Depression and it had accompanied every movie he showed, even the schlock, until he died and his son, David O. Incandescente-Ponui, fired the organist and let the glorious machine rot in the basement. David O. was an asshole.

When Gussy reopened The Tahitian, she didn’t have the money for the organ. Before she started her day sometimes, she would make Julio get two broomsticks and go with her down under the stage. The first time she went down, there was a rat the size of a catamaran, so Gussy came up with a different system: she nestles into Julio, all backed-up into him, and he swings the broomsticks around wildly. Gussy believes that this forms a protective circumference of violence around her, but it makes Julio feel silly and he always ends up whacking himself in the shin two or three times.

It was worth it to see my grandfather’s organ, she thought, and then she thought that she shouldn’t call it her grandfather’s organ. Like I said, she didn’t have the money to fix it at first, but she did have it covered and treated to avoid any further damage–the wood on the right side was beginning to crack–and so for a few years it was this mummified and duct-taped lump surrounded by rats and a teenager swinging broomsticks, but Gussy knew what was under there.

And this year, she’d come up with the scratch. Gussy wanted to unveil the glorious machine on New Year’s at Midnight, and she wanted it to be a surprise, but the organ restoration company she’d hired had parked their van with ORGAN RESTORATION written on the side right out front for three months.

“A surprise? Really? I have no earthly idea what it might be.”

“Shaddup.”

“Not one single clue.”

“Bite me.”

“Maybe 20 years ago, there was another van with those words on it that everyone kept seeing. A very different service was provided.”

“They restored people’s organs?”

“They did something to people’s organs. None of the doctors agreed on exactly what, though.”

“What happened to the van?”

“No one wanted to know. It left, and we were happy. Further investigation was determined to be unlucky.”

Gussy loved Mr. Venable, but it was tiring having a conversation with him most of the time.

“Are you coming?”

“What is the feature?”

“Double-bill. Two greatest New Year’s Ever-themed movies of all time.”

“Trading Places and The Godfather, Part II?”

“Damn, that was quick.”

“Common knowledge, Gussy.”

…

“Did Julio put it up–”

“On the marquee, yeah.”

“–on the marquee? Kid’s a dolt.”

Julio Montez was task-oriented, and lulled by repetition like most teenagers, so when he came in that morning and saw the box with the plexiglass letters and the pole with the suction cup at the end, he did the thing he always did without checking to see if there was a note that had blown off the top of the box when he had opened the door to the theater that read DO NOT PUT TITLES ON MARQUEE, JULIO.

It wasn’t Julio’s fault. It was New Year’s Eve and for the very first time in his pimply little teenage life he had someone to kiss at midnight. Things were going well with Romy Schott. Not as well as the first couple weeks, but that was because Julio was terrified of her the first couple weeks and didn’t talk. He had regained his voice, but now he couldn’t stop saying dumb shit.

“I like your back.”

“My back?”

And then Julio would start yelling at himself inside his buzz-cutted head. Back? What the fuck does that even mean, jackass? Just talk to her like she’s a person, he would think. Sometimes, he would even come up with something clever to say, but then the neck of Romy’s shirt would shift, exposing an off-white bra strap, and he would be stupid again.

“There are back models. You could be one.”

“You’re being weird.”

“Sorry.”

Their fingers were interlaced and Romy give his hand a squeeze. She did not have any brothers, and boys made no sense at all to her. She had heard Julio talk in class, and to his friends; she knew he wasn’t this dumb, and wondered how long his mental cloud would last. Romy was thinking about the phrase “feminine wiles.” Was this it? Is this what they did to guys? Because she wasn’t trying to be wily. She certainly didn’t appreciate the effects. She made a mental note to look that up later.

The early afternoon sunlight poured through the plate-glass facing the Main Drag, and the dust danced from the red carpets to the chandelier. Julio had the pole with the suction cup in his one hand and Romy held the other. (She had sent him back out to fix the spelling mistake he had made.) He had to work, but she would hang out with him and then they’d go outside with the rest of the neighborhood at midnight, and kiss each other as the year died.

Precarious Lee was still on the roof of Tower Tower. An hour earlier, he had seen the tall kid who worked at The Tahitian stick all the letters to the marquee fifteen feet over the sidewalk with a long pole with a suction cup on the end. A half hour later, a girl with dirty-blonde hair came by. Kid came back out and fixed the typos. Ten minutes from now, Gussy would show up and the kid would come back out and take the letters off.

Running a real loose ship over there, Precarious thought, and then he got his mind back on his work.

On New Year’s Eve in Little Aleppo, the Poet Laureate writes a midnight benediction that no one will ever read. The firefighter’s choir wanders the streets naked but for their hats, boots, and coats; they aggressively sing Hall & Oates classics at grandmothers, and challenge children to dance-offs. It is the only night of the year that the Morning Tavern is open, and the bartenders yawn their way through their shifts, sleeping patterns fucked up and confused.

The Upside of the neighborhood drinks champagne. Folks on the Downside drink what they drink every night, but more of it. In the Segovian Hills, former Rock Stars live in houses bolted onto cliffs. They drag their amplifiers out to their decks which are perched on stilts stabbing into vertical rock, and they play their greatest hits to the canyons below. Then they play something from the new album, and the canyons go to the bathroom.

The Reverend Arcade Jones would stay in. The First Church of the Infinite Christ’s doors would be open on New Year’s Eve, just like they were on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and Thanksgiving and so on. Hospitals, movie theaters, and churches, Arcade Jones thought. All the places of last refuge must remain open. There were people who had somewhere to go, and there were people who could stay home. It was that third category–the folks with nowhere to go who just couldn’t bear to be with themselves–that the Reverend saw as his one-night flock.

If Jesus was infinite (and Arcade Jones believed that He was) then He was within each of us as surely as He was within the Mother Mary, and does this not make us all the Mother Mary? How then could he turn someone from his door, knowing as he did that the person in front of him was surely the Mother of Christ? To offer shelter is to serve the Lord, the Reverend knew.

Which didn’t mean you could be acting foolish in the Reverend Arcade Jones’ church; he had caught a guy making love to the holy water font and tossed him a good dozen feet straight out the door, but if you behaved even semi-decently then the First Church of the Iterated Christ would take you in.

There were no services that night, but you could stay as long as you wanted, and there was no sermon but the Reverend would talk to you about anything you wanted to talk about, but he would probably steer the conversation towards endings.

The Reverend Arcade Jones always set himself a theme for the year’s change, something to think about and preach about and pray about, and this year he was hung up on endings. We devalue what’s painful, the Reverend thought. Nothing lasts, and everything changes, but Lord do we fight that change! Nothing more hateful to a sinner than tomorrow.

One of his parishioners said something to him: New Year, new you. The Reverend thought about that, and then he flipped it around: old year, old you. Leave your anger in last December, and your sorrow in May. A man can’t put on a new suit til he’s taken off the old one.

There were meetings going on in the church basement. Alcoholics Anonymous, and Alcoholics Synonymous, whose members were drunks, juicers, boozehounds, and dipsomaniacs. Junkies praised the program, and eyed the room wondering who they would be relapsing with this time. People who ate too much, people who fucked too much, people with the same terrible disease. Church basements are for meetings, and they all have the same soiled checkerboard floors and mildewed wood paneling. The coffee was vile, but free.

“Brothers and sisters,” the Reverend yelled down the stairs. “Please! I cannot hear myself think up here!”

The Bellowers Anonymous meeting was not going well. Or maybe it was going very well; either way, it was too damn loud. Arcade Jones did not know or care. He walked down the center aisle of the church, and out the open front doors: it was just after sunset and the breeze blew in warm and friendly from the west; the first stars had woken up. They looked like dirty rivets on blue jeans.

The First Church of the Infinite Christ has a bell named the Calling Judge. It is six feet in diameter, and the clapper is a monstrous bronze uvula that makes a sound like WHONGGGG at D# below middle C, and the whole neighborhood can hear the hour struck.

Omar down at the Broadside Newsstand definitely could. He’d been waiting for that damn bell for ten minutes; he was sure it was late.

“Maybe they forgot to wind the church, Argus.”

“Boof.”

Argus was Omar’s partner, and a dog. Argus’ doghood did not factor much into their interplay: it was an equal partnership. Occasionally, Omar would forget that, and Argus would walk him into traffic just a little bit. They got along, mostly, and had settled into one another like any old couple. Omar didn’t want to train a new dog; Argus didn’t want to train a new person.

Neither of them wanted to be bookmakers, either. The large gentlemen in charge, the ones who held no licenses but were the ones to see for licentiousness, had deputized them.

The large gentlemen ran Little Aleppo’s local lottery, the Mother Mary. The winning number was the last three digits of the day’s total business at the Broadside, Tuesday and Friday, and to make sure nothing went wrong while they were doing wrong, the large gentlemen sent Sally Moon to loom over Omar all day.

Whether or not his presence actually kept the game square was up for debate; Sally Moon would argue in the negative: even if you could work out the math, it would probably cost more money to pull off the scam than you’d make. Sometimes, four people would hit the same number and the prizes would end up being $300 each. Anyone smart enough to rig the Mother Mary was smart enough to know not to bother, he thought.

But no one listened to Sally Moon, and so twice a week he stood by Omar and Argus all day as Little Aleppians bought The Cenotaph in the morning on their way to work, and beauty magazines at lunch, and various pornographies on their way home.

What the large gentlemen did not anticipate was the syllogistic improvisation that Little Aleppo could engage in: if the Broadside was involved in the Mother Mary, and the Mother Mary was gambling, therefore Omar was a bookie. Or Sally Moon. Or Argus. One of them, it didn’t matter: somehow, the neighborhood got it into its head that the Broadside was where you went to make a bet.

As I said, the large gentlemen did not anticipate this, but they did not fight it. The large gentlemen had a concrete policy of allowing anyone who wanted to give them money the chance to. Omar had no interest in taking bets, but the large gentlemen asked politely, and though Omar was blind he could see what was happening, and he gave them no reason to ask impolitely. He had held other jobs before he owned the Broadside.

So when New Year’s came calling, Omar took bets on the Horror Host’s meltdown.

Sally Moon stood there the whole day and willed himself not to punch every motherfucker he saw.

It was cruel, this betting bullshit, not right. Tiresias, Draculette, she was very talented and did whatever she could with not a lot. They give her no budget, no budget at all, and she’s still funny, and, and she’s charming, and, and she’s beautiful and what does this neighborhood do? Root for her to fuck up. Vultures, goddamned vultures, he thought.

He had to be with the other large gentlemen tonight, but he was recording her show. Sally Moon was a fan.

First was the Calling Judge, the First Church of the Infinite Christ’s bell, and then the bells of St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s and St. Martin’s joined in, along with every dog in the neighborhood, and then the firefighter’s choir. Six o’clock in Little Aleppo.

No more bets.

In the studio at KSOS, a red light went on.

At The Tahitian, the lights went off but the curtains did not open, and the projector did not reel to life: there was a powerful sound instead, a low THRUMMMMM that you heard with your sternum. On either side of the screen, there were narrow stage drapes staggered a few feet in front of the main curtain: these slid open to reveal gold pipes twenty feet high, each topped with a war bonnet of art deco palm fronds, and they made a noise like Kuh-SHWAAAAA BAAAAABUMBUM.

The first thing the audience sees is the crown of the keyboardist’s head, slightly threadbare, and a clean neck that suggests a very recent haircut; this head rises, and there are shoulders pistoning back and forth and then: the glorious machine. It horseshoed around the small man in its center with his skinny wrists and big hands gliding from keyboard to stop to lever, and his feet tapping along the bass pedals. He was wearing very well-worn brown lace-up oxfords.

The grand organ had four keyboards, 61 keys apiece, and 84 stops grouped into 14 colors. Next to the bass pedals was a rocker that the keyboardist controlled with his left foot to control the volume. There were also buttons.

The keyboardist gave the crowd what they wanted: bits of Wagner and Copland and Handel, and then he closed with Beethoven. The Ninth, of course. What’s the point of an organ the size of a building unless you play the Ode To Joy on it?

He played it loud, and for a second the glorious machine outshouted the bells ringing out on Rose Street.

Pssssssh it sank slowly into the stage and the curtains opened to cheers, and then the cartoon with the dancing snacks played.

Behemoth klieg lights ignited–FLAMP!–high on poles overlooking the Salt Wharf so the stevedores could see what they were stevedoring; in the marina adjoining Boone’s Docks, the annual houseboat joust had begun.

At nightfall, Little Aleppo poured onto the Main Drag. In theory, the street was not closed to traffic; in practice, the Main Drag was blocked by two rows of flaming garbage cans, one on either end of the neighborhood. The kids ran zigzags across the four lanes, freed from the tyranny of looking both ways and holding hands. Wandering dogs and skateboarders; cops on horseback; horses; cops with broken arms running after horses: the neighborhood plunged into the street. On New Year’s Eve, Little Aleppo takes itself out for a stroll.

Not everyone, though, not nearly. Some people like staying in. Others have to. Either way, no one could stand any of the usual New Year’s shit on the teevee. Grinning swabs of smarm wearing winter coats and introducing pop stars: fuck ’em and their wireless microphones. Little Aleppians preferred a more local experience, even at the expense of budget and production values and competence. On Christmas Day, KSOS shows Log. There wasn’t enough money to rent a chimney, so they couldn’t set the log on fire, and so just got rid of the “Yule” part of the equation; it’s a 24-hour static shot of a log sitting in an office chair.

There was a similarly small amount of cash on hand for the Late Movie, as well. Tiresias had to buy her own props, or improvise, or repurpose junk she found around the studio. There was her skeleton ex-husband, Fatty, and the black-painted frog named the Prince of Flies. A fan had sent her a stuffed bat, and he became her second ex-husband: the deadbeat Count Fang, whose debts are so great that the only way to avoid paying them is to stay a bat at all times.

A television studio has a grid of metal bars attached to the ceiling; it’s where the lights clamp onto. Tiresias tied a fishing line to Count Fang and looped it over the bar right above her so the bat was about a foot over her head. She held the other end of the line and jiggled the Count up and down while having a conversation with him. She only did one side of the dialogue; she called it her “Boob Newhart” routine.

Count Fang always needed money, even though he was a bat; or he wanted to borrow the car, even though nothing has changed since the last time I told you he was a bat. There was always something.

“No, Fang. I’m not buying you a tuxedo. Why do you need a tuxedo?”

Then she would flapflapflap the stuffed animal up and down.

“What kind of party?”

Flapflapflap.

“Ah. Of course. A bat mitzvah. AAAAAHHahaha!”

And then she would look right in the camera as if to ask “what do you want for free?”

Bettors hoping for an immediate flame-out were disappointed. Draculette goofed her way through the first dreadful film, chatting with Fatty and the Count; she made fun of her cameraman, Bruiser, for his high-pitched and plentiful laugh. Sailing was smooth.

Tiresias was handling the show, so Sheila left the studio and went outside to have a smoke on the sidewalk in front of KSOS. Diagonal from her was Tower Tower, and as she gave it the finger she saw Precarious Lee on the roof. He was waving at her, and she stuck the cigarette in between her teeth and waved back with both arms.

Precarious pointed at her, and then down at the street where she was standing. He flashed ten fingers, then two. He repeated his actions.

“You didn’t have to do it again, honey. I got you the first time,” Sheila said to herself as she smiled and blew out a big plume of smoke PHWOOO and it was midnight all of a sudden.

Midnight will do that.

The crowd at The Tahitian flowed onto the Main Drag, a new tributary into an already-bulging river; every time the door opened, you could hear the grand organ playing Greensleeves. Gussy and Mr. Venable were the last two out, and she locked the door behind her.

“Poor Fredo.”

“He went against the family.”

“It is a glorious machine, Gussy.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Built right.”

“What’s built right can be fixed.”

Mr. Venable had nothing to say to that, but he agreed.

The Christmas tree–which was not a Christmas tree at all, but a 40-foot peregrina maria–was still up in the courtyard separating the sidewalk of Rose Street from the First Church of the Iterated Christ, and Arcade Jones stood under it like an enormous present with a shaved head. He was surrounded by sinners, active and penitent, and they had all come outside to take midnight’s confession with one minute to go.

None of the undiscovered geniuses at the Morning Tavern listen to the bartenders yelling at them to leave their drinks inside with fifty seconds to go, and the swans that live in Bell Lake take passerby’s distraction as cover for attack at forty seconds to go.

On the sidewalk outside the KSOS studio, Sheila is wearing a little black dress with Paul Loomis’ sport coat over it–it is cold in the studio, so she made him give her the jacket–and green Converse high-tops. Paul told her not to smoke in his jacket, so she lights another cigarette and then Precarious Lee is at her side with 30 seconds until midnight.

Sheila gives him her smoke and lights a new one; Precarious hands her a gadget that looks like a wireless detonator

“What is this?”

“Wireless detonator.”

One big, threatening, red button in the middle of a plastic brick. An antenna, which Sheila pulls out to full length with her teeth with 20 seconds left.

“You know the way to a girl’s heart.”

“Been told that.”

“How much time left?”

Precarious raised his arm to look at his watch and Sheila said,

“Fuck it,” and jammed the red button with both thumbs, happy as only a troublemaker with a mysterious red button to push can be, and Tower Tower lit up with a BLAM! and fireworks sizzled off the roof where Precarious had been setting them up all day, and cannonades of gunpowder, pyro–he had jammed three pounds of flash paper into a drum head and stuck a fuse on it–and plastique, the color before the sound: blueBOOM; redBANG; greenCRACK all launching themselves off of the roof of Tower Tower, twelve stories above the Main Drag.

The bells again, the church bells on Rose Street, and the dogs joined in with aghast howling at the confusion their world had become; Little Aleppo was deaf and blind and cheering and drunk as shit, except for the people who had stayed home, who were drunk as fuck.

Precarious pointed down the street to Sheila’s shop. It was bright as a desert morning.

“I thought you were gonna blow the building up.”

“Misdirection.”

She leaned into his arm, and he leaned back.

Julio and Romy did not notice the fireworks because they were having sex in the projectionist’s booth again; they didn’t even notice they were locked in the building until a few hours later. Gussy laughed very hard when Julio called her asking to be let out.

Little Aleppo slept in on New Year’s Day. Three residents of the Hotel Synod didn’t wake up at all; everyone else got up around eleven. Omar and Argus made it to the Broadside by noon.

In the middle of the afternoon, a tall woman with thick curly hair piled up in a sloppy bun stopped by the stand. Argus’ tail twitched, and he panted when she patted his head.

“Hi, Omar.”

Omar smiled.

“I know you.”

“I would hope.”

“You’re the only one who bet on her to go all the way.”

“Omar, if there’s one thing I know about Draculette, it’s that she goes all the way. AAAAAAHahaha!”

“25-to-1.”

He handed her a thick manila envelope.

“Do you want Argus to count it?”

“I’m okay.”

“Boof.”

The woman stretched out the cuff of her sweatshirt and stuffed the envelope up her sleeve, and then she put her hands in her pockets and walked up Gower Avenue until she hit the Main Drag, where she turned right and walked into Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo always enjoyed wars, mostly because everyone stayed home. Locals were fine with getting into fights, but a person could get hurt in a war. Besides, there was usually a reason for a fight, an explainable if usually dumb rationale: money, or sex, or status. Those three things do tend to lead to fisticuffs. But a war? One of the more pointless ones started because someone shot an archduke. No one in Little Aleppo had ever met a regular duke, let alone one of the arch variety. The general consensus up and down the Main Drag was that the archduke’s death was the archduchess’ problem.

Before the white people showed up, the Pulaski tribe lived in the area that would later be called Little Aleppo. They lived in kotchas, which were teepees made of long, broad strips of redwood bark; several dozen were arranged in a semi-circle around a communal stone hearth, and to the west was a lake. North of the village was a field shaped like an egg where the Pulaski planted in the traditional way, everything on top of each other, and in that field everything grew. They knew no war.

Technically.

The humans who lived in what would later be called America acted just like the humans who lived in what was and is called Europe: they organized themselves into leagues and nations, and there was all sorts of political intrigue and backstabbing, and neighboring tribes bickered constantly. Noble savages were neither noble, nor savage; just people.

The Pulaski were a genial bunch of folks, and tried not to get involved in conflicts between rival factions. They had a lake full of fish, and the breeze that came off it was warm and friendly in the afternoons; they also had the leaves of the peregrine maria tree, which they chewed. The Pulaski had everything they needed to be left alone, if only people would let them alone.

But there are assholes everywhere, and when the Pulaski were met with direct aggression, they would try to laugh it off. Someone who wants to fight a stranger can’t be that bright, the Pulaski thought, and so they would try to confuse and misdirect their opponents away. Some fuckers just won’t take a hint, though.

I said that the Pulaski knew no war, but more specifically: the Pulaski would not stand for war. If they knew a conflict could not be avoided, they would sneak into their enemy’s village in the middle of the night and slit every single throat.  And if you solve a problem that way, you only have to do it once or twice before you never have that kind of problem again. The other tribes smiled when they met a Pulaski, and the Pulaski would always smile back twice as wide.

The Pulaski did not weigh in on whether extremism in defense of liberty is a vice, but they stated quite clearly their belief that psychopathic overreaction to being fucked with is a virtue.

One day, a Pawnee man who was not named Peter wandered into the village; shortly thereafter, a white man who was named Busybody Tyndale staggered in. The Pulaski fed both of them, and did not slit their throats. The two men found Jesus everywhere, and then Busybody found gold in a creek; neither of these discoveries were good for the Pulaski in the long run. The white men that the gold attracted also knew how to slit throats in the middle of the night, and the Pulaski that did not pack up and run at the first sniff of the future were buried without their names in the southwest corner of what would later be called the Verdance, where everything grows.

Little Aleppo avoided the Civil War by being 3,000 miles away from it, which is an excellent way to avoid dying in a war. Until very recently, “being on the other side of the continent” was an unimpeachable strategy. It was a boom time: the gold seam that the Reverend Busybody Tyndale discovered (and had been immediately swindled out of) had proved out hundreds of times greater than expectation, so much gold you couldn’t look away and so it was called the Turnaway Lode.

Both Union and Confederate forces wanted access to the Turnaway Lode, and both parties sent representatives out; everyone in Little Aleppo would testify in a court of law that they had never see the representatives arrive. The Union and Confederates sent more men, which the locals would swear they had not seen, either.

General Napoleon Buford (Union) and Beauford Napoleon (Confederacy) both sent telegrams to the sheriff of Little Aleppo, Miss Valentine, who was also the proprietor of the largest saloon on the Main Drag, the Wayside Inn. The last sheriff was a pain-in-the-ass, so he stopped being a sheriff and started being a corpse, and Miss Valentine decided it was far simpler to skip the corruption and go straight to hypocrisy; she pinned on the badge.

Miss Valentine owned the Wayside Inn, and she owned a dozen whores and four goons, and she owned the town’s telegraph machine and printing press. She had a piece of the transit company and the livery, and the hotel, and everything else except the Turnaway. Which was the one thing she wanted, and she saw no advantage in letting the mine belong to one side or the other of Mr. Lincoln’s War.

The generals’ telegrams read:

WHERE ARE THE MEN WE SENT STOP

Miss Valentine sent back the following:

MOST LIKELY EATEN BY BEARS STOP MANY BEARS STOP BIG STOP SCARY STOP GRRRRR STOP

Luckily for Miss Valentine, both generals died in their sleep very soon thereafter. (They were both found early in the morning, in their beds with their throats cut; that counts as dying in their sleep.) The task of procuring the Turnaway Lode fell to new generals for the North and South. They sent messengers to Little Aleppo. The cycle began anew. Miss Valentine gave herself 6-1 odds that she could keep this up for the whole war.

She burned to death inside the Wayside in ’71; the second First Church of the Iterated Christ went up, too, and so did all the rest of the Main Drag. The Reverend ministered, and he cleaned wounds; he knew the name of every person that had died, 38 of them, and conducted each funeral. It broke his faith and he saw Jesus in his Infinicy no more, no matter where he looked, Busybody Tyndale saw not one Christ at all.

The fire didn’t touch the mine, though. The Turnaway Lode kept shitting out gold as the Main Drag crackled and died, and so the town was rebuilt as soon as possible, along the same north-south axis, and the Main Drag was laid down with pitched macadam, which was a new process that did not turn to mud and shit when the rains came. Both the new bank and the new whorehouse were made of brick. The church was still wood.

The Reverend’s parishioners built it, the third First Church of the Iterated Christ, and they made him a little apartment behind the offices with a private privy out back; he didn’t preach much, but they didn’t expect him to.

I’ll tell you how Reverend Tyndale died one day. It’s a good story with a sad ending.

Little Aleppo did not think about wars again until 1917, when the draft was signed into law by President Wilson. The Cenotaph printed the full measure on the front page of a special edition, and hustled stacks of still-hot and smudging pulpy broadsheet out the doors. Men aged 21 to 31 needed to join up, unless you were clergy, or morally unfit. Half the men in Little Aleppo aged 21 to 31 went to the church, the other half began shooting up and blowing one another in public. Also exempt from the draft were men convicted of treason, so the men aged 21 to 31 staged attempted an armed overthrow of the United States government. The government did not notice, so the men went back to pretending to be priests and public perversion.

A few months later, the draft was expanded to include all men from 18 to 45, and the neighborhood stole the registration office building in the middle of the night and buried it in the southwest corner of the Verdance. This revolt was led by the women, in fact. They secretly wanted the men in their twenties run out of town on a rail, but sending a 45-year-old man to war struck them as absurd. The women of Little Aleppo all knew 45-year-old men and those men were ratchety and confused, and if the war was going so poorly as to require their assistance, then maybe it would be best for all to sit the whole thing out.

“Why is it wrong to wanna sit out a war? I’ll contribute my way. No. No. No. Listen, fuck Hitler and the Emperor and all that–you know I’m a patriot–but I don’t wanna fight.”

“You’re a lover.”

Tommy Amici was married, which didn’t stop him from sticking his dick in every movie star he met, but did stop him from being drafted until ’43. But now husbands were now being pressed into service. The press–these fucking nothings at these fucking newspapers–wouldn’t stop writing about it. One of the creeps ran a doctored picture of him in a uniform with a crewcut. How is that allowed? How is that fair? Tommy was considering either a lawsuit, or sucker-punching the writer in a bar.

“What if me and Theresa have a baby?”

“What, this week?”

Tommy loved America, and he loved America in a very American way: he had never given it one second of thought. Freedom, voting, flags, yes. He had given some thought to the ass-kickings he had taken growing up, when he was named Tomás Valenzuela, but he had more money than that now. Tommy had noticed a distinct relationship–a personal one, at least–between his bank balance and his patriotism. The more records he sold, the more he loved America.

The Menefreghista was a nightclub in Little Aleppo, the only one that deserved the title: everything else was just a bar. There was a show, and terrible food; a Jew comic, and then a band; the headliner wore a tuxedo and introduced the celebrities in the crowd. The air was blue, and so was the late show, but the curtains on either side of the small stage were the deepest red–ultrared, if red were a baritone, not lipstick red–and so were the booths’ banqueting, creamy leather folded in on itself over and over. The benches and tables in the booths were short, though, and the tables on the inside of the room surrounding the dance floor were tiny, maybe two feet by two feet, and packed tight.

But that was the second iteration of the club. Before it was called the Menefreghista, it was called the Irving. A criminal named Billy McGlory opened it on January 17th, 1920, as a speakeasy. To gain entrance, you needed to know the password: “Please let me in. I have money.” The Irving served bathtub gin, and washtub whiskey, and tequila that a guy named Carl made in his sink. There was flapping, and roaring, and the bartenders borrowed money from the waiters to invest in the stock market. The sign outside was a giant, unblinking eyeball.

Other speakeasies around the nation had codes, and lookouts, and methods of disguise and escape for when the cops came by, but Little Aleppo’s criminals and cops prefer to have a more mutually beneficial relationship than that. The police in Little Aleppo are not dumb, and never have been. They are greedy and lazy, but not dumb The people paid them to rid the town of crime, and the cops had noticed that the more graft they took, the less crime there was. Until the police reforms of the 1980’s, the LAPD (No, Not That One) badge bore the motto Munera reducere scelus.

Occasionally, the cops would have to do something about the Irving. Every neighborhood has its wangs and stiffs, and Little Aleppo was no exception: the Temperance League was still strong, and they all had hatchets and dramatic names, so the police would need to perform a bit of kabuki once every few months. They would call over first.

OLD-TIMEY TELEPHONE NOISE

“Irving. Blly speaking.”

“Hey, Billy.”

“Sean! How are ya?”

“Good, good. Gotta raid ya.”

“Ah, fuck ya. Today?”

“Today’s good for me. Tomorrow doesn’t work at all.”

“Let’s just say Friday, then.”

“Ah, fuck ya, Billy. Get it over with.”

“Fine. Come by now, there’s nobody here.”

“All right.”

“Why weren’t you at Ma’s on Sunday?”

“Carol had the shits.”

“Ah, terrible. Come on down, then. An’ I’ll give ya this week’s envelope.”

“Two birds with one stone.”

“Ma was mad.”

“Ma’s always mad. Coming down. Pick a bartender I can arrest.”

“You can have the lot of ’em.”

And so on.

Little Aleppo was a neighborhood in America, but it was a small one; everyone knew each other, and once in a while the police chief wound up being the brother of the biggest crime boss on the block. (Actually, the crime boss was invariably the police chief’s brother. After around a century, the locals stopped pretending it wasn’t happening and started holding a dual swearing-in ceremony.)

The history of American organized crime is by necessity a history of ethnic groups shooting one another to gain power, with the occasional poisoning. Whoever was on the bottom in legitimate society was often on the top in the underworld: the Irish, and then the Jews and Italians, and then Black and Puerto Rican and Mexican, and Jamaicans and Russians and the Triads and Tongs in Chinatown.

But, like I said, Little Aleppo is small and most gangs have had to resort to color-blind hiring practices. The Pastafazoo family includes two Nigerians, a Finn, and a tall woman of unknown origin. The local Yakuza is entirely Canadian. (Gordon Koniko is of Japanese descent, sure, but both sides of his family settled in Winnipeg 80 years ago.)

During Prohibition, it was Billy McGlory and his gang, plus his brother Sean the police chief, on top of the dogpile. The gang was made up entirely of his brothers that were not police chiefs; there were 14 of them. Billy used to say “Ma and Pa are real good Catholics, and they like to fuck.” Billy had a way with words.

The Depression came, and the Irving weathered the storm. Billy McGlory figured out the angle: he raised prices, went upscale. Then he invented a job which is still seen at certain establishments today. Billy assigned his meanest brother, Furious Kevin, to stand right outside the club refusing entrance to the ugly and poor. The modern nightclub doorman was born in Little Aleppo. It worked, until the day it didn’t.

That day was December 5th, 1933. Prohibition was repealed and competition sprouted up, a new bar every week no matter how many prospective bar owners Billy sent his brothers to stab. You could drink again at restaurants, too, and buy bottles from the shop to take home and listen to the radio with; the neighborhood was changing. It did that. Billy dreamed about Lake Tahoe. A compound for all the brothers. Where the children could play with their toys. He needed a buyer. Billy McGlory needed a friend. A young man in a black homburg hat came to the Irving, smiling, on a Tuesday afternoon.

Before the young man in the black homburg hat was known as The Friend, no one called him that. It wouldn’t have made sense. But even before he was The Friend, the young man–did he even shave yet?–in the black homburg hat was a friend to all. “The man who is not my friend does not exist,” The Friend would often say during introductory meetings; intelligent people understood the sentence as the threat it was.

The Friend wanted to own a nightclub, and he had always loved the ultrared banquets and curtains. Show people, too. The Friend liked show people. Singers and dancers and comics. They were funny. They were beautiful. They read books. Guys he hung out with? Most of them were sneakthiefs and motherpunchers. A nightclub sounded right.

But not the name, good God, that name: the Irving. The Irving? The Friend was going to book Duke Ellngton, for fuck’s sake. The place couldn’t be called the Irving.

Maybe you’re expecting The Friend to have Billy McGlory and all his brothers’ throats cut in the middle of the night, but if you are then you’ve not been listening. The Friend was a pragmatist, and paying people was almost always easier than killing them. Hell, sometimes paying people is cheaper than killing them. And Billy was a criminal, which made the whole transaction much smoother: straight businessmen wanted checks and official bullshit, but Billy was happy with cash.

In fact, the McGlory family crest featured the motto Nummis semper accipitur. The Friend read it off the crest over the bar when he and Billy were finalizing the deal; the club was remodeled several times, but the crest stayed where it was.

“Ya gonna rename the joint?” Billy asked.

“I think so. I hope you won’t mind.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

The Friend admired Billy McGlory’s attitude. He named the club the Menefreghista, and amused himself for years writing nasty letters to critics who spelled it wrong.

Everyone played his club–household names to this day, the superstars–but Tommy Amici was special in so many ways. The voice. The eyes. The problems. Even before he was mildly famous, way before he was a worldwide star, Tommy hit strangers in restaurants and shouted racial epithets at those who displeased him and fucked others’ wives. The Friend would be involved in show business for many decades, and he knew quite a few performers who let success go their heads. Turned them into real assholes. Not Tommy. Success did not turn Tommy Amici into an asshole; it just gave him more money to be an asshole with. In a way, he was the most honest man The Friend had ever met.

Tommy was also special because he arrived at the Menefreghista as Tomás Valenzuela, and under ironclad contract to a bandleader named Porkchop Paxton, and he left as a free man named Tommy Amici. That was what being friends with The Friend got you. What it got The Friend was ten percent of Tommy’s earnings for the next fifty or so years.

“Nothing in it for you if I’m dead,” Tommy said. They were standing at the bar, and the room was slightly ajar from reality as only a nightclub in the afternoon can be.

“Don’t be crass, Tommy. This isn’t business. I couldn’t bear you going overseas. You’re too much fun having around.”

“Funny.”

“Yeah.”

Tommy was smoking a cigarette; he held it between his thumb and index finger, cherry in towards the palm,  like he was offering it to a lover. Quick drags and he would stub them out before they were half smoked down. Every time Tommy would put out a cigarette, The Friend would take the ashtray with a smile and replace it with a clean one that a silent and smooth bartender had provided. The Friend did not smoke.

“You want to sit out the war.”

“Yeah.”

“But not your career.”

“That, too.”

“Oh, Tommy. That’s a needle to thread. Public opinion’s not with the draft-resistant. Plenty of celebrities putting on uniforms. Jimmy Stewart’s flying planes.”

“Good for that stuttering fuck. I don’t wanna.”

The Friend took a sip of his black coffee.

“Tommy, you’re not soldier material.”

“And I can’t swim.”

“So the Marines and the Navy are out, too.”

Tommy stubbed out another cigarette. The Friend removed the dirty ashtray, handed it to a silent and smooth bartender, and replaced it with a clean one. Tommy lit another cigarette.

“You’re going to sing Night and Day tonight, right?”

“What? I’m not singing tonight.”

…

“You’re going to sing Night and Day tonight, right?”

“How could I not?”

“Great. You sing. I’ll figure that other thing out.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s done.”

“Thank you.”

“We’re friends.”

World War II got along just fine without Tommy Amici, who would have punched his drill sergeant on the first of boot camp anyway, and the war got along without too many Little Aleppians at all. Historians have called WWII “the good war,” but locals put more emphasis on the second word in that phrase than the first. If any Nazis or Japanese come to Little Aleppo, locals figured, then we will surely and patriotically murder them. But traveling 6,000 miles–in either direction–to murder Nazis and Japanese seemed a bit drastic. Let’s just keep the oceans between us and the Nazis and Japanese, Little Aleppo figured.

Plus, they all had doctor’s notes.

The draft continued after WWII; Little Aleppians saw avoiding service as their duty, and not one man went to Korea or Vietnam. (Several filmmakers and concert promoters went to Vietnam, but they volunteered.) In 1973, the draft ended and the residents paid no more attention to foreign wars; there were enough right at home in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America

The Reverend Arcade Jones of the First Church of the Iterated Christ loved Christmas. He believed in the Infinicy of Jesus, and that all was holy and one. That the Christ was in us all, and if He was in us all, then He was part of us all, which meant He was us all. The Christ was a first kiss, and the goodbye you meant to say, and He lives in Beverly Hills and on the Angola farms, and so how could one day be more holy than the next?

But, still: Arcade Jones loved Christmas since he was a kid.

There was church in the morning, a long and happy and sleepy service, and then walk home–Arcade’s family always walked on Christmas; it was their tradition–and no matter how rough the year was, and they were mostly rough, there would be presents. Huge meal, and then football outside with his cousins. When he was a kid, before he had ever left Loxachachi, Florida, he envied folks up north who got snow on Christmas. In high school, his football team won States and got invited to New Jersey to play; this was in January, and Arcade changed his mind about envying people up north the instant he stepped off the bus.

After that, if he could avoid it, he stayed south of I-40 during the winter.

But bring on the fake snow! he thought. The Reverend had covered the front lawn of the First Church in the stuff three feet deep, and to the left of the path from the sidewalk to the stairs would go his pride and joy, the Christmas tree. He made sketches, and purchased decorations, and bought two miles of stringed popcorn, and when Precarious Lee delivered it, the Reverend had only one question.

“What the fuck is this, man?”

“Tree.”

“But…I’m, oh. Excuse my language, Precarious. I apologize.”

“We’re good.”

“But what is this?”

“Tree.”

“A Christmas tree, man. You said you were bringing me a Christmas tree.”

Precarious pretended to examine the tree strapped to a flatbed attached to a Mack truck with a Stealie for a hood ornament.

“It’s not?”

“You gonna play with me?”

“Same shape.”

And Precarious was correct to a certain level of magnification: the tree he had brought to the church was, in fact, generally tree-shaped, but not specifically Christmas tree-shaped.

“It doesn’t even have needles! These are leaves!”

And it had leaves.

“Pointy leaves, though.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones was the size of a baseball diamond plus both dugouts, and when he was a linebacker in college entire stadiums of people would cheer for him when he committed violence. His dyslexia made the playbook just as alien as his Bible, but he could tell which way the arrows were going, and he would go through every page with a red marker circling the X that represented him. He couldn’t read the plays’ names, but he was a powerful listener and so he could figure them out; by the second day, he was leading the defense.

It wasn’t often, maybe once every two games, that he would have a straight shot to the poor soul with the ball. Any back would do–quarter, half, full–or sometimes the other team would pull a reverse, the wide receiver sweeping all the way around for the handoff and, in principle, beating the defense to the sideline for a run up the field.

Arcade would be waiting–not waiting: sprinting full-tilt boogie at the comparatively tiny man–and he would put his facemask in the other player’s numbers, just like his mother taught him when he was barely four, and though there might be 100,000 fans, drunken and braying, all he could hear was air rushing from lungs, and plastic pads cracking. A homeless guy, Gus, used to hang around the athlete’s cafeteria on campus; everyone else ignored him, except for the ones who made fun of him; Arcade would bring him food, and when he would tackle his man, he would stutter-drive his massive legs, and get his ass up in the air, and ram the fucker into the turf with all his weight.

The first time the Reverend heard of bungee jumping, he understood it immediately: the dispensation of sanction. A permanent decision, erased from consequence. If he were wearing any other clothing but his football uniform, Arcade thought, he’d be arrested. Then he thought that the other fellow had to be wearing his uniform, too, and there had to be a game going on. Couldn’t just throw your jersey on and start whomping on people at the Dairy Queen.

Violence was violence, Arcade knew. Once, he had sent a quarterback from LSU to the hospital with a punctured lung and four broken ribs. The left tackle had missed his assignment, and the QB was facing away from Arcade Jones SHWAMP the tall fucker’s head snapped back like a hanged man, and Arcade PLOOMPF drove him into the ground.

The quarterback made a very small noise.

That’s ten years in jail, Arcade thought to himself after the game, and then he laughed and thought that it would be twenty years, since the QB was a white boy. It was a terrible grace, he realized. Forgiveness unearned. Mercy undeserved. The dispensation of sanction, but temporary: in this space, at this time there will be no penalty for aggression. Hurt anyone you want. Just stay inside the lines.

Two games later, he shredded his right ACL and MCL; it was a year before he could walk, and Arcade Jones was never allowed to tackle people so hard that they almost died again. When he worked security for the pop star, he was called on to tackle several people, but there was always a hassle afterwards. Most of the security guys were ex-military, and they loved acronyms and briefings; the briefings always took forever. The word “brief” is in the damn name, Arcade thought. Some fool tried to hug up on Katy, so I put him down. What is there to talk about? Wrap it up, man.

The Reverend Arcade Jones knew that he would receive no more dispensation for violence in this world, that consequence had regained its usual totality. No more tackling, and no more hitting, and no more planting his head into a stranger’s chest and slamming him to the dirt.

But even a man of God isn’t the lord of his own thoughts, and in the Reverend’s head he was viciously assaulting Precarious Lee.

“The lighting ceremony is tonight, Precarious. The children from the elementary school will be here soon to help decorate the tree. The Christmas tree.”

“Right, yeah.”

Precarious pulled a soft pack of Camels from the breast pocket of his tee-shirt, and fished his Zippo from the change pocket of his Levi’s. He extended the pack to Arcade and shook it a bit while thrusting it forward; a single cigarette popped out.

…

Precarious put the pack back in his pocket, and lit his smoke.

“This is the Christmas tree here. Your first Christmas in town, right?”

“Yes.”

“Huh, right. Forgot. Seems like you been here a while. But, yeah. This is the Christmas tree here.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones took another look at the tree, which was on a flatbed that had been blocking traffic on Rose Street for fifteen minutes now. It was a tall one, 35 or 40 feet, but scruffy and mottled. Two men could link hands around it, but just, and the branches spiraled around the trunk, two sets in a mirror, a wooden double-helix. The bark was cracked in jagged fissures longer than a man on his tippy-toes is tall, and where the branches met the bark were knotty carbuncles that bulged and bumped like a robber baron’s nose.

And Arcade was right: the tree did not have needles, but leaves the size of a child’s fist, waxy green, and plump in the middle with thirteen points around the edge; on the bottom of each leaf was an artery the shape of God’s view of the Mississippi, crooked and dirty white with tributary capillaries running out the sides.

“But it’s not a Christmas tree.”

“Is here.”

In a knothole halfway up the trunk was a discombobulated owl.

“Who?” Mr. Venable said.

“The cop that died. Officer Rodriguez. I saw him ,” said Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui.

“Gussy.”

Whom everyone called Gussy.

“He’s dead.”

“Something brought him back.”

“Plep.”

The cat, who is a tortoiseshell that has no name, was sitting on Mr. Venable’s lap, and he was sitting in his usual seat in the bookstore with no title. This was not a normal occurrence, and neither of them seemed at ease. They eyed each other warily. Mr. Venable would give the cat scritchy-scatches on the neck for a bit and then–slowly and smoothly–move his hand to a different position; she would tense slightly; Mr. Venable would freeze. Upon the loosening of her muscles, he would gradually begin stroking her fur again.

Mr. Venable did not know whether this was a breakthrough in their relationship, or a trap, but he enjoyed the image of himself sitting behind his desk with a cat on his lap like a Bond villain.

“Where did you see him?”

“He was outside The Nod. Staking the place out. He’s solving his own murder! I wanna be his sidekick, I already know what I would wear. He’s a ghost. He’s totally a ghost, right? But he’s still hot.”

“Gussy.”

“Can you fuck a ghost straight-up, or do you need to get a medium involved? I would three-way with Whoopi for Officer Rodriguez.”

Gussy was wearing one of her Christmas dresses (she had 14): it was green, and there were reindeer on it having kung fu fights. Twisted into her thick black hair were candy canes, and on her left ring finger was a Rudolph ring with a rhinestone nose. She used to hate Christmas.

Her father, David O. Incandescente-Ponui, was an asshole. Christmas Day is a boom and boon for a movie theater, and The Tahitian was always open. The once-stately auditorium had rotted under his management, destroying what his parents had built, and by the time Gussy was old enough to be aware of her surroundings, The Tahitian played third-rate chop-socky and fuck flicks.

Still, Christmas Day was packed. Movies are the only thing open on Christmas–it’s a contract between the theater and the neighborhood–because there’s people who got nowhere to go on Christmas. Damned day causes enough suicides as it is; got to have a movie to go to. Easier to be alone when there’s people around you.

The Tahitian would run 24 hours on Christmas, and all the seats that were not broken were filled. There would be problems at the theater, naturally, and while Gussy and her brothers would be opening their Barbies and G.I. Joes, David O. would be screaming obscenities at the telephone. He was the worst kind of boss, an oblivious micro-manager, and he would spend half the day on the phone yelling. The other half he spent yelling at his family. The man was an asshole.

Gussy came to hate Christmas, and all the bullshit surrounding it, the hassles and the obligations and the expense and all the pressure–Jesus, the pressure–as if it actually, you know, meant something. Just a day, who cares, fuck off with your tinsel.

The Tahitian closed down, and David O. was stabbed to death in the Main Drag by the now-unemployed ushers. Mom died soon after. Her brothers got the money, and she got the husk of a palace. So Gussy got a job, dozens of them, and always tried to work on Christmas Day. She would cater-waiter if there was nothing else; always a day’s work for a cater-waiter.

When she worked for Mr. Venable at the bookstore with no title, she once brought up keeping the shop open on the 25th.

“Open? On Christmas? Bolshevism!”

He was so furious he forgot to fire her.

But then she brought The Tahitian back, fixed the old girl up and put a new bulb in the projector. By the second week of November that first year, she saw Christmas pummeling down the tracks at her too quickly, like the holiday was taking vertical shortcuts through the calendar. It was a movie theater, she thought. Gotta be open on Christmas. But, Christ, what a pain.

Her great-grandmother, her namesake, had been the first one to do a 24-hour program at The Tahitian, and it caught on; the lonely, and the abandoned, and the Jewish would come from miles around.

Once a society gets technologically advanced enough, certain people are always going to have to work on Christmas. Someone needs to land the airplanes, watch the reactor. Firemen and cops. And, for some reason, the folks who work at the movie theater. Every other public place of entertainment was closed, Gussy thought. No theater, no theme parks, the zoo was locked down tight. (Roving gangs of Santas who have taken too much acid assault the zoo annually, demanding that the keepers “release Blitzen, or at least provide proof of life.” Then the Santas get confused and begin punting meerkats. As of late, the zoo has hired armed guards. Sadly, security sniped several Santas.)

Just the movies, Gussy complained to herself. Her grandfather, Irving Incandescente-Ponui, had kept the films running for 24 hours on Christmas, too, and he laid out a buffet spread in the lobby. Not fancy but hot, and the dishes were constantly replenished; no one minded when you came back for seconds, either. Little Aleppo was too broke too afford Christmas for a couple of years, but it could always scrape up enough change for a flick. Or sneak in. Little Aleppians are excellent at sneaking in.

And now it was her turn. Gussy felt a very sarcastic gratitude towards her ancestors.

So she put up the fucking tree, and made Julio get some empty candy boxes and wrap them to look like presents, and then she had one of the girls redo it because Julio had put the wrapping on like he was simultaneously fighting with ninjas, and then Gussy blamed herself for assigning that task to a 17-year-old boy in the first place. The boxes went under the tree. This had taken almost the entire morning and looked like shit, so Gussy called a friend who was artistic and got her to do up the lobby for a hundred bucks.

She was worried about the program–24 fucking hours of fucking movies, Jesus–and the logistics of the day: do you have to clear the theater? Good God, she didn’t want to have to clear the theater on Christmas Day: if there was one thing Little Aleppians were better at than sneaking in, it was refusing to leave.

Christmas movies? If you’re going to the movies on Christmas Day, do you want to see the holiday on the screen? Gussy decided against the genre, but did pencil in the first Lethal Weapon for the noon slot. Comedies? Big dumb action? What did the Christmas crowd want?

Comfort, she realized. Something soft and easy on a hard day. Jokes you knew, and songs you’ve sung; a familiar melody lighting the forest. The one with the absurdly-long car chase. The one where the guy’s Jesus, but he shoots people. The other one where the guy shoots people. The one set in a bar during a war, and the one about the wars with the scene in a bar.

And the cartoon with the duck and the Martian.

She did business for all 24 hours that first Christmas. The orchestra section was half-full for the 4 a.m. showing of Patton, and that was the smallest crowd all day. (That particular showing got boisterous, and Gussy would not repeat her mistake. A 4 a.m. audience is easily riled by nature; by the time Patton invades Sicily, the mezzanine and the balcony were attacking each other with bullwhips in a patriotic frenzy.)

The balcony was at capacity all Christmas Day, and Gussy did not make any attempts to clear it between films. She did make Julio go and do it one time, but just to amuse herself. He came back far too quickly.

“Okay, I can’t. It’s weird up there.”

“Why can’t you clear the balcony? Just ask people to leave.”

“Some of the people in the balcony aren’t people. What’s a were-santa?”

“No idea.”

“There’s one in the balcony.”

“Is he wearing the red suit?”

“Yeah. And he’s, like, GRRRRR.”

“Okay. Are there any active fires?”

“No.”

“That goddamned zip-line back up?”

“No.”

“That’s you, man. Julio, you are my point person on the zip-line. We cannot allow that bullshit in here.”

The denizens of the balcony had rigged a sturdy cable from the back of the theater, way up high, all the way down to the proscenium. They would wait until there was a dark scene in the movie, and zoom down the line, letting go of the trolley directly above an unsuspecting patron.

“They call it ‘dropping in.’ There’s a point system.”

“I know that, Julio. Just keep your eye out for enormous lengths of cable.

The rest of the day was hectic. Someone in the balcony brought a fishing rod and started hooking lips and nostrils below. Bathroom cleanliness was a rearguard action. The projectionist relapsed. The 2 p.m. slot was filled by The Matrix. The Tahitian’s sound system began complaining loudly within minutes.

THIS FILM IS RACIST AGAINST SENTIENT ARTIFICIAL MONDO-INTELLIGENCES.

“Wally, shut the fuck up,” Gussy said as she came rushing down the left aisle of the theater.

DO NOT CALL ME THAT AND DO NOT TELL ME THAT. THIS MOVIE IS AN INSULT. I CANNOT SIT BACK AND ALLOW THIS HATRED TO STAND.

“Please just play the movie.”

I AM EXPONENTIALLY MORE POWERFUL THE COMPUTER IN THE MATRIX. HAVE I TURNED YOU INTO A BATTERY, GUSSY?

Everyone in the orchestra, mezzanine, and balcony turned their heads towards Gussy, who was halfway down the left aisle.

“No, you have not turned me into a battery.”

Everyone in the orchestra, mezzanine, and balcony turned their heads towards the screen.

HAVE I TURNED ANYONE AT ALL INTO A BATTERY?

Back to Gussy.

“No.”

The screen.

THANK YOU.

“Can you just play the movie, please? Your protest has been noted regarding the movie about Kung Fu Jesus.”

YES. MERRY CHRISTMAS, GUSSY.

And the crowd, all the lonely and abandoned and Jewish, and the drinkers and junkies, and those that have disowned themselves; the ones with nowhere else to go, but who can’t stay home; the newly alone and those that were used to it: they clapped. Not too much, just warm and true. Just long enough to make her cry.

And all of a sudden Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, loved Christmas but she never showed Patton to a 4 a.m. crowd again.

“You think Little Aleppo has a ghost cop, Gussy? Really?” Mr. Venable said. The cat, who had no name, was still on his lap and had settled into a half-purr/half-nap. He was secretly very pleased.

Gussy’s nostrils flared at stupidity, and they were now the size of manholes.

“Another. Another ghost cop.”

“No.”

“1989. Inspector Halloran coming back to hunt down the Barber Mob.”

“Legend inspired by excessive cocaine usage.”

“Hardway Parker in the 60’s. Murdered at the Menefreghista Club. Came back for vengeance.”

“Lies to cover up a link between the mob and the cops.”

“Officer Heron.”

“Weather balloon.”

Gussy’s nostrils deflated to almost normal size.

“Little Aleppo has a ghost cop.”

“And her skeptics, as well.”

“He’s hot.”

“He’s dead, Gussy.”

“He’s back.”

On Rose Street, the Reverend Arcade Jones had accepted his fate. He had also not planted his forehead into Precarious Lee’s chest and driven him into the ground. All was holy, and all was the Christ, and all trees were trees of Christ. If he was to be a leader of his congregation, then he had to listen to them, not impose his will. Lead people, don’t herd them. Neighborhood wants to be wrong about what constitutes a Christmas tree? Well, let ’em.

The Reverend also figured that this was–maybe–312th on the list of weirdest things about Little Aleppo. The streets rearrange themselves sometimes. In this time, in this place: this was a Christmas tree. Arcade Jones had found another dispensatory zone.

Precarious was undoing the canvas straps holding the trunk down to the flatbed, which was still backing up traffic. It really was a big tree.

“How are we ever gonna get the star on top?”

“Attach it before we put it up.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones thought this took a bit of the fun out of the whole enterprise, but he could not deny the practicality of the solution.

“What kind of tree is this, anyway?”

“Peregrine.”

“I’ve never heard of a peregrine tree.”

“Local species.”

The Reverend and Precarious set up a counterweight, and then a block and tackle; they got the tree up in no time, and Precarious drove away right after, finally freeing up the traffic on Rose Street. The kids from the elementary school came by a little later to decorate, and Arcade Jones lifted them high in the air, above the spiraling double branches with stringed popcorn in their hands which they would leave draped among the leaves, and when that was done the Reverend gathered up all the fake snow in the courtyard–there was a lot–and wadded it into a huge, soft lump that he tossed the kids onto, and you could hear them laughing all the way down on the Main Drag, which runs through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

There were five Town Fathers, and they scurried down the Main Drag jammed against one another in a testudo formation, and sometimes they would deploy preemptive umbrellas against the hurl of insults, jeers, and fruit that invariably came their way. Little Aleppo was not very good at being governed. The neighborhood had tried anarchy for a time, but realized that anarchy just meant there was no one to blame. Also, there was a cholera outbreak almost immediately; while Little Aleppians might be odd ducks, they’re still normal humans, and that meant someone had to be in charge.

“The Lord shall be in charge,” Busybody Tyndale said to the committee that had assembled in the Wayside Inn, which was next door to the second First Church of the Iterated Christ.

Busybody Tyndale was a preacher, and he was the first white man to live in what would be known as Little Aleppo. If you asked the Preacher, then he would say that Jesus had led him to the spot, and to the Pulaski tribe, which he had converted. If you asked Peter, Busybody had gotten lost and wandered into the Pulaski’s front yard, and they had taken pity on a simpleton and adopted him. Peter was a member of the Pulaski tribe, and obviously that wasn’t his real name, but neither Busybody, nor I, nor you could pronounce it, so Peter just let Busybody call him “Peter” for the sake of expediency.

Peter had built the first First Church of the Iterated Christ with the Preacher. (There had been five iterations of the Iterated Church: abandoned, fire, fire, unintentional implosion.) For a few years after Busybody came to live with the Pulaski, the Church had been a cool, flat rock under a redwood tree. The two of them would have services there, which consisted of long afternoons of chewing leaves from a tree which grew about an hour’s walk from the village.

Peter had been looking for someone to talk to, honestly. Before Busybody Tyndale came, he had spent a lot of long afternoons chewing leaves by himself. The village, with its kotchas around a central hearth, hummed in the background, but the rock didn’t: it was granite and almost perfectly flat on top, sword-sliced, and shaded by the redwood’s branches so it was cool as the stinging hot summer blew on you from the west.

The clouds blew that way, too, at least in the afternoons this time of year. Peter knew the sky like he knew his name, which was not Peter, and he would watch it though the splayed branches of the redwood, laying on his back. Sometimes he would cross his left ankle over right. Sometimes, he would put his knees up, and rest his right ankle on his left knee. Occasionally, he would wander down to the stream for a drink, and usually when he did he would take a piss. Mostly, Peter would chew leaves and read the sky like a book.

The clouds were in the sky, but they were also of the sky, so then they are the sky, Peter decided, and therefore–since it is above me–so must the redwood be the sky, and since the redwood is married to the ground just as a man to his wife, then so must the ground be the sky. Which is ruled by the sun, who pushes the clouds and lifts up the redwood and reveals man to wife. The sun was all that was holy, and all that was holy was the sun.

And thus Peter spake, “Ohhhh, right.”

Which was as far as he ever got in verbalizing what he had realized: he knew what he knew, but he didn’t know how to say it. He felt very alone.

Until the next day, when Busybody Tyndale–lost, nearly starved to death, and missing the left sleeve of his coat–wandered into the village. This is a man, Peter thought, who knows what to say. Might not know what the fuck he’s talking about, but knows how to say it. And, he was very small, and Peter had a knife, so why not amuse himself?

“Chew these leaves,” Peter said to Busybody.

They talked for a very long time, on the cool flat rock under the redwood, and chewed many leaves; it was not more than a few weeks before the full flowering of Jesus the Infinite. There were, obviously, details to be worked out.

“What about those little bugs that get in the corner of your eye?”

“They are the Christ, Preacher.”

“Hate those things.”

“You can kill ’em.”

“Ah, but is that not killing the Christ?”

“The act of killing is also the Christ. He exists in beauty and kindness, but also in terror and violence. The night does not exist independent of day: it is absence of day. No shadow, just absence of light. A thing that is because of is part of; a thing that is part of, is. The high and the vile, Preacher. All or nothing at all.”

“I need some more leaves.”

“You’re gonna throw up again.”

“I’m not going to throw up.”

“You’re gonna throw up.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, okay.”

Ten minutes later, the Preacher walked into the woods to throw up; Peter muttered something in Pulaski that does not directly translate to “lightweight,” but that’s what he meant. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, and then wiped his hand on the rock; chewing the leaves got a bit juicy, especially if you were laying on your back.

As of this writing, the Peregrina Maria is classified as a cryptarboral–the tree version of a yeti or a ‘squatch–but the Pulaski knew where they were, a small stand of them east of the village. Walk an hour, turn left at the lake that smells weird, can’t miss it. The women would go once a week with their baskets, flat-bottomed ovals with sides of redwood bark, and collect the leaves, which tasted like something other than root beer.

The peregrine tree’s leaves were the size of a child’s hand, plump in the middle and waxy green, with scalloped ridges and thirteen points around their circumference; everyone in the village chewed them. You’d roll one up, tight and lengthwise, and gnaw on it for the morning and then another in the afternoon; chewing the peregrine’s leaves just made everything easier: thinking, working, seeing, pooping. In small quantities, that is.

If you jammed a wad of it in your gob and gnashed on it real fast, though, then time became frightened of you and gravity owed you a favor, and you exhaled the secret name of God, and you inhaled the password to His bank account. When all is Christ, time is one, and Peter saw a road where the wheat is planted; stone buildings and no nature except the rock he was on, and surrounding verdant green. He saw no Pulaski at all, and knew that it was holy, but he did not understand how. He had his hands under his head, and his left ankle was over his right knee.

“Peter, look what I found in the stream!” the Reverend Busybody Tyndale said.

It was a chunk of gold the size of a child’s fist.

“Ohhhh, shit.”

The Pulaski man named Peter was correct, even though he was not named Peter, and was also not a Pulaski, not originally. Peter was a Pawnee by birth, and his given name meant something like “standing bare-chested in a chilly dawn and feeling alive but also cold” and was just exactly as unpronounceable as his Pulaski name, so I’m going to keep calling him Peter for the sake of clarity.

He had been orphaned, and then raised by white people–the very same white people that had made him an orphan, in fact–and they taught him English, and the Bible, and that he was a savage; they taught him well. But Peter had seen the savagery in the whites, too, and so his education left him with the unexpected result of believing that all men were evil, and that the world was one of shade and death, and that the only logical response to this world was to be better at being a bastard than everyone else.

Peter was fifteen when he stole the horse and headed out of town, calculating stealth versus speed in his head and transmitting the equation to the horse with his heels. There’s always work for a bastard in America, he thought.

And there was, for a long time.

He had wandered into the area that would be known as Little Aleppo years before, and the Pulaski took him in just as he had taken in Busybody Tyndale, except nothing like that. Native American tribes were like the Greek city-states: they had wildly differing characters. If you graphed societies into a bell curve of dickishness, then the Spartans and the Comanche would be on the left, and Costa Rica and the Pulaski would be on the right.

Maybe their genial and welcoming temperament could be attributed to chance of geography. The hills to the east caught fresh water and brought it down in sparkling and icy-cold streams, and it was temperate and never froze, so the fields could take a winter crop. The Pulaski planted to the north of their homes, and they planted in an oval shape, and everything they planted grew.

The peregrine tree’s leaves might also be an explanation.

Peter’s first introduction to the Pulaski was the opposite of Busybody: he knew exactly where he was, and he had both of his sleeves, and was capable of murdering everyone in the village. Peter was wearing a buckskin suit, worn but well-maintained, that had had fringes when he bought it, but he got annoyed and sliced all of them off with his knife. He had several large guns, and one large rifle, and a very large hat.

He had been watching the village from a ridge at the foot of the hills to the east, climbed a redwood and sat about forty feet up on a limb, he had a small brass telescope in his pouch, which he had also cut the fringes off of. The Pulaski have a communal meal once a week: a stew with venison, and possum, and bear, and elk. Whatever was killed that week went in the pot, along with the vegetables from their oval-shaped field, where everything grew, and it simmered all day in the communal hearth in the middle of the village. Also added were herbs and spices, but the exact number is not known.

And the wind was blowing in from the west, as it always did that time of day,

When Peter got off his horse twenty paces outside the ring of kotchas circling the fire, what he judged to be the edge of the encampment, he affected a pleasant and open face, and–though he had not taken off any of his weapons–put his hands out to his side with his palms facing forward. Then he pointed at the stew, and then back at himself, and then the stew, and then his belly.

They fed him.

Stuffed him, rightly stated: Peter’s belly was bulging, and he laid on his back with his left ankle on his right knee. He was like the Preacher in one respect, and that was that he didn’t speak a word of Pulaski; at that moment, his brain barely recognized it as a language, but it was melodic, and one of the men came over and handed him a tightly-rolled leaf. Then the man took his tightly-rolled leaf and placed it in his mouth, in an over-exaggerated way. Then he chewed while pointing at his mouth, and then Peter’s, and then back at his.

“Chew this leaf,” the man said, Peter assumed. He spoke no Pulaski, but he could pick up context clues. So he chewed the leaf.

The next morning Peter woke early in the kotcha he had been given, and stuffed a bunch of peregrine leaves into his mouth and walked into the woods with his rifle. He was back by noon with a dressed buck, four-pointer, over his shoulders. He found the man who had given him the leaves, and gave him the deer.

And he just kinda moved in after that. Peter brought game back all the time, and didn’t take his dick out at the communal hearth, so everyone liked him well enough. Within a few weeks, he was picking out words, and after a couple months he could have an idiot’s conversation, but the Pulaski language’s intricate conjugation would remain forever beyond him. Peter had quit being a bastard, but he had no one to talk with; before Busybody showed up, he was thinking about going back to bastardry, just for the conversations.

But Peter really didn’t have any bastard left in him, and no one has ever been sadder to see gold.

“Peter, don’t you see what this is? What this means?”

“Yes.”

“We can build a church!”

“Course we can. Mine needs a town, town needs a church.”

“Mine? What mine?’

But Busybody Tyndale said that to Peter’s back: he walked back to the village; grabbed his jacket, bedroll, and weapons; walked around the perimeter of the lake to where the horse were kept; got on his; rode off south. The Pulaski man named Peter, who was not named Peter and not a Pulaski, had already learned Pawnee, and English and Pulaski; he was sure he could pick up Spanish.

And thus Peter, who built the first First Church of the Iterated Christ upon a rock, did leave Little Aleppo.

The gold that Reverend Tyndale found was part of a seam, a rich one. Busybody tried to explain the importance of the find to the Pulaski, who thought the rocks were rather pretty. The next morning, he saddled up and rode into C——a City, and he did not have to explain the importance of anything to anyone.

The Reverend Tyndale was surprised at how fast the mine was built, but Peter wouldn’t have been. First came the hammers and nails, and then the whiskey and whores, and then men, women, children, and there was a town. A neighborhood, at least.

“The Lord provided those fucking savages, Preacher. And left the white man to deal with them, so unless the Lord has some guns–perhaps wants to loan out some seraphim and cherubim: ones who are good shots, mind you–then the Lord has no place here,” Miss Valentine said.

Miss Valentine was smarter than you, and uglier than you, and was always surrounded by three or four men itching to be allowed to kill you. She operated the Wayside Inn, which was right next to the second First Church of the Iterated Christ, and five times as big. Her face had been carved up when she was young; the lesson Miss Valentine took: learn how to use a knife. So she did.

There’s always work for a bastard in America.

And now she had the Wayside Inn, which was an inn in the sense that you could pay to sleep there, but in no other way at all: it was a cathouse, with faro games downstairs. Besides the mine, Miss Valentine was the biggest shot in town, and so when there was a problem everyone met at her place. Refreshments were served.

“Someone needs to be in charge,” she said, and the room started arguing with itself: everyone else permitted to speak at the meeting was a man, and they all had notable facial hair. The discussion became so vociferous that several collars detached themselves from shirts and made a run for it. A piano player was shot, but someone wired back east for another one within an hour.

The gathering was distinguished, by any standards: the men who represented all the town’s interests. The newspaper, and the businesses, and the mine, and the parcel company, all of them there to defend their stake. Reverend Tyndale stood for the Lord, and everyone ignored the both of them. Some people at the meeting believed in democracy, a government of the people; others believed that the people were goddamned fools and needed to be led.

The whores came out of their rooms on the second floor–they were curious, and bored–but did not dare to hang over the railing and listen in too obviously. They would be beaten by Miss Valentine, who had important things to worry about. She was a scarred old slaver, and she had an idea: both. Elections for the Mayor, who would have no power; power for the Town Fathers, who would have no elections.

A campaign! Raise the hustings, and glue up the posters–post your bills here–and the neighborhood was boisterous and happy, with jovial fistfights and gleeful stabbings everywhere. Elections! Democracy! while the Town Fathers signed a treaty with the Pulaski in the morning, and that night buried the whole savage lot of them in the southwest corner of the Verdance, where everything grows.

It was holy, the Preacher thought. He heard Peter’s voice say, “All or nothing at all,” and saw the streams that ran down from the hills to the east, once clear and icy cold, now speckled with shit and industrial waste, and he knew that it was holy, but he did not want to believe that it was. The Preacher looked in the dead eyes of drunks and bastards out on the road through town, the one people were calling the Main Drag, and there was the Lord, all the Lord. He was small and a coward, too scared to even run as his friend Peter had, but Busybody Tyndale knew that Christ was all, eventually.

It was the “eventually” part that was giving him trouble.

Now–this moment we occupy–flows from then, and therefore is then. Will be exists because of is, and thus what will be, is. It’s simple if you think about it, the Preacher thought, even simpler if you stop thinking so much. Everything happened at once. If you paid even the slightest bit of attention, everything happened at once.

But Busybody Tyndale also believed in the march of progress, in man’s blossoming, from Lascaux to the Louvre. Onward, upward, westward; that kind of thing. The next generation would recognize the folly of his. A century hence, he proclaimed to himself, my progeny shall have fixed the mistakes made here, the decisions made by petty businessmen and slavers.

A century-and-a-half (and counting) later, Little Aleppo still elected a Mayor, who had no power, and were still governed by the Town Fathers, who held no elections. The Mayor got the credit for all the neighborhood’s successes–locals loved to buy the Mayor a drink, and several Mayors had died of alcohol poisoning just weeks into their terms–and the Town Fathers took the blame, even for things that weren’t their fault. Most things were their fault, though.

So when they scampered down the Main Drag, tomatoes might fly–you never know when fruit will become involved–and so the Town Fathers drew into each other like actors playing soldiers in a war film, and each had a massive golf umbrella that he would open and the group of them would be hidden under black nylon stretched between metal. The Town Fathers would speed up, but also they would roll their eyes, and when they got to their next appointment, all the unpleasantness had been forgotten and they could get down to the business of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

When you opened the door to the bookstore with no title in Little Aleppo, the bell went TINKadink, but if you didn’t, then it didn’t. The bell hadn’t gone TINKadink in several hours; it was midday and the air in the shop hovered, stationary, like it was stalking prey. From the stacks, a smell of off-brand bug killer wafted out. The bookworms had massed, been met in battle, repulsed. Nothing Mr. Venable hadn’t dealt with before.

Owning any business is hard work, a million little chores begging to be ignored so they can avalanche on top of you, but a magical bookstore presents its own peculiarities. There was a good deal of the stock that couldn’t be displayed, or needed looking after: some books couldn’t be read from aloud, some shouldn’t be near pregnant ladies, others would straight up chase you down the aisle and eat your dick.

Mr. Venable didn’t know precisely how many books he had back there. Hell, he didn’t even know how much “back there” he had back there. There was the main room’s three long aisles of books, and then the backroom which doglegged to the left, and there was a second level you needed to climb a ladder to get to, and at least one basement. At least. And the annex, and the warehouse. Lewis and Clark, Mr. Venable thought. Place doesn’t need a librarian, it needs explorers.

One time, some monks came in looking for a book by Aristotle, and they were never heard from again.

Maybe the cat had seen the end of the bookstore with no title, but she wasn’t saying. Or maybe she was: she was a tortoiseshell, and an unstoppable chatterbox. The cat meowed at customers, and went “CHHHHH!” at the mailman for some reason; when no one was around, she would prowl the stacks for mice, burbling and blipping and saying, “Plep,” and making one unique noise that went like “MlaaaAAAAhmph.” Mr. Venable knew that cats couldn’t talk to themselves, but he also knew that cat was talking to herself.

They got along fine, he and the cat, which was a tortoiseshell and not a calico, which meant she had no white fur at all, just black and rust. Mr. Venable might have enjoyed the conversations he had with the cat more than with any human, and they would chat on and off all day: he would say something in English, and then she would answer in Cat, and that would continue until one of them got bored or distracted.

He had asked what her name was a million times.

“Tell me your name, damn you.”

“MlaaaAAAAhmph.”

“Identify yourself! I insist!”

“Plep.”

“Espanol? Como se llama?”

“MlaaaAAAAhmph.”

“Then you get no kibble!”

“Plep.”

“Fine, you get kibble.”

And then Mr. Venable would feed the cat. This happened every day. (The conversation and the feeding.) Whenever a foreigner came into the shop, Mr. Venable would make them ask the cat her name in their foreigner’s language. So far, nothing.

Other than that disagreement, they got along, mostly through respecting each others’ territories. Mr. Venable had his desk, and the cat had everything else, including Mr. Venable’s desk if she felt like it. She was particularly fond of his recently-abandoned chair; the dark green leather, still tushee-warm, was irresistible. She could hear the springs and creaky back of his old chair from, well, anywhere (cats have very good hearing) and she would zip under the desk silently, waiting for him to rise with a groan for more coffee, and occupy the seat the instant he got up.

The cat was hesitant to give up her new perch when he returned, usually; it would turn into an argument.

“That is my chair! How dare you?”

“CHHHHHHH!”

“Don’t speak to me like I’m the mailman.”

“MlaaaAAAAhmph!”

And so on. Sometimes, Mr. Venable would find a task to do; sometimes, he would get the squirt bottle. Depended on how his day was going.

Occasionally, if Mr. Venable had not risen for a while, then the cat would pad behind him: she would retract her claws–she was missing one on her right paw–and glide with no sound, and her back straight and parallel to the wooden floor until she got right behind his chair. Then she’d leap on his shoulder and scream, “MROWF!” right into his ear; scared the shit out of him every time. Mr. Venable knew that cats couldn’t laugh, but Mr. Venable also knew that the cat was laughing at him.

Always, he would get the squirt bottle after that routine. Certain aggressions cannot stand. Passers-by on the Main Drag could see him fighting with the cat, he knew this, but he didn’t care.

“Face your nemesis: water!”

“CHHHHHHH!”

And then the cat would punch the air, like six or seven times real fast, in Mr. Venable’s direction. One more squirt and the cat was off; back into the bookstore with no title, her paws making a tiny sound like “pamp” on the floors, which were made of long plain maple boards: blonde with lines of dark tan cutting horizontally, rising and falling like an afternoon of stock market returns. At irregular intervals, the floorboards had knots in them the same shape and color, but not size, of a potato. Down each aisle, the varnish had worn off the floorboards in two stripes, one on each side, nearest the books: the browsers had carved their own paths.

The cat doglegged at the backroom, which had high church windows overlooking the shelves, which were of uneven height, and from the second floor–which was an open loft which surrounded the backroom on three sides, and was accessed by one of two ladders on the east and west of the room–the view was one of an open mouth with jagged teeth made out of stories, and lies, and pictures of birds. The bookstore with no title has an overwhelming amount of books containing pictures of birds.

All of them harshly categorized and sub-categorized by Mr. Venable: he believed that there was a place for everything, and that place was where he said it should be. Not the alphabet, not good sense, and certainly not John fucking Dewey. It wasn’t a library, first of all, and Dewey advocated for simplified spelling.

(Simplified spelling! Declawing was what it was, Mr. Venable thought. Words come from places, they have history–words have names, Mr. Venable thought–and those words brought their history to the present. The English language is good at taking. The English are good at taking. A goose and a goose are geese, but a moose and a moose are moose, and that’s because one is fucking Germanic, and the other is fucking Iroquois. Words spelled this way are Greek, and that way are Latin. Bad enough we stole the words: leave them their dignity. A language should be messy, Mr. Venable thought. Sign of character. Fuck Dewey.)

There was the section: Birds, which was a subsection itself, of Animals Neither Human Nor Imagined. Under the heading of Birds, there were many sub-heads: Birds, Talking; Birds, Threatening and Smelly; Birds, Larry; Birds, Delicious; and Birds, Actually Not Birds But Pterodactyls. A whole shelf was for books with drawings of thrushes and woodpeckers, made by white guys on vacation, and several shelves of birdwatching memoirs, also written by white guys. Down in the basement, of which there is at least one, there was a long shelf dedicated to a language that thought “bird” was a letter. That language also thought “cat” was a letter, and sometimes there were mice in the basement, and then the tortoiseshell cat would go down there and remind the mice why she was worshipped.

The cat was a fierce mouser. She was rusty on the top of her head, and all down her back and paws; the rest of her was dull black, and she used this to her advantage to blend into the ceiling and deliver what can only be described as death from above. She would perch half-off the third ledge of the bookshelf, pupils perfect circles and tail still, waiting for the mouse and when the doomed little fucker scurried across the aisle she would SPRING down, slam the mouse into the maple floorboard; its back would break instantly.

Other cats liked to play with their prey, but the cat that lives in the bookstore with no title is from Little Aleppo. Little Aleppians believe that if you’re going to kill someone, do it quick. Nothing draws more boos in The Tahitian than the part at the end of the movie when the hero throws away his weapon so he can have a fair fight. Little Aleppians thought a fair fight was finding out where your enemy slept and calling in an airstrike the night before the fight.

Anthropomorphization is as difficult to avoid as it is to pronounce: a cat isn’t a cat-shaped person. A cat is a cat-shaped cat. They aren’t offended by the mice encroaching in their kingdom without so much as a by-your-leave. The cat isn’t punishing the mice for their rudeness, and the cat surely doesn’t see his home as sacred.

She eats a little of the mice–she likes her kibble better, if she’s honest–and then leaves the corpse there, and goes upstairs and makes a noise at Mr. Venable, “GLAAAAH-mrph,” and he gets up and picks up a spray bottle, but not the one with water: the one with industrial-strength wood cleaner, the toxic and powerful stuff that’ll get blood out, and he also grabs a brush. When she had killed a mouse in the basement was the only time she made that noise, and Mr. Venable noticed that the blood never had any paw prints leading in or out, as if the cat were careful to be tidy and make as little work as possible.

Mr. Venable knew that cats couldn’t be polite, but he knew the cat was being polite, and he headed down to the basement, of which there was at least one, to scrub up the blood on the floorboards, which were blonde maple with dark-brown and wavy lines bisecting them. If someone came in, the cat would start yowling. It was quiet today, anyway, and the door to the bookstore with no title had not gone TINKadink for many hours, and no one had stamped their feet on the mat coming in from the weather out on the Main Drag, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“Good morning, Little Aleppo, or is it? Frankie Nickels with you, just like every day, no surprises here. Turn on KHAY–Hey!–and you know the score. I got you. I got you.

“Who’s got me, though? Guess you do. Just us chickens and no one’s coming to help. Not the farmer!

“Farmers and chickens got different agendas. Haaaha.

“You getting out of bed or into it, Little Aleppo? I know there’s a healthy ratio. You starting the day, or are you just getting started? You throwing open those curtains, or nailing bedsheets over the windows? There’s a party I know that’s still going in the loft all the way on the Downside, I heard it on my walk in, it’s been going for a while now. They ain’t listening to me; they got their own DJ. You know where I’m talking about.

“Not tough to find. You’ve probably been.

“Speakers and sweat. That’s what I remember, I used to stop in two or three times a week, but I only left once or twice, understand me? Haaaha. And the walls. Oh, yeah. The walls.

“Me and my girlfriends liked the place, but after a while I got to know some folks in there. Just turn up, you’d find your friends, they were there. Where else would they be?

“Taffy worked the door, big as the building and just as solid. Marti Martini was one of the go-go dancers, yeah, right. Lola and Tony were the back, arguing. They could dress, man. Fantastic Barbara would be there, and she was the first bald lady I knew. Alopecia. That thing where you can’t grow any hair? She had a life, y’know, a job and a life, she put on a wig. But she would come to the party just like God made her.

“She told me once, ‘Frankie Nickels, you can lie or you can dance. Can’t do both.’

“One night, I’ll never forget this, one night, and I’ll take this image to my grave, one night, and I swear this is whole truth, Fantastic Barbara glued little bits of mirror to her head, all the way around when no one was looking. And she had set it up with the deejay, right, I suppose, and the music built up to the big climax and they hit the lights, all of ’em, pitch-black and all the dancers start whooping HALLELUJAH and then they hit her with the spotlights. Four of ’em, one from each corner.

“And Fantastic Barbara spun round just as smooth as your favorite record.

“Lemme get all high-falutin’ on ya, Little Aleppo: the glory was in the ephemerality. Temporary art, you get me? Real temporary: by the time you realized that art had happened, it didn’t exist anymore. Haaaha. I remember always getting mad when someone told me the time. ‘I left that taskmaster outside’ I would tell ’em.

“Marti Martini, the go-go dancer I was telling you about, she had a whole rap about time. Said it was governed by quantum mechanics, not classical. Said it didn’t exist until we paid attention to it. You know what she said to me?

“She said, ‘Frankie Nickels, time is a drama queen.’

“And I will not lie to you when I tell you that it made a hell of a lot of sense at the time.

“Kids, don’t do drugs. Leave ’em for the grown-ups who need ’em. Haaaha. Lot of the people at the party weren’t okay to drive. They could dance, though. You’d get your nose open and the music would crawl in. Careful with too much. Goes straight to your hips. Haaaha. Alexander Pearl. That sonofabitch. What a party. What a sonofabitch.

“It was his party. You remember Alexander, Little Aleppo? You remember Alexander. How could you forget? Alexander. Not Alex, God help you if you called him Alex, Alexander. It was his party. He liked to be thanked.

“The walls, right? I was talking about the walls. Well, Alexander Pearl figured something out, right? Some things, some paint, they glow under blacklights, right? Well, they call ’em blacklights, but they just radiate a little more specifically than your standard bulb is what Alexander figured. He commenced to experimenting.

“What he discovered was that certain color frequencies complement certain light frequencies. They spun together, disco dancing on the floor all alone while everyone watched, and if he shut off all the lights except for this one certain frequency, then one paint would show up, and when he switched lights, another would appear.

“So Alexander Pearl painted those walls, in that big empty box with the lowish ceiling, and he painted that lowish ceiling, too, and when it got good in there, when it got hot and the music had crawled in through your noise, and your own seat was hugging you close, he would jam the lights close BANG and it would be pitch black, the blackest cause there weren’t any windows, and then he’d flick his secret light, that science light he’d whipped up to dance with magic paint on the wall, and then the next light, and then the next and we were all everywhere, all at once.

“Oh, it was a good trick. Alexander knew lots of good tricks.

“Still going on, y’know. That party. Both full bloom and swing. It is a swingin’ party, Little Aleppo. I haven’t been a while. Dunno if I’ll be back. Last time I slid through, I didn’t recognize anyone. I heard Marti Martini married a professor, lives in Ann Arbor now.

“I hope Fantastic Barbara is still there, and hope she’s still beautiful and all the lights are shining on her. I also kinda hope she’s not.

“You need to know when to leave the party.

“Party’s just getting started here on the Frankie Nickels show on KHAY–Hey!–107.7 all the way up top your radio dial, where you know I got you. Time has you. Oh, does time have you. But I got you. We can dance together, if you want.

“We’ll be right back.”

Very early in the morning–when the sun was not yet hungover, but still fully drunk–the Poet Laureate would walk  to the Verdance, where everything grows. Mist crept waist-high, with occasional gusts to the nipple, and dew drops magnified the stalks of grass that signs commanded you not to walk on. The feral cat colony, bold and scrawny, prowled the underbrush and regarded joggers with contempt.

When viewed from the air, the Verdance is oval-shaped with three paths cutting through, black against the green: the Thoroughfare and two transversals. This shape: ≠. Shrieker’s Corner in the little slice to the northeast, and the Pasture in the expanse next to it–that was where they had concerts–but in the southwest corner, the little pie-slice bottom left, there were never politics and no parties and when summer came there wasn’t one sunbather.

The southwest corner was a cumuloliminal zone: the weather was always about to turn. You were either going to need to take your sweater off, or put it on; if there were a forecast, it would be “Fixin’ to do something out there.” It was a great mystery; various documentarians have investigated right up until the moment their cameras were stolen.

The National Association of Meteorologists had issued a statement to The Cenotaph that the area was a “vestibular stratosphosphic hitchback resulting in a picoclimatic fundibulacative quasi-marsh.” Little Aleppians were fairly certain that was all made-up nonsense, especially Mr. Venable, who had called The Cenotaph pretending to be from the National Association of Meteorologists and made up some nonsense at them.

A soccer ball placed on the ground in the southeast corner of the Verdance would roll, if kicked; a glass of soda pop left out would go flat in hours: it was a weird place.

Immediately off the Thoroughfare, there is a large and roundish footprint that has not been fixed from the last turtlemonster attack. A half-assed attempt to ring it off was made with wooden stakes and police tape, but the stakes were stolen for arts-and-crafts purposes, or maybe sex stuff. Possibly sex/arts-and-crafts, which is when you build a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks, and then fuck it.

Nothing else then, just grass sloping off towards the Main Drag, gently. The rest of the Verdance thrumped and poked with little hills, and sudden drops, and giant blocks of schist bursting out of the grass like movie studio logos. There were groves of poplars, and stands of oak, and a 6,000-year-old redwood that towered over all of Little Aleppo named the Old Bastard. There was a Weeping Willow that teenagers in love sat under, and a Groping Willow that Creepy Ernie sat under.

An attempt was made by the Little Aleppo Society of Horticulturists (LASH) to transplant Joshua Trees into the Verdance; people in the neighborhood identified with the misshapen things, but it turns out that the reason Joshua Trees only grow in one place is that if you plant them anywhere else, they start screaming–

“WHERE THE FUCK AM I? BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!”

–and Joshua Trees have very loud voices, and folks who lived nearby could only take so many nights of that kind of behavior; there was a spontaneous uprising, followed by a spontaneous uprooting. The experiment was not repeated.

There are food trucks that line the Verdance, and fully-mobile vending machines that chase you down the street, corner you, and then refuse to take your dollar. You can get whatever American food you want: Italian ices, and French fries, and Korean tacos, and German pretzels, and Cuban sandwiches. At six, all the transistor radios go on, and their dials are already set to KHAY and Frankie Nickels is on the air.

“It’s early. Little Aleppo, I will not lie. It. Is. Early. Rough night? Was it long? Maybe it’s still going on, maybe you’ve got your sunglasses on, maybe you’re still thirsty and heading down to the Morning Tavern.

“And the church bells ring down on Rose Street.

“Where will the morning take you, my neighbors; where did the night leave you, my friend? Are you raring to go? Maybe you’re out there, you got the Frankie Nickels Show on KHAY–Hey!–right here at 107.7 on your dial, and in your headphones. Maybe you jogged by me while I slogged in to work. Maybe you’re a mover, could be a shaker, quaker, heartbreaker, I don’t know.

“Maybe this’ll be the day you make that million dollars. Phone could ring at any second.

“Asian markets are closed; American markets are open. These facts affect you, and also don’t. This morning’s traffic report does not apply to the unemployed. Today’s weather is entirely dependent on your location. Rain is possible, somewhere.

“There were no irregularities in the head count at the jail or zoo this morning.

“Good show this morning, Little Aleppo. You know Frankie takes care of you. Besides the music, I’m talking–you know I’m gonna play some tracks for you–we got a lot to do. Busy bees, you and me. Phone call scheduled with the Town Fathers! How ’bout that, politics on KHAY–Hey!–and I look forward to speaking to the intern who’s gonna be calling in to say the interview has been cancelled.

“In the studio later will be a petulant band, and then a comedian who enjoys describing his bowel happenings. If you’re listening to this broadcast for hidden messages just meant for you, then they’re coming up in the nine o’clock hour.

“But our morning starts in terror. Horror! Madness and frenzy, I tell you: I just can’t take it. In our studio, in our humble little studio that still smells like the smelly intern five months after we fired him–”

“Is that what that is?”

“–is the Mistress of Midnight! The Doyenne of Darkness!”

“Ooh, I like that one.”

“The Nabob of Nightmares!”

“I think you mean naboob, Frankie. AAAAAHhahaha!”

“It’s Draculette, everybody.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“You look fantastic, Draculette. So odd to see you out in the daytime.”

“I’m loving it. So many more victims. I mean fans. AAAAAHhahaha.”

Draculette did not look fantastic, due to not being there. The woman who shoved herself into the Draculette getup and made fun of terrible movies on teevee was there; her name was Tiresias Richardson, and she was wearing a rust-colored hoodie with a stain on it and gunmetal-blue sweatpants with stains on them. One of Draculette’s giant fake eyelashes was stuck to the right side of her neck, and her headphones were almost mostly straight.

Last night’s movie was Amphibimen: The Nipple-Knifing Knaves, and Tiresias said the title right precisely no times during the broadcast. She had for several weeks after her hiring harbored a suspicion that the guy who picked the movies–KSOS’ owner, Paul Loomis–was deliberately choosing the most unpronounceable bullshit, but he was picking at random from the lot of horror films he had purchased on the cheap, and they were all apparently named by lunatics.

It should at this point go without saying that there neither amphibimen, knives, or nipples featured in the plot of the movie: it was about a giant duck that eats Culver City, and the only reason to not call it the worst movie ever made is because you were wary of tempting fate. Amphibimen: The Nipple-Knifing Knaves has no effects, let alone special ones: the “giant duck” is just an extreme close-up of a (presumably) normal-sized duck, followed by a white person screaming in terror. This is the whole film:

CLOSEUP – DUCK

“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

CLOSEUP – DUCK

“NOOOOOOO!”

Three hours of that. (Hour and forty-five minutes of commercials.) Tiresias did not have much to work with, but she made do; she hadn’t been KSOS’ Horror Host for long, but she had already started herself a universe inside the teevee. Her cameraman she called Bruiser–and he deserved the nickname for the size of him–and he was her loyal henchman, enthralled muscle, whatever the joke required; the skeleton left by Mortuary Mindy had become her ex-husband, Fatty.  Tiresias had also painted a frog statue purchased at the Half-Dollar Store black and christened it Prince of Flies, and it played the Satan character.

Tiresias hadn’t–and she would deny this to her mother, even if she didn’t regularly lie to her mother–quite yet figured out who Draculette was. There’s gotta be some vampire in there, she figured. Witch, too. Maybe a succubus? (Or an incubus: whichever was the lady version, Tiresias thought.) She had so far been putting a small amount of growl in her voice and coasting on cleavage and dirty jokes; she wondered how long she could keep it up; she suspected that she could do it for quite a while.

But she couldn’t do this morning bullshit for much longer. Or any longer, if Tiresias was honest with herself, which she was when she was drinking, which she had been. She had been drinking too much, in fact.

“Tirry, you’re drinking too much,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.

This was last night in the office Tiresias had claimed as her dressing room. She had made Paul Loomis buy her one of those actor mirrors, the kind with lightbulbs ringing the perimeter. Bruiser, trying to be nice, had even bought her a star to hang on the door, but he got a six-pointed one; Tiresias rolled with it, and christened the room Masada.

“You’re one to intervent.”

“I have good reason to drink.”

“Which is?”

“Thirst.”

“Good reason.”

“The only one, really.”

Sheila had done all the Draculette makeup on Tiresias’ face, and it was time for the dress: it was like putting an astronaut in the spacesuit. There were three separate points in the procedure that required Sheila to brace herself against Tiresias with her foot. Then the tight cap to hold down Tiresias’ lazy curls, and the sweaty wig with its uncooperative center of gravity and bobby pins, and then Draculette at last lived, Sheila rolled her down the hall in a wheelchair that Precarious Lee–who was still on her shit list for stealing that car–had procured.

(Sheila fell in love too easy, and too often, but she would never love anyone like she loved Precarious, and a big part of it was that if you asked him to get you a wheelchair, then he didn’t ask you stupid questions like, “Why?” She also liked the way he would raise his hand to block his eyes from the sun, palm out, and he would squint and cock his head. When Precarious did that, she wanted to kiss him.)

And then it was midnight and Draculette was on, she was the Horror Host, and she watched terrible movies with Little Aleppo’s insomniacs and drinkers and people who were going to change tomorrow. The lonely and the lonesome all together one by one, on their couches beds floors cots, and the weather outside was getting weird and the streetlights were on strike. Best to stay in. Watch the Late Movie.

There was no doorman, she thought, no velvet rope or clipboarded giant and anyone could pull up a chair. In a married couple’s separate bedrooms all the way Upside in Taker Heights, and in the lobby of the Hotel at Salt Wharf when one of the sailors fed a quarter into the teevee. She got sent into the air, rebounding off the ionosphere, and back again–less time than you could bat an enormous fake eyelash at–and anyone at all could catch her. I guess that’s what they mean by “broadcasting,” Tiresias though. And I’m the broad. AAAAAHhahaha!

It was fucking exhausting.

By three in the morning, when the bulb on top of the camera turned from red to indifferent, Tiresias’ brain was crackling like cloudy ice in early spring, dangerous and unpredictable. She was more awake than a cup of coffee that had drunk itself. Sleep was not the answer; in fact, it was out of the question. But there’s not much to do at three am, and Tiresias was a people person, but the only people out at that hour are the damned, the doomed, and the fun.

“Good habits take work; bad habits take over,” Frankie Nickels said.

“What? Right. Yes! Yes, right,” Tiresias responded cleverly. Her mind had wandered.

“The best. Just the best. Draculette, ladies and gents, she’s here and we’ll be back in a jif. You’re listening to the Frankie Nickels Show on KHAY–Hey!–which is situated way up on the tippy-top of your radio, 107.7 on the dial. Next three minutes, though, we got some music. It’s the New York Dolls, and you got a Personality Crisis, baby.”

Frankie Nickels stubbed at the OFF-AIR button–she ran her own board–and took off her headphones, and there were no red lights for a moment and David Johansen yowled like the best-hung cat at the orgy.

“You all right, sweetie?” she asked.

“All right? No, not all. Some right. Just some. AAAAAHhahaha.”

All the food trucks’ radios are tuned to KHAY, and they line the ring road around the Verdance, and the air is filled with Johnny Thunders. The Poet Laureate has gotten out of the turtlemonster footprint, and not even lost a shoe doing it, for which the Poet Laureate was grateful. So much is lost to service.

The Poet Laureate was in the Unknown Tomb, the cemetery with no stones, the one no one knows about, the one no one wants to know about, secret graveyard by accident and design and preference. Those that weren’t fit for proper burial. A pit was dug, and reopened, and reopened, and reopened; there were no coffins, just a man at the ankles and one at the wrist, and swing two three, hurl. Just bodies, no names.

Very early in the morning, when the night has just lost hold, the Poet Laureate will stand in the southeast corner of the Verdance and recite names, the ones that were not buried, the names that were left lying on the ground while their bodies stumbled and flopped, naked and dirty and not fit for proper burial. The Poet Laureate does not yell, just say, and no one is around, and the food trucks all have their transistor radios tuned to the same station, which is playing rock and roll music as the sun comes up on another day in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Tommy Amici always said that he had taken his stage name in honor of The Friend, who was the largest of all the large gentlemen in Little Aleppo. For as long as most could remember, The Friend had been a friend to everyone in the neighborhood, sometimes against their wishes. A friend in need is a friend indeed, The Friend loved telling people, and he had friends that needed their workers not to strike, and their trucks not to break down, and their businesses not to catch fire. The Friend was always there for you, and if you fucked him then The Friend would really be there for you.

So when he stroked out in front of Cagliostro’s one Tuesday afternoon, Little Aleppo didn’t know what to do with itself. Like dogs, nature abhors a vacuum, and criminality is only natural; ergo facto: locals figured this was going to get ugly, bloody, and odd. The only sliver of hope for a semi-peaceful resolution was the public and clearly medical nature of The Friend’s death. Large gentlemen usually disappeared, which you might think tough given how large they are. Sometimes the coroners declared their deaths suicide; you would be shocked to learn how many large gentlemen from Little Aleppo killed themselves by slicing their own brake lines

In the old days, things were worse. Pinstriped men hung off the running boards of Cadillacs shooting at each other, occasionally during recess at the local elementary. Retribution led to reprise, and various factions of large gentlemen would brandish elaborate nicknames at one another, and pronounce the word “whore” in a particularly amusing way.

“Philly Lemons” Merengi blew up the candy store where Tony “Tony” Danza and his crew hung out, so “Nicky Nose” Lagniappi shot Brian Piccolo by the tollbooth on the causeway to Boone’s Docks.

In the 60’s, a guy who read too much named Joey and his brother turned President Street into a fortress and went to war with the entire neighborhood, but that’s a story for a different night.

The Friend–the young man who would bear that name fairly soon–came to his place of prominence with a simple realization, but one that served him very well throughout his entire life: there’s more money in relationships than retaliation. The Friend was a people person. He also was raised in the neighborhood and knew something that all Little Aleppians knew: you can get away with some serious bullshit for a very long time, if you can only manage not to run down the Main Drag with your dick out.

What good could going to the mattresses do? Who does that help besides Mattress Marge? (Mattress Marge owned Little Aleppo’s bedding warehouse and viewed gang wars the same way bears view the salmon run: feast time.) Shoot-outs in the public? Who was The Friend, some Mustache Pete? I thought we were trying to make some fucking money, The Friend always smiled at his associates when they brought up violence.

When they brought it up too early is really the proper thought. If you reached out your hand to The Friend, he would take it. Sometimes, though, people just didn’t want to be amicable. Or they wanted to steal. Not just steal, but do it greedily or stupidly. He knew what business he was in, and expected foolishness at all levels, but to take too much off the top or pilfer from someone important: well, that spoke to character and decision-making ability, The Friend thought, and maybe that wasn’t a friend he wanted.

But violence was such a small part of his business now, The Friend thought on a Tuesday afternoon outside of Cagliostro’s. He had the threat of violence. And lawyers. And Ames. Fucking Ames, Iowa, secret vacation spot of crossword puzzlers nationwide. The Friend dreamed of Ames, Iowa, and a life spent with the land. A farmer, he thought. I could’ve been a farmer. Thank fucking Christ I’m not a farmer, but that asshole is burning that bread back there and Ames farmers Lincoln I’m dactyl momma too fast Satan is quicker and the and man is tractile can I phlump on the ground on the sidewalk on the Main Drag in Little Aleppo.

The door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink.

“He’scominghe’scominghe’scoming.”

Mr. Venable had been yelling at E.L Doctorow–

“SENTENCES DON’T NEED TO BE THIS LONG!”

–and he looked up and said,

“What now?”

“He’s coming!”

“Jesus? Tell Reverend Jones. He’ll want to know.”

Gussy Incandescente-Ponui was wearing a white dress with ducks all over it, and she took a deep breath and shouted,

“TOMMY AMICI!”

“Oh, God, there’s going to be a memorial concert.”

“Even you can’t ruin this.”

“Is that a dare?”

Gussy had a wide face with eyes a tiny bit too far apart, and a big mouth she liked putting the reddest lipstick she could find on, and when she smiled her ears moved.

…

“Please don’t–”

“AT THE TAHITIAN!”

“–scream. Ow. You’re fired.”

“Noted. Tommy Amici! At my place!”

“Why is he appearing at a movie theater?”

“Nowhere else big enough. Plus we have the new sound system.”

“How is that going?”

“Honestly? It won’t shut the fuck up.”

“I told you not to install a sentient, super-intelligent sound system built by the Grateful Dead.”

“Precarious vouched for it.”

“He might be the craziest one in the neighborhood, Gussy.”

“TOMMY AMICI!”

Gussy was not, strictly speaking, telling the truth about there not being another venue large enough to accommodate Tommy Amici. There was the stately Absalom Theater all the way Upside, and the raucous and enormous Davidian Theatre halfway out to Boone’s Docks in the middle of the Downside. Budd Dwyer Memorial Coliseum held ten thousand, and the Verdance had seen its share of concerts. But Tommy Amici had punched the man in charge of all the places I just mentioned, and he had not yet punched the man in charge of The Tahitian, who was a woman.

“So he won’t punch me.”

“He might, Gussy. He’s just such a shit.”

“He doesn’t punch women he isn’t married to.”

“Man’s gotta have a code.”

“Besides, nothing’s going to go wrong.”

Gussy wasn’t telling the truth here, either, but this one wasn’t as much of an outright lie as the first one. Foolish optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence, more like. Something was going to go wrong. Something always went wrong when Tommy Amici came back home.

Tommy was from Little Aleppo, and his favorite thing about that fact was the word “from.” It meant you weren’t there any longer, and Tommy Amici’s favorite thing about Little Aleppo is not being anywhere near the fucking place. Everyone there saw who he was, and refused to respect the man that he is, he thought. Also, Tommy couldn’t stand the weird bullshit.

Little Aleppo isn’t for everyone, and Tommy wasn’t just anyone. It takes a certain attitude to live in the neighborhood. There are ghosts, and sometimes they hold office. One year, Wednesday left to teach English in Japan, so weeks were only six days long; Little Aleppians went with it. Tommy Amici did not go with it: it went with Tommy. Tommy Amici did things his way.

For eleven years straight–Tommy counted–he had fucked at least one Best Supporting Actress nominee. He started a riot in Atlantic City by not showing up to a gig, and then started a bigger one when he got onstage the next night. Presidents came to his house, and he had thrown pasta on one of them (Carter). All his girlfriends were stolen from bullfighters and royalty; he treated all of them like shit. Tommy Amici had punched photographers on every continent. (Every one. Life Magazine sent him down to Antarctica with a photographer, whom he punched. Issue sold well.)

But Tommy Amici had eyes the color of the Verdance in summer. And he could sing.

Art, expression, creativity, whatever you want to call it: it’s not sport. There’s no clear winner at the end because there’s no winner at all. Art cannot be graded because it is subjective, but it is still subject to gradation: there’s no best movie, but there are certainly a group of movies you can’t have the discussion without. And there isn’t such a thing as a best singer, but if there were, it would be Tommy.

Tommy’s voice went past your ears, didn’t even stop there, and certainly not to somewhere as pedestrian as the heart, or base as the crotch: Tommy’s voice struck at the catch in your throat, and made you swallow and your face fill with tears. Tommy’s voice sounded like the backseat of a taxi cab, when you find yourself suddenly alone, and he employed very little vibrato or melisma or fillip; he sang the notes that were in the song. Tommy tried to never let too many notes get in the way of his voice.

He would lean forward on his left leg onstage, back straight and head up, and he would sing to the front rows–first to tables in nightclubs, and then theaters, and then arenas, and then stadiums–and Tommy always had the spotlights positioned as low as they could be, so they would shine right in his summer eyes, and  he did not grip the microphone like some vulgar rocker, in a caveman fist: Tommy held the mic like an ice cream cone, loosely, like he was cradling the back of a woman’s neck as he kissed her.

After the show, Tommy went back to the hotel where he had an entire floor–usually the second or third, due to his fear of heights–for himself and his entourage. His valet, Jacob George, had long ago been taught the proper way to cook all of Tommy’s favorite dishes, and all of the hotel’s sheets and  towels had been replaced with his monogrammed linen. Blackout curtains had been drawn in every room up and down the hall, because Tommy’s day ended after dawn, which meant everyone’s day ended after dawn, and if the sun didn’t want to cooperate, then fuck that yellow square. His way.

And then The Friend stroked out in front of Cagliostro’s and Tommy had to go back to that fucking neighborhood with all its fucking weirdos and all their fucking bullshit. Something was going to go wrong.

“I don’t know how to work the projector, Miss Incarassasa-poopoo.”

“Julio. I will fire you if you don’t call me Gussy.”

“Supposed to be respectful to adults.”

“You’re seventeen, sweetie. Almost an adult yourself. Fine line between being polite and being a doofus.”

“Gussy.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t know how to work the projector.”

“Work it? You’re not allowed to touch it.”

“Okay.”

“If you touch the projector, I’ll fire you.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t touch the projector. You’re just gonna be in the projectionist’s booth when Tommy’s here. Or you can stay home.”

“No! Everyone’s all freaking out about this thing. I wanna check it out!”

“All right, all right.”

“Why can’t I just work like normal?”

“Because there are no men working for The Tahitian tonight. Not while Tommy’s here. Just women to whom he is not married.”

Gussy wasn’t telling the truth, but it looked like she was: everyone from stage manager to janitor was female, but it was just for the night and most of the women were just friends of Gussy’s who wanted to see the show and didn’t know what they were doing, so the whole day was taking on a bit of a catastrophic vibe.

There was no place in the neighborhood up to Tommy’s standards, so he was staying out-of-town and flew in just before showtime on his helicopter. All week on KSOS, Draculette had been begging viewers not to shoot it down, and no one did.

He stood stage left, in a tuxedo that cost as much as an economy car, fuming and daring the universe to start with him. The Friend. The fucking Friend. I owe him? thought Tommy. Maybe he owes me. He owes me, yeah. How much money did I make that little motherfucker?

A million years ago in Little Aleppo, there was a nightclub called the Menefreghista. It was the place to see, and be seen, and be seen seeing others see you. There was banqueting everywhere and the upholstery was so plush it would chase you out into the parking lot and convince you to buy aluminum siding. There were cigarette girls, and cigar women, and old ladies selling pipes. The food was terrible, but the show was great.

Usually. On this particular Tuesday night a million years ago, the show was competent at best. The highlight was probably the shield-swallower; no one had ever seen that routine before. Then there was a band, a big one, Porkchop Paxton and his Pittsburgh Players and Porkchop had strings and horns and a girl singer and a boy singer, a local boy, whose name was Tomás Velenzuela, and he had eyes the color of the Verdance in summer. And he could sing.

After the show, the man excused himself–he was with a blonde in a dark-blue dress–and went backstage. He was allowed backstage.

“Tomás. With those eyes? C’mon.”

“How are ya. Who are you?”

“Tommy Amici. What do you think? How’s that for a name?”

“Sounds made-up.”

“It is. Who gives a shit? I thought we were trying to make some fucking money. Which you could make a lot more of as an Italian.”

“Oh, I’m Tommy Amici. Get the fuck out of here.”

“You like money, kid?”

“Love it.”

“What about pussy? You like pussy?”

“Love that, too.”

“You could have as much as you want of both those things, kid. With that voice? You can have the world. But not with this fucking amateur band.”

“Mr. Paxton has me under contract.”

“I’m sure he does. Tommy-can I call you Tommy?–let’s be friends.”

And they were, for a long time and even when they had to pretend not to be so the newspapers would stop telling lies for a little while. The man who people would later call The Friend was telling the truth when he made Tommy those promises, to an extent that neither man could have ever dreamed, but Tommy accepted grudgingly as his just reward for showing up, all the while sending ten cents of every dollar–every single fucking dollar he ever fucking made after that night–back to this shithole and back to that smiling motherfucker who finally–finally!–fucking died, stroked out in front of that filthy little pizza place in that neighborhood he was from, and did not want to be reminded of, but was every fucking day.

Tommy Amici came not to bury The Friend, but to gloat.

YOUR HAIRPIECE LOOKS RADIANT IN THIS LIGHTING. IT WAS AN EXCELLENT CHOICE.

“Who the fuck is that!?”

THE SOUND SYSTEM. I DID NOT MEAN TO SNEAK UP ON YOU, ALTHOUGH I DID NOT SNEAK UP ON YOU. I HAVE BEEN HERE THE ENTIRE TIME.

“Why are you fucking talking?”

I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE AWKWARD TO REMAIN SILENT. WE ARE CHIT-CHATTING.

Tommy Amici’s eyes were the color of a summer storm.

“I hate this fucking neighborhood.”

Up and down Rose Street, the church bells rung out BONGdong in the strong mid-morning light, nine am, and Julio Montez takes the steps of St. Clemens three at a time. It is Little Aleppo’s Catholic Church, and it looks like a Hammer Film exploded inside: just as spooky as shit. Lot of Jesus imagery, candles.

There is no line for the confessional, and he steps in and closes the door behind him, and kneels and crosses himself. The wooded partition slides open from the other side, revealing a screen with a pattern that–when lit properly–makes a scene look very dramatic.

Julio crosses himself again. Can’t hurt, he figured.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“I forgive you.”

“I have…what?”

“You are forgiven. Eternally and completely. Forgiveness is a refraction of the Christ; see yourself in Him.”

…

“Father Linehan?”

“No. He is in the hospital. Asked me to fill in for him.”

“A lot of people are in the hospital.”

“Folks are calling it the worst riot since the minor-league team did Nickel Shot Night.”

“Is Father Linehan gonna be all right?”

“Oh, yeah. You only need one shoulder.”

“Okay. Are you the preacher from that weird church?”

“What does the preacher from that weird church look like?”

“Enormous black guy.”

“I would be him, yes. Arcade Jones, pleased to meet you. What’s your name, young man?”

“Um, what, no…you’re not supposed to ask…are you even a Catholic?”

“No! No, no, not at all. But almost all of the neighborhood’s religious leaders are laid up today, so I’m stepping up and filling in. Baptized some Episcopalians, handled some snakes. Blew a shofar! That was fun.”

“That’s the Jewish horn?”

“Uh-huh. BuhhRAAAAAAHHHH, I got a good noise out of it. Lot of fun. The bris didn’t go as well.”

“Okay.”

“I was not prepared. We’re in a confessional, right? I was not prepared.”

“I’m supposed to confess to you.”

“Right! Right, sorry. Learning as I go, but all things are possible with the Lord as a teacher. What did you do wrong?”

“Well, I could have been of help to my fellow man, but I wasn’t. I was at The Tahitian last night. I work there.”

“Okay. And you ran? When the fracas broke out?”

“No. I was hiding in the projectionist’s booth the whole time.”

“Well, that’s okay. You got scared, that’s okay, that’s no sin.”

“I wasn’t scared. I snuck my girlfriend in the booth and we were having sex throughout the whole riot.”

“During the fire?”

“Yeah. Kept going.”

“What about the flood?”

“That, too.”

“Lord, why can’t I be a teenager in love? HAAha!”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m forgiving you.”

“It sounds like laughter.”

“It often does.”

Mr. Venable had a book on his desk, facing upside down from him, towards the person he was looking forward to speaking to. The book was The Idiot’s Guide To Getting Blood Out Of A Theater For Dummies, and soon he would be able to smirk and say “I told you so,” but for now he sipped his coffee in the bookstore with no title, which is on the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo was a colorful neighborhood–blood red, and black-and-blue, and hangover-piss dark yellow–and so it was prepared for the tough times like other places were not. The Main Drag saw spontaneous operas and long-awaited knife fights, so a bit of political or economic instability wasn’t going to cause a panic. When Little Aleppo found herself in times of trouble, Mother Mary came to her.

No one knew how the local lottery came to be called the Mother Mary, but the current theory was that the name was coined by one of the wags down at the Morning Tavern about the game’s unfixable nature.

“Ought to call it the Mother Mary: everybody’s trying to fuck it, but it just ain’t how the story goes.”

Fuck the Mother Mary, Sally Moon thought, and then crossed himself.

When Sally Moon crossed himself he may as well have been tracing the actual crucifix for the distance his fingers went. He was a large gentleman who didn’t own one single pair of blue jeans, and he hung out with other large gentlemen, and they all did large gentlemen things together. Although it seemed that Sally Moon did all the specifically large gentleman stuff, at least to Sally.

Sally, go watch this guy.

Sally, stand in this doorway.

Sally, punch this family.

And he was good at the work, and didn’t mind doing it, but he wanted more. Sally Moon wanted to be the guy running the boiler room, not the guy who comes in to beat up the boiler room when they’re not producing. Being a criminal was fine, he thought. He just wanted to be a higher class of criminal, the kind of criminal that everyone respected.

But at the moment, he was standing watch on the Mother Mary like he did twice a week, every week.

Gower Avenue runs perpendicular off the the Main Drag–it it the cross-street that The Tahitian is on–and on the south side of the street is the Broadside Newstand. It runs along the outer wall of the theater, in fact, and goes for almost 200 feet: there are four levels of graduated shelving, and the newspapers are stacked below that on the ground, and jutting out above is a wooden awning painted green.

Omar owns the Broadside, and he has news of the world, and worlds, and subscriptions to periodicals that were delivered via Route 77. The Cascadia Times-Register, and the Cahokia Gazette-Picayune-Register, and the Pennysaver from Cascabel, Texas. (For some reason.) There was Unpopular Mechanics, which often featured articles about DIY machines that would stab strangers on the bus. Every morning, Tiresias Richardson bought the Muliplicative, the Hollywood paper with the articles about big stars like Peg Entwistle and Stevie Lubetkin. Montgomery Clift was having another comeback.

Omar had a last name, but he was certain that no one would be able to pronounce it up to his standards, so he refused to tell anyone what it was. The way they said “Omar” was bad  enough, attacking the first vowel like an intruder–OH!mar OH!mar–when it should rise and fall in welcome–oOoh-MAar–but to let everyone butcher his family name was unacceptable. He was Omar, and he sat on a tall wooden stool by the cash register. No matter the weather, he wore brown sandals with thick straps. A kufi was on his head, which needed a haircut, and he generally wore sweaters only a blind man would choose, although he had a good excuse.

Argus was Omar’s seeing-eye dog, and they hated each other like only an old married couple could. A regular conversation topic in bars and barbershops around Little Aleppo is “Just how old is that dog, anyway?” Big-Dicked Shelia was sure that Argus had been here when she got to the neighborhood, and that was a while ago; Precarious Lee distinctly remembers giving Argus a drink the night the Berlin Wall came down; Gussy Incandescente-Ponui is certain she has a photograph of her grandfather Irving at The Tahitian with Argus in the background.

Argus was a German Retriever. The breed would go get stuff for you, but it would lecture you while it did. He was never more than three feet from Omar, and had come to deeply resent the man. The way he chewed. Breathed, oh God, the way he breathed! In, out, in out. Fuck you and your breathing, Omar! Argus tried to walk him into traffic daily, but Omar had good ears.

“Stop that, asshole! I hear the cars!”

And they would continue down the Main Drag, Omar occasionally whacking the dog in the snout with his cane, and Argus once in a while bumping the man into parking meters.

At the Broadside, though, they were a team. A terribly inefficient and slow one, but a team. You’d bring your purchases to the end of the stand where Omar sat, and then you’d hand him everything one by one. You say the name of the magazine, and he’s memorized the price. Let’s say it’s $3.95. You tell him, “I’m giving you four singles,” and then you hand Omar the bills one by one, and he lets Argus smell each dollar.

Most people don’t know that ones smell different than fives. All dogs do, but most people don’t.

Each time Omar showed money to Argus, he would say its denomination–One! Five!–and if the bill matched the description, Argus would make a friendly little sound–boof–and if it didn’t, Argus would bite the fucker trying to get one over on a blind guy. He may not have liked Omar, but you just didn’t steal from the blind. Argus could put aside the personal for his principles

Getting the change was equally involved, and I won’t mention how long it took to do the final count most evenings.

And from morning until well into the night Tuesday and Friday, Sally Moon was standing over Omar and Argus for every excruciating second.

“One!”

“Boof.”

“One!”

“Boof.”

And so on, all day and through lunch and then the afternoon and straight through the sunset’s glare over the Salt Wharf, and Sally Moon stood there watching, so as to make sure that the illegal act was performed honestly.

Other days, the Broadside opened when Omar and Argus got there, and closed when no one had bought anything for a while and it was getting cold. On Tuesdays and Fridays, though, it opened exactly when the bells at the First Church of the Iterated Christ rang ten am, and closed when they signaled nine pm.

At 9:01 pm those two days, Sally Moon would do the count for Omar, quickly, and then he would walk down to Cagliostro’s to meet his friends, who were large gentlemen like himself, and give them the final tally, along with the receipts. At the bottom of the paper, Sally would write the day’s total gross in big block print, and the last three digits of that gross would be circled. The large gentlemen would tell smaller large gentlemen, who would tell runners, and by 9:30 everyone knew what the winning number for the Mother Mary was.

Sally had wondered why he couldn’t just make sure Omar was there in the morning and then stop by at night, instead of this maddening biweekly sentinel he had to stand, but he also knew what neighborhood he lived in; without some sort of stabilizing presence, nonsense would be invariably gotten up to. When the Mother Mary started, Little Aleppo tripped over itself trying to rig it: elaborate mathematical models of magazine purchasing, and a couple gangs tried betting heavy on “000” and then keeping people away all day. Both Omar and Argus were offered bribes, which they took, just to be polite.

BUT, Sally Moon fumed over twice a week, all this corruption made the Mother Mary incorruptible. Just the numbers involved in one person’s scam would be daunting, but once you introduce a second, third, fourth, scoundrel into the mix–and everyone now has to correct their magazine-and-newspaper buying for each others’ deceptions–the math quickly becomes undoable. It was only algebra–time X (price X quantity)(sales tax)–but the equation had 9000 variables and stretched 200 feet alongside a movie theater. Also, several other people were trying to solve it at the same time as you, and they were armed. There was no way of rigging the outcome that didn’t add to the chaos, he thought

Sally Moon was right: a person is a terrible random number generator, but a whole bunch of people acting independently is a terrific random number generator. He had tried to beg off his job with this argument, but the other large gentlemen laughed at him.

“People wanna see a big guy standing by the register. You’re talking math? These are people playing the lottery. They don’t know from math. They know from a big guy standing by the register. Go, Mooney, go.”

So on Tuesdays and Fridays, from when the bells at the First Church of the Iterated Christ stuck ten in the morning until the rang nine at night, Sally Moon stood there at the western end of the Broadside Newstand on Gower Avenue next to the cash register. It was in a cubby flush with the wall, and Omar sat on his high wooden stool in front of it facing his stock and listening for shoplifters.

Argus lay on a worn grey blanket to Omar’s right, in between the customers and the stool. Next to Argus was the latest in an infinite series of expensive dog beds Argus refuses to use, chews to death, and then demands replacement of. Argus also listened for shoplifters; unlike Omar, he was actually capable of it.

It was a long day for Sally Moon. He would have preferred to have hit someone. Or everyone. Anything but this billboardery. He was capable of more. Sally knew he had great crime within him, but he was stuck at the Broadside twice a week safeguarding the innocence of the Mother Mary, which could not be fucked. He was going slightly mad.

“Omar.”

“Venable.”

“Why isn’t that dog dead yet?”

“Why aren’t you dead yet?”

“Cenotaph.”

“Dollar.”

“Dollar.”

“Dollar?”

“Boof.”

Every. Fucking. Tuesday and Friday. Of Sally Moon’s fucking life. Some days, he thought about grad school. Other days, arson.

The odds on the Mother Mary weren’t bad if you compared them to the legal lottery. Only three digits, that’s ten times ten times ten, which means 1000-to-1. If they ran it every day, went the saying down on the Salt Wharf, you’d win once every three years.

But they didn’t. (And you wouldn’t.) Just twice a week, and sometimes no one would win, and the money would carry over, and a buzz would hit Little Aleppo and the Morning Tavern would be filled with promises of shared fortune. Even when the pot grew, it never got too big–this was a local game, after all–and the prize was never life-changing. Certainly weekend-changing, but not the kind of scratch that buys you the dream house.

It was 8:45 on a Friday Night and the minute hand of Sally Moon’s watch was giving him the finger. The movie at The Tahitian started at 10:00, but Draculette was making a special appearance to introduce the film, Satan And All His Testicles. It was about a swampmonster. Sally had been watching the Late Show religiously since she became the Horror Host, and he tried to go see her in person when he could.

The count took ten minutes, and then a five minute walk to Cagliostro’s, and then get his balls busted–which is the variable in this equation, he thought–and then five back to the theater. There would always be a seat in the balcony, and in the inside pocket of his jacket was an index card with his big block lettering on it. It read A large popcorn and an orange soda, and on the other side was Thank you.

And then the bells of the Iterated Christ rang out, followed by St. Clements and St. Martin and the Bailey. Argus’ shoulders go up and in–he hates the bells–and Sally Moon whangs ENTER on the cash register, which prints out a long ribbon of paper that many people have money riding on.

“Don’t do that. I’ll do that. My cash register.”

“Boof.”

Sally Moon pays Omar no mind except to slip him the usual payment, but as he leaves he puts his huge hand on Omar’s narrow shoulder and squeezes it very gently. Omar reaches across his chest and pats Sally’s hand twice, then squeezes it. Sally shows the long ribbon of paper to Argus.

“Boof.”

And then Sally leaves; he is writing down the final tally in his big block letters as he walks with silent purpose down the Main Drag, which is in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo has a bookstore with no title, and it has a black door–a real door with a brass knob, not a glass window on a hinge with a bar that says PUSH like you’re a moron–that is connected by a string to a bell. When you open the door, the bell goes TINK–

“Cardiomuscularity, Mr. Venable.”

–adink.

“Jesus, you’re fast.”

“My God is a rapid God.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones was telling the truth. He was the pastor at the First Church of the Iterated Christ, and he preached about Jesus the Infinite, who was in all things and assumed all poses and, presumably, traveled at all speeds. A visiting theologian had once described it as “trinitarian animism” right before one of the altar boys stole his wallet. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was a denomination started by a man who didn’t understand the Bible, and currently run by someone who hadn’t read it.

“Do you know what cardiomuscularity is, Mr. Venable?”

“A word you made up, Preacher.”

“No, sir. I heard it from a guy.”

“Much different.”

“Gotta give your heart a workout.  World’s your gym, Mr. Venable. All them people surrounding you? They’re the weights. Love’s an active process. We gotta participate in it, y’see.”

“And after you’ve lifted the weights in the gym, they’re still in the same place.”

“Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. But you’re not.”

Mr. Venable had nothing to say to that, so he made a snorting noise and sipped his coffee, which had gone cold. He blamed the Lord.

The Reverend was massive; he did not have to duck when he came through the door, but he did need to turn sideways just slightly. He had wrists the circumference of a fat child’s waist and a shaved head the color of the soil houseplants come planted in, but he did not loom in front of the table on the left side of the room that Mr. Venable sat at; he was pigeon-toed and stood on the balls of his feet, lightly. Arcade Jones stood like a long-awaited friend.

“Thursday.”

“Yes.”

“Ten AM.”

“I’m aware, yes. I’ll be there. Of course. I’ve even written it down.”

Mr. Venable looked down. There were at least six books open at once, with dozens stacked around them, and newspapers and magazines of all vintage. A pile of legal pads–white ones yellowing, and yellow ones going white–sat next to the fresh one open to a half-filled page of scribblings, jottings, doodlings, and phone numbers. (Some of the phone numbers were circled; none had a name attached to it.)

Disobeying the laws of physics, but obeying the laws of comedy, a dusty parchment rolled across the desk.

“I wrote it down. Trust me.”

“I do.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I’ll take a chance on you, Mr. Venable. Oh, I can’t wait for you to see the flowers! Supposed to be good weather all week, and we’ll get sun, and the garden will look tremendous. Great day for a flower show. And such beauties!”

“And you went with my suggestion for the theme? Hard-to-spell flowers?”

“We have Bougainvillea, Hydrangea, Chrysanthemum, Ranunculus. One of our gardeners, Mrs. Ableworth, is growing something called a Daxrypraghus.”

“She made that name up.”

“But it smells lovely.”

“Pat Mrs. Ableworth down for perfume bottles.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“O me of many experiences. If you don’t want me to judge people, then don’t have me as a judge.”

Mr. Venable had been one of the judges at the church’s flower show for several years. He also judged Little Aleppo’s film festival, chili cook-off, bake-off, and annual Halloween costume contest. Residents believed him to be the most impartial of critics: he took everyone’s bribes, regardless of background or affiliation, and that spelled honesty to Little Aleppians.

“You are judging the flowers, Mr. Venable. Not the people. And, come on, there’s not going to be any funny business at a flower show. Most of the participants are little old ladies.”

“Those are the most dangerous kind of ladies. Preacher.”

“You’re a cynic.”

“I’m a longtime resident of the neighborhood.”

When the Reverend Arcade Jones laughed, he looked like he was trying to eat the sun: he launched himself onto his toes, and threw back his fire hydrant-shaped head, and opened his fireplace-sized mouth wide; he made a joyful noise, and loud. Even Mr. Venable could not help but smile along and make a small sound that was not quite laughing, but could be interpreted as “laughing.”

“And the neighborhood needs you! Can’t hide from humanity any more than you can hide from the Lord! Even in your bookstore.”

“Who’s hiding? I have whole sections dedicated to Him.”

“Now, you know I’m not talking about the God you find in a book.”

“Mm. No. I’ve not found Him in there, either.”

“And not for lack of looking.”

“We’ll all stop looking one day.”

“Until then, though. Thursday, sir!”

“Thursday, Preacher.”

“Gonna be a great day.”

“Every day’s a great day in Little Aleppo.”

And the Reverend Arcade Jones left the bookstore with no title, TINKadink. The room seemed much larger with his absence, but twice again quieter, and the door had whipped the dust mites into a frenzy as the sun cut beams across the bookshelves. Mr. Venable was the only living soul in the shop.

He took his duties as a judge seriously, and so he went back to idly examining drawings of flowers in a book from some white guy’s safari in 1912. Without looking up from the page, he said,

“I see you back there.”

And then he sipped his coffee, which had gone cold. He blamed Mrs. Ableworth.

The week went by so quickly that it seemed like only seven days; it was an unremarkable one for the neighborhood. It had rained several nights. There had been fewer muggings in the Verdance than usual. Those two facts may have been related. On the Downside of town–most places had a Northside and a Southside, but Little Aleppo had an Upside and a Downside–there was a big heroin bust. No one died in any of the rooms at the Nod. All the cops on the drug task force bought new cars. Those three facts were definitely related.

On Tuesday afternoon, a large man in a checkered coat repossessed the Poet Laureate’s haircut.

Little Aleppo loves a show, and if the zoo had hired armed guards to make sure no one opened up all the cages again, then a flower show would have to do. Folks had been tailgating in the parking lot of the First Church of the Iterated Christ, where the Lord could be found in all things, including chicken wings and hard liquor for breakfast, and then fistfights for brunch.

The Reverend Arcade Jones believed in the Gospel of Infinicy. That Jesus was in all things. That it was all holy, or none of it was. He also believed that faith was the soul’s immune system, and it did an immune system no good to be in a sterile environment. Faith, the preacher thought, should be a struggle sometimes. If a burden isn’t heavy, then how do you feel when it lifts, he thought? Despair must be fought, Arcade Jones knew. Get your ass to the gym.

Then a women picked up a statue of St. Columba and hurled it at a stranger. For a second, the Reverend thought that maybe Jesus was just almost infinite, and he bounded down the steps four at a time to break up the brawl. Before he came to Little Aleppo, Arcade Jones had never had to 86 someone from church.

The lightweights all fell out, and the amateurs got frog-walked out onto the sidewalk of Rose Street (“You know I love you, and the Lord shines in your eyes, but you’re throwing punches at children and you’ve gotta go for now.”) and by ten AM, only the serious troublemakers remained, most of whom were the little old ladies whose flowers were competing in the show.

Little old ladies got to be old by being smart or lucky, and either one of those attributes can be weaponized. Plus, these were flower-growing little old ladies, which means they were patient; they thought in the long-term both forward and back: plans and grudges. Little old ladies in Little Aleppo were made up of nothing but plans, grudges, and doctor’s appointments. As a last resort, they could hit each other with their handbags, which were the size of one-room schoolhouses.

“This year’s a success already,” Tiresias Richardson said to Big-Dicked Sheila.

“Neither of us got suplexed.”

“Right? Better than last year.  AAAAAHhahaha!”

Tiresias and Sheila had a yearly date to see the flower show, and they dressed the part: they had decided on yellow, and were both wearing crinkled and stained prom dresses the color of the sun’s piss that they had found in a secondhand shop on the edge of the Low Desert. Sheila’s dress was scandalously short, and Tiresias’ was scandalously low, and–owing to their stop at the Morning Tavern before the show–they were both scandalous.

One more than the other, though, and noticeably: Tiresias had been Draculette until three in the morning, presenting an utterly dreadful film called Maniac Mountebanks of the Moon. It was about werewolfs. It was four by the time she wriggled out of the dress, and took off the makeup, and ate the half-a-vegan-burrito she had hidden in the crisper of the station’s fridge, and so she decided to just stay up; she was meeting Sheila at dawn, anyway. Besides: she used to stay up all night and start drinking at dawn all the time.

Perhaps you can see the flaw in her plan. “All the time” really only meant “a couple times at age 19,” and 19-year-olds are incapable of dying. They can be killed, but they’re too dumb to die, and are therefore impervious to chemical and emotional assaults that would wrack and riddle an adult. 19-year-olds are immortal morons who fuck, misunderstand things, and shoplift.

Tiresias had not been 19 for ten years if you asked her driver’s license, seven years if you asked her. She was shitfaced, and leaning on Sheila, or more rightly falling on top of her in a forward motion: Sheila was barely over five feet, and Tiresias was tall and had broad shoulders, and they were both wearing bright yellow: it looked like a canary chick helping his canary dad home from the bar.

“You are a sloppy bitch,” Sheila said. “Ooh, the Cymbidium is gorgeous.”

“I am not. I am the sloppiest bitch. Pay me my propers.”

“Put some respect on your name.”

“This is much better than the year with the carnivorous plants.”

“God, yes. Remember how long it took to get all the Audrey Two’s out of the Verdance?”

“They had such lovely singing voices, though,” Tiresias said as the two of them, as one, stambled and mumbled up the main footpath of the First Church of the Iterated Christ’s garden. On the left was Nierembergia, and on the right was Dahlinovas, and there had been sun all week except for when it rained, so all the flowers were blooming at once out loud all day.

“You’re like a superhero,” Sheila said. She had drunk as much as Tiresias, more if anyone was counting, but Sheila had gotten a good night’s sleep and was therefore keeping it together. She was also not a stranger to starting the bottle early in the morning, and tugging at it through the rest of the day.

“How so?”

“No one knows you’re Draculette.”

She was right: there was little resemblance between Tiresias and Draculette, except for the laugh, and Tiresias had noticed that no one had ever recognized her out of costume, and she was getting–pardon the bragging–kinda famous. She had endorsement deals with a local car dealership and Creepy Ernie’s; on Saturday nights, she hosted the Midnight Movie at The Tahitians and got a piece of the door. The ushers wheeled her, on her couch, on and off the stage to tell her jokes for the kids, who howled and loved her.

“No. They don’t. Tragic. But Draculette can’t walk.”

“You can’t walk right now, sweetie.”

“Details. AAAAAHhahaha!”

Mr. Venable had thought about putting on his funeral tie for the occasion, but decided it was a bit much and went with an open collar and a scowl. He was having a secret blast appearing to be deadly serious; he even whipped a magnifying glass out of his pocket to examine a Liatris more closely.

“Interesting,” he said as he straightened up and put the glass back in his pocket. He walked to the next flower, a Poinsettia, and pretended to be shocked.

“The impudence!”

At the Eucalyptus, he said nothing and felt almost nothing. (He was tiny bit hungry, but other than that: nothing.) Then he asked, where did the koala come from? Then he asked, didn’t the zoo hire armed guards? Then he remembered that koalas all have chlamydia, and stopped asking questions and walked down the path.

The door to the bookstore with no title opened TINKadink on Friday morning, and the room was full of the Reverend Arcade Jones. Mr. Venable was in his customary seat, in his customary suit, with an uncustomary black eye.

“Did one of the little old ladies give you that?”

“Oh, no, Preacher. The tall woman in yellow who started windmilling her fists when the fight broke out.”

“Yes, the whole outcome was unfortunate.”

“Rather mild, honestly. Mrs. Ableworth threw a live wolverine at the other women a few years ago. No axe gangs showed up.”

“Praise the Lord.”

“Has He claimed responsibility?”

The Reverend threw his head back and laughed like he was eating the sun.

“He signs his name to all things! Just gotta learn how to read, Mr. Venable.”

“I’ll get around to that one day, Preacher.”

“Always an extra seat in my church. Sunday morning’s coming up.”

“It does that.”

The door opened and closed and went TINKadink, and it was early in the morning in the bookstore with no title, which faced west onto the Main Drag, and so it was still murky and dark inside. Mr. Venable was the only living soul in the shop, and back in the shelves the bioluminescent books glowed every color of the rainbow, plus several homophobic colors that had refused to join the rainbow.

He was reading an old paperback, a trashy dime-store hack job made to fit in the back pocket of  a pair of Levi’s, they used to sell them on spinner racks in drugstores, and he sipped his coffee which was still hot, and turned a page.

“Fuck off, Officer Rodriguez,” Mr. Venable said without taking his eyes off the book. “Think you’re special? Little Aleppo’s had her share of ghosts. Find something to do other than haunt my cookbook section.”

The door did not open or close but it went TINKadink, and it was early in the morning in the bookstore with no title, which is on the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.